Out of Time

I guess it's natural for each of us to be comfortable in our own time. The world we grew up in is our baseline, and every year brings changes that make everything feel a tiny bit less natural. I think this is the main reason old people are cranky all the time. That, and the sore everything. Middle age has brought  not only an acceptance of mortality, but an appreciation of it as well.

There are usually a handful of changes that we treasure, though frankly I'm having a hard time coming up with any at the moment. It seems every advance during my life has been a double-edged sword, trading diversion, minor convenience, or economic efficiency for a more complicated life and erosion of our environment. I make my living from technology, and I'm not sure how we watched television before there was Google, but there are days I would gladly trade the whole thing for forty acres and a mule.

On the other hand, many of us long for some aspects of life that may have passed away before we were born*. Jimmy Buffett apparently wanted to be a pirate, and not the Somali kind. Mine is a world with space for solitude. The thought of walking for weeks without meeting another person carries great appeal for me at times.

There is a park in Northwest Arkansas that has been my favorite place in the world since I was a child. Part of what I liked about it then was that it was quite inaccessible and not very well known, so there were few visitors. The trails were long, mostly deserted, and so quiet you could hear gentle breezes blowing down the valley. It was a place where you instinctively spoke quietly.

There is an interstate within a few miles of it now, and it is covered with tourists during the summer, but last time I was there during winter it was still pretty deserted. I spend a few days there as often as I can, which usually ends up being only about once a decade. I walk, and climb, and sit, and walk some more. I don't exactly feel like I'm alone in the world, but I usually do get a chance to remember what it's like to be a human being.

Maybe this fall will be time for another visit. I've been looking for an excuse to buy a new pair of hiking boots, and I could certainly use the quiet. Did I mention there is no cell coverage, no television, and only one phone in the entire park?

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*How else do you explain Renaissance fairs? And NASCAR?

Looking for a One Man Dog

Dramatization*

I received a comment on a post a while back, from someone I respect, questioning my taste for a specific music artist. It didn't particularly bother me in the "oh, no, she doesn't like my music" sense. My tastes in music are all over the place, and I have never really met anyone who likes exactly the same things I do. But it did leave me pondering how I might convey the impact that some of these artists had on the period of my youth, which I think we can (mostly) all agree produced a lot of amazing music. I have struggled somewhat to find a foothold, because most of these people have long been relegated to the genre of "music old squares listen to," while many of their contemporaries have been credited with helping to change the world. But at the time, it was all one tapestry of far out groovy heavy sound.

One possible stroke of fortune in my search for common ground is that my wonder years bore some striking similarities to the present time. There were contentious racial, economic, and political divisions in the country and the world. Common people were struggling. It seemed then, as it does to many now, that global industrialization and unbounded capitalist greed would put an end to the American middle class once and for all, and that our country was being divided cleanly between the "haves" and the "trickled down upon." The country was suffering through a long, increasingly unpopular war, and optimism for the future was at an all time low.

The media narrative of the time was almost universally grim. Body counts from the meat grinder that was Viet Nam topped the news nightly. Ghettos burned in cities across America. Churches were bombed. Banks were bombed. The Manson Family unleashed their special brand of helter skelter. American college students were shot dead by the National Guard. One political figure after another found the wrong end of a gunsight. Stories like the Son of Sam killings that would dominate the national media for months in today's climate, struggled to stay on the front page. The Apollo missions were virtually the only national bright spot in this violent, troubled landscape.

They say great art is born in suffering, and the young and rapidly expanding genre of rock produced some lasting and powerful music during these years. You've heard some of it, if only in movies. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, CSN (and sometimes Y), CCR, Richie Havens, Edwin Starr, Steppenwolf, and dozens of others produced music that was fresh, relevant, and powerful. They are the soundtrack to the pain, confusion, fear and hope of a generation of Americans. Their message was simple and compelling. Get yours now; the country is burning.

In the midst of all of this, a different movement emerged. Unlike today, this was not a movement of angry and frightened old people. Those were the people in charge. These grass roots were mostly young,   overwhelmingly white, and decidedly middle class. Their fathers fought in WWII, or Korea, and went to college on the G.I. Bill. Their mothers were housewives. Their grandparents had struggled through the Great Depression. These people believed in the innate goodness of America and its citizens, but could not delude themselves that what they saw in front of them was the American Dream. Instead of taking to the streets, they turned to each other.

The soundtrack for these people was written and performed by Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Nilsson, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Carole King, Jimmy Buffett, and John Denver. That's right, I said John Denver. I dare you not to think of a John Denver song right now. And almost everyone my age liked his music, whether they will admit it or not. I knew people who had his albums right next to their Iron Butterfly. 

The music did not usually focus on the burning of America, but it also wasn't about surfing, or sock hops, or fast cars. It was music of the land, the seasons, and the road. Songs about love, and growing up, reflection, and loss. These songs reminded us that every story is a personal story, and that the only way to really make the world a better place is to be kinder to the people around us. It was about the things we valued most about our country and our lives, back then. These were the songs that people would play -- and sing -- at this time of year, outside around a fire, sometimes with a goat on a spit, or a pig roasting in a hole, but always with beer, and wine in skins or screw-top bottles. They were songs you could sing while holding your breath, which was very handy in those days.

Okay, maybe I can't explain it after all. That time is long gone, and no matter how similar this time feels to old farts like me, the world is a much different place now. Wood smoke adds to our carbon footprint, and I wouldn't even begin to know where to find a goat these days. Whole Foods, maybe? Young people have more serious things to worry about than "finding themselves," like whether the corporate recruiters are going to find the toga party pictures that their friend posted on her Facebook page.  Taking to the road is something only homeless people and illegal immigrants do.*** 

I guess I will have to be content to know that the people who didn't live it will someday struggle to explain Wilco, or Coldplay, or whatever music touched their heart when it was still tender. And every time I hear Everybody's Talkin', Moondance,  Bridge Over Troubled Water, or  You've Got a Friend, I will unabashedly sing along. Singing makes us feel better, right?

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* The stuff in the picture is a mixture of basil, oregano, and mint. Seriously. I grow it myself.  I wouldn't even know where to look for that name brand weed the kids smoke these days.**

** Okay, so that's not precisely 100% true. I do work at a college.  But it may as well be true. The last thing I need is to be even more confused, forgetful, lethargic, and hungry than I am already.

*** Isn't this really what the Tea Party is up in arms about? The world got more complicated without their permission? After all, these are many of the same people. They are just old, sober, and frightened now.

Letting go of the rope

A dear friend of my family is dying. Inexorably, painfully, hopelessly dying. Some days are better. Some are hard to bear. But the eventual outcome is not in doubt.

Along the way, he will have spent a double-digit number of weeks in the hospital, an unknown number of days in a rehab facility, uncounted hours being shuffled between the two, and no time in his own bed. He is finished eating, walking or going to the bathroom unassisted. He has so far engaged eight or ten specialists, and not a single general practitioner.* It will -- has already -- cost a fortune.

This is a man who was a proverbial captain of industry only a few years ago. An actual son of a share-cropper, he worked tirelessly to improve his lot and provide for his family for most of the previous century. He created a thriving business, became a pillar of his church, and a force in political discourse. A generation ago, he's a man who would have died unexpectedly in his sleep, or pitched over into his dessert after a big steak dinner and a couple of martinis. Today, he is a frail, frightened shell of his former self, his body struggling to maintain the minimum requirements for continued existence.

It is the way of life, and American medicine, that many of us will live our final days undergoing every procedure, and receiving every medication, for which our insurance will reimburse the medical corporations whose representatives are working so hard to bring our vital signs back into the range where they may consider the course of treatment complete. There is no talk of cure, or even of going home. Address the current issue, get the patient stable, discharge them from your service, and hope for the best, seems to be the only strategy.

I think the end of life is like water-skiiing. When you feel your balance slipping, you can try to right yourself, or let go of the rope and glide to a stop, more or less under control. The trick is in knowing when to let go. Release your grip too soon, and you may miss a chance to correct and ski on. Hang on too long, and you end up dragged face first through the water, sometimes with your swimsuit floating in the water behind you. It's not exactly drowning -- assuming you let go eventually -- but no one would call it fun.

I've reached the age where I think about these things. Not because I want to, or because I think they are interesting, or significant, or cool.  I think about them because they are happening to people close to me. And because I can feel it in my future, the way we once saw graduation, or marriage, or a new car, just over the horizon. It's all the same journey, but the scenery gets darker towards the end.

Ultimately, hanging on or letting go is a personal decision. Maybe the most personal we ever make. I'm not surprised my friend chose to hang on. It is his nature to struggle, and I always assumed that he would not be one to go gentle into that good night.

For myself, I hope I can be less Dylan Thomas and a little more William Cullen Bryant. Of all the ways we can measure the quality of a life, length is not high on my list. Every story has an ending, and I hate stories that go on too long.

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* Because we don't have those anymore.

On being alone

A few days ago, my brother sent me the transcript of a speech delivered to the cadets at West Point by William Deresiewicz, an old and somewhat crusty book critic who likes to flip the occasional metaphorical bird at the literary establishment. It's an interesting, if somewhat rambling discourse, with the gist being that true leadership requires (among other things) introspection, focused concentration, sustained reading, and friendship of the meaningful conversations kind.  All of these activities he says are related to solitude, which is not so much being alone as being able to be present within oneself.* He reserves a few of his tastiest jabs for those who seem to confuse leadership with ambition.

As I get older I run across more people who are semi-permanently on their own. A few are widows, more are divorced, and some just never really managed to pair up for whatever reason. Some have kids at home. A few have parents living with them, or requiring daily care. But one thing they practically all share is a sort of apartness, a combined self-reliance, independence, and seeming ability to live a little more in the moment than those of us who are more permanently entangled.

Perhaps one of the reasons that I have almost always enjoyed being alone is that those are some of my favorite personal traits. I mean, I love people, and no one is more ready to pile a bunch of people into his house or dance stupid in a bar than this guy. But I also like it when the people go away for a while. My favorite days at work are the ones I spend alone in my lab, and the only people I talk to are the baristas at the coffee bar in the bookstore.

I especially like solitude in nature. I can spend hours sitting by a creek or on top of a bluff, studying the infinite variety of trees, leaves, and rocks, listening to the wind and watching the little animals do their little animal things. If you put me somewhere I can hike, I will keep going out until I am too sore to walk. And maybe a short walk after that.

One exception to this love affair with myself occurred immediately after my first marriage split up. I kept finding myself in my crappy little apartment full of hand me down furniture, increasingly desperate to talk to someone on the phone, or to go somewhere that other people would be. They didn't have this fancy Internet thing back then, so there was no YouTube or Facebook to keep me company. Besides, the ex took the computer, so I couldn't even go on Prodigy^® and do whatever you were supposed to do on Prodigy^®.

I can still remember the moment -- it was a Sunday evening about three weeks after I moved into the apartment -- when I reached for the phone and thought, "Wait. If you are sitting alone and you can't stand the company, then something is terribly wrong." I put the phone down and started working on my self. I only made it a couple of hours that night, but it got better over time.

Someone said once that love is the uncomfortable realization that there is someone in the world besides oneself who is really real. I think it's also the process of surrendering the apartness. Some people think you're not really in love until two people have more or less completely fused to share one life. Many of the more experienced** people I know are a little more circumspect, and generally try to find a balance between "me" and "us".

In the end, that's something that each of us has to decide for ourselves. Which of course, requires solitude.

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*I may have added that last part.

** I mean old, not slutty. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.

Now I really can't go home again

I got an e-mail from my mother a few weeks ago informing me that my childhood home had been demolished. This wasn't completely unexpected, but still came as somewhat of a surprise. My parents sold the house in the mid-1980's to an attorney who had plans for it that apparently fell through, and it has sat empty most of the time since, slowly decaying. It had become both an eyesore and a hazard, and reminded me a bit of Miss Haversham's place in Great Expectations. While I was considering writing this post I realized that I don't have a single picture of the house or property. I'm sure I lost a few just being a young man who moved a lot, and the rest left with my ex-wife.

Unlike most Americans of my generation, I lived in the same house from the time I was born until I left home. And it was no ordinary tract home in a subdivision, though it was certainly not a McMansion, or any other sort of mansion. The house was a modern* split-level on a wooded two and a half acre lot that was essentially given to my parents by the man for whom the street is named. He owned a very large tract of land and "just wanted good neighbors." We had only two other houses within a half mile of us. It was practically wilderness when I was a child, surrounded on three sides by woods, with a small creek running across the property. By the time I graduated from high school, the street was four lanes, there were subdivisions on all sides and I could see McDonald's from the driveway.

The house was very unassuming from the front, but from the back it was two thousand square feet of glass overlooking a large brick patio and a small hillside. My father designed and built the house in three stages, using a combination of subcontractors and child labor. By the time he was finished we had five bedrooms, three baths, two fireplaces, a living room and dining room, den and game room with a pool table, poker table, seating area and a wet bar. He had also put in a large swimming pool with an outdoor kitchen, gazebo and dressing rooms. A friend told me one time that it was the sort of place that should have a name.

Our house was not only the center of our lives, but a frequent stop for a number of overlapping social circles. Between casual gatherings, band rehearsals, poker parties, pool parties, church socials and a ridiculously large all day Independence Day party every year, our house was known by people I didn't even know I knew. To this day, when I meet people from my hometown -- many of whom I may be meeting for the first time -- they are much more likely to ask about that house than about members of my family. In fact, just last week a friend I haven't really seen since high school mentioned the house in the first e-mail message we exchanged after being out of touch for almost twenty years.

It broke my mother's heart to sell the place and move, and I know she suffered watching it erode and finally fall. She raised all of her children there, and poured her own hopes and aspirations and pride into making it a showplace. For my father, I think the loss was balanced by the opportunity to build a better house and avoid some of the mistakes he made with the first. I feel it more than I thought I would, but it's a tragedy of much less than human proportions. After all, it's been twenty-five years since I've seen the inside of the house, and the memories are still with me, even if the building is no longer there.

There is a sort of diffuse, low grade sadness in knowing the place is really gone, sort of like hearing that an old classmate or neighbor has passed away, even if they were never that close and you haven't spoken since childhood. I guess it's just another reminder that time and entropy make fools of us all. Still, when I'm home for the holidays I think I'm going to have to drive by and see the hole. Maybe I will find that G.I. Joe I lost behind the wall.

_____________________________

* Modern in the 1950's architectural sense, with a flat roof, clean lines, natural materials and lots of glass. My father was a huge fan of Frank Lloyd Wright.

The more things change ...

I have an old friend who joined Facebook recently, apparently after months of urging by several people, me included. She admitted to me after signing up that two things had kept her from doing it before. The first was her daughter's absolute mortification that her mother would be joining FB, and presumably seeing the thousands of drunken photographs (WHOOOOO!!!!) that all college aged kids seem to feel need to be on the Internet.

The other reason was an old and deep insecurity that people would not like her. I was touched that she would admit this very personal and sensitive information to me, so I am posting it on the Internet. She's just lucky I don't have any drunken pictures of her from college.

Now, this person was not unpopular in high school. Besides being a cheerleader and some big muckity-muck on the yearbook staff, she was in about a thousand extra-curriculars and a bunch of honors classes. And in spite of all of that, everyone loved her. I mean, everyone. Boys, girls, jocks, townies, Sharks, Jets ... you name it. And still she is insecure, all these years later.

Between social networking, reunions, being around college kids, and (sadly) funerals, I have had many occasions over the last few years to reflect on the insecurity that seems to drive so many of us, and how no matter how rich or accomplished or otherwise secure we become, it only takes one ill-conceived comment or ignored friend request from the wrong person to plunge us back into that icy bath of teenage anxiety, wondering if our friends will still like us despite the fact that our mother wouldn't spend $12 for three-stripe Adidas.

It does get easier, though, and I think this may be part of the reason that social networking is gaining so much traction with the AARP crowd. We get a chance to confront the old anxieties with our grownup brains and experience, and hopefully vanquish them. There are several people that I have happily de-friended lately when I realized that I really didn't give a shit what they thought of me, and that if I met them at a social function today I would probably spend a good part of the ride home talking about what a tool they were.

Of course, now we get to start all over with our Internet friends. So you bitches had better leave comments and follow me and make sure my stats are up or I might have to go to my room and turn on the blacklight and listen to the Moody Blues on 8-track as loud as it will go.

Heritage

I grew up in the Civil Rights South. I was born a few years after Brown vs. Board of Education set the course of American schools (for better and worse), and a few years before the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act effectively ended state-sponsored segregation. I don't remember ever seeing whites only drinking fountains, or "don't let the sun set on your head in this town" billboards, but I know they were around when I was little. This, and the Vietnam War, were the backdrop for my childhood*.

The civil rights movement ignited a sort of civil cold war in the South, almost exactly a century after the real Civil War, once again pitting neighbor against neighbor and dividing families. The only time in my life that my father ever slapped my face was when I spoke the n-word in his house. I was six or seven, and relaying a message from a neighbor boy to my older brother. I took it as an unambiguous declaration of which side our family was taking in the conflict.

My father was a general contractor in those days, and employed men based on the quality of their work and the cost of their labor, without any seeming regard for race. If anything, I think he may have been running his own little affirmative action program, though it would have been more for pragmatic reasons than ideals. There is a persistent family rumor that my great-great-grandfather owned a single slave, and that one of his descendants (who shares our family name) became a prominent civil rights activist. Most of my family stories are apocryphal (to be kind), so I don't set much store in this one. One family trait I have retained is the belief that one should never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. I mean, the man and his accomplishments are real. He has a freeway named after him. It is only his relationship to my family that is in question.

In his later years, my father's insecurity, the deterioration and violence that were overtaking the city he loved, his new family, and (I suspect) his upbringing led him away from some of the principles he taught me. It was small things really, offhand comments and ill-informed remarks. Still, it was a profound disappointment to me, and I took it as a stark warning that age and fear can rob us of more than our health and future. In the end it seemed that he defeated whatever doubts had plagued him, and he dedicated much of the last year of his life to helping an African-American community near my hometown. I take that as an even stronger reminder that it's never too late to reclaim what is important.

I attended six different public schools, including a year at Horace Mann, a traditionally black high school that had been converted to a junior high as part of the school desegregation plan. I rode a bus 45 minutes each way to school, and made some lifelong friends. I will be the first to admit that the quality of education at Horace Mann was not equal to the schools I had attended previously, but I learned a lot about survival. A long time family friend -- now a judge -- was small for his age and suffered some form of violence almost daily.

In the end, it was abandonment that destroyed our public schools, and contributed to a host of our society's current ills. As whites fled first the schools and then the neighborhoods and cities, we returned to separate and unequal, except now the division was as much economic and ideological as it was racial. The poll tax was replaced by private school tuition, and interstate highways provided the separation that Jim Crow laws no longer could. I'm not implying that the people who left were wrong. They did what they believed to be best for their families. But the cumulative results are undeniable.

In addition to the cultural and civic and traffic problems that resulted, I believe these changes accelerated a fragmentation of our society that was already in progress. When I was a small child, our city park had a municipal pool set among the zoo, a golf course and a few permanent rides and other attractions. Of course, I never really noticed that everyone there was white, but as soon as that changed, many people stopped bringing their children to the city pool. Subdivisions with their own, private swimming pools began to spring up seemingly from nowhere. Within a few years the city pool was closed for good, and the great meeting place of children from across the city was replaced with a few dozen isolated descendants. My father was either unwilling or unable to join one of the local developments' pools, so he built his own, an enormous blue boomerang that did wonders for my high school popularity, at least in the warmer months.

Did we move too quickly to end the injustice of segregation? Too timidly? Is there some way we could have avoided the problems that have resulted, while still reaping the benefits? Would it have been better (or worse) if children had not so often served on the front lines of this war? Frankly, I don't know and I don't think it's important any more. We are where we are. I live in a city with a majority white population and an African-American mayor. The arguments of racism have evolved (mostly) from race to culture, which is not where we want to be, but you would know it's a lot if you grew up when and where I did. Still, we may have a "post-racial" President, but I am sure we have not yet achieved a post-racial society. And the rising Latino population will bring new challenges to our country's ability to be the "great melting pot of humanity" that I learned about in school.

School busing and forced desegregation are ending now throughout the South, and state-sponsored discrimination is mostly a thing of the past. It's time to tackle the problems that were created -- or at least exacerbated -- by the steps that were taken to address a great injustice. But we can't go back, and I would be heartbroken if our haste to find solutions led us to give up any of the ground that so many suffered to win.

_____________________

* It's no wonder music was so important to us.

Gimme the beat boys

I saw a spot on TV this morning about a sixteen year old girl who had stopped growing -- and apparently aging -- at about six months. Her doctor was talking about the hope of someday "turning off aging" and giving everyone an indeterminate lifespan.

I have two problems with this. First of all, we have enough people already, without everyone living forever. Perhaps more personally important, the girl apparently stopped developing when she stopped aging. She still had the mental capacity of a nine month old.

I was reminded the other day by an old friend that a group of us used to sing "Ain't No Sunshine" and "Drift Away" while getting ready for football practice in junior high. A few years later, I was singing "We Will Rock You" with a different bunch of young men in the back of a 44 ft. trailer while we loaded lighting equipment. There was joy that only the young can feel. At the same time, other friends were killing themselves, by accident and on purpose. That amazing range of emotions is driven by youthful hormones and exuberance, but also untempered by the perspective that experience brings.

Wisdom and joy both come at a price. I would love to have my 20 year old body back, but I don't think I would like the insecurity and loneliness that went with. Everything I have learned (and I read a lot) indicates that life is a process, and we interfere with that process at our peril. If we could stop aging, what age would you pick? Twenty? Forty? Something else? I might have to go with seven. I could read when I was seven, and I was no longer forced to take naps, but I didn't have a lot of responsibilities yet.

In the end, I think I will stay on the journey until it ends. Every year has brought surprises and new insights, and I think there is still more for me to learn.

Concert Season

There has been a veritable flurry of activity from the old roadie community lately. I have several e-mail chains that are at least 10 messages long, with a couple hundred recipients. So far I have resisted the urge to reply, "Unsubscribe!", which is usually my oh-so-subtle way of pointing out to people that "Reply all" is not the only option. Anyway, it started with some semi-coincidental commemorations, both happy and sad. Several couples are celebrating high numbered wedding anniversaries, and there have been a couple of weddings, finally legitimizing relationships lasting 30 years or so. I try not to consider the possibility that these are related to some of the sadder events, and I secretly hope that no one has been driven to the altar by thought of being cut out of an inheritance that they helped to build because they do not enjoy the legal status of a spouse.

On the other side, we have commemorations of old friends gone to that great gig in the sky. Old friends with names like Poodle, Dirty Mike, Goat, BJ, CD, Lunar and too many others have fallen to causes accidental and self-inflicted, and with each one there are stories. Lunar was queen of the electronics shop, and for years she was the only one anyone trusted to solder snakes. These were the 99-pin monster cables (not to be confused with Monster cables) that ran from the control boards out in the house to the lighting and sound systems backstage. The 99 wires were color coded with little stripes, and all had to be soldered to the right pin on a plug only about three inches across. Someone asked Lunar one time how she dealt with all of those itty bitty pins and wires, and she said, "I just smoke a joint or two and they get bigger*." I guess Steve Martin had something with that "getting small" thing, after all.

Several other old comrades are celebrating the anniversary of their first show, which is less of a coincidence than it might seem. Summer was outdoor show and big festival season, and everybody who was anybody was packing up all the equipment they could scrounge and heading out for Red Rocks or Pine Knob or the Meriweather Post Pavilion, where they would play for a few thousand of their closest friends. Wineskins and blankets were everywhere, and the SHOWCO shop was usually empty save some old curtains, a few bubble machines (don't ask) and the Who's giant spotlights. Of course, for every Genesis show at Wembley Stadium, there were too many like the Bee Gees at the Pontiac Silverdome, REO Speedwagon at the Rockford Jam. or KC and the Sunshine Band at a drive-in theater in Buffalo (all stories for another time). As August rolled towards September we would hit the state fair circuit in the upper midwest and Canada. All the gigs were at racetracks or rodeo arenas or just out in a random field, and the roadies had to drag all the equipment through the mud and string miles of extra cable and make it all work somehow each and every day. We didn't really care for State Fair season, though I'm still a sucker for a corn dog and some cotton candy.

Summer was the time to get hired if you wanted to be a roadie, and more than one was picked up at a show and learning the trade on the road a few days later. It wasn't always pleasant, it was never easy, but it was more than any other time of year the reason we were all there. And it definitely broke the monotony of 100 more or less identical hockey/basketball/multipurpose arenas in a row.

The conversation has moved on to t-shirts, some of which are now worth $1000 or more. So if I ever gave you a shirt, you should be ashamed of yourself because I know what you probably did for it. But you should also see if you can find it, because all of mine are long gone. There is actually talk of trying to find the old silk screens and making some new ones. If it happens, I expect you all to buy some.

_____________________________________

* Just say no, kids.

Robot Birthday

Yesterday it was my birthday. I hung one more year on the line.* It ended up being sort of a robot-themed day, partially through coincidence, if you believe in such things. I had decided while watching trailers before seeing Star Trek that I wanted to see the new Terminator movie on my birthday (NERDS!!!). I did not know that my wife had already bought me this:

Inevitable, really. I've been fascinated with automation and figuring out how things work as far back as I can remember. The first symptom I remember came when I was about five or six and I picked out a Big Bruiser from the Sears Catalog for my number one Christmas present. If you are too young to remember the Sears Catalog in its heyday, think of it as a paper version of Amazon.

A year or so later I got an Erector set, and built a skyscraper with a working crane.

The year after that it was a crystal radio kit, which I still believe is magic. I mean, I put the thing together myself. I know there was no battery in it, but I could listen to the radio (almost) as well as people with batteries. That might be the first "What the Hell?!?!" experience I can remember.

Subsequent Christmases and birthdays saw a steady procession of telescopes, microscopes, chemistry sets,



rock collecting kits, crystal growing sets and dissection kits. That's right, kids. In those days you could buy something in the toy department that would help you carve up little woodland creatures that you might capture around the house. It came with a frog and a couple of bugs in formaldehyde**, but how long is that going to amuse a curious 10 year old boy with a scalpel, tweezers and low power microscope?

This was all in addition to the dozens of watches, clocks, toys, tools and household appliances that I took apart to see how they worked. Of course, this included many of the items mentioned above. In my defense, most were broken when I started, I got almost all of them back together with no pieces left over, and I actually fixed a few things.

Then I got older and put away childish things. Except for the year after I was married and got the Big Trak.

Oh, and then the rockets.

And the RoboRaptor.

The cats are pretty sure he is mentally challenged.



So, that's a roundabout and memory-filled way of saying I've always been a science nerd and a sucker for cool toys, and I suppose I always will be.

As for Terminator. It was good. Star Trek was better. Oh, and this is what I built with my robot kit:

I'll be back.

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*With apologies to Paul Simon

** Kids today don't appreciate a good carcinogen in their toys like in our day. Nowadays you put a little lead in a toy car and everyone starts acting stupid. Oh,wait. Sorry.

The Flip Side of Aging

In some previous posts, I might have indicated that getting older is not much fun. I think the word "sucks" may have been used once or twice. Well, that's true in some respects, but there are compensations. At least partial compensations. For example:

1. I know all sorts of stuff. For example, I know what usually causes your air conditioner to stop working on the hottest day of the year, and what to do about it.
2. I don't care about what most people think. I will wear my house slippers to the mailbox, and once even to the grocery.
3. I (usually) know what I'm doing. Corollary to (1).
4. I have my own tools.
   

I realize that these are exactly the things that make older people either endearing or frustrating to young people, and often both. All I can say is, suck it young people. You will get your chance, and you will probably enjoy it as much as we are enjoying ourselves now. I know my parents' generation had a great time wandering around in their bermuda shorts and sandals with socks, eating cocktail wieners and telling us all how we didn't know how good we had it.

They were right. And I'm afraid we may all find out how good we had it very soon. It appears as though there may be challenging times ahead, and we are all going to need each other. Old people may not know how to get the pictures out of their phone, or what the Hell a "Twitter" is, but by and large they know how people and organizations really work, and how fundamentally unfair the world can be, and it is probably worth listening to what they have to say. Unless they are idiots. Aging usually just makes that worse.

And for those of us who think we've seen it all and know it all, we would probably do well to remember that the world is very different than it was only two decades ago, and that most of the knowledge taught in college today didn't exist when we were there. The "kids" who we think look too young to drive will do the heavy lifting that determines whether we end up living in our Crown Victorias, burning our 401K statements for heat.

Memory is stupid

Why is it that I can't remember what I logged on to my computer to do for the two minutes it takes to boot up and sign in, but I can still remember the last nine lines of Thanatopsis that Sam Blair made me learn in 11th grade?

Thanks a ton, Sam. Jerk.

Eight(y) is Enough

The last things I thought I would be talking about when I started this blog were death and old age and other depressing shit like that. But that's what's been happening in my life, so there you go and there you have it and there you are. Anyway, if you're not depressed enough by the post-holiday-economic-meltdown-seasonal-affective blues, let's see what we can do about that.

I sent my father's widow (I've never been able to call her my stepmother, since I was in my 30's when they married) a Christmas card, and got this message in reply:

I hope this is still your correct email address. Merry Christmas to you and (wifey)! I appreciate your remembering me this year. My life is very quiet now and I don't drive very much anymore, so I stay home a lot. Some of my friends cannot even do that. Enjoy each other and do all the things that you wish to do while you and young and able.
Love,

I mean, Holy Shit! What am I supposed to do with that, besides everything in my power to make sure I don't live that long? After sitting alone in the dark for a couple of weeks with a bottle of Jack and a loaded handgun, I decided that the only thing any of us can do is to take her advice. My father went through several careers and started a number of companies, the last when he was 79. He used to say that when a door closed on our lives (NO! Not the window thing!) it was time to pick up whatever we had left and head on down the road. (Whew! Close one.) My father was full of crap about a lot of stuff, but I think he had this one right.

Life is too short, people. And to paraphrase someone smarter than I, it's definitely too short to live it in a way that makes us wish it were shorter. It's also too precious to spend it beating ourselves up because we're too fat or we don't make enough money or our job sucks or we already broke our resolution or our loser <pick one> left us for some <pick again>. I can go on...no?... you get the idea?... good, because we were about to go blue.

So be happy today. Do something you've always wanted to do. Or watch reruns and eat a whole box of Cheeze-its. And if you end up never visiting the Parthenon, don't beat yourself up about it. The thing we can never do later is live our life the way we wanted to live it at the time.

If I weren't so lazy/busy, I would go find one of those Bon Jovi smiley face things to put here. You will have to use your imagination.

Nights to Remember

I can't let this day pass without mentioning a time and a place and a group of people that meant a great deal to the direction of my life. Somewhere around the dawn of time (1970), when rock concert tours were starting to be a big deal, a couple of musicians from Dallas discovered that they were actually better at building sound gear than they were at making music come out of it. The demand for their equipment was high enough -- and the interest in their music low enough -- that they decided to start a sound equipment rental company. This was the beginning of SHOWCO, Inc., a sound -- and eventually lighting, staging and special effects -- company that became almost synonymous with the golden age of big rock shows in the 70's and 80's.

Besides providing sound equipment, lights, pyrotechnics, lasers, spotlights, mirror balls, projectors, bubble machines, chase lights and practically everything else you can imagine to the biggest names in the music industry, SHOWCO and its people helped create and define an important segment of the entertainment industry with constant innovation and a commitment to excellence that was second to no one. If companies had mission statements back then, theirs would have been, "Make it happen." I once saw them charter a Lear jet to fly a laser to Canada for a stadium show that was going to start in a little over eight hours.

The lighting division of SHOWCO was eventually consumed by their own invention, the Vari-lite, while the sound arm was purchased in 2000 by their major rival. The company that bought SHOWCO used both names, like FedEx Kinkos, until they decided this past year that time had run out on the SHOWCO brand and retired the name, presumably forever.

The company provided services to more top tier bands than I can list here. Led Zeppelin, The Who, Black Sabbath, The Bee Gees, Genesis, Three Dog Night, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, David Bowie, ZZ Top and James Taylor are a very few examples. In addition, they produced several large fashion shows, conventions and special events, including the annual convention for Mary Kay Cosmetics, whose big pink headquarters was around the corner from their own. Oh, and their lighting director programmed the big light ball on top of the Dallas Hyatt Regency. Most people don't know that the lights were supposed to flash in patterns. The first couple of nights they used it there were so many accidents on I-35E that they had to stop.

The scale of some of these tours, and the work required to put them on, was hard to conceive. The very large tours would have up to 15 semi trailers packed full of equipment that had to be unloaded in the morning, put together, tested, repaired and adjusted, used to its limits during the show, and then pulled down, taken apart and put back in the trucks. All fifteen trucks would then have to drive three or four hundred miles to do it all again the next day. Along the way they faced and solved technical and artistic challenges on a daily basis. Whether it was chroming the entire lighting system for the Bee Gees, mounting six huge, rotating mirrors above the Genesis stage that totaled more than 2500 lbs., making music sound good outdoors and still be loud enough to make your ears bleed, or simply figuring out how to put together pyrotechnics that would rattle the Superdome, SHOWCO people made it happen time and time and time again.

The workload was brutal. It wasn't Alaskan crab fishing dangerous, but there were definite similarities. Thirty-six hour days were common. Days off on tour were rare, which meant that the traveling crew were living on two or three hours of sleep (sometimes less) for weeks at a time. One becomes very familiar with the lower end of Maslow's hierarchy. Very few people lasted a year. I once fell asleep on the sidewalk at the Sacramento airport while someone went to fetch the rental car. And when Jackson Browne said that roadies were "working for that minimum wage," he was being charitable if you consider the hours worked. His was another SHOWCO crew.

So why did people do it? One thing: the music. Not "partying with the band," not the women (they were only interested in the musicians, anyway), and not the glamorous lifestyle. When you were on tour with a good -- or even better a great -- band, the two hours or so of live music made up for all of the pain and loneliness and frustration. There is nothing like being at a great concert with 25,000 of your closest friends, unless it's being onstage for it. I can't even imagine what a rush it is for the musicians. No wonder so many of them go all crazy. Oh, and tour jackets were cool, but they weren't really worth the effort without the music thing.

I was fortunate enough to work for SHOWCO for three years in their heyday. I worked with some of the biggest acts on the planet, visited 45 states and 3 foreign countries, stayed in practically every Holiday Inn in America, and became intimately acquainted with theater and arena design. To this day I don't even have to think about where to find the bathrooms in a public arena. And I made a few lifelong friends. I met some of the best and most interesting and unique people I have known, and each and every one would show up to help you move. I learned things in that three years that most people will never even suspect.

Tonight at the Arcade Bar in Dallas a bunch of nondescript, middle-aged men and women are gathering to mark the passing of the SHOWCO name and raise a glass to the days when sex and drugs and rock & roll were as much a part of the fabric of the country as consumer credit and reality shows are today, and the dinosaurs of entertainment ruled the earth. I'm sure many lies will be told, and even more true stories that are harder to believe. At least as much of it as they can remember. If you happen to be there, or if you ever run into an old roadie in a bar, buy them a drink. They will almost certainly have an interesting story to tell.

Old Friends

Today my mother told me of an old friend of hers who had passed away unexpectedly over the weekend. Earlier in the week an old classmate informed me of her grandmother's passing, expected but never welcome. Last weekend it was another childhood friend relating how her husband and all of his buddies had lost their fathers in the last few years. The previous day there was the former colleague whose lifelong friend had passed away that morning, taken by a disease that progressed more quickly than expected.

This is the life of those eligible for AARP.

It is an insidious but profound transformation for many of us just on one side or the other of the half-century milestone. Our parents’ generation attains the average life expectancy for Americans in the early 21st Century and our own generation reaches the age that Samuel Shem called “young enough to die” in his novel House of God. The increasing number of funerals and “I thought you would want to know” phone calls and e-mails inexorably turn our attention to thoughts of health, retirement and our remaining time in the world.

As the days before us grow noticeably fewer than those behind, hope gives way to regret; for loves abandoned early or never explored, for friends betrayed or forgiveness withheld, for all that we are finally forced to accept will never be ours. Last chances spin past us with the accelerating turn of the seasons. We are getting old. We grow tired. We realize that it takes fifty years for most of us to really understand what it means to be mortal. As my ex-wife always liked to say, growing old is not for wussies, though that’s not the exact word she used. She was classy.

Perhaps the ultimate cruelty is that age does not diminish our desire to do and see and experience new things. We still wish to have adventures and fall in love and be popular. The spirit is not only still willing, it still burns with the same pride and desire and ambition that it has in decades past. But the flesh grows steadily weaker, we are reminded at every turn that we are no longer twenty-something and that even if we are as good once as we ever were, we are not as good as we once were (with apologies to Toby Keith, and to everyone else I know for quoting Toby Keith).
The upside to all of this, if there is one, is that those of us who are paying attention begin to appreciate our time more. We stop thinking “some day” and start acting. We make our bucket list, or start that business, or spend the occasional day at work completely screwing off. Because in the end, there will never be enough days if your life is sweet. But one perfect day can make a life worth living. So if you can see the Old Folks Boogie in your future, don’t waste another day worrying about the past you didn’t get exactly right. Use every day you have left trying to make that perfect day. And if you are too young to know what I’m talking about, just try to take it easy on the old folks. They may be having a hard time.