Retro-Blog 1987 (age 24): A Childhood Memory

A MEMORABLE ROTOTILLER

At some point in my preadolescent life my maternal Grandfather died.  As with other family deaths, there was a great pilgrimage to the scene of the death.   Aunts and uncles and cousins from all over Oregon loaded into their full-size early-seventies family cars and made the long hot nonstop to rural Colorado.

The ending of his long and colorful life was commemorated by a twenty-one gun salute fired by octogenarian veterans.    Even though I scarcely remembered ever meeting him,  I did manage to force a few tears, being under the influence of all the sincerely portrayed sorrow around me.

As my critically-wounded step-grandmother lay in the intensive-care unit of the local hospital, my aunts and uncles set themselves to the task of remembering.    The process of remembrance in my family consists primarily of the acquisition of objects once owned by the deceased to serve as "something to remember him by".    Thanks to the generosity of one of my aunts, I had the opportunity to remember this grandfather I never knew with his wife's gold pocket watch to assist me in the task of fond recollection.   Back in Oregon, however, my mother coerced me into surrendering the watch in exchange for a gas-powered model airplane, the result of some rather persistent negotiation on my part.

My grandfather died in a high-speed head-on collision while delivering a load of gallon jars of honey in his VW van.    One small irony is that he was illegally driving while legally blind at night, yet it was the other driver who had strayed into his lane.   While viewing a newspaper photo of the remains of the vehicle, my aunt Alma remembered that her father had once mentioned that he liked to keep a hundred-dollar bill taped inside the dashboard to be available in case of emergency.  So she went to the wrecking yard and had them pry apart the smashed honey and blood encrusted dashboard, only to find that the treasure was already gone or perhaps had never been there.

Undaunted by this disappointment, my aunt rented a U-Haul trailer to carry enough inspiration for a lifetime of fond memories.   After returning to Oregon,  she discovered that she had inadvertently remembered her dead father by the rototiller he had recently borrowed from his neighbor.

[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): This is one of those things written specifically for the "I" collection mentioned in my notes on a previous blog.  Since my collected works at that time provided virtually no information about my poorly remembered childhood, I attempted to provide what few anecdotal reports I could.  By the way, the phrase "octogenarian veterans" was far too seductively quasi-alliterative to resist, despite the fact that my grandfather and his peers firing the rifles were more likely in their 60s at the time.]

Retro-Blog 1982 (age 19): Random Walk

RANDOM WALK

There's an all-to-familiar strangeness in the air in which the fish are swimming back into the sun. And it's getting far too easy to lose my constant struggle against the current changes in the direction of the flow. Every time I think I'll make it over, it begins to tow me under, but I'm still trying to keep my head above it all.

And all ears are tuned

to the turning of the tables And all eyes are focused

on the faces in the frames.

And nobody knows which way the wind will blow the mountains and the seas cannot answer for what the rocks intend to do about the falling of the skies that are raining down upon the leaves that wilt in unfiltered sunlight reflecting off the tops of houses in which domesticated fur-bearing animals ponder the whistling of the wind through the trees that reach out for nothing they could ever grasp and all the creatures watch and wonder about the reasons for things that were never meant to mean a thing.

[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): A stream-of-consciousness experiment with mildly interesting results.  The two split lines in the middle, between the opening and closing paragraphs, are a recurring motif which appear in a number of other works and were eventually part of the pre-chorus of a song titled "Modern Man".  I almost removed these lines from this post as it is my general intention to hold back any material which I may intend to eventually develop further, and I do have some small hope of actually recording "Modern Man" at some time.  But they are originally part of this work, and it seems to suffer structurally without them, so they remain.]

Retro-Blog: August 20, 2008 (Age 45) - Human Implosion

Caution: Stay Well Back: Human implosion in progress  The alternate title for this post was "Emo Implosion", but that sounded too much like a themed night at a club. The playbill might read something like: "Drag yourself down to Mopey's Pub every Tuesday night for EMO IMPLOSION, a showcase for the most depressing and marginally talented local singer-songwriters available. All ages! Any patrons making eye contact with the staff will be ejected. Goths and other poseurs welcome. Complimentary beatings upon exit provided by a local college athletic fraternity." But seriously. "Implosion" seems the most apt term for what I am experiencing. In building demolition, as you may well know, the art of implosion is remarkably subtle. The margin of strength by which most buildings stave off their inevitable surrender to gravity is often very slim. Only a few small charges in strategic locations, triggered with the right timing, can reduce a seemingly substantial behemouth to rubble in a matter of seconds. Human implosion is similar, but a little more mysterious. It seems that an accumulation of minor and seemingly random and disconnected emotional injuries, often inflicted casually and unknowingly, can sometimes hit just the right weak spots at just the right times to put a human psyche into a sudden and utterly helpless self-destructive freefall. Detailing the placement and nature of these injuries is irrelevant, as there was seldom any intent to do harm in the first place, and nobody could have seen how each little chip and crack would add up to such a complete collapse. Speaking of collapse: I'm going back to bed, which seems to be my answer to everything lately.  My condolences to those who do not have this solution available as an immediate option. [Editorial Note 2015 (Age 52): There you go, a Retro-Blog from beyond the adolescent years, yet seemingly not beyond the adolescent psyche.  Re-posted today because this is once again how I feel right now and I can't really improve on how I expressed it some six years ago.  The only change is that sleep is an elusive escape.  When I first wrote this I was still experiencing significant somnolence as a side effect of clonazepam.  Since then I have built up a significant resistance. Sleep is difficult to achieve and maintain, especially when I am preoccupied with anxiety over upcoming events, or regret over past action or inaction.]

Origin Of Retro-Blogs

The majority of the posts I have made, and may yet make, which are indicated to be a "Retro-Blog" were written between 1977 and 1987, one youthful and tumultuous decade out of  my 52 relatively mundane years, and compiled into a boxed set of 11 volumes, numbered one through twelve, skipping eleven because I had some inexplicable problem with the number eleven at the time, yet just as inexplicably I had no problem with there being a page eleven in every volume.  The title of this collection of some 687 hand photocopied pages is simply "I".  It was commissioned in 1987 by a friend of mine who had seen a smaller volume of selected works and wanted to have the "complete works".  Only three physical copies were made, one each for my benefactor, myself, and another friend who I believe also contributed funds.

The page count of 687 isn't nearly as much writing as one might think, given that many pages are line drawings, collages, and other visual works and artifacts.  The density of words per page varies widely as well, as much of it is poetry, and most of it is presented in photocopied facsimile of original formats, which varied widely in format and print density.  The only works to be manually transcribed to digital form and neatly printed were those that were in my nearly unreadable handwriting, or were written specifically for the collection to provide context.  Of those, no digital copies remain, so this retro-blogging is a by-product of a halfhearted new effort to digitize the entire collection.  It has all been scanned to multiple PDF documents, which have in turn been processed through an OCR engine and saved as rtf documents.  Not surprisingly, only a fraction of the OCR efforts rendered text that could be read with a reasonable amount of editorial repair.

I should also point out that the vast majority of the writing is simply dreadful, and only a few comparatively less dreadful selections will be presented publicly as a Retro-Blog or in any other form.

I promise I am very nearly as bored of writing about this as you are of reading about it.

This is where I would normally bemoan the the lack of readers of these blogs, but I am well past caring.  I know my place in the world, and the insignificance of my undisciplined works of writing.  I care just enough, maybe, to carry on posting this evidence of a younger and more energetic version of myself, for awhile.  I don't know exactly why, but I have theories, which I don't care to explore at this moment.

On occasion my Retro-Blog entries may mine sources other than the "I" of 1987, primarily saved copies of entries from my now defunct Facebook "notes" and MySpace blogs.  Of that, there is probably nothing even marginally interesting beyond 2009.  Time and failure and 4 1mg doses of Clonazepam a day have dulled my wits and eroded the edges of my psyche.  I barely have enough delusion of self worth to remain alive, much less write, which begs the question of why I am doing this right now.

Retro-Blog 1982 (age 19): Mommy Video

MOMMY VIDEO

Mommy Video - Daddy Video
You've taught me all I know of the world
     from my black-and-white memories
     to my Technicolor dreams

You've made me what I am
Please make me part of what you are

Grab me by the eyes and pull me in
Soak me up through your phosphor dots
Feed me back through your electron guns
Modulate me on your carrier wave
Send me back through the ether
             to where it all began 

Store me on reels of video tape

Mommy Video - Daddy Video 
Take me home

[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): The technology described here remained pretty much unchanged from the earliest days of television in the mid-twentieth century until the relatively recent mandated transition to digital broadcast in 2009, and around the same time the transition from CRT tubes to solid state imaging devices for television was well underway.  I'm not sure how I would write this in terms of current television technology in the United States.  For all I know there are some parts of the world that still use analog broadcast and CRT displays.  

You may notice that the "Retro-Blog" entries are so far all clustered around 1977 (age 14) and 1982 (age 19).   For reasons about which I may speculate at a later time, a large amount of my written output is clustered around these years, but eventually I will post equally unremarkable works from other years.  For now, this was just something I could put out quickly to maintain my self-imposed discipline of daily postings until I run out of material that I am willing to expose to an imaginary public.

As an aside, no matter how confident any scientist or technician may sound, nobody knows how radio, and thus television, really works at the most fundamental level.  We know how to build devices that generate, encode, detect and decode radio signals, but we don't really know in real physical terms how the signal gets from the transmitter to the receiver.  This statement is virtually blasphemy in current western culture where Science has been degraded into a sort of religion for people who are too clever for metaphysics and too arrogant or afraid to admit that there are still things not yet known, or perhaps even unknowable.]

Retro-Blog 1982 (age 18): Empty Spaces

4:30 A.M. McMinnville Oregon 1/27/82

In this town there is a time when nothing is moving. Between the closing of the bars and the opening of the gas stations is a dead zone. Interstate truckers and travelers drone by on the highway just outside of town, while the old main street remains deserted, bright in the artificial illumination of streetlights and storefronts.

And the mannequins stand and stare across at flashing beer signs. And the horn of a distant freight train sounds as steel wheels clack across track joints.

The street carries on a robotic life while everyone sleeps. The traffic lights change with the thumping of relays, the transformers hum and the neon lights buzz, and a rotating sign squeaks like a perpetually closing door. The smaller sounds get louder at night.

The all-night restaurants and convenience shops are isolated islands of glare.  And the cats and dogs wander across the lawns and through the schoolyards.

In the newer part of town, a shopping center sprawls amidst its acres of asphalt parking space. And the hidden speakers blare on all night with distorted renderings of music from a period decades past.

[Editorial Note 2015 (Age 52): I have produced very few examples of what I would consider good writing.  This is because I have no process and no discipline.  The only good things that come from me are those which seem as if they created themselves and demanded that I bring them out.  This is one of those things.  There were very few preliminary notes, very few drafts.  It pretty much burst forth from my head fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus.  This rhythmic and alliterative little piece of prose also reflects my lifelong fascination with empty spaces.  More specifically, I have a fascination with empty spaces normally occupied by people, but encountered alone when all others have abandoned them.  I don't know if that means anything other than the obvious indication of my apparently self-imposed social isolation, which is perhaps a profound kind of selfishness.]

Retro-Blog 1977 (age 14): Nonsense, a poem in three parts

NONSENSE: A POEM

So He said to The Frog
"What is your name?"
And The Frog Said
"blerb"
with an exclamation point


          NONSENSE: MIDDLE PART

          So He says to me
          He says
          "blerb"
          with a question mark
          And I say to Him
          I say
          "Your existence means nothing to me!"


                    NONSENSE: CONCLUSION
                 
                    So He said to The Frog
                    "What is The Meaning Of Life?"
                    And The Frog died
                    period



[Editorial note 2015 (age 52): This was my first poem.  I have no idea why, at age 14, I became possessed of the conceit that I was a poet, having no knowledge of traditional or contemporary ideas of form, which may be obvious.  Nonetheless, every manual typewriter keystroke was deliberate, including line spacing and use of capitalization.  Many drafts were written and discarded.  I still like this poem.  I miss this early version of myself who had just discovered he could give himself unilateral permission to be creative, and to define what form it would take.  I'm very glad that, unlike most 14-year-old poets, I did not apply my efforts to nauseating love poems and songs.  That would come a few years later. 

By the way, Blogspot is taking random liberties with my line spacing and I am still trying to figure out how to get full control of the formatting.  My old-school HTML skills, in which the most exotic constructs are tables and the concepts of spans or CSS were as yet undreamt, don't help much with the way things are done here.]

Retro-Blog 1982 (age 19): I Have Always Been This Way

Hayward California, November 1982

I'm concerned and insecure about things right now

Not simply about comforts and finances

I'm confused about my personal value and worth

About the value of any human and all humans

I'm questioning what the concept of "value" means to me

Because right now I feel very worthless and very small

Very insignificant

And it does not feel good at all

It also does not feel right

And I draw a distinction there

Between subjective good and objective right

Although I cannot be sure that this distinction itself

is not wholly subjective

Once the frame-of-reference has been found questionable

the whole structure falls apart

This is what has happened to me

Why do I feel a need to feel worth and significance?

I doubt that I could even adequately define

what I mean by those words

And what of this need for happiness?

It, too, seems to exist somewhere within reality

Yet beyond definition

My intellect tells me that happiness

or a sense or an attitude of happiness

would only be possible if I were to close off

certain perceptions and avenues of inquiry and reflection

This state would not only be objectionable

But also quite impossible to maintain reliably

As experience has proved

It seems that the centralized “self”

and the homogeneous "all"

are irreconcilably variant concepts

A workable proof to the contrary would be most welcome

I desperately need it, in fact

Thus far, the joyless and inaccurate assertions of psychology

and the abstract and verbose mazery of philosophy

and the hypocrisy and silly self-serving

dervishing metaphysics of religion

have failed to provide anything of substance

[Editorial Note, 2015 (age 52): Among the few things to have changed since this writing is that now feeling worthless and small and insignificant feel "right" or "normal".  I don't know if I am more mature, more broken, or simply more adequately medicated, but I am no longer distressed by the idea that I am not God's gift to the world.  It is, in fact, comforting to know that I need not expect any more of myself.  As a further note to the imaginary reader about these retro-posts: they are not likely to be chronological, although sub-sequences of closely related materials may be.]