Our Dumb Blog

“Come in here, I want to show you how this works,” yelled Ken from the Studio. I dropped the book I was entering into the computer and ran into the next room. Ken was running some tape through one of the three reel to reelplayers in there. “This is called a pancake,” he said, as he spun tape off the roll without a reel around it. Then he quickly explained what he was doing as he expertly punched buttons, switched levers, and spun reels, leaving me with an even more vague impression of what it’s like to mix audio. He played the tape of the guy he’d interviewed on phone from across the country, stopped it, played the tape of himself asking questions, stopped, spun the reel backwards, and then set it for when the guy said “T…” of the “two” of counting backwards from five. Then he played the two tapes together. The rich sound of his studio recorded voice grated against the metallic sound of his voice over the phone lines as they played out of sync by a nanosecond. “That’s close enough,” announced Ken, quite pleased. He turned down the channels of him and the interviewee on the phone and left the two studio recorded voices playing. “Now I’ll check every five minutes or so to make sure they’re still in sync,” he said, “and adjust it over here if one runs faster than the other.” We listened to the two voices discussing a novel the guy being interviewed had written. “We’ll edit most of this stuff out,” Ken said, “I’m just trying to draw him out.” Near the end, Ken grinned and said, “Sounds like we’re sitting next to each other, doesn’t it? Who’d of thought we were separated by thousands of miles?”

Hmm..

I’ve got way more e-mail than I can deal with. So quit complaining about not getting anything personal, and
I’ll try to remember to add you to my mailing list.

Right.

Today. Hmm… Today. I’m beginning to think my moniker is correct. Especially with cars. No, I don’t get vomitted out onto beaches by sedans with stomachaches. I just seem to bring bad luck to vehicles. Like the dead battery day before last?

I was running a bit later than usual this morning after printing some stuff out and taking (too much) time to read e-mail from the night before. So I grabbed a piece of bread and the last can of grapefruit juice and trotted out to the car, revved it up and took off down the road. Only my car is running a little rough and keeps making this WOMP WOMP WOMP noise. “That,” I thought, rather astutely, “Sounds just like that time I had a flat tire.” Stopping the car and running around to the other side, fears were confirmed. The front passenger side tire was as flat as Kansas. I pulled off out of the road and onto the grass on the side of the street and walked back a couple of doors to the house where I’m staying with my bread and juice in hand.

I called AAA and got an estimate of 15 to 50 minutes before a truck would show up to change my flat. Then I called my employer and explained the situation to him. He suggested getting it fixed at a place down the road on the way to his house. I hung up and told Joanne, the female half of the Wallaces with whom I am staying, “I have a flat.””Oh!” she exclaimed, “Well, let’s see, let’s see. You can take my car, and I’ll take the Suburban; I’m getting ready for this big thing we have tonight, and I’d usually be gone by now, but if you take my car, I’ll stay here–I don’t have to leave for a while–till they come to fix it, or you and Doug could go get a used tire, or…” I stood quietly till she paused and then calmly explained what I was going to do. “Oh,” she answered and then added, “You don’t get flustered easily, do you?” I smiled, “No, not really.”

I sipped at the grapefruit juice while sitting on top of my hood, waiting for the truck to arrive. It was warm; the sun was out. Thursday seemed to be lawn care day. The neighborhood I’m living in is fairly nice. No one seems to dotheir own yard work. Trucks were scattered around the neighborhood with workers mowing lawns. I sipped some more juice and read chapter 2 of the book by Dorothy Sayers I’d been assigned to read. “Excuse me,” came a voice from the house I was parked in front of, “Excuse me, what are you doing there?” A woman stood in the doorway, an expression of annoyed suspicion on her face. I gestured toward my tire, “Got a flat.” “Oh!” her expression changed to surprised compassion, “Do you need to call anyone…?” I shook my head, “Got someone on the way.”

It got warmer, so I took shelter in my car with the windows down. The yard workers got closer. Evidently they did most of the yards in the neighborhood. Soon lawn mowers were cutting the grass right near where I was stranded. I looked up from my book to see one of the older guys in glasses and a black tank shirt at my window. “Is there any way you could put your car into neutral and let us push you out of the way?” he asked. “Got a flat,” I answered. “Is that all? Well, $#!%, we can take care of that!” he exclaimed, “Got a spare and jack?” I assented. “I’ll get the boys.”

It turned out that, though I did have a spare in my trunk, the jack was missing. I don’t know where it went. It used to be back there. Maybe someone swiped my jack, replacing it with the can of soup that I really can’t explain the presence of. But the yard people had an air compressor that plugs into a cigarette lighter. A big fellow with a beard and blond pony tail stuck around till it filled my tire up. The leak was slow enough to let the tire hold air for awhile. I thanked him and drove off, waving at Tank Top on the way.

The people at the auto place were nice. I sat around staring at car magazines and wall charts of axles for about 15 minutes. Then a fellow came in and plopped a bent, headless nail on the counter. “That’ll be six bucks.”

Tire’s still full tonight.

In other news, all the paid employees of Mars Hill gathered in the Myer house to watch Dr. Strange Love. Or Dr. Strangelove. That is one weird film. Made by the same guy who directed The Shining, 2001, Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket. He also took over direction of Sparticus. Peter Sellers is magnificent as the title character. And two others.

“Just remember… If you don’t reach the President, you’ll have to answer to the CocaCola Company.”

Here’s something I just wrote my dad.
—

Some thoughts.

It’s interesting being here in the East. People here have a mentality, a
sense of culture, that Southerners aren’t aware about and folks out West
simply don’t care. I’ve found myself most often leaning up against the wall
in some corner, viewing the goings on with admiration yet alienation,
woefully inarticulate and… I’m not sure where that thought was heading.

Ken’s kids are… well, let’s say that Donut Man probably is below their
level of sophistication. And BHV is, well… You have to understand that
these kids read Sherlock Holmes and listen to classical music. Well, they’re
also Star Trek junkies. “Okay, you can watch ONE more episode.”

I’m not sure, but most of the people I’ve come into contact with around here
seem to be Presbyterians. Kilroy, when he had to read several sermons and
write summaries of them for alternate chapel, remarked that Presbyterians
impressed him with their intellectual arguments. This as opposed to the
bombasticism of Baptist fire and brimstoners. “Emotionalism” is not
paramount here. Intellectualism is. And an appreciation for ‘high’ culture
and its art forms.

Alice just walked in and invited me to accompany her and a friend to an
excursion to the James River. I declined. “What are you doing?” she asked,
looking at the computer monitor. “Writing a letter to my dad.” “Oh, that’s
America Online!” “Yeah, I installed it. I guess I’ll have to ask the
Wallaces when they come home if that’s okay.” “Oh, I’m sure it is.”

Why did I decline? I dunno. Maybe because I really like being by myself.
And with as much socialization I’ve had with all these new people I’m
meeting, a house to myself is wonderful.

When I mention “Integrity Music” to people, they nod and say, “Ahhh,” sure
signs that they’re not real familiar with it. Praise and worship what? But
it’s a Christian company, you say?

The “Great Task,” Ken called it. “Not great as in good but in BIG,” he
added. This is the task of making labels for the books and organizing them.
It’s what I’ll be doing whenever I’m not doing something else he’ll have for
me to do. But it’s great. I love doing it. It’s so mindless. My “C” comes
out so strong that I have to kick my consciousness and tell it to hurry up.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, just mostly so. Ken and Kate both seem to be
high “D’s,” but I don’t know how accurate I am about that. Ken probably has
a bunch of “C” in him. He likes his library organized JUST SO. “It’s okay
if you don’t do it perfectly,” he said, showing me how he types up the labels
and glues them to book spines, “I won’t fire you or anything.” But he hates
to delegate. He said he’s convinced he can do anything better himself.

Elmer is walking over to see me. “Yeeeooaaawww…” he utters hoarsely. Now
he’s licking his paw and then using it to rub his face. Now he’s resting.
My gosh, he’s fat. But he’s oh so mellow. You’d probably like him. He’s
incredibly friendly in his laid back way.

Saturday, June 1, 1996
I did. I finally got up today after noon. I’ve got a nice room here. It’s upstairs with a slanty ceiling on one side and dormer windows jutting out. There’s just a double bed with shelf headboard and a lamp on top, a small chest of drawers, a watercolor and framed poster of “Intimate Landscapes” hanging on the walls, and a ceiling fan. It’s been chilly at nights here, but by the time I get up by eight, the sun makes the room a lot warmer, so I keep a window open. I’ve got the keyboard I brought stacked on top of the couple of Roughneck containers I packed my clothes in at one end of the room. There are something like 5 rooms upstairs, one of them being used for storage. There are two bathrooms with two sinks each. I get one to myself.
The Wallaces have a neat big house. I think Cape Cod style is the way to describe it.There’s a circular driveway that leads to some stairs up to a small porch with rocking chairs on it. The door opens up to a hall with a parlor on the right and dining room on the left. The hall ends in the kitchenbehind the dining room and a living area over to the right. On the far right side of the house is the master bedroom. The far left side is a sun room with a couple of bookshelves and a desk, where I sitting right now. One of the shelves is devoted to Charles Dickens and classic Christian authors like Augustine, Martin Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Kierkegaard along with some more recently written books and Bible stuff. The other bookshelf has a bottle of Russian Pepsi on top of it. Beneath that is a shelf full of books on or by Dostoyevsky followed byother Russian writers.
There’s also a basement. I found an ironing board down in the laundry area and pressed all my clothes that had suffered the rigors of travel. A big open area houses a disorderly stack of board games and puzzles and a ping pong table folded up against one wall. What this house reallyneeds is a pool table. But the Wallaces are moving to a smaller house this fall. There’s a small office downstairs also that looks like it belongs to Doug. Joanne is his wife, and she’s 48 according to a newspaper clipping on the wall about a marathon she ran with her twin sister. They seem to have one daughter, Jen, who’s married. They went to visit her this weekend, leaving me and a mostly absent Alice here by ourselves.
I just discovered a trial disk from AOL on the desk next to the computer. I didn’t ask if I could use the computer, but then, no one is here to ask permission. When Ken suggested Jenna bring me over and tell me about all the house rules at the Wallaces, she replied, “There aren’t any.” She and the two other members of Mars Hill in Charlottesville came over for supper on Thursday night. Ken has some property he wants to build a new house and office on over in Charlottesville, but he has to sell his current house. It’s been on the market since October. They got their first offer, an incredibly low one, the day I arrived. So in the meantime, he works in his office and studio next to his house in Powatan, and the rest of the staff works at the officesin Charlottesville.
Jeff and Jenna are the two other full time employees along with Ken. Jeff is soft spoken and laid back but with an edge to his humor. His shaggy blond hair falls down above his small oval glasses and well established Van Dyke. Jenna is just the way I imagined her, which, along with being odd, means I can’t describe her appearance at all. She just looks like a typical college student with shoulder length light brown hair. She’s actually graduated from college and is preparing to enter Regent College in Vancouver this fall. Jeff is also leaving; I think he
s getting married and is going to grow vegetables and work with cows. Bart is the other intern. He’s going to seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina but not to become a minister. He evidently wants to start a magazine dedicated to the sort of things Mars Hill Audio does. Severalpeople told him, “That’s what Ken Myers tried to do with Eternity Magazine.” So Bart thought he’d come see what Ken did wrong. Bart is a fireball of cutting wit. At the dinner table he was asking Jeff to warn him when he hit Jenna’s breaking point. “That’s something you’ll have to discover on your own,” Jeff grinned softly.
After someone said something nice at one point during the evening, Jeff turned to me and said, “Sometimes a bit of kindness actually creeps into our conversation. “Oh, I answered, “So I won’t be caught off guard when it happen.” “You won’t be caught off guard if somebody says something kind?” he repeated and then paused and added with approval, “Good.”
“Do you like Star Trek?” Ken stopped what he was doing in the office and asked me. He has a friend who writes scripts for “The Next Generation.” “We have all but two of them on tape,” he grinned. I suppose it should have been of no surprise when the subject of Star Trek came up at the dinner table that night. Bart made a fatal flaw of asking, “Is there more than one?” Well, yes, everyone explained to him. There’s the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, not to mention all the movies. Ken told us about one Voyager episode where the crew finds several beings trapped in suspendedanimation. “What’s that?” asked Bart. “Statis,” answered Susanna. “Cryogenics,” I added. “All these words you’re throwing out,” Bart spread his hands in frustrated amazement.”
“Are you going to stay at the Wallaces all summer?” Jeff asked me over dessert. “Unless they throw me out,” I answered. “They won’t throw you out,” said Jenna softly, “Not the Wallaces.” She stayed with them for several weeks when she first worked for Ken as an intern. I followed her over after supper on Thursday. The Wallaces live about 15 minutes away from the Myers. They were really glad to see her. I sat in on their conversation as they caught up on stuff. Later as I removed clothes from the Roughnecks and hung them up in the closet, Jenna came in and sat down on my bed. “You live at home with your family?” she asked, “And you have brothers and sisters?” When I assented, she went on, “I was always with other people at college. Then when I was home, I had a seven year old sister who was always running around.” She paused and then said, “It’s a lot quieter here.”
Alice came home late this afternoon, and we watched _Babe_. What a great flick. When it was over I asked, “So, how about some pork for dinner?” We made chicken vegetable stuff over pasta instead and had that with cantalope for supper. I think Alice is originally from Taiwan. Her family lives in Baton Rouge now. She just graduated from the University of Richmond or University of Virginia in Richmond or something. She invited me to go to church with hertomorrow morning. She’s groaning about having to get up at 9 to get there in time. Alice hasbeen staying here for the last week and a half or so studying for the Certified Financial Analyst test, which she just took this morning. She’ll leave tomorrow or Monday to move in with several other people in an apartment.

Friday, May 31, 1996

Here it is 11:30 or so on a Saturday night, andI’m sitting here at a Pentium using Windows 95 (I suppose that’s a given) and wondering what I’m going to do with this document after I finish typing for the night. I suppose I could figure out the printer. I wonder if I can remember how to delete documents on an IBM (and on a Macified one at that). (Microsoft Word doesn’t seem to like the word “Macified.” It’s got it underlined in red squiggles.)

I’ve been sitting at a computer monitor more or less all day, so this isn’t really relaxing at the moment. But I’ve also been mentally composing stuff, so having the chance to put it down on “paper” is nice, typing what I want to type instead of endless authors and book titles like my fingers have been pecking all day. That seems to be my current job description, along with making labels bearing Library of Congress numbers and sticking them onto the spines of hundreds of books. Ken Myers has an incredible personal library; there are more than 15 thousand entries in his computer list, which includes periodicals and articles. And they’re all books I’d love to read, so to keep from getting distracted is going to be quite a battle.

The books are housed in a smaller building across the patio from his house, where Ken lives with his wife Kate and their two kids: Susanna (age11) and Jonathan (age 9), I think. The building also serves as his studio, where he interviews people and makes copies of backlog tapes. He performed an interview yesterday with someone over the phone but in anotherstudio. Theytape both ends of the conversation and then mix them together, so it doesn’t sound like one of them is on the phone. He took off for Washington, D. C. today to give a commencement address for 5 graduating seniors from a church school and do an interview.

Today was my second day on the job. I arrived Wednesday late in the afternoon in time to accompany Ken on some errands he had to run. He bought me a nice swivelchair to workin (I tested it out by spinning as fast as I could) and a trash can. We went to Pizza Hut andmet the rest of his family there. Susanna and Jonathan homeschool, and they’d just finished a unit and its tests, so they got to go out to eat AND bring their books. Normally they’re not allowed to read when eating out or when other people are present. I resigned myself to eating whatever was presented; I don’t want to be difficult. So I consumed pepperoni and sausage.

My eating habits seem to be shot. For instance, I ate a ham and cheese sandwich today. Kate fixes me lunch, and I eat with her and the kids. Today we talked about fiction while Susanna and Jonathan read at the table. Jonathan was on his second book since Pizza Hut. He seems to enjoy a cheese sandwich everyday, without the crusts, of course. If potato chips are available, he’ll place then inside and crush them between the slices of wheat bread. Susanna eats one with chicken noodle soup, propping her book up against the bowl. They bargain with their mother concerning how many pickles each can have.

The two kids are a hoot. Susanna was out catching butterflies with a net she made out of cheese cloth, a coat hanger, and a stick. Whenever she’d catch one, she’d bring it in a plastic milk carton and show it to me in t
mhe office where I was working, informing me of its name as near as she could ascertain from the Audobon Socie’s butterfly identification book. Jonathan caught a feisty green bug with huge mandibles with his bare fingers and a gigantic bee of some sort in a jar, but he wouldn’t hold Stalin. Having a conversation with them is always entertaining. They have the vocabulary of graduate students, but their sentences are punctuated with wild whoops and yells and grotesque facial expressions.

Well, I about to crash here, so I’ll see if I can save this. The couple I staying with just left town for the weekend, so I here by myself with a girl named Alice, who’s taking some 6 hour finance certification test tomorrow. I think I’ll sleep in.