Week 14: Memory & The Green Door

In which the podcaster lays down some tracks of extended and deleted scenes, explains why you can trust him, then ties up all the episodes to date with a pretty green ribbon, kind of like the writers of 24 accidentally wrapped up the plot of Season 1 halfway through, but unlike them pledges to actually provide new plotlines instead of just repeating the same one twice over.

Whereas this isn't a bonus episode per se, it kind of is in that it helps to have listened to some (or all) of the earlier eps. Here's a list of those that are useful to have heard. "Week 4: Sound and Silence" will be the most helpful for both.

Also note that this episode has two chapters, so you can skip over the "bonus tracks" and listen just to the story (which illustrates some points from the first part, but can be heard without them).

SUGGESTED LISTENING FOR BONUS TRACKS ("MEMORY")

Week 2: Status Report
Week 3: Book Report on Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Week 4: Sound and Silence
Week 5: Intentionality and the Blackhawk Blues
Week 6: In the Middle of Nowhere
Weeks 10-11: The Final Fantasy of Commander Shepherd, Nora Witcher
Weeks 12-13: Drink the Light

 
STRONGLY SUGGESTED LISTENING FOR “THE GREEN DOOR”

Week 4: Sound and Silence

 
LIGHTLY SUGGESTED LISTENING FOR “THE GREEN DOOR” 

Week 5: Intentionality and the Blackhawk Blues
Week 6.5: A Musical Interlude
Week 9: The Purpose of Rash Action


"This Is Not a Jig" on YouTube

Cover of "Billie Jean" by sax-playing chickens
(Same link as last ep because it might save your life.)

 
THE NEXT POD WILL BE CAST ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Part 1 - Memory
• 16:57 Part 2 - The Green Door

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 13 – WEEK 14: Memory & The Green Door

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode Lucky Number 13, covering Week 14 of My 12-Month Video Fast. 

Last Sunday, September 1, marked the three-month dearth-day of this video fast, and this Wednesday, September 4, the first twelve episodes of the podcast cumulatively hit 500 downloads, so, as you might expect, Yaaaay! To celebrate the latter I did a little jig in the dance area of my front room wherein formerly bode the currently banished TV, and posted a vid of said jig on social media where it will no doubt up the dopamine of many; it’s also tucked away on the podcast page of my website (address in the episode notes). And to observe the former, that three-month toll of the gong, it seems like a good time to give you an update on where I’m at with all this, especially after all that clamor of deprive-writhing and jones-moaning I performed in the first few weeks.

This week I’ve gone back to listen to the episodes in order, out of curiosity and to recall my status as I’ve gone along. I’m happy to report that those initial cravings and messed up I-only-wanna-watch-TV fugue-stupors really did fade out after about a month. At this point, however, I do experience sudden random longings like I did and occasionally still do for nicotine or amphetamines (or white sugar when I’ve been off that – there’s another jones to add to the list) or – well that’s enough for now. This week for instance I had to open that insidious MAX app to switch payment methods, since I promised my family members that I’d keep it for them (shhhhh, that’s between us), and noticed that if I wanted to I could watch the recent scary-flick The Watchers, the directorial debut of Ishana Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night, which I really want to see – well you can’t – but it’s – sorry, not happening – but it’s a Shyamalan a Shyamalan Shyamalan Shyamalan – SHUTUPALAN! the answer is NO. [*sigh*] (Sorry ‘bout that, folks.) Last week I was at a literary event and someone read a poem about an ex-bf who’s doing speed, and I was like, mmmmmmm… Oh wait. Cause I never know what’s gonna trigger these things, with the video urges maybe it’s because I’ve seen a few movies in theaters lately, which I hope won’t become a liability, but Gyod they are annoying. [CRITICAL VOICE: Not as annoying as me.] Yeah that’s right.

Speaking of triggers, how am I doing on the cessation of phonescrolling – and why am I asking you? I have been working on it: first I have to notice that I’m doing it, then I tell myself to stop it, and either I do or I don’t. In other words, as explained in the previous episode, my dopamine control center has to convince my dopamine desire center to cut it out, then they have a gray-matter wrestle to see who wins. So far it’s about 50/50, and I’ll keep at it. But I also find myself evaluating whether and to what extent a little dopa-fueled escapism is useful to my day-to-day productivity. I mean, you don’t want me to go all work on your ass, do you, Wendy? Remember in the last episode my amused reference to finding an vid online of three grown-ups in realistic chicken costumes squawking a cover of “Billie Jean” on saxophones? (There’s a link in the episode notes and I’ll put one here too.) Well I’ve viewed that barn dance a number of times, because for whatever reason, for me, it feels like a 70-second antidote to the nihilism of the era and injects a little more (goofy, irrational, chickeny) hope in my day – which is always energizing. So, is allowing a modicum of scrolling a rationale or self-medication? I’ll keep you posted.

Another thing I’ve noticed in reviewing the episodes is how many cockamamie themes and details they have, that sometimes intermix and carry over several eps. I try my darnedest to keep these diatribes honest and clear, but sometimes juggling all those deets can be precarious – maybe not as bad as juggling cats, though if you drop a detail, something might get broken, whereas if you drop a cat – let’s try another figuration here. How about this – sometimes in transferring a detail from one episode to another, it can get smudged. Here’s a good example. In Episode 4, where I explicate Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander briefly mentions a view held by Walter Benjamin that actors on television appear to have no “aura” – which Mander calls a “life-essence”. Then much later, in Episode 11, the one about the video games, I’m thinking of that when I claim that the shooter games (quoting myself here and I hope the podcast doesn’t fold in on itself) “accustom you to seeing your targets as lacking humanity,” to suggest that dehumanization as one potential catalyst for the number of shootings in America today. I don’t draw the connection explicitly, though I meant to and didn’t notice until the episode went live. Details! Subsequently I refer to the same point in the following episode, last week’s one on dopamine, where I awkwardly suggest that (self-quoting again) “games convert enemies and targets into Walter Benjamin’s soulless people who seem okay to gun down” – a reference that folks are finding confusing (including me), because I didn’t include a segue, a connection. Bad podcaster! I hope this clears that up.

Sometimes I’ll pull back on details in order to make a story or an argument more succinct, then later wish I’d put them in. For instance, also in the last episode, I suggest that book-dopa (the dopamine you get from reading) has it over movie-dopa in that it utilizes more of the whole brain, with the center-brain reacting to the book while the front-brain constructs its own version of the author’s world as you read. True there, but that does happen with some films as well, and we bring in the front-brain to analyze and deconstruct, when we bother to – which Mander also mentions was one of Bertolt Brecht’s goals for theater, and at which I like to think we’ve improved somewhat in the decades since. Anyway I wish I’d supported film a little more in that point.

And while I’m making bonus tracks for alternate and deleted scenes, here’s one more before we move on to something new (and green and door-like). In Episode 6, “Intentionality and the Blackhawk Blues”, there’s a story about a little “vision quest” that I went on at the base of Mount Diablo in Northern California. I recount how I stumbled across a huge hollowed-out boulder which served as a rather magical (and really comfortable) shelter for a couple of nights, and kept me snug and dry even through a heavy rainfall. One detail that I couldn’t find a place for, but wish I had, is that after I got home I learned that my roommate had forgotten to put the poles in his tent that I’d borrowed, so if I hadn’t found that obscure geologic anomaly, I’d have had no shelter from the cold hard rain that night and might not have finished the quest. So there’s a deleted factoid that would have leant both weight and nuance to the happenstance and coincidence involved.

So all these stories I’ve been telling from my past – memoirettes, you might call them – what’s up with that? And how can you trust that they’re honest and accurate? I’ve noticed (and you may have as well) that most of them take place in the 1980s, the decade of my 20s, which might have been my most adventurous decade, and which coordinates well with stepping from a television into the world outside. Also I’ve found it to be a less documented decade than those since – the 90s brought a lot more portable cameras, still and video, and the 00s blew things up with the internet then smart phones, putting pretty much everything under a microscope, and a telescope, and a stethoscope, and – let’s not get any more scopic here. The 80s fell just before and on the cusp of that, and in a way mark the end of the pre-hyper-documented world, but of course there was a lot going on then too. Much of that seems to have been quickly lost to time in the wake of YouTube, blogs, and social media – but my old notebooks and memories were not. So for a few years I’ve been writing short memoir pieces from that era: detailed hitchhiking and roadtrip stories, tales of being a San Francisco bike messenger, the beginnings of the Homocore (queer punk) movement in the late 80s. (Those are all part of collections that I’d love to finish and get out there, by the way, so if anyone has an extra year lying around that they can spare, please let me know.) And it was also, as I noted in my first episode, a decade of virtually no TV viewing, and possibly that of my strongest connection to the world (whatever that is).

As for the accuracy of these old anecdotes – an interesting topic to say the least. As I’ve been writing those short memoir pieces the last three years or so, and there are about ten completed to date if I’m counting correctly, I’ve had a very strict rule to not embellish, and to fill in minor details as little as possible. So how can I be sure of my memory? No one can really, but I use a few strategies to up my level of certainty. For one, I do have decades of notebooks around to refer to. For example while writing the roadtrip episode (“In the Middle of Nowhere”), I wanted to find the name of the Lakota chief from Rosebud Res in South Dakota back in 2000, and I was pretty sure it was listed in a notebook somewhere. I have a shelf under my desk with a tangle of about thirty battered old spiral-bounds, so I reached down to that shelf and yanked one out – and it was the exact notebook. I’d flipped through them all in the past, thus the memory that it was there, but whether it was also memory that allowed me to pull out the right one (without looking), or happy coincidence or serendipity, I’ll never know, though either possibility adds to the foundations of this essay.

As well, some memories are flashpoints or stakes that mark a certainty around which other details in the memory abide. For instance, take the vision quest story again from the Blackhawk Episode. I am certain that I found that hollowed-out boulder in the steep side of that little valley, having stayed in it for two nights, and equally sure that I could find it again, even if the boulder has somehow broken loose and tumbled, unless of course the valley has since been marauded by “developers”. That memory allowed me to further recall the dimensions of that quasi-cave, and also led me to remember the rattlesnake skin, which I know I found on that first bright night and had around for a few years afterward. Somewhere (hopefully) there is a notebook that I had with me on that excursion, with a couple of detailed entries scratched into the pages with a pen that had run out of ink; that’s currently lost or in storage, but I did find an entry from later that year with some notes on the ritual, and the story is also supported by a calendar check of that second full moon in May of 1988. The boulder and the snakeskin to my mind serve as confirmed memories as well as instances of serendipity, which has on many occasions sprung up to color my Universanschauung. 

Compare to that the perspective of last week’s episode, “Drink the Light”, in which everything in our lives seems reduced to and controlled by neurotransmitters. I loved researching and writing that one, and found the information fascinating and incredibly useful, especially when you’re plotting to usurp yourself. (Hey, there’s a great zen anarchist bumper sticker: “Usurp Your SELF” haha.) That ep has also been really sticking with me and framing so much of what I’ve experienced this past week, where everything seems to result from neurotransmissions, which after a while seems to open up an existential chasm between the hemispheres of my brain. Discussions of free will aside, that’s still pretty yikes. But that’s just one perspective in our awkward-metaphor insect-eye minds, which feels nicely balanced with these tales of serendipity that fall somewhere outside the realm of personal agency and, most likely, neurotransmitters, instead leaving us with an occasion of wonder and to wonder. So I’d like to finish up this week with another of those stories with several moments of no-way-that-happened that totally did. I’m calling this one “The Green Door,” and it’s part of a longer, mostly unwritten memoir piece called “My Romance with Boulder” (brother, can you spare a year?) about how I – serendipitously – ended up moving to Boulder, where tons of amazing shit happened. It also connects with several other stories in these episodes, some tangentially, some directly, and links them in a timeline that you haven’t really seen to date. In the online notes for today’s ep you’ll find a list of all the episodes that connect to this one, both for the bonus scenes we’ve already had and this story in particular. It’s also going to test you, because it contains some of the most inexplicable incidents and coincidences yet. So, with that in mind, here’s “The Green Door”.

In March of 1987 I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, preparing for a cross-country drive to San Francisco in my first car ever, an old maroon Ford Torino that had been my grandfather’s, with a brand new Michigan license plate that read 911SZZ. I was ready to roll! The day before I left I was hanging with my old friend John and his son Jason, who were living in an old Metro box van behind someone’s house. John is thirteen years older than me and had been a sort of mystical guru for some time. They were both planning to move to Boulder in the next year or so, and they asked me an unusual favor: they wanted me to take two small objects and leave them in Boulder to prepare for their arrival. The objects were what looked like brushed aluminum, one a cylinder and one a disc the size of a quarter slug, that both fit in my palm.

“What are they?” I ask.

Jay explains that he made them in a shop class in high school, and though they weren’t functional, they were supposed to represent engine parts – the cylinder was a piston and the disc maybe the end of a cylinder chamber. (I forget what he called it.) I don’t know engines well so I ask, “For the engine to work, the piston has to be able to move freely, and the cylinder cap has to be very stable. Right?” (In truth, I have the mechanical acumen of a Pomeranian; with apologies to Pomeranians.) Somehow, I am correct.

“I’ll do you one better,” I say. “I’ll leave the cylinder cap where it won’t move for a long time, and the piston where it will continue to move for a long time. That’ll get your engine running.” I’d never been to Boulder and had no idea whether this plan was executable. 

“Sounds good,” they said.

So off I went, though it took me a bit longer to get to Boulder than expected, as I stopped in Chicago to visit two old friends and stayed for five months. That adventure is partially recounted in Episode 10, “The Purpose of Rash Action”. I did finally get there, one evening in late July, and checked into the Youth Hostel quite giddily, having not been at altitude for most of seven years, since I’d lived at Lake Tahoe (see Episode 5: “Sound and Silence”). Then I scurried into town and found the Trident Café to get some coffee, because coffee, and to figure out what to do next. I was sitting there getting wired and writing postcards when I was gripped by a sudden panic and a spooky vision – I’m not sure what else to call it. Sitting there spacing out, I saw myself on the front walk of a huge old brick house, no, more like an old schoolhouse. It was night. I was approaching the big front doors and about to go up the old stone steps when I looked down and saw a crack in the bottom step big enough to fit that disc. That was it! And what the fuck! That’s Naropa, I thought. Naropa Institute (now University) was the only place that I knew of in Boulder, though I didn’t know much – some kind of Buddhist school that had something to do with Allen Ginsburg. I must have seen a picture of it – I must have – but certainly not of a crack in the first step. I jump up and scare the barista asking frantically where it is. He knows but has to draw me a map. The place is about nineteen blocks and the better part of a mile and it’s ten o’clock and the Youth Hostel locks its doors at 11. I take off at a run.

Soaked in sweat and out of mile-high breath I find the place, and it’s just as I “saw” it. Suddenly I’m creeped. It has a big open lawn and I might look like a trespasser, so I hesitate. Finally I start up the front walk. There’s that brick. There’re the doors, There are the steps – and yes, there’s a big crack in the bottom one. I insert that slug like a coin in a vending machine and walk away quickly. I run up The Hill (it’s actually called The Hill) to the hostel, make it just as they’re closing, and decide, fuck it, grab my pack and leave. I hike up the big grassy slopes of Chautauqua Park and sleep there beneath the Flatirons, in full view of the stars and the town.

Next morning I made my way to Dot’s Diner, which I’d spotted down the street from the Trident. I had just that day to figure out where to place the piston so that it would continue to move for a long time – much more challenging than the disc and I wasn’t expecting another vision. I decided to take a chance and ask the waitress. Her name was Jenny and a few years later we’d become good friends and would work together – at Dot’s Diner. She loved my question and the whole idea.

“Why don’t you throw it off the dam,” she said.

“The dam?”

Turns out there’s a dam, fifteen miles up Boulder Canyon, the road to which was just west down the block from the diner. It holds back a reservoir and from it spills Boulder Creek, which tumbles all fifteen miles back down, through town, and out onto the plains. The lesson there? Always ask a waitress. (And yes I know they’re called servers now, but I find “waiting” to be a much more gracious-sounding occupation than “serving”. And don’t give me the gender argument because if all genders can be actors or servers, all genders can be waiters. End of rant.) I finished breakfast and drove up the canyon.

John and Jay never did move to Boulder, though John visited for a while a few years later when I was living there. Regardless, the ritual was done. And I have to wonder today, thirty-seven years later, is that disc still motionless beneath those steps? And is that piston still in motion somewhere – in Boulder Canyon, or beneath the town, or eastward where Boulder Creek joins the South Platte River, on to the Missouri then the Mississippi then all the way to the Gulf of Mexico? I don’t know! And do I need to?

So I made it back to San Francisco in one inspired piece, to find that one of my roommates had turned crazy and evil (no, not the same one later in Austin; I’m just a magnet) (or a catalyst), and had spread shitty rumors about me amongst the poets, so I looked elsewhere for amusement, and here we merge with Episode 5: “Sound and Silence” where I meet Ted Thacker and Phil Wronski, musicians and the first peops from Boulder that I’d ever met (except Jenny the waitress, but that was in Boulder) and isn’t that timing curious. And I end up playing bass and acoustic rhythm guitar in their band, Baldo Rex, for a year and a half. (You can hear two of our tracks from that time in Episode 6.5: “A Musical Interlude”.) The car lasts a few month, then Szzzz. Somewhere after that I have an intense fling that spurs a depression and a vision quest (“Intentionality” again), and finally a release when I meet a bunch of new friends and end up in The High Risk Group, a queer dance theater ensemble. By that point the Baldos have moved back to Boulder and I’m feeling quite myself again (whatever that means), not to mention dancey, and I’m comfortable in San Francisco first time in a year and have a decent job and am doing a lot of readings and performance of different sorts and know tons of folks – which is apparently my cue to decide to move. I mean, have you been listening at all?

So come that June, it’s 1989 now, I start wondering if I should move to Boulder. One night I’m thinking about it pretty hard, and I decide to call Ted Thacker, the guitarist from Baldo Rex, the next morning to see what he thinks of the idea. The next morning as I’m making coffee the phone rings, and it’s Ted Thacker, calling not from Boulder but from five blocks away, inviting me to breakfast. He’d decided on a whim to drive his truck to SF to say hello to everybody. I was the first person he called. So that pretty much answered my question before I could ask it, and I did join him for breakfast.

I planned the move for August 1, for no particular reason. I had a lot going on then, as I say, so this move got a little more attention than most. In fact some folks were confused as to why I’d move away when I was having such success with my writing and performance. Here’s what I would tell them, or something very close to this:

Sometimes life seems like a long hallway lined with doors. Most are shut: many are locked, some just closed, and some ajar. Sometimes I open one to look, and sometimes I walk through one, and usually just end up back in the hall. That’s where I am, but up a little ways ahead a door has swung open. It’s green, and behind it there’s a golden light. That door is Boulder, and I feel like it’s opening for me, so I gotta go through it.

A fairly simple allegory, really, and for what? – whimsy, curiosity, intuition, universal consciousness? – and not really that interesting. But it got the point across, or didn’t, and it was the only answer that I had.

A day or two before I left, I’m wandering around with a friend South of Market talking and talking. Because that what we did. We were big talkers. (I’m a big talker, haha.) We’re walking down Harrison Street, which in those days was mostly industrial: warehouses and machine shops and courier services and the occasional bodega or bar. The blocks are long, which was good because we had a lot to talk about. Then up ahead I spot something odd, but like half a block away so it’s hard to make it out. “What the fuck is that,” I say as we approach. Then there it is, surreal as a ribbon. In the middle of the broad sidewalk someone has put up a door frame – just a doorframe, with a door, which is ajar, seemingly with no other purpose but to step through if you want. And – I am not shitting you – it was green. Because of course it was. I stepped through.

So I take off on the afternoon of August 1 with my lucky American Flag backpack, my ubiquitous shoulder bag, and my acoustic guitar. I’ve got a ride from a friend of a friend who’s going further east, so I’m paying for gas to Boulder. His name is John and he’s driving a silver Honda Prelude. None of that seemed unusual, though riding in a Prelude seemed like a good omen. Something held him up so we got a late start, but it was all good. A few hours later we’re driving over the Donner Pass in the Sierras near Tahoe, about to head down into Nevada. It’s been a beautiful clear day and the sun is setting behind us. John’s driving and I’m scribbling in my notebook about these scattered clouds in the east that are glowing bright pink, reflecting the sun against a darkening blue. They’re real pretty. Then something hits me – a sensation, not an object – hits me hard. Maybe it was dopamine but who cares. I get very excited and start begging John to pull over. I can’t tell him what’s going on, I have to check first. What? He pulls over into a scenic view and I jump in the back, rummaging in the bottom of my trusty backpack, where I’d stashed a bunch of old notebooks, some with half-finished writing, just in case. Because of course I did. I knew it was in there and had to find it to see if I was right. And it was, and I did, and I was. It was a notebook from a cross-country hitchhiking trip I took in 1984 from Berkeley to New Hampshire – that story is written elsewhere. It had taken me all day to get to the Donner Pass, but I’d scored a ride all the way to Maryland so I was sitting pretty. And there, on the first page of that old notebook, I was describing the bright pink clouds to the east reflecting the sunset behind us, and how beautiful they were against the darker blue sky. At the top of the page was the date: August 1, 1984 – exactly five years before this to the hour. That was in fact the last time I’d gone east across I-80 before now. And both times I was riding with a guy named John who I’d just met in a silver Honda Prelude. 

And that’s the beginning of The True Story of E’s and 5’s.

Okay! I hope that helped to wash away any residue of biochemical reductionism. I know it did for me. Not that neurology isn’t useful – but WHAT WAS THAT?

One thing it was was a lesson in how useful notebooks can be.

So I’ve done a count, and after this Episode Lucky Number 13, there should be 20 more episodes until my video fast presumably ends on June 1, 2025, if I manage to stick to the schedule. The next ep will be two weeks from today, on Saturday, September 21, and once again I’m not sure what it’ll be about and where this pod will lead me. I’m kind of cashed out on the 1980s, and though there’s more stuff in there, I think it needs a rest for a while. I have a few ideas, but as always feel free to suggest topics you’d like to hear (or hear more) about – and if they’re enough on theme (whatever that is), I’ll see what I can do as I go gently into…this TV-less night. In the meantime, we’ve got all these numbers floating around: 13’s, 20’s, 1’s, 5’s – and others I’ve lost track of. And as we all know, serendipity loves numbers. So if nothing else, perhaps they might be taken as a genial suggestion to make every number your lucky number.

This has been Episode 13, covering Week 14 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Thank you for listening.