Cerebrate aquarium popped into my head at 6,249 feet above sea level. We were sitting around contemplating how we were going to get two people up to Valdez Alaska in the wild-west era of helicopter skiing. The publisher of The Local Mountaineer, a pulpy attempt at chronicling the N. Tahoe lifestyle, had a way of getting us into “projects” that seemed way out of reach but we always ended up attaining.
My place in the editorial hierarchy was the role of consigliere. Our editor/publisher was obsessed with SNG and often compared me to Deanna Troi which I accepted as a badge of honor. As much as I acted as a voice of reason in a twenty-something pack of craziness when I “gave a blessing” oh shit, it was on.
I received the nick name Uncle Doug during my tenure with this clan. Definitely a term of endearment. But still to this day, I really don’t know why it stuck. I seemed to be an uncle-ish figure, I guess. Always there with a pearl of input that to someone made sense.
As we connected the dots from Kings Beach to Valdez we sat around, made phone calls, read magazines and otherwise scaped around for information. Remember, this was before Google. We are talking 1993-94. Dewy and his decimals were more known to us that dot-com. A lot of thinking.
I distinctly remember seeing all of us siting there, thinking. I kept going around in my head, thinking, all of us pooled together. It’s our think-tank. Ok, think-tank. Think, brain, cerebrum, cerebrate… Tank, container, group, school, fish, aquarium…
Cerebrate Aquarium…