When I was a child I was brought up as a Lutheran. My father was Irish, and had been put through a Catholic grade school which I gather he really hated. He became an atheist, but he didn’t really talk to me about it. My mother, brother, and maternal grandmother were Lutherans, and so I went along with their program by default. This was the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, so the Sunday school programs were rather liberal. Most of what we did involved studying various workbooks, and not so much reading the Bible itself. As an adult I actually regret this, as when I encounter allusions to the Bible in art or literature, I usually have to go look it up to understand what’s going on!
Sometime in the summer of 1976 or 1977 I went to the county fair and encountered a Christian booth that was giving away Jack T. Chick tracts. I was immediately taken by what I was seeing. I hadn’t really read comic books as a child, with the exception of MAD magazine, which is not really a comic book anyway. I probably read Archie or Richie Rich a handful of times.
Chick’s version of Christianity was vastly more hardcore than the mild-mannered Lutheran religion that I had been exposed to. Yet it was so much more emotionally compelling than what I was exposed to in Sunday school that I read every Jack T. Chick tract I could get my hands on! At one point I think I mail ordered a huge compilation pack that included most or all of the issues that were in print at the time.
One tract in particular stuck out: Big Daddy. This was a rather infamous creationist manifesto, a direct and ruthless attack on the theory of evolution by natural selection. My religious thinking was beginning to come to a head with me sometime in about my junior year of high school. I remember taking a biology class that included a section on evolution, and the instructor had to spend the first part of the class simply addressing the negative creationist feedback he had received over the years.
But several things were in my favor, as far as the search for the truth goes. One was that the biology class set things out in an orderly progression, where one piece of evidence logically flowed to another piece of evidence. In contrast, Chick’s manifesto was a scattershot hodge-podge of criticisms, not a logically coherent theory.
I remember having a sort of teenage epiphany walking home to lunch one day with my friend John. I was talking about evolution and the biology class. John had known me since early grade school and was rather shocked to hear me express doubts about evolution.
“Matt, you’re a scientific kind of guy, what are you doing believing in all this creationist nonsense?’
Indeed, one of the saving graces of this period was that I had discovered the non-fiction books of Isaac Asimov. I don’t know what essay it was, but I had a genuine epiphany when I discovered Asimov’s treatment of the second law of thermodynamics. Asimov pointed out the great flaw in the creationist’s argument regarding the second law; the earth is not a closed system, and the second law only applies to closed systems. At this point I knew that Chick was full of shit, but the implications were deeper still, and this is why this episode rose to the level of epiphany for me.
The family I grew up in never “joshed” each other, or “told stories” or even “pulled your leg.” If this sounds rather emotionally rigid, you would be right. Obviously my friends didn’t adhere to this same kind of standard, and I believe the development of my “bullshit detector” was rather stunted. Even as an adult, I look back with sadness at how many times people have lied to me and gotten away with it, at least for a time. Again, I’m talking about the intuitive level, not the above board critical thinking level. I believe that critical thinking is like typing, it’s not a skill that one is naturally born with, it’s something you have to work at and develop.
So believe it or not, having a huge emotional infatuation with the tracts of Jack T. Chick then realizing that he was totally full of shit about evolution, made a huge impact on me. How could there be people in this world who spent their entire lives spouting nonsense and lies? How could there be people in this world who wouldn’t change their beliefs when exposed to strong evidence or logical argument?
Obviously the older I got, the more I realized that the world is absolutely chock full of liars, con men, frauds, and bullshiters of every kind!
I became a complete atheist by reading a rather odd pair of books. The first was the Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Bierce’s book was an anthology of biting aphorisms, often quite blasphemous. But one theme that was constant in his book was that there are, and have been, many religions in the history of humankind, each of them believing itself to be the One True Religion. Simple logic dictates that they can’t all be right, and in fact most of them must be wrong because they all contradict each other. This is a simple concept, but it made a big impact on me.
Eventually I read Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell. This was the first time I learned that various logical arguments had been proposed for the existence of God. The argument from first cause, the argument from design, etc. Russell systematically demonstrated that all of these arguments are fallacious. Russell’s book was also a valuable exposure to the nature of logic expressed in a linguistic fashion as opposed to the mathematical proofs of geometry that I was familiar with.
So by the time I started college in 1980, Jack T. Chick was an embarrassing episode in my mental development, kind of like admitting you liked some really bad music for a certain time period…
Only recently did I even start thinking about Chick again as a result of becoming interested in “underground” comics in general. I became a fan quite late in the game, largely as a result of Denny Eichhorn giving me a whole set of his Real Stuff comics, and seeing the documentary Crumb. Just a few years ago, Fantagraphics opened a retail store in Georgetown, which is literally just over the hill from where I live. Through Fantagraphics I was reacquainted with Jim Blanchard, an amazing cartoonist and graphic artist in his own right. I had actually met Blanchard in the late 1980’s when I came into a Kinko’s that he was working at. I allowed him to keep some copies of some photographic portraits I brought in. He eventually re-drew and incorporated some of them into his graphic compilations.
During Super Bowl Sunday, 2010, Jim was kind enough to loan me a rare parody-documentary tract called “The Imp” which was a rather scathing criticism of Chick. Unknown to me, during the 1980’s Chick had become associated with other individuals with beliefs just as far-out as his, and he integrated their stories into his own tracts. Blanchard also gave me a copy of a fantastic video documentary on Chick that included interviews with at least two people I was familiar with.
Chick is an enigma; obviously he’s not in the same aesthetic niche as Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, or any other “underground” comic artist. You won’t find his tracts for sale at Fantagraphics, nor even many Christian bookstores. According to the documentary, Canada considers Chick’s comics “Hate Literature!”
I’m sure I’m not alone in being one of those people who was affected in some weird and possibly profound way by Jack T. Chick. I think I’ll start asking people for their own stories…
Recently I got an e-mail from a graduate of my high school. It contained a link to a website which was put together to organize a 30th anniversary reunion for the class of 1980. Part of the website had a page dedicated to those of our graduating class who are now deceased. This reminded me of a strange incident that involved the most famous member of our graduating class: Steve Albini.
Steve and I graduated from Hellgate High in Missoula, MT in 1980. Back then I was pals with Steve to some degree. He formed Montana’s first punk band called Just Ducky. Their first public performance was at a bar downtown called the Forum. Steve asked me to project a movie I had made using the “direct stock” method, which involves creating images on the exposed film itself, rather than using a camera. The most well known film maker that used this method was Stan Brakhage.
Steve was also a columnist for the school newspaper, called the “Lance”. I think his column was called “Paparazzi” which was my first exposure to that word. I knew several other people on the Lance staff as well.
In a high school the size of Hellgate, it wasn’t entirely unusual for a student to die during the school year. During my senior year of 1979-1980, not only did one student die early in the school year, but a second one did as well! Unknown to me at the time, Steve Albini and several other members of the Lance staff organized a morbid “dead pool” into which each member put in five dollars. Each member of the dead pool then picked a week of the remainder of the year. If a third student died during that week then the “winner” would collect the money. If no one died, the staff would use the money to buy pizza at the end of the year.
But word quickly got out about the dead pool, and it was immediately dissolved. I remember watching a student who knew one of the deceased students confront Albini and physically threaten him. I suspect that if it came to blows, Steve would have gotten the worst of it, as he was no great shakes as a physical specimen… But that never happened, and as the school year went on, this little scandal was forgotten about.
But tragedy struck a day or two before graduation, as one of the most popular students in school was killed in a high speed automobile collision. This kid was not only a star athlete, but a top-notch student, and all around well liked guy. During the graduation ceremony we had the obligatory moment of silence for him, though if memory serves, they were quite blatant about having everyone pray for the kid.
Later that summer, I got to talking with another student who had been on the Lance staff, Steve D. Steve D. and I were fairly good friends until he became a born again Christian and I lost touch with him. I had forgotten about the connection between Albini’s dead pool and the death of the well-liked athlete. I asked Steve if he participated in the dead pool, and he sheepishly admitted that he had. I asked him which week he picked and he was quite chagrined to admit that he had picked the week that the popular athlete died!
I always wondered if he considered having participated in the dead pool a sin, and asked Jesus to forgive him…
A recent article that appeared in Martin Gardner’s column Notes of a Fringe Watcher reminded me of an incident that occurred to me when I was in high school. This is a comment of mine that originally appeared on Metafilter.
I used to watch the national evening news on TV with my father virtually every night from about 1968 until about 1981, when I moved into the dorms. I remember watching the evening news broadcast somewhere in the late 1970’s which reported that the WHO had announced the eradication of smallpox.
The news in and of itself was mind blowing to me, even as a high school kid, as I had no idea that an eradication program was even in effect. I knew enough about the history of epidemic disease to know that this was an absolute milestone in human history, the epidemiological equivalent of putting a man on the moon.
But then my father dropped an even more profound bombshell on me, rather casually in fact. “I had smallpox.”
This was astounding, as even then I knew that Jenner had come out with his vaccine in the late 1700’s. By the time my father was a child, the smallpox vaccine was commonly available. The fact that my father survived smallpox, growing up in Butte Montana in the 1930’s, amazed me further still. He showed no scarring that was visible.
“Why weren’t you vaccinated?” was all I could think of to ask.
“My parents didn’t believe in it.” I still couldn’t understand, as I suddenly started having to make a bunch of inferences. My father is an emotionally private person, and many things I’m very curious about I just don’t ask about. He’s Irish, so I had to assume his parents were either Catholic if religious, or atheist. My father is an atheist. As far as I know, the Catholic Church has never opposed vaccination, though they are, of course, saddled with a boat-load of other irrationalities…
So all I could gather from my father was that my paternal grandparents opposed vaccination on some sort of nebulous anti-government, anti-medical establishment, anti-something-or-other irrational reason.
So when I hear about people who oppose vaccination all I can think of is “Yeah, my father contracted smallpox because of people like you…”
It’s cold outside. So cold in fact, that it reminds me of the time I got frostbite.
I grew up in Missoula, which doesn’t get as cold as some of the other cities in Montana, like Butte. My father was from Butte, and he would regale me with stories of how cold it would get. I think he told me it was -64 Fahrenheit on his birthday once when he was a child. The all time record cold temperature in the contiguous United States is -70 Fahrenheit set at Rogers Pass, MT on January 20, 1954. But the coldest I ever remember Missoula getting was a relatively balmy -20 Fahrenheit.
When I was in high school I used to ice skate. I followed my father’s lead and chose to use speed skates rather than the hockey skates that all the other boys used. Back in the 1970’s, the primary “rink” was a pond at McCormick Park. The pond was fed by an irrigation ditch that was itself fed by the Clark Fork River. This led to a bit of a problem in that the flow from the ditch would change over the course of the winter, and would cause the pond’s surface level to change. Huge cracks would develop in the ice. The parks department was utterly clueless on how to take care of an ice rink, and would only flood the surface of the rink once or twice a season, if that. They would NEVER scrape the ice shavings off the surface. When they would flood the rink, it was with a fire hose, not a garden hose, which resulted in huge wave-like ripples on the surface. When you were out skating you would have to do your best to avoid the huge cracks, simply by memorizing where they were and try to avoid them.
But to their credit, the parks department had erected floodlights, so people could skate at night. They put in a big loudspeaker and played the radio.
“Blinded by the light
Racked up like a douche
You know a runner in the light
Some silico-sister with a manager, mister
Told me I got what it takes…”
There was usually an adult attendant in the warming house. I remember one time going out to skate on a Friday or Saturday night. As I came inside to change into my skates this college-aged attendant asked me: “Why aren’t you out on a date?”. Yeah, way to go guy, thanks for making me feel even worse about never having been on a date with a girl…
The speed skates had no insulation. They were simply one layer of leather. I assumed that keeping my feet warm was my own problem. I tried all sorts of combinations of materials. I remember getting some silk socks which were very thin and formed the first layer. Then it was usually ordinary socks, then wool. I remember getting some “space age” type socks which I believe were basically aluminized Mylar woven into some other fabric. The whole “space blanket” thing was very popular back in the 1970’s, and I think these were some sort of funky byproduct. They didn’t keep my feet warm worth a damn.
I had heard that you could put powdered chili pepper in your socks and it would keep your feet warm. One night I tried it, putting the powder in my socks before I took off for the rink. My parents allowed me to drive the family car, a wretched French Renault 12. When I got to the rink I found it was closed! Well, my parents didn’t expect me back for a while, so I decided to visit my friend JC, and older guy who drove a cab. He lived out at the Shady Grove Autel, a collection of rental bungalows in a dodgier part of town. By the time I got to JC’s my feet were burning, as they hadn’t been exposed to the cold. I don’t remember that he was home, either! I never tried the hot chili powder trick again…
Eventually I came to expect a pattern; I’d get out on the ice, my feet would get painfully cold, then they would stop hurting because they would go numb. Then it would be OK. I’d skate for an hour or two. When I’d finish skating, I’d change back into my shoes, and the feeling in my feet would come back.
One time I went skating and everything went as it normally did; my feet got painfully cold, then numb, then I kept on skating. But this time it was different. I changed back into my shoes and got into the car. Driving back home I began to grow concerned; the feeling in my feet still hadn’t come back. By the time I got in the house I was quite frightened.
Not knowing any better, I filled my sink with hot water and alternately put each foot into the basin. That still didn’t work. I went upstairs into the study where my father was reading. I told him what was going on. He didn’t seem particularly agitated, but suggested I had frostbite. He said what I needed to do was put my feet into a tub of COLD water, then very slowly raise the temperature. But of course my mother had to get in on the action. She became rather frantic and called a friend of hers who was a nurse. The nurse said to put my feet into LUKEWARM water. Now my father knew this was bullshit, but our family dynamic was all fucked up, and only rarely did my father ever put his foot down to stop my mother’s irrationality.
So into a tub of lukewarm water my feet go. Soon enough sensation in my feet started to come back. But not in a nice way. So here I take full responsibility for my own actions; because I had initially exposed my flesh to HOT water, my nerves were screaming out in pain. I kid you not; this was arguably the most intense physical pain that I’ve ever experienced in my life. Worse than breaking my arm falling off a wall in LA. Worse being hit in the eye with a rock thrown by that drunk asshole in front of Charlie B’s in Missoula. Worse than any skateboard fall. Worse than Sheli Story’s right hook to my eye.
The pain was so bad that I called my friend Elliott who worked at the Trail Head sporting goods store. I thought he might have some magical cure my father didn’t know about for the excruciating pain. He kind of laughed it off, and suggested whiskey, which was not an option for me at that time and that place.
Frostbite is no joke. If you feel your hands or feet start to go numb because of the cold take warm shelter as soon as possible! If your extremities have been numb for more than a few minutes, and the feeling isn’t coming back, put them in COLD water. VERY SLOWLY warm them back up. If you plan on spending significant amounts of time exposed to the cold, investigate frostbite and hypothermia and be prepared.
The last time I was in Missoula there was no more ice skating allowed at McCormick Park. What do Missoula kids do in the winter these days? Probably just play video games…
![2854336981_6cafd6bbd3[1]](http://orgoneresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/2854336981_6cafd6bbd31-350x233.jpg "2854336981_6cafd6bbd3[1]")
When I was a child, my mother gave my brother and me each a Hudson Bay blanket. My mother had been a child in the Great Depression, and the experience clearly made a profound impact on her. I grew up constantly hearing her tales of deprivation, which induced in me a sort of guilt when I would receive gifts, or even drink lots of milk. My mother told me that her family didn’t have fresh milk in the Great Depression, due to a combination of primitive refrigeration technology and poverty. They had to make do with condensed milk.
So I was told that the gift of the Hudson Bay blanket was a Very Valuable Thing, a thing of such value that one must be given to my brother AND me so as not to demonstrate overt favoritism. At least that was my interpretation of why my mother made such a big deal of giving one to each of us…
My mother told me that my brother had once written an essay for school on the venerable history of the Hudson Bay blanket, and may have even delivered it as an oral presentation. Clearly there was some serious mojo going on with this blanket.
But deep down, I never quite “got it”. The thing looked cool, all white with the boldly colored stripes, but it was made of wool, and as such was all scratchy. It didn’t seem substantially warmer than other blankets, especially the down comforter I had, encased though it was in an ugly brown satin. I also had a blanket my mother called a “thermal” blanket. There was something odd about this blanket, in that it was crocheted or woven in a manner that produced a myriad of holes. Even as a child, my nascent skepticism was aroused; weren’t all blankets “thermal” blankets? Wasn’t holding heat the idea in the first place? And why should a blanket be full of holes?
But Western Montana is a cold place, and I was grateful to have lots of blankets. I would arrange the layers so the Venerable Hudson Bay Blanket would be somewhere in the middle, so it wouldn’t scratch me.
By the time I got to college, I began to go through a sort of ascetic phase. I gave away many of the things I owned, and at one point I started to eat a lot less. At the time, I think I was trying to impress my first so-called girlfriend with how much will-power or self control I could exert. I call her my “so-called” girlfriend, because she refused to have sex. Yup, her refusal was a gigantic ego-shattering, self-esteem destroying, frustrating mind-fuck.
But eventually I came to my senses, and began running into women who liked to, you know, “get it on”… One night I was by myself at the Top Hat bar in Missoula, probably watching yet another R&B boogie band cover “Mustang Sally”. In walks Christy. Christy worked at the Kinko’s where I did all my photocopying. She was older than me, one of Missoula’s classic old-school radical feminists. I’m not sure exactly how she perceived me; she helped me photocopy a great deal of information I had gathered on autoerotic asphyxia, and even bound it all together for me into one large binder. This was the binder that I later loaned to Rick Linklater. I think she may have perceived me as some sort of “new wave” guy, some sort of unexpected by-product of what the hippies begat.
She walked up to me and hugged me. These days, that’s a benign greeting, and certainly not always one with sexual overtones. But to me, at that time and in that place, it could only mean one thing: She liked me and I must pursue her sexually!
So I did. We walked and talked, and of course I tried to ply her with alcohol. She seemed fearful of beer, on the grounds that it had yeast in it. Yeast was bad, somehow. I tried to explain to her that commercial American beers were both filtered and pasteurized, and so had little or no live yeast remaining. But this was really my introduction to the fact that she had a whole slew of “new age” and pseudoscientific beliefs. She claimed to have “allergies” yet wouldn’t accept that true allergies are a histaminic response, not the sort of generalized malaise she complained of. She was a believer in astrology.
Eventually we had sex. The first time was awkward and not very fun. But this created a History between us, and for her History was political. All the psycho-social ramifications and implications of this political act had to be discussed ad nauseam. But Christy was a smart gal, and in general I liked her company. Many of the women I met who were my own age were vapid and shallow airheads, and I knew deep down I could never relate to them. But I was beginning to see the weird angry-hippie-feminist side of Christy as well. I remember her telling me about how human society began as a Golden Era, run by women, and called the “Matriarchy”. But then evil men took over, and society became a “Patriarchy”.
This was news to me, as I had always assumed men had pretty much oppressed women from the get-go, and that things had gotten better for women rather late in human history, mostly in the industrialized countries. But I had come from a hard science background, so the concepts of “Matriarchy” and “Patriarchy” were completely novel to me. I had no easily accessible resources with which to investigate her claims.
Certain more tangible things began to get on my nerves. She boasted of once having destroyed a man’s Aerosmith LP because it contained the lyrics “You can’t catch me, ‘cause the rabbit done died”. But rabidly horny guys will put up with all kinds of things, and I was a rabidly horny guy. So we had sex a second time. This time things were better planned, and it proved to be the first time I ever saw a diaphragm. It looked pretty cool, actually, and of course I wondered how it might fly if thrown like a Frisbee…
So we start going at it. At this point in my life I think I’d had sex only about 5 times, so I still quite the n00b. I don’t remember how long I lasted before I came. But surprisingly, my erection didn’t go down! This was a bit of a surprise, so I just kept on going. This time around some sort of weird equilibrium was achieved, and as it happened I didn’t stop until the sun came up. I think we had been going at it for 5 or 6 hours. Alas, I was only able to pull off that stunt the one time, but it reminded me of all those old blues songs that included lines about “all night long”. Hmmm, I guess it really was possible…
By the way, for those reading this in 2009, this occurred in the 1980’s, long before phosphodiesterase inhibitor drugs were available. Indeed, no drugs or freaky devices were involved, other than probably just some alcohol.
Being that Christy worked at Kinko’s, she wasn’t a wealthy person. At one point she complained that her house was cold. I offered her a blanket, which she accepted. Since her primary need was simply warmth, I decided to give her my Hudson Bay blanket. This act had a two-fold fallout. My mother was aghast that I had given away what was to her almost a family heirloom. I found this attitude strange, as it seemed to be directly at odds with her Christian religion, which ostensibly placed a high value on charity. I refused to confront my mother with this contradiction, as by this time I took great pains to avoid arguments and confrontations with my mother.
I was not entirely surprised that the radical leftist recipient of this gift had even less understanding of its material value than I did. Back in the 80’s I had no easy way of finding out how much such a blanket might really cost. But a quick Google search tells me that buying one today might set me back $300! I’m sure it didn’t cost my mother that much when she bought it, but I don’t disbelieve her claim that it was expensive.
The final straw with Christy and me came while we were eating ice cream. We started talking about the SLA, and Christy began to deliver an impassioned screed about how bank robbery really wasn’t such a heinous crime! This was a mind-blowing assertion, as I had come from such a completely different moral background. My father had been the assistant Attorney General for the state of Montana. He was largely responsible for re-writing Montana’s state constitution in 1972. He taught law at the University of Montana starting in 1965 until his semi-retirement in the early 1990’s. My law-and-order upbringing was directly at odds with Christy’s radical leanings.
After that I’d see Christy around Missoula from time to time, but it was all over between us.
Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to that damn blanket…
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