All Posts Tagged With: "personal"

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

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

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

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

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