“This is the first time I’ve been to New York City, ‘cept for driving through.”
That’s what I woke up to about an hour ago, having walked across a river and standing on a Manhattan Island that could never have existed at any time in our history. I was telling this to a very pretty red haired woman who . . . well, more on that in a moment.
The above statement is almost true: I have been to New York City once, but it’s not like you would imagine. I had to fly to Hyannis, Massachusetts for software training in the the summer of 1988, and since we (the people I was with, my manager and project leader from Playboy) were flying cheep, I flew out of Midway and landed at Newark, which was no the airport it is today.
But how to get from Newark to Hyannis, you ask? We flew in a very small, eight passenger twin prop job that never flew higher than a thousand feet the entire way–after we were out of NYC air space, that is. We left Newark going east, flew right over the Statue of Liberty, then headed up the East River at an altitude of maybe five hundred feet. It was still light, and the day was clear, an I was on the left side of the plane, so out my window I had all of Manhattan laid out before me, watching the city in a beauty pass shot right out of a movie.
That is my one and only exposure to New York City. When I say I’ve only driven through, that happened in a dream I had maybe six months ago. I drove over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, when into a part of the city seemed like the Battery, then headed into Brooklyn. I met with a woman later on what may have been Long Island, or it might have been near the Tappan Zee Bridge, because there weren’t nearly as many building around when we sat for coffee, but it wasn’t the city proper, I know that.
I have a hypothesis as to why I might have had this dream last night. David Gerrold, otherwise known as the Father to Tribbles and The Oldest Red Shirt Ever, posted something on his Facebook wall yesterday. It was one of those strange, simple meme statements you find popping up all the time on Facebook when people are posting pictures of cats, or trying to guilt trip you into liking something by saying you’ll go to hell if you don’t share a post being against pistol whipping bulldogs.
The statement was simple: ”If you could go back and tell your younger self something, what you would say?” A very science fictiony concept, because if you could go back and tell your younger self to do something that you haven’t done, you’ll set up another reality that you, the teller, will never see, because quantum physics gives not one fuck about you, but that’s beside the point. The question is: what would you say?
David had left a statement, as had several others. I normally don’t respond to these things, because I’m a pain in the ass bitch, but with that point, I was compelled to respond. I said, “Transition and to hell with what people think, and go to her, you know where she lives.” Why would I say that? Well, those are two things that have become important to me . . .
Neither would make the present me happy, because nothing would change for me, but for New Past Me, there something might happen. One can only guess if I’d decided not to get married in the early 80′s and started my transition, I may have had a twenty years jump on less insanity. I wouldn’t have my daughter, that is true, but I might have had a lot less sadness and hurt and pain. Or I might be dead. Can’t say, you know.
The second part . . . Harlan Ellison’s story Grail tell of a man who spends most of his life in search of a cup that will show him his true love. After decades of search he finds it, looks into is and sees his one true love . . . and as he states at the end, I will met her in death, because she died before I was born.
Last night I walked across the Hudson into the city with a woman who was younger, and who had red hair, but I knew her even though that disguise. I remember saying to her, “I was told you’re nice and curvy,” and she looked at me with a sideways glance and smiled and said, “Yeah? They said that?” and I replied, “Yeah, and you’re soft an warm, too.”
And we stopped after crossing the river and turned to each other. ”You know that for a fact?” she said, and I took her in my arms and said, “Oh, yeah.” And then I kissed her and said–
No turkey today for me: it’s duck all the way. Not a big eater of the gobbler, but love a duck slow cooked on the grill, so that’s where it’s at today, taking advantage of what will likely be the last 60 degree day for some time. Then eat, rest, computer time–I have some programs I want to check out–then writing.
Back to the NaNo, which is down to its last four chapters, and may inch over sixty thousand words tonight if I’m lucky. The wordage tells me that I may, just may, hit seventy thousand words when this is over, which is a good thing, because that puts it in an area where I can shop it in a lot of places if I go that route.
So all is good there. Just get through the holiday–or as Rocky called it, “Thursday”–and move to the next day, which will not involve shopping. Stick your Black Friday where the sun is non-luminescent: I’ll be here.
This is, so I’m told, the day to give thanks. Okay, thanks. There you go, I’ve done given them. I know what I have thanks for, and what I don’t–
There are a number of people on social media–and you know what social media I’m talking about–who like to put up pictures of stuff from like the 1960′s and ’70′s, and ask, “Hey, Like if you remember this!” or “Like this if you remember how great your childhood was!” or “Like this if you weren’t stoned on heroin by the time you were in college.” Okay, maybe not so much that last one, but you know what I’m talking about.
There always seems to be a rush to some nostalgic time in a person’s life where they talk about how cool it was to run around outside barefoot, or having your parent yell out the backdoor that it was time for dinner, and no one hovered over them while they played. (Oh, and for the meme going around that the people born in the 1950′s and ’60′s were the last to play out in the street: come to my neighborhood. You’ll be surprised.)
One thing you should know about the past: it wasn’t as great as you remembered. There were a lot of interesting things that happened back in them days, but compared to today–naw, I’ll stay in the future.
Sure, you had hand cranked kitchen appliances, and rotary phones, and maybe a TV that was the size of a Buick–but the chances are also good that you probably grew up for a while without air conditioning (as I did), and if you lived in any part of the country that had brutal summers (in other words, everywhere), there were probably more than a few times when you couldn’t get to sleep because it was 80 degrees outside, and the humidity was 85 percent, and there wasn’t a breeze in sight, so you laid there and suffered, hoping you passed out from exhaustion very, very soon.
It wasn’t always easy to make a long distance call; I can still remember my mother having to get an operator if she wanted to call her parents in Florida, because those long distant direct dial systems weren’t always working. And if you wanted to call someone overseas, you usually went through an operator, and then your call was routed through an undersea cable–as happened with the first international call I made in 1989. The echo was fantastic, let me tell you. These days, I can pretty much call seventy percent of the world while I’m driving down the road if I know the number.
As for that huge TV: three networks, plus a couple of local shows if you happened to live near a city big enough to support them. For the longest time in the Chicago area, it was CBS, NBC, ABC, WGN, WTTW, and WFLD–or, Channels 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 32. You watched what they gave you, and you were happy–mostly. And none of those stations ran twenty four hours; leave any station on long enough, and that damn Star Spangled Banner was gonna blast you awake at some point.
Oh, sure: go ahead and bitch about there being nothing on TV, but I can get my favorite shows out of the UK six hours after they were broadcast there–or faster, if I hop on my computer and look for an upload of the episode. If you can’t find something to watch across eight hundred channels, you’re not trying.
Speaking of computes . . . when I was growing up, they were either something you saw in science fiction, or they filled a room and pumped out enough heat to cook today’s dinner. When I went to school to get my degree in computers, I was on of the first lab techs to rule the roost when we got out own computer–an IBM Series-1. We had the Model 3, with 32 kilobytes of memory to run our COBOL and RPG programs. Yeah, you heard me: 32k of memory. Kept that a year, then moved up to an IBM System 34, with 64 kilobytes of memory, 128 megabytes of hard drive storage, and enough tools to make your programming experience a sweet one. Yeah, baby: we were cookin’ with gas!
Today I fire up my laptop, connect to my wireless router, and I’m working here, in the cloud–from whence this blog post cometh–and chatting with people all over the world. I can take it with me and work just about anywhere. I have access to as much information and as many cat pictures as I can handle, and if I want to see what the city I’m writing about looks like, I can call it up on a map and get ideas for a story–as I’m doing with my NaNo Novel this year.
Science and medicine . . . if you forget for a moment that you might not be able to pay for treatment, if you can, you’ll probably beat most most stuff that’s out to get you. As a child I was often afflicted with parasites of the lower intestine, and it wasn’t pleasant. My daughter has never had to worry about that. Most of the time you can get something to help you with illness by going to the story and buying it over the counter. If you have high blood pressure, or high cholesterol, or depression, you can get something to help with that.
When I was a kid, if you had something with one of your organs, you were gone. Today, we have transplants. I was still getting tuberculosis tests until the fourth grade, and since I always came up with a false positive, I’d have to go off and have a chest x-ray, just to be sure that my lungs weren’t bleeding out on me. My daughter only knows of these things through school–the same with polio and smallpox. We haven’t figured out how to cure everything these days, but in the 1960′s, a lot of things that could kill you back then are only bad memories today.
I am a huge geek when it comes to space, and the 1960′s was a good time to be alive if you followed anything in orbit. But I also remember reading in school science books that, as far as anyone knew, it was possible there were canals on Mars, and those clouds covering Venus could hide a huge, planet-wide jungle filled with dinosaurs! Then the Mariner space probes came along and spoiled it all . . .
As are the other planets–and smaller bodies, too–in the solar system. We’ve visited every planet and taken pictures of them and their moons, we’ve sent probes to comets and asteroids, and in a few years we’ll have our first look look at Pluto. We’re discovering planets around other stars, sometimes with the help of amateurs who are given access to data collected by the larger scopes, or by data from orbiting satellites–or even using their own equipment. To paraphrase a line from Goodfellas, “It’s a glorious time to look at the cosmos.”
Believe it or not, there are a lot of things that are far better for people in terms of how things are done socially these days, than they were when I was a kid. In the 1950′s and 1960′s, it was hard to vote in some places if you were black; if you were a woman, getting an abortion or contraceptives were difficult, impossible, or illegal. Some states didn’t allow people of different ethnicities to marry. And if you were LGBT, you damn well had better stay in that closet–or else.
It’s not quite perfect, mostly because you’ve still got idiots roaming about who are scared of all the the stuff in that last paragraph, but it’s getting there. Just about anyone can get married regardless skin color, and people are becoming far cooling with gays being allowed the same. It’s going to happen everywhere, and in time the anti-marriage equality people will be a bad memory, just as were the people against people of different ethnicities getting married.
LGBT people are becoming far more a part of life than they ever were “back in my day”. Neil Patrick Harris is pretty much a household name; Ellen DeGeneres and Rachel Maddow are all over TV; George Takei . . . oh, myyyyyyyy. Enough said.
It’s not a perfect world for LGBT, but it’s a hell of a lot better than things were before Stonewall. How many people my age remember Rock Hudson’s life, spelled out in the same fashion as Neil Patrick Harris’? No, you don’t. People didn’t know about his life, because coming out as a gay man, in the 1960′s, would have destroyed him as an actor. We don’t remember much of his life: we only remember his death.
I don’t look back. For me, there were a lot of interesting things that happened, too many to recount, so many that shaped me. But I’ll never post something like the picture of a cassette tape and say, “Remember these? Like them if they remind you of a better time!”, because all I remember was when the damn things were eaten by your tape player, turning Benny and the Jets or Bohemian Rhapsody into some gibbering, fever dream creature straight outta Lovecraft, and your normal reaction was to curse loudly, eject the sucker, and toss it in a bin or, as I often did, out the window of your car as you cruised down the highway going sixty.
Forward, I say. Let the past collect dust, and keep it there to use as a reference–but don’t kid yourself that it was super fantastic adventure time . . .
That’s coming on in twenty minutes. And if you’re busy on the computer, DVR it.
In terms of the week I’ve had, yesterday wasn’t that bad. Yes, I felt like I was dragging a little, but I was writing. Between blogging and my WiP, I managed about two thousand words. Oh, and I wrote another two thousand word guest post that should be up later on another blog.
Considering I feel like I have the Chest Buster roaming around inside me, that’s not too bad.
I finally finished Part Eleven of Diners at the Memory’s End. It was helpful to get some of what I was feeling out, but unlike my, Cytheria is very cool under fire. She just blows things up and doesn’t get all that worked up over it. Well, she did upset a bit: just ask the exploding dummy at the end. But she knew it was take it out on something inanimate, or you might end up smoking someone close to you. Or you could break down a building. Decisions, decisions.
So now I can move on to Part Twelve, and that means there are only six more parts remaining to write. At least two of those are going to be big, and those will likely be the parts that kick this story up over fifty thousand words. Me, wordy? Surely you jest! But this is going to hit the short novel limit once more, and I don’t have a problem with that. Hey, where else can you get the most bang for your $2.99? If and when it gets published, that is . . .
In the meantime, I let my mind drift last night. Because that’s what I do when I need to do something that doesn’t involve thinking.
I got to thinking about Kerry.
I’ve written about Kerry more than a few times, but of late he’s been missing in action. A lot of that is because I’ve been so busy with my other writing, and trying to publish things, that he took a back seat to the action. Plus, I’ve been feeling sort of sad about him, because there are things I would love to say about him and his lovely girlfriend, Annie, but I can’t seem to find the voice for these things. It’s one of those things where I want to say something in words, but I can’t find the words.
And for a while, I assumed I might not ever. There are tales here, but I’m not sure I can ever tell them. But one never knows, so it doesn’t do to think about them.
But last night he was on my mind. I was listening to music . . . see, one of the covens supports an annual talent show around Ostara, and while Kerry can’t sing all that well–autotuning is the way to go, even if it’s magical–but he loves to perform. He loves being on the stage and put it out there for all to see. Yes, he’s not a very assuming person: in fact, if he could, he’d stay in the background all the time.
And the stage is where he does one of his craziest things every . . . but that’s another story.
I miss all that. It was a good trip down memory lane last night. I really need more of those, because when we can’t remember our past, we can’t ever see where we are going.
Yeah, it’s been a not-so-bad weekend, and it’s coming to a close fast. I’ve almost finished Part Ten of Diners at the Memory’s End, and I went to sleep knowing that I’ll probably finish up that part in less than five hundred words today. I mean, after what one of my characters did last night, not much else for them to do now, save go somewhere and blow off some steam. Which is one more, it’s Part Eleven.
So there is that. But today, I’m of a different mind today. On about something else, I am.
If you’re on Facebook–and who am I kidding, you are, just admit it–you know that 3 July, Andy Griffith died. You couldn’t help notice it because just about everyone was posting things: links, pictures, cats–yeah, everyone posts cats, that’s a law on the Internet.
Anyway, there was a lot of emoting about how childhoods were shaped by the TV show, and how it was a great time, and how fond everyone was of Mayberry.
Yeah, about that . . .
First off, the show in question, The Andy Griffith Show. It was only funny when Don Knotts on was. Search your feelings, you know this to be true. You found Goober funny? You’re amused by car wrecks, aren’t you?
Second, the thing I always remember Griffith for was A Face in the Crowd, which remains brilliant to this day. ”Lonesome” Rhodes is everywhere today; just flip on Faux News, and you’ll see him in the flesh.
Now, thirdly, that feeling of living the idyllic life, the sense of peace that comes from growing up in a small town . . . yeah, sorry. I’m gonna call bullshit on ya, ’cause there was nothing idyllic about growing up in a small down in the 1960′s–
See, that was me. I grew up in a small town in Indiana through the 1960′s and 70′s. Some might argue that with a population of 6,000, it wasn’t small enough to be a small town, but we were one of those strange places where we were cut between two different school systems, so while I went to school in town, a much larger segment of the town actually went to school in a town about 10 miles away. There was even a small part of the town that went to school in another town, but we never speak of Lowell.
So it was a small town, with a small school system. There were 165 people in my graduating class. I attended 6th Grade in a building that had alarms that went off whenever the pressure in the main boiler became too great, and when that happened, the building would have to be evacuated because said boiler might explode within the next half hour. A pastime at my high school was calling in bomb scares, and when that would happen we were immediately sent onto the football field to wait to see if the school was going to explode. This once happened during January, when the outside temperature was hovering around zero, and we weren’t allowed to grab coats before being marshaled outside–where we stood for almost two hours.
Can’t complain, however. One of the things I spent time doing in school was trying to make nitroglycerin from some home-made formula one of my friends discovered. I think we came very close to blowing ourselves up once, but it’s hard to say: when it started smoking like hell we dumped it down a sink, and abandoned our attempts for that year. We didn’t start up again the following year because one of the guys I was working with moved to Colorado with his white-supremacist family–which is not a joke when I remember his father–and the other guy was busted for selling drugs, and was kicked out of school. I decided that I’d go it alone, and spent a couple of years learning how to build pipe bombs. No, really.
I lived 30 miles south of Gary, and in pre-EPA America, it was pretty common that when looking to the north you’d see, not a blue sky, but one that was a muddy brown. It was even worse during the summer, when you could almost taste the crap in the air, and I remember several times when a murky fog would drift around the town, and people would go, “Oh, it’s the mills,” and accept what was happening.
Minorities didn’t exist in my school, or in most of my town. It was all white kids, with families divided between farmers and factory workers, with a few people involved in home construction here and there. There were a few “wealthy” kids in my school: a couple whose parents were doctors, and a couple of kids whose family owned a very successful marina. The rest of us got by. I didn’t go without, but by no means did my family have a lot of money.
Speaking of my family . . . my father was from Tennessee, and my mother was from Chicago. Racists, both. My grandparent: racists. The majority of my relatives: racists. But I shouldn’t hold this label on just my parents, ’cause the majority of my friends, and my friend’s families, were like that as well. But that’s another story, so lets stay on what I know . . .
Everyone close to me feared the following in this order: Negros, Mexicans, “foreigners” (I know, they really keep those options wide open), hippies (1960′s, remember?), radicals, and anyone who wasn’t like them. It was a wonder anyone could go outside due to fact there was a good chance they might run into someone who fit any of the prior criteria. Needless to say, growing up I heard a number of things about killing minorities, or harming minorities, or beating up hippies and radicals–or killing them . . . yeah, that’s how it was.
And if I wasn’t happy with small town life in Indiana, for a few weeks every summer I was hauled off to small town Tennessee life, where damn near everyone lived in a state of mind that started with losing the Civil War, and thinking that, any time now, they South was gonna Rise Again. A place where I was once told I couldn’t listen to a transistor radio inside my aunt’s house, because it might offend them (apparently they were way off in batshit insane religious territory, but I didn’t know about that until much later), and where I was once publicly castigated by relatives, at what would have been the ripe old age of nine, for saying something nice about Dr. King.
Small town life, for me, wasn’t idyllic. It was fraught with being looked at as something of an outsider. It was being set up as someone who didn’t fit in. I’ve blogged before about how my musical choices in high school had people calling me a freak because I wasn’t listening to Top 40 pop. I was even beat up once in, 1976, by a “friend” who got pissed off at me for saying that British bands seemed better than American bands, and then having the temerity to back up my statements.
I also walked away from everything my parents believed and feared. I went to college with all the sorts of people they hated. I even went out on a couple of dates with a girl from Jamaica, and at the end of each night, kissed her. Oh, yes! I kissed a black girl! Something my parents told me would force them to, and I quote, “throw you out of the family.”
Consider myself tossed, ‘kay?
TV is not meant to be reality. Not even reality TV, which is just as scripted as any other program you might see. And during the 1960′s, TV was about as far from reality as you could get. It might make you feel good, but all one had to do was look out their front window and see that the real world was nothing like the small towns portrayed on the tube. It’s all a fiction. It’s all unreal. It’s meant to entertain, not be a blueprint for life.
Remember all you like about how great your life was, but I’m pretty certain you’re not remembering your life–you’re remembering the life you wish you had.
Good think my dreams these days are of the future . . .
