Thirty eight years ago today Volkswagen Type 1 (more commonly knows as Beetle) produced it’s 15,007,034th unit. This number bested Henry Ford’s famous Model T, making the Beetle the most produced car in the world.

The 1977 Beetle I owned, affectionately dubbed “Libby”, was the last model year that the curvy VWs were imported into the US. This was also the same period where full-time production stopped in its German assembly plants, while the car continued to be produced in Peru and Brazil for another 25 years or so.

I bought Libby around 1993 or 94, after having my 2nd stint as a carless-person in Houston. She was in pristine shape: great body, tinted windows, air-conditioning (!) and only 85,837 miles. She was a great car to go “motoring in” around Houston’s flat, well-maintained roads.

Of course all of that changed when I moved to DC: potholes, salt & sand on the roads, careless parkers and stringent inspection standards all did their toll. I put Libby “out to pasture” in summer 2003, with a  good conscience. Needing many, many repairs I sold her to the father of a high-school friend of mine, who tinkers and restores old VWs. So I assume that Libby is still out there somewhere, leisurely motoring along a country road.

beneath the city of houston, and above
the bayou where the old brewery
once flourished, you
sway on your feet.
in your right hand, a plastic cup
is almost empty, and in your left,
trembling fingers manage
a broken cigarette.

i hear water whispering below,
faint music from behind a door, but i
listen only to you.

words leave
your mouth as if keeping them inside
was like holding breath.
words washed with vodka, words cooked in grass,
words, words, and
more words fly free from your mind
to be ensnared
by mine.

later, a thousand birds
will flap their wings
inside my head.
with scissors
in my hand, i must remember;
beneath the city of Houston, and
above the bayou where the old brewery
once flourished, you
just swayed on your feet.

©2009 Faisal Butt

It’s 1994. Kurdt has just offed himself, Blur’s Parklife and Orb’s Live 93 play continuously in my CD stack while The Twins™ sunned themselves on the brick courtyard in front of my lovely little garden house. I motored about in my 1977 VW Beetle at 25 mph, filling the tank on Friday evenings on the way home from work and giving her a wash on Saturday mornings. I never locked her doors.

I had recently purchased my first computer, a Performa 630 CD. Yes, it had the “CD” in the name, pushing the new-fangled technology of CD-ROM. Fancy. One of the underlying reasons for this purchase, aside from the fact of not wanting to go into the office to mess around with Illustrator and do side projects was to play some games. SimCity 2000 had just come out and I was embarrased to have my boss finding me playing on my work computer on a weekend, so I figured I needed to move it home. Another game I desperately wanted to try was Myst, a game played with a CD and Mac-only at that point.

Myst was really a revolution when it came out. It featured wonderfully rendered 3-d images, almost unheard of at that time. The interface was simple, static point-and-click images to turn, navigate down a path, etc. The game put you on a mysterious island and you had to figure out what to do; it’s intrigue was in its beauty and simplicity (and once playing, complexity) and wondering around, figuring out how to work the elements on the island and puzzles contained within. I remember it came with a blank notebook where you could jot down things to remember, sketch out maps of the puzzles and basically doodle what was happening around you, as several “books” in the Library on the island showed you as you read them. The game also featured QuickTime movies embedded into the gameplay, which again, was unique for gameplay at that time.

During this time I was also dating Mr. Shipman who was currently working for a client in Chicago and would return to Houston for the weekends. On weekends we would have our together time, going to dinner and having beers and doing dating things. Once I had a big outing planned and Mr. Shipman, after learning I had Myst and being the computer geek he was, said “Why don’t we stay in, order a pizza and play Myst?” Heaven.

Last week Cyan, the creators of Myst, released the iPhone port of the game which is identical to the original from 1993. I think I still have the original booklet that I diligently wrote all my clues in 15 years ago but I’m not sure where it is. It may have been discarded before the last apartment move, I’m not sure. What I do know is that I’m immersed in a world that is oddly familiar (sometimes blatantly) but feels primitive, exciting and full of nostalgia.

I haven’t had to diagram much this time around and back then finding a solution to a tricky puzzle was to sit there and figure it out, whereas now a simple Twitter question or using a provided “hint” link will eventually lead you online to the answer you’re seeking. Trying not to use the hints I’ll still be through it in a week or so now, because I know what to look for, opposed to the couple of months it took me to complete it back in 1994. It’s still fun.

Thanksgiving is traditionally a time spent with members of your family. When I was living in Texas, 2000 miles away, I came home for Thanksgiving once and only once. The airports were nightmares (and this was before 9/11 security screenings), the airline lost my luggage and it was a chaotic 72 hours spent in preview of a trip I would be making in a mere three weeks anyway. So I stopped coming for Thanksgivings after that.

When I moved to DC in 1995 it was much easier to go gone for Thanksgiving since it was a 90-minute drive. I liked arrive on Wednesday evening so that I could wake up to the smell of the turkey, a ham, stuffing and all the other sides baking away, my Mom getting up early to get everything started. She would have a checkoff list if everything she was preparing and the order in which it needed to be started. She would have two or three ovens going at the same time, all burners in the stove on and then be using country space as prep area or, more likely, rolling her homemade pie crusts. She’d let us help out: chopping celery or rolling the dough, opening canned goods or getting the table ready. I miss those days.

As my Mother’s ALS progressed to the point where she could not perform these activities, Thanksgiving dinner responsibilities have been passed on to aunt Darlene or, currently, my cousin Deidre. She has a huge Great Room and it’s a good place to hang with your plate and watch the football. We’re never too formal.

A couple of months ago my Dad informed me that my middle brother and sister-in-law were going to visit her family in upstate New York. This means that the kids, my niece and nephew, are going to be out of town for the holiday. Possibly rightfully so, this is my family’s only bonding agent and without their presence everything falls apart. Case in point: my Dad also says to me “I know you sometimes go and do things with your friends or have plans so don’t feel like you have to cone down.” Wow. Not only have I attended the last 13 Thanksgiving dinners (and every other family event during these years) but I’ve also carved the turkey every time. Has this gone unnoticed?

So presented with the opportunity for a skip, I took it. It will give me time to prepare for Saturday’s brunch and the opportunity to sleep in is always good.

I liked Wired better when it was a magazine. Like, a 1.0 magazine that I bought at the Stop-n-Go at the corner of Westheimer & Montrose because it was like nothing I had ever seen before. A magazine that talked about things I always knew but yet had never heard about. A magazine that, after subscribing I kept every issue of until it was time to move and I checked eBay and it wasn’t worth anything and I threw them all away except for the first year (when it was issued bi-monthly). But I kept the 2.01 issue because it was the Douglas Coupland Microserfs one.

There was a long debate on whether a magazine about being (un)wired should really be made of paper in the first place; shouldn’t this be on the world wide web (as it was called back then) instead of being tethered to the ancient art of printing? With the content it was delivering, shouldn’t it be presented in a medium of its own preaching?

This was 1993. I don’t think I had internet access then. Did you? If you did, it was probably through Prodigy or a very young America Online. Remember them? I know I had email in 1994 and maybe Wired had something to do with that pushing me into this realm.

In the late 90s Wired’s online offerings were an odd web-search portal and a bunch of other crappy linked sites. This was before they started offering the same content as the published magazine, because then nobody realized you could actually publish content online and still be profitable. This was before The Bubble.

Their ace in the hole, however, was suck.com. Using original content not found in the magazine, it represented a new approach to online offerings, very sharp, slight of hand and tongue in cheek. While the content was the hook, it featured illustrations by the brilliant Terry Colon.

All was good until the bubble burst right about when everybody knew it would. Wired was bought by Conde Nast who turned it into the U.S. News & World Report of the technology world. While I can’t compare today’s printed edition (do they still do that?) to the online site (suck.com was killed in 2001—pop!), it’s basically a here-is-today’s-news boring CNN format. Along with Conde Nast’s purchase came lots of reader demographics research so now they assume all wired.com’s readers are hipsters and dorks. What do articles about mountain biking or Seth Rogen’s latest movie have to do with Wired’s philosophy on technology, privacy, hacking and digerati? Not much, I’m afraid.

There’s only two weeks to go in this seemingly endless campaign that has been going on. Regardless of the outcome we will be able to wipe the slate clean, and start rebuilding our divisive animosity and disdain for one another anew.

If the Democrats win, the Republicans will continue to mask their bigotry and lies behind Fear Of A Black Planet, while Democrats, and probably the rest of global civilization, will go down in a fiery demise after McCain dies in office and Sarah Palin starts shooking nukes out of helicopters across her backyard toward Russia. Live out your own apocalypse.

It’s a lose/lose situation.

I wish my family shared the same political and social beliefs I have. I’m the one that defected from them though, so they aren’t really the ones to blame. I’m the traitor in this situation.

It would be easier, however, if we saw eye-to-eye on any one thing. The fact that we don’t puts up communication barriers to most things with the exception of light banter. I always know it’s time to end the phone conversation with the weather is brought up. In a familial gathering, I usually sit quietly, waiting for their bigotry talk to end or the departure time for my train, whichever comes first. I’ll let you speculate as to the outcome of who wins that grudge match.

We don’t discuss politics in my family, or at least we never used to. Maybe I wasn’t around during campaigns for those college + years while I lived in Texas and therefore didn’t hear them. But then Fox News didn’t exist then either, drilling it into their thinking during every waking moment.

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Today is reminiscent of those Saturdays I had in Houston, the Montrose, of waking up late and having too many things to do, too little time to do them in. And lots of habits and distractions <wink>. Thankfully, there is no Jack-In-The-Box. Instead, there is Olympic watching, garden weeding and biking on a rather pleasant August day. 

Last night I checked a bookmark I had made a couple of weeks ago. It is a chicken taco recipe and while I think I have the recipe for chicken soft tacos down, I’m always open for new ideas. So while revisiting this recipe I checked out the current posting for this blog and after scrolling past the breakfast burrito recipe, there is an enticing photo of spiced rubbed salmon on a cedar plank recipe. Although I do not own cedar planks (apparently you can get them at “finer” grocery stores) I kept reading through the description and once at the recipe I discovered that, yes, I have brown sugar, yes, I have kosher salt, yes, I have ancho chili, yes, I have ground cumin, yes, I have ground black pepper, and yes, I have honey all in my cupboard. I also have salmon steaks in my freezer. So guess what I’m having for dinner tonight?

My brother has called and asked if I want to join him and his family tomorrow for DC Ducks. For non-Cap City rezzies, DC Ducks is an amphibious tour bus which takes you around the tourist sites and takes you through a plunge in the Potomac. I’ve always wanted to do this, cheezy as it is, and this my opportunity!

Batman tonight? Yes? No? Maybe so?

It’s a Wednesday and that means Project Runway. And some blogging.

I originally wanted to write about this a couple of months ago but I guess there was were other things going on that were distracting me. Like, life and memories and dealing with all of that.

So I haven’t had a car in just over five years. I think this is longer than those times when I didn’t have a car in Houston. I’ve realized that, while not having a car is a huge pain in the ass in any American city other than New York, I enjoy driving cars but I don’t like owning them.

The last car I owned was a 1977 Volkswagen Beetle. It was silver, had only one previous owner and 83,857 original miles. It was in great shape and even had air conditioning. I read through the entire owner’s manual and discovered things that VW had learned after 40 years of making basically the same model. For instance, it is inadvisable to drive the car while resting your hand on the gearshift.

I set about doing things like making sure the back seat’s safety belts were available for usage and making sure the oil was always at the proper level. On Saturdays when my landlady’s would be out at their ranch (this is Texas, y’all) I would pull the car—dubbed “Libby”—into their driveway and would give her a wash, in preparation for Saturday night’s cruising. One Saturday they didn’t make it out to the ranch and they moved their truck out of the driveway without me asking, just so I could wash Libby and I thought that was especially nice.

After driving Libby, with The Twins™ inside, to DC with its lumpy pavement, huge potholes, asshole drivers and chemically-treated roads every vehicle inspection was nerve-racking. There was always something to be found wrong, and what was being found wrong was increasing over time, both in quantity and in replacement cost. Eventually Libby had developed the car cancer: RUST :and soon this deteriorating condition was becoming a need for an entire overhaul. Like strip everything out of the car to its shell and rebuild, to the tune of fifteen grand.

It seemed time to put Libby out to pasture, as they say. I guess I should backtrack here. When I purchased the car, the sole owner made me promise to take care of it, so I couldn’t just turn it in to a junkyard or sell it to just anybody. I’d discovered that the father of a high school friend customized old Beetles so I sold it to him in good faith and standing. The Millionaire I was dating at the time was kind enough to offer me transport to central Virginia to drop Libby off but I was able to drive her to my parents and she was picked up there. I said goodbye with a clear conscience.