Serial No. 2

I should be going to bed so I can get up in 5½ hours and have a bit of morning before leaving for Vegas. Here I am instead. Oh well, it's not like I could actually go to sleep now.

I definitely provided too much information last night, but it felt right while it was coming out of me. I hit a storytelling flow, and didn't feel inclined to shut it off until it was finished. There isn't nearly as much to say tonight about the second half my history with serial fiction, but it does need a little bit of a set-up:

In the 70's and 80's there was a flourishing APA culture that you never knew about. APA's started much earlier than the 70's, but by the time the 70's rolled around, they were springing up all over the place. APA's— Amateur Press Alliances— were groups of people writing about specific subcultures. They published their work generally monthly or bi-monthly and distributed copies of their work to all members of the group. For the most part, membership in any given APA was small because printing costs were still high at this time. (This was well before everyone had access to a home computer and printer.) Do you remember the days of getting copies of your work done at the local copying store or at Kinko's? If you wanted to print on both sides of the paper, it cost more. If you wanted to print on color paper, it cost more. If you wanted thicker paper... it cost more. So, let's say you've had a productive writing period and you've fitted your words to six pages. (Typically, your monthly or bi-monthly contribution was called a 'zine.') Now suppose there are 50 members of your APA. When mailing time comes around, you need to provide 50 copies of your zine, which you mail into the central mailer. Three pages, double-sided, could easily cost you $50 - $75 for 50 copies. Although I've never heard this expressed, I'm sure costs were the reason most APA's kept their membership small. (The central mailer, on receiving copies of everyone's zines, would then shuffle them all together and bind— staple!— them and redistribute one full copy of that 'issue' to each member.)

So what were all these people writing about? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but APA's were an early outgrowth of geek culture. Think about, who else is going to sit and write passionately month after month about a specific topic. So, many APA's were themed around science fiction, TV programs, comic books, erotic fiction, etc. In fact, those themes are too broad for 80% of the APA's back in the day. They were mostly themed around specific TV programs or comic books or science fiction subgenres. If you think about it, they filled the function that we now commonly associate with fan websites. So, there were APA's themed around Star Trek, Superman, and anything else quantifiable and capable of producing at least a couple dozen fans willing to write about it. They were small communities of people finding each other and communicating there love for one or more topics before the internet made that sort of thing common.

In the mid-80's I used to go to San Diego Comic-Con with my group of friends every summer. We were all big into comics, and the San Diego Con was much smaller and much more manageable than it is today. The Con was still largely about comic books at the time, whereas today it is about movies and TV and video games and comics. Like I said, we used to go every year and have a blast down in San Diego for four days. (I could spend many blog entries reliving old San Diego Comic-Con stories!)

I was the first person in our group to stop going regularly. I had a weekend and night jobs that didn't always afford me the time to go. I wanted to hear everything from the guys though when they returned! I very vividly remember my friends returning from the Con during the Summer of 1991. (It could have been 1990, but I believe it was '91.) I was working nights at the gas station then. Pat returned from the Con on fire about an APA named Interlac. I knew nothing about APA's at the time, but I was a big Legion of Super-Heroes fan, as was Pat. Somehow he had found out about Interlac and he returned from the Con with a copy of one of the mailings. It was like a phone book of multi-colored pages, filled with writing about the Legion of Super-Heroes! It was easy to get caught up in Pat's eagerness about the APA. After reading the mailing, he shared it with me (and Dale, my roommate at the time), and Pat and I were instantly ready to join. (Dale contributed a little bit, but I don't believe he ever put himself on the list to join— which was a shame since he was the most physically creative of all of us, making ship models you could fold out of paper and also making 'action figures' out of modeling clay.)

Pat and I could not be restrained though, and immediately signed on as Wait-Listers. Interlac had a capped membership of 50, so anyone who wanted to join when the membership was at level cap had to sit on the wait-list. Some people sat on the wait-list for three or four years before becoming members. On the wait-list all you could do was hope that less active members would drop out, thus making spaces in the membership rolls.

Wait-listers could also contribute to each mailing. Members were required to provide 50 copies of their zines each time around— enough to make 50 full copies of the current mailing, one to be sent back to each member. Many people, however, made extra copies, and the central mailer would bind these extra copies together to make nearly complete mailings. These extra mailings would go to the wait-listers by their order on the list. When Pat and I joined, we were about 15 spaces down the wait-list so we generally got fairly complete copies of the mailings, as most 'Laccers (Interlac members) were generous with the extra copies.)

The wait-list was also time to get yourself known amongst the membership. Literally, some people had been members since issue 1 of the mailing, some 15 - 20 years before. So, the members knew each other pretty well. (Many of the zines were just long letters the members were writing to each other.) It took some time for wait-listers to get noticed, and contributing to the mailing while on the wait-list was the best way to get noticed. As I said, Pat and I were so anxious to join that we started out wait-lister zines immediately. To our credit, we both got a lot of attention from the membership pretty quickly.

I could go on and on talking about Interlac, but that's not really why I brought up the subject. My favorite character in the Legion of Super-Heroes has always been Brainiac 5. Since I didn't have Pat's talents for cartooning, I had to stick to writing, and it wasn't long before I started writing— you guessed it!— a serialized story centered around Brainiac 5. It was a lot of fun to write, and I daresay it got positive reviews from the membership. At the time, I was still working nights at the gas station, so I had hours to read and write every night. It was a great time... that came to an end when the gas station got rid of all us employees. I found work a few months later, but it was a full-time, no slacking off job. As much as I enjoyed Interlac and maintaining my zine, I dropped out about a year after starting that job— and that was after many issues to which I did not contribute.

So, everything I've written about last night and tonight leads me to believe that writing a new serial will be fun and productive. Doubtlessly, it will also end abruptly after some as-yet-unseen change in my life. I can only hope we all enjoy ourselves before then though!

Until next time.

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go."— E L Doctorow

Milk and Serial

I am a blank slate tonight. It's about 12:40 AM as I start this, and I just realized a few minutes ago that I haven't written today. I thought about skipping... but that's a bad habit I want to avoid whenever possible.

You may be wondering why I want to start a serial story in this blog or why I think I may be good at writing one. That story goes back quite a long time. In 1982, shortly after moving to San Bernardino, I got a job working a Fedco. Some of you may remember Fedco as a membership department store, like Gemco. I'm guessing these sorts of stores were the rage in the 70's, and they were still quite popular when I got to Fedco in the 80's. (Of course, their popularity didn't last much longer. Gemco went under first, and Fedco followed suit, finally going belly up in 1999. The San Bernardino store went under long before then though.) A year or so after I started at Fedco I began working in the Automotive department. As the newest member of that department, I got one of the filthiest jobs in the store— hauling oil and other fluids from the rear warehouse and keeping the floor stocked. I had a flat cart about 6' x 3' that I used to haul the product to the floor. I say 'filthy' because, if you'll recall, oil and transmission fluids were sold at the time in thick paper canisters with metal lids and bottoms. You used to punch a hole in the top with a bottle opener attached to a spout. Those cans gradually 'sweated,' and one that was left alone long enough was sure to have a thin slick coating. The rear warehouse was not attached to the main store and was never equipped with AC so, on top of the normal sweating process, the cans were regularly heated by temperatures that would go over 100 degrees. AND, as if that weren't enough to keep one washing his hands all day, the cans were transported into the warehouse on palettes and those palettes were moved around by forklift. Frequent sloppy driving of the forklifts would see many cans crushed while plastic-wrapped together with uncrushed cans. One crushed can in a flat (of 12) inevitably beslimed the other 11 cans. If a crushed can were left stacked on a palette, the oily slime would drift to other flats as well. So, very nearly every time I hauled a load of oil to the floor, I spent a considerable portion of my time weeding out the violated cans and cleaning off the good ones. It was a FILTHY job.

Despite my general ignorance of automotive parts and their uses, I was quite successful in the department, and my earliest success was staying on top of the oils and transmission fluids. Not only did I keep the retail floor well stocked, I kept it as clean and tidy as possible. To do this, I had to spend a lot of time in the back, making sure my inventory was in good shape. I remember one period of a few days, during the initial clean up, when I was hardly on the sales floor because I was spending so much time in the rear warehouse, organizing and cleaning. It was during Summer, and I would emerge from the warehouse at the end of the day covered in sweat and oil stains. But, when I was done, I got compliments from my department and supervisor and manager for the work I'd done. No one had ever bothered to do this before.

So where does a serial story fit into this? Well, I'm not sure how I got the notion first to do this, but I was big into comic books at the time, and that must have influenced me. For reasons you can deduce from the above paragraphs, I was almost always alone when I was in the rear warehouse. There were two warehousemen, Ron and Tim, who used to move the various products around— yes, with their suspect forklift skills. I would occasionally see them and have a chat with them. But, even when they were in the warehouse, they were seldom in the back row, where my products were. One day, for some unremembered reason, I grabbed a pen out of my pocket and began writing on one of the boxes stacked across from my oil. These boxes were large and had wide open blank spaces. So, I began to scribble the adventures of a super-hero named 'Vegetable Man.'

Vegetable Man was loosely inspired by the Alan Moore run on DC's Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing was hugely popular at the time. (If you wonder why, Alan Moore is the writer who eventually went on to write Watchmen.) Honestly, Vegetable Man was a lot closer to Spider-Man than he was to Swamp Thing. In fact, Vegetable Man would use long ropey vines to swing his way through the city, like Spider-Man. But the name of Vegetable Man was definitely an homage to Swamp Thing.

Right there on the side of a box, I spent 15 or 20 minutes writing chapter 1 of the adventures of Vegetable Man. It was five or six paragraphs long and occupied a space about 4" by 7", filled with tight printing. I labeled it as 'No. 1' as well, imagining that someone might go around the warehouse eventually, hunting up other chapters like a literary scavenger hunt. And there were other chapters. Once or twice a week, when I could slip away for a decent amount of time, I would head back to my giant canvas and scribble out further chapters. As they went on, the chapters became longer because, in my head, the story was growing each time I wrote, I had little idea what was coming next, though, until I put pen to... cardboard.

After a few weeks, I noticed that my chapters were disappearing. The boxes weren't getting moved, but someone was using a box cutter to remove the outer layer of the cardboard, thus taking my chapters. Then I ran into Ron and Tim. Up until this time, I only knew these guys to say 'Hi' in passing or, seldomly, have a brief conversation designed to keep us all away from real work in the front. After my chapters started disappearing, they cornered me one day and asked if I seen what was being written on the boxes. I pleaded ignorance, and they confessed they were both avidly reading the chapters and trying to figure out who was writing them. I was not well known in the store, and I guess I didn't even register on their suspect-scope. That was the greatest feeling in the world, though, to know I had two fans.

Unfortunately, right after this, I was transferred to the Toy department and lost my chance to go back to the rear warehouse and write new chapters. With no new chapters forthcoming, I spilled the whole thing to Ron and Tim, and I'm happy to say that they were two of my best friends at Fedco for the next few years.

This was not the end of Vegetable Man though. He lay dormant in me for the next year or so until I started to hang out a lot with my friend Chris. Chris was quite the artist, and we used to discuss comics and Vegetable Man all the time. In fact, buried deep in my boxes of comic goodies, I still have a picture of Rat Boy, Vegetable Man's sidekick, penciled and inked by Chris. After some time, it became clear that I need to write about Vegetable Man again. Since I was buying a lot of comics at the time and spending a lot of hours each week at the comic store, hanging out with John, the guy who worked there, it was natural that I would hit him up for a little counter space. I began handwriting Vegetable Man issues on blank pieces of regular paper and then copying them at the copy store. (This was long before we all had computers and word processors and printers!) Since I didn't want to leave any new fans behind, I started a new storyline and dubbed my text-only comic book 'The Alternate Adventures of Vegetable Man.' Within a few issues, it grew to be multiple pages. I launched a second story and experimented with the format, producing one issue like a newspaper. The issues were distributed for free. Whenever I had a new issue, I left a stack of them on the counter of the comic book store with John's blessing.

Unfortunately for Vegetable Man, after seven or eight issues, John had a falling out with the co-owners of the store and exited over night. (In fact, he spent that night on my couch and got a ride up to Victorville the next day.) I was a good friend of all the stores' owners— they had another store in Redlands— but I didn't like the way John was treated so I stopped going to the store for some time. Vegetable Man disappeared during that hiatus. Without a distribution deal, there was no emphasis to keep publishing. When I did eventually go back, the woman (and owner) who was operating the store then was cool to the idea— and not cool in the good way.

Next time, the back story on my follow-up serial. I know you can't wait! Until then—

"It's clobberin' time!"— The Thing

Olla Podrida

Just going to be odds and ends stuff tonight. No poorly written themed essay like last night.

I have a problem with food— I love to eat! I'm so freakin' huge because I can't stop. I think part of it is also due to some bad wiring between my brain and my stomach. A lot of times my stomach will start telling my brain that it's hungry— and not just hungry, but famished— when it only takes a moment for me to realize that I'm not hungry at all. In fact, I'm usually full from my previous meal. But that stomach signal is hard to ignore, and I can actually get the shakes and/or a headache from it.

Last night I resolved to start eating healthier— and less. I bought a few different cereals and put them into plastic tubs as grazing food. One is multigrain flakes and the other is a Grape Nuts knockoff. (Here's some advice, if you like Grape Nuts, buy Grape Nuts and not a locally branded knockoff.) That actually worked pretty well today. I woke up and just ate a few handfuls whenever I felt a bit peckish. Then I made the mistake of going to 7-Eleven for a cup of coffee. 7-Eleven is right next to this wonderful little take-out place that opened up. It serves Southern food. The woman who owns it and does all the cooking basically makes two meals a day. One is usually fried chicken. The other is fried fish or pork or ox tails or something. She has several sides to choose from, three or four on any given day, including macaroni and cheese (my favorite!), white rice with gravy, green beans, greens, chili beans with rice, etc. If you want more, she usually has two of the following desserts as well: peach cobbler, sweet potato pie, and banana pudding! And trust me, it's all as good as it sounds. When you order fried chicken, she coats it and fries it right then. So, you can see my mistake today. As soon as I passed her restaurant, I decided that I had to come back for dinner. When I got home, with coffee in hand, I stopped grazing and let myself build up an appetite so I could pig out later. And I did! It was soooo good.

And that was how I lost on day one of my resolve to eat better. Keep your fingers crossed that I do better on day two. (And feel free to ask me about this new restaurant. I will happily show you there myself!)

Anybody else bedevilled by those scam phone calls for extended auto warranty service? I get four or five of those calls a week now, and they're really pissing me off. It costs me 13 cents every time to go check my voice mail and clear off that trash. (If I don't recognize an incoming phone number, I let it roll to voice mail. If I answered, it would cost me 13 cents as well.) I know these scam calls have been going on for over a year now. (I only started getting them five or six months ago.) The phone companies claim they are unable to stop this activity because the phone phreaks are using software to make the calls untraceable. I'm claiming "Bullshit" though. Every time one of these bogus calls gets placed, the phone company is charging the recipient. That makes it financially beneficial for the phone companies to continue letting these calls through, claiming the phone phreaks are just too smart for them. We all know there's not a drop of moral integrity in American business any more. Every mote of ethical behavior, every customer, every employee, every single facet that can be controlled and sold by an American corporation will be sold in a heartbeat for an extra dollar. If an American corporation is given the choice of making $10 million profit in one year and maintaining its business ethics or making $10.1 million in that year and ditching its ethics along the way, the latter option is always the one chosen. So, as long as the phone companies are making money by being 'unable' to stop the scammers, the scamming will continue. And, it really raises the question of who the actual scammers are...

I have to apologize if anyone's been offended by any recent comments left on my blog. Some spammers have hit recently. Because I don't want to force people to register in order to leave a comment, I leave the 'anonymous comment' option available, but that option lets some of these spammers go crazy. I remove the comments as soon as I see them, but you may see one before I do. If you do, please ignore it. The spammers, of course, do not reflect my opinions.

About 57 hours from now I'll be leaving for Vegas. I'm looking forward to the getaway and hope to have some fun. After that, I'll be home for a week and then taking off for three weeks in Florida. That too should be fun. I'm hoping that by changing up my surroundings for a bit, I can get some real writing done. I will have to cave to my parents for a bit of sightseeing and some card play in the evenings, but I envision a couple weeks of having the mornings to myself for swimming and writing. I've also invited Russell to drive down from Atlanta and join us, and I believe he may be planning on doing so for a week.

Unlike my last vacation, I intend to maintain my blog the whole while.

Enough for tonight I guess. Until next time!

"Sacred cows make the best hamburger."— Mark Twain

Twinkle, Twinkle

I just saw a meteor. I'm tempted to say that means tonight will be a lucky night, but, truth is, I see a lot of meteors, and I haven't been particularly lucky lately. Honestly, probably a month hasn't gone by in the last several years where I haven't seen at least one meteor. I attribute it to spending a lot of time looking at the stars. If I'm outside at night, I'm sure to be looking up.

When I was young, I wanted to be an astronomer. I decided this probably about the time I was in 7th or 8th grade. Somebody asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and it was the first time the question was ever posed to me seriously. It was the first time anyone asked me and expected a genuine reply. I'd never really thought about it at the time, and I can't recall if I ever had a 'kid' answer to the question. But, when I was asked this particular time, I took a few seconds to think it over and 'Astronomer' was my answer.

It was the right answer too. I can remember looking at the stars as a very young boy. I've always been fascinated by them and have spent many hours memorizing star names and constellations. One of the earliest memories I have on my father's side of the family is attending a family reunion in Rhode Island and spending one evening stargazing with several of my uncles. Even now I'm still fascinated by astrophysics, quantum physics, and everything concerned with how the universe operates at the large and small scales.

So, from that moment forward, I wanted to be an astronomer. I held on to that and aimed in that direction through high school— though, of course, high school is not really noted for pre-astronomy training beyond general mathematics and sciences. At this point in the narrative you're probably expecting me to wonder how I lost track of that dream and confess to a certain amount of confusion. But, simply, I intentionally gave it up when I went to college the first time. I had a full NROTC scholarship and acceptance to UW in Seattle (among other schools). When it came time to choose my major, it was clear that the Navy placed more value on a Mathematics degree than it did on an Astronomy degree. In my mind I can dimly remember being counselled to choose Mathematics, but I may have come to this realization on my own. Of course, this is the beginning of the end of the story, as I soon dropped out of college, and all thoughts of being an astronomer disappeared when the possibility of a degree disappeared. To me it feels like being an aerialist and missing the swinging bar— you'll fall safely to the net, but once missed, you'll never grab that bar. There's no second grab as you fly by.

I've spent all the years since still looking up at the stars. If you're ever out at night with me, I can generally point out quite a few interesting features in the sky. And, now that the slim chance of going back to school has arisen, I toy with the idea of re-pursuing astronomy. (Mathematics is on the plate as well, as it's also a good fit for me.) However, an astronomy degree would not get me much at my age. I listen to a podcast called 'Astronomy Cast' and one of the podcasters is a working astronomer. On a recent show, when asked how hard it was to become a working astronomer, she frankly admitted that it was nigh impossible any more. She said that an astronomy degree is most useful if you want to teach astronomy, but the odds of conveying it into the occupation of astronomer were slim to none.

Tonight, FYI, is when the Lyrids meteor shower is in town. I looked this up just after seeing that shooting star earlier. If you happen to see this before the sun comes up, look in the direction of the new moon. Of course, you won't be able to see the new moon because... well, it's new.

See you again soon!

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."— Oscar Wilde

Sad

I'm not exactly sure why, but I'm so sad right now. In fact, a few minutes ago, my eyes were welling with tears.

Every day it seems more and more like I will have to pursue the next portion of my life in some place other than southern California. I'm not sure what that means yet— or where some place other than southern California might be. There are a few obvious choices, but everything is up in the air. It's strange that I dislike so much about this area that I can't wait to travel somewhere else whenever possible, but the thought of making a permanent move away fills me with melancholy. I grew up constantly on the move (with the exception of an eight-year stay in New Jersey). Every time we moved I lost my friends and had to start over making new ones. But, I've been in SoCal now for 27 years, and some of my friendships go back over 20 years. The thought of leaving these people behind is the saddest thing I can think of.

But, it's getting harder every day to see a way to stay in the area. I can't find a job. I would like to go back to school full time, but that life style still requires me to make a certain level of money. I don't know how to pull it all together. I'm so dismayed by it all right now that, like Albert Brooks at the end of Lost In America, I would swallow my pride and go back to work for my old employer if some opportunity opened up— even knowing how shitty they've treated me.

I received an email from Orbitz today, advertising new low round-trip ticket prices. So, I decided to check around and see how low things are. One of the first things I saw was that a round-trip to Tampa was just about $200, which is so reasonable that I had to jump on it. I squared things with my folks and then I contacted Russell to see if he would be interested in driving down during part of my stay so he could meet my parents and so we could sightsee Florida. Everything seemed to come together nicely, and I'll be spending three weeks of May in Florida. But, here's the other part of what's making me sad— I just realized that I scheduled myself to leave town just before the new Star Trek movie opens, and now I won't be able to see it with any of my geek friends. Sad but true.

Oh well, I guess I'll sign off before this gets too morose. I hope to see you again soon!

"Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad."— Victor Hugo

It's Too Darn Hot

So I souped up my car tonight and drove to Starbucks. It's the first time I've been here in over two weeks. In all that time, I never turned on my laptop, and I was surprised to find that it had a full charge in the battery... unlike my Kindle, whose power dwindles every day, whether I turn it on or not. In fact, without turning it on at all, the Kindle drains itself in about six or seven days. I would like to find out why that is. I suspect that when I turn it off, I'm only putting it to sleep, and it keeps doing things while I believe it to be off. One time, shortly after I got it, I found it finishing an OS update when I grabbed it to start reading.

My car also continues to misbehave. Starbucks is two to two-and-a-half miles from my house. I poured a bunch of coolant in both the radiator and the reservoir, thinking I would be able to make the trip, one way, with only a slight bit of overheating. I was wrong. By the time I arrived here, the needle was just below three-quarters, well over the customary driving temperature. Fortunately I plan on being here at Starbucks for a few hours so it has a chance to cool. If need be, I can stop a few different places on the way back to give it a few minutes to cool down. This is what I had to do the last time I dared to drive it this far— it overheated in the drive-thru line of Del Taco and I had to stop twice on the way back and eat for a few minutes to give the engine a chance to cool a bit.

Doubtlessly my car has not been helped by temperatures in the mid-90's these last two days. Ugh.

The last few days I've watched the two introductory episodes of a new show called "Parks and Recreation." I never heard of the show until I happen to see an ad pop up on Hulu. It stars Amy Poehler so I decided to give it a shot— I'm always open to a new comedy. My initial impression is favorable, but if obvious imitation bothers you, then this is not your show. I say that because the show is filmed the same way "The Office" is— the characters react to the camera because there is an unstated premise that the characters are actually being filmed for some reason. I find it engaging because it allows the characters at once to behave as if they're in a scripted show and then to step back occasionally and behave at a meta level.

In "Parks and Recreation" Amy Poehler plays a government functionary in the Parks Dept of a small town in Indiana (or some other rural "I" state). Her character is eager and completely turned on by all the trappings of government. In this she is almost completely a female version of Steve Carrell in "The Office." Poehler brings a higher level of perkiness to the character though. The current plot of the show concerns a pit— dug out by a construction firm and then abandoned for fiscal reasons— which is on a busy corner in a neighborhood. Poehler's character, seizing on a perceived opportunity to have her own subcommittee, promises to have the pit renovated into a park. As far as I can tell, this park is the plot MacGuffin for at least the first season. Joining Poehler's character is a thoroughly pleasant and corrupt aide; a former romantic interest in a different government department who actually knows how the government works; a woman who lives next to the pit and was the one to mention it in the first episode and who has now been drafted to work for the subcommittee; this woman's boyfriend/husband (I forget) who currently has two broken legs after stumbling into the pit one night and who now spends his days playing Rock Band; and a teenage girl who seems to be Peohler's daughter. (I've forgotten if her actual relationship was established.) The cast and the characters are all likable. I've enjoyed watching the first two episodes, amused by them, if I didn't actually laugh out loud at any point. I give it a thumbs-up for now. Check it out on Hulu.

I've been reading a wonderful book about writing called "The Tao of Writing." In the past I've always spurned these sorts of self-help books, but lately, in a desperate attempt to keep myself motivated, I've turned to several of these books looking for anything that will help me turn the corner. This book is easily the best of the lot so far, and I can say handily that it has helped me immensely— even during these last few weeks when I've been nearly unable to write and depressed by that block. My recent problem stems from the Blizzard story I started to write. I put a lot of pressure on myself to complete it and to write a great story. In doing so, I forgot all about the fundamentals of writing in favor of the dream of a finished product. I put the cart before the horse, so to speak. Then, unable to finish that story, my incessant self-flagellation kicked in and blocked me up good. (That's an entirely different problem I need to work on.) Of course, I need to find a way to make sure that I can eventually write a story when I need to, but what I put myself through these last few weeks was not the right way. This new Tao book has really helped me to see some things clearly.

Well, that's it for tonight. This was comfortable and fun. I hope to see you again soon!

"When Spring comes the grass grows by itself."— from the Tao Te Ching

1469 Days

I went to Baker's tonight for dinner and I ran into Don. His name is one of the few things I know about him. I was surprised to see him tonight as, in the past, I've only seen him working the morning shift at Baker's. Seeing him has been my infrequent reminder of the trouble I got into four years ago. In fact, the four year anniversary of my Stupid Mistake was just last week. (I refrain from labeling it the most stupid thing I've ever done as I've surely done far stupider things that were less criminal.) It was 1469 days ago that I didn't get arrested.

Probably everyone is tired of this story by now. I didn't bring it up to go over the whole thing again, but for those who don't know, on that night I unintentionally shined my laser pointer at the county sheriff's helicopter and was subsequently prosecuted and sentenced to 30 days in the county jail. I wish I could point you to my previous blog. In that blog I described what happened that night, all the court shenanigans I went through, and the details of serving my sentence. Unfortunately, I lost that blog a few years ago without having saved the text, which I deeply regret.

I know my posts have been morose of late. This isn't meant to be another in the series. It's a coincidence really. I was quite aware pf the anniversary last week, and seeing Don tonight made me feel that it would be a good blog topic. (Well, at least it's something to write about.)

I've always been thoroughly mixed about the whole thing. Me, personally, I'm embarassed and ashamed of what happened. Whenever I stop to remember that I now have a criminal record, it makes me feel about an inch tall. On the other hand, if I take a step back, part of me is fascinated about having gone through the whole process. It would be an understatement to say that I learned a lot about myself during that time. I also learned a lot about society around me. Particularly interesting has been the reactions I've received over the years. I would say that 90% of the people I've met and explained the situation to have laughed it off. My old manager at FirstAm used to make jokes about it, in fact. My parents, who started off much more sober, have recently started to tease me about it whenever the opportunity arises. (And, man, does it seem to arise an awful lot.)

Almost every single comic I've ever told about it has said over and over that I need to use the whole thing as material. I was always reluctant to do so when I was actively performing because I was still on probation at the time. Now that my probation has expired, I would very much like to use it on stage. One comic, however, when he found out, was not at all amused, and I had to reassure him that, despite the levity that usually accompanied the story, I was quite aware of how serious my offense was.

Despite getting embarassed when teased about it, I'm pretty emotionally detached now after four years. It's now part of my history— in fact, given how dull my life is, it's one of the most interesting parts of my history. I have been counseled (not professionally!) to forget the whole thing and put it behind me, but the experience is too valuable to do that. In addition to motivating me to refrain from further legal stupidity, I've always felt there was a book in the experience. In fact, over the years, I've played around with an outline and even tentatively titled it. As it stands now in my head, it's a "semi-autobiographical novel." I hope to write it someday, but who knows, eh?

I hope tonight's post means that I'm coming out of the funk I've been in lately. No promises. I'll be leaving next Saturday to spend a few days in Las Vegas, and the thought of that trip has been buoying my spirits. I'll be meeting family there and eating well, but probably the most gladdening thing about the trip is the thought of having a decent hotel room to myself for three full days. Ah, AC!

I promised a serialized story coming up soon. I'm currently tossing around a few ideas for it. Don't expect too much from it. It will doubtlessly be the highest form of fluff. In the past, however, I've found that I could successfully work the serial form, and my previous ventures have always attracted readers.

Thanks for sticking around. Hope to see you again soon!

"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company."— Samuel Johnson