Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1517
Special Alaska Weekend Edition
Good morning. Probably. Hello. Hi. How are you? I missed you guys. Missed a Friday edition. Sorry about that. Lot going on. It is Sunday now. Special weekend edition. Maybe. or maybe I will send it Monday morning. Difficult to say. In any case, this is the first free time I’ve had in days, so I am taking advantage of it. We are back at our hotel. Jane is doing DuoLingo in front of me. Emma is getting a much needed nap.
Okay let’s pick it up where we left it off on these Alaska chronicles.
I already filled you in on Thursday day. Thursday evening, Frank picked me up and we drove out to Esther to the Malemute Saloon, made famous in the Robert Service poem The Shooting of Dan McGrew. Well, you know. Famous around here. Robert Service is practically Fairbanks royalty.
Ran into my aunt and uncle coincidentally, along with some distant relatives who I just think of as another aunt and uncle. But this was convenient because Uncle Jack could tell me the years my grandfather owned the Malemute, and it was for like 20 years, so that was legit. He was Don Sterling’s partner apparently. Jack worked there when he was a kid. So that was useful to get cleared up.
Jack also told some great stories about glidering, since he is still, well into his 70’s, an avid glider pilot. I had some stories from my childhood, but I wanted to get them sorted in my brain, so that was great. Still at it! Now he stays below 12,000 feet, but his record back in the day was well over 30,000 feet. In a glider!
Family left and high school friends trickled in: Dave and Mike and Jessie and Dave and Shaulane and Larry. Forgot the Malemute closes early on weekdays so we all filed out and headed to the Golden Eagle, which is a great bar but a) it’s a bar I associate with my recently passed friend Dave, so that made me sad, and b) Frank ran into a couple clients he wanted to avoid (he is a defense attorney) so we made it an early night. I missed Gavin and Carrie that was sad.
Friday morning we got our daily breakfast sandwiches from Sunrise, one of the little drive-through coffee-carts that dominate the pacific northwest. My cousins work there. Second cousins. Or maybe once removed. There is a lot of debate. They were not working. But my wife and child have also grown to love Sunrise breakfast sandwiches, and it is nice when one of my Alaska habits rubs off on my family.
We ate our sandwiches at a little playground across from Chandra’s grandma’s old house. My high school friend Ann met us, which was fantastic. She us doing a lot of elder care (man everyone up here is in the beginning, middle or end of elder care, it consumes our lives), so did not have a lot of free time to make it work. But make it work we did. Also she had two best friends back then, and I was great friends with them all, and she surprised me by having one of them, Kim, show up, and then completely randomly, the other one, Jenny, called her from California, so I got to see the Trifecta. Just fantastic.
I had made a deal that I would watch Jane all day so Emma could go to Value Village undisturbed for three hours. Great thrift store, Value Village. It’s a PNW chain but everyone says the Fairbanks one is the best. I once bought an arctic fireman’s parka there it is amazing. I had also had this brilliant idea to make buttons for the reunion dance on Saturday. Each button would have the name of a different venue at which we threw a dance. So we bought a button maker at Michael’s and Jane and I spent all afternoon making buttons. It was great. Took me a long time to figure out the button maker but eventually Jane and I got a good system going. The cutting out of the circles was the most tedious, but with both of us cutting we got it done in short time.
That evening we drove out to Goldstream to my friends Harper and Jen’s house, met up with Gavin and Jamie and some other old friends and had a lovely evening, with Jane, who loved it out there. Harper made his whole house by hand, and it has been my conversations with him that inspired me to do the Studio. I’ve seen him a lot more often on my visits than other Alaska friends. But I hadn’t seen Gavin (and Jodie!) in a good 20 years, so that was just marvelous. Early night because we had Jane.
And then Saturday, reunion day! Woke up, got Sunrise sandwiches, and DID run into a cousin, yay! Alexis! I dropped Emma and Jane off at the hotel and I did a ton of shopping for the party: Coolers and beverages and paper products and the supplies I needed to make the memorial area to our lost friends. It turned out really great! We had a digital frame you could add photos to, and a bulletin board, and pins and cards that people could leave memorials for each of the friends who we had lost. Here. I have the cards right next to me. There are twenty-two names. Three from this year, so it is accelerating.
But the dance, the party, it was fantastic. We had a daytime part with kids, I did a Real Wild Child dance party, with my co-DJ being my old friend Dan, two kids, lives in Brooklyn now. There were about 20 kids zooming in and out of the dance floor. Really hard to predict what kids will dance to. “Whip it?” Not a hit. “Cars?” not a hit. “Close to Me” by the Cure? Big hit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My old friend and ex Jamie, who was one of the chief organizers of this shindig, brought her mom, who was my teacher and junior high, a friend of my mom’s, and, of course, my girlfriend’s mom for a while, so that was great. She brought her bother Sam too who I hadn’t seen since a kid.
So many other friends there. Just amazing catching up. I will spare you the listicle.
Daytime kid thing ended and my sister Val, her husband, their two kids, our cousin, and Jane, Emma and I all headed back into town. Got Thai food (of course), settled the kids in at our hotel suite and our cousin was our babysitter for the rest of the evening. So Val, Matt, Emma and I got to back and have a proper party without parenting, which was AMAZING.
As a DANCE goes, it was touch and go. There was an inside and an outside dance area, too much dance area. Dave was supposed to be playing chill out outdoors but he cheated. And of course everyone there was catching up with people they hadn’t seen in years.
Buuut for a good hour, hour and a half, we had a real solid dance party. Tyrone played the exact perfect hits from the old days: Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, Thrill Kill Kult, Love and Rockets (we really liked Bauhaus), Violent Femmes, a punk set, an electronic set.
And I was just dancing with grown-ass people who I’ve been dancing with since my teenage years, all singing along to “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan” or something, just so weird, so great. And it made us all very, very happy. You could see it on their faces. because, of course, the ones who are not made happy by dancing to “Christian Says,” are not on the dance floor, ya know?
It was great catching up with so many friends. How do you rate an event like this? Not everyone was there from that scene. Recluses are still reclusive. I could think of a dozen people, easy, I would have loved to have seen, and those are just the ones who still live in Fairbanks. But there were another good dozen people I hadn’t seen in decades, which is amazing. Kinda overwhelming, kinda in a daze, exhausting and emotional and intense but also boring as you say the same things about where you’re living, how old your kids are, etc. You know how reunions go.
Some people seem awesome. They have happy lives, they’re doing great, you have amazing conversations with them. But… in you’re 50s… there really isn’t, like, next steps. Like I am friends with them on Facebook or I have their numbers — one person I got their number and it was already in my phone from probably 20 years ago. I will make a point when I’m in Dayton or Seattle or Portland or Sydney or whatever to see them and have a lunch or something. But you’re not gonna go to Sydney just to see them, you know? They’re amazing, you get along great, but this is the relationship you have, and barring, like, widowhood or major geographic moves, this is the relationship you’re gonna have.
It is hard to put into words, an embarrassing thing to admit if you are a writer. But hey. You’ve been a reunion or wedding, you know the drill.
I think maybe when you’re younger, a reunion can be an opportunity for a relationship reset. And I guess to some extant that is true. But for the most part, it is a check-in, check-up.
I have been thinking a lot about a guy up here with whom, 30 years ago, I had a feud, he tried to beat me up with some thug buddies in a parking lot, over a girl, etc. etc. But as the years went by, we made up, made our peace. Then after that he sorta degenerated, I don’t really know the whole story cuz I wasn’t up here, but he had some mental illness issues, was homeless a bit, eventually died.
And I am so happy we got our bad blood behind us before that happened. Don’t let anyone die with bad blood.
So I don’t think it extends to the bad blood level, but there was one person at this event with whom I definitely didn’t get along back then, again over a girl. And he was the first person I saw there, and I sat down next to him and had a nice, long talk. I mean, I don’t want him to die, he is doing great, looked healthy and happy. But if he ever does, no bad blood.
So, you know, got that done.
Got back to the hotel around 1, helped Matt pack his kids into the car and passed out.
We had really wanted to go on a riverboat cruise, and it turned out the only time to do it was at 8:30 this morning, so Jane might have gotten seven, eight hours of sleep, but Emma and I got six. But we sucked it up and went, got breakfast (no cousin sighting) and met my aunt and uncle at the Sternwheeler Discovery.
So the Sternwheeler Discovery has been a tourist attraction in Fairbanks my whole life. Family-run affair, big family, everyone in Fairbanks knows at least one of them, fifth generation. There are actually three sternwheeler Discoveries now, they are on Discovery 3. They keep getting bigger. Discovery 1 was getting phased out as I was born, Discovery 2 was most of my childhood, I think we had a prom on it or something. I MAY have been on Discovery 3 once, ages ago, but I don’t remember it.
Honestly, they’ve really upped their game since I was a kid. Used to cost like $20 but now it’s $100 and I was peevish before we lect.
But it was a great time, worth every penny. Jane loved it. Sternwheeler up the Chena to the Tanana river, stop and watch float planes take off, see Reindeer (not Caribou. Domesticated. Honestly probably not even local). Nice part now where you stop in a fish camp and learn about flora and fauna and cabin-building n shit.
The whole thing was so professional compared to last time I did it. And I did the rough math and these people are pulling in a million a day easy on this easy. Half the staff is from the family, and they are quick to remind you “but all this costs money and we have to pay everyone” but you’re not fooling me, man.
When I was a kid, the Chena river just had a bunch of Alaska versions of McMansions, 3-4 really nice log cabins. For 30, 40 years, Fairbanks did not build contemporary modern houses. We easily had the most modern house in the city. BUT NOW: Man, there are like 10, 15 amazing new modernist beauties along the Chena. And the way everyone made a point to come out and wave leads me to believe that they were mostly the family. Got a little empire goin on.
But my uncle’s land is still there (mom’s sister’s brother), two nice cabins on it, just up from the Pump House. I used to go to the old cabin for Thanksgiving, loved running along the river — they have a relatively large cleared area right on the banks. My first cousin lives there now.
Anyway, lovely time.
After the Riverboat we headed up to Ivory Jack’s to catch up with the party clean-up crew, but it was more than an hour for food so we just said our his and byes, sat with them for a while, let Jane drink an apple juice, heard a good story about Krist Novascelic from Willow. Group hug with Dan and his family. Excellent time.
And now we are down to our last night. Got a show tonight with some old friends, and we head back to civilization Monday afternoon. I don’t start work again till Wednesday, so I will probably sleep a lot.
See you soon, lovies.
Your playlist today is, of course, my set from the Alaska edition of Real Wild Child. All bangers, no filler. grab your kid, hit the floor.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.