The true story of R.E.M. once opening for the band that now plays in bars

This is a story of synchronicity and finding the truth about an apocryphal story.

This starts with the Insect Surfers "Planet Earth's Longest Running Modern Surf Band!", first formed in 1979 in the Washington DC area (actually, Chevy Chase, Maryland), which is before anything I mention in this post occurred.

From 1981 to 1985 I went to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where I would listen to CMU's radio station, WRCT, broadcasting at that time a tiny 10 watts (or as some of the DJs would say, "10,000 milliwatts!")

My initial familiarity with the Insect Surfers was almost surely hearing their song "I'm in Gear" from their 1980 "Wavelength" EP on WRCT. You can listen to it on the below video while you get dizzy watching the vinyl EP spin on the turntable and the slight undulation of the the tone arm as it plays the slightly warped record, and when the side of the record ends you can hear the slight scratch as the needle moves to the area of the record that I now know is called "dead wax".

"I'm in Gear" is their only song I can remember by name and and the only lyric I recalled. When I played the video of the song, listening to it for probably the first time in 30-plus years, it jogs a bit of my memory; the tune is slightly familiar and I definitely remember the slightly out-of-tune organ. As one YouTube comment says, "A bit of surf - a bit of new wave - a bit of power pop."

In 1984, my final year of college at CMU, I shared an apartment in Pittsburgh with two roommates, one of them from Chevy Chase and he knew some of the band members from high school.

In 1985, after graduating college, I returned home to the Los Angeles area. That year the Insect Surfers relocated to Los Angeles.

A few years later in Los Angeles, my younger brother dated a woman from Chevy Chase. She knew the members of the Insect Surfers and my roommate in Pittsburgh. This is one of those "what are the odds?" things - My brother met his girlfriend without knowing anything about the Insect Surfers and my roommate. I may have been the common connection between my brother, his girlfriend, my roommate, and the Insect Surfers, but I had nothing to do with making the connection, I was just in the middle of it.

I finally saw the Insect Surfers perform, probably in 1988 or 1989, at a somewhat divey bar in either Manhattan Beach or Hermosa Beach. My memories don't include the name of the of the bar, but they do include that it was decorated with fishing nets and starfish and had light pine wall paneling. I don't remember their performance at all, but I did buy one of their T-shirts.

I saw them one other time when my brother hired them to play at a party in an apartment courtyard in Santa Monica. The neighbors weren't pleased, and the Santa Monica Police came and shut them down in about half an hour.

Something I heard about the Insect Surfers was that back in the early 1980s, when they had a college radio hit, there was a show they played which had R.E.M. open for them. I may have heard the story from my brother or my roommate, I don't remember. But I occasionally repeated it as an ironic tale to tell about the fates of the two bands - the band that still played in dive bars after twenty years of existence once was bigger than R.E.M. who had no problems filling stadiums when they performed. I don't want this to come across as some sort of sad fate for the Insect Surfers; given that they still chose to continue to perform after decades means they were doing something that they loved - how many bands manage to continue to perform for so long?

In the years after I saw the Insect Surfers perform, I moved to Seattle, and my Insect Surfers T-Shirt disintegrated. On September 22, 2011, while listening to KEXP while driving to work, it was announced that the Insect Surfers were going to be performing live on the radio that day. I was surprised that they still existed as a band. But there was something else big in the music world that was reported that same day - R.E.M. announced they were breaking up.

While at work at my desk, I listened to the Insect Surfers perform on KEXP. It was the perfect moment to find out whether the story about R.E.M. opening for the Insect Surfers was true. I emailed KEXP as they were performed:

Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 2:09 PM
To: KEXP DJ
Subject: The time R.E.M. opened _for_ the Insect Surfers

Perhaps this is a bit cruel to ask, but you have to ask the Insect Surfers about the time that R.E.M. opened for them in the 80s.

And the response from KEXP:

From: KEXP DJ
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:19:36 -0700
Subject: RE: The time R.E.M opened _for_ the Insect Surfers

That's not cruel, that's genius. Thank you!

During a break between sets, my question was asked, and yes, R.E.M. opened for them once.

But it wasn't the R.E.M. that everyone knows; it was a different band that was also named R.E.M.

And there you have it, my apocryphal tale was sort-of true, and it now has amusing coda to add to it. 

(Alas, the performance is no longer archived on KEXP's website. When KEXP did a website upgrade a few years back, they never restored it. I started a draft of this post about five years ago in the hope that they would eventually restore the recording so I could put it in this post. I've given up waiting, so here's the post without the recorded evidence.)

Instant Oatmeal Pancakes

Becomes:

This is a recipe I came up with at work, where we had a kitchen with stoves, but a limited supply of ingredients. I wanted pancakes, and although eggs and instant oatmeal were available, no staple ingredients such as flour or bulk sugar were available.

And these days with everyone stuck at home and markets being sold out of flour, you might find this recipe useful.

Note that one of the instant oatmeal packets is cooked in the microwave in advance. In fact, whenever you prepare instant oatmeal, you should use the microwave. For my entire life, I used to just add hot water to the instant oatmeal, making a pasty glop that was edible, but not that great. When you prepare instant oatmeal in the microwave, it puffs up, and is much lighter, and not too different from non-instant oatmeal.

• 2 packets regular instant oatmeal
• 2 packets sugar (or 2 tsp sugar)
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 pat butter (or 1/2 Tbsp butter)
• Dash of salt

1. Add 1 packet of instant oatmeal to a bowl.
2. Measure 1/2 cup water by filling one empty oatmeal packet with water to the marked 2/3 cup line printed on the packet (yes, what the packet says is 2/3 cup is only 1/2 cup. 2/3 cup will make the batter too thin).
3. Cook for 1 minute in microwave (if the oatmeal hasn't puffed up after a minute, give it another 30 seconds).
4. The oatmeal needs to cool before adding the egg. For faster cooling, transfer the oatmeal to another bowl, spread it as thin as possible, and let it cool for about five minutes.
5. Add the other package of oatmeal, the egg, sugar and salt to the cooled oatmeal and mix thoroughly.
6. Put pan on stove on medium-high, and melt butter in pan.
7. Drip the butter into the batter while stirring, then mix thoroughly.
8. Use a spatula to spread the remaining butter over the surface of the pan.
9. Pan is ready when droplets of water skitter around a bit before evaporating.
10. Pour the batter into pan to make 4" pancakes (I usually make three in in two batches, the first with two pancakes, the second with one).
11. Peek under the pancakes to check if they’re nicely browned and ready to flip.
12. The pancakes are a bit fragile, so carefully slide the spatula under a pancake before flipping to cook the other side.
13. Eat! (they’re good plain, or with syrup, jam, Nutella or anything else you’d like)

 Options:

• Use Maple and Brown Sugar oatmeal (but don’t add any sugar if you do).
• Dice up a slice of cheese and a couple strips of bacon and some onion. With two pats (or 1 Tbsp) of butter cook the onion and bacon together until the onion starts browning. Add onion, cheese and bacon to batter. (Note: at work we had pre-cooked bacon, so it didn't give off much grease when cooked, thus the reason for the butter. If you're using raw bacon, you can probably forgo the butter).

I am an Arbiter of Lepidopteran Life and Death

The nights of a Seattle summer are cool, with the temperature almost always dropping down into the 60s. The cooler nights happen regardless of the high daily temperature; even as the high temperature day approaches or exceeds 90 degrees, it will drop 20 to 25 degrees during the night.

It is rare for homes in Seattle to have air conditioners. Historically, there just haven’t been enough days during the summer to warrant homeowners investing them (although it does seem to me that the recent summers have more and more days exceeding 85 degrees). Without air conditioning in our house, the summer ritual is after the sun sets to open the windows to let the cool night air into the house (augmented by, in some rooms, a window fan blowing air into the house from the outside).

Our house did not come with screens on the window, and until this year we had none. Which, of course, means that moths with their attraction to light would easily make their way into our house. Moths' attraction to artificial light (which the reasons why is still not clear), luring them into our homes, is not a good survival trait. A house is a death trap for a moth. Once a moth enters a house through an open window, it is unable to navigate the reverse journey, and the interior of house is is no place for a moth survive. There is no flower nectar for it to feed on (for those moths that feed; some species only eat as caterpillars and when after metamorphosis they are mouthless, only existing to find a mate to leave eggs for their next generation). A moth in a house is lost and confused, an unpleasant state to be in as its short life ends.

(An interlude of a memory returning as I write this: My junior year of college, I lived in a single dormitory room, with a multi-tube fluorescent light mounted to the ceiling right above my bed, and a large window with no screen. One night soon after I moved in, I went out, leaving the light on and window open. When I returned their were scores of moths hanging upside down on the light’s frosted white cover, stuck at the point they could no get no closer to the light. I had no choice but to sleep with the moths above me with the window open, with the hope that they would be lured out my room by the light of street lamps. That was the last time I left the room at night with the lights on and the window open.)

One morning I awoke and when I went to use the toilet, I noticed a moth with about an inch an half wingspan inside the toilet bowl, perched just above the water line. I could have just flushed the toilet and let it spiral down to its death in the sewer.

And although I have no hesitation about killing the small Indian meal moths (and their maggoty larvae) that occasionally invade our pantry, the moth in the toilet was not a pest and was just trying to find a dim place to rest during the day.

I lowered a piece of tissue down to it and with a slight touch of my finger coaxed it on to the tissue. I carried the moth and tissue to a nearby open window, gently shook the tissue, letting the moth fly off to the outdoors. I was now a moth savior.

A few days later, in the middle of the night, I heard our cat, Jay, in the bedroom, squeaking and pawing at something by the window. I returned to sleep, but in the morning on the floor was a crippled moth with tattered wings walking around in circles. Our cat is known for catching things, not killing them (do not ask me about the rats). The moth clearly wasn't going to survive long, and to put it quickly out if its misery (if that's even a state a moth can be in), I slid an open magazine under it, closed the magazine, then stomped on it, feeling its thick stubby body get crushed to goo between the pages.

One day a savior of moths. A few days later a killer of moths.

On Knowing Your Childhood Home Has Burned Down

During the December 2017 Skirball Fire in Los Angeles on a news website I saw the below photo. It brought what I can best call a distant and mild sense of dread and nostalgia:

The highway is the 405/San Diego Freeway going down the Sepulveda pass between the San Fernando Valley and West L.A. The buildings belong to Leo Baeck Temple.

Here's a picture of the same scene from Google Earth from 2016 (somewhat skewed and distorted due to how aerial images are converted to an oblique view). Note the homes right above where the flames covered the hillside last December:

When I saw the photo of the fire, I had no doubt the homes above were burnt down.

One of those homes my parents built in 1966, and my family lived there until 1973 when I was ten years old (and Bel Air must have been a lot more affordable then, as my parents managed to build a 4 bedroom house on my father’s salary as a junior high school vice principal). The house is on Casiano Road, on the east side of the Sepulveda Pass. A familiar landmark (which wasn't there when I lived there) is the Getty Center, across the pass, on its west side (Google Maps view from above).

Snowboard Time Machine to the year 1999!

With the 2018 Winter Olympics ongoing, it reminded me of this Craigslist ad I put up in 2011 after finding an old snowboard left in the attic by the previous owners of a house we had just moved out of:

The previous owners of the house had left way too much stuff in the attic after they moved out in 2000. It wasn't until we were cleaning out attic for putting the house for sale in 2011 that we found the snowboard. I originally thought it was a monoski as I had not seen a snowboard shaped like that before. I googled snowboarding lingo to put in the ad, and sold it that week to a vintage snowboard collector who lived at Snoqualamie Pass (little did I know when I found it that 12 years old made it a vintage snowboard). After I sold it, I also got an enquiry from France about it. These days, I'm seeing these listed for over $500 on eBay.

Beware the Future Making Your Unpublished Stories Anachronistic

On Monday, the very day my story "Love, Anger, and Pity; or Fuck Everyone in the Entire History of Humanity" was published, the U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling that made a plot point in the story an anachronism ("Supreme Court rules: Offensive trademarks must be allowed").

(Well, not perfectly. The ruling [pdf] invalidated the Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure §1203.03(b)(i), and my story refers to §1203.01. But close enough.)

This is not the first time that U.S. Supreme Court affected that story, although the first time didn't cause an anachronism. My first version of this story was written in 2012. Originally Eddie called Tom his partner, and in 2015 after the Supreme Court ruled gay marriage to be legal, I changed the story to have Eddie call Tom his husband.

(And gay marriage has changed what used to be non-ambiguous phrases into ambiguous phrases. Ten years ago, "Before Tom and Peter got married..." would be interpreted as two separate weddings where Tom and Peter married their wives. Now you need to make it non-ambiguous by writing something like, "Before Tom and Peter married each other..." or "Before Tom and Peter married their wives...")

There are a number of unpublished or unfinished stories sitting on my computer's drive. I can think of two of them that now have anachronisms since I first started them:

1) Some characters get to the International Space Station on the Space Shuttle. And since the last Shuttle flight was in 2011, when I get around to finishing that story, I'll have to choose another means of getting them to the ISS. With luck, I'll be able to get it published before 2024 when the ISS is scheduled to be retired.

2) A woman is checking her calendar to determine the best date to break up with her boyfriend. Original story: the calendar is a Day-Timer, a small notebook. Updated story: She uses the calendar app on her phone.

Of course, the you can avoid the future causing anachronisms in your stories if they take place at a certain time in the past. But then, you have to worry about inadvertently putting anachronisms in stories from the start. (I imagine in a hundred years there will be stories written where 1970s punk rockers use email).

You can take this post as a plea to writers (and myself!) to finish their stories and get them published. Don't let your unfinished stories remain unfinished, and your finished stories unpublished.
(#SFWApro)

This year's sacrifice to Cthulhu is sponsored by…

In my story “Who Weeps for Cthulhu?”, the old gods have returned, but perhaps there is a greater horror. Featuring Trader Joe’s tequila and turkey kielbasa, plus mariachi music. Published on Literally Stories. (#SFWApro)