Introduction

Last week I woke up to a facebook message from an old friend asking to confirm the last name of our mutual old friend Gary. When I did, she sent me his obituary from a couple weeks before. I hadn't spoken to Gary in a very long time, but in our 20's we were an inseparable team. It was New Paltz, NY, a college town in rural Ulster County on the way to the Catskills. And it was a special time to be there. Being 20something in the 90's was fun. It felt like everything was beginning to change from the cold war Reagan 80s. Of course, that was our youth talking, and the drugs may have played a part in that, and the explosion of music from the underground that was becoming mainstream at the time. And I'm sure every generation thinks that the era of their coming of age was amazing, because coming of age is an amazing time in one's life. Anyway... needless to say, I was quite floored by this news. He was only 2 days older than me, and we hadn't had a chance to reconnect in the almost 20 years since we had moved away and gotten married and started new lives across the country from each other.

We were a couple of college dropouts up to all sorts of wild adventures and schemes and plans to somehow make it big doing something we enjoyed doing. We were obsessed with the Church of the Subgenius, and the whole "slacker" ethos. Gary even had a tattoo of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs on his calf. We never did start SlackJam records, but we did put out two issues of Slackful Living, which we made on copiers and typewriters and layed out with glue sticks. Most of our clip art was from the Subgenius books, as well as some old books that were left at our house by the owner and previous occupant who had been the head of the Political Science department at SUNY New Paltz and who also totally robbed us of our security deposit.

There were only the two issues because shortly thereafter, I took an internship which led to my relocating to Washington, DC. My first job there was with a nonprofit for young union members as the communications coordinator, and I ran their newsletter like a zine, only this time using PageMaker, but still trying to make it as GenX as humanly possible.

I had forgotten about Slackful Living for many years. But upon hearing news of Gary's untimely demise, and talking with his widow (which feels like an incredibly surreal term to use for somebody around my age, even though some of my friends have been grandparents for years now) who asked if I may have had any pictures (I did not because back then you had to take them with film and develop them, and we probably didn't want a whole lot of photographic evidence of the kinds of shenanigans we got ourselves into), but I remembered that I had the zine in my filing cabinet and was very thankful for keeping it around all these years. So now here it is, it's it's "digitally remastered" glory, a time capsule if you will.

This is not the kind of blog that will be updated. Everything that needs to be here is here. Feel free to comment. I also realize that most of the stuff we clipped is copyrighted. I really hope I don't get any C&D letters for posting this. It was all so long ago and I'd hope at least the spirit of fair use would be respected here.

Dedicated in loving memory to Gary P. Budnik, Jr.

Jason Buckley
Oakland, CA
11/25/19