When I worked the graveyard shift at one Circle K in Galveston, I passed the night by reading all of the magazines that were sold in the store. I rarely had more than a couple of customers per hour, so I did a ton of reading. I started reading the gruesome stories in the few detective magazines we sold and for some reason or another, I decided to start calling people in the stories in the middle of the night from Circle K’s pay phones. It was partially curiosity, to see if the stories were made up or if the magazines changed the names to protect the innocent. They didn’t.

I brought magazines outside to the pay phone and called directory assistance in the appropriate cities, using my red box to avoid the long distance charges. I took notes in the magazines, writing phone numbers of people related to the case next to their names in the magazine. I bet the people who purchased the magazines were surprised to find their home phone numbers written in there.

I can’t remember exactly what I said to people, but I’m sure I wasn’t entirely creepy about my calls. I mean, I wasn’t all “This is the ghost of ________ _______, and I’m going to haunt you with phone calls!” I’m sure it was still bizarre to get phone calls in the middle of the night about murder and fraud cases. I think I mostly just asked questions about the case to see if I really had the right people, probably posing as a reporter or something.

I still remember this one story about a teenager named Kenneth Glenn Milner, who attempted to murder a bunch of people in his small Texan town. The story was filled with tons of fail, because I don’t think he managed to actually kill anyone. I came across someone with the same last name as him today and suddenly remembered the whole thing, so I Googled his name and found this interview with him.

The end of my job at that particular Circle K ended my hobby of interviewing crime victims in the middle of the night. That is, until 2002 when I started interviewing random people in stories that I saw on Fark. I doubt any of those sound clips on that page still work.

I’m sure Richard Cardo will be noting this entry in his file on me. “Oh, so he has a FASCINATION and a HISTORY with murder!”

Does that store still exist? I don’t think I’ve seen one since the 90′s. As a kid, it was my favorite store to have my parents take me to because they had several computer terminals set up around the store for customer use. They were very 80′s-looking machines with green or amber lettering on a black screen. Just aimlessly playing around on them was fun enough. But the really cool thing I could do was order merchandise on them which would be shipped to the exit/pick-up area of the store. Anything in the store could be sent down a conveyor belt for us to pick up.

I started small, but quickly advanced to having huge things like couches and refrigerators and other huge appliances sent over. As my mom and I stood in line, waiting for our turn to check out, I was in silent hysterics as I surveyed all the items sitting behind the counter waiting for pick up that I was responsible for. Sometimes I would have so many huge items sent that walking space behind the counter would be scarce for the employees. If I ordered 5 couches, they would almost always sent out 5 couches.

The other awesome part of this was that they would eventually page the names I used over the store intercom. I started out using random character names from books that I liked. Hearing them say “Harriet Tubman, your order is ready in the pick up area.” was hilarious enough. But soon I started making up wacky names for them to say. I went through a phase of using names of illnesses so that they would end up paging Mrs. Amneisia or Mr. Cancer to the pick up area. Then I just started putting nonsense into the fields. I remember one I wrote was Mrs. Teetertotter, which caused a lady to announce over the store’s paging system that a child was playing with the computer terminals and that employees should be on the lookout for them.

I got to relive some childhood memories in 1992 when me and Sylvia lived in Los Angeles and were walking around and found a Service Merchandise. I was happy to see that they still had the computer terminal system in place, so we placed several orders for the largest items we could find. I remember a getting a complete living room set and some large kitchen appliances, such as a fridge and a stove. Their pick up area was much smaller than the old one in St. Louis, so the employees were pretty cramped back there, waiting for customers to come and get their giant items.

I saw my last Service Merchandise in 1994 in Austin, Texas. Their computer terminals there were slightly updated and had credit card readers on them. I taped some strips of cassette tape around my drivers license and tried sliding it through the reader, hoping that it would cause an error and let me enter one of my hundreds of stolen credit card numbers manually. I don’t know why I thought that would work, but at least I tried. Soon after that, I used a stolen money order at that same store to purchase a police scanner. It was in the days when you could buy unblocked 800/900MHz scanners, which I used for years afterwards for all kinds of phone fun, including the Dino incident that happened a year later.

Ahhh, good times with Service Merchandise…

Here’s the craziest fireworks stories I can think of…

You know those pink tube things that just spin around on the ground making cool colors? Did you know if you light it in your hand, wait for the fuse to burn almost all the way out and then throw it up into the air, it flies around in the air really good? That’s what I’ve always loved doing with them and surprisingly I’ve never set one off in my hand that way.

As a teenager I decided to tie fishing line around one of these and dangle it out my 2nd story window by a broom handle to see which way it would fly. It immediately burned away the fishing line and quickly hovered up and then over – straight into my bedroom window as I jumped out of the way. I watched in shock as this glowing ball of fire hovered in the middle of my room for a few seconds. Then it went out and fell to the floor, not burning anything. It was awesome, but I decided not to try that experiment again.

The cool fireworks were illegal in Illinois, so we had to drive across the Mississippi into Missouri for the good stuff. I think my brother and his friends actually biked over there for fireworks before they had drivers licenses. Apparently fireworks stands didn’t care that kids were buying things. I think it was when he was 16 and I was 14 that we drove over there and got a ton of bottle rockets. And for days we drove around, shooting them at people from the car. We’d just hold them in our hands, light them and aim at people, houses, cars, etc.

Probably the funnest thing was driving up to the golf course in Wood River and shooting them down at golfers. It was great seeing them down there with tiny explosions of smoke happening all around them. They just stood there, looking up at our car, helpless to do anything about it as we laughed hysterically. This was the 80′s, so nobody had cell phones to report us with.

In high school I set off a pack of 100 saturn missles in a hallway during lunch, which is detailed on this page.

Dropping lady bugs (I think that’s what those tiny firecrackers are called) into a 20oz bottle of water is fun because it makes the bottle bounce up into the air and sprays water around. And dropping those colored smoke bombs into buckets of water creates the coolest effect ever.

Once I got a drivers license, Mike Tankersley and I had a lot of fun reliving the things my brother and I used to do with fireworks. Mostly driving up and down alleys, shooting bottle rockets at houses or throwing exploding things over fences. We had a few close calls with cops, like when I’d just shot a bottle rocket out of my hand into a yard and I looked up to see a cop driving by on the cross street. Luckily he wasn’t looking our way.

In Junior High I used to boobie trap everything in class with poppies – those white balls of paper that pop when you throw them at the ground. A few times I boobie trapped doors with those firecracker-type things with the strings on either side of it that are about as loud as a firecracker, so that when doors were opened they would explode. During lunch we’d tie these to classroom doors that were in session and we could hear them explode from anywhere in the school.

I know there’s more, but I can’t think of anything right now. I’ll have to come back and revise this with more of my stupidity later. Today the kids and I are driving up to Portland for the day and we’ll watch the fireworks display there tonight. I bought some sparklers, poppies and confetti poppers to do on the riverfront. I don’t think they allow anything stronger than that there.

7/5 EDIT: Kristine commenting reminded me of my Eastgate fireworks escapades! During the construction of the additional auditoriums I started bringing bottle rockets in and shooting them off inside. They would hit the ceiling and explode. I can’t remember what the ceiling was made of it but it never burst into flames and killed all the moviegoers in the other auditoriums.

After awhile I started sticking a few dozen bottlerockets into the launcher at once and using a lighter and an aerosol can as a flamethrower to ignite them all at once. The noise was fantastic! Eventually Debbie got sick of it and posted a list of rules on the bulletin board which included no fireworks, no skateboarding behind the concession stand and no radios. She wasn’t really into confrontation. The list was hilarious.

Back in 1993 I worked at a movie theater in Indianapolis and met a guy named Shane there who I became friends with. Then I left Indianapolis forever, in fear of the IRS comin’ to get me. But then I swung by Indianapolis again several months later to pick up Shane and fly him all over the country on stolen credit card numbers for Spring Break.

In just under a week, we visited San Diego, Galveston and Cincinnati. Cincinnati was the town we nearly got arrested in after a cop, suspecting us of vandalizing a pay phone, searched my bag and found a bank’s courtesy phone that I’d stolen earlier in the day. Later that night we were both sleeping in a friend’s basement and heard the cops upstairs, apparently taking our friend away. Luckily they didn’t come down for us too. Early the next morning we quietly slipped out a basement window and got the hell out of his neighborhood, hoping not to be spotted by cops on the way to a bus stop. It was fun and more details are at www.notla.com/travels/. While we were eating somewhere in San Diego, Shane drew this comic of Jim Bayless, a man who is kind of a staple of PLA. It was a great vacation and it’s a miracle that we made it back to Indianapolis with no legal mishaps, considering I was scamming these airline tickets on the fly as we reached each new city.

Colleen and I visited Shane once again in 1994 when we took a vacation (free, of course) to Indianapolis to see him. After that, I never saw him again. UNTIL…15 years later (last night) I noticed his name on a ShmooCon site. A little more digging around found that this Shane was also in Indiana. And then even more Googling found a video of Shane and it was actually him! From reading various websites that him and his friends were on, I found that Shane and I have probably been passing each other at various hacker cons for years now. He’s been a ShmooCon, PhreakNic, Defcon and Notacon.

So I emailed him last night and we did some catching up today. He was equally surprised to hear from me. Both of us assumed that we’d never hear from each other again and it’s kind of a bizarre way to come across each other, especially since back in 1994 neither of us knew that the other was even into computers. Turned out he was manning a table in the very room we kept using to sneak into ShmooCon and his voice can even be heard in the video I made of us sneaking in. A friend of Shane’s showed me an email today from 2005 where he’d written me to ask permission to use PLA material on a broadcast they were doing at a con.

Just bizarre that we’ve been at all these same places together and never knew it. Kind of reminds me of how I was friends with my biological brother in high school, both pining for the same girl for a couple of years, then finding out we were brothers 10 years later. Shane’s going to be at Defcon this year so I’ve got to hunt him down.

Oh yeah, speaking of hunting down old friends, Kristine and I managed to find Brad Thompson last week, a guy we both worked with back in the 80′s. He’s part of the reason (indirectly) I ended up moving to Galveston when I left my parents house in 1991. When I got there he got me a job as a painter with him. Was kind of fun catching up with him too. The internet rules for tracking down random old friends. I need to do this more often.

The Gamma Dose Rate Meter was probably the coolest thing I saw at the Picc-A-Dilly flea market on Sunday. Me, Kate, Eric and a few other people drove there and spent a few hours. It’s been close to a year since I visited that place. I didn’t buy it, though. I did buy a couple books, some padlocks to pick and a 9-LED flashlight for just $3.00. Went on some hikes too, one on Saturday morning and another on Sunday evening.

Last night me and linear did epiosde #4 of The Phone Show. If anyone reading this wants to listen to the archives, visit www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow/. I’m enjoying doing it. I thought it would be kind of a drag, having to come up with an hour’s worth of show every week, but we’re not even preparing for it. We just take phone calls for most of the hour and hope for the best. So thanks a lot for the show, Party 934!

Last month while looking through all my old envelopes to discover my old addresses, I also came across this handwritten chart, written on the back of my work schedule from Union Station Cine, showing how much money I could make doing quarter roll scams:

This is something I wrote about on my Travels page, but never went into too much detail on. But here’s how it went… In 1992 I discovered that I could pass off rolls of pennies as rolls of quarters to convenience store clerks and other businesses. I did this by taking a roll of pennies and removing 4 of the pennies, then wrapping a couple strips of construction paper around the roll. Stick the finished product into an ordinary paper quarter roll and you’ve got yourself a roll of quarters worth just 46 cents.

In 1992 I’d passed a few of these around Alton and it seemed to work perfectly every time. So Chris Tomkinson and I decide that we’ll spend an entire day, driving from Alton to Paducah, Kentucky, passing out quarter rolls to as many businesses as possible. And by we, I mean me. Chris wasn’t dumb enough to pass the quarters, but I still wanted to split the profits with him if he came along with me.

We had a great time during the trip and the fake quarter rolls paid for our gas and excessive amounts of food and drink all the way there. We also had fun exploring some of Paducah. I don’t know why Chris picked Paducah of all places, but it was a good destination and we got to visit Metropolis, Illinois, the home of Superman! (Or so they claim.)

What I would do is buy something for under $1.00 (usually) and then say, “Could you use any quarters? I happen to have this roll here.” and they would almost always accept it. Then I’d get my $9.00 in change and quickly leave. For the most part, passing the rolls of quarters went smoothly, but I did have occasional close calls. Like one lady who really needed the quarters for her register and started banging them on the edge of the counter to break them, only they wouldn’t break because of the extra layers of paper. I quickly made my way out the door and ran to the car.

Another time the guy opened the roll before giving me my change and saw that there were pennies inside. I had to pretend that I was the one who got scammed by some other store. “The clerk at 7-Eleven had to give me this yesterday because they were out of large bills!” I can’t remember if he seemed to believe me, but at least he didn’t jump over the counter and tackle me for it.

And then there’s the lady who discovered the fakes as I was talking to her and backing out the door. She sees the pennies and goes, “Hey!” I quickly exit and run to my car. Luckily she had to walk around the long counter before she could make it out the door. I was in my car and starting it when she burst out of the front doors and towards my car. I backed out of my place and just kept backing up out of the parking lot and down the street. This particular incident actually happened before Paducah, in East Alton right across the street from the police station.

In between hitting stores, Chris put together the fake rolls of quarters while I drove. I had a metal file box filled with all the necessary supplies for making fakes. I guess we weren’t too worried about fingerprints because I don’t remember us taking any precautions against that. Guess it’d be hard to lift prints from construction paper, though.

Our last close call was very late at night as we were making our way home. On some Illinois highway, cops were stopping all cars and checking for drunks. Before we got up to the checkpoint we were pretty sure that it was some kind of state-wide manhunt for quarter roll scammers. They check my drivers license and talked to us for a few seconds to make sure we weren’t drinking. They shined their light all over the inside of my car. The metal box full of counterfeiting supplies was on the floor in the back.

The problem came when I couldn’t find my insurance card. I looked everywhere for it and couldn’t find it. Not in the glovebox or the visor. Checked all over the floor. Nowhere. The cop kept leaving and coming back to see if I’d found it. And each time he kept shining his light around my car. He finally had us pull to the side of the road to get out of the way of traffic. Chris was freaking out, sure that they would eventually search the car and find our box. After what seemed like forever, I finally found my insurance card amongst all the trash on my floor and we were allowed to leave. It was a stressful search though.

Our final profits for the day were pretty pitiful. Nowhere near the possible $9,500 that I fantasied we could take in. We didn’t keep track of the money during the trip, but we just spent a lot of it on food, gas and other junk and didn’t have much left by the time we got home. But it was still a fun and completely free trip. After our scamming roadtrip, I gave up on the idea of quarter roll scamming being profitable and never tried it again, mostly because it seemed just too risky. Took me a few more years, though, to give up my dream of scamming for a living.

Our quarter roll scamming did make the police log in the Alton Telegraph. I remember they claimed we’d hit places that we didn’t actually hit, such as the Wood River Donut Shop. So either the police were trying to anger us into calling them and telling them how wrong they were, or there was a copycat criminal out there.

I went to pick up my son from school today, and parked on my usual side street. As I’m leaving my car and walking towards the school, some guy trimming his hedges says to me, “Hey could you not park there in front of my mailbox? The mailman doesn’t like when you park there.”

“Oh, okay. Sorry about that, I won’t do it again.”

“Could you go ahead and move it back a few feet?”

I looked and I wasn’t even in front of his mailbox. It was about a foot in front of my car. “It doesn’t look like I’m in front of it anyway.”

“Just back up a few feet for me!”

“Not now. I won’t park there again though, I promise.” And I keep walking towards the school.

“YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE!” he yells.

This makes me smile. I pause for a minute and then go back to where he can hear me.

“Hey, I’ll probably park there tomorrow too. And every day from now on.”

“Go ahead! I’ll call the police! You’re an asshole!”

“Bye now!”

And I continued walking to pick up my son. I told him about it so that if the guy started yelling things at us again, he would be prepared. I was kind of hoping for more, but he wasn’t outside. He was probably on the phone with 911, frantically telling them all about me.

I usually can’t even park in that spot because some other mom is already there. And is it even illegal to park a foot away from a mailbox? I know it’d make it difficult for the mailman in his truck, but that can’t be illegal. Or maybe it is, who knows. In my 3 years here, I’ve never seen that guy in his yard but I can’t wait to give him a friendly hello every time I see him from now on.

In 1992 I moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and found a cheap apartment a couple blocks from the beach. I had 4 roommates and they were young guys, just like me, and always seemed to be getting into some kind of trouble and there was always crazy drama happening. Like when one guy got pulled over for speeding and ended up getting arrested for some reason, so we all pooled in our money to bail him out, only to find out that he actually had a different name than we knew and he’d been using some other guy’s drivers license to live under. Or the time one guy burst into my room in the middle of the night to show me that he’d stolen the fortune telling machine from Subway and needed me to help him get all the quarters out of it.

Somehow we ended up with a TV in our living room. I forget where it came from – probably from someone’s trash since it was one of those giant wooden console TVs. We were sitting around the living room and trying to tune in shows, but having very little luck. We briefly talked about splitting the cost of cable, but that didn’t do anything for our need of television right now. $5.00 each was probably out of our budget ranges anyway. So that conversation turned into ways that we could steal cable.

Our apartment didn’t even seem to have any cable wires running into our building. But the building across the street did. We found a few people who we guessed had active cable in their apartments, so we started making plans. My idea was to hook up a splitter to their cable line and run a new wire underground up to our building. We would have to go buy a splitter and a bunch of coax, which would cost maybe $20 or $30.

But my roommates weren’t as patient as me. They wanted to watch cable TV tonight. So instead of being stealthy about it, they walked over to this other building and started ripping down their coax cable from the wall. They yanked on it until the cable came loose and we had the end that plugged into the TV. Then they pulled it from the other direction and I believe they ripped some of it from the telephone pole. In the end, we had just barely enough cable to reach over to our building, into the window and hook it up to our TV.

We had to pull the TV right up to the window and there was no slack at all left on the cable. In fact, outside the cable was at a very tight angle from the ground to our 2nd story window, probably obstructing people from walking by on the sidewalk. I can just envision a guy on a bike not seeing it and getting clotheslined. There was no connection on the end of the cable since we’d apparently ripped it off while pulling the wire off the side of the building, so I used my wire cutters to lengthen the leads and get them hooked up to the TV.

So we turned it on and it worked great! After the 1 minute warmup period that giant wooden consoles take to turn on, we were sitting around and happily enjoying Doogie Howser, M.D. or whatever the hell people watched in 1992.

After a few hours, somebody begins knocking on our door. Guess who it was. Yeah, it’s the guy we stole cable from. Literally, stole cable from. Stealing in the sense that we actually deprived him of cable TV because we took it from him. Not only did we end up stealing his cable, but when they yanked his cable off the side of his apartment building and pulled on it until it came out of the wall, it actually pulled his TV off the shelf and it fell to the floor. There was no mention of his TV being broken, but he wasn’t a happy man. We apologized to him and handed his mangled cable TV wire back to him. I don’t remember much of the actual exchange between us and our angry neighbor that night, but I do remember that it ended with him giving us a very weak, “Well, uh, don’t do it again!”

I guess we got our fix of cable that we needed, because we didn’t buy or steal any more cable for the rest of the summer.

Today, as I was walking into the post office, there was an old man on the sidewalk with a clipboard, I assume to sway peoples’ political beliefs. There’s always one there this time of year. As I opened the door, he asked me if I was a Linn County resident. Without looking at him I said “Nah” and continued inside. But before the door shut, I heard him say, “Oh, you’re fibbing!” So I walked back out the door, knocked the clipboard out of his hand and screamed, “FUCK YOU!” in his face. Wait no, that last part is a lie.

Actually, I continued inside to pick up my mail. I probably wouldn’t have said anything to him, but a lady who works in the post office (one of the higher ups, who gets called to the counter when a customer demands to talk to a supervisor) was at the door and telling him not to do something. She was saying something like he needs to approach people on the way out instead of the way in.

So I stopped and said, “You know, I wasn’t lying to you. I really don’t live in Linn County.”

He says nothing. So I continue, “So you don’t need to call me a liar.”

“Huh?” he replies.

“You said I was fibbing when I told you I don’t live in Linn County and I don’t appreciate it. I shouldn’t have to be called a liar whenever I come to pick up my mail.”

“Oh. Well I was just kidding, buddy!”

By the time he says this I’m getting into my car and the post office lady is giving him an evil look. As I pull away she’s talking to him again. I don’t know how much authority she has over those people who stand out there, but it would be great if she made him leave. I hate having to dodge them every single day.

Oh, and I really am a Linn County resident. Tee hee! I love being a jerk.

EDIT: Just to prove that I’m not a complete jerk all the time, I should point out that in December I give those Salvation Army bell ringers at the post office money almost every single day.

I’m going to wave my cane around and tell you how things were back in the day before all this new-fangled internet came about.

Back in my day, there was no email, no cell phones, no twitter, no pagers, no instant messaging. If I wanted to contact a friend I had to call him on a land line and sometimes I’d call and get nothing but a busy signal for hours. The entire family shared a single phone line and they were much busier back then since it was the only means of remotely communicating with friends and family. If your friends and family lived far away, you couldn’t talk to them very often or very long because long distance was expensive. And if you were away from home and needed to make a call, you had to stop at a pay phone. Imagine that, regular people using pay phones all the time.

Oh sure, things like cell phones and pagers existed, but only businessmen and drug dealers owned them. The first cell phone I ever saw was a gigantic bag phone that someone in our church brought in with them in the 1980′s. It was 3 times the size of his wife’s purse. So even if you could afford a cell phone then, you’d look like a douche carrying it around.

Most high-tech communities revolved around C.B. radios. They were huge back then and you could find normal rednecks chatting with each other on a dozen channels in any given night. There were battles between rednecks, just like in chatrooms and online communities today, which sometimes evolved into tire slashing or coax cutting. Guess that doesn’t really compare to the harshness of SWATTING someone, though.

I had to look up facts in things like dictionaries and encyclopedias. There was no instant access to any kind of information I could possibly want 24 hours a day. If I needed some information and the library was closed, I was out of luck. My parents didn’t even own one of those giant sets of encyclopedias so I had to trek to the library to find anything. I couldn’t even access the library’s computer from home. If I needed a library book I had to look in a card catalog that was taller than me, flipping through hundreds of cards manually and hoping to find what I was looking for. The Dewey Decimal System owned me.

Phone books were also a necessity in any home. I couldn’t text Google for a number or look it up online. I either had to find it in the phone book or call 411, which charged money for it. And 411 only handled information in Illinois. If I needed a number across the river in Missouri, I had to call 314-555-1212 for Missouri information. Just to contact information in a different state, you had to know an area code in that state. Sure, 411 could tell you the area code, but then you’d be double-charged for information.

In 1990, I finally got a computer that had a modem (that only displayed green text on a black screen) and I became interested in BBSing. But to connect to one of the dozens of BBSes in my area, I had to get past the busy signal first which could sometimes take hours on the really popular boards. Luckily my modem software would automatically redial a BBS number over and over until it picked up while I did other things. Hopefully I would notice when it connected, before the BBS would hang up on me and become busy again. Oh, and remember 56k modems? Imagine the speed of a 56k and divide that by 46. That’s how fast BBSing was at 1200 baud. When I upgraded to a 2400 baud a year later, I was astounded by the increased speed. And when I finally got a computer with a 40 meg hard drive (that’s MEG, not GIG), I knew that I could never use up all that space.

When I left home in 1991, I didn’t have MapQuest to plot my route to Texas and I didn’t have GPS to bail me out if I made a wrong turn. I had to buy a map to get me there, and at each rest stop I’d have to refold it so I would be looking at the part I was on. There was no little green dot on a screen to guide me anywhere. Once I arrived in a new state or a new city, it was time to buy a new map. By the mid-90′s I had a huge collection of maps that I was dragging around the country with me.

Pornography was not easy to come by. My parents didn’t have any porn in the house, so my brother and I would have to rely on friends to supply us with Playboys and Hustlers. The soft-core images in those magazines was about as good as it got. We might score a new magazine or two maybe once per year. Compare that to the unlimited supply of free porn available to any kid on the internet today. The difference there is just unbelievable.

When it came to watching movies and TV shows, I was at the mercy of cable TV. When the monthly TV Guide arrived in the mail, I would flip through it and highlight the movies that I wanted to watch. Then I would just have to hope that I didn’t forget about it. There was no automatic popup on the TV to remind me that my movie would start soon. There wasn’t even an on-screen guide to show me what shows and movies were playing. I either had to memorize the TV schedule or refer to the TV guide, which was usually buried deep under a pile of newspapers and magazines.

There was no database of movie and TV trivia either. I’m sure there were movie magazines back then, but I’d never seen one. If I wanted to know which actor played a character in a movie or what a song in a movie was, I had to find a time when the movie was playing and wait for the credits to roll. The only problem there was that the resolution on our TV wasn’t meant for reading the tiny text on credits. I was lucky if I could make any of the words out in the credits. And it’s not like I could pause the picture to try and decode the print. Movie trivia just wasn’t accessible back then.

Imagine a life with no Ebay and no Amazon. I lived that life. If we wanted to purchase an item, we had to purchase it at a store and pay full price for it. Our only hope for a discount was to drive from store to store, comparing prices and hoping to save a few bucks. If I wanted a cassette tape, I paid full price. I couldn’t log onto Ebay or Amazon and find a few hundred people selling the same cassette for a fraction of the cost in a store. I was almost always stuck paying full price for just about everything.

And if I wanted to get rid of some old junk I had, there wasn’t much hope of making any money at it. Garage sales were about our only option. My parents had a garage sale once and I put my old TRS-80 computers out, hoping to make $10 off of each of them and some other low prices from the accessories. Years later, I tried selling those same TRS-80′s at a yard sale of my own, for 50 cents each. No takers. Just a few years ago I tried selling all my old TRS-80 stuff on Ebay and I made over $100 from it all. Without the internet, I either had to keep stuff forever, practically give it away for free, or just throw it in the trash. Listing an item for sale in the newspaper was your best shot, but if nobody bought it then I was stuck paying the fee for the classified ad.

If we thought school would be closed due to the snow, there was just one AM radio station we could check to find out for sure. Sometimes it would take up to 30 minutes to finally catch the announcement and we’d wait quietly as the DJ read through an enormous list of closed schools, hoping ours would be in the list. Today, my kids’ school sends out an automatic email or text message to let us know. I don’t even have to wake them up.

People always talk about how great the 80′s were, but how could anyone want to go back to when none of this existed? I love having my entire life’s music collection, my address book, calendar and hundreds of pages of personal notes in the palm of my hand. Being able to take a call in the middle of the woods or at the lake or in your car is awesome. So is instant access to any kind of information imaginable 24 hours a day and an active social life beyond local friends. As a teenager in the 1980′s and even the early 1990′s, I never could have imagined how awesome things would turn out just a couple decades later. And I can’t wait to see how much things have progressed in another 10 or 20 years.

Went to the library the other day with the kids and ended up finding Mark Twain’s Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays. There’s 2 volumes of it so I just picked up the first one for now. Great stuff!

Speaking of libraries…around 1992 I had checked out a book called Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman. Before I got around to returning it, I looted a 7-Eleven and attempted to flee the state. Somehow this resulted in me never returning the book. When I moved back to the Alton area in 1997, I went to check out a book and they said, “It looks like you never returned Steal This Book” which sounded pretty damn funny. Somehow they let me continue using my library account for the next 8 years without paying for Abbie Hoffman’s book.

Thinking this was a great opportunity for a prank phone call, I called up that library yesterday to check on the status of my account. I was waiting for them to tell me that I’d never returned Steal This Book so I could make a bunch of obvious jokes at them. But nobody I talked to could find any reference to it on my account. I called up several other libraries in the district, since they all had access to my account, but none of them found anything about the stolen book. I guess they just don’t care about a book that I didn’t return 14 years ago.

What was great was that a few years ago I checked that library’s catalog for that book. Right next to the title of Steal This Book it showed the current status of the book. Which was, “Presumed lost/stolen.”

And speaking of library antics! Also back in 1991 or so, Chris Tomkinson and I discovered how incredibly easy it was to get a library card with minimal identification. At the time you didn’t even need picture ID. Just something with your name on it, such as a utility bill. And utility bills were easy to forge. So we starting getting library cards and stealing tons of books. Well, I make the fake utility bills and applied for the accounts. Chris was always too much of a wuss to do any of the dirty work himself. He was just there to reap the benefits.

The maximum you could check out in 1 visit was 8 books. But all the libraries in our district were connected which meant we could check out 8 books from each branch. We had about 7 or 8 branches within driving distance, so that was at least 56 books per fake utility bill we printed up. We spent many evenings driving to every library we could, piling up books in the back of Chris’ car.

The method I used to fake a utility bill was quite primative at the time – I took a real utility bill, applied a light coat of whiteout over the important bits of information, then used my brother’s typewriter to type in new information. Neither of our dot matrix printers would have done that good of a job. The only time this method failed was in the Edwardsville library, when the librarian noticed something odd about the print on the bill. She held it up to the light and could clearly make out the real name and phone number information underneath. I can’t remember how I responded to that, but I know we didn’t get a card that time.

Right around 2001, 10 years later, I decided to return most of my stolen books. Many of them I’d never even bothered to read and they just took up space on my bookshelves which could be going to books that were actually useful to me. So I drove to the East Alton library late one night and dropped a few dozen books into the book deposit. Most of them still had their identifying numbers on them and the stamped card inside, showing the date in 1991 that they were due. I bet the librarians were surprised. If they only knew that many of those books accompanied me as I criss-crossed the country several times in the early to mid 90′s.