Long View

Reading through this mountain of archived person-to-person emails has been half-therapeutic, half-embarrassing. It’s embarrassing not in how genuine and excited and sincere I was, but how thinly-veiled my desire to sleep with half the people I shared mail with (I suppose that if I had made it my bold intent, I would’ve been more successful, eh?).

Really, though, this was my mid-20s, and although I still believed I knew everything (to a diminishing point), I knew that there were a lot of unanswered questions in the spaces between myself and the people in my life. That was where I wanted to explore. Strange lands indeed. These missives were the attempts, the feelers, to reach out for a hand to hold, for a funk soul brother, a sweet soul sister, a fellow commiserator in the coffee-and-cigarettes table of life.

The therapy comes in the form of this long view, a high observation tower not over space, but over time. Memory is faulty, but the written word is clearer, and in the light of history, it teases out the crux of intent, the tasty bits of what made me tick, of seeing, in sentences, the voice that said in not so few words, “please acknowledge me”.

Juno Retriever

In 1996, Greensboro, my roommate Paul hooked me up with a Juno email account. Juno was a special thing then, because it allowed us, without a dialup account, to use his low-powered computer and modem to send and receive email with the world for free. The client software would, at our prompting, connect to the Juno dialup number, transfer any mail and advertising in the queue, and then hang up so we can read it.

Technically, Juno was my first post-college email address, so it’s something a little special to me. Over the years that I used the service, I gathered a ton of messages. This corpus represents a time capsule of my thinking, life, and communications with the people who were important to me during my mid-20s. Before I moved away, I made a meticulous backup of my account with all the messages, addresses, and settings I had so that, when I eventually built my own computer, I would be able to install the client, restore from my backups and continue on.

I still used the service for a while after I got a dialup account with its own email address. Juno served as my backup address, my go-to for important stuff like friends, taxes, domain registration, etc., because I knew the service would still be around even if I failed to keep up my dialup and phone bills (1999 was a rough year). Some time in the first half of the millennial decade, Juno announced that they were cutting support for the standalone email client and suggested users migrate to the webmail service, which I did begrudgingly. The webmail panel didn’t contain any of the old messages; users would have to upload them to the server themselves (Juno should’ve published a tool to do so automatically). After a time, all development stopped on the client, and I could no longer use it to fetch mail, so I made another backup of all my account settings and uninstalled the client.

I’ve had this backup sitting on disk for the past however-many years, and I’ve been meaning to migrate it to something more modern and non-proprietary. Well, last night, I finally did it. Found a tool called juno5bdb that will take the two Berkeley-DB mail storage files (mailbox.atr and mailbox.bdb), parse them, and split out all of the mail folders and messages into UNIX-standard mbox files that you can then import into your preferred email application. I use Thunderbird, so the import works best with the ImportExportTools plugin. I managed to import most of the mbox files, but the few that remained failed because the plugin mistook them for Eudora’s variant of the mbox file, which it doesn’t directly support. After some examination, I found a set of scripts in the Eudora2Unix project that went the last mile in transforming the message headers to make them look more like UNIX-standard mbox files.

With all the message folders imported into Thunderbird’s “Local Folders”, I renamed and rearranged them to something similar to the hierarchy I remember from the client. Then, in clumps, I drag-dropped the folders into my local IMAP mail storage (the same one mentioned here). Now I have all of my old Juno emails together, at last, with the rest of the mail I’ve accumulated over the years from all of my other accounts. Everything finally together, all under one server. Kumbayah.

Solo Part

Touched my music gear, and it made pretty noises. I recorded the MIDI, but only after losing the magic while opening the recording app. That’ll teach me to play without everything being armed and ready. Writing prose is easy relative to making music; with prose, everything’s in your head, and you control it all as you write it down linearly. Music requires parallel component parts that, unless you’re a wizard, you cannot play simultaneously without holding it all in your head long enough to record each part as a layer. My music comes across as vignettes, essences, stems, incomplete pieces of a nebulous whole that will never form without the breath of others. That bothers me intensely.

Making music solo is lonely. First, I was prideful in wanting to go it alone. I wouldn’t have to share collaborative credit, you see. And then I was bashful because the more I play, the more I know I don’t know the language of the jam. And now I’m lonely because I recognize I need help to make it happen, and there is no help because it only comes to those who want to take it somewhere beyond the home studio, which I don’t. I know people who play music, but I just can’t burden them with my creativity problems.

I shouldn’t complain because I have music equipment to touch and make pretty noises. There are starving children in Africa who don’t have enough music equipment to eat. I should be ashamed.

Wages, Ages

Here’s an example of how wrong the best motives can be.

I must’ve been somewhere around 4th grade. Was attending children’s church at Highland Park First Baptist back home. Was a ministry that catered to kids between 1st and 6th grades, to keep them interested in going to church. They had fun things like puppets, singing, group dancing to songs like “Father Abraham”, a few musical numbers from some of the church’s grown-ups, and then a mini-sermon by the children’s minister. The quietest kids during the sermon would get “Bible Bucks” that they could use in the candy & toy closet. Typical children’s ministry stuff.

There was a guy, a member of the church, who did magic tricks for us, though he didn’t call them “magic” because that would connote the influence of the Devil. He called them “illusions”. Usually he’d do tricks that illuminated his little object lessons about giving, sharing, being honest, listening to authority, honoring your parents, and so on. On a nondescript morning, however, his object lesson was on the concept of the Wages of Sin. His tone was rather serious. Had a box on a pedestal next to him with the words “The Wages of Sin” lettered on the outside.

“I’ll show you what the wages of sin are at the end,” he said, before going into his talk and doing little bits of sleight-of-hand to keep us interested. Finally at the end, “Now, I’m going to show you the wages of sin that are inside this box, but I’ll only show you for a short time, so pay attention.”

“The wages of sin,” he said, opening the face of the box to reveal a stark white human skull, “are Death.”

Nobody talked. Our mouths dropped, eyes wide, most of us in fright, some in disbelief, the rest covering their eyes or fidgeting in their folding chairs. It all came down to that; in a room full of kids having fun playing church, singing with puppets, paying attention in our Sunday best, was this guy scaring the Hell out of us.

What a horrible lesson to give to children. Not even a handful of us were over the Age of Reason…we were children, unprepared and being forced to confront this lesson on the spiritual world. In more agrarian times, yes, children would have confronted death a lot sooner, but not in an urban community in 1981. Not by a long shot. I know this guy meant well, but sometimes the most well-intentioned among us don’t consider the suitability of their message on their intended audience. I don’t recall if he did any talks after that incident, but the lesson, or at least the shock of it, stuck with me through my adolescence.

Denied Inside

At the cafe. Overhearing a conversation where these two prima face intelligent men are discussing the debate over whether the 9/11/2001 WTC attacks were an inside job, and they’re going on and on about it. Sounds to me like they’re both leaning toward that conclusion, even in the face of all the word-of-mouth evidence against it they’re mentioning. I should be astounded, but I’m not. This is a cafe, after all. I expect to hear anything here. Echo chamber.

What’s more interesting to note is the thought that the WTC attacks happened almost 12 years ago. Twelve. That’s almost a generation ago. And people are still debating it. I suppose it’s the JFK assassination or the Apollo moon landing of our age. In the shadow of overwhelming evidence, some of the population will deny it with their own brand of crazy.