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Hi. I’m tinkering with a new template and the interface for modifying it is vastly different than what i’m used to. I’ll keep tweaking it but in the meantime, things are likely to look a bit garish around here for a while.

-s.

Two Saturdays ago, along with about two hundred other people, had a memorial for the life of Barbara Cramer. A lot of people shared their stories which is probably the biggest reason why i went. I wanted to hear the voices of others that knew and loved Barbara. I think the most remarkable thing was this thread that wove itself into everyone’s story – when you spoke to Barb, she was there. She was genuinely there with you to listen, to talk to you and to enjoy that moment.

In other words, she was sincere. She was genuine.

(more…)

Updated 30 mar 25.

Some years ago a man that worked where I worked died of complications onset by the covid 19 virus. There were hundreds of people at his memorial and of those, a handful of us that gamed with him. I didn’t know Eddie well but i’d helped him several times (i’m a desktop support monkey in a heavy, industrial environment) and of the two LAN parties that Barbara hosted, Eddie was there both times.

Barbara and her husband, Cody, was there for Eddie’s memorial. I was a bit shocked at just how few of us from work were there because he was deeply loved by many where we worked.

It was an early autumn day- the kind of day where the sky bellowed with chunks of white and grey. It was one of those days where the sun shone between those chunks and the rain fell as it does that time of year- in fits and sometimes as a drizzle, sometimes as actual rain.

I remember standing outside in the rain that day. I felt the sunlight for what would be one of the last times before the sun would cease being warm for many months and the winter rains began in earnest. Between the sunlight and the rain, the changing of the seasons and the breeze, i remember standing outside watching the dying light, feeling the rain on my face (we don’t use umbrellas in the PNW) and turning to someone, possibly Barb, telling her, “This is a good day to remember a life.”

Two years ago or less Barb quit coming to work. As these things go, i figured she was working from home. In the evenings, i’d see her on Steam playing AdVenture Capitalist or AdVenture Communist- both what are called “idle/ clicker games”. She’d had her 2nd child a couple of years before and there was no reason for Barb to work onsite because her role had changed from engineering to something engineering adjacent.

It wasn’t until months later that someone told me that Barb was out because she’d been diagnosed with cancer.

Glioblastoma.

Of all of the diseases… please, not that one. Not glioblastoma, pancreatic cancer or a metastasized breast tumor or melanoma. But please, please, please… not brain cancer.

I was torn. Absolutely torn over this. Part of it was personal (which i’ll get into if you don’t know my story) but i wanted to be respectful of her time with her family and with whatever procedures she would have to endure to overcome it.

She eventually called me. “I’ll be back to work in April!” she said. She assured me that she was making good progress against the tumor and she fully expected to be done with chemo and radio therapy in the coming months and be back at work full time.

April came and went. May came and went. Summer came and went. Barb didn’t come back to work.

Still, she called me now and then because she needed access to something on our network or had a question about something work related. Of course we talked about personal stuff; at least whatever my time would allow. She was always upbeat, still convinced she was going to triumph over her cancer but taking the time to travel and do things like meet Gates McFadden- a pic that she shared with me with no small degree of happiness.

To my discredit and perhaps to my shame, i didn’t press her to visit. I thought she was responding to therapy and that she was recovering.

But there’s another reason. A reason that began for me in 1966.

A woman named Rosemary all of 24, 25, 26 years old- i don’t know- gave birth to me in Houston, TX. During my delivery she had a grand mal seizure but had no history of epilepsy.

After i was born, it was discovered she had tumors in her brain.

My dad worked two jobs in the Port of Houston making $2.10 an hour, then would go to take care of and spend time with her. My grandparents told me how he would cut her food and feed her when she went from being paraplegic – then quadriplegic. My grandparents largely raised me during this time. Rosemary’s health deteriorated over the course of the next two years until she died some time in 1968 or 1969 i think. I do not believe she lived to see 30.

When i learned that Barb had brain cancer, i felt like i would have been intruding in what might end up being a very short time left on this world. It wasn’t a selfish thing nor was i afraid of being around someone that might end up being terminally ill (some people are) but at the same time, i failed to remember the thing that made Barbara who she was.

After hearing the stories that many people shared at her memorial last Saturday, one of the many qualities that Barb had was the ability to be there- REALLY THERE when you spent time with her. Her conversations were genuine, fun, substantive and when you spoke to her, she really wanted to know how you were doing.

As much as she gave to others, i suppose i never gave thought to the fact that we also gave to her. Friends are chosen and without hesitation, i can say that Barb was a friend to me and i was a friend to her.

Late last year, i found that Barbara wasn’t doing well. And with that news, i decided it was time to see if i could visit.

But i had to go back to Texas first.

That trip wiped me out emotionally as family trips often do. It took me a week or two to recover. And then- finally, after a year and a half of putting it off, i was told to email her husband, Cody, and ask if i could visit.

There was no response.

Two weeks later, i emailed Barb.

No response.

A few days later the news came that Barbara had ceased chemo and radiation therapy, which she was no longer responding to, and was at home under hospice care.

A woman that worked with Barb and Cody scheduled me to visit her on 15 feb.

Then the news came that she died on the 8th.

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Hey. It’s ANOTHER Sunday afternoon. I’m thinking i should break this entry into two parts. The 2nd part won’t be that long – at least i don’t think it will.

Mr. Ellis – if you catch this, i wanted to take a moment to thank you for your comment. I write in this journal because it helps clear my head. I suppose the difference between just thinking something and actually taking the time to put it somewhere public lends itself to some degree of vulnerability (should we choose to be honest with ourselves instead of just seeking to garner attention) and in doing so, it brings some modicum of perhaps calmness and clarity in my life.

As an aside, that was quite the match between Aus and Eng during Autumn Nations last year. And while i don’t watch league as much as i do union, i have to admit that league is an absolute blast to watch – and the Rabbitohs in particular.

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Quick announcement – i am working on editing and posting another episode of Catharsis/ Sex & Ice on YouTube. This one is particularly long and frankly, i cringe so hard that i could cause the earth to shudder at some of the banal shit that i said back then. I’ll make it a point to resume working on it this week.

Repeating what i said last week: I also want to make a quick announcement that my initial enthusiasm for this particular template has worn thin. It’s nice in a lot of ways but doesn’t quite hit the spot for me in terms of both aesthetics nor presentation.

I don’t know how many, if any, people read this journal but if you do, expect to see some visual changes soon.

-shelly

 

I had a few things on my list that i was supposed to do this weekend; not least of which was to complete an entry here that i started a few days ago. Unfortunately i’m having difficulty sleeping these days and my three day weekend ended up being a three day stretch of being stuck in a fugue state.

There’s nothing newsworthy going on with me and whatever rants i may have in store are pretty tame (but hopefully amusing). More than anything, i’m making this entry to remind myself to get off my ass and start writing again. Writing is kind of like painting in that the less i do it, the less i want to do it. But writing is also like painting in that i need to do it because i need it.

To that end, i’ll make it a point to turn my focus this week toward those things that i put off this weekend – publishing videos from my converted ACTV tapes, painting and writing.

I have no doubt that i’m not going to finish this entry to the degree that i want it to be finished. I usually rehearse what i want to say for days before i put my fingers on the keyboard. I find the strands, i pull and tease them apart, then as i try to find a way to work them back into each other, i feel for a certain type of cadence; a rhythm to my thoughts and how they interconnect. Once i have that, i try to weave them back into a tapestry with some parts fitting into others with the hope that once completed, there is a cohesiveness and singularity to whatever it was that was on my mind.

This feels a bit loose and disjointed. Maybe it’ll congeal as i keep going.

I’m not sure i should be writing tonight. Technically speaking, i had enough sleep last night but i don’t think i had enough REM. So let’s see where this goes and if it holds together well enough as a rough draft, i’ll publish it but with the caveat that it’s likely to be revised a few times.

Parallel to everything that i’ve written about in the first two parts is something that has been growing in me for several years.

the disconnect.

Strands that once tethered me to the beauty around me began to fray. My desire to meet and date women started to break. For years it’s become more and more difficult for me to connect to others and for the same amount of time, my desire to has faded as well.

It’s a contradiction of sorts. I won’t lie- i am achingly lonely. It’s now been six and a half years since i’ve had any intimacy. That was with a woman that i dated for about three weeks. The woman i dated before her lasted for about that long and was two years earlier. As an aside, i will never date another poly woman again. Ugh.

And that loneliness isn’t just the craving for physical touch. It’s also just having someone to talk to, someone to sleep next to, someone to share a meal with…

It’s wanting, perhaps needing someone who speaks to me because she wants to and someone that will listen to what i have to say.

And as the years have gone on, i’ve found myself just… i’m just unable to connect with others like i once did. And it’s not cynicism. It’s not “just getting older”. It’s far worse than both of those things because i don’t remember HOW to connect anymore.

The first two parts of this entry were about this woman that i dated. She’s gone now. Her messages became less frequent and then shorter. And now- not a word from her in months. For my part, i can say with sincerity that i enjoyed our conversations but i’m also reminded that in the 10 or so months of our bouncing messages and emails back and forth, she never called me. At one point i was ready to call her but after a few “maybe laters,” i took the hint. If she wanted to speak to me, she would- but she didn’t.

I do not know why she contacted me last March. I have nothing to offer her and perhaps she finally realized that and just disappeared.

There is a cruel irony of sorts at play here.

After she left me some thirty years ago, i eventually went into counseling. One of the things that came from those sessions is i have some pretty severe abandonment issues. To a two year old toddler, having his mother get sick and die was something that shaped me. The woman i call my mom is technically my step mom but she’s the one that raised me and she is my mom.

But when i was 14, she left my dad for reasons that i won’t go into here. Shortly thereafter, i was shipped off to a boarding school which our valedictorian nicknamed, The School for Disposable Children.

Abandonment is just baked into me it seems. Then when Michelle left me in late 98, it broke me. The wounds have healed, the armor has been fitted to hide the scars but without condition nor prefix, Michelle absolutely and utterly broke me and i have never been the same since.

Back to those counseling sessions.

Being able to identify this underlying issue of abandonment explained much of why i had such a disproportionate reaction to when she ended our relationship. Well, that and i was inexperienced and emotionally undeveloped.

But this time? To be sure, it saddens me. She is an exceptionally strong, intelligent person and she values altruism. She has endured cruelty that too many women know but few overcome- yet she did.

She has made an exceptionally brave choice to abandon the predictability of corporate comfort to pursue her own direction. And although i doubt there’s much i could have done to help her, i wanted (and still want) her to succeed.

But now she’s gone.

Again.

The first time she left, it devastated me. As i explained, i was a different person then for better and for worse- but mostly for worse. And she was a different person. It was unfortunate that our communication failed but we were both young at the time and i suspect that neither of us quite knew how to effectively communicate.

This time, it saddens me. I genuinely appreciated her and her conversation and it plucks this wound of abandonment that can never heal. But this time, not a single tear. Just the cold comfort of knowing that virtually every time someone from my past pops up, they never explain why and once they have their fill of me, they leave. Guess it’s just part of having the charm and charisma of a bucket of soggy oatmeal.

It doesn’t make me angry. Sad? Sure but you know how these three parts have been titled The Disconnect? And that’s what it is. That particular sensation- the growing emptiness that has metastasized between me and the world around me- i’m coming to the realization that it’s both completely understandable and entirely justifiable.

shelly.

I’ve been wanting to change the appearance of synaesthetic for some time but i never put much energy into it- so it didn’t change. Funny how those two things work together.

This template is called LowFi and i like it- but it doesn’t behave like any other template i’ve ever administered before. As such, i’m not sure if it’ll stay. For instance, i’m trying to change the image on the index page but no matter what i try, the image i’m selecting won’t stay. Worse, i prefer to use one of my own pix or maybe even one of my paintings instead- and that doesn’t appear to be an option*.

Still… i like the simplicity and elegance of this template. I’ll see if i can understand it better in the coming days.

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Oh- before i forget- for reasons that i don’t fully understand, i’ve been unable to upload images to this site. The permissions on the directory are set correctly and there’s a discrepancy between what WordPress thinks my asset library is versus what i say it is.

*i managed to change the default image- it was more manual than i expected but every template is going to require different solutions

Once upon a time i used to write, if not prolifically, then at least with some frequency. It’s hard to point to when i shifted but i think it was about a decade or ago when i went through my last breakup. My posts have become sporadic at best because my motivation to write just… changed.

Tonight is not the night that i continue this entry but i wanted to put this out there because for anyone reading, i haven’t forgotten nor will i wait until next year to continue, which has been the frequency i’ve had for the last decade.

I’m also putting this here as a challenge to myself to sit down and gather my thoughts and continue this because… well, just because.

There are strands that will be inextricably tied to one another but for me to do so will require sitting down and actually teasing those strands apart, just to find a way to braid them together again. And these evenings, i’m actually painting which requires all of my focus.

Still, this story will continue; hopefully by the end of this week at the latest.

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I’m trying to find a way to get back into this entry and it’s difficult. I think the reason i’m writing this entire thing is to help me articulate what’s going on instead of just letting it carom around my noodle, as is usually my wont.

Let me resume with this:

For reasons that i will never understand, she sent me a simple ‘hello’ via facebook last March i think it was. And i was… i was dismayed. I remember sitting there and looking at the name and having a moment of disassociation as my brain refused to acknowledge that this person that i was such a dick to… that she would find any place in her heart to acknowledge, let alone say hello to me.

In the coming days i would explain to her what was happening to me- in particular the manipulations from the afore mentioned coworker. I went on to tell her all that i’ve been through – the time i lived with Michelle and how she would abandon me. I told her about moving to SF, the shooting, Michelle leaving me, me leaving SF, then moving back to and then leaving Texas, moving to Portland and eventually falling for someone who was seemingly decent at first but then eventually revealed herself to be a dumpster fire of white trash… and my stupid fucking foray into the poly and kink community, which are both magnets for broken people.

I explained how i lost a quarter century of my life to obstructive sleep apnea and how i nearly died… and how, by all accounts, i absolutely should have died in my sleep many, many times over. I remember she took, well, i don’t know if she took offense but she certainly took exception to my using the phrase, “… i shouldn’t be alive,” but it’s true. Statistically speaking, i should have died.

Anyhow, i think that email has ended up being the 2nd longest email i’ve ever written. It was honest and i hope unflinching in my admitting and being accountable for my failures as a man and as a human in those days. And please forgive me for using this word, it was cathartic.

But i finished it with a p.s. that was incongruous with the spirit of all that i’d written.

I think i essentially said, “Thank you for your time but i hope you don’t write back.”

And that’s a pretty complex sentence to unpack. The reason why i wrote it was because while i was grateful to have the opportunity to come clean to her, she was a reminder of some pretty shameful behavior on my part. And while i’m not that person anymore, it just seemed smarter at the time to have just made my peace and walk away — to let her know that for all of my shittiness to her at that time, karma had thoroughly and profoundly cut a brutal swath through me that has left me just a shadow of what i could have been.

But i think it was also my way of running away. I didn’t want to risk being castigated and i didn’t want to be reminded of who i was then. So me being me, i was perfectly content to have made my peace and disappear.

Besides- what could i possibly have to offer her? I’m just a loser in a dead end job that doesn’t make much money and has absolutely no prospects for either prosperity or a career. I didn’t know where she was at the time but i’m in the ass end of nowhere and it’s not like we were going to date again. She was married to the best of my knowledge and even if she were single, my tastes in women have certainly changed and i can’t imagine that she’d be in the least bit interested in me like that because i have it on very good authority (that authority being every woman that i’ve ever been involved with, with one exception) that i am absolutely better off not being with anyone – a lesson that after 57 years of life i am finally making peace with.

I do not know why she wrote back but she did. And as i took off my armor and told her everything that happened to me since i lived in Austin and all that happened after- she did the same. And whatever shit i went through was nothing compared to the absolute hell that she endured.

And that she overcame.

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It is late. I’ll probably have to go through this entry again and clean it up as i’ve done for the previous one. As i’ve been writing this, James Grant and Jody Wisternoff have been keeping me company. These two DJs always seem to put together really solid sets and bring me some sense of beauty and peace that i appreciate.

In my mind, this will be written in three parts. The reasons behind the title may not become clear until the end.

It was about 10 months ago; maybe a year by now. Someone from my past sent me a message on FB saying hello. It was from a woman i dated in my misspent youth. To say it was unexpected is an understatement because, to be honest, i was as ass to her.

Rewind.

It’s 1990 or 91. I’m 23 years old. I am very emotionally undeveloped, inexperienced in both sex and relationships and as the saying goes, i was the embodiment of being “young, dumb and full of cum”. And it was about this time i made one of the biggest mistakes one can ever make at this age or any age for that matter- i dated someone that i worked with.

It was a wafer fab in austin and we worked the swing shift (16.00 to midnight). I fell for her, she liked me and we proceeded to spend 28 of the next 30 days with each other. Work, eat, sleep, fuck. Work, eat, sleep, fuck. Work. Eat. Sleep. Fuck.

And because i was so inexperienced and because i was, as previously stated, emotionally undeveloped, it all just became so overwhelming. It was as though the torrent of emotions just became so overwhelming that i couldn’t feel anything anymore. It was just a constant bombardment of being around her and i just felt- at risk of using the word again- overwhelmed.

I asked if we could spend time apart but instead, she heard me say, “I don’t want to see you anymore.”

But at that time, i didn’t know that.

After a couple of weeks, i was ready to see her again and much to my shock, she was just not in the least bit interested.

To say that i did not take that well is an understatement. I simply did not know how to process this rejection. The abandonment… and there is no easy way to say this, but it broke me. It was a disproportionate response to be sure but hold onto that thought of abandonment because it’s going to come back up at some point.

In the coming months, that pain turned to anger and that’s when i started to antagonize her. It’s important to explain something else that was fueling my anger; something that i would not learn the truth about for several years.

At work, we used a VAX/ VMS system to track the workflow of our orders. I had access to a training account because someone gave out the password and i started using it to send/ receive messages to others. For those that never worked with VAX/ VMS, it was… archaic by today’s standards. Hell, it was archaic by the standards of the early to mid 90s for that matter. Monochrome, no mouse, big and a heavy clacky keyboard. It made DOS look good.

One night, i started receiving messages sent from another training account. They were antagonistic and made snide comments about me and goddamn, they just filled me with rage.

There was a guy that worked in the same area as i did. His name was John. John would stop by and i’d go on an anger fueled scree about how she was antagonizing me but she never signed her name to the messages so i couldn’t prove they were from her (remember they were coming from another training account, not her work account).

And John would listen and then he’d talk to me about her for a bit and i’d tell him stories of the things we did in the month that we dated.

Looking back, i was so blind and stupid.

The next night or a few nights later, there would be another email with details that only she could know. Each note became more belligerent and cruel and my anger and rage increased proportionately.

And it was then that i decided to make her as uncomfortable as possible.

And i did. I would glare at her in rage; jaw clinched and would stand in her way or refuse to move from a seat if we were having a group drinking session after work. I was a dick. I was a belligerent, borderline malicious dick to her. And in response, she eventually went to HR and reported me for creating a hostile work environment.

Which i did.

The only reason why i didn’t lose my job is that a few days prior to her reporting me, i’d had enough. My mental state was deteriorated. I wasn’t myself and the anger i had been harboring was consuming me. It was around that time that i decided to seek out the psychologist that worked at the facility where i worked and ask her for a referral to a counselor; which she provided. There’s a side story to that visit that i should probably share at another date. It’s a story which has stuck with me since that meeting.

Once it had been corroborated by HR that i’d been seeking help, i kept my job but i was also encouraged to move to a different facility; which i did.

Parallel to these events is my ever present obstructive sleep apnea which, at this time, is beginning to take hold in earnest. That’s not exactly germane to this story but everything, everything, EVERYTHING that happens to me in this time and for many years after, is amplified and distorted because i’m not getting recuperative sleep.

And at the time, i just could NOT let go of my anger toward her.

I’m leaving out a few details for the sake of expediency but i’m going to end that part here with this final bit of information.

Years later i would learn that she was not the originator of those messages. Remember the coworker that i mentioned- John? It was him. I don’t know what he got out of it or why he did it but i think he just liked to wind me up for the fucksies. I know karma eventually caught up with him (he had abandoned a woman that he was living with to marry a young, stunningly attractive woman that would, in a karmic turn of events, abandon and divorce him a few years later), but with his fueling my hurt and rage, i would have never have been such an ass to this woman that i dated.

But the truth is that i was and i am responsible for my behaviors and words. To that end, i WAS an ass to her and as i learned that i’d been manipulated and as i grew older, my hurt and my anger eventually disappeared. Those feelings were eventually replaced with shame and with shame, the knowledge that some day i was going to have to find her if she was still alive and not only apologize but to be accountable for the cruelty that i inflicted on her.

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end part one.

Since the beginning of Synaesthetic, i was being hosted by Godaddy. Back then they weren’t just a new player on the stage, they were /craving/ business and had reasonable rates.

I could never complain about the reliability of Godaddy nor their support but over the years, those reasonable rates became… unreasonable. For my two very, very small domains, i was shelling out upwards of $40 USD/ month.

As such, it was time to shut down my sites- both synaesthetic.com and shellytumbleson.com until i could find another provider.

I’m not being compensated in any manner for this but i wanted to share that so far, my new hosting company, Hostinger, has been a fantastic value. It’s affordable, flexible in the number of sites i want to run and while I haven’t had to contact their support directly yet, there are a lot of tools that are accessible and my request to activate this site took less than 24 hours.

One word of caution, though. Don’t be like me and kill off your current hosting company before you migrate to Hostinger. Had i known they had tools set up to migrate currently existing sites, it would have saved me a few months of being offline.

As for me, i’m mostly fine. Autumn is here which is always a welcome respite from the summer but we’re now looking at a long stretch of rain— the kind of rain that washes away roads, erodes river banks and floods houses (I’m looking at you, Sumas and Everson). We had a system like this two years ago. It caused millions of dollars of damage and i’m not entirely sure anything has changed since.

I’m keeping this short tonight. I just wanted to say i’m back and there’s some stuff i’ve been working on. And by “stuff” i mean, i’ve been converting old miniDVs and VHS tapes and posting them to YouTube.

The MiniDV tapes were just the wanderings of my life in the late 90s, early aughts and the VHS tapes are of the shows that i did when i was a producer at Austin Community Television (ACTV)— Catharsis, Box of Bugs, Red Herrings and yes, even a tape of Brainfarts survived.

It’s been… odd. Surreal, even. So much of that time was before i met Michelle. Then there’s this huge period where i was madly and passionately in love with her and then there is this entire swath of when she was gone and while i was able to put on a show, i was utterly and completely broken. But beyond that, i’m continually… i don’t want to say “embarrassed” because all that does is invite shame but let’s just say that my sense of humor is so very different now than it was then. In regards to the prank callers, there were quips and responses that i would never think to do now and so many things that i thought were so important then just… just… just…

Just not important to me anymore. And haven’t been in a very, very long time.

And while some of that is just the nature of a misspent youth, i know much of it was also the fact i was getting 2 hours or less of recuperative sleep a night and that had been going on for years beforehand and would continue for many years after. I was just so utterly and completely physiologically incapable of thinking clearly. And i know i’ve gone over this before but it’s impossible to discuss anything to do with my life from my early 20s until 2008 without seeing it through the lens of the obstructive sleep apnea that not only carved so much of my life out of me but it kept me from dealing with my own stupid shit and sometimes idiotic behavior as a result.

I’m meandering and like all good meandering, there’s no real point to it other than to anyone that happens to read this, please consider what i’m about to say:

If you know anyone that gasps for air and/or stops breathing in their sleep, please know that this is not normal. Snoring is one thing, which may require investigating if it’s bad enough, but if someone you know stops breathing and then gasps for air, please get them help. It’s not just that their under duress in their sleep but when someone is going through those phases, they are unable to get recuperative sleep and without recuperative sleep, they are NOT going to be able to navigate their life with any quality, regulate their emotions, control their words and it will hold them back from being able to grow in any capacity.

That’s enough of that.

It’s good to be back and while my focus is mostly on dealing with my backlog of VHS tapes these days, i still have more than my fair share of backlogged shit on this site that need to unload.