Space Travel, Scavenger Hunting and Video Gaming

It seems like an odd combination at first glance - like three puzzle pieces from entirely separate sets. But all three have been on my mind of late, and in turning them over endlessly, I've come to realize that they may be far more connected that I had expected.

The first has been on the minds of many lately, as Branson, Bezos and others with the fortunes to spend on such endeavors blast off and leave behind the blue planet we all call home. There have been a lot of mixed feelings about this, some suggesting that the cosmos should not be the exclusive playground of the uber-wealthy, while others applaud their efforts to inch mankind towards the next leg of our collective manifest destiny. I'm pretty sure we're allowed to feel both of those ways at the same time - I do, anyway.

The second one has been considerably less on the front pages of newspapers, yet far more present in my thinking. Over the last several months, I've managed to turn what began as a marketing endeavor into an entire book of its own, "Tampa Bay Scavenger," which is now entering the very last review cycle. It has been significantly more complicated than my first book, "Secret Tampa Bay," but I expect that it will also be more rewarding. It has already given me a new perspective on the place I live, letting me see the Tampa Bay area as a puzzle, gameboard and setting for some RPG campaign. It has reshaped my thinking and I am increasingly excited to provide it to the public.

Lastly, I've been thinking about video games. A bit of that is a natural connection to the scavenger hunt thanks to books like "Ready Player One," which has forever fused those two ideas together. But I also think back to the games that blew my mind, drained days at a time from my life, and opened up new worlds to explore and experience. Wizardry, Metroid, Grand Theft Auto III, Everquest, and many others as well.

All of these things share something in that they are all part of a very particular category of activities or events. I believe that they are all hallmarks and indicators that we are rapidly closing in on the very tail end of terrestrial exploration. 

It's not like this hasn't been coming for some time. Decades, at the very least. Sure, there may still be a few patches of unexplored earth left, and the bottom of the sea remains largely a murky and mysterious world. But the idea of a frontier, a tree line or mountain range or river beyond which lies the unknown, that's something that seems to exist primarily in memory. You could drive from just about any point on just about any continent to any other point by simply entering your current location and destination into the app of your choice. 

I've talked about this a little bit before, through the lens of nostalgia, but I don't think I've shared here my thoughts on what it means for the present and the future. 

Video games - they give us an accessible means of exploring strange and wondrous places, from post apocalyptical landscapes to ancient civilizations, to alternate universes, all which exist to be played. VR and AR further blur the lines between the physical world as it is and the many worlds that we program, design and romp through. Sure, it may be fueled by escapism, but maybe it's something we're escaping to rather than from. Maybe not entirely such a bad thing. Maybe even a way to reconnect with something essential that we're losing or have already lost.

Scavenger hunts, urban exploration, historical tours, abandoned places - I can no longer entirely separate these as they flow together. Without the frontier, without discovery in the traditional sense, we seem to be discovering rediscovery as a pastime. In my own case that's certainly true, and my fascination with ghost towns, forgotten monuments and such seems very much to be part of a larger zeitgeist. Retracing our own historical footprints and coming, sometimes unexpectedly, upon the beauty of what has decayed or what has sprung forth anew from our own recent modern ruins.

Which brings us to space. Perhaps not the final frontier that Gene Roddenberry fans are prone to call it, but certainly one facet or aspect of that next frontier. It becomes ever more imaginable to us all - some scenario that renders earth uninhabitable, but hopefully it will be our burning curiosity rather than our burning cities that ultimately take us from our home planet. Yes, it's most often been the wealth that go first to plant their flags, from the conquistadores funded to by their king to the moguls funded by their business ventures. But it opens a pathway, it shows what is possible and what will almost unquestionably eventually be accessible to the masses. Ocean travel, railroad travel, automobiles, air travel - all were once dreams, then luxuries for enthusiasts, until they become such a common part of our daily lives that we forget entirely the marvels they were in times past.

Can you see it now? The thin translucent filament that binds together these seemingly separate things? The picture that emerges from those three puzzle pieces turns out to be an illustration of that "productive struggle" T.S. Eliot described in "Little Gidding," which few to my knowledge have ever summed up better:

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

St. Petersburg Post Office

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

A creative deviation in this post office's design was once a source of controversy.

Florida's love affair with Mediterranean Revival-style architecture is evident in buildings throughout the state. Several can be found in St. Petersburg and include buildings such as the Vinoy Hotel, The Princess Martha Hotel, St. Mary’s Church, and Comfort Station One. This style also extends to a post office located at the corner of 1st Ave North and 4th Street North.

The post office has been a functional landmark in continuous operation since 1916. In 1975, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

A plaque affixed to the post office states: “The Nation’s First Open Air Post Office CorneStone. Laid on October 12, 1916. Completed and Dedicated on September 27, 1917.”

But, according to at least one article in the local Green Bench Monthly, there’s more to the story.

According to the article, in 1907, St. Petersburg Post Master Roy S. Hanna recommended that the facade be left off the post office. It was his belief that this would improve accessibility, and allow residents to get their mail day or night.

The federal postal authorities, however, had a different opinion and refused to pay rent based on the design. Eventually, they relented and resumed rent payments only after a postmasters’ convention held a few months later in St. Petersburg. During the event, government officials approved the design as an appropriate adaptation for the needs of the city.

Eventually outgrowing its original open-air location, the post office briefly moved to the first floor of city hall while Congress approved funds for the full-service post office. For more than a century, it has continued to serve the city with a distinctly Floridian style, complete with several Renaissance elements.

Near the rear of the building is a small postal museum, which includes an old leather mailbag, postcards, and a postal money order purchased by none other than John C. Williams, the founder of St. Petersburg.

Signs of Life

It seems an all too common preface for my blogs here, "It's been a while since the last post," but that makes it no less true. Nor does it reflect any lack of progress on any number of creative, professional and personal fronts. But as well you know by now, I post when I can and when I feel the need to. And lately that need has been overwhelming.

Doors are opening once more all over the country, even if they never really closed all that much here in Florida. Jen and I got vaccinated back in April and took our first real trip since the pandemic began (I'll have more to say about it in another post). I've been writing business proposals again after being "put on the bench" for almost a year. I'm still writing resumes too. I'm still getting "Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure" on more bookstore shelves. And I am very nearly finished with my second book, "TB Scavenger." The volume and intensity on all fronts has been rapidly mounting. 

I've lost over 20 pounds now since January - more than halfway towards my goal, which would put me at the same weight I had in college. Every five pounds the resistance I get from my own body seems to increase - progress comes more slowly or plateaus completely and seems to take more energy to maintain and keep moving forward.

It's that gravitational pull of what's comfortable. What's known. In some ways, the same invisible force that I've felt before launching a business venture. It's hard to achieve escape velocity, but I've done it before and I'm doing it again now. 

But it's different this time around. Slower going. TB Scavenger is proving more complex to write than I could have imagined. 360 riddles related to various points throughout the greater Tampa Bay area. Yet even as I try to get pictures of each one, every week they change - an old building is knocked down, a storefront with over 100 years of history hangs a "closed" sign in the window for the last time, and so on and so forth. So I've got to keep writing faster than the world is changing. And the world is changing faster, it seems, than ever before.

This week marked six years now since the death of my friend Steve, which essentially launched me off on this new path. Maybe his last and most powerful gift to me. And he's still with me as the path branches further and further off from what was known to me before. The metaphorical highway became a local road, then a dirt path, and now seems to be heading in dense jungle.

So that's where I've been lately, hacking a new path into the unknown. Learning, as I do so, the very same lessons the Spaniards learned when they first explored the very  same land I am reexploring now; and the reason they sent scribes along with the conquistadors to record their deeds and discoveries:

It's hard to take notes while marching through the uncharted wilderness wielding a machete. 

Carry Out My Wayward Son

 If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, then you know that I like to try new things - not only exploring places I've never been but also applying my creativity in ways that I haven't before. Prior to the pandemic, one of the last concerts my wife and I saw was Weird Al Yankovic, who I've been listening to since I was a kid. Being a punster, his clever mock lyrics always appealed to me. So, with plenty of time for writing in 2020, I decided to try my hand at some spoof lyrics. The result is below - I hope it gives you at least a chuckle. If you decide to perform it, please let me know and share the results if you like.

Carry Out My Wayward Son

Carry out my wayward son,
Wash your hands when you are done,
Lay your gloves and mask to rest,
Don't go out no more.

The store I go to used to have toilet paper
Shelves are bare except for brussels sprouts and capers
I found a single roll of Charmin, but it wasn’t two ply.
My bank account was flush with stimulus money
I went online for a box of Oats and Honey
My Amazon and Etsy orders, they will ship next day

Carry out my wayward son,
Wash your hands when you are done,
Lay your gloves and mask to rest,
Don't go out no more.

Like my neighbors I’m a hermit and a miser,
Got a year supply of hand sanitizer
I do my best to social distance, but I find it hard
Dr. Fauci says we need to heed the warning
I walk my dog eleven times every morning
I think her paws are getting tired, but she won’t sit and stay

Carry out my wayward son,
Wash your hands when you are done,
Lay your gloves and mask to rest,
Don't come in the store.

Carry out
Six feet back, that’s an order
Carry-out
Don’t be some kind of hoarder
If I get bored of watching Tiger King, well
There’s always Animal Crossing…

Carry out my wayward son,
Wash your hands when you are done,
Lay your gloves and mask to rest,
Don't go out no more.

Secret Tampa Bay Bonus Content: Niche Markets

This is another chapter that didn't make it into the final version of the book. I would have very much liked to include it, but for one thing it's hard to condense all of the unique and unusual markets in the Tampa Bay Area into just one chapter and still do them all justice. Secondly, once COVID-19 hit, many of these markets suspended their activities. Some have returned now while others have not. I'm sharing it with you here though, so that as we emerge eventually from the global pandemic, you will one day be able to enjoy them.

Niche Markets

 

Where and when can you find the freshest ethnic foods and local crafts?

 

From craft fairs and makers markets to fresh local produce and food trucks, whatever you’re craving you can probably find at one of the many markets throughout Tampa Bay. Some occur weekly like the St. Pete Sunday Farmers Market and the Ybor City Saturday Market. Others like the Fresh Market at Hyde Park and the North Tampa Market are held monthly. But among the ever-growing list of indie and farmers markets, some stand out as being truly unique and exceptional.

In lieu of having its own Little Italy, St. Petersburg has Mazzaro’s Italian Market. Occupying a full city block, it a labyrinth of European specialty shops under one roof where you’ll find a butcher, bakery, café an impressive selection of wines and cheeses. What started as a mom and pop coffee roasting business has continually expanded over more than 20 years to include indoor and outdoor dining, catering and most recently a separate building for kitchen and home goods.

If it’s Thai food you’re hankering for, visit the local Buddhist temple, Wat Mongkolratanaram of Florida (better known as Wat Tampa) on Sunday mornings. Starting around 8:30 AM, booths begin filling up with a variety of offerings including chicken satay, phat that, curry dishes, Som Dow, Guiteow, egg rolls, Thai tea and more. With a full plate in hand, you can make your way to the picnic tables along the river to meditate on the connection between culinary ecstasy and spiritual enlightenment.

More recently Coppertail Brewery began hosting its own night market on the second Friday of each month from 6 to 10 pm. Weather and temperatures permitting, the market is held outside behind the brewery and features a wide variety of local artists, artisans and boutiques with clothing, jewelry, vintage and repurposed goods.

There are dozens of regular, local farmers markets and craft fairs. If you want to see what’s happening when and where, saturdaymoringmarket.com/bay-area-markets is a good place to start.

Shop Local What: Numerous specialty markets Where: All throughout Tampa Bay Cost: Free to browse, vendor pricing varies Pro Tip: Visit Mazzaro’s on a weekday if you can to avoid the crowd. Similarly, at Wat Tampa demand for both food and parking spaces often exceeds supply – it’s best to arrive no later than 11 am.

 

The Music Tree

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

A hurricane-stricken oak tree has been reborn as a beautiful chainsaw artwork.

Not to be confused with the nearby Singing Oak tree in New Orleans’ City Park, the “Music Tree” does not make any music but rather pays tribute to it. This dead oak at the south end of Bayou St. John has been reborn as beautiful chainsaw artwork. 

The tree survived the water and wind of Hurricane Katrina only to be struck and killed by a bolt of lightning in 2012 during Hurricane Isaac. At the behest of the organizers of New Orleans’ annual Mid-City Bayou Boogaloo, master chainsaw artist Marlin Miller set about transforming the tree after its unfortunate fate. 

Miller carved snakes, a fleur de lis, a phoenix-like eagle, guitars, a piano keyboard, and a pelican into the trunk of the tree. The gnarled branches became birds in flight. He drew from the area’s history for inspiration, specifically when the bayou served as the entryway for the French founding fathers of the city some 300 years ago—a passage likely witnessed by the old oak tree.

Know Before You Go
The tree is easily visible most of the year. It stands alone by the intersection of Orleans Avenue and Bayou St. John. For one weekend each year, however, the shores are packed with visitors to the city's music festival.

I Want to Believe

I realize that milestones like new year’s, birthdays, really all celebrations of our experience of time are on some level arbitrary. But still I find value in them as a point, individually and collectively, to look back and ahead. To appreciate the completion of a unit, of a chapter, an arc. And this year has left us all with a good bit more to reflect upon in both directions of the timeline. But this penultimate day of each year, for me, has added significance, as my friend Steven would have been forty five years old today. He did not suffer through 2020 with us, though I often thought of what he would have said or thought of it; nor is he able to turn the page on it with us. Here and not here – like so many others who did not get to see the first hint of daybreak after what felt, at times, like an endless, lightless, new moon midnight of a year. So it’s up to us to bring them along with us, all those we’ve lost during and prior to the pandemic, and they are great in number indeed. On Steve’s birthday I cannot give him a gift, but I can honor his memory by making my memories of him into a gift to you and to all who read this.

If you’ve been reading along over the past few years, you know that I credit my friend Steven with being critical to having discovered the path I find myself on now. Bearing that in mind, I’m entering this year with a deeper and greater commitment than ever before to experiencing and exploring the world around me. To delving into the many rabbit holes I find along the way towards uncovering hidden history, strange stories, and that which shapes or shift my perspective. To borrow a notion from Josh Foer’s “Moonwalking with Einstein,” I want to experience time as densely as possible for however much of it I have. And turning it not only into a passion but a vocation at the same time. Seems like a perfectly reasonable goal to me.

Before I can start the new year though with a clean slate, I need to make good on a promise to you. I’ve been laying the groundwork for some time, hinting at one specific experience I shared with Steve in my childhood that stands out for having unlocked a door that I’ve been peaking through ever since. It’s time at last to complete what has been one of the major arcs thus far in this ever-evolving story we’ve been sharing. Time to reveal that mystery at the heart for me of all unexplained and unknowable. That time I maybe witnessed magic. Real magic.

I should note that it also seems appropriate that Jen and I are currently watching the X-Files series in full. For years, since the series first aired, in fact, I’ve had standing on my desk a pair of Mulder and Scully action figures to which I have added more recently, a small stand replica of the “I Want to Believe” poster from Mulder’s basement office. I do want to believe, even if that means preserving some mysteries and leaving unanswered at least one important personal question.

The story I’ve been working my way towards telling you took place one summer about thirty years ago. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen at the time, if I remember correctly. We were at Blue Bell day camp that summer and both of us being rather athletically challenged, rather than being out on the baseball field or basketball courts, we more often selected activities like woodshop, ceramics or, as was the case on this day, computers. On the second floor of an old barn, the camp had set up several commodore 64 computers. We eagerly scampered up a rickety ladder, under cobwebs that had grown thick with the same dust that spun endlessly through the shafts of light from windows that appeared to have not been cleaned in years. If ever. Our reward for making it to the top was to to take a seat in front of one of the now archaic monitors and learn the basics of programming. If/then and Goto line X type commands. Long before the internet brought to us all HTML programming. Before even more than 64-bit graphics, this is back when computer games like Zork and Amnesia were entirely text based and the top of the line graphics at the time consisted of static images and 3D mazes of Wizardry or clunky Atari 2600 games.

On this particular day it was Steve and I and one, possibly two, other campers, and the instructor whose name I’ve long forgotten. I remember him being lanky with glasses and longish brown hair – maybe twenty years old. After maybe twenty or thirty minutes, one of the other two campers sitting a few terminals down from Steve and I made a series of audible groans and put his head down on the keyboard. The counselor came and sat down next to him.

“Everything ok?” he asked.

“Migraine” the camper said. He appeared to be slightly younger than Steve and I.

“I don’t have anything for headaches,” the counselor said. “But I can try something else.”

The camper gave his consent with a nod. The counselor put the palm of one hand just barely touching the camper’s forehead and his other hand behind the camper’s head. “I want you to visualize streams of color flowing from one of my hands into the other, right through your head. Picture blues, and greens. Picture waves of cobalt blue, of deep sea blue green, the sky blue of mid evening,” and so forth, describing in detail a variety of different blues and greens. Tranquil, calming colors delivered in a voice to match. After just a few minutes the camper widened his eyes in amazement.

“It’s gone.” He was clearly surprised. “Wait, how did you do that?”

“It’s something I’ve been studying and working on,” he explained, looking into each of our faces as we were all now curious, “called Kabalistic magic.”

Seeing that we were all now fully hooked, he continued. “It has to do with several spheres of different colors, each representing different properties.”

Without discussing it among ourselves we had all slid our chairs over and were gathered around him, fascinated.

“Here,” he said. “I’ll show you something else.”

He began rubbing his hands together as if he was rolling something in between his palms After a few moments he asked one of us to give him our hand. The migraine sufferer volunteered first. The magician moved his fingers in patters just centimeters above and below the camper’s outstretched hand.

“Weird” the camper said. “Feels like you’re touching my hand.” But we all observed that no contact had been made. The magician asked the kid to turn his head away and without looking, tell everyone what pattern the magician was making. First circles, then a series of squiggly lines, triangles, circles again. He went six for six.

Each of us tried it and to our surprise were easily able to discern the shapes being drawn on our hands. The magician explained that it had to do with electrical fields.

Maybe it was true and maybe it wasn’t, but we were convinced at the time. Retrospectively, there are any number of scientific rather than magical explanations. The migraine trick was essentially just a guided meditation. And the patterns the magician drew on our hands without touching them could have simply been brushing against the fine hair follicles on the back of our hands. Of course, that wouldn’t explain why we felt it below on our palms as well, but perhaps that was just an imagined response.

The third and final demonstration was harder to fake.

“Every once in a while,” the magician confided, “I can create a thin beam of light between my fingers.”

We waited and watched. Again he rolled his hands together as if shaping putty. After a couple minutes of this, he balled his hands into fists and raised each of his index fingers. He moved his hands closer and further apart, trying to get the distance just right to produce illumination. And then…

 

…

 

And then what, you’re probably thinking?

There are, of course, only two possible outcomes. Either after straining to see some flicker we saw nothing at all, and the magician shrugged, saying that it doesn’t always work. Or as we all peered into the space between his fingers our faces began to glow from the bright filament-thin beam that connected his fingertips for a moment.

But I can’t tell you which one it was. Partly because I just can’t really trust the memory any further than I’ve taken it, and partly because, even if I could recall it with perfect clarity, I don’t think I’d reveal it. To do so would take away from you and from me something perhaps vastly more important than any objective truth could provide. As curious as I am about what I really saw or didn’t see, I’ve come to believe that not having an answer might just be the best possible answer. Like the dialog in an episode of the X-files, I can hear the dispute in my head between the rational Scully and the emotional Mulder. That rational voice says that nothing really happened - we were kids who saw what we wanted to see; the only magic we witnessed was that of the power of suggestion. But the voice of the believer asks, if it was such a clear-cut case of imagination run wild, why then is it still the subject of endless mental replay and blog posts some thirty years later?

Steve and I discussed it afterwards in hushed tones from time to time, neither one of us entirely sure what we actually saw. We talked about it less frequently over the years and gradually it just slipped away. It would have remained there in that void of lost childhood memories, had I not gone digging for it all these years later. And now, without the intersubjective confirmation of my friend who was there to witness it with me, it becomes even harder to discern. I suppose I could try to track down that computer counselor, or the kid with the migraine, but I know I won’t. 

Because I've come to believe that some mysteries deserve to be left unsolved.