the daily snivel

During a conversation this weekend with the always lovely and charming Celeste, we took a trip down memory lane to number 12, Years Ago Street, when we first met. There was a Lois 'N' Frima's ice cream stand in the Byward Market that used to be run by a friend of mine named Warren. Warren was an odd duck, but generally was a nice and funny guy, and he managed a now-defunct bi-weekly outdoor reading series known as "The Vanilla Reading Series." I got my start in reading short stories and poetry there, and I'd often hang out at the ice cream stand with Warren while downtown on those hot summer days in 1994.

Celeste was another denizen of the Byward Market in those days -- a fourteen-year-old punk rocker with green hair. She ruefully recalled that Warren was the first person to ever really sexualize her breasts, with him commenting on them in a way that still seemed inappropriate, all these years later. On a chance meeting at the ice cream stand that summer, Celeste borrowed my Porno for Pyros cassette, and even returned it some weeks later. I still have that tape, although Warren is now long gone (I hear good things about him both getting settled, and settling down, out west, though) and I don't have much time for reading anything but passionate submissions these days (which isn't to say that my emphatic enunciations in front of an audience haven't helped get over the stage fright of being in court). At least I still have the good friendship of Celeste, notwithstanding the fact that I am a busy and often neglectful friend.

At any rate, another character from those days of old was a young man of notoriety named Rob Nelms. He was something of a larger than life figure, preceded everywhere by bizarre stories about his artistic feats, including the tale of the time he nailed his own penis to the wall. He had stretched earlobes before such things were done, coming to classes with those plastic 35mm film canisters inserted through the massive openings in his earlobes. He was an artist in the most gorgeous and grotesque sense, devoting his time to making Things out of other things, appearing under various pseudonyms (such as "Emily J. Whist"), and coordinating in groups and events (like the Kitten Ling Foundation) so as to bring his works into the public eye. He was in a couple of my philosophy classes in my first year at Carleton University, and I had more than a couple of conversations with him that left a favourable impression on me, but I confess that I lost track of him and then, past about 1998 or so, he simply vanished.

Google is quite equivocal on the subject. I commented to Celeste that it is entirely possible that he is now dead. It is also possible that he became medicated and domesticated and, not unlike myself, is happier being respectable by day and safely anonymous at all other times.

But I put it to you, the people with far more time and knowledge and connections than I have. Does anyone know what happened to Mr. Nelms?