Exploring the Virtual World: Seeking Wonder in a Pandemic

I'm fortunate in more ways than I can count. I and all of my immediate family and loved ones are healthy and safe. I hope the same is true for you and those you love, and for those in less fortunate circumstances I share my condolences. Collectively and to varying extents, with varying degrees of success, we've all been finding ways of adapting to the changes that COVID-19 has brought. For some of us, this means learning to work from home and spending more time than we're used to with family, children, pets and partners.

In my own case, for the most part, it has required only minimal changes - I've been working remotely from my home for going on ten years now (I was only surprised to learn that apparently another name for my lifestyle is "quarantine"). But one of the key components that has made this lifestyle work for me, is that it has up until recently afforded me the ability to pause throughout my day or week and choose a new local spot to explore, be it a unique restaurant, a hidden monument, an oddly specific private collection, a natural wonder or something else that intrigues me. That, of course, has gone largely by the wayside and I worry that many of these smaller, lesser known sites may not be able to reopen as they are often far more dependent on the money from offbeat tourists than the larger and better known attractions. But until I can continue my exploration in person, I too have had to adapt, and I've been quelling my wanderlust to the extent possible through virtual museums and tours.

No, it's not the same as being there in person, but it's as good as I imagine it will get for some time yet. And so through my screen I've been wandering the hallways of art museums in Spain and London, listening to the sound of arctic glaciers underwater, learning about the endless construction undertaken by the heiress of a gun manufacturing company and viewing an array of medical oddities. All of these tours are different, but I generally think of them in four categories:

Static Tours:
The Museum of Broken Relationships falls into this category, with a pinterest-style display of items and the stories attached to them. Visitors can scroll through an astounding assortment of trinkets and objects (the most memorable of which may be a 27-year-old scab) that tell the sweet, sad, surprising and sometimes laughable final chapters of different romantic relationships. While the collection is truly fascinating, I would love to hear some of the stories narrated or be able to have a 360 degree look at the objects, perhaps those are features already in the works. In the meantime, what it lacks in interactivity it makes for in content.

You can explore the Museum of Broken Relationships here.

Guided/Recorded Tours:
Both the Winchester Mystery House and the Mütter Museum fall into this category and I enjoyed both of them a great deal. I have not yet visited either one in person although I've read about both of them and the knowledgeable guides do an exceptional job of bringing both to life. Just a few highlights from the Mütter Museum tour (which takes less than a half hour) include the Soap Lady, the skull collection, the world's largest colon, the death cast of Chang and Eng (who were the first to be call "Siamese Twins), and slides of Einstein's brain. The Winchester House tour is equally fascinating, delving into Mary Winchester's compulsion to keep building, even if it meant stairways leading to nowhere and other such architectural oddities, possibly in an attempt to confuse the spirits of those slain by Winchester weapons. Although the tour of this labyrinthine abode no longer appears to be offered for free on the site, the $5.99 seems like a very reasonable and worthwhile price. 

You can see the Winchester Mystery House here.

360 Degree / Self-Directed Tours:
Both Bran Castle in Romania (famously connected to Vlad the Impaler, who was supposedly the inspiration behind Dracula), and the Paris Catacombs are accessible via this type of self-guided tour. While I enjoyed both, I do think they would have benefited from more background and narration. The ability to have 360 degree views was a benefit, but I would have traded that functionality for more insight via recorded or even text information. I know that the technology will continue to evolve and perhaps eventually arrive at an easily accessible form of true VR, but that seems a ways off yet and in the meantime, the clunky navigation ultimately just made me more acutely aware that I'm not  able to visit them the way I would like. Still, both are worth exploring, however you are able to get there. Bran Castle does have a video tour version with music in lieu of narration.

You can experience Bran Castle via Google Maps here.
Visit the Paris Catacombs here.

Hybrid Virtual Tours:
Several of the tours I've explored thus far online combine both interactive and guided elements, none more effectively, in my opinion, than the National Parks. The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks provides interactive as well as guided components of five different parks. So far I've just explored the first two (Kenai Fjords in Alaska and Hawaii Volcanoes) but I plan to check out the other three as well (Carlsbad Caverns, Bryce Canyon and Dry Tortugas here in Florida). The technology behind these is sharp and seamless, the content is very engaging. Overall I think these have been the most enjoyable stops in my online exploration.

You can experience the National Parks here.

I'll continue to seek out wonder in the world and online, and I'll share my perspective in the days to come. Even though some states have begun to ease restrictions, I think it may be quite some time before we're all traveling about in anything resembling the way we did prior to 2020. And while visiting unusual places from my desk isn't my preferred means of experience them, I am thankful to be able to visit them at all - a hundred, or fifty, or even thirty years ago none of this would have been possible. So I'll keep focused on that, and while I'm at it, I'll think of something more compelling to call it than virtual tourism - digital out of body travel perhaps? Technology enabled astral projection?

Coca-Cola Secret Formula Vault

I've been thinking about all the places I want to go see and experience once we're able to travel again, and also taking time to reflect on the highlights of some previous trips, like Atlanta. (The piece below was previously published on Atlas Obscura. You can see it here.)

One of corporate America's best-kept secrets is also one of the most publicly displayed. 

As far as trade secrets and intellectual property go, it’s hard to think of a better-known example than the formula upon which Asa Griggs Candler made his fizzy fortune. In 1888, Candler bought the Coca-Cola brand and formula from pharmacist John Stith Pemberton and launched what has become the largest beverage company in the world.



While the formula itself is kept safe, the safe that holds the original written recipe is displayed prominently within Atlanta’s World of Coca-Cola museum. The formula was moved from its former location at SunTrust Bank in downtown Atlanta as the capstone to the company’s 125th anniversary.

The formula, which passed from Pemberton to Candler to Ernest Woodruff and a group of investors, wasn’t committed to paper until 1919 when it was used as collateral for the loan that Woodruff and his colleagues secured for the purchase of the company. The formula remained in a vault in the Guaranty Bank in New York until the loan was repaid in 1925, at which point it was moved to the Trust Company Bank (now SunTrust). The current vault is the central part of an exhibit within the museum. To be clear, visitors are welcome to view the vault, but you won’t be able to see the formula itself unless you buy the company.

The museum is home to a number of other exhibits on topics ranging from the history of the company to the now largely-automated bottling process. Visitors can also have their pictures taken with the brand’s polar bear mascot and sample various Coke-owned beverages from around the world, including Fanta Melon Frosty (popular in Japan and Thailand) and Brazil’s Guaraná Kuat, in the tasting room on the second floor.

Laughter in the Dark

“May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”

Like others all over the world right now, my wife and dog and I are all weathering the COVID-19 pandemic, with varying degrees of success. For Tinker Bell it’s probably the easiest – she is overjoyed that not one but now both of her human servants are at her beck and call all day. For me it’s essentially not much different than most of my days over the past decade. I have worked as a writer and contractor from my home office for the better part of 10 years now – it’s strange only in that I now see my wife, friends and family working through the same disorientation and disconnection that I felt at first.

“Don’t worry,” I tell them. “In my experience it gets much easier after the first three years.”

Maybe they chuckle, or grimace. They know that my sense of humor runs dark. But in times such as these, I believe that humor (however twisted) is perhaps the best tool at my disposal for managing that which I cannot control or make sense of.

We’ve all got our ways of dealing with things, from meditation and yoga to alcohol or escaping to other worlds through the portals of books, films and video games. It’s more than understandable… it is quintessentially human. Wars, plagues, disasters of all sorts, force us to confront how very little we really control. They reveal how flimsy a defense our wealth, our military might, and our scientific advancements really are. It forces us to confront our mortality on a prolonged and collective basis. And that can be upsetting, terrifying in fact. How are we to manage, confined to our homes like prisoners with our fear and uncertainty as an unwelcome cellmate?

If we are to be prisoners though, it does not exempt us from making our choices, even if there are far fewer of them than we might wish. My choice is to laugh, and in doing so I spite the anxiety and terror of all this is unknown to me. I do so knowing full well that my laughter is just a very tiny candle with which I am trying to hold back the infinite darkness. And I know that the inevitable outcome of that battle, between light and lightlessness, is a foregone conclusion. But I’m not focused on winning some battle that can’t be won. I’m interested in making bearable, in making meaningful, whatever time I have. 

And so I hope to share this small light with you, that it may momentarily tame if not dispel your fears. Let’s cast clumsy shadow puppets together. Let’s crack stupid jokes, make artworks out of the contents of our canned food and let loose our defiant, awkward, loveable snorts and bellows and guffaws against the silence. Because for however long we can ward off the darkness with our small, flickering lights, I believe it is worth doing.

Exploring Chicago: Epiphany on Carroll Ave.

There are places where the city shares its own secret language with who know how to seek it out.

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, the process of saying good by to my childhood friend, Steve, and the process of saying goodbye to the city of Chicago became inseparably intertwined for me. As I committed myself to better knowing one (the city), at the same time I committed myself to better remembering the other. More than once I called his cell phone to try and memorize the voice I'd known for most of my life, a voice that I can still recall as I write this, but one that sadly I will not hear again. It was his voice I imagined with me as I made up my list of Chicago places and activities.

I set out to discover the place I'd been living. I chuckled when I went to visit Shit Fountain, and I was fascinated when Jen and I went to visit the button museum, but I wasn't truly or fundamentally altered until I walked Carroll Ave.

Visiting Carroll Ave. seems like such a simple task - it's just a street after all. You can spot it easily enough on old printed maps, google maps or any GPS system. But when you try to find it, even when you seem to be right there on top of it, you likely won't see any sign of it.

And that's because you are, literally, right there on top of it.

You see, the story of Chicago is one of buildings reaching ever higher, one alongside and on top of the next, ever upward into the sky. Which means that walkways and bridges and streets needed to be built up as well. Such is the case with Carroll Ave. from which one could, once upon a time, look up from and see the sun. Now however, looking up from Carroll Street, you'll only see the bottoms of shoes and the tires of cars through grates as they pass above you - completely unaware of your presence. The street has been devoured completely by the city and reborn as a secret subterranean tunnel.

To get there I went down an elevator to the Marina along the Chicago River - but rather than stop in to examine the boats, I kept walking and found myself in a long, dingy passageway. There were train tracks that had fallen into disuse. I passed the lower entryway to the House of Blues, and I continued walking until I was directly under the Merchandise Mart.

It felt like being one of the Goonies, discovering a wishing well from the bottom; as if, at any moment, I might stumble over the remains of Chester Copperpot or some similarly hapless explorer who had come this far, but no farther. It was a place I'd passed or walked over hundreds of times, but never once even wondered how anyone would get down there. Thus I had my first real taste of the vaguely subversive pleasure that is urban exploration. Carroll Ave was my invitation and indoctrination into a quasi-secret second city. A second, Second City, if you will. Clive Barker's Midian.

I could imagine Steve's presence there with me, just over my shoulder. Would he have had the foresight to tell me that this was what I loved and what I had been seeking without realizing it? Would he have seen the words as they formed, what was to be my newest iteration of self? It wouldn't surprise me - he usually grasped such things before I did. He knew me at least as well as I did, but without the subjective baggage and blindness.

I circled back and took a ramp back up into the daylight. I was on LaSalle Street. And I realized I'd looked at that very ramp so many times before without really once ever seeing it. It was the city's own form of steganography - hiding there in plain sight, a message to its inhabitants, and I was seeing it for the first time.

From that point forward I began to notice doors and stairways that seemed to lead to nowhere; windows where there was no logical reason for them to be. It opened my eyes at last to the place I was leaving and to all places I've visited since, making new those places I'd been before and making sacred those places to which I was new.

And it brought me back to one specific time when my friend Steve and I were no more than thirteen years old in the late summer afternoon sunlight and dust choked shadows of a barn loft where we witnessed something that made us pause and ask each other, did we just see that?

Was that, just maybe...

Magic?

Edgar Degas House

Halloween is a fun and fascinating time to visit any city in America, but it seems especially well suited to the Crescent City, which knows perhaps better than any other how to don wild costumes and throw a memorable party. Two years ago this week, Jen and I had the exceedingly good fortune to stay at the Edgar Degas House and it set the tone for what remains one of our favorite trips together. 

(The piece below was previously published on Atlas Obscura. You can see it here.)

The only home of the famous French impressionist painter open to the public is now a museum and bed and breakfast. 

Edgar Degas, born in France in 1834, is known around the world for his Impressionist masterpieces. Less well known is the short, but critical, period of five months from 1872 to 1873 that he spent at the Creole estate of his mother’s family in New Orleans.

Degas’s mother died when he was a child, but he still had family in New Orleans, including his uncle, his brother René, and René’s wife Estelle, who had begun by this time to go blind (a fear that haunted Degas for the rest of his life).

During his visit with his family, Degas produced 22 paintings, including “A Cotton Office in New Orleans,” which depicted the work of his uncle Michael Musson and was the first of his paintings (and the first by any Impressionist) to be purchased by a museum. He also painted a number of portraits of his relatives, and it was during this time that he began to explore a looser style of painting that would evolve into what we think of as Impressionism.

The home he stayed in was built in 1852 by developer and architect Benjamin Rodriguez as one of the original homes in the Esplanade Ridge Neighborhood. Wealthy Creole families like the Mussons composed of many new residents in the city, which experienced a boom prior to the Civil War. Following Degas’s visit, René’s business collapsed, plunging the family deep into debt and the Musson home was torn apart, first figuratively when René left his wife for a close friend of the family, and then literally in the 1920s when the main house was cut in half with one wing moved 20 feet to the side, thereby creating two residences.

Today, both halves of the house have been reunited under the ownership of Degas’s relatives and Musson descendants. A major restoration was performed on the main house, which now serves as a bed and breakfast, while the other portion, which contained Degas’s studio and bedroom, has been restored to the way it would have looked during his visit.

A visit to the museum includes a documentary video with historical details on both the family and the artworks that Degas created while in New Orleans. The museum, breakfast, and mimosas are all complementary if you happen to be staying as a guest.

Autumnal Magic

Since childhood, October has always been my favorite month of the year.

All months, all seasons have their unique qualities, but October is the one for me. Of course, it all culminates with Halloween – our reinterpretation of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people wore masks and disguises to ward off ghosts and spirits. It was though that the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was thinnest at this time, making it possible to pass through like simple diffusion through a cell membrane. Not even Pope Gregory the Third’s designation of November 1^st as All Saints Day could succeed in dispelling the underlying pagan pageantry of it.

There’s magic in change, a reason that solstices and equinoxes mean something powerful in myth and older religions. And fall in the northeastern US is particular visually stunning as the leaves let out their collective final scream in shades of red and brown and orange. In the northeastern suburbs of Philadelphia, I remember it being always the first month where it became cold enough to see your own breath. The first month when the setting of the sun became noticeably earlier. The first month for wearing gloves.

A time for conjuration. For necromancy. The autumn leaves, the bare tree branches and the raising of the dead, were forever bound together for me the first time I saw a particular painting by TSR artist Jeff Easley.

Nobody brings the undead to life like Jeff Easley.

I have good memories of October and Halloween.

On Sundays, my dad and I would watch football together, although I didn't really follow it. For me, it was all about the "Creature Double Feature" that would follow the games - old campy black and white horror films with Boris Karloff or Vincent Price or sometimes Godzilla movies (for the record, I always assumed that Creature Double Feature referred to some specific two-headed monster). My dad always pronounced Dracula with an extra "r" so it became "Dracular."

Then there was Shawn, who lived in the house on the corner of my street. He was a few years older and I thought he was the coolest. His older sister, Haley, baby sat sometimes for my sister and I, so we were young. I was maybe seven at the time. The first Halloween I remember Shawn gave me a set of glow in the dark stickers of the faces of the classic movie monsters – Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf-man. I remember staying up late that night after trick or treating to watch scary movies in what used to be my father’s old den. I watched Silver Bullet based on “Cycle of the Werewolf” by Stephen King and John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing starring Kurt Russel. It was the best kind of terror – the kind you can hide under your sheets from and make disappear. As I got older I loved horror movies – Steve and I would rent a couple almost every weekend of the school year. The original Nightmare on Elm Street series, Ghost Story, The Stuff, Return of the Living Dead, those were just a few of them. As we got older we would make more elaborate and monstrous costumes. By middle school his favorite was a cloaked skeleton costume and my preferred mask was of a fanged horror. I remember when I put it on there was the strong scent of rubber and it would become oppressively hot after just a few minutes as it filled with my own breath. When I took it off the sweat on my forehead felt good in the brisk night air.

I thought it was a lost pleasure, but New Orleans brought back a taste of it when Jen and I visited a couple years ago. Halloween was the perfect time to go – we came for the Voodoo Music Festival and stayed through the 31^st. New Orleans seems to do Halloween pretty much year round. Where the gates of Guinee are perpetually at least partly ajar while Papa Legba and his fellow loa MC the endless night party. If you believe in such things, of course.

The tomb of "Voodoo Queen" Marie Laveau

This year Jen and I joined various groups of paranormal hunters at Summerseat Mansion in Morrisville, PA. I was more interested in the history – two signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution lived there (Morris and Clymer). George Washington spent a pivotal week there, where he allegedly made the decision to attack Trenton, thereby changing the tide of the revolutionary war. Two British spies were said to have been held there briefly before their execution. If ever there was a historic home worthy of haunting, it would be this one. But I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief. The dancing lights of the various hunters' EMF devices seemed more like a nice visual effect than a message from the other side. The static on the EVP sessions seemed more likely to have come from the bonfire party going on across the street. The rattling, thumping and clanking noises, nothing more than water pipes.

Inside historic Summerseat Mansion for a paranormal investigation.

After just a couple hours Jen and I wandered outside. It was cold and dry. For me, it was refreshing – something I’ve missed living in Florida, although not as much as I thought I would. Jen felt no such nostalgia.

“Want to get out of here?” I asked.

She nodded vigorously. “Eastern State Penitentiary would have been better,” she frowned.

So, it seems, this October some portals have thus far remained closed to us. We’ll keep looking though. There may be magic and wonder and spirits yet to be uncovered, but we didn’t find any residing this autumn at Summerseat.

Exploring Florida: Three Sisters (and Two Cousins)

Cities as siblings.

In the three years now that Jen and I have lived in Tampa, I’ve struggled to understand and define its relationship with the adjacent cities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater. My latest attempt at comprehension entails putting it into a familial context, as three sisters.

Tampa is the oldest, and most grounded. A bit of a cigar-smoking tomboy who grew up playing with trucks and frequenting strip joints with pirates, she’s turned out to be resourceful, reliable and resilient, even if she’s never quite been able to get that old criminal record expunged entirely. She’s got intelligence of the practical, actionable type. Even if she’s not most stunningly beautiful of the three, she is unquestionably the one you will call when your car breaks down. Or if, late at night, you find yourself needing to dispose of a body.

St. Petersburg is the middle sister that left home to get an education – specifically an undergraduate degree in musical theater, a Masters in Fine Art and most of a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (one of these days she'll finish that doctoral thesis on how geographic location and topography impact belief systems). You want to talk abstract art, literature, punk rock, craft beer, famous muralists or pretty much anything culturally significant, she’s your gal. The downside? Predictably, she’s got a bit of a thing for hipsters.

That makes Clearwater, city of star worshipers (of which the sun in our own solar system is just one popular option), the youngest. The prettiest of the three, but also the flightiest. Last week she was into astrology, phrenology and tarot, before that it was numerology, and as we speak she’s out on the beach with a metal detector looking for buried treasure. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, but just keep in mind that if you're joining her for dinner or drinks be prepared to have your birth constellation charted in detail.

The analogy could end there, but let’s extend it to include the Broadway cousin, Orlando/Celebration. She’s kind of a big deal these days and getting bigger all the time. It might be due to her insatiable appetite - after consuming both the Marvel and Lucas universes, she’s still hungry. As she expands, day by day, mile by mile, she’s getting closer and closer to her cousins until eventually, one assumes, she’ll be living right next door. 

There's also the quiet, understated cousin to the south, Sarasota. She ran off to join the circus as at a young age but has since become surprisingly sophisticated. Quiet but articulate, when she speaks it's more because she has something to say than to hear her own voice. You've got to scratch the surface to get to know her, but it's worth the effort.