Address: 3641 Bates Street Apt 1, Pittsburgh, PA
Bedrooms: 2
Term: 8 months
Duration: December 21, 1995 to August 20, 1996
Lease Signed: December 20, 1995
Rent: $450/month
Security Deposit: $450
Occupants: 2
Utilities: The lessee is responsible for gas & electric, and hall lighting.
Parking: $50/month (not needed)
Other Terms: Tenants permitted to use the basement bathroom.

We lived on the first floor and the basement. Two girls lived in the apartment above us. JM took the bedroom on the first floor. Or – at least, he made it into a bedroom. The place was laid out oddly, converted into an apartment. When you entered the living room (probably the original dining room), two large French doors slid into the wall, leading to what was perhaps the original living room. He made this into his bedroom, and would often practice on his electric guitar without an amp.

The kitchen was pretty large, and I had my computer set up on a desk along a wall near a telephone outlet so that I could dial up bulletin board systems (BBS).

There was a sort of enclosed porch off the kitchen that one of our coworkers, HH, would turn into her own bedroom. It was petite and skinny, more of a wide hallway. I had a thing for HH, but we just didn’t click. She was a bit short and was always hanging out with another guy who was just a friend who sold pot, and occasionally into Whip-its. She was fascinated with David Bowie.

There was a half-bathroom just under the hall stairwell, and the angle of the stairs was over the toilet. It lacked a shower or bath.

As you walk from the kitchen to the basement, a large blue wall is poorly executed. Behind it was the bathroom, which included a shower. It was not insulated, and you could see your breath inside during the winter. There was a fairly large bedroom, which VC took. VC came with me as a roommate from Chester Street. They would often go to sleep with Enya playing.

My bedroom was more of a walk-in closet from VC’s room. It had a smaller room leading to the water heater, which kept my room warm. As I closed the door, I was in complete darkness, which suited me perfectly.

Looking back at the lease today, I see that we were allowed to have only two tenants. However, in college and in every place I have lived in the area, these rules were often violated to lower the rent.

Leaving Pittsburgh

I’ve had a lot of traumatic events in Pittsburgh. Roommate/coworker beat in the street, a roommate dying after his body rejected a liver transplant, a fire in an apartment, and now mono. On top of that, seeing how the insurance money was spent at my parents rather than recovering my stuff was disheartening. I took another semester off for mono, and my heart just wasn’t in it to continue. My mother said that without a job or school, she wasn’t going to continue supporting me, so I ended up moving back home into my parents’ basement around July, a month before my lease was to end.

My First Website

I had designed my first website while living here. It had a tiled background that resembled black leather. A woman in a white dress held her hands outstretched, looking up. I edited the woman’s image to remove the background and make it transparent, so the tiled background would show through. I used tables to position her. The web page was probably about goth culture at the time, focusing on music and movies.

I don’t recall what the website was about or where it was located. It may have been an early version of my Geocities website, located at /Athens/Accropolis/4507. The Athens neighborhood is reported to have been added in August 1995. When my brother first told me about it, there was a limit of about 300 KB of storage that you could host on your site for free. I’ve tried using the Wayback Machine to search Internet archives, but it didn’t turn up anything about my old website, and The Geocities Gallery doesn’t have it in its collection either.

I have a copy of the site on GitHub, but my account username was “moonhalo,” which is based on an event later observed when I was a pullet catcher in ’96. If my oldest/first site is on GeoCities, it’s probably in a different neighborhood, unless I changed my account name (unlikely). It’s likely the site was hosted either by my internet provider at the time or at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh under a student account. Another option may have been AOL via members.aol.com/username.

Downloading “Warez”

Painting on Foam Board

It was around this time that I painted a few pieces of foam board I had from school with acrylic.

David Bowies Outside Tour

A few of us ended up at a concert where Nine Inch Nails opened for David Bowie’s Outside Tour. What made it special is that Trent Reznor sang Hurt with David Bowie. I hadn’t known much about David Bowie other than what seemed like oldies. When he came out on stage, it felt like he was dressed like a kid from California. It was the first concert I had ever been to. One thing I was taught is that you never wear the shirt you buy at the concert you are attending, so I just kept it off. HH’s friend brought some pot, and we smoked in our seats.

One thing I recall: as NIN finished their set, many people had left. Although NIN was opening for David Bowie, most people came for them. The two artists didn’t seem to mesh musically at the time, and David Bowie seemed to have been reinventing himself. I could identify with NIN at the time, feel the beat, feel the emotion. With David Bowie… I didn’t know.

David Bowie had what seemed to be a 3×3 grid of fluorescent office lights behind him that flickered, while Trent Reznor and the rest of Nine Inch Nails had round disks sitting a foot or two above their heads that would buzz with electricity. I was more into Nine Inch Nails at the time, but started listening to David Bowie’s new stuff over time. Trent Reznor of NIN is from PA, so he was pretty big in the area.

I started learning more about David Bowie, his history, movies, and followed his new stuff. I hadn’t realized that he was Jared the Goblin King in my favorite movie, Labyrinth. I didn’t know actor names and such. We would watch the man who fell to earth. Bizarre movie. I didn’t even realize that he was in the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me movie that my roommate on Baywood Street used to watch. He also sang a song on the Cool World soundtrack I had. He was popping up in more places in my life than I had realized.

David Bowie was among the first websites to experiment with Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), where you could walk through a weird virtual world with other people and chat. He even had a video game called Omikron, which I later played. It was odd: you could keep switching which character you were playing, so you weren’t an individual character yourself, but a presence that moved between them. It also featured a song in the game, unheard of at the time.

Pink Floyd: The Wall

At the time, I was getting into Anime with Akira and Ninja Scroll, then moving on to Heavy Metal. Eventually, someone said I should check out the anime in Pink Floyd’s, The Wall. There are only small bits of animation, but the movie as a whole was very moving. It introduced me to the idea of a concept album, where every song turns into a story and melds together. Plenty of emotional trauma is woven into a story, leading from one event to the next and culminating in an overall theme.

In 2025, with the rise of artificial intelligence to compose and sign music, as well as assist in analyzing lyrics and improving flow, and so on, I gave it a shot to make my own concept album called “re: Cubicle 13” as a tragicomedy of a corporate drone office worker, where every object is personified and out to get him.

Mono

My roommate had a girl come over occasionally. One time, she brought a friend over. Her friend sat next to me. I never got her name, but there was a lot of kissing on the couch. Shortly after, I got sick. The back of my throat was swelling with white spots. Even drinking water was difficult. I went to the hospital up the street, and they sent me home with antibiotics. It was getting harder to swallow the antibiotics, so I went back. They ran some tests and prescribed bigger pills. I was crying at home, trying to swallow those things. I later got a call that it was mono (mononucleosis), commonly called the kissing disease. I mainly went to gargling warm saltwater instead. I eventually got a call from my father complaining that I had gone to the hospital after looking at his insurance bill. I hadn’t been to a doctor or a dentist since middle school, and I wasn’t aware of the intricacies of scheduling with a family doctor. I just knew I was sick, and didn’t know what else to do.

Rocky Horror

My roommate had another girlfriend after I recovered. He invited me to come along to see a movie near them – The Rocky Horror Picture Show (RHPS). I met a girl there, and ended up passing mono to her as well.

Over the years, I’ve picked up references to the movie from earlier times, when college classmates were talking about it, but I was clueless. One had a book he opened, pointing to different pictures.

RHPS was an old movie, but everyone dressed up to see it. I arrived and was pretty impressed with it. It opened up with two music videos featuring Tim Curry, and everyone would get into the aisles and dance. I didn’t know how to dance, but with the euphoria of the crowd, I danced anyway. I only knew Tim Curry from the movie Clue and The Littlest Witch, which was a series of films that came out every year around Halloween about a little girl going to witch school – much like how Harry Potter comes out around Christmas each year. Meat Loaf had just become famous in my world recently with his “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” song on the Bat Out of Hell II album, so it was interesting seeing him appear as well.

RHPS is a bit… different. Besides people dressing up as characters, or half-dressed in lingerie, and having a “double feature”, the audience heckled the movie, as well as each other, based on a script that they all knew ahead of time. In addition to that, they would throw things, or make noises – but there were rules at the theatre of what you couldn’t bring, as it was difficult to clean up. Water guns were a no-no, as well as anything thrown (toilet paper, cards, bread, etc.) Another feature was that sometimes people acted out the scenes in front, playing out what was on the screen. The movie started at 12 midnight every Saturday. Meanwhile, we would go downstairs to smoke clove cigarettes in the smoking area between the bathrooms while waiting for the show to start. Afterwards, we would head over to Eat ‘n Park at three in the morning to grab breakfast and Smiley cookies before sleeping at my roommate’s girlfriend’s house.