Philip Fibiger

In preparation for our March trip to the British Virgin Islands, Emily and I decided to finally take the plunge (so to speak) and get certified to SCUBA dive. I love snorkeling and have wanted to dive since I was twelve, but I never managed to get it done. We figure that as long as we’re going to be in Florida for the foreseeable future, we might as well embrace its access to the water.

Our schedule this winter was tight, so we had to do a little hunting to find a good match between our open days and class schedules. Ultimately, we decided on American Dive Institute. They were a little further from Orlando than I would have liked (about 25 minutes away in Winter Garden), but it was an absolutely fantastic experience. James and Alex, the owners of ADI, were fantastic teachers, very patient and accommodating. Along with their expert instruction, they set beginners up with top-of-the-line dive gear: Zeagle BCs, Atomic regulators and fins. If you’re looking to learn to dive in Orlando I would recommend them in a heartbeat.

We really lucked out by getting our certification in the winter. Normally classes are capped at 8 students, but getting certified over Valentine’s Day weekend let us take classes with a 1:1 instructor-to-student ratio. It let us really fly through the classes, we didn’t have to wait around for some other student who was having difficulty mastering a skill. Since we’ve both spent a lot of time in the water–lifeguarding or swimming competitively as kids–we both felt comfortable enough that counterintuitive things like breathing underwater or negotiating adding or losing air to maintain buoyancy felt easy to learn.

The open water checkout dives were a lot of fun, particularly the final dives at Blue Grotto. Blue Grotto is a freshwater cavern that goes down to a little over 100 feet. Emily was a little surprised to discover upon arrival that although the grotto is open water, the cavern receded back from its opening and much of the dive is spent with rock overhead instead of a straight shot to the surface. It’s to the credit of Alex and James’s instruction that we both felt prepared and relaxed about diving in these conditions. We dove to about sixty feet, checking out a limestone rock with carvings from previous generations of divers and through deep, turning passages of rock. More than once someone in our group stopped to wonder who was the first person to see a hole in their backyard and think, let’s see how deep that goes.

Of course now I’m totally hooked and thinking about advanced certifications. The gear-head in me is psyched about a hobby that has so much technically cool gear, and I’m already putting together wishlists in my head. We’ve bought an inexpensive underwater digital camera; I’m sure lots of photos will pop up after our trip to the BVI.

All of this great Husker Du concert footage is showing up on Youtube. This is from a SST Records showcase. The mix isn’t great, but the power of the show comes through. The ending’s a lot of fun, as members of SWA, Saccharine Trust, The Minutemen and The Meat Puppets come on stage and tear apart “Louie Louie.” Here’s a zine article that reviews the show, declaring that “clearly, this band is God.”

The footage, which unfortunately isn’t the whole show, is divided into three sections:

Diane / Hate Paper Doll / Green Eyes

Divide And Conquer / Pink Turns to Blue / Eight Miles high

Makes No Sense At All / Louie Louie

Many people are writing about David Foster Wallace’s death, quoting beautiful and weighty words he delivered in a Kenyon College commencement speech a few years ago. My memory of the man, and his writing, is a much less serious event.

He was one of a number of writers reading at a “Downtown For Democracy” event at UCLA, sharing the stage with Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Anne Lamott and Alice Sebold. Emily bought us tickets as surprise birthday present. He was reading a short story he’d written which, as far as I know, remains unpublished. I’ve forgotten the plot of the story, but the main character was a goody two shoes kid. The part of the story that’s important to this anecdote is a conversation between the child and the child’s school principal (who detests the kid). The child is getting more and more wound up in the conversation while the principal is quietly seething. Wallace read the child’s dialog in character, mimicking the child’s hyperventilating. He starts to smile as he reads, and quickly the smile turns to an attempt to stifle laughter. As he quickly shifted between the child’s excitement and the quiet hatred of the principal, it seemed to crack him up even more. People were laughing out loud, both at the story and with Wallace’s obvious enjoyment. He was unable to keep it up, forced to walk away from the podium and take a drink before continuing.

It was a charming scene, and I loved the fact that after obviously having written and rewritten this countless times, he was still able to crack himself up over it.