As I illuminated his foot, he was startled by the sound of some woman calling to him. He said he had to leave immediately or else his girlfriend would abandon him there. He got up and ran toward her and her car, evidently with a glass shard still embedded in his foot. Thoughtfully, he suggested I carefully clean off my knife…

It’s presently drying after an extended bath in 35% hydrogen peroxide.

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…

Unlike Ashleigh, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take photographs or retain other kinds of ephemera about SCUD. So I’m running strictly on memory here, which can be fallible.

First off, I moved to Seattle from Montana in 1987. It was immediately obvious to me that just being a pharmacist was not emotionally satisfying in and of itself. At the time, I was deeply inspired by the books published by RE/Search, which suggested that intensive investigation into unusual topics was intrinsically cool. I had already accumulated a large database of forensic literature regarding autoerotic asphyxia, and I began to buy books on forensic science, which were often rather expensive. So at the time, I thought of myself as a researcher and not a creator. I was also fascinated with counterfeit currency, and began to buy books on the topic. This was a result of my obsession with the movie To Live and Die in LA.

Soon after arriving in Seattle, I discovered COCA, the Center on Contemporary Arts. Almost all of the content appealed to me, and even as a pharmacist, I felt very much at ease with what was obviously the best of Seattle’s underground artistic counterculture.

Not long after I arrived in Seattle I began to hang out at a long-gone bar on Capitol Hill called Squid Row. One night a long haired man about my age came in the bar with a metallic suitcase, much like the one seen in To Live and Die in LA. I immediately figured this guy must be cool, based on this characteristic alone. Soon enough he opened his briefcase, and inside were copies of his fanzine, hot off the Kinko’s presses. This was Tim “Zamora” Cridland, and his ‘zine was called Off the Deep End. Although I had done a great deal of photocopying before coming to Seattle, I had never seen a true fanzine before. I remember thumbing through it, and coming upon a morbid cartoon; an illustration of the JFK assassination with the caption “The three ballots that elected Lyndon Johnson.” This really knocked my socks off, and thus began a long term friendship with Tim Cridland.

Cridland knew Mike Hoy of Loompanics. At the time, I was totally unfamiliar with Loompanics, though I was familiar with one of its rivals, Paladin Press, having ordered Get Even several years before. I think I was at a COCA event, possibly “Weapons of WWIV” when I was approached by Tim who told me that Mike Hoy was interested in having me write an essay about autoerotic asphyxia for Loompanics. Hoy learned of my interest in this arcane subject through Tim. At the time, I was hugely flattered. I was going to be paid $100 for this essay! I would be a published author!
I set about writing the article, and eventually submitted it to Hoy. It ran in the 1989 main catalog and was later included in a compilation of essays published as a book entitled Loompanics Greatest Hits. Included in the essay were two illustrations by an artist I was unfamiliar with. At the time the only “signature” of the artist was an equilateral triangle roughly bisected by a line.

I think I was at the Rebar when I finally met the artist, Ashleigh Talbot. I think she approached me and introduced herself. Being that her illustrations were so graphically morbid, I think I expected her to be dour and negative; perhaps she sacrificed chickens in her spare time… But she was nothing like that at all, being ebullient and positive. She seemed to genuinely understand the fascination with atypical death and sexual paraphilia.

I remember being at the SCUD party for the Modern Primitives show. I think as a COCA member I received an official invitation. Honestly I don’t remember too much about the party, except the entrance of ManWoman, whom I had read about in the RE/Search books.

I felt like a groupie as I called out to him as he entered… I remember going ga-ga over meeting Andrea Juno, whom I respected as a co-creator of the RE/Search books, and because she was very good looking. I corresponded with her a bit afterwards, but nothing really came of it. I got this vibe that over time she became something of a man-hater, but I could be wrong about this.

Years later, when I was on the sideshow, I had the pleasure of visiting V. Vale at the RE/Search offices. Andrea was still in San Francisco at the time, and still with RE/Search, but I gathered that things were beginning to break down. V. Vale was the perfect host with me, however, and he called Andrea on the telephone. Evidently she was upstairs at the time. V. Vale told her I was in the office, and invited her to come down and say hello. Apparently she couldn’t be bothered, and refused to leave her post. Awkward… I remember V. Vale casually opening an office drawer which revealed a large caliber short barreled revolver. I thought that was pretty cool; better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it…

I attended the COCA opening of the Modern Primitives show and took photographs. I could tell that the Modern Primitives “scene” was going to be big, and indeed it became so. But I also noticed that most of the participants were young, white, and mostly middle class. It occurred to me that there was a whole other set of tattooed people who had not received the kind of lavish artistic attention that the “Modern Primitives” had; convicts. I formulated a fantasy of creating a book documenting prisoners and their tattoos. The state prison at Monroe wasn’t too far away, and even Walla Walla wasn’t very far either. I knew that good photography was critical to the project. When I was in college, I had been in a band called Sports and Science. We enlisted an amateur photographer’s help in taking promo shots of our band for posters. It turned into an absolute nightmare, as he was developing his own photos, and time was quickly running out. At the VERY last minute, he delivered his still-wet enlargements, literally floating in a bucket of water…

I didn’t want to farm out the photography, so I purchased a Canon AV-1 camera and a macro lens. I began to take close up photos. I also got very lucky, as I found a tattoo artist named Roni Falgout who had made her own tattoo gun! I invited her to a party at my apartment and took photos of her equipment, and of her tattooing a lime. I could tell that macro photography was challenging, and at the time I didn’t even have a tripod.

But as it happened by 1991 I had joined the sideshow, and my entire life began to change in huge ways. I was no longer a spectator or fan of the underground Seattle scene, but an actual participant! Our sword swallower Paul Lawrence, or “Slug” as he was known at the time, had but one tattoo on his body. He decided that he wanted to be completely tattooed, in the tradition of the great Omi, but he knew that he didn’t have the money to pay a professional to completely tattoo his whole body. Being that we were on the road at the time, it occurred to him that if he had the equipment, he could probably work on his project during his off-hours on the road. Who would do the actual tattooing? I’m not sure what his plan was…

At the time, there was no World Wide Web as we know it today, and my understanding is that professional tattoo equipment was only being sold to “established” tattoo artists. I suggested to Slug that perhaps I could build an improvised gun, much like Roni Falgout’s machine. I remember going to a Goodwill store in Burien and buying about 8 small motorized appliances, in hopes of finding a suitable motor that could power a tattoo gun.

But yet again, it was another project that never quite got finished, as thankfully Ashleigh stepped in to help out Slug. This is why I’m included in the photograph posted on her site; I wanted to follow up on Slug’s crazy project, and was more than happy to see someone competent like Ashleigh doing the tattooing, and with professional equipment.

Ashleigh was a huge supporter of the sideshow, and created one of the more enduring illustrations of the original group. I remember being in her studio and seeing the artwork for the very first time. It was about 95% completed, with some crosshatching missing in a corner. It was a VERY well done illustration, and I was gonzo over the fact that it would be used as promotional material for posters and t-shirts.

As it happened, Jim Rose was also in attendance, and was also smitten with the image. He was a chronic pothead, but this evening he seemed to be more than several tokes over the line. At one point he dreamily remarked “I just want to gaaaaazze at it….” This became a catch phrase for us for a while there. Again, Ashleigh had to remind Jim that the illustration wasn’t finished. But somehow, Jim either didn’t listen, didn’t care, or was just too stoned to remember, and he took the artwork before Ashleigh had a chance to finish it.

The artwork began to show up on posters and t-shirts. At first it was kind of funny; a testament to Jim’s stoned fuck-up in not listening to Ashleigh. But over time it became less funny, and eventually it really illustrated how Rose treated other human beings. The missing crosshatching reflected on the artist, not on Jim Rose, so Rose could care less. The design came to be reproduced again and again, with Rose never stepping in to allow the final and correct design to be reproduced. Rose was a great promoter, but was a total shit as a human being.

Ashleigh included a great illustrated story in her SCUD history about the man who wanted to get inside the building, but was thwarted by the mail man. During the time I was on the sideshow, I began to spend more time at SCUD, specifically hanging out with Ashleigh. She was completely nocturnal, so it would always be a nighttime visit. SCUD didn’t have an apartment style buzzer system, and cell phones weren’t in widespread use back then. You either yelled at the building, or threw rocks or pennies at the window. I took a careful look at the door, and decided that I could simply slim Jim the thing. I got permission from Ashleigh to enter the building this way, and kept the slim Jim in my car. I can’t remember clearly, but I may have ended up hiding the slim Jim near the door of the building.

I met Jim Hogshire through Tim Cridland, and discovered that Hogshire spent a great deal of time at SCUD, hanging out with Ashleigh. I remember seeing Hogshire at SCUD one night with a small briefcase full of tablets and capsules. I seem to remember seeing Dilantin capsules. This confused me, as Dilantin was not something that would get you high, nor did Hogshire have epilepsy, as I recall. He just had an overwhelming fetish for pharmaceuticals…

In 1992 I purchased an oxy-acetylene torch set-up, but had no shop with which to work in. Thankfully I was introduced to Louie Raffloer, who had his own blacksmith shop not far away from SCUD. I would drop by there from time to time, to socialize with Louie and learn about metal work. I remember trading Louie a Mossberg shotgun for a Milwaukee angle grinder. Below Louie’s shop was a band practice room, and from time to time, you would see members of Pearl Jam or Soundgarden coming out of the dingy basement and into the equally grungy alleyway…

I remember attending a big target shooting party with Louie, Jim Hogshire, and a number of other folks back in about 1996. Louie brought a bunch of spray paint cans which he had bought on sale for a buck apiece at one of the big chain hardware stores. We would have a campfire burning beside the paint can, and when hit with a bullet, the can would explode like something you see on MythBusters. I seem to remember posing for a photograph with Louie and Jim Hogshire. I think Hogshire had his notorious M-1 carbine and I held a Ruger Mini-14 with a black synthetic folding stock. I never did see that developed photo….

Weirdly, Hogshire and I had been to one of the periodic gun shows held in Puyallup previous to this adventure. Someone was selling home-made thermite incendiary devices for $20! This was the only time I saw anything like this for sale there. Hogshire and I each bought one. I took mine to Louie’s target shooting party and lit the fuse. It was a dud! What a rip-off!

Later, when Hogshire was busted for poppy possession at his apartment, the cops found HIS thermite device, and the SPD had to call in an additional bomb squad!

I think I met Clark Humphrey at SCUD, at one of Ashleigh’s late-night get-togethers. Over time, I would read his essays on Seattle, popular culture, and many other topics, but it took me a long time to really realize how much attention and research went into his work. His books Loser and Vanishing Seattle are superb histories of the transient nature of Seattle culture.

Although Steve Fisk was a SCUD participant, I really only got to know him through our mutual friend Kim Thayil, whom I had met on Lollapalooza in the summer of 1992. Honestly, I didn’t really understand or appreciate Fisk’s contribution to the Seattle music scene at the time. I remember speaking to him about Negativland and their album U2. Steve was kind enough to give me a cassette of that recording. Again, at the time I had little appreciation of exactly how rare or exotic such a recording was. I’m pretty sure I still have that tape!

All the time I spent at SCUD I was completely oblivious to Ben McMillan and Gruntruck! As lame as this sounds, I was introduced to Gruntruck by watching Beavis and Butthead! It was only after SCUD was all gone that I happened to run into Ben in a magazine store on Broadway on Capitol Hill. He was most polite, and I had no idea at the time that he had significant health problems. I ran into him once or twice more on Broadway, then I learned that he had died!

The mummified cat brought back memories too… At the time, I knew enough about forensic science in general and taphonomy in particular to know that mummification takes place only when a body is in a warm and dry place for a long time. I had read enough about the Green River Killer case and the work of Donald Reay and Clyde Snow to know that mummification is highly unlikely in an environment like the Pacific Northwest. Thus I was always a tad skeptical that the “mummy” wasn’t a gaff, and that Ashleigh and the SCUD people weren’t Rickrolling the marks with the “mummy” story.

But I believe Ashleigh, and I believe the feline mummy was the real deal. I suspect it died indoors, perhaps in a furnace room, or during a hot and dry Seattle summer.

All in all, SCUD was a trip, even though I was there mostly just as fan or hanger-on. For me it was one of those things in life that you take for granted, and don’t realize its value until it’s gone.

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…

Ordinary poppies DO contain psychoactive drugs, in fact Hogshire was correct in his assertion that most if not all species of the genus Papaver contain phenanthrene alkaloids which include morphine, codeine, and thebaine.

To my way of thinking, the publication of his book would open the floodgates of people growing or buying “ornamental” poppies to get high. I figured it was one of those things that was too good to last; once the “secret” got out, the game would be over. Much to my surprise, this didn’t happen.

I found Jim and Heidi to be charming and intelligent people, but they both wrestled with significant personal demons.

I haven’t seen or talked to Jim or Heidi in more than 10 years. Over the years I’ve been tempted to write down all of what really happened, but the bottom line is that for all three of us, undignified things happened, and everything ended poorly. There is no real value to be gained in exposing undignified things that happened years ago.

But I’m writing this now because I understand that Hogshire’s book has been republished, this time by Feral House.

In all the chaos of that time period, one incident really stood out for me, an incident that fundamentally changed my perception of the Seattle Police Department, and the criminal justice system in general. The following is a slightly re-worked comment I made on Metafilter in a thread that was later deleted.

Yeah, I was there back in 1996 for whole Jim and Heidi Hogshire fiasco. Jim and Heidi were the first (and perhaps only) Americans ever arrested for possession of dried florist’s poppies.

It’s a long, long, story, and I’ll tell you just a part that changed my view of the criminal justice system forever. When Hogshire was arrested the police confiscated his M1 carbine, various other items, and his dried poppies. His wife was also arrested, though she never even drank poppy tea.

The Hogshires were immediately evicted from their Capitol Hill apartment, here in Seattle. Heidi stayed in Seattle, but Jim went on the lam. After a long time, Jim was able to find pro bono legal representation and the charges were dropped. Jim was still back East, and called to have me go pick up his confiscated items.

So I go down to the courthouse and get put through the whole rigmarole. Thankfully, I was able to transport all his gear by myself in one trip. As you can imagine, everything was packaged in heavily wrapped newspaper, and even the carbine was thoroughly disguised. It was weird walking through downtown Seattle carrying an M1 carbine…

Hogshire wanted me to double check the manifest of what was seized during the raid on his apartment with what the cops actually returned. I carefully unpacked all the stuff on my living room floor. There wasn’t all that much stuff, really. One M1 carbine whose serial number I double checked, a bunch of stuff I don’t remember, and three scales. The scales were, of course, “drug paraphernalia.” One scale was a Dillon Precision triple beam balance, used for reloading. Another scale was some sort of prosaic kitchen scale for weighing out spices and whatnot. The third scale I didn’t immediately recognize. It had an electrical cord coming out, so I assumed it was electronic. But I saw no “Tare” button, or even an on-off switch. It was flat and square, but with a small circular disk on top which I interpreted as some sort of pan.

Then the moment of epiphany.

The Seattle police department had seized and booked into evidence as drug paraphernalia a COFFEE MUG WARMER.

This would have been in the mid to late 90′s, and I think Leif Garrett was involved in some sort of musical comeback at the time. Kim, Krist, Krist’s girlfriend Darbry, and Leif Garrett all roll down to a bar nearby after his show ended. I think Jeff Gilbert was there as well. Jeff ended up co-owning Seattle’s fabulous Feedback Lounge. I mostly ended up talking to Darbry, as I was impressed with how smart she was. But of course I was fascinated with meeting Leif Garrett; how could a guy like that possibly match what his public image was in the 1970′s? I hardly remember what we talked about, except his retelling of some sort of Hunter S. Thompson anecdote involving drugs; cocaine I think.

But it all got sort of weird and memorable when the subject of conversation turned to cell phones and microwaves. Seemingly out of nowhere, Garrett tells me what sounds like a landmark urban legend; that if one places two Nokia brand cell phones together when both are broadcasting, that enough heat will be generated to melt the phones. “Dude, they run on microwaves, it’s like a microwave oven” was his technical explanation.

I countered that a microwave oven produces on the order of a thousand watts, whereas a cell phone transmits in milliwatts, a MILLION fold difference in power. Now I must admit, These days I’d probably do some fact checking if I was to seriously assert something like this. But given the circumstances, I would probably say the same thing again.

I can’t remember his response, and knowing me I probably argued with him about it for a while. I never met up with Leif Garrett again, so my memory of him has this strange twist associated with it. Later, I saw an episode of Behind the Music about him and learned of his drug-crazed history. He seems to have hit a rock bottom some time back which was chronicled here.

I wonder what brand of cell phone he uses…

When I was growing up, my mother was quite fascinated with UFOs, Bigfoot, and ESP. We would often have issues of Fate magazine around the house, books on UFOs, and I think at least one of Charles Fort’s books.

Sometime when I was in high school, I encountered one of the first skeptical books I ever read. This was famed UFO skeptic Philip Klass’ first book on the subject: UFOs-Identified.

It was interesting not only because it exposed me to the process of critical thinking, but also because I’d never heard of something so exotic as “ball lightning” before. As I understand it, as time went on Klass placed less and less emphasis on ball lightning as a prosaic explanation for UFO sightings. But I never followed the UFO subculture very much; I was always more fascinated with Bigfoot. But the concept of ball lightning always stuck with me, and eventually led to my own experiments and discovery that carbon fiber makes an excellent material with which to initiate a plasma.

By a strange twist of fate, later in life I actually met Philip Klass! Back when I was a sideshow performer, I would often room with Tim Cridland, AKA Zamora the Torture King. I was always impressed at his extensive contacts with people doing and investigating all sorts of odd and esoteric things. Remember, this was 1992 and 1993, before the World Wide Web, which made Tim something of a master of the old school technique of writing letters and doing research by “snail mail”.

And so it was that the sideshow was performing in Washington D.C. Tim rather casually tells me he is going to go interview Philip Klass. I’m impressed! I grovel and genuflect and ask if I can tag along. Everything seems casual, so indeed I’m allowed to come along. We arrive at Klass’ rather modest brownstone and are let inside. Tim was doing an interview for his fanzine called Off the Deep End. I took photographs, but sadly they didn’t come out. I seem to remember requesting that Philip pose with my Leatherman tool!

Soon it came time for Klass to walk his dog. Tim and I join him. Frankly I don’t remember much of the entire event, but I do remember the following two situations. One was Philip pointing at an airplane that was taking off from a nearby airport, which I believe was Ronald Reagan Washington National. Klass made the point that aircraft are the shape they are for a good reason; disk shaped aircraft are intrinsically unstable in flight. The classic disk shaped UFO is not aerodynamic.

The second event was genuinely memorable. Philip Klass was the first human I ever witnessed who picked up his dog’s “solids” with a plastic bag over his hand, everted the bag, then discarded it in the trash. I was simultaneously fascinated, repulsed, intrigued, and “weirded out”. Growing up as I did in Montana in the 60’s and 70’s meant stepping in dog feces all the time. It was a real bummer if you happened to be wearing shoes with a tread pattern which required an improvised tool, usually a stick, with which to pick out the offending matter. When I was a kid, no one ever picked up after their dogs. Consequently, I believed that life inevitably entailed stepping in dog shit from time to time, much like how life entails catching colds from time to time. We used to let our dog Lancer run free just like many people did back then. When Lancer was younger he would occasionally drag home a large bone or chunk of animal carcass during the fall hunting season. He must have grabbed them from dumpsters or hunter’s garages. We euphemistically called them “trophies”.

Sometimes when things change you simply don’t notice the change. When I moved to Seattle in 1987, I didn’t even realize that I wasn’t stepping in dog shit anymore. Nowadays there are laws enacted whereby dog owners must pick up after their dogs. I remember a time back in the 1980′s where there was a little broom and dust pan combination called a “Pooper Scooper”. I would see them advertised, but I never saw anyone actually use one. It surely would have been weird and inconvenient to carry a “Pooper Scooper” around with you when you walked your dog. Now everyone seems to use the everted plastic bag.

I have to wonder if this progressive social behavior is not tied directly or indirectly to the proliferation of polyethylene shopping bags. If my memory serves me, the whole “paper or plastic” thing became popular in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s.

I’ll bet that if plastic bags didn’t become so popular that we would all be stepping in dog shit on a regular basis.

Again, one more reason to venerate plastic! Hail polyethylene!

At around 7:00 on both nights, my manager approached me and told me to shut down the pharmacy. Evidently she had received word from the police that protestors were coming up to Capitol Hill from downtown, and that businesses should close to be on the safe side. I was more than happy to comply and get the heck out of there!

As I recall, the third day of the conference I had off. That afternoon and evening I was going to help my friend Kim schlep gear to the Showbox, a venue downtown he was scheduled to perform at that night. It was a one-off performance called the “No WTO Combo”, which consisted of Jello Biafra, Kim Thayil, Krist Novoselic, and Gina Mainwal, a drummer who had previously worked with Novoselic.

I picked up Kim in the afternoon and we drove to Belltown to a practice space to meet the other members of the band. Loud helicopters circled over the downtown area. Jello wasn’t there, but the rest of us huddled around a small TV which was tuned to a local news program. The vibe on the TV news was tense, as was the vibe in the room. On the TV, images of downtown chaos played endlessly. Kim was close to bailing on the whole thing, as one TV camera located near the Showbox seemed to indicate there was teargas still in the air. It seemed foolhardy to walk right into what might be a genuine riot. None of us were sure that we were even going to be allowed to enter the downtown area.

Krist started arguing that it really wasn’t that bad, that he lived downtown, and that what we were seeing on the TV “wasn’t real”. At this point I began to seriously question Krist’s judgment, as it was obvious from the live TV broadcasts that downtown was still in chaos. I began to wonder if Krist wasn’t like some of the Missoula hippies I was exposed to growing up; living in a new-age fantasy land of his own making, oblivious to the harsh reality around him. My mind was tipped more toward Kim’s vaguely paranoid and cynical risk assessment. Yet we all sat around watching the TV, deciding whether to go to the Showbox or not.

Being that this was December 1, the sun set early that day. The practice room had a western exposure, and we could look out the window towards the setting sun. At least Belltown was calm. Suddenly I had a genuine epiphany: As the sun set, the shadows grew longer in the real world out the window. But the shadows on what was purported to be “live” TV coverage were not! The TV stations were “looping” a few minutes of footage shot earlier, again and again, and calling it “live”! Suddenly Krist’s pronouncements about the TV coverage made complete and total sense. I was seeing the truth of his crazy “new age” viewpoint with my own eyes! The local TV news was lying to us after all!

So we set out to the Showbox. Kim and I took a big loop around downtown, and came up 1st Ave from the South. There were no police checkpoints, no tear gas, no protestors, no chaos at all! We parked and moved his gear into the venue.

Soon enough Jello arrived. I had been a huge Dead Kennedys fan back in the 80’s so it was a trip for me to meet him. He had gained a few pounds over the years, and no longer looked like the hungry hardcore punk of his glory days. I chatted briefly with him, and I remember him telling me that Levi’s had made an offer to use “Holiday in Cambodia” in a Dockers ad. I was most impressed at his refusal to sell out for a few dollars.

I helped move equipment onto the stage, thus fulfilling my “roadie” obligations. Soon the crowd began coming in. I recognized a gal I’d spoken to before, and started talking with her. Neither of us could remember where we originally met. As it turned out, she was friends with local Seattle comedian Cathy Sorbo. We had met some time before at Cathy’s baby shower. For a time she wrote a gossip column for the Stranger, a weekly Seattle newspaper, and had done an impression of Courtney Love for the local TV show Almost Live. We met again in early January 2001, where I made the egregious faux pas of telling her that she reminded me of an old girlfriend of mine. Later I read about our encounter in her Stranger gossip column, where she compared me to a dog lapping up antifreeze. I didn’t quite get the analogy at the time, and I still don’t. At the Showbox she was escorted by a man that I believed to be an out-of-town protestor. I spoke to him only briefly, as he had an overwhelming body odor.

Despite all the alleged chaos downtown, the show was well attended, probably because of the draw of three veteran rock stars on the same bill. Eventually the lights dim, and the band hits the stage. Now to my way of thinking, when an act first hits the stage the audience is primed; they’ve been waiting for hours for this moment, and they want action! Think of Led Zeppelin in the movie The Song Remains the Same; they open the show with Rock and Roll, not Going to California.

So the “No WTO Combo” hits the stage, and Jello begins to talk. Kim, Krist, and Gina wait in place while Jello delivers his leftist spoken-word diatribe. In my mind this was a total buzz-kill, a self-centered and narcissistic indulgence, especially considering who he was sharing the stage with!

But eventually the music started, and it genuinely rocked! If I remember correctly the first tune was a new one, a dig at Microsoft, called “Electronic Plantation”. Jello’s play on words was that Microsoft’s employment policies created “serfs” so he “never wanted to hear serf music again”…

And then a Dead Kennedy’s song; Let’s Lynch the Landlord, I believe. At some point someone in the crowd handed Krist a gas mask. Krist put it on and continued playing.

I think the band played only 3 or 4 songs, but thankfully it was all recorded. I remember Kim contacting me later to ask how I wanted to be listed in the liner notes to the forthcoming CD. “Matt Crowley”, “Matt ‘The Tube’ Crowley”, “Tube”, or something else? Eventually I got a copy of the CD, but I loaned it to a gal at a pharmacy shortly before I quit, and I never pursued getting it back.

All in all, the whole experience was genuinely surreal. I’m glad I was there.