Quotables: The Stories Only You Can Tell

From one of those lists of quotes by famous writers that go around every so often, which usually comprise a smidgeon of generic inspiration with some pat condescension and a whole lot of discouragement (at least that’s how I tend to experience them), here’s one I thought was actually pretty helpful:

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you.

― Neil Gaiman

(Gaiman is, of course, the best-selling fantasy novelist who created The Sandman, one of the most sublime comic-books-for-grownups ever written… just in case you didn’t know… )

Jun152014

How Can I Live Up to This?

A few days ago, I came upon my white-haired father muscling a squat metal cube about the size of a picnic cooler onto the concrete apron near his shop. The object was mounted on wheels, but they weren’t turning much, and when one of them did break free and rotate a quarter-turn or so, it only happened with the agonized squeal of metal long-frozen by rust; Dad was dragging the object more than he was wheeling it.

I trotted over to give him a hand — he’s been pridefully ignoring the problem, but his back isn’t what it was — and also to get a better look at this… whatever-it-was. The fabulous Bennion Compound holds a lot of mysterious artifacts I cannot identify, but I at least recognize them as part of the collection. I couldn’t recall ever seeing this one, though, so I asked the natural question: “What the hell is this thing?”

“It’s a gas-powered welder,” Dad replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Oh,” I said, still not really understanding what I was looking at.

Dad elaborated. “It’s an arc welder with its own generator, so you can weld out in the field where there isn’t any electricity.” Ah. Now I got it. Now I could see that the unit was actually two machines in one, an engine on one side and a boxy appliance festooned with electrical hook-ups and outlets on the other.

“Where’d it come from?” I asked.

“Oh, Jack Smith gave it to me at some point. It’s been out in the barn underneath a bunch of stuff.”

Jack was our next-door neighbor as I was growing up, a kindly if sometimes exasperating old guy who sort of resembled Fred Scuttle, a moon-faced, mischievous character from the old Benny HIll Show. At one time, Jack had been a welder at the famous Kennecott open-pit copper mine that has eaten away a good chunk of the mountains on the west side of the valley. He’s also been dead for nearly 20 years, which meant this welder had probably been tucked away for 30 or 35 years.

“I used to have another one,” Dad continued, “but I got rid of it a while back. I remembered this one and thought I’d see if I could get it going.”

It seemed like a dubious prospect to me. The machine was ancient — the ghost of a logo I could see on the side looked to my eye like a 1960s font — and the whole surface of it was reddish-brown and scaly with corrosion. But I’ve seen Dad accomplish miracles with less, so I didn’t doubt too much.

“I just hope it hasn’t had gas in it all this time,” Dad said, reaching for the screw-cap on top of the engine. Like the wheels, it was frozen by the passage of time, and Dad had to wrap a rag around it and bear down hard to get it to move. When it finally broke loose, it spun nearly all the way off, releasing a puff of foul-smelling air. If you’ve never smelled gasoline that’s turned to varnish, trust me: there are few stinks on this planet that are worse. Maybe that weird flower that smells like rotting corpses. Or whale farts. But that’s about it. Seriously, it’s bad.

The smell of old gas is a satanic layercake of sickly sweet tones and acrid highlights. And an engine that’s full of that stuff may as well be packed with chewed bubblegum, because it has approximately the same effect. I knew Dad would be at this for a while, so I wished him luck and went about my business for the rest of the day.

Later that evening, I checked in with him again and asked how it was going with his new/old toy. His face broke into a grin and he motioned me over to the antiquated box. He wound a starter cord around the pulley — yes, this thing was so old, it didn’t even have an automatic recoil on the pull cord like every small-engine machine built since, oh, the Korean War or thereabouts — and gave it a tug. The ancient motor turned over once or twice, coughed, hesitated for a long enough beat I thought it had frozen again, then abruptly broke into a steady rumble. Dad pushed the throttle linkage a couple times and the engine obediently revved up and down. When Dad pressed the kill button after a few more seconds, the motor at first refused to die, as if it was reluctant to return to its decades-long dormancy. Not only did he get it running, I mused, he got it so running, it won’t stop.

“So how’d you do it?” I asked. Dad proceeded to tell me how he’d poured lacquer thinner into the gas tank to break up the varnish, and then crafted a new fuel line out of a piece of small-gauge copper tubing he’d found, because the old rubber line had dried up and cracked with age. There were probably other things as well, but to be honest, I stopped listening at some point. I was too busy thinking how amazing my old man is in the way he can take a rusty old hunk of inert metal that I would’ve hauled to the dump and breathe life into it, like Victor von Frankenstein and his accursed monster. Moreover he does it just for fun. Just to see if he can. I, on the other hand, can barely change my own oil.

I’m ashamed to admit there was a time in my life when I didn’t appreciate his gift, and truthfully, I doubt if he himself appreciates it to this day. He doesn’t even see his skills as a gift. They’re just what he does. Me, I can look around and see all the instances of misused apostrophes on signs and menus (dear god, why don’t people understand it’s versus its?). But so what? Nobody wants to listen to a scold and there’s always another typo to be found. Dad, on the other hand… he can work a genuine form of magic on the real world, the practical world, the world of moving parts and hand tools. He can rebuild a car or rewire a house. He knows plumbing and carpentry. He can estimate distances accurately with his eye alone. He understands how things fit together and what needs to happen to achieve a certain physical effect. He can make things. He is a man in an old-fashioned sense of that word. He is, in fact, the manliest man I’ve ever known. I don’t begin to measure up to his example.

It was once impossible for me to say this, for reasons I still don’t entirely comprehend, but it’s becoming easier for me to say this with every passing year: I am proud of my dad. I just wish I was more like him.

Happy Father’s Day, everyone.

Jun132014

Have You Seen the New Dragon in Town?

I’m now officially two weeks late in commenting on this topic, but that’s apparently going to be the new reality around this blog, so let’s just pretend for a minute that it’s two weeks ago, okay?

So, did y’all watch the big unveiling of the SpaceX Dragon V2 spacecraft that I pinged you about? Yeah, I didn’t either. I was getting ready to go camping that evening. If you’re interested, you can see a recording of the event here; if nothing else, it’s kind of entertaining to watch Elon Musk doing a giggly, somewhat awkward impression of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark from the Iron Man movies (i.e., gazillionaire boy wonder making a slick pitch for some new technological marvel). But hey, you’re probably too impatient for the video, so let’s cut to the chase. Here’s the new ship, with Musk standing to the right:

My first impression is, well, that kinda cool. But while a lot of other space bloggers have been gushing about how cool and futuristic it looks, I find there’s something… ungainly about its shape, at least to my eye. Still, if it works as Musk says it will, its appearance will be pretty irrelevant, and its function may well turn out to be revolutionary.

The vehicle is obviously derived from the cargo-only version that’s been delivering groceries to the International Space Station for a couple years now; the big difference I immediately noticed is that the V2 has three large windows instead of the single, hatch-mounted porthole of its predecessor, a dead giveaway that this machine is built to carry human beings who might want to see what’s outside. The V2 also has a sleeker hull, without as many exposed seams or technical systems as the version-1 Dragon. And of course, there are those stubby little landing legs.

Yes, the rumors are true. Instead of splashing down in the ocean like every other U.S. spacecraft to date except the winged space shuttles, the V2 is designed to land on terra firma, descending on rocket thrusters and touching down “with the accuracy of a helicopter,” according to Musk. (There will be parachutes in case the thruster system fails.) The video I linked a moment ago includes a brief animation at about the 4:00-minute mark, showing how this is supposed to work.

Another interesting innovation that stands out (especially after watching the animation) is the retractable nose cone that conceals an extendible docking ring. I’m not sure any previous spacecraft has had such a system, unless you count (again) the shuttles, which carried a docking rig in their payload bays once the ISS was under construction. And in an interesting bit of corporate synergy, the Dragon V2 will be controlled with the very same digital touchscreen technology used in the Tesla Model S electric cars built by Musk’s other technology venture. I’m not too keen on those, to be honest; touchscreens and I don’t get along. Think about that old Simpsons episode where Bart sells his soul for five bucks, and then finds that automatic doors will no longer open for him. That’s me and pretty much any smartphone or tablet I’ve ever played with. I much prefer the satisfyingly solid snap of a good old-fashioned toggle switch or push button. But then, how could I not? Like the tagline says, I’m an analog kind of guy.

Mild reservations about the styling aside, the Dragon V2 looks pretty impressive, and I’m looking forward to seeing it actually fly and, more exciting, land. Musk’s goal is for this vehicle to achieve what my beloved shuttles never quite pulled off: quick, simple and, most of all, relatively inexpensive reusability. Let’s hope the V2 meets the goal.

The Dragon V2 is not technically “human rated” yet — it still needs to jump through certain hoops for NASA to meet that definition — and its first test flight may come as early as next year. NASA wants a commercial spacecraft ready to carry astronauts by 2017, and although I know a couple other companies are working to meet that deadline with their respective vehicles, SpaceX will likely get there first.

If you’re interested in further reading, the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has a few thoughts here, and Ars Technica had some good technical (but not too technical!) detail in their article.

Photo source: SpaceX official Twitter feed

Jun082014

It’s a DVD Miracle!

When I heard the news a couple weeks ago that Shout! Factory — a niche entertainment company that produces, among other things, DVDs of “orphaned” TV series whose owners abandoned them after releasing only one or two seasons — had licensed my beloved WKRP in Cincinnati, I crossed my fingers and hoped against hope that they were going to do this right.

If you’ll remember, WKRP, which is possibly my all-time favorite television sitcom, is one of those shows that presents a huge challenge for home video, because it used so much actual music performed by original artists. If a scene called for “Old Time Rock and Roll” in the background, WKRP used Bob Seger’s version instead of a re-recorded soundalike. This added immensely to the verisimilitude of a series set in a radio station, but of course all of those songs need to be licensed from the record labels that own the copyrights on them in order to release the show on DVD, or even for syndication. And the cost of doing that adds up in a hurry. Practically from the moment ‘KRP entered syndication in the early ’80s, the music was a problem that the show’s owner “solved” by substituting low-cost generic stuff, or by trimming scenes that featured music. Often this created problems with the narrative because scenes and even entire episodes were written around specific songs, and to not have them there left a big hole… or, in the worst cases, made the story downright incomprehensible.

When Fox released Season One on DVD way back in 2007, the version they released was so heavily edited that many people — myself included — decided it was unacceptable and refused to buy it. Based on poor sales of that first set versus the prohibitive cost of music licensing, Fox decided not to pursue releasing the rest of the series. And so we fans of the show have just had to make due with bootlegs and the butchered syndicated versions for seven long years.

But now along comes Shout! Factory, which has announced plans to do a box set of the entire series. Could it really be that they’ve somehow worked out the licensing issue? Am I finally finally going to get the ‘KRP I remember watching instead of the ghost of itself it has become? Well, Shout! still hasn’t issued a definitive statement… but during a cast reunion at the Paley Center for Media on Wednesday night, Tim Reid — who played disc jockey Venus Flytrap — reportedly said the box set will contain all the original rock music. A little subsequent googling turned up an interview with Hugh Wilson, ‘KRP‘s creator, who claims Shout! has successfully relicensed about 85% of the original music. There’s no release date on the Shout! set yet, so I think it’s probably safe to assume they’re still working on the problem…. which means we may end up with an even higher ratio than 85%.

I can’t tell you how over-the-moon thrilled I am about this. The acquisition of WKRP, along with Time-Life/StarVista’s upcoming release of The Wonder Years — with all its original music intact too! — will basically complete my list of personal holy-grail DVDs, i.e., those movies and TV shows that I’ve wanted to own but thought would never be available in a high-quality digital format. I’ll have it all, except, of course, for sanctioned releases of those pesky pre-1997 versions of the original Star Wars trilogy. And now that Disney is calling the shots on that issue instead of Uncle George, I even have some hope for those…

Jun062014

70 Years Ago

I tend to resist the term “greatest generation” and the simplistic idolatry it encourages, because the men and women who lived through the Depression and fought World War II were just that: ordinary men and women, and not the uniformly noble, steel-jawed icons we, their descendants, often imagine them to have been. Confronted with enormous and terrifying geopolitical events beyond their control, they responded with the same range of fears, doubts, and uncertainties — the same moral quandaries — that any people experience in wartime. I firmly believe it wasn’t the generation that was exceptional so much as the times in which they found themselves. And I believe many World War II vets would probably agree with that assessment, and say that they just did what they had to do.

Nevertheless, when I think about the D-Day landings — in particular, when I think about the poor bastards who were in the front row when those ramps dropped and the German machine guns opened up — it’s pretty hard not to shake my head in wonder at the immensity of what happened on the shores of France on this day in 1944, at the audacity of trying to retake an entire continent with little more than manpower and sheer determination. Or perhaps resignation would be a more appropriate word. With more landing craft coming in behind, there wasn’t any going back, so they had to move forward if they were going to survive, let alone succeed. It’s impossible to think of the scenario and not wonder how I — how anyone — would behave had we been there.

I hope with all my heart nobody ever has to find out again. And I wish I could shake the hand of every man who did.

Jun052014

“Forty-Three” Restored!

For Christmas a few years back, my parents gave me a netbook, one of those weird little contraptions that look like a laptop computer, but aren’t quite full-featured enough to really qualify as one. (The biggest difference, as far as I can tell, is that netbooks have no optical-disc drive, so there’s no ripping or recording of CDs and DVDs with them. And yes, I know nobody does that anymore, and I just dated myself and reinforced my reputation as a late adopter of the latest and greatest, to which I say Good.) It’s come in handy a few times — for example, I took it with me to California to cover the 25 Hours of Thunderhill endurance race for The Daily Derbi — but the truth is, I rarely use it, in large part because I can’t figure out what, exactly, I ought to be using it for. And also because it’s annoyingly slow and kinda clunky. Which means it mostly gathers dust on a shelf in my Inner Sanctum.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I opened it up the other day and discovered, stashed away in the Recycle Bin for who knows how long, a text file called “43.” If you’ll recall, “Forty-Three” was one of the lengthy blog entries I was unable to recover following last year’s server crash, the one I wrote on the occasion of my forty-third birthday, which recounted the big medical adventure I’d undergone in the previous nine months. I’d thought it was gone forever, evaporated, and I literally felt my heartbeat speed up at the thought of finding a copy of it.

Now, it’s not unusual for me to begin an entry in Notepad and finish it here on the blog platform, so I briefly threw the brakes on my enthusiasm, figuring that whatever was in that file was probably incomplete and I shouldn’t get my hopes up. At best, I’d be able to get back a few more paragraphs than I’d had before.

Well… I got lucky. Astoundingly lucky. As it turned out, the forgotten file contained the whole thing. The complete entry, beginning to end, and even a couple of random notes I’d jotted down as I was planning out what to say on the subject.

I was overjoyed. I mean, in the long run, it’s not that big a deal; it’s not like this one entry is the most beautiful piece of writing I’ve ever created or anything. But it is the only complete accounting I’ve ever made of my diagnosis with Type 2 diabetes and my subsequent journey to get my health back in order. I’m sure you’ll understand how that’s a story I’d kind of like to hang on to.

I’m going to repost that story here, if you’ll forgive my self-indulgence; I thought about just dropping it back into the original entry, but I’ve decided instead to keep the record of what was lost, and what’s now been found again.

Sadly, the Girl with the Grey Eyes and my lament for the passing of analog movies remain MIA, as do all the other lost entries. But beggars can’t be choosers, can we? I’m happy to have rescued even this one piece.

And now… “Forty-Three,” originally published on October 29, 2012:

Just to bring you all up to date, I turned 43 a little over a month ago.

Friends and long-time readers know that I don’t especially enjoy my birthdays. Not anymore. I used to. My old photo albums are full of pics of me holding up the latest cake designs for the camera and looking happy. I used to anticipate the landmark rite-of-passage-type birthdays as eagerly as any kid ever followed an advent-calendar countdown to Christmas: becoming a teenager at 13, getting my driver’s license at 16, adulthood at 18, finally able to buy booze — legally, that is — at 21. For some reason, I recall 25 was kind of a big deal too… my silver anniversary, I guess. I had a quarter-century behind me and the main engines were still burning, all systems nominal.

Then something changed. I started having a problem with birthdays when I reached my thirties. And they got to be really difficult for me when I hit 40. Other people tell me they see birthdays a chance to celebrate life, or at least a good excuse to have a party. But for me they have become depressing reminders of time lost… no, time wasted… and dreams unfulfilled. As I wrote on the occasion of last year’s birthday, “there’s just too much baggage now, too many disappointments and regrets. Too much understanding that a single lifetime isn’t enough for all the things you want to do, and if you avoid making tough choices when you’re young — as I did — you might not get the chance to do some of them.” Since turning 40, I’ve also realized, as I further elaborated at the beginning of this year, “that while there may always be possibilities — as Mr. Spock so frequently counseled us back in the days when Star Trek was relevant — the probabilities of a great many things are shrinking for me.” Pretty hard to party hearty with that sobering truth lingering in the back of your head, isn’t it?

It probably doesn’t help that my birthday falls around back-to-school time, with all the bittersweet memories and melancholic feelings that stirs up, and the waning sensations of summer to amplify the sensation of time slipping away.

And yet, strangely enough given all the discontent and self-loathing that usually accompanies this annual observance of my failure to live up to my potential, this year’s birthday… wasn’t bad. Certainly it arrived with considerably less sense of utter defeat than in years past. Maybe I’m just becoming resigned to middle age, irrelevance, and mediocrity. But it’s also entirely possible that my forty-third trip around the sun was so traumatic that the formal demarcation of its end might have come as more of a relief than a reckoning. Seriously, the past 12 months have been… well, they’ve been something, that’s for sure.

For starters, there was my dad’s emergency gall-bladder surgery, an unexpected, frightening, and difficult-to-accept demonstration of parental mortality. Then there was The Girlfriend moving in with me. Don’t misunderstand my intentions for including that event on this list. It’s been a good thing, and it certainly was a long overdue thing, but it also turned out to be a much bigger adjustment than I expected when we first started talking about it a year ago. We’ve been a couple for so very long, I guess I just figured that cohabiting wouldn’t be that much of a change. Kind of nice to know I can still be so naive at my advanced age, isn’t it?

However, the big news in Year 43, the thing that’s loomed over every other event of the past nine months, is an adventure that began around the end of January when I learned that something I’ve long taken for granted — my good health — wasn’t quite as good as I’d believed.

Don’t worry, I’m okay. But circumstances have required some major lifestyle changes.

I should probably note that up until 2012, I hadn’t been to a doctor in, oh, somewhere between 15 and 20 years. Why? Well, that’s somewhat difficult to explain. Or at least difficult to explain in any way that doesn’t sound completely asinine in hindsight. A major factor, to be certain, was that I spent a considerable number of years without any insurance, and, in a cruel twist of all-too-common fate, I also wasn’t earning enough during those years to feel like I could afford the out-of-pocket expense for routine visits. I gambled — or rationalized, I suppose — that it wasn’t too important at that stage of my life, because I was relatively young, so surely nothing major could be wrong, right? Later, when I finally landed a decent job that offered some reasonably priced coverage, I was frankly out of the habit of going for yearly check-ups, and I felt just fine and anyway I really didn’t have the time to take a day off to go sit around in a waiting room with a bunch of sick kids. And besides it had been so long since I’d seen the last doctor, I was sure I would need to find a new one, and that was likely to be a total hassle and how the hell do you go about finding a doctor you like, anyhow? You get the picture. The bottom line is that I didn’t go to the doctor for a very long time. Eventually, it got to be something I just didn’t think much about, and when I did… well, I’ll be honest, I was afraid of hearing bad news, or at least of getting a lecture on how I shouldn’t have put things off for so long, and if there’s anything I hate, it’s having someone wagging their finger in my face and telling me how I’ve screwed up. Stupid, I know — damn foolish pride. And probably pretty damn childish, too. But that’s how it was.

Then, one afternoon following his gall-bladder surgery, my dad brought home an automatic blood-pressure cuff, one of the simple, do-it-yourself variety you can buy at Costco. We were sitting around the kitchen table admiring the new gadget, and Dad handed it to me and said, “Here, boy, give it a try.” So I did, and the results were… unexpected. If Dad’s new toy had been equipped with flashing lights and sirens, it would’ve been announcing DefCon 1. So, you may be wondering, just how high was it? Do the numbers “212 over 126” mean anything to you? If not, let me explain that both of those are supposed to be roughly half of that.

I don’t know what my expression was like, but Mom and Dad both looked as if Godzilla was coming down street, incinerating the neighbors’ houses with impunity. Then Dad — who was diagnosed with type II diabetes about a decade ago — thought it might be wise to see what else about me might be… sub-optimal. He got out his glucometer, pricked my finger, and that result was… also alarming.

Mom and Dad immediately started haranguing me about getting into a doctor’s office. I was hesitant. Not because I wasn’t taking the situation seriously — believe me, I was; I was crapping my pants, to be honest — but given I didn’t have a regular doctor anymore, I wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed. And to further complicate matters, I was due to leave in exactly one week for a Hawaiian cruise with The Girlfriend and her parents. I promised my folks I’d deal with this immediately after the cruise, but that wasn’t good enough for them. (And I have to grudgingly acknowledge they were right not to let me procrastinate… but don’t ever tell them that.) So my mom called her and Dad’s doctor and begged him to take a look at me. He had a full docket and wasn’t accepting new patients, but under the circumstances, and given Mom and Dad’s long relationship with him, he agreed to give me five minutes. And it really was just about five minutes, at the end of which I left his office with a prescription for blood-pressure medication and an appointment for a full physical when I got back from Hawaii.

It wasn’t exactly the most restful vacation, let me tell you… especially since I’d elected to keep this news between Anne and myself, so her parents had no idea what was up. I wasn’t ashamed or anything — not exactly — but I wasn’t prepared to talk about it much. Especially not until I knew exactly what I was dealing with.

Well, to make a long story somewhat shorter, I had my physical in February, as well as a couple of elective tests, and was ultimatley diagnosed with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and type II diabetes, just like my dad. I could no longer ignore the obvious: that I am a middle-aged man with some serious problems. Or, as my new doctor so charmingly put it (in a misbegotten attempt to lighten the mood, I think), I was a walking time bomb. I had a lot to think about in the coming weeks, and a lot of work to do to try and salvage the situation, all coming on top of the challenges of learning to live with someone (Anne moved in mere days before the cruise).

To again condense the narrative a bit, I’m doing fine now. I’ve made a lot of changes to my diet and my lifestyle, I take six pills a day (the doc even threw in something to help with my gout, as long as he had the prescription pad out), I bought my own Costco blood-pressure cuff and glucometer, and my various metrics are all right where they ought to be. I wasn’t aware of how bad I used to feel — if you’d asked me a year ago, I honestly wouldn’t have believed anything was wrong — but I can’t deny that I feel better now than I did last Halloween. I used to get frequent headaches, which I blamed on eyestrain because my job involves so much reading. I don’t anymore. I no longer feel my heartbeat throbbing in my head when I get stressed out. And you know the expression “seeing red” when somebody gets angry? I used to literally do that. It was like somebody dropped a colored filter over my eyes. No longer.

Those symptoms were all due to the high blood pressure, of course. The diabetes, on the other hand, didn’t really come with any symptoms, at least not any I took notice of. I didn’t have any of the classic warning signs like unquenchable thirst or blurry vision. I was urinating frequently, but I’ve always done that, as far back as I can remember, so that wasn’t anything alarming. My completely uninformed guess is that maybe I’d only recently crossed the threshold into diabetes shortly before we caught it, and my glucose numbers never got high enough to trigger the usual problems. But that may be wishful thinking; I really don’t know. In any event, my glucometer tells me it’s under control now. And honestly, I know I’ve been lucky in how easily I brought it under control, at least compared to what some people have to endure. None of the changes I’ve had to make have been terribly onerous. Diet-wise, I mostly just cut out candy and desserts and switched to Diet Coke instead of the fully leaded stuff. I choose whole-wheat bread and pasta when I can get it, and I no longer eat potatoes or white rice. And I try to take a good long walk every afternoon. As I said, nothing too difficult, and so far at least, these measures seem to be sufficient.

There have been some definite positives to come out of all this, too. The most obvious is that I’ve lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 pounds. I can’t say for certain how much I’ve lost, because I started dropping last fall before I was aware of the diabetes and I failed to take note of my starting weight. (Unexplained weight loss is another warning sign, but I didn’t know that then, and was simply pleased to think I had dropped a few pounds.) But I do know I’m back to about what I weighed when I graduated from college 20 years ago. Needless to say, I feel pretty good about that. It’s done wonders for my ego, actually, and I’ve had a lot of fun trying on old clothes that I’ve saved essentially as souvenirs, never imagining that I’d someday be able to wear them again. (Of course, the flip side is that a lot of more recent favorites are now too big for me to continue wearing. It’s always something!) Also, on a less tangible level, I find I’m generally a lot less irritable than I used to be. Things just don’t seem to piss me off the way they did, although I can’t say if that’s a physiological thing or just some hard-won perspective about what’s really important and what’s not. And my dilemma — and what I’ve had to do to cope with it — has inspired Anne to do something about her own weight and health as well. So in a weird kind of way, the ‘betes and the high BP have resulted in a lot of good for the both of us.

Even so, I’ve had a very rough time coming to terms with this. Before now, I haven’t wanted anyone outside my immediate circle of loved ones to know about it, and I don’t know why. Diabetes and hypertension are hardly uncommon, after all, and there’s no good reason why I should be embarassed about having them. It’s not like I caught the clap from a two-dollar hooker. But even though everyone I’ve confided in has been quick to remind me diabetes runs in my family, and most forty-something people have some kind of medical issues to face, I can’t help feeling like I really screwed myself hard. I spent a lot of years living on Ding Dongs and Red Vines, and telling myself I really wasn’t fat because I wasn’t Jabba-the-Hutt fat like some of the poor folks you see shuffling around out there. I did what I’ve always done: I procrastinated and looked the other way and tried to pretend I was still an immortal nineteen-year-old, and it finally caught up with me. And these problems are never, ever going to go away. I’m going to be taking these damn pills and watching what I eat until the day I die. Which I worry may be a lot sooner now that I have these problems. As I said, the diet isn’t really all that bad. But the psychology of having to follow it anyhow really gets me down: the knowledge that I now have to be vigilant and make choices and weigh the consequences of my actions, and be prepared to make up for the occasional splurge. I no longer have the luxury of being carefree about what I put in my mouth. And I fucking hate that. My numbers are stable enough I can get away with having a slice of pie or something once in a while… but I always feel guilty and worried after I do. And that well and truly sucks. I can’t tell you how I’d love to just mindlessly shovel down a package of Oreos while watching a movie, the way I used to… but of course, that’s how I got myself into this mess. One Oreo, one Hershey bar, one piece of cake, one fistful of M&Ms, one bottle of Coke Classic, one pint of beer, one mound of white-flour spaghetti at a time.

So, yeah… getting back, at long last, to the subject of my birthday, I suppose it shouldn’t seem at all strange that I had an easier time getting through it than in years past. After all, how could any single day of self-reflection possibly be any worse than months and months of that?

Jun042014

Impressions from the Weekend

Driving southeast between Scipio and Salina, two of the smaller dots on the map of Utah. We missed the rain, but the hummocky two-lane highway is still wet, and it shines in the golden light of late afternoon. The asphalt has a pinkish tinge, a pale derivative of the vibrant orangey-red soil we occasionally spot through the dense brush that crowds the edges of the road. A sweetly acrid odor of sage infiltrates the Jeep Liberty I borrowed from my parents; I know from past experience that the smell is always most noticeable right after a storm, when the plants are still steaming. It smells fresh and clean to me. Anne is sneezing and rubbing at her eyes.

We’re three hours from home and haven’t encountered another car in nearly 20 minutes.

***

Dinner at Mom’s Cafe, a two-story brick building that’s stood at the corner of State and Main for a hundred years. A red and green neon sign buzzes over the entrance; a good ol’ boy in a ratty Harley t-shirt sits at the counter and flirts with his waitress. Our own waitress, a cute teenage townie with a blue bandana wrapped around her forehead, is getting frazzled by a late dinner rush. On the wall above our booth, there’s a signed photo of Willie Nelson with his arm around someone… “Mom” herself perhaps. His handwritten inscription notes how much he enjoyed his steak.

Coal trucks rumble past outside, their massive shadows intermittently darkening the whole interior of the cafe. We gobble cheeseburgers. The buns are toasted, the onion slices crispy and not too sharp-tasting. The meat is so fresh and flavorful, it was probably standing in a nearby field only the day before.

***

A black man sits on the concrete jersey barrier at the edge of I-70, midway up Salina Canyon. He wears knee-length shorts, a sleeveless green t-shirt, and a friendly smile for the passing cars. A stuffed and well-worn backpack sits on the ground between his ankles. He makes no attempt to raise his thumb, but I consider stopping and offering him a ride anyway. I don’t. I’ve heard too many horror stories about crazy people. So I blow on past and feel a nagging sense of guilt for the next ten miles. I hope he gets where he’s going.

***

I awake cold and aching from a light doze, the first sleep I’ve managed since going to bed six hours before. I’m curled in a ball beneath a pile of afghans and quilts that’s done nothing to stop the chill rising up from beneath me. The thermostat says its 55 degrees inside the camp trailer. I think to myself that I’ve surely endured worse nights, but offhand, I can’t think of any.

***

I spend the day in a groggy haze. I keep reflecting that my idea of “roughing it” is staying in a historic motor lodge somewhere away from the freeway ramps.

I feel like a hopeless city slicker, a tenderfoot, a real lame-o with no manly skills whatsoever. Earlier, I tried to connect a propane tank. For the first time in my entire misbegotten, everything’s-backwards-because-I’m-left-handed life, I actually remembered the “righty tighty, lefty loosey” meme. It turns out propane tanks are the one thing in this humiliating world that are threaded the opposite direction of everything else. If I’d turned the nut the “wrong” way on my first try, as I always have before, it would’ve worked.

I wonder what the hell I’m doing here.

***

The clouds finally blow past just before sundown. The camp grows dark with the coming of night, then darker still as the others turn out the trailer lights and bed down. The encircling trees become a shadowy rim for the enormous black bowl that has settled over the world.

Back home in the Salt Lake Valley, I live at the bottom of another bowl, and there’s so much light pollution from the city and its surrounding ‘burbs that about all I can see in the night sky is Orion and the Big Dipper. Here, though… here the bowl arcs up over my head, infinitely deep and deeply black. There are so many stars up there that it’s actually hard to pick out those two familiar constellations against the multitude.

As my eyes adjust, even more appear, and I start to perceive their colors, too: white-hot, gentle yellow, sullen red, intense blue. A shooting star etches a path across the bowl of the sky, like in a Spielberg movie. An orange spark crosses overhead, too high and too fast to be anything but a satellite.

The longer I stand there with my head cocked back and the darkness seeming to grow denser around me with every passing minute, the more I can see. Its as if the universe is an origami chrysanthemum unfolding itself, opening in a slow, sensual pace, revealing its secret inner surfaces to me. Then the final glory fades into view: a hazy white fog that gradually reveals itself, the longer you stare at it, to be composed of billions of individual points of light. The same points of light that have shone down on the human race since we walked out of Olduvai Gorge; the same points that will be there when one of us sets foot on Mars. I’m watching the entire galaxy as it watches us.

I think I hear something moving out there in the trees. Supposedly a bear has been seen on this mountain, and elk, too. But whatever it is, assuming it’s not just my imagination, comes no closer. The air is growing cold. And I am alone with the stars…

May292014

SpaceX Unveiling Dragon 2.0 Tonight…

The headline pretty much says it all: SpaceX, the commercial spaceflight company that’s leading the pack with its amazing Falcon boosters and Dragon spacecraft, plans to finally reveal its human-rated version of the Dragon in a live webcast this evening at 7 PM Pacific time. This variant of the existing Dragon design will reportedly have seating for seven astronauts, a major step up from the three-person Soyuz capsules that have been ferrying personnel to and from the ISS since the space shuttles were retired three years ago. And it couldn’t come at a better time, either, considering the impact that the current diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Russia is having on our joint space operations.

I confess, I still miss the sight and the runway-landing concept of my beloved shuttles — as an aside, I’m looking forward to the first orbital flight of the shuttle-like DreamChaser being developed by Sierra Nevada Corp., currently planned for 2016 — but those guys at SpaceX have become heroes of mine with their rapid string of successes. Remember that this company designs and builds most of its own hardware in-house, and that it’s only been around for 12 years. In that time, it’s gone from square one to operating a field-tested, reusable, reliable spacecraft and booster system, a pretty remarkable achievement any way you look at it. And Elon Musk, the company’s founder, seems to have a strong and audacious vision for the future, with talk of sending humans to Mars and the company’s exploration into landing spacecraft on their tails like the old-fashioned movie rocketships of the 1950s. This is all potentially very exciting stuff… we may still get that spacegoing future we once believed in…

May242014

Notes to Myself: Summer Movie List

This is one of those entries that’s more for my own purposes — specifically my increasingly unreliable middle-aged memory! — than you guys, but perhaps one of my Loyal Readers will see something here you weren’t previously aware of and think, “Hey, thanks, Bennion, for letting me know about that!”

Memorial Day weekend traditionally marked the beginning of the summer movie season back in my days as an usher and projectionist, so here are the upcoming (and a couple of already-playing-that-I-haven’t-gotten-to-yet) summer movies that have caught my fancy:

May 16

Godzilla

Because, well, why not?

May 23

X-Men: Days of Future Past

There seems to have been a re-evaluation of the X-Men series over the past few years, and the popular opinion now holds that these movies — which I recall being highly praised (at least by the geeky community) when they first came along — aren’t very good. Nevertheless, I still enjoy them, especially Hugh Jackman’s performance as Wolverine, and this one looks especially promising.

May 30

Maleficent

Honestly, this one only makes the list because Anne wants to see it — I really don’t see the point of a live-action retelling of an old Disney cartoon, nor do I get the appeal of all the recent fairy-tale-based properties in general (Wicked, Once Upon a Time, etc.). But I will say Angelina Jolie looks utterly fabulous as the title character, and also like she had the time of her life playing this role.

A Million Ways to Die in the West

I’m not a big fan of Seth McFarlane’s humor — okay, I’ll be frank: I think Family Guy is the most painfully stupid, vulgar, tasteless, and unfunny garbage ever foisted off on an unsuspecting public in the history of, well, anything — but the trailer for this actually made me laugh a couple times. I liked the gag with the bottles. And Liam Neeson lends coolness to everything he touches. So… we’ll see.

June 20

Jersey Boys

A biopic about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, directed by Clint Eastwood? Yes, please.

June 27

Boyhood

This coming-of-age project from writer/director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) begins with a fascinating gimmick — he filmed it intermittently over a twelve-year period so he could use the same child actor throughout the story as he ages from six to 18 — but it also just looks like a really good story. Linklater has become one of my favorite filmmakers, a consummate observer of the human experience.

July 2

Tammy

And then there’s this, which I’ll probably regret even admitting to having any interest in. But I like Melissa McCarthy and I love Susan Sarandon, and the two of them have demonstrated really great chemistry on McCarthy’s TV series Mike and Molly. God help me.

July 18

Jupiter Ascending

Mila Kunis discovers she’s some kind of long-lost interstellar princess in yet another live-action anime from the Wachowskis (The Matrix trilogy). If nothing else, it looks like some excellent space-opera spectacle.

August 1

Guardians of the Galaxy

Here it is, my number-one can’t-wait gotta-see of the summer. The next entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe looks utterly goofy, but everything in the two trailers (trailer #1, trailer #2) released thus far mashes my happy buttons hard. Trailers lie, true, but from what I can tell, this is something akin to The Fifth Element (a favorite of The Girlfriend and myself), an eye-popping visual feast with its tongue firmly in cheek. Exactly my kind of movie. I never in a million years imagined I could be this excited for a movie that so prominently features a machine-gun-toting badass berserker raccoon… but damn, I am excited. Don’t let me down, Marvel-ites!

Get on Up

Another biopic of a musical legend… James Brown, in this case. These flicks all tend to follow a formula, but I love ’em anyhow… the music, the period settings… love ’em.

August 8

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Twenty-four years ago, The Girlfriend and I went our first date. I took her to see the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the one where the heroes wore rubber suits with animatronic faces. And we loved it. (Of course, we didn’t go another date for three more years, but that’s unrelated.) Now comes a reboot directed by trashmeister Michael Bay and starring Megan Fox, whose main talent, as far as I can tell, is outbitching everybody else. I have very low expectations, but a lot of morbid curiosity.

August 15

The Expendables 3

Stupid stuff-blow-up-good movies, but I love seeing all the decrepit old heroes of my youth back in action. And this one includes Harrison Ford! And, rather incongruously, Kelsey Grammar! But hey, Harrison Ford!

August 22

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

I have very mixed feelings about the first Sin City movie… I thought it was a beautiful-looking movie with an utterly unique visual style and an unbelievable cast that brought life to a graphic novel in a way no other movie has ever done… but the story was one of the ugliest, most nihilistic things ever written. (I’m not a fan of Frank Miller.) Now here’s a sequel which looks like more of the same… I’ll see it, but I expect I’ll be equally as ambivalent as I was the first time around.

And there you go… what are you planning to see at the cinema this weekend?

May212014

TV Title Sequences: The Goldbergs

One of the more pleasant surprises of the TV season just ending has been The Goldbergs, an ABC sitcom predicated on nostalgia for the late, great 1980s. I wasn’t sure about this one at first — the pilot episode was a queasy mismatch of mean-spirited snark and treacly sentiment that had just enough laughs to bring me back for another try. Fortunately, the showrunners saw the problem and modulated the yelling and sarcasm in later episodes, allowing the show to develop its own quirky flavor that’s a lot less Married… with Children and a lot more The Wonder Years.

The Goldbergs actually echoes The Wonder Years — that landmark coming-of-age series that ran in the late ’80s/early ’90s, but was set 20 years earlier — in a number of ways, which I suspect is probably intentional. Like The Wonder Years, the show is built around a family of five familiar archetypes: grumpy dad, kooky mom, moody older sister, bullying lunkhead middle brother, and cute youngest brother, who serves as the protagonist of most stories. The Goldbergs also adds a sixth character to the recipe, a swinging-single grandfather who is winningly played by veteran character actor George Segal.

There are other similarities to The Wonder Years, notably a voice-over narration supplied by an adult version of the youngest brother, as well as the show’s use of original music from the period to comment on and enhance the storylines. (The season ender last week deployed Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” in a way that was simply sublime. If any Gen-Xer watching that episode didn’t end up with a lump in their throat and a big old grin on their lips, they need to catch the first time-traveling DeLorean back to the ’80s and do it all over again.)

However, one big and very remarkable difference between The Goldbergs and The Wonder Years is the way they respectively handle time. While the latter show identified each season as representing a specific historical year, as well as a specific school year/grade level for its young protagonist, The Goldbergs takes a more… post-modern approach. We are informed in the voice-over each week that the show is set in a generalized “1980-something.” This gimmick — which I think is actually pretty funny — allows the producers to include familiar pop-cultural landmarks, fads, clothing styles, and news events from all over the decade without smart-alecks like me pointing out, for example, that there were five years between the release of The Goonies and the advent of the Reebok Pump basketball shoe, two ’80s icons that have both figured prominently in recent episodes. This approach gives the show a slightly absurdist tone, but in a weird way, it helps to better capture the sense of the Awesome ’80 than a show with a more persnickety focus on detail might. We end up with something that feels true rather than strictly factual. Kind of like the jumbled, middle-aged, increasingly unreliable memories of the Gen-Xers who surely comprise the show’s target demographic.

(It also occurs to me that perhaps this “1980-something” trope says something about how we Xers recall our youth versus how the Baby Boomers who made The Wonder Years saw theirs. They were all about earnestness and bittersweet poignancy, whereas — if a sitcom can be said to be representative of a generation — we’re a lot more irreverent about our formative decade. That’s not to say The Goldbergs is never poignant — I frequently get a little something in my eye while watching — but it lacks the self-consciousness and self-importance of its predecessor. To follow this through to the grossest overgeneralization I’ll ever make based on a half-hour sitcom, the Boomers wanted to change the world; we Xers just wanted to have fun with it.)

The Goldbergs‘ theme song — if a composition only 30 seconds long can really be called a song — has a similar post-modern, mix-and-match origin. Performed by a band called I Fight Dragons, “Rewind” is a mixture of pop instruments and vocals with something called “chiptune,” electronic music and other sounds originally synthesized by vintage computers and video games. The result, like the show itself, is weirdly effective at evoking the feel of the ’80s without really being much like an actual TV theme from the era. I’ll warn you now before you click “Play”: it’s insanely catchy.

I love it.

I recently tweeted I Fight Dragons to ask if there’s a longer version of this, and they actually responded… it won’t be on their upcoming album, but they will “definitely be doing a full-length version soon.” Something to watch for…

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