[sic]

Seems like only yesterday my Susan and I were wandering in wonderment the walks and waterways of Venice.

Brief backstory: I have an Alphasmart 3000, a somewhat goofy PlaySkool-looking AA battery-operated, bare bones portable word-processor that I bought prior to our Africa honeymoon trip in 2005 because I wanted something rugged and durable and cheap ($200) that, given our locations in the Rwandan countyside, the Serengeti (pictured at right tapping away on it into the dark of the night within our tented camp) and other various outposts with uncertain access to electric power, wasn’t in need of recharging. The device performed flawlessly throughout the more than two weeks abroad. I wrote this journal of that trip on it.

I barely used the thing since. In fact, the only time was in the summer of the following year when I brought it with us on our 4,500-mile roadtrip through California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. I’d also brought our old Apple laptop with us as well and so I hadn’t much use for the Alphasmart.

Which brings us to today when I turned it on for the first time in practically two years and found the 1,421 forgotten words I’d written still stored in its memory, recounting a bit about our travels across the famed Beartooth Highway on to and through Yellowstone.

About 356 words from the end there’s a break where I’ve apparently stopped writing about Yellowstone and several days later picked the thing up to type a few emotional words after we discovered the four abandoned pups on the side of the highway in Monument Valley — and that ends abruptly, too.

For wont of a real blog post today, after the jump it’s all copied and pasted (with a couple links to pics) in full unedited glory.

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Isn’t it funny how we forget about stuff. I was cruising through the back end of the ridiculous amount of photos I have online at Flickr, and these two Santa Cruz island foxes showed up, bringing back a flood of good memories of the days I spent in November 2004 with a crew of docents from the Los Angeles Zoo. We were there as guests of the Nature Conservancy and as part of their island fox recovery program our purpose was to assemble captive breeding pens for the island’s decimated island fox population.

In looking further around my Flickr stream I was disturbed that this was pretty much the only photo from the excursion. What had happened to the others? Had they been deleted? OMGWTF? Then, from the cobwebby recesses of my memory I pulled out the recollection that I never uploaded any to Flickr. I put them up on shutterfly.com because back then I was all into making keepsake books for my photos. Here’s the link if you want to check it out. Or you can view a slideshow of all the photos here.

It was a remarkable experience and I’m glad not only that I was reminded of it, but relieved that I was able to remember where I’d stored the memories.

Occasionally I’ll scroll back through the time machine that is my photo archive and in this case I ended up all the way back to early 2004 before slingshotting back forward to the summer of 2005 and our Africa trip, in particular this shot taken on our last morning in Zanzibar when I waded out a few hundred yards nto the Indian Ocean at daybreak for what turned out to be a sunrise made all the more glorious and spectacular by the flat calm of the shallow water and the multiple layers and textures of the  clouds (click to triplify):

More than two years removed from it the image took some getting oriented too, since being a lifelong Californian I’m used to the sun setting into the sea, not rising from it.

Look what I found on an old buried computer disk (click to quadruplify):

It’s not just every day or just anyone who gets to sit in the Dodgers dugout with Congressman Xavier Becerra and his three wonderful daughters. But before you go thinking I was some political insider or something even more dubious, rest assured my only claims to fame was that I was friends at the time with a fellow L.A. Zoo docent named Laure McNulty who was full-time nanny to Becerra’s girls and since the trio of tots spent a lot of time at the zoo that summer I got to know them and subsequently their high-powered dad and mom well enough to have the honor of accepting their invitation to be the guests of the Dodgers for the June 21, 2002, game, which included pre-game field (and obviously dugout) access before settling in to a luxury suite on the first base side.

It was a dream come true and I’d thought this image, snapped by Laure was long gone.

A year ago last month for various reasons and excuses I posted about a semi-ffrivolous desire to adopt the nickname “Dub,” and I was subsequently surprised and humored by the various comments from my friends and blog pals who pretty much summarily rejected or pfffft’d or chuckled at the idea.

So I let sleeping Dubs lie.

Thirteen months later I find an email in my inbox this morning alerting me to a new comment on the matter from a gentleman from the great state of Tennessee who — through the timeless wonders of the internest –  found my post and has signaled his time-tested approval of the idea.

His name? If you haven’t guessed it by now, read on:

Well, Dub, I say go for it!  It’s worked fine for me for almost 60 years.  It’s a tried and true name that is extremely hip and I highly recommend it to anyone who is not squeamish and who’s first name being replaced begins with the letter W.  And Dubby was ok for me as a kid but I don’t recommend handing it down to young offspring, as my own parents did to me.  I said bye to the “by” in Dubby right around the same time I lost my virginity.  Good luck to you!

Dub Campbell
Nashville, Tennessee

Thanks Dub! I do like the sound of it but have to say while I’d still be keen on the moniker, I’d need special dispensation from the proper authorities in order to violate the unwritten rule of self-bestowing a nickname.

It just dawned on me that a couple days ago was the 10th anniversary of The Worst Birthday Of My Life. Sure, a lot of people have a lot of subjective reasons why a birthday might blow, but I guarantee you that my 33rd sucked in an empirical and impenetrably definitive sense.

Let’s go take a look, shall we?

On May 29, 1997, I was working at a magazine called Pool & Spa News as an associate editor. I’d been there a couple months and was charged with doing all sorts of things and none of them very well. I was the publication’s webmaster, I oversaw their annual nationwide design contest, I managed their continuing education curriculum. And on top of that I was writing features and columns too on whatever whim the editor, who never thought I had enough to do, would assign them to me. In short I was stuck doing the jobs of several people and I attempted this juggling act while working for the aforementioned editor who was the most micro of micromanagers. If I had an idea she would find a way to modify it. And she was never satisfied unless she made me rewrite every rewrite of everything I wrote. Once she marked up a memo I’d written to her and sent it back to me for revisions. I responded by throwing her and her red pen out the 4th floor window of the old building we worked in on the corner of 6th and Western in Koreatown.

Not really.

Living in Encino the commute to mid-Wilshire was hellish more often than it was not. Hellish trek, hellish job, hellish boss. It made me relish my lunch hours and on May 29 when lunchtime came I hopped into my beloved blue 1994 Honda Civic LX for a run a few blocks west to to the nearest ATM on Wilshire and Irving to get some cash for something to eat.

Motoring west down 6th I arrived at Irving and noted the familiar mayor’s mansion on the southwest corner as I pulled into the intersection to turn south. Facing me was a Sparkletts truck in the left lane blocking my view of the oncoming traffic while waiting to make a left and go north on Irving. Inching forward a few feet I tried to get a peek around it to see if the lane next to the truck was clear and when I thought it was at pretty much the same moment I punched it I saw the Mercedes sedan bearing down on me and I braced myself knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wouldn’t be able to clear its path and a collision was imminent.

And it was. Boom.

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A year ago today Susan, me and our friend Rachel had a weekender in Death Valley and they accompanied me on a day-hike in the Panamint Range to the 10,000-foot mark and then sent me on my way up the rest of the trail to the 11,049-foot summit of Telescope Peak. Breaking campe the next day I rang in my 42nd — or as my friend Mark would call it “the 13th anniversary of my 29th” — by going the other way in the form of an exhilirating 17-mile downhill ride from our campsite at 8,300 feet to the floor of the Panamint Valley.

Photoset of that weekend here on Flickr. 

Seeing as we’re but a week or so returned from our awesome European vacation, on this eve of the 14th anniversary of my 29th no activities so monumental or unique are on tap. Instead I’m going to put an end today to my three-plus weeks out of the saddle and bike over to the Los Angeles National Cemetery and back before mom comes over this afternoon and we fire up the grill and share the rough DVD/slideshow Susan and I created featuring some 1,600 images from the trip. It has the potential to be a home movie from hell but mom’s expressed a desire to see what we saw so we’ll see how durable that desire is.

To really get the gears turning back in the right direction again tomorrow will be a good day for the This Is My Life Ride that I charted out last October.

My fellow Blogging.la contributor David Markland is psyched for the Star Wars Celebration beginning this Friday at the L.A. Convention Center, and wrote that he can track his desire to be a filmmaker back to when he saw the film and then the landmark “Making of Star Wars” special that aired on CBS back in 1977.

Which reminded me of the 2005 posts I wrote during the frenzy building for the release of the series’ much-anticipated final chapter about me actually being in that TV special. So climb aboard my flashback machine and let’s relive that glory:

April 7, 2005

With all the overblown obsession of all the people in line at the Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood planning to wait the 43 days until the next “Star Wars” film opens (but at the Arclight, not the Chinese), it got me kinda nostalgic for those good old days back in the summer of 1977 when my friend Luis DeJesus and I cut summer school at Le Conte Junior High to go see C3P0, R2D2, and Darth Vader get their feetprints enshrined in concrete in the famed theater’s forecourt.

And wouldn’t you know, the website of those geeks who are currently lined up there has an image posted of that very same event:

I kid you not, Luis and I were standing in the area indicated by the arrow, perhaps 12 feet or so from where the coolest droids and the bestest villian ever showed up to smoosh their tootsies in the Ready-Mix. We were in 13-year-old heaven!

The cool thing was Luis’ mom was working at 20th Century Fox at the time and had scored us each an authentic film crew tee with the distinctive logo on the front — which of course we both wore.

Later, after the ceremony was over and the crowd had dispersed Luis and I were trying to figure out a way to sneak in to see the film when a guy near the box office with a video camera called to us as we stood beneath one of the posters on the right side of the courtyard. We both looked over at him and he held the camera on us for a few seconds before saying thanks and moving on.

We thought it was just a local cameraman grabbing footage, but we later found out it was much bigger than the six o’clock news. Shortly thereafter, to capitalize on the fever the film induced, we heard of a “The Making of ‘Star Wars,’” a documentary that aired about a month later on TV — just after 8th grade had begun.

Of course I watched it, having no idea that near the end when the doc was wrapping up with an exploration of the merchandizing phenomenon the movie had become, all of a sudden there I was with Luis onscreen standing under the poster in our matching “Star Wars” t-shirts. In a blink we were gone, but it was enough for me to come to school (in the shirt, of course) and wallow in some short-lived celebrity from a steady stream of schoolmates who throughout the day would yell at me, “Hey! I saw you on TV last night!”

Man it would be so cool if I could get my hands on a copy of that old doc… but maybe I already have it. I should dive into the special features discs of the “Star Wars Trilogy” that Susan got me for Christmas… perhaps it’s in there. How cool would that be!?

Turns out four days later, bad back not withstanding,
it would be very cool, after the jump.

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Has it been 13 years since the Northridge Earthquake rocked my world?