I’m back! Yesterday was a long day of travel — I got up a 5am to go to the airport, and what with the flight, then waiting to take a shuttle to the western part of the state, sitting on the shuttle, waiting for Mary to get off work and pick me up, and then the drive to Morris, it was 1am when I finally got home. I slept in until 9:30 this morning.

I think it’s going to be my last trip back to the homeland. My mother’s house is going on the market in a few weeks, after it’s stripped down to bare walls, and there won’t be anything to come home to anymore. That’s sad.

I’ve brought home a few mementoes, but it’s mainly a few pictures and selections from the vast collection of stuff Mom had filed away. She was a doting mother, so she kept everything related to her kids, most of which is going to be trashed this week. It all has to go! I plucked a few small things out of the pile to bring home.

I brought home a letter I wrote in 1979, because it immediately took me back to my first year of graduate school. It was a different world then. Remember: no internet, no computers, no cell phones, long distance phone calls would cost you a few dollars a minute, so you only used it for emergencies. That meant we had to write letters to keep in touch — and literally write by hand, because typewriters were the only alternative. I was writing a letter every week to my parents, writing to my grandparents every few weeks, and several times a week to my girlfriend. That was common in my generation.

Here it is. Do not mock my handwriting, treat it as a glimpse of the distant past.

OK, I’ll translate and give a little context.

3 August (1979)
Dear Mom + Dad + Tomi + Mike + Lisa + everybody,

That’s everyone who was still at home. My brother Jim and sister Caryn had moved out, too.

I had just completed my BS in Zoology at the University of Washington, was accepted into the University of Oregon, and had even been offered a research assistantship for the summer. No gap year for me! I went through commencement and immediately moved into a summer research program. I was living in a bare, nearly empty dorm dorm for the summer, which was not great — days spent in the lab were great, but then I’d go home to this empty, unfurnished room and stare at the walls until I fell asleep. I was writing because I was finally moving out to my own place.

I’ve got my new apartment today. It’s a small studio with a private bathroom, and I share the kitchen with the apartment next door, so it’s not very impressive physically, but it has a good price and I figure room+board won’t cost me much more than it would in the dorm. August rent is $120, + fall rent is $170 a month, with all utilities paid for. It’s very close to campus — it’s located right behind the 7-11, near about 3 bookstores (wrong–5 bookstores), 2 markets, + a couple of cafes. The manager is also a grad student who is involved with the biology dept., + arranged to get me the keys tonight, so I can start moving in tomorrow. I still have a week to go in the dorms, so I get one more week of food service, which will give me an easy transition into life on my own–I can just eat in the dorms until I figure out how to cook, + get set up to do it.
My new address:
735 E. 14th St., Apt 6A
Eugene, OR 97403

Look at that rent! Things have changed a bit.

Living in a reasonably sized college town was paradise. All those bookstores in walking distance! I spent so much money in the Smith Family Bookstore.

Work is coming along fairly well — for about a week now, I’ve been tangled up in about 3 projects, + I had to give a presentation of my research to a lab meeting today, so I’ve been pretty busy, what with finding an apartment on top of that. My little fish haven’t been behaving very well, either. They’ve been giving me cock-eyed results so this next week will be spent refining my set-up to get rid of some extraneous noise that has been fouling up my data. I’m also learning a little photography, since Dr. Kimmel wants me to start making a complete record of my experiments. It’s not high art, but I can take magnificent portraits of oscilloscope screens.

My first project was trying to reliably record extracellular action potentials from the zebrafish hindbrain. Electrophysiologists will know the feeling — carefully grounding everything, housing everything in a faraday cage, starting off every day making fresh sharp electrodes, etc. This is also the moment that Chuck Kimmel sent me spiralling down the photography game.

Because this was a poor student writing home, of course I had to talk about money.

Since I won’t have to be out on the 31st now, I’ll probably be staying down here a little longer, so don’t expect me home until 7 September at least.

P.S. Thanks a lot for the loan. I’ll pay it back as soon as I can, but it will be a few months until my bank account will be full enough to make me confident. If you need it, though, I can pay back one hundred any time, + maybe two or three hundred next month, + still get by.

It’s still true that moving into a new place required first and last month’s rent, and a security deposit, so even when the rent was that low it was a difficult financial decision to make the move. Fortunately, I had parents who could loan me a few hundred dollars to get set up. Yes, I paid them back over the next 6 months or so.

I salvaged a few letters like that, just because it was mind-blowing to remember what it was like to be 22 years old again.

Yesterday was a succession of meetings with lawyers and bankers. They were nice enough people, but I now have a clearer picture of what hell would be like. It’s forms, forms, forms, the clicking of computer keyboards, mysterious requests, and a lot of passive butt-sitting. I did close out several bank accounts and converted them to checks that I’ll deliver to another bank in Minnesota.

And then…my mother had a half dozen annuities, investments that we’re in the process of notifying the holding companies that she’s dead, which triggers them to send out forms to all of her heirs who then have to fill out pages and pages of information about themselves, provoking them to vomit forth checks. Progress was made.We have begun the process of untangling my mom from the grasp of capitalism.

Today, I have to deal with the DMV and realtors. Abandon all hope.

Everything.

I’m at my late mother’s house. My sisters have been working hard to sort out the years and years of stuff Mom had stashed away. They have dragged out boxes and boxes of stuff.

Would you believe she kept all of my report cards? Somehow she also got her hands on my university exams and put them in bags and boxes. Right now I’m looking at my exam from Genetics 453, The Genetics of the Evolutionary Process, from Winter quarter 1979 at the University of Washington. I got a 7.3 out of 8.0 on it, with a 3.8 grade for the term. I’m kind of flabbergasted. My mother should have been a CIA operative.

There’s so much more. I was the assistant editor of the O’Brien Elementary newsletter in 5th grade. Mom had a copy. It’s silly.

In 3rd grade, I almost died of acute appendicitis (I survived, don’t worry), and missed a couple of weeks of school. My classmates wrote me “get well soon” letters. Mom saved them, of course. Among them is a letter from one Mary Gjerness, who about 15 years later was going to become Mary Myers. Weird. She is mildly upset now that she made several misspellings.

Throughout college and grad school, I was regularly writing letters home — you know Mom filed them all away. The mindblowing thing to me was how neat and tidy and well laid out my handwriting was, all written with a fountain pen. Partway into grad school I got a home computer and a dot matrix printer, and that was the beginning of the end of my penmanship. I should probably go buy a fountain pen and start practicing again.

It’s not just me, either. My brothers and sisters are all archived in this vast collection of personal documents.

I thought I was going to see a few old photographs, but no, I’m now deluged with ancient artifacts from my past. I have to stop looking at these things, because I’ve got a week of banking and probate law to deal with.

I traveled across country yesterday, from Morris to Seattle, and the first stop on the journey was a truck stop in Sauk Centre, where highway 28 merges onto I-94. I gassed up the car, and then wandered in awe-struck wonder through the display of stuff you could buy if you wanted more than a tankful of gas and a cup of coffee.

There were pewter crosses that you could buy with your name embossed in the middle. There were racks of flag-adorned knick-knacks. There were toy trucks and tractors you could buy for the kiddies. Was drawn to the wall of inspirational art, which all had a theme: farming and patriotism.

I could have got myself a metal wall hanging with two pistols, and the words, “In this home we don’t call 911,” which had me wondering…if Ralph nicked an artery on the hay baler, what are you going to do with those guns? If little Edna wandered off in a snowstorm, who you gonna call?

There were very colorful paintings/prints, all in a hyper-realistic style. There was one of a charming farmhouse with a green grassy yard, and five different tractors parked on it, dominating the scene. I guess in this world, prosperity is measured in how many tractors you own. There were so many pictures of eagles, with American flags worked artfully into the background.

But my eye was most strongly drawn to these two pictures.

There on the left was Donald Trump, riding his flag bedecked motorcycle into town, with Melania, and spectators in red MAGA hats cheering him on. On the right, Donald Trump crossing the swamp, in a boat full of poses stolen from a better known painting. We know it’s Donald Trump, not because the figure actually looks anything like the fat old man, but because of the weird candy-floss hair or the bright red tie.

My eye was drawn to these absurd pictures only because I was so repelled that I wanted to slash them. I resisted.

Anyway, this is the Trump cult in full flower out here in the rural midwest. It’s all tangled up in agrarian fantasies, religion, and trucks, tractors, guns, and motorcycles. Good luck rooting it out.

I’m flying out to Seattle this weekend to take another step in the probate process after my mother’s death. I’m meeting with lawyers and bankers — can you imagine anything more fun?

I’ve been getting all this paperwork together, going through my mother’s birth certificate, marriage certificate, social security card, death certificate, etc., etc., etc. I’ve also got all the same stuff for my father — they skipped probate at his death, since everything was in both my mother and father’s name at that time, but now all that has caught up to me. It’s depressing to see a whole life reduced to a small pile of papers.

Next week everything gets shut down, her official existence is over, and every penny gets shuffled into an account in my name, before I have to start divvying it up and sending checks to all the heirs…after we sell off the house. Anyone want to buy a 4 bedroom house on the road between Auburn and Lake Tapps? It was good enough for almost 50 years of homey living and 6 kids.

I’d have to agree with the extremes of this entirely subjective and data free map.

I have to disagree with some of the middlin’ state rankings, though. North Dakota is a terrible place, I think it got a higher ranking just for Fargo, which really belongs in Minnesota. I’d rank Wisconsin above Iowa. Texas is ranked way too high.

Yeah, Mississippi is kind of the leaking colon of the country.

About a year and a half ago, I had an absolutely miserable experience. A student and I were going to the American Arachnology Society conference at Cornell University; we paid up the conference fees, made a lovely poster, booked our flights, and traipsed down to the Minneapolis airport…where we sat for two days, watching our flight get delayed and delayed, and eventually, finally, they gave up and told us that our flights were cancelled, we should go home.

That was terrible enough.

All this was paid through university travel funds, and I did all the responsible stuff of getting our registration fees reimbursed (I thought), and while we were miserable and disappointed, we were done. Except…my nightmare had only just begun.

You see, all travel expenses at my university go through some accounting software called Chrome River. We didn’t go? We spent less than we’d told it we were going to? Some of the planned expenses were bouncing back with reimbursements? Total shit fit. I’ve been dealing with its conniptions ever since, getting cryptic demands and threats by email.

What totally threw the software was a) Cornell said we were getting reimbursed, but we didn’t, and I only just got a check for the registration fees this week, and b) the rotten airline did not reimburse us at all, but instead billed the university for $60 for flight cancellation. That’s right, they cancelled the flights, but we got charged extra for the inconvenience.

Chrome River has been dunning me, personally, for the money for the past year. If I didn’t cough up something in the next few days, I was going to be held responsible for spending less money than we had planned, and was going to have to pay up or else. All year long, I’ve been getting these horribly opaque machine-generated emails from some evil accounting software.

Well, I think I’ve finally jumped through all the flaming hoops they’ve demanded of me, getting all the ridiculous paperwork filled out and filed today. I’m done.

Except…I’m told that tomorrow I have to log on to Chrome River and press three buttons to finalize everything. I’m terrified. I’ve seen how Chrome River reacts to tiny deviations from its required protocol. What if I press the wrong button, or press them in the wrong order, or fail to show the proper respect while following its demands? This hell might go on even longer.

I think I might have to retire sooner than expected just to avoid dealing with Chrome River ever again.