Why am I doing this? 

 

The name says it all: it’s because that is who I am. 

 

As happens to me all-too-often, someone else said it better than I can:  “My initial intent with this page is to provide an outlet for my rants that I have in the past sent to people via e-mail.  Mass e-mails mean that my opinions may be forced upon people who might not want to hear them. This blog cures that problem, since by definition you have to seek out the page to read the opinion. On the other hand, the blog format has its disadvantages — mainly in that my opinions cannot be forced upon people who don’t want to hear them.  I am still working on a regime whereby my opinions are forcibly jammed down people’s throats, whether they like it or not.” -- Patterico

 

In my case this began as a family letter called the St. Ives Chronicles.  I named it that because to me it represented a letter ”for miscellaneous kids, cats, sacks and lives of other beloved persons who don’t always manage to get a letter for various rationalizations which seem reasonable to the author even though possibly unacceptable to the authored”.  Of late I have felt a desire to include more people on that list, although very possibly this is a case of my ego exceeding my common sense yet once again.

 

I’ve always blogged, it’s just that I started so long ago we didn’t know what to call them back then.  Algore had not only not yet invented the web but Algore himself had not even yet been invented when I published my first handwritten neighborhood newspaper (three families), the pencil having only recently been invented. 

 

I blogged some real estate columns in the San Francisco Bay Area…well, a whole jumble of various things moderately interesting to me, but, then, I’m prejudiced, whereas you could be, and perhaps should be, bored out of your mind.  I tell you only to explain why the ink-stained words scrawled on my wall are “please stop me before I blog more…”

 

Blogging.  We didn’t even know what that meant, back around 1940 or 1941 when I essayed to publish my first neighborhood newspaper.  My neighborhood at the time consisted of three families living within a few feet of each other in the Mojave Desert east of Barstow, and if there was any good Peyton Place news about them I for sure did not know it.  Having only 3 subscribers made producing on carbon paper easier.  In high school I wrote for the school newspaper…believe it or not, I was the sports columnist.

 

I had time for this because I was athletically the worst of show, quite uncoordinated when compared with my peers.  This was not exactly my fault…I arrived at my Southern Utah high school in the early fall of 1948 ready for my sophomore year at age 13.  My contemporaries were several years older, but since I went to a VERY SMALL country school (we did not play football because the entire school did not have enough boys to support a team let alone an athletic budget to equip one) my ‘peers’ ranged all the way up to 20 or older. 

 

Our senior athlete that year, for instance, was a wizard with a ball.  He was the center on the basketball team and highest scorer; the pitcher on the baseball diamond; and when we scrambled together a grab-ass team for touch football, at recess, he was always one of the quarterbacks.  The winning one.  If you think I couldn’t compete with my contemporaries, think about my trying to compete with HIM!

 

I had two things going for me…I was big for my age and I was very fast.  I ran the 100-yard dash in 10-flat in my tennis shoes.  Oddly enough, I was a star touch football player, because a big part of our offense was what later was politically called NGD, although in the Southern Utah of my time that term was unknown since we had no N-persons in that part of the state.  The play was simple: I ran downfield as far and as fast as I could and he threw me the ball.  Nobody could keep up with me in a sprint and in those days I had very good hands.  If I could touch it, I could catch it.  Other than that, though, I was a complete athletic incompetent.  If you wanted to see something truly pathetic you should have seen my attempts at pole-vaulting.  The coach, a great guy whom I loved, once told me that if I could throw the shot a few feet further he would put me on the shot-put team, but as it was I was on his shit-put team.

 

This led to my becoming sports columnist, because it let me go on all of the team trips with the “real” players as “athletic assistant”…even in those days we had nice names for the guy who picked up the used towels off of the floor. 

 

From the high school newspaper I graduated to science fiction.  One heady day in Panguitch, Utah, I came across a coverless copy of Famous Fantastic Mysteries and my doom was sealed.  In due course I was discovering fanzines: in due course I was editing one.

 

My first actual blog was a related sideline: a mimeographed magazine in a special (or so we thought) club for only top editors, called the Fantasy Amateur Press Association.  I produced 30 issues of my subscription fanzine, Oopsla!, and wrote for FAPA for many years producing something called The Rambling Fap.

 

(If you Google ‘Oopsla!+Calkins’ you’ll get a hint.  Do not confuse this with the newfangled word ‘OOPSLA’, a term which had not even been invented when I came up with the name and I was appropriately astonished when it later appeared.  Even ‘Rambling Fap’ shows up in a Google search, somewhat to my surprise.)

 

In between college sessions I joined the Marine Corps in order to make the world safe in Korea.  To this day North Korea is still afraid to come south for fear I am on duty, but that’s another story. 

 

To get an idea of how ‘gung ho’ I was in those days (some say this translates into civilian English as ‘stupid’), when I got out of boot camp they asked me what three things I would most prefer to do in the Marine Corps.  I said parachutes.  No, the guy told me sadly, we no longer have parachutists.  Okay, then, tanks?  Fine, what else?  My mind was blank.  He prodded gently…did you have any hobbies before you joined the Marine Corps?  Well, I said, I published my fanzines…

 

My entire platoon eventually was sent to Korea to make the world safe without my help.  I was sent to Headquarters Base Camp Pendleton to write for the base newspaper.  (I never got there, but that’s another story.)

 

Eventually, the world safer, I went back to the University of Utah to resume my college career.  I kept up my amateur science fiction publishing at the time…in fact, that continued for decades afterwards.

 

Later I came to write another publication about Costa Rica, Adventures In Costa Rica, together with Carol, which you can also find more about on the web, but we’ll leave that for another day.

 

For about the last six or eight years, maybe more, I have written what is essentially a semi-open letter for family and friends, distributed by email, named St. Ives.  What you are reading now is essentially St Ives in blog form for a wider audience.

 

And that’s why I’m doing this.  Blogito, ergo sum.