Last month in here we were talking about worlds in which the United States never came into being and what the situations would be there. I found it very interesting this afternoon when I stopped by Barnes & Noble and saw this new book by Harry Turtledove.

The premise of Opening Atlantis, the first of a new trilogy, is that the entire East Coast of North America, from the beaches of the Atlantic to the Western side of the Appalachians (and including the islands of the Caribbean Sea) were formed a thousand or so miles further East to make a small sub-continent in the mid-Atlantic.

I figured that this would be a fine Christmas present for Prescott or anyone else with interest in both history and speculative fiction.

On a side note, I wanted to let everyone know that I'm doing fine; my retirement parties were last weekend (and Augur managed to get to the brunch on Sunday afternoon.) I've been writing one of the exclusive stories for the book the last couple of days and am quite pleased that I can do a couple thousand words per day. It's hard work while I'm banging on the keys, but I love the results.

I hope that the exams for those contributors that are in law school went well and that Billy Joe wasn't injured when he put his car in the ditch over the weekend. (We got some serious snow on Saturday night.) I'm looking forward to talking to all of you soon. Merry Christmas, Joyous Yule and a very Happy New Year to everyone at Urbanagora.

Tom

Labels: alternate history, personal, retirement, Tet

September 1968...

Even now, nearly forty years later, I remember it. The flash from the lightning bolt reflected from her eyes and burned itself onto my retina as she lay in my arms. The cooler wind from the gust front swept across the orchard where we had parked--soon we would have to scramble for the shelter of the car.

By the time the first big drops struck the leaves above us, we had gathered as many of our clothes as we could find, tossed them into the front seat and had snuggled in the back under the blanket, picking the remaining blades of grass that had come in with it. The wind howled noticeably and the lightning forked, again and again, hitting trees so close that the strikes weren't followed by thunder, but instead accompanied by the crack of superheated air.

We giggled in pretended terror at the closest ones, holding each other more tightly each time. In the strobe light, we noticed each other's face and I enjoyed, once again, the wonder of a girl who kissed back with feeling.

Eventually, the storm passed--heading off toward Chicago, where it would dampen the fun of other teenagers until it ended somewhere over Ontario. We opened the doors, inhaling deeply of the ozone-laden air as we rearranged our clothing by the overhead light until we were sure that we passed muster. I clumsily tried to refasten her bra, but the nuances of female undergarments were still far beyond the expertise of my fingers.

The rain had been severe enough--an inch or so in an hour--that I had to rock my father's Buick for several minutes before we were able to get to the lane leading back to the township road. A couple hours had passed, but the dance at the high school wouldn't yet be over.

I parked at the edge of the lot, we leaned together for a last kiss, then she walked toward Tonica High, where the old gymnasium had been decorated for the back-to-school dance. I would follow ten minutes later, making sure that no one saw me and could make the connection between the two of us.

You see, at sixteen, nothing matters as much as being included. We were both outsiders, ridiculed and unaccepted for reasons that our tormentors seldom bothered to explain.

She was not a pretty girl, but instead interesting in ways that would not bear fruit until college. Her hair was raven black, her shape too wide across the hips and too small across the bust. Her mother had been unwed and way too young at the time of her birth. She tended towards the white blouses and knee socks below plaid skirts that the girls at the Catholic school wore.

I was lost in thought most of the time. It was nearly impossible for me to overcome my shyness long enough to speak to a girl. We didn't have a shower at the house, so it was difficult to remove the detrius of farm life from my body. My mother bought me clothing from the Sears catalog that she felt were the latest thing, but that were guaranteed to result in at least one occasion per week when I would be cornered and slapped repeatedly by the tough boys.

When I entered the dance, I looked for her across the floor. She was talking to the few girls that would speak to her--each of them too fat or too skinny to be included in the cliques of girls dancing with each other on the floor with one eye out for the basketball stars. The other girls noted my interest and turned up their lips in disgust.

My neighbor friends, Joe and Billy, were leaning against one of the poles that held the balcony up. They had secreted their packs of Marlboro Reds in the pockets of their jeans lest the banker or the grocer who had agreed to chaperone the dance find them and confiscate them--the height of irony, since the grocer himself had probably sold them the cigarettes over the noon hour.

We watched the movements of the cool girls dancing on the floor. Billy was good-looking enough that he would probably get a chance to spin with LouAnn out on the floor once or twice before the evening finished. The two of them noticed the small foursome of outcast girls off to the side and made the kind of cutting remarks that only uncaring males could make, just loud enough for them to be heard. I cringed, but said nothing, knowing that even the slightest hint of defense would result in both of them ostracizing me for at least a month. I couldn't afford that, since the two of them were as close to a defense as I could find against abuse from the tougher crowd.

I stood and joked, aching to speak, to hold, to touch the girl across the room once more. I was sure that she felt the same about me, but if I dared to approach her group, she'd lose the few friends that she had. It wasn't worth taking the chance for either of us.

As the last few songs played on the hi-fi, we wandered off to the parking lot. She waited in the darkness after her friends drove off, I waited in my car for that moment. She opened the door and slid in beside me, her hands flew around my neck and she covered my face with kisses. After a few minutes, we resigned ourselves to our curfews. My father, in particular, was adamant about the car being back at the house before midnight and our assignations were dependent on having a vehicle to get us away from the lights of town.

"So," I said, "you have any idea about the Homecoming Dance?"

"Sure, " she replied, "the insurance agent is going to be chaperoning and he's got three little kids. He should be gone for hours. I'll let you know when he and his wife have left and the kids are in bed and you can slip in with no one the wiser."

"Sounds good. I really can't wait. Do you think we've got time for one more..."

She put a finger to my lips and smiled in the light of the streetlamps that we were passing. "You know better than that. Mom waits up and so does your dad. I'll see you at school and even if we can't talk, we can look at each other and smile, right?"

She stepped out of the car and into the gravel driveway of her house. The lights reflected from the puddles in front of her as I watched her go inside. I put the Buick into gear and headed off into the country....

I think back now, lyrics of a half-dozen classic rock songs running through my head--Night Moves, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Brown-Eyed Girl and so many others. I was troubled for years thinking that I had done her wrong by not being willing to acknowledge her in public, in front of our tormenters despite the cost.

A few years ago, I got an email from her. She, like myself, was a grandparent. She had married several times, lived all over the country and sometimes, when she saw the lightning in the distance, thought about how we felt together and regretted that we didn't know more about life when we had each other. My conscience was put to rest at last.

So here's to you, my brown-eyed girl--there is nothing quite as sweet as the wickedness of the completely innocent. I will never forget you, even if I live to be a hundred.

"I awoke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Aint it funny how the night moves
When you just dont seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in..."

Tom

Labels: coming of age, personal, teen angst, Tet, Tonica Days

October 1962....

It was over 75 miles to the center of Chicago, so we were going to be the survivors.

How much can a ten-year old understand about the end of the world? My father had lost the woman who would have been my mother in London, killed by a V-2 rocket as she left her job at the Windmill. He told me and my brother about the rockets and bombs then and that we'd have to stay in the basement for a few days while the dust settled, then we could come up and figure out what to do next.

I had been reading two serials in the Saturday Evening Post--Fail-Safe and Triumph, both explaining in detail the events leading up to a nuclear exchange. In my Uncle Joe's library in Oglesby, I had read Level 7 and Alas, Babylon so I knew what to expect. The cover of Level 7 had a blurb--"the story of a society hell-bent on nuclear destruction."

That certainly summed up the world I was seeing on the set in the living room. Each night, Huntley and Brinkley would show photos of ships blockading Cuba and read the announcements by the Soviet head of state and the American replies.

The Chicago Tribune had diagrams, concentric circles centered at State and Randolph with a legend describing the extent of destruction that would occur within each of them in the case of a 50-megaton explosion. There were listings of times that the USAF would be making sonic booms above the city, as they practiced for possible attacks on the Baku oil fields adjoining the Caspian Sea.

It was Indian Summer, the leaves has already turned and fallen, and we were burning the ones that my grandmother had removed from her yard. A pall of smoke hung in the still air over the farm. My father would tune between the stations on the radio listening for new information while he milked. The sky was filled with contrails since as many planes as possible were kept in the air to avoid being surprised on the ground by a first-strike.

Fifteen minutes from detected launch to detonation--that's what was expected. We waited for the CONELRAD symbol to come up on the television. The radio had two frequencies marked by the manufacturer that we were to tune to when the announcement was made of the attack.

I read, went to school--tried to get all of this off of my mind. It was easy sometimes, when Billy from down the road would clown on the bus. Still, part of my mind waited for the flash and my body would tense as I looked for a spot that would provide shade from the searing heat of the fireball.

The month drew to a close. The newspapers announced that Khrushchev had backed down and that the missles would be withdrawn. The flights overhead were less noticeable, although they never disappeared completely. The exercises at school returned to fire drills instead of students collecting in the halls and sitting against the walls in the interior hallway.

The anticipation didn't go away completely, either. As I grew to adulthood, there was always that little air-raid warden in the back of my head that cautioned me to look for a safe spot, perhaps under that desk over there. Occasionally, I would jerk uncontrollably when an unexpected flashbulb went off, then shake my head with embarrassment.

Twenty-seven years later, I watched on a television as the Berlin Wall was hacked to pieces. Some of our nuclear missles were going to be dismantled and their silos filled with concrete. As that evening progressed, the tension in my shoulders that had first appeared in the Missle October finally went away. I hoped at the time that it would be forever. As it was, the danger retreated for a decade, then returned from a different direction.

There are many idealistic projects that we can work to promote. There are hungry and hopeless people that we see every day. There are those scarred by violence that need the righteous to seek justice.

Being a child can be hard enough as it is. For the future of humanity, it is essential that no child on this planet needs to wake weeping from a dream in which they are startled to consciousness just in time to be burned alive.

Tom

Labels: Cold War, history, personal, Tet, Tonica Days

August, 1957...

The thing I most remember about being five was that everything that was man-made was drab.

The barn had not been painted in twenty years, so the bits of red paint on its sides had faded to rust color. From my four-foot high vantage point, you could not see the occasional traffic on the dirt road running past the house, but a car's approach was announced by a cloud of grey dust. Mother's shift had once been cheery, but years of washing it with the borax needed to soften the well water had faded it until you had to strain to make out the flowers that covered it.

By mid-morning, the black-and-white television had lost my interest. Captain Kangaroo was over, and Commander 5 wouldn't be on until noon. I sat, playing with my black and white kitten, Muffin, moving a stick through the grass until she chased it. I looked up into the blue, blue sky and watched the white contrails of a B-52 on watch move from one horizon to another.

Mother was hanging laundry out on the line, holding a wooden clothespin in her mouth while wrestling with the bedsheets. Occasionally, there was a breeze that would lift one up with a snap, its brown pin flying back into her basket, from which she retrieved it and started the process over again.

Lunchtime came. If I went slowly and looked carefully for cars, I was allowed to cross the road to my grandmother's house across the way. Her house was off-white, too, but was surrounded by riotous colors.

My grandmother had had a fight with the Catholic Church about twenty years before, and had never returned to Confession or Mass. Denied Communion, she spent her Sundays on her knees in her flower gardens, tending to the creations of God in a gesture of respect that she hoped Christ and His Mother would understand. If one judged by the results of her labors, God was very pleased with her.

Today, she was waiting for a mole. She sat on a kitchen chair in the shade of a two-hundred year old burr oak with a pitchfolk by her side. She held her finger to her mouth and pointed to the end of the tunnel-mound which had stopped moving at my approach. I stood like a statue waiting for the next step afraid to even breathe deeply. Suddenly, fluidly, she struck at the end of the mound and with one motion, lifted the impaled mole into the air. It described an arc of ten feet or so, landing wounded at the feet of her orange tiger cat, who made short work of the pest.

She made little sandwiches for me, cutting the slices of bread into quarters. We returned to the yard, she in her beige straw hat, me in my off-white T-shirt and brown shorts. I was amazed that everything with color had a name. The flowers were lillies and petunias and african violets. The red insects (not bugs, as she constantly reminded me) were called ladybugs and wouldn't bite if you wanted to pick one up. The insects with the shiny wings were beetles and I must kill them when I see them, since they ate flowers. The long green ones that prayed were Praying Mantises. They ate other insects that were pests, so they needed to be left alone to do their work.

The red birds were cardinals and had four different songs. In the little birdhouse was Jenny Wren, and when Grandma spoke or whistled to her, Jenny would reply with her 10-note song. Jenny was brown like the dust, and tiny. The robins had orange bellies and would occasionally pull a worm from the ground when Grandma wet the earth in a section of the garden.

The heat of the day settled in, and we drank lemonade in the shade. The cows, black and white Holsteins, grazed on the short grass outside the fence. Soon Mother would come for them, and it would be time to go home. For now, I watched, wide-eyed, as a yellow and black bumblebee moved from one flower to another, the sacs on its legs full to overflowing with pollen stolen from the garden.

My father returned from the fields where he had cultivated beans all day. You could just make out the faded blue of his shirt under the layers of dust. Supper was shades of brown and grey also--mashed potatoes and pork cooked so thoroughly as to have little flavor left in it. Mother put together a small bowl of vegetables--early squash and cucumbers from the garden. I waited until she looked the other way, then moved mine back into the bowl from my plate. She was obviously tired, since she didn't bother to reprimand me this time.

Dusk fell and my father finished up milking the dozen cows by hand, dumping the milk into cans that sat in the cold trough of water that served a dual purpose. It was deep enough to keep the cans cool overnight while also providing water for the cows who slept near it.

I was not tired, so I sat after sundown on the stones of the cistern cover waiting for the lightning bugs to come out to play....

And, for the first time, became aware of what was happening as the light faded. There was no moon that evening to dilute the view from our back yard. One by one, lights appeared in the sky--not the few visible from a backyard in 2007--but thousands of them, for there were no yard lights, no outside lights at all on farms then to obscure the view.

There were sweeping expanses of glory, the summer Milky Way casting a diffuse glow within the night. Not only were the lights everywhere in the sky, but they were different colors! In the very south, there was a red lantern shining among other bright stars that were arrayed in arcs. Further up the sky, there were bright orange and yellow stars standing out. Everywhere I looked, there was glory, even down to the edge of the sky near Highway 51 a mile away, where I could see the orange running lights of semis heading to their destinations.

Time passed. Occasionally, I remembered to breathe, sometimes not, for I realized that this was what my Grandmother had been talking about when she spoke of the presence of God. I learned a secret that day, one that has served me well for the rest of my life.

There are always times when life fades into the drab, when it is apparent that the vanities of mankind are impermanent. At those times, I can look upward and realize that the sky above me is the same one that I saw that day, so long ago. The house is gone, my Grandmother, too--gone like my kitten, Muffin.

The burr oak looks the same as it did that day. The fields still have corn and beans in them, but no cows low at the thought of grain for supper, and the skies will be there long after I'm gone, too.

Tom

Labels: childhood, personal, philosophy, Tet, Tonica Days

I was recently in Washington D.C. for the second time in my life. The first time, as with this time, the most pristine memories flew to me when standing in the Jefferson Monument. His words are powerful and beautiful, he is inspired by Heaven and optimism. The monument is a bit of a walk from the main Mall, the distance is a small test, Jefferson only wants guests, not tourists. I stood at his feet around midnight and alone, at least in my mind, and I looked up to see a giant. Only a statue of those proportions could express and communicate his genius. I stood there with my neck painfully, yet pleasantly, crooked on high...I stood there as a child, I am a child before him. I read his words on the four surrounding walls with slow meter, admiration, wonder, inspiration, and jealousy. The color of the lights in his great hall are a soft orange, eerie as the color of ghosts, & the perfect shade to express his ideas, an enduring burning and not too brightly such that they could not be understood by every human being, alive or dead.

Even if America is someday supplanted as the world's greatest nation and its physical reign is only 300 or so years, our intellectual reign will be infinite. The influence and courage of our ideas, of Jefferson's enkindling, will ripple on and improve humanity's plot in the universe. America embodies liberty, but we do not own liberty, it is a human idea owned only by God. We have and will share liberty and that will be America's enduring empire.

Here is one random, yet clarifying quote from him and about him:

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens....There has never been a moment of my life in which I should have relinquished for it the enjoyments of my family, my farm, my friends & books.

~Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Melish, 13 January 1813)

Labels: Billy Joe Mills, Founders, personal

Thanks, Augur, I really appreciate the support that you gave me when I was so ill.

I still remember, three days off the operating table, going to Lincoln Square and having that marvellous lunch and then playing with toys in that little shop in Lincoln Square. I could hardly walk, but it was so delightful to feel alive again after having the oxygen supply restored to my brain.

I had been toying with writing a "wise old guy" post today and thankfully you've given me an excuse to write one.

I am taking extreme pleasure in the fact that as of today, I can "put in my papers" if the powers-that-be offend me. There's a lot of freedom in being able to tell "The Man" to go to hell. Lifetime paid health care at Carle is nothing to sneeze at, so to speak.

Being 55 is a very strange position. My youth is still very close to the center of my mind, but it's tempered with years and years of new memories and new data explaining the events that I witnessed and in which I participated.

My grandmother warned me that I would, for all practical purposes, remain about 20 or so in my mind. It's hard to describe in actuality. Sometimes it seems like I fell asleep one day when I was a Junior in college and woke up with pains in places that I didn't know that I had. My essence (my "soul", I guess you could call it) is still the same as it was then. What has happened, mostly, is that the little voice in my head that says, "Tom, you know that's probably not a good idea" is a lot louder and I have a tendency to listen to it a lot more often.

While I was really sick and dependent, I realized that one of the practical reasons for being a good and decent person to your family is that you don't have to die alone. It also reminded me that the more people you have in your family, the less of a burden you are to any one of them.

I can see now that this post is going to ramble a bit and sometimes dip into the maudlin, so please bear with me, I only had a couple ideas when I sat down at the computer and this is going to be stream-of-consciousness in some parts.

Advice to the blogger-boys here who are just starting out in your careers....

Try not to allow yourself to get totally defined by what you do to make money. You're a lot more than your job. I've read a lot of Studs Terkel, as I've mentioned earlier, and his interviews point out that everyone has a story. A lot of the time, it has little or nothing to do with what the person does to make a living. The job that you do have, however, if you're going to survive it, needs to be one that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. If that's not true, you're just killing time on the way to the grave, and believe me, you arrive there before you know it.

A college degree is currently vastly overrated in our society. I know that you don't want to hear this, since you've gone way into debt in order to finance your future, but it's often true. I figure that about a third of the students who come to university would have been better off to try something else--the competition for the jobs requiring degrees is too fierce for the lower third to do much but drudge work in the corporations hiring them. kitten sent me an old USENET post from a disgruntled physicist who said that he had more friends whose lives had been ruined by getting a Physics Ph.D. than by doing drugs. There's a lot of truth in that.

Therefore, be careful in initial assessments of people that you meet that took the non-traditional paths in education. Often, they're going to be the ones that are actually building your McMansion, with the help of guys from Mexico with sixth-grade educations. A degree right now increases your lifetime earnings by about 58%. That sounds like a hell of a lot, but keep in mind that once you have your housing, food and the care of your wife/husband/children taken care of, anything left over is usually either frittered away or spent on things that may not have any meaning in the long run. (You also have to spend your twenties and/or your early thirties paying for that expensive education, too. Sometimes it's better just to detail cars.)

I have found that once those needs are met, day-to-day happiness trumps money any day of the week. Money really, really does not buy happiness (except in the possible case of Augur and drunken dwarf hookers.)

Politics....

I've found that a lot of liberal thought is based on the principle that humanity is perfectable. That's a craptastic idea. I've also found that conservative thought is based upon the premise that humanity cannot be improved. That's a depressing, as well as craptastic idea.

I think my Libertarianism is actually middle ground between those two ideas--it's based on the perhaps radical idea that if you leave people the fuck alone, they'll muddle through and occasionally come up with something that just might save the human race--or at least give us something to talk about on the 'Net.

Speaking of the 'Net, I cannot bear listening to the "blame America for everything in the world that's screwed up" crowd. I mean, seriously, what other nation on earth would invent something like the Internet and then give it away?

At any rate, I want to take this occasion to thank and send love to my Wives and Husband and to my children and grandchildren out in the world. I love all of you more than I possibly can express. I know that I regularly screw up, but you keep loving me no matter what.

I want to thank Billy and Brian for the opportunity last fall to turn my ideas into electrons on a regular basis and put them out for everyone to see. You and the rest of the regular contributors and commenters on this blog are my best friends, even if we've not all met--you keep me honest and thoughtful at the same time.

And a special thanks to Augur--I wish you were my son. You make me proud of you every day.

I've been given a second chance at life. I'll try hard not to blow it.

Tom

Labels: birthday, personal, Tet

This one's for Kevin...

So, return with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear--specifically to the Fall of 1984. As I had mentioned in my last article, I was in sad, sad shape. My crazy drunken wife had left me, I was totally socially inept while sober and I was lonely as hell.

However, by gosh and golly, I was not unarmed in the battle of the sexes. I was a trained engineer! There had to be an approach to the situation that could be devised using systems theory. All it would take would be some study, and I'd have it.

First of all, the reasons for my abject terror had to be analyzed. Inexperience in social systems was the main problem. In the past, I would start working on a pitcher of brew and my underlying Jedi Master powers would be unleased. I would use a few mind tricks, turn on the charm and the young lady in question would fall into my arms. The main problem in that case was merely remembering what her name was the next morning.

This was clearly unacceptible for obvious reasons. I decided that some research was in order. I staked out a section of the Illini Union where the coffee was flowing freely and observed the successful dating tactics of sober men. After a week or so, the evidence led me to the conclusion that the successful men were actually having conversations with the women in question.

Unfortunately, this presented a problem. Under normal circumstances, I could speak very well on any number of abstruse subjects--astro- and high-energy physics, gas chemistry and quality assurance all immediately came to mind. The problem that this presented was that the very small number of women who were working on my project were either already taken or gay.

Somewhere out there, there had to be something that was non-threatening, intricate enough that I could demonstrate my intelligence, and available for me to learn on my lunch hour, since I was working ten-hour days. Sports? Nah--too much competition from buff rugby players. Politics, religion? Nope--too controversial, and I'd get raving and they'd get scared right off.

Suddenly, it hit me: SOAP OPERAS. I knew that my mother liked them and that some women spent an inordinate amount of time watching them. Non-threatening, and fun--fit the bill completely. One of the bars on campus at the time had a projection television, so I walked over from Loomis Lab to Campustown at noon and sat down in front of it and watched the program that they tuned to every day--All My Children.

Well, within a week I began rushing to get there in time to get a good seat. By the end of three weeks, I was hopelessly hooked on the adventures of Tad and Jenny Martin, Erica Kane and the suave but evil Adam Chandler. Unfortunately, I had fallen into the program to the extent that I didn't even notice the people around me (including women) while it was running. I moved from my original venue to Murphy's, since the food there was better.

So, this brings us to the day after Thanksgiving '84. I had a pile of books in front of me (IAU Symposia, since I was working my way through the Astronomy portion of the Physics Library) and was standing and shouting at Tad Martin on the TV, who had been caught sleeping with both Liza Colby and her mother, Marion during the same weekend. It suddenly occurred to me that at the end of the bar, there was this cute blonde girl who also had a stack of books in front of her that was shouting at Tad, too and saying many of the same things that I was.

Hmmmm. Very interesting. First check for wedding ring. Crap. At least she's not gay. Books are science-fiction and feminist-lit. Acceptible.

Oh, wait, I recognize her. She does the night shift at the Honky Hen (as we called the White Hen convenience store) across the street from the bar--11 to 7, as a matter of fact. Check--she's used to weirdos. This is looking better and better.

I move closer and engage conversation circuits. We have a good laugh over the exploits of everyone's favorite Soap Lothario. Early on, I determine that she's been separated from her husband and is casually dating a guy. Bingo. Oh, damn, how do I analyze her personality?

Aha!!! "So, my brother is getting one of those new VCRs and we were going to get some movies over Thansgiving weekend. What five movies would you recommend that we pick up?"

Ice was broken and mission accomplished. Whew. When I returned from my trip up to the farm, I saw her in Murphy's again the next Friday. We went to Papa Del's Pizza and when the check came, she reached for it and said in a firm, feminist voice, "How dare you presume that you were going to pay for it!" I smiled wryly and replied, "How dare you presume that we're not going to split it!" That was all it took. I walked her home and her tuxedo cat, Patience (named after a frontier Lesbian,) jumped onto my lap and began purring, even though she "never did that to anyone." Her couch looked strangely familiar, and it turned out that she had met the woman who would become Elderwife at the gay coffeehouse in town and had gotten the couch from her.

Let us draw the curtain now on this romantic scene and just say that it has been a fine twenty-two plus years of cats, gender issues, books and hours watching Tad grow from a teenage seducer to a middle-aged grandfather. I guess this just goes to show that no matter how big a geek you are, there is always hope for you--if you understand how to approach a problem. Who knows, you might get an entire basket of kittens.

Tom

Labels: engineering, personal, romance, Tet

So, no shit, there I was--March 31st 1982. I was riding in my car with my friend Jan, whom I considered the hottest of the hot--after all, she was an artist's model as well as being a fiery redhead with a mind like a white-hot poker. She was all of those metaphors and more. She was also a hopeless drunkard like myself.

She and I and my wife at the time, Ginny, were scheduled to arrive at a party at our friend Michael's place at 6:30. It was a Saturday afternoon, and she had been at an earlier party that day with Big Sue and Igor. I stopped by to pick her up there and we were on the way to Michael's when she demanded that I stop the car.

I pulled over to the side of Race Street and she proceeded to roll down the passenger window of my car and threw up all over the right side of it. This was certainly disconcerting, to say the least. I tossed her a couple napkins from my glovebox and we continued on our way.

I asked her if she wanted to go home and sleep it off, but she said that she was getting her second wind. We swung by my house, picked up Ginny and arrived just a bit late. As per usual, the three of us headed for the keg in my case and the hard liquor for the two of them. I watched Jan for the rest of the evening getting drunker and drunker until she passed out in a heap at around 11pm. I walked out to my car and looked at the right side of it and realized in one of those moments when time stops that I was just like her.

So I quit drinking. I had been drunk for the last five years--solidly, without a break. Generally, I would start the day by putting a couple shots of blended whiskey in my coffee for work, go over to the bowling alley next to the factory for two beers during my half hour lunch and then stop off for one or two after work before driving home and picking Ginny up for a night at Murphy's that would end with the two of us picking up a case at closing to hold us over until morning.

Most of the entire period of 1977 to 1982, as a matter of fact, is a blur at best. I vaguely remember getting married, but to this day, I cannot tell you what year it was, just that it was towards the end of October. I certainly cannot tell you anything about late 1981 or early 82 beyond who the President was and that the economy seemed better. However, the calendar came screeching back to me beginning on April Fools' Day.

I took a few days off of work, since I figured that I would be a little bit shaky. Since then, I have learned that in many cases of alcoholics coming off of a five-year bender, the heart simply stops and it is highly recommended that one commits themselves to a hospital so that drugs can safeguard the body until the DTs fade.

Some addicts who have done both swear that the withdrawl from alcohol is an order of magnitude more horrific than that of heroin. I cannot say this for certain. However, I remember vividly that for three days I writhed in my bedroom while thousands of hallucinatory fleas jumped upon me and bit me while I scratched my arms bloody trying to kill even a few of them. I threw up anything that I tried to eat and shook and shivered and banged my head against the waterbed until it would all go away for a few minutes. Then it began again.

Finally, after about 72 hours, I collapsed into a deep near-coma. When I awoke a day later, I was shaky, but could keep soup down, at least. I was surprisingly enough not tempted by beer, since I realized that even one would send me back into the spiral that would cause me to have to withdraw again. Nothing was worth that.

So, now my problems really started. You see, stopping drinking does not end the difficulties of an alcoholic. All of the problem in my life were still there. The irrational decisions that I had made at work were still there to haunt me. My wife was addicted to both cocaine and gin and had enough millions to buy as much of either as she wanted. I was a manic-depressive that had been self-medicating with alcohol, caffiene and cigarettes and was still doing the latter two. And, most important, I was still an asshole.

Now, a lot of alcoholics end up in AA. It's the surest way to stay sober--as a matter of fact, only about one in six who do not use AA manage to make it for even five years. My problem was that I was a militant atheist and the invocation of a higher power was close enough to religion to cause me to avoid contact.

The only way that I could see fit to manage my life was to do it with philosophy. The avoidance of drink was not for myself, but was done so that I was no longer a menace to my children, my co-workers or the poor bastards that had the extremely poor luck to be on the road at the same time as myself. By putting others first, I began living for more than just myself.

Secondly, I had to have complete and total faith in the virtue of what I was doing. I ruthlessly examined every facet of my life and, a bit at a time, began the moral repairs.

Because the tendency to return to the bottle with rationalizations and denial, it is absolutely critical that the non-practicing drunk never, ever allow himself to accept his performance of an immoral action as anything but anathema. One misstep is enough to empower the little voice inside one's head that explains patiently to the alcoholic that "it's ok, one drink won't hurt...no one has to know."

A pure heart is a necessity to continue living. This is part of the reason that so few drunks actually make it in the real world. AA makes such ethical strictures part of a daily ritual and formalizes the necessary moral boundaries for the alcoholic. Independents like myself have had to indoctrinate themselves with an examination of each and every action to see whether or not it is unethical. We know that one misstep, one mistake, one fumble will have a high liklihood in resulting in our deaths, and possibly the deaths of those around us.

Time passed. My marriage had been based on our mutual love of drink, and once it became obvious that that was over, we found that we had nothing in common. She ran off with her cocaine dealer, (who not coincidentally had stolen my first wife and badly mistreated her) and turned up dead within a year. She had snorted enough cocaine to give herself a stroke, which had occurred while she was bathing in an oversized bathtub. She slipped beneath the surface and was deprived of enough oxygen to make her brain-dead before she was found and resusitated.

I began examining my relationships with women--I had never spoken to one amorously without having at least two or three drinks in me prior to my sobriety. I solved the shyness problem by formulating human relations as an engineering problem. [There's a great story there, involving how I met kitten. It's too long for now, but I promise that I'll tell it in the future.]

Within a year of sobriety, I had landed my job as a DOE contractor with CDF. Within five years, my daughter returned to a home that was now safe for her. Gradually, trust was reestablished with the rest of my children, although my first wife remained convinced (and is to this day) that my sobriety was merely an act and that I would revert to evil at the first opportunity.

Other people came into my life. I found an effective medication to dampen the highs and lows of my bipolarity. I moved from the real world to academia at about the 10 year mark and continued to improve my life. At the present, I cannot remember the last time that I really craved a drink, to tell the truth. Often the family has liquor of one kind or another in one of the refrigerators in the house, and I don't even notice.

This coming Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of the night that I chose to live. I'll look at my children (and three of my grandchilden) who will be visiting during that time and feel so much joy that I have been allowed the luxury of those extra years.

This one thing, above and beyond everything else I tell you, "To thine own self be true."

Tom

Labels: personal, philosophy, recovery, Tet

Folks that have listened to me speak are certainly aware that I'm a proponent of what is termed SMIILE--Space Migration, Intelligence Increase and Life Extension. Ever since the death of Robert Anton Wilson, I've been meaning to tell some stories about him, Doctor Leary, the Illuminatus Trilogy and the High Weirdness Weekend(tm). If you don't know who Timothy Leary is, I suggest you follow this link first.

Let me start out by talking about my buddy, Scout. When I arrived at the University of Illinois in 1970, I felt intimidated by the older hippies there. Even though most of them were three years older or less than I was, they had lived through massive changes within the Twin Cities--the start of the Community Council (the alternative city government), the establishment of West Main Street in Urbana as the Hippy Ghetto, the burning of the North End and the campus demonstrations and riots. Being a poor farm boy from a graduating class of 28, it was hard to get the cow manure scraped off of my shoes.

Scout was my native guide. When he drew himself up to his full height, he nearly reached 5 foot 2 inches and his weight managed to hit 93 pounds if he had just eaten and not shot any speed for a day or two. This was before the radical hippies had long hair in the Midwest, so he had a ducktail with a goatee and handlebar mustache. To tell the truth, he looked like the Mayor of Munchkinland would, had the part been played by Satan.

Scout taught me how to tell stories, how to flirt with a woman and that being from a small town wasn't necessarily a handicap, since we had a tendency to speak plainly. He introduced me to the rest of the hippies and made sure that I was as comfortable as possible.

He had a great story, though, about Doctor Tim. It was the autumn of one of the years right before I got to school. Scout was wandering through the basement of the Illini Union and noticed a tall man in a white robe with a flower-chain around his neck who was wearing sandals in an Illinois November. Scout walked up to him and said, "Doctor Leary, I presume?"

Scout would say, "He dug it!" and go on talking about the wise sage and his philosophies. At the time, Leary had mysteriously vanished from prison and the Weather Underground was hiding him somewhere in the country. Every week, there would be a "Leary Sighting" somewhere or another. Finally, the Doctor surfaced in Switzerland.

Fast forward now to the early 1980s. Leary had been recaptured and spent a few more years in prison. I had lost track of what was going on with him, since I was drinking about as much as he was at the time. Imagine my surprise when I found a flyer announcing a debate by him and G. Gordon Liddy, (the man who had arrested him while Liddy was working for the State's Attorney's office in NY state.) They were going to be at the Auditorium in the next week, so a bunch of us got together and got there very early to get good seats.

It was a strange, strange debate. Liddy took the side of the traditionalist, all-American believer in patriotism and manifest destiny. Leary didn't really look at the audience as much as look through them at a cosmic target somewhere on the other side of Venus. He spoke of trans-humanity resulting from the unlocking of higher states of conciousness and how they would allow us to colonize the galaxy. Liddy kept looking at him with raised eyebrows and Leary would smile knowingly across the intervening space.

Afterwards, my friends and I decided to head for Coslow's, which was a campus bar that was a socialist/intellectual hangout. (They also had nachos that people had crawled six blocks after a hard night of drinking to obtain.) We had reached Daniels Street, the home of the Frat Bar Extraordinaire, Kam's, when we noticed a very lost-looking Guru of Psychedelia talking to a not-so-bright, but extremely beefy bouncer.

"Excuse us, Doctor Leary?"

"Yes?"

"What seems to be the problem here?"

"Well , these nice young men from a fraternity told me that this would be a good place for me to get a drink, but the attendant here at the door doesn't want to let me in."

"Hey, we know a much better place a block over, come on...."

So, we trooped over to Coslow's where folks like Railroad Terry, his sister Jan and Rasta Wilson were already sitting at this bar's version of the Group W Bench. The incoming four of us, including Tim, sat down and, of course, ordered nachos.

What followed was a couple of the strangest two hours of my life. We all talked about big things, future things, evolutionary things. The Good Doctor dominated the conversation, of course. He explained that human beings were a product of their brain's wiring, which was a result of both their genetics and environment. This wiring enabled or retarded their development in life depending on how it agreed with what was necessary to get by in life. This wasn't all, though. It was possible, using various psycho-active substances, meditation or ceremonial magic to rewire parts of the brain--the programming could be altered, just as a computer's programs could be altered by installing new instructions. At closing time, we parted. Some of us were shaking our heads and the rest were very far away, envisioning a world where the evolved lived like some kind of secret superheroes.

Another nine years passed. I realized that I was not utilizing my full potential, so I found a job working on a project investigating the first few microseconds of the universe's existence at Fermilab. The conversation with Leary had demonstrated to me that we could rise above our circumstances and that each one of us had the potential to contribute greatness to humanity.

During Labor Day weekend of 1991, kitten and I attended the World Science-Fiction Convention in Chicago. It was an amazing weekend, since during the period beginning on Thursday and ending on the following Monday, the following events were simultaneously taking place in Chicago:

The World SF Convention
The NORML Legalize Marijuana Activist Convention
The Chicago Jazz Festival
The opening of the Battletech Center, the first VR video arcade
The Libertarian Party Presidential Nominating Convention
The Wilson-Leary Virtual Reality Roadshow

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the greatest panel ever in the history of weird--a full two hours featuring Tim Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shea, and Philip Jose Farmer. During the panel, the members spoke on the nature of reality, the paranoid truths of the Illuminatus Trilogy, and "where do we go from here?" for humanity. Wilson threw in his pet theory that, since English didn't have a number-for-letter transposition possible, anagrams were the way in which to do English gematria.

Following the discussion, I wandered down the street to where Leary and Wilson had their show set up. It had a bank of DEC computers and heavy air-conditioning. They had a helmet and glove combination. I sat in a chair and they fitted me with the helmet, which covered my entire field of vision, (even the peripheral) and slid the glove onto my hand.

The screen turned on on the inside and it was no big deal. It was a badly-depicted version of Seattle, nothing to see here.....

And then I turned my head, the view turned with me and my brain lurched (as did my stomach) when I suddenly was in the middle of a badly-depicted reality. Seattle was there, around me, moving. It was the strangest thing that I had ever seen. Then, Tim said, "Point the finger of the glove up." And I did. And I began flying. I could control my movements with the glove. I soared over the skyline, did laps around the Space Needle and dive-bombed some orcas in the middle of the Sound. I did this for what seemed like hours, yet only took the fifteen minutes for which I had paid.

When I finished, I looked at them and said, "How long? How long before this is everywhere?" Tim chuckled and RAW said, "Well, my guess is that it'll be used first for pornography and recreation long before it ever makes it to use in day-to-day life. That's all right, when humanity needs it, it'll be ready."

They're both gone now, but every time I walk down the road in TES:Oblivion or fly over Paragon City on my way to a meeting of the Global Heroics Supergroup in City of Heroes I think about them and raise a silent toast. We're not there yet, perhaps a generation more, but we're going somewhere else. Sometimes I worry I'll end up like Moses on the wrong side of the Jordan forever in the end, but other times I know that I've been at least afforded a glimpse of the Promised Land.

Tom

Labels: future, history, personal, Tet, weirdness

It's about time for my family's annual house-party weekend, Kittencon. Here's your chance to meet me, Elderwife, kittent and the rest of the folks that I described in my articles on commune life. Compare the room colors with my inadequate descriptions, argue politics and religion with me in person, and find out that yes, indeed, everything I tell you in here is true.

This invitation goes out to all of my fellow bloggers here, our regular commenters and the gentle readers out there on the Internet. The house does have a finite size, so I may exercise a cut-off at two dozen readers--first come, first serve.

Obviously, I am not going to give out our address and phone number in a public forum, so in order to answer our RSVP, you can contact us at the kittencon email address given on the webpage or you can write to me at [tcgtrf{at}gmail{dot}com].

This especially goes out to my neighbor, Brandon, who lives three blocks away, but mysteriously avoids getting close enough to be assimilated by the Borg.

See you in April!

Tom

Labels: par-tee, personal, Tet

The far north suburban village of Fox Lake neighbors my hometown of McHenry; they're both about an hour and a half northwest of Chicago. For those who live in this region, there is an informal hierarchy establishing the trashiest towns in the area. McHenry, I'm afraid, is pretty high up in the rankings. In most people's eyes, however, Fox Lake takes the top prize.

I bring it up because the Tribune reports today (sorry, subscription required) on Fox Lake's refusal to enact a smoking ban, bucking a trend followed by several nearby towns. Smoking bans have been debated ad nauseum, and I don't want to start one up here (regular readers will assume correctly that I favor them and that certain other contributors to Urbanagora vehemently oppose them), but I did want to highlight this quote from Fox Lake citizen and barbershop owner Ron Swanson that made me chuckle:

That's what this town is all about--drinking and smoking and pizza and hamburgers...and I think it should stay this way.

Am I being a liberal elitist for laughing at this man? Yes. Will this post provoke comments haranguing me for my snobbery? I wouldn't doubt it. Nevertheless: hahahahahaha!

Labels: Brian, personal, role of government, society

It has recently come to my attention that I am increasingly finding myself surrounded by people who have grown up in affluence and have for the most part only really interacted with other people who are like them in socio-economic terms. So I decided that I need to share a few stories from the other side of the tracks.

First a bit of background. I spent the first eleven years of my life in Highland Park, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles, California. When I was growing up there in the 80s it was mostly a lower middle class to working class Latino neighborhood. What most folks would call a ghetto. I happened to be a bit lucky and live right at the foot of the more affluent neighborhood of Mt. Washington, so my immediate surroundings were pretty nice. Two or three blocks away was a different story. When I was very young it was alright, but as I got older, either the neighborhood deteriorated or I just opened my eyes. I tend to think it was a little bit of both. Highland Park is mostly known for being one of the oldest parts of L.A. and its rather extensive gang culture dominated by the Avenues.

I was about nine when I realized just how dangerous the seemingly "normal" neighborhood I called home was. I remember being in my room watching TV when the front door opened and my brother, five and a half years older, about 15 at the time stumbled in with a girl supporting him. He was staggering and crying. She left shortly afterward and he stumbled through the living room and kitchen up the stairs to his room and locked the door. I don't think I saw him for two days after that. My parents had to practically break the door down to get in and when they did they found a sorry sight.

He was bruised from head to toe purple, black, and yellow. He could barely open his eyes because they were so swollen. He had small cuts all over his body and a very distinct impression of a ring on his forehead. My pop immediately took him to the police station where he was asked to identify who beat him. He saw quite a few of them but said nothing because he knew that pointing anyone out would mean that next time he wouldn't be so lucky as to only be beaten to a bloody pulp. For the next few days he stayed up in his room groaning with pain. I went up to visit him sometimes but he didn't tell me much about it.

It wasn't until three years ago that he finally told me the whole story and gave me permission to tell it in a paper I was writing for school. At the time of the incident, he was in a tagging crew (for those of you scratching your heads, a tagging crew is basically a small gang that commits petty crimes - car jacking, petty theft, and of course vandalism) that was in conflict with the Avenues. A member of his crew got into a fight with a guy in the Avenues and won (big mistake by the way) which led to what I gather to be a series of events that got the entire crew "green lighted" by the mafia. I'm told that "green lighting" is essentially permission to kill without reprisal. So a day or two after this fight, it was on. As they got out of school a sizeable group of at least 50 was waiting outside for them and it was every man for himself.

As he hurried home, a van and two cars pulled up and unloaded and the men who got out asked the dread question "where you from esse (or essay, however the hell you'd spell it)?" There being quite a sense of pride and honor in gang subcultures, he told the truth. So for the next few minutes the fifteen or so guys took turns beating the crap out of a kid that was younger than probably even the youngest among them. He was saved by a friend's sister who ran in and chased all the guys away (yes, Latina women can be that scary and powerful). She helped him up and helped him towards home as the guys cursed them and threatened him.

Two blocks from home another car pulled up and two men got out, one of whom was the biggest man my brother has ever seen in his life (and trust me, he's a big guy). Again with the question, and again with the obstinate response. The big guy was the one who gave him the ring impression that he had for the next month. All this was four days after he had been jumped into the gang. So basically he had been beaten three times in four days, and two of those times were within five minutes of each other and could very easily have cost him his life.

It took him about a month to fully recover physically and I'm not sure he has ever fully recovered otherwise. While I'd like to say this was an atypical occurrence in my early years, I'd be lying. Granted my brother was never beaten like that again, but we knew a lot of people. I remember one guy (a dwarf now that I think of it) whose cheek looked like he was carrying a golf ball in it permanently because someone hit him in the face with a baseball bat. I had my own beatings, knew people who were shot, preganant at 12...ah but those are all for another time and another story. Until then, welcome to the other side.

Labels: Brandon, crime, personal, society

~a trip down the historical rabbit-hole by Tom (tet)

So, no shit, there I was...

I was bound and determined that I was not going to miss the radical excitement this year. It was the first anniversary of the shootings at Kent State. Tuesday was one of the two days that I had arranged in the week during spring semester to have no classes, so I was going to spend it seeking out the radicals and participating in something meaningful to commemorate the fallen students.

I had seen the Daily Illini photos of the National Guardsmen in front of Murphy's Pub. When I had come down to the university the summer before for early registration, four blocks of Champaign's North End lay in ashes. Every ground-level window facing into the Quad had been smashed and had then been covered with a sheet of plywood. The hippies had painted upon them stirring pictures of Superhero Hippies with Omegas on their chests, their fists raised in defiance against the government and oppression.

Damn, I was pissed that I had missed the action! Not this May 4th, no way, no how. I went from room to room in Noble Hall looking for students to accompany me on my quest for radical meaning and hot, patchouli-wearing chicks in khaki. Unfortunately, the dorm was full of former farm boys, engineers and journalism majors and they had all headed for class about an hour before I had pulled myself from bed. This was going to be harder than I thought.

As I was heading back toward my room, I spotted my buddy Pat at the other end of the hall. We met in front of my room and he held out a surprise for me. Since he also had no classes on Tuesday, we often would spend the day together in varying mental states. Today, he had two doses of Window Pane in a small envelope in his hand.

Now, for those of you of the younger two generations, I have to tell you this was something very special. The effective dose of LSD was measured in hundreds of micrograms. When you took a dose that came in a tablet, you had no idea what had been mixed with it to alter its properties. However, Window Pane was clear polyethylene that had had the proper dose pipetted onto it. It was pure as was available anywhere. Pat had obtained a small treasure for us.

Now, I had never tripped during the day before, although I had quite a bit of experience of evenings under controlled situations in dorm rooms. We had both heard horror stories about students who had burned out their eyeballs staring at the sun, but a quick glance outside showed us that there was a light overcast, so we promised each other that, no matter what, we weren't going to look up.

Down it went. Pat agreed to accompany me on my journey to find other folks interested in doing something in remembrance and we headed for the Quad and the Union. Nobody. Nothing going on--everyone was going about their business, attending classes, playing bongos on the Quad and watching the little green worms drop from the new trees that had been planted on the west side near the Administration building.

And then the Acid hit. (A few days later, Pat and I found out that each of the little poly panes contained not the usual 250, but a full 500 micrograms of the substance.) The spring colors suddenly took on hues that we hadn't really ever seen before. The students began to exhibit more and more of the attributes of a circus parade and the leaves in the trees were forming arcane writing that you couldn't quite decipher. There still were no radicals, no demonstration, nothing. Where the hell were they?

The Alma Mater! They always met at the Alma Mater, where someone would crawl up onto the seat with a bullhorn and speak to everyone. Quickly, we gathered enough of our loose wits to enable us to head that way.

Still nothing. Green Street, looking toward the engineering campus, was taking on the characteristics of a Van Gogh painting. The edges of the brick buildings were becoming more and more indistinct and light breezes were creating wind-chimes in our heads as the uncut grass blew in waves. This would never do. We decided after some thought that the best thing to do would be to start a demonstration ourselves, by burning our draft cards. We pulled them out of our wallets, spend a minute or two figuring out which end of a cigarette lighter was the business end and within a few minutes, the ashes blew across the grass toward the Union.

In actuality, we were about seven hours too early. By sunset, a huge crowd had gathered at the statue and were worked into a frenzy by a bullhorn toting firebrand. They marched across campus aimlessly, looking a great deal like a warband of Huns that had asked the Pope for directions to Rome. After going back and forth for an hour and a half, they decided that the proper thing to do was to pillage Follett's Bookstore. Evidently, someone had told them that Nixon was planning on filling the bays of B-52 bombers with overpriced textbooks.

We, of course, were still puzzling over the lack of action. Where could the radicals be? Finally, it dawned on us both--they were not here because the police had scared them off. This was clearly unacceptable. What to do, what to do? Aha! If the students could see the police cars coming from a long way off, they'd be able to scatter and not get caught. They'd be free to pursue their aims of free speech followed by long hours of sex afterwards. Being an engineer, my mind began going over ways to make police cars more easily visible although my analysis kept being interrupted by moments when the stoplights became hilariously funny. Suddenly, a bright light exploded in front of me (literally) and the answer became clear--if they were bright orange, they'd be visible for blocks and blocks.

At this time, there was a small hardware store about four blocks from the statue. After some discussion, we remembered which direction the store was in and headed down a street lined with trashcans that would move slightly when you were looking at them out of the corner of your eye. We were surprisingly successful in locating the store and even more fortunate in finding that there were three cans of bright, day-glo paint--(you know, the kind that are used for safety purposes). The total cost came to just over five dollars, which presented a problem, since both of us had forgotten how dollar bills were used. There ensued a short discussion with a bored manager, who finally just took all of our bills from us, did some mysterious thing with them behind the counter and returned others.

Off we went. At this time, the campus police station was located in a decrepit building on the engineering campus. It took a bit of exploration, but we spotted it at last and noticed that there were, indeed, several of the offensive police cars parked in front of the place. It began to dawn on Pat, who was a bit more massive than I and therefore had taken a relatively smaller dose that this might not be as good an idea as we had originally thought. He suggested that he watch from across the street and signal me if anyone came by.

I got right to work. It was delightful, the feel of the can in my hand was almost sensual, the orange paint coated the surfaces almost completely the first time. I had finished the right rear fender of the first car and was just starting on the door when I sensed that I was not alone. I glanced over my right shoulder and noted, indeed, that there was a rather large police officer standing behind me.

"WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?"

"I am painting police cars orange so they'll be easier to spot!"

"YOU, STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!!!"

"I will not cease my actions until my mission is complete!"

"WELL THEN, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST!"

I drew myself up to my full five foot, four inches, one hundred twenty-six pounds of defiance and said,

"YOU CAN'T ARREST ME, I'M INVISIBLE!"

At which point I spun upon my heel and headed off towards Green Street. Pat, watching from across the street, saw the entire exchange and watched in first horror, then amusement as the officer stared in my general direction, suddenly looked puzzled, looked on the far side of the police car and then went back into the building shaking his head and talking to himself.

By the time we had joined up again and reached Green Street, we had run across Jane, a young lady of somewhat Bohemian tastes. Since Pat and I were both eighteen years old, radical activities disappeared immediately from the plans radar. She invited us over to her apartment where we spent the remainder of the afternoon listening to Dory Previn records and trying in vain to find out what was behind Skirt #1. By evening, the dose had worn off enough that we were exhausted and I spent the evening and night on her couch.

And this, guys, is why I ended up paying full price for my Physics 107 textbook.

Tom

Labels: history, personal, police/community relations, Tet

~By Tom (tet)

In this third part, I want to get down to the nuts and bolts of the interaction within our family. It might be helpful for the reader to go back to the article I wrote two weeks ago about why the communes in the past failed. By contrasting, it may be possible to determine why we're still together.

Finances

We're run as a true communist entity (in other words, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.") This, of course, only works within a group that is truly dedicated to the continued survival of the group as a whole, as well as having a deep-seated moral belief in fairness and equality. These necessary qualities are, as I have mentioned earlier, one of the main reasons that communism is limited in size for a working arrangement, since the more people you have within the commune, the more likely you are going to have someone who is only going to pay lip-service to the concepts.

Each of us is able to have some personal property--computers, automobiles, business inventory (as well as personal luxuries). We are each required, for the most part, to pay for those items individually, although high-cost auto repairs are sometimes shared by the household as an entity, since all benefit from the convenience of the car working.

Each of us has an income. The amount of money needed for each individual as spending money has been calculated and agreed on by both the individual and the family as a whole.

In my case, for example, I take home $1400+ each two weeks after contributing to retirement and paying taxes. I require about $250 in spending money for that same period. In addition, I have a credit card that I use for luxury items, a car payment and the co-payment on my half-dozen prescriptions (these all total about $625 per month). All of these are deduced from my net income. The remainder of the money goes to the house fund to pay mortgage and taxes, put into savings for home repair and buy food and household items.

This calculation is repeated for the other members of the household. If someone is between jobs or if their business is hitting a slow month, they can withdraw enough from the household funds to make sure their needs are met.

Decision Making

By and large, the major decisions of the household are made by consensus. Our evening meals double as business meetings. Each member is free to bring up anything that they feel requires a decision on the part of the whole. Debate is free-wheeling, with the one major rule that yelling is not allowed at the table. This is strictly enforced.

All decisions MUST be unanimous. The result of this rule is that only those things that really are required are done. In addition, it prevents the formation of blocs, which occur in democratically-run communes. It also prevents one person from becoming a despot and forcing the others to go along with their plans exclusively, since even one dissident is sufficient to prevent something from occuring. Compromise is the order of the day, since everyone that cares has to have something to please them in the finished product.

In some cases, some members of the household really do not want to deal with the day-to-day operations of the family. The household budgeting, for example, has been delegated to myself and the Elderwife. We still report to the rest of the family at regular intervals about the state of the finances and major expenditures, but the mechanics are done by only a couple of us. The same goes with the handyman-type jobs--Sean, Cheron and the Elderwife generally will work on those things.

Again, this structure, while more robust than other models, is still fragile in the face of real evil. It is essential that individuals planning a group-living situation be as picky as possible to "weed out" potential troublemakers.

Delegation of Responsibility

We've generally attempted to insure that everyone contributes to the necessary activities to keep the household running smoothly. As a rule of thumb, the more financial contribution an individual makes, the less they are required to do day-to-day chores around the house. Generally, the people living in an area are required to keep the area at a state of cleanliness that is acceptible to them.

This *has* run into some difficulty with the common areas because of differences in ambition and standards. This has led to the requirement that shoes not be worn in the upstairs common areas (to reduce the need for vacuuming) and that a list of kitchen chores (cooking/dishwashing/shopping/cleaning) and those that do them is decided each week at the evening meal.

My health has prevented me in the past from doing a lot of physical work around the house. (Currently, I clean the catboxes on a daily basis and do about 80% of the laundry work.) I expect that as I recover and have more time after retirement that my role will expand in the maintenance of the place.

Interaction with Society

As I have said before, you survive by staying *off* Jerry Springer. We've successfully dealt with various government agencies as a group, but we do not flaunt our status to much of anyone. Each of us have made decisions as to who knows of our family structure--for example, all of my co-workers, friends and my mother knows of our living arrangements (although mother's a little hazy on the sex thing.)

We regularly entertain and are planning monthly pot-lucks for our friends this year. We also have a yearly weekend-long party called kittencon and a Yule open house in December. (I also get a retirement party this year--hurrah!)

That's about it. The floor is open for more questions, which I will try to answer to the best of my ability.

Tom

Labels: personal, philosophy, Tet

~By Tom (Tet)

As promised, here's part two of three. This section of the article describes the physical plant of the house and the decisions and parameters we used to find it.

We first made up a set of criteria:

1) Price needed to be within the range of $130k-170k, including repairs

2) We needed about 500 sq feet/person

3) There needed to be one kitchen per wife (my eldest wife argues that this was not a real condition, but I counter-claim that I would never have agreed to a place without this being true)

4) There needed to be a separate air-supply for Cheron, since she is allergic to cats

5) There needed to be a balance of personal space and common space

We spent about eight months looking. We found, during that time, two houses that fulfilled our criteria. The first, unfortunately, was grabbed out from under us by someone with faster reflexes. The second looked promising, but there were a number of problems.

Our house began its life as a single-family dwelling during the early 1950s. It had been built by the son of the man who built and lived in the (still-unpurchased) brick luxury house to our immediate east. It was built with a usable basement, two fireplaces and ground floor with a two-car garage in the back.

During the 1960s, a in-ground swimming pool was put in the back, with the garage being turned into a bathhouse for the pool. Also during this period, central air conditioning was put into the house.

Unfortunately, the family sold the house during the big "student-apartment boom" in the mid-1970s, when many houses were converted into rooming houses. Unfortunately, the conversion was done, apparently, by three rednecks and two kegs of beer over a long weekend. Short cuts were made, corners were cut and the overall value of the place was reduced. The backyard pool was filled in.

It stayed this way for about thirty years, with the general structure of the bulding deteriorating where neglected. When we found it, it had tenants in both the upstairs and the basement, with a guy dealing crack out of the cottage in the back that had been created from the bathhouse.

*However*--the absentee landlord, who was in Massachusetts was eager to sell off in the current market and we managed to get them to lower their price to $138k--a steal for the square footage (or so we thought.)

We rented the apartments until we could convince the tenants to leave (in two of the three cases, they were low-life enough that they defaulted on their rents and we were able to have them evicted--in the third, she and we agreed that the lease could be broken and she found a new place after selling us her sectional sofa for rent credit.)

We took *real* possession of the house in the late spring of 2005--that's when the real fun began....

If you're not a fan of Extreme Makeover, you can safely ignore the next three paragraphs.

The plan was to expand as much space in all the units as was possible to increase the open-air living space. As much work as possible was going to be done by the family itself, but code-important work was to be done by licensed contractors and electricians. Mission accomplished--the floor in the downstairs was removed (as well as the ceiling, walls removed or moved, bathrooms renovated. The cottage was turned into a two-room efficiency apartment.

New problems were found then. Beneath six layers of flooring in the downstairs living room, water seepage was found from the chimney area. Two full walls of the sun porch were eaten by termites to the point where you could put your hand through 2x4s. There wasn't a grounded circuit in the main house. Contractors fixed all of these problems--the house was rewired, followed by the family restoring the ceiling, Sean built a temporary wall to hold up the sunporch's roof while New Prairie Construction build two walls, another outfit rehung the gutters on the front of the house, which had been angled to dump rainwater along the side of the chimney into the basement.

Total cost? About 45k--over our estimate, but adequate for now. Remaining work to be done consists of finishing the siding and replacing the roof on the sunporch, new windows for the cottage and, within a couple years a new roof on the main house.

Physical Setup

Imagine an inverted L. I'll descibe the main house by telling what is in the top and side legs on each floor. The sun porch (ManCave) is attached to the top side of the side leg and is accessible by French doors.

Main Floor--Main House

The side leg is the common area for the commune. It consists of the dining room with the table set where the family takes its evening meals plus a large common living room/entertainment area with fireplace and media center. The color scheme in the room is dominant light yellow with deep red highlights. At the top of the leg is the entry to the ManCave, along the two outer sides are five windows looking out on the side yard and the street. There are paintings and clocks all over the walls in this area.

The top leg has the stairs to the lower level on the farside of the eldest wife's kitchen. The kitchen is where she, Sean and occasionally kitten prepare the evening common meal. The kitchen is done in teal and brown. Down the hall, past the full bathroom is her office, from where she runs her home business, plus her bedroom. I believe that the office is done in light green and burgundy and her bedroom is goldenrod and burgundy.

The total space of the two legs is approximately 1000 square feet, evenly divided.

The ManCave is attached to the top of the side leg, but parallel to the top leg. It contains Sean and my game materials and a pair of hotstuff homebuilt gaming computers. (It, and every other room in the house is net- or wireless-connected to the Internet and each other.) It has windows on three sides and has its own heating and cooling system. Total space in the ManCave is 14 feet by 8 feet.

Lower Floor--Main House

The entire lower floor has bookshelves on every available bit of wall space everywhere except for the kitchen and laundry room. These shelves contain most of the 3000+ volumes in the family collection. (Probably 200 are in the cottage.)

The side leg contains kitten's office and living room. It is lined on three of the four walls with bookshelves. The walls are dark orange or wood. She has her writing desk here plus a small television, stereo and futon. When we have visitors, it doubles as a guest room.

The top leg contains kitten's kitchen, which is decorated in Barbie-pink and white. It, like the rest of the basement, has indirect, diffuse lighting and white ceilings to minimize the feeling of being in a cellar-space. The half-bath, including shower is at the foot of the stairs heading upwards. Beyond the stairway is kitten's bedroom, which is done in deep purple and midnight blue. Off the kitchen and near the door to the outside from the downstairs is the laundry room, which contains survival materials, clothes hangers and the dryer (the washer is in part of the kitchen to avoid moving major plumbing fixtures. The laundry room is painted lime green.

Total space 1000 square feet, evenly divided between the two legs.

Cottage

The cottage is approximately 25 by 15 feet in size and is divided into a living room/kitchen area with full bath off to the side (approximately 16 by 15) and a computer-gaming room/bedroom that measures 9 by 15. Our dog, Java, has a living area within the cottage (including a bed that is in the larger room.

The back yard will soon contain a ritual circle and firepit, as soon as spring comes. My son, who has worked in landscaping, estimated the value of the ground landscaping currently as 10k. Fortunately, it came with the property.

We also have a shed in the side yard where we keep our gardening tools and a compost bin where organic materials from the kitchen is mulched.

~Tom (Tet)

Labels: personal

You might have heard that the Chicago Bears recently won the NFC Championship for the first time since the ridiculous and violent ‘85 Bears team. You may have also heard that nearly every analyst in the country picked the Saints to beat us. In other words, we were supposed to get our asses kicked. The first graphic shows that all eight ESPN “experts” (as Brian Urlacher would later call them with “air quotes”) picked the Saints to win. The only person at ESPN with confidence in da Bears was the ESPN Accuscore Game Forecast: A fricken computer. ESPN also conducted an online poll asking the nation which team they thought would win the game. Nearly 70% of fans from the peanut gallery picked the Saints. The only State in the Union with faith in da Bears was Illinois itself, with a vote that was statistically the inverse of the nation’s. Keep in mind that during the regular season the Bears had the best NFC record at 13-3, while the Saints had the second best NFC record at 10-6.

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