FaceBook se fue, pues.

It's been maybe a month now that I haven't been hooked up to FaceBook. I got on it in the beginning because it afforded me a link with my eldest's adventures as he headed from his digs in Cincinnati to Portland, OR. He posted pictures along the way and gave us little tidbits about what he'd seen or how many times he got pulled over for speeding on open ground in Utah or New Mexico. Then I stuck with it 'cause I'd found a bunch of folks whom I'd known or with whom I had or did have in the past some relationship or the other. Cindy & the boys were on it. A bunch of Cindy's friends and some of my friends were on it. My former commanding officer in Puerto Rico was on it. A couple ham radio friends also had FaceBook accounts.
     It was a social network thingie, just like they say it is.
     It was also very time consuming and, due to my open nature about political, religious or whatever else views, it was a great way to go through the day arguing with folks about things that neither they nor I were willing to make concessions or reconsider as erroneous.
     So I got tired of the fights.
     After the shootings in Arizona last month, I made a comment about gun control that I figured most folks would at least give me some hedge for and leave me alone. I expected at least to see folks I know admitting that the access to firearms by anyone at all was source number one of the problem & cause of the shootings.
     What I got in return was the usual NRA-inspired “liberty” and “freedom” illogicals that made me shake my head in disbelief, horror and dismay.
     After a couple days of back-and-forth diatribes, interjected bits of logic from my kids, which interjections were summarily refused, I went up to the menu item to turn off my FaceBook account.
     If you've done this, you know how it works: FaceBook wants to know why you're leaving.
     I'm leaving, I thought, because I'm wasting time & I'm getting sick of the idiocy of some folks political viewpoints, even if the people presenting them are, to all other indicators, just folks like you and me.
     I left, I thought, because I didn't want to waste my time or anyone else's trying to change the world digitally over huge distances & all that other computer culture stuff.
     Of course, the minute I disappeared from the “friends” list of many of these folks, I was beset with emails & a couple phone calls asking me what it was that had caused me to “defriend” them.
     Simple put, I hadn't defriended anyone. I'd gone off the FaceBook world and, unless the putative Messiah of creation suddenly showed up and told me it was going to fix everything in the world, including the superstition that makes Messiahs exist, I was off for good.
     A week went by and I heard less about my not being there.
     Two weeks went by, I heard from ham radio friends that they'd noticed my disappearance.
     Three weeks went by and, yes, I have to admit it would have been nice to share my adventures building an antenna tuner via FaceBook's picture publishing thingie. But I didn't and time passed without much further turmoil
     The turmoil, I can tell you right here, I have not missed one bit.
     Of course, I've seen stuff other family members have posted, pictures and news and whatnot via Cindy's account. She says something and shows me screens. I look, I see and that's that. Not one bit of turmoil. No arguments about insurrectionist bullshit. No blather about who wouldn't have been killed if a bunch of folks had been armed. How the West was won. How the Mexicans are causing trouble.
     No turmoil. No arguments. No news. No big deal.
     It's been a month at least now and I have to say that I haven't missed it a bit. Instead of keeping the world aware of whatever minor point of existence had intrigued me personally and with total narcissistic attention, I've cleaned up the office (again) after finishing a rebuild of the entire ham radio antenna steering system, taken the time to fix a couple really nice Turkish recipe dinners and sat down and read a book about gun control & insurrectionism and another book about the history of the Latin language. Among other things.
     At this point I seriously suspect that I won't be back on FaceBook again. The only things that would drag me back would be something where my communication with the world would be necessary for what are more mundane reasons than having my own Twitter posse. Like going out to Arizona with a bunch of data collecting doodads to find the places where Dad lived as a child and maybe take pictures of the school documents that are hiding out there in some historical society vault. And in fact, should I end up doing that trip, I don't really think I need FaceBook to track myself. I've cell phones and email and that should be good enough. Pictures? I'll post 'em in emails.
     Other 'n that, there ain't much of a draw for me any more. It's quiet and peaceful and reasonable to just be with the folks I am actually, physically with. FaceBook may sound like fun to some. Cindy's on there every night catching up on what the eldest and his lady friend are doing. Cid can track the youngest's travails in New Jersey and the rest of the family can drop in for a couple photo shows. Fine and dandy.
     Me? I don't need the trouble and waste of time. Or as Dad used to say with a wave of his hand, as if fanning away ghosts, “Chingado. Así sea.”
 

Guns & Newspaper Editors

Since I dragged the 1942 Mosin-Nagant rifle into the hacienda, I've been catching hell from Cid about how guns are dangerous and guns kill people and guns don't belong in houses and cats and dogs might learn to use 'em and then they could bribe us for more food and warmer places to take crap.
      I usually respond to this stuff by pointing out how many gun owners there are on the planet and how many guns are in the hands of people at any day of the week and how, except for members of active duty military units actually in combat positions, there ain't that much shootin' of other people. And how most of the guns on the planet are hangin' on walls, stashed in gun safes or cabinets, or holstered on belts, some of which might be on the bodies of policemen and other law enforcement folks. And yes, them's is both long sentences but that's how it works.
      Guns in the hands of people kill people.
      Guns in the hands of military folks trying to make the other poor, dumb sonovabitch die for his or her country kill said poor, dumb sonovabitches.
      Guns on policemen's belts generally stay there unless they find themselves in combat-style situations, in which case the statement above applies.

And then there's the biggest one: Guns handled stupidly in social situations.

So up I get Sunday morning, awaked by a cat's plaintive call 'cause there was another, unknown cat on the front porch. And as much as I am sure the cat calling about the intruder probably would like to learn how to load and fire a Yugoslavian Tokarev and light off a few rounds at said intruder, I ignored the cat's demands for summary justice and hauled my coffee mug out of the dish washer.
      Part of the paper's sittin' on the table. The rest of it's sittin in Cid's lap in the living room.
      I put three pieces of old multi-grain, crunch-up-your-teeth bread in the toaster, which when toasted I then butter and slather on some Keiller's Dundee Marmalade.
      I sit down at the kitchen table, look in the obits to see if Paul Simmons had made it there yet, read the cry-baby tantrum letters to the editor and then Cid brings out the front section. We trade. I turn to page A13 and there at the bottom of the pages is a picture with a cut headline that says “Horsing Around at the Cattle Baron's Ball.” At which point I know that if I mention what I see to Cid, she'll go off like a rocket.
      I quietly read the bit under the picture and then go upstairs to write a letter to the editor.
      Why?
      Holy shi'ite, Mask Man, check out the picture!

A group of south suburbanites (Dayton, Ohio speak for “rich people”) are standing around while a grinning woman, identified in the paper as Sherry Oakes, holds a Winchester Commemorative 94 lever action rifle and waves the muzzle of the piece around. One of the guys in the picture seems to be turning away and pushing the muzzle out of the way of the guy next to him. The rest of the gang has the silly monkey look.
      Right there on page A13 of the Dayton Daily News is the picture of someone doing something stupid with a very powerful, albeit pretty, Winchester. And there are other stupid gun tricks on the newspaper's website for the event.
      Remember thing about guns and stupid people?
      The “Guns handled stupidly in social situations” part?
      Right there on the page, waitin' for Jimmy Nobrain lives down the street with his grandparents 'cause his own parents stupidly shot each other playin' with a couple .357 Magnums with real elephant ivory grips one evenin' while drinkin' whiskey shots around the family's nightly bonfire.
      Right there on the page, waitin' for anybody who thinks that guns are dangerous and guns kill people and guns don't belong in houses and children might grab one subsequently shoot themselves, their parents, a guy drivin' down the street or their own little brother of three years age.
      As, I will admit freely and with complete horror, happens every so often around here and likely elsewhere in Gringolandia.

So I get on my high horse of horror & disbelief and send a letter to the editor of the newspaper saying that they should be ashamed of themselves publishing that picture. I didn't mention that the person with the rifle in the picture should be taken out for brain scramblin', although not much would be necessary, given the evidence for having no brain at all presented in the picture.
      At the same time – and I didn't mention it – the picture is all you need for Cid's proof, of course. Never mind that my Mosin is hangin' on the wall behind me with one of those obnoxious trigger locks on it that defeats any safety that the rifle might have had – which is an argument for ancient firearm design – by holding the trigger pulled all the time. Or that everyone I know who has a gun or guns gets real nervous when they pull the piece out of a holster or a gun safe or off the wall, even if they know that there ain't no way it's gonna light off a round, basically because, as I said in my letter to the editor

As a gun owner and veteran, I know such “horsing around” as a public invitation for someone to get shot or killed. Obvious in the picture is the simple fact that two primary rules of gun ownership and handling are being ignored.
      Treat every gun as loaded is the first rule. The second rule states that the only safety on any gun is the person holding it.
      It makes no difference whether you're talking about grandpa's 1890s pump action .22 rifle, Uncle Igor's 1942 Mosin-Nagant, a Winchester Model 94 commemorative, a rusty Tokarev pistol brought back from Vietnam or the 1911 Colt service pistol Dad carried in Guadalcanal.
      All firearms are potentially dangerous and deadly mechanical contrivances. Nobody should “horse around” with any fiream. Ever.

      And never mind how many gun owners there are on the planet and how many guns are in the hands of people at any day of the week and how, except for members of active duty military units actually in combat positions, how many people don't get shot. And how most of the guns on the planet are hangin' on walls, stashed in gun safes or cabinets, or holstered on belts, some of which might be on the bodies of policemen and other law enforcement folks. And yes, them's is both long sentences but that's how it works.

In the end it all comes down to stupid humans doing stupid things. Leaving a gun under a bed – as if you're gonna be awake enough to choose a target if you hear a bump in the night – is pure ignorance and a callous disregard for the curiosity of children. Keeping your father's 1911 Colt .45 auto loaded 'cause that's the way Dad carried in in the war is asking to get shot or to shoot yourself. And putting five rounds in the mag of your Mosin 'cause that's the way Uncle Igor carried in the Revolution when every day was strйggle and then install a trigger lock that turns the Mosin into a quick trip to the morgue is outrageously moronic.

The rules are simple:

Treat every gun as loaded.

The only safety on any gun is the person holding it.

Never point the muzzle of any firearm at anything or anyone you don't want to shoot or kill or maim.

      Any firearm is a dangerous & deadly mechanical contrivance, as dangerous as a moron settin' his car to launch on a highway. As dangerous as a cast iron printing press built in 1875. As dangerous as a gas oven, an open frame high voltage power supply or that switchblade you bought in Genoa on the '71 Med Cruise that you carry in your right pants pocket.
      You can die horsing around with guns. You can kill people horsing around with guns.
      Wealthy society folks obviously don't understand that. Mental defectives.
      And the Dayton Daily News should be ashamed to have published that picture.
 

And Now at the Dissertation Lounge . . .

I've had three friends go through the academic system deep enough to end up with PhD after their names. One guy got his degree in chemistry, a task that I would consider absolutely more daunting that getting a PhD in, say, literature or communications. The other guy got his degree in history, but he did it in Portugal, which is "old Europe" and thus, at least to what I understand of education in Europe, a bitch. The third guy is hauling ass toward his PhD in biology, which I consider just about as daunting as a degree in physics or, even, chemistry.
     One way or the other, each of these people put in serious reading time and huge amounts of personal energy by way of study and memorization, plus research time -- which is the whole point of the paper chase in the first place, some folks believe -- and all the fears and frustrations of going into something so deeply that you end up looking like the comic book guy on the Simpsons, all nerdy and obsessively focused on every tiny little detail you could ever find about a corner of a molecule somewhere on the skin of a cell.
     Like that, yeah.
     Now, given this preamble, let me say straight up here and now that I am in no way comparing my experience of writing a novel with the experience of my three friends. Sure, it's been a pain in the ass, all the editing and spell checking and rewriting this and inserting this bit of text into that. I've sweated here and there over how it looks, at the currency or specificity of this or that bit of info that is supposed to inform the reader of where the hell whatever is going on takes place.
     But I really think that, after what looks like seven or eight months, not counting all the time I've thought about this or that part of the book just sittin' on the can or marching back and forth across the lawn with the mower, if this is anything like getting close to going for a PhD, I think I'll pass.
     There's all the data, first of all.
     You start out writing a book about a guy travels through time and space by way of having been found all dead and dried out in his little space ship by a very advanced extraterrestrial species, you're gonna run into trouble. Like the physics of time travel itself. That and the physics of going from one universe to another -- since true time travel would involve dimensional travel as well, given what little I understand of the physics of time travel.
     And then there's the geography of things.
     Where's this home world that this so-called "singularity species" called the Community come from? How'd it get to be like it is, this planet with this one organism covering it from sea to rippling sea? How does this species communicate with itself, given that it's got little brain nodes all over itself, everywhere it can stretch out and catch the sun on this home planet? And how'd they learn to travel through space and time?
     And how did they find the main character? How'd they revive him? Did they just do that once?
     I mean, you gotta settle that question, the grandfather paradox lookin' question about what happens if they send him further back in time than his own particular place in the timeline of the universe in which he was found.
     If they find him -- which is one temporal event -- and they revive him with a copy of himself -- which is another temporal event -- what happens to the universe he came from when he's sent back in time to before human beings were what they are today? It's another temporal event, this sending back thing, after all. So . . .
     Are you starting to get the idea here, chum?
     'Cause I already did a half dozen times in the back yard, sittin' on the can, walkin' down the street and, yes, and even while I was writing all this crap.

Holy shit is it a pile now!

At which point we go back to that dissertation & PhD interrogation thing.
     See, right now it's a 250 pages of text -- minus the few extra blank pages that are part of the typographic conveniences & the stuff book printers know about, with my access to such secrets being a completely different rant.
     At 250 pages of text, it's almost big enough to be somebody's dissertation and if not that big a deal, certainly a chapter in one. In a dissertation, that is. Thus, for all intents, I will say that writing this thing has been about the same amount of time at the keyboard as most folks I know would have spent on the their dissertation, counting in all the pre-writes and the chapter-by-chapter hacking away at making sure the point of all this scrivening is understood by the reader. By the dissertation review committee and all that, that much work.
     Only thing is, right here, there's a big difference between a dissertation on, say, a moderately well-known Latin American writer whose work spans not only decades but also political upheaval and a couple handful revolutions, juntas and take overs and the dissertation that my friend wrote for his chemistry degree.
     See, there's the hard science part of a PhD in chem or bio that just has to trump the artsy-fartsy work going into a dissertation about literature. Yeah, sure, there's dates and names and publication dates and political moments and all that. But you write a hard science dissertation, you have written about lab-assailed & assured facts. Numbers and figures, equations and the simple bottom line of literature being very much a soft science when it comes to what is.
     Science is about stuff you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.
     Literature is about stuff you can tie together with other stuff, some of it facts but most of it figurines, to make the literature important to talk about.
     Like William Faulkner, who, as far as I figure it with my meager credentials, is known today only 'cause somebody wrote a dissertation on him which might have become a book.
     And it's here that the whole bit about writing a novel versus a dissertation comes under bleak inspection.
     I think that I've suffered the work here on this book. I put in my time trying to get the physics of the book look at least something like the physics of the world I live in. I've worried the placing of the action, the actions of the characters, the interactions between various bits and pieces of the plot line, all that. I've worried out.
     And I've worked on making sure the typography makes the story legible and readable, that. Which ain't nothin' in a dissertation 'cause the review committee and all them overlords have their own ideas of what is good typography so get over it and stand up like a man!
     Dammit.
     So, yes, I'm whining. Big deal.
     But I think that what I've written -- beyond whether anyone later on writes a dissertation about it -- amounts to at least the same amount of work that a dissertation writer might have tossed into getting started on book of knowledge that every dissertation becomes. But I'm sure as hell not arrogant enough to think that my work on this book has any close glitter to the PhD that my friend is gonna have after his name in a year for spending all that time in the lab.
     It's nice for me to think of it that way. And it's nice for me to think that this book -- and the one I'm going to start on once I get through the hell of making this first one "perfect" (and oh, what perfectionism costs, my children) -- are dissertation quality.
     So I can hope.
     As if.
     

     

While I Was Away . . .

Back when it was still mørketiden, Cindy decided that we should hie hence to Portland, Oregon, to visit the eldest young'n. Personally, at the time, I was quite willing to sit in the northern wintertime darkness and fiddle hours away playing with radio junk, playing with printshop junk or collecting junk so I can be on Hoarders. At the time.
     So up comes June and off we go, Cid & me, to Portland. We spend five hours crammed into a metal tube with wings and end up, eventually, at the same hotel we stayed at last time we did this dance, a year ago more or less.
     We both nodded off a bit 'cause we'd gotten up plenty early our local time & it was afternoon when we arrived. A short recharge later we were down in the lobby with Ian and Sarah, ready to go. As if. And off we went, eating dinner together at some place I ain't sure I remember but that ain't all that uncommon any more, me bein' retired and all.
     Then it turns out we were just in time for the Rose Festival Starlight Parade, which came at the end of a race of sorts. I say "of sorts" 'cause after all the serious sweating went by, along came the folks who just went on the run/walk for the hell of it. Including six guys in women's one-piece swimsuits with leotards and pink rubber shower hats, doing a pose-a-ballet as they went by. The crowd applauded & hooted in approval. After some more of that kind of silliness, the real parade started, with flags and politicians and clowns and service organizations, including ER medical staff in scrubs, waving and walking and having a good time.
     About 10:30 pm, which would have been 1:30 am in Ohio, Cid ran out of steam and we left the parade to its own, well, devices.
     There must have been fifteen highschool bands. And a band called The MegaBand, which went two blocks long and had all the instruments & marchers & musicians that didn't fit in the other bands, including the retired guys band, which was a hoot of its own.
     So we went back to the hotel & passed out.
     Up early the next day, we did some more stuff I don't remember, but there was a trip to Mt. St. Helens and to one of the northerly beaches.
     Ian drove. I just looked out the windows.

It's been 30 years since Mt. St. Helens blew top and blasted out a range of destruction running miles off from the main crater. In all those three decades, a lot of the area has been re-seeded. Weyerhaeuser, which uses the land for a vast tree farm, sent in thousands of workers to replant the areas blown off the map. Thus today you can drive up the road to the volcano pretty much enveloped in green. Until you get to the serious blast zone, which looks just as lunar today as it did three decades back when everything over a micron off the surface was scorched, burned, pummeled, buried and snuffed out. Withered, weather-beaten, dried tree trunks stick up out of soil and rock nearly without any signs of life. Six different kinds of rock litter the area, covering some stuff and providing home to the tiny animals who can live in such arid devastation.
     It's flat-out humbling.
     At the same time, what happened on Mothers' Day in 1980 and what continues to happen at the volcano site today has advanced volcanology and volcano geological knowledge more in thirty years than all that geology knew previously. Add to this the Icelandic volcano activity of recent and we are getting a much better picture of how active geology works.
     And if you are not into active geology -- or otherwise abjure the depth of time that the planet's been circling the sun -- leave now. If there were no active geology, we wouldn't be here today to argue about it. Period.
     So we did those tours.
     Then we took the two-stop electric rail car to the Portland train station and got on a train to Seattle.
     I hadn't been on a train since I was a kid, probably something like 50-odd years ago. In truth, given the decline of the American dream to the level of know-nothing tea-baggery, I wasn't expecting much.
     What I found was completely different. Like courteous folks with pleasant voices. Easy boarding and seat-finding.
     And the room!
     Oh yes, the room!
     We could stretch out completely between our seats and those of the folks in front of us. We had big windows to look out of. We didn't have to fasten seatbelts of worry about where to stash our carry-on crap. And we got to see eagles in trees and one little Oregon town after another, simple, peaceful and quiet. We found ourselves asking why anybody would want to fly.
     And me bein' retired? Hell yes! I'll let Cid fly to wherever 'cause she has to be there quick in and out. I'll take the train and meet her there.

Yeah, even cross-country.

So we detrain in Seattle, catch a cab to the Sheraton and take a break before meeting my eldest niece & her son for dinner at a very spiffy Hindi restaurant of their experience. I ordered the mattar paneer. Spice level three. It was delicious.
     In the process of all this, either 'cause I once knew and have since forgotten or because I didn't think of it before, we find that Tiffany, along with her son and kinda her daughters, is one of them vegetableaireans. You know: no meat. Not quite "I don't eat anything that casts a shadow," but good enough.
     Which ain't a problem, 'cause I tend to vegetables a lot more easily than chunks of meat, and that more 'cause it's better for me at 64 years, what with a desire to live longer than the old woman in Kazakhstan to lives off yogurt and is 162 years old, according to dubious Soviet-era records.
     The next day Cid & I wandered around the market area of Seattle, a short downhill walk from the hotel -- and I must mention, should you go to Seattle, get a USGS topographic map so you can choose the less high angle slopes to walk around. We saw the flying fish market sites. I swear that Andy Montesano's doppelganger works there. We saw a food vendor truck that looks like a huge metalic pig. We listened to buskers making enough money to afford iPhones. We bought some expensively fresh fruit and some rolls for the next day's pre-departure breakfast. We saw the place they make cheese at. Very tasty cheese. Very expensive but very tasty cheese. And the guy who had a parrot did tricks and all that too. We saw that.
     During all of this, however, we found time to sink more cash into a lunch at Cafe Campagne, where the chef is a madman who refuses to reveal the secret of the killer quiche they serve there. It was like . . . like . . . like buttah! Seriously. Melt in your mouth, nearly custard without being that dense, down good and tasty quiche. Something a real man would enjoy.
     Then I found a place where Cid could put me in photo with one of my many tentacle buddies. You know, like the guys in anime . . .
     And then we met Tiffany and Ryan again for dinner, this time at Wild Ginger.
     Damn place had too many options on the menu. But the food was excellent and the conversations quite amazing.
     We came to see that some parts of the clan are just as crazy as the others. Or that we're the normals and the other members of the clan with whom we have interactions may be, well, a bit this side of tetched, see?
     And then it was back to the hotel, pack & crash and get up the next morning to catch a train from Seattle to Portland.

Did I tell you how cool it was, this train business? Well, it is.

Once we were on the train but before we left the station, they announced that the lounge car had some electrical problems and was being pulled from service. Thus there would be no vending point for sandwiches & drinks, such as one might want if one did not want to go to the fancy dining car like Dad did when we were kids. Go to the dining car.
     Which is a neat segue to . . . When I was a kid, the dining car had cloth table covers and fancy china & all the amenities of a full-scale, kick-ass restaurant of the late 1940s. I know this 'cause I remember at least one time that we got breakfast on the train in the dining car. I remember that because the waiters were all thin black men in white uniforms like the guy on the cover of the Cream o' Wheat box.
     This, of course, was back in the day when the train would have to stop now and then for the brakeman or some other organ of trains to go out and applied oil to the rags stuffed in the journal boxes (as opposed to the roller bearings that now smooth the ride of the train over the rails). This was back when trains had steam engines with multiple drive wheels larger than most large men. Back when railroad/road crossings had the crossed white thingies that said "Stop! Look! Listen!" and not those sissy "Watch out, you might get killed and it will be our fault!" crossing gates.
     Yeah, back in the late Pleistocene.
     And being as how Cid and I were enjoying the comfort of the train ride, we decided to eat lunch in the dining car.
     At which point things got really interesting.
     See, because of the demise of the lounge car, the dining car had to roll double duty. There was a line of folks going to the dining car to pick up what few sandwiches &c they had managed to squeak into storage on the dining car. From there, those folks, having lined up not to eat at the dining car, would take their stuff back to their seats elsewhere on the train and snack down.
     We of the reserved space in the dining car, we were different.
     We got to sit down "community style," as they called it, to eat with people we didn't know.
     Kinda like in bootcamp but without the DIs and all that.
     So our table partners were two women, one named Cindy and the other named Myken. Cindy worked for an environmental clean-up outfit. She reminded me of my back-door neighbor. Very friendly, killer sense of humor. Straight up person. Myken was a runway model.
     I pegged Myken walking through the train station before we boarded. She was tall and thin and very attractive. Nearly slinky, but in a nice way. I said to Cid: "Very tall and very thin."
     "She's probably a model," Cid replied. "I was wondering if you'd notice her."
     Duh.
     We chatted during the meal, of course. Afterwards, Cid said we probably sounded like a couple mid-west dweebs, the cat-lady and his wife, going off to see our son who has been in Portland a year and still can't find a job. And how the garage needed painted and it was so nice to see all those crafts at the Seattle public market. Something right out of Burroughs.
     "Mother and I would like to know . . . "
     Cid noticed that Myken drank two beers, ate nearly all the entre, including the salad and bread that came with it. I think Cid was hoping to see someone who played with her salad and then ran screaming from the room for having eaten too much.
     I just noticed how amenable she was. Myken. Nice smile, friendly face, pleasant voice & demeanor. It was soooo PostModern.
     Once we'd paid for lunch we all went our separate ways, back to the cars where we had our seat assignments.
     The rest of the ride was pretty much like the first ride: eagles, water, riverways, green this and green that, and little railroad towns with quaint stations from a time when my father was a youngman, riding the rods, as he used to call it.

Now, out of all this travel -- and I'm not going to bore you with more details of plane rides or boarding passes or the woman who was traveling alone, on a plane, with six children, the oldest of whom was probably not more than ten -- I have come to see the need for a couple really strange things.
     First, I must begin the finishing touches on the beginning of the next novel. Between where we ate and the whacked-out conversations we had with Ian and Sarah and the conversations we had with Tiffany & Ryan and the stuff we saw and heard or ate on this trip, I have tons of material to plaster the walls.
     Twoth, I am seriously considering giving up on plane travel. Sure, it's quick and greasy. You can actually arrive someplace before you left. You don't have to plan for a couple days of driving or worrying about where you're going to sleep, should you be driving. But jebus in a hopper of malt for a Seattle micro-brewery, it is too much like being stuffed into a miniature submarine with almost no room to stretch while being surrounded by loud engine noises and the possibility of turbulent air interrupting your sit on the can. That and the hustle and hassle of all the trappings, baggage weight limits, people trying to make full army backpacks into carry-on luggage, and the vexation of trying to find a restroom after you get there, well, it gets old, yo.
     It gets very old very quick.
     And we won't even mention how close it gets to being strip searched before you get to the boarding gate. Thus I suggest to myself the following item:
     Threeth, rail travel may take more time and it may require me buying a ticket with sleeping accommodations, and it may be more expensive in that frame, but holy hell, Hanna, look at what I get!
     Room to stretch out without banging my shins of the seat in front of me.
     Room to get up and walk about, should I feel the need, say, to visit the mobile outhouse or maybe go all the way to the end of the train -- as my father did with me over five decades ago -- to see the track running away from the train as it moves on down the line.
     Big roomy cars with roomy seats!
     Did I mention the room?
     Dining facilities, which, even in their most minimal application, as much more commodious than a fold-down tray table that pokes at my belly, upon which I can put a little plastic tray with a bit of fruit and a small milk carton, all of which might at any time fly off the tray table as the plane runs into bumpy weather. (And I notice the airplane folks no longer say "turbulance." They say "bumps.")
     And even if the sleeping accommodations are not as luxurious as they were when I was a kid -- mainly 'cause Dad spent money like a sailor when we traveled -- I'll gladly take a snooze in a chair in a position closer to prone than the horrible back aches I get from being stuffed into and sitting immobile in a metal tube smaller than a submarine torpedo room. Any day of the week.
     Yeah, it takes three days to get from Chicago to Portland.
     Fine.
     I'll look out the window with my feet stretched out in front of me, resting on the foot rest, my laptop plugged into the nearby recepticle, taking notes as I slip along the surface of the countryside . . . while the rest of travelling humanity looks down a mile or more to where the train track looks like a scratch along the landscape.
     And, as I did many times during this trip, mostly 'cause of the people I was with, I'll smile.
 

The Broad Side of the Barn Exercise

So let's do the math: There are 50 rounds in the box. If I load six rounds each in the two magazines, that's 12. Then there's another 6 rounds in the storage case. I stop at the landfill by the wetlands and blow one round out the muzzle. So there's 49 rounds total left. I then go off to a shootin' range and lay out the two magazines at one target. I then load six rounds each into the three then-available magazines and light them off, which is a total of 12 rounds (2x6) and then another 18 rounds (3x6), which is 30.
     Then I go home and spend some time breaking down the pistol & cleaning it.
     I load 6 rounds into one magazine and 7 into the other. The third mag is empty, in the piece.
     So, I went through 31 rounds, counting the 30 at the range, plus the 1 at the landfill.
     And there are still six in the storage case, which totals out to 39. The 13 rounds in the mags plus the 6 in the case is 19. The 31 rounds shot plus the 19 unspent is 50.
     All of which means that I didn't remember to count my shots, although I remember wondering when the slide was going to lock back when the mag was empty, which it did, much to my relief.
     Then we can get down to counting the holes in the targets.
     The first target has 10 holes in it, 6 inside the circle of the target area and 4 outside the circles. The second target has 13 holes in it, 2 outside the circles. Which means that I hit the target(s) in one fashion or the other a total of 23 times out of 30 shots. At which point I have ask myself where the other 7 slugs went.
     I can only wonder. I say that 'cause in the post noise-making cleanup I came across one piece of metal that wasn't a 9mm casing but a chunk of copper such as one might think came from the front end of the pistol as opposed to the ejector. And that would mean that I left 29 shots down range and one that somehow made its way back to where I was standing without causing any bodily harm.
     Lucky that.
     Now for the grand total thingie, all that adding and counting comes up with a score of 76.6% just for hitting the target paper itself and 73.9% for hitting inside the target circle against hits on the target at all, or . . .
     Out of 30 shots taken, only 17 of which hit the target inside the circle, gives me a score of getting a round inside the circle at 56.6%.

What this means on the grand scale is beyond me. What it means to me about owning a 9mm pistol is something else, most of which comes down to gut reactions. At which point I look at myself in the mirror and realize that I was really nervous pointing that thing down range at the targets and that all the concentration in the world added nothing to my nominal success.
     In other words, I can sit here at this desk and put a pistol in my hands and try to do everything that I remember about shooting – which information is over 40 years old in itself, let alone relevant only to a much larger pistol in the hands of much younger man – and I can feel that I might win out.
     The truth, as evidenced by the math of the target hole count, is something else.
     The first of the truths is that the 9mm pistol, being a light & small object from a distant time of hammers & sickles, kicks like the proverbial mule. I caught on to that with one round at the landfill. Standing in the lane at the shootin' range proved again and again that the mule is very much there.
     The second truth is that it's a damn loud thing to be around and, adding in the mule kick, the second or third shot was taken with a built-in flinch factor. As in: I knew as I squeezed the trigger – and I can only guess that I was "squeezing" it – I waited for my hand to be pulled off axis by the force of the recoil, discharge or whatever you want to call it.
     And then there was the muzzle flash. Man was there a muzzle flash.
     So I not only got hammered at the wrist, I flinched and I blinked.
     Talk about disheartening & embarrassing.
     At the same time, having gone this far once, I am going to take another stab at this again some time down the road. Maybe in a couple weeks, after I've assimilated all the stuff I have been thinking about since I took that first shot. The one at the landfill.
     I have to consider what my hands were doing, shaking either from nerves or from my old stand-by, essential tremor. If it's that, I'm stuck with a shaky hand and a rotten score & hope to hell I don't scare anybody else doing this.
     I also have to consider what it means to be ready to flinch, to blink, to do whatever it is that is, for want of a better term, disarming me as I take aim and/or squeeze the trigger.

I say all this with a distinct memory of a summer day in Puerto Rico, somewhere around 1969 or so, with a Colt 1911 .45 ACP pistol in my hand, round after round hitting the target and scoring slightly better than my shipmates, some of whom had already been to Vietnam & were thus already tested by the true fires.
     And then there's the simple fact that, once I've gone through this much ammo and knowing what it's gonna cost me to buy more, I'm pretty sure that the PA-63 that I fired off today will soon enough be sitting in its case, two magazines probably filled as best I can get 'em to their specified seven rounds and that will be that.
     After all, I didn't buy this thing to gather with Bubba and the other local mental defectives who seem to enjoy blowing a noisy hole in a quiet Sunday afternoon by fillin' the wetlands with the sounds of what I can only guess is a couple shotguns, a half-dozen pistols and at least one AK47 with full automatic kicked in.
     Yes, an AK47 in full auto, jamming out lead right down the street from my house.
     I bought this piece and the other'ns because I wanted pieces of history. A rifle with a hammer and sickle on it, for instance. The shootin' part? Well, I'll do that too. But I think it's a lot easier at the shooting range. And it won't wreck someone's Sunday evening dinner too.
     Would like to improve my score some though.
     

The Other Half of the Other Gun Rant

It has finally dawned on me, after nearly a month of dealing with my having suddenly become a pernicious gun owner, that part of the problem I have with being a gun owner is the simple fact that my life is already outrageously hypothetical as it is. This is another way of saying that I have noticed many – not a pile but at least a few – gun owners seem to predicate their need for a piece on a need to defend themselves. As in: they see an immanent possibility that someone is going to bust into their home, kidnap the cats, steal the refrigerator's refrigerant and haul off into the night with the family wine collection, leaving them a heap of quivering jelly on the floor.
     Or: some gun owners believe that they're going to be attacked at any moment by sinister forces, the names of which we do not know and probably couldn't pronounce if we did.
     Hypotheticals, dig?
     "I have this gun 'cause I don't want to be stuck in the corner of my bed room in my flannel boy's town jammies while some armed maniacs rape my son. The one with the tattoos."
     "I had to get a gun 'cause the world is just too flippin' like insane, see? I mean, like who knows what like might happen some night as I lay like sleepin'. Like a burgular (yes, that burg-you-lur) might like break in and I'd have to like shoot it or whatever."
     "Well, I'm armed for the day the bloodbath race war starts between the crocodillians and the lizard people from Venus, that's why I have a gun!"
     "There's killers out there roaming the streets and I don't want to get killed."

Those kinds of hypotheticals.

Now don't get me wrong. There is always the possibility that someone will decide that I need to have a home invasion run on my ass. If such would happen, I'd end up like Grandpa Pitts down the street. I'd be slapped up the side of my greying head and left k-oed on the floor while the invaders made off with the large screen TV and that collection of tentacle sex videos I bought on the InterWebs.
     It's happened down the road a bit from here. Couple miles. Could happen here.
     Maybe.
     Perhaps.
     Ok, it could happen but . . .
     And in such a case, yes, it would be somewhat consoling to know that all I'd have to do is flip off the safety, battery up a round and sit in the darkness at the top of the stairs until whoever it was broke in decides they want to check the family holdings aloft.
     But then I'd have to explain why a possibly unarmed person is bleeding out at the bottom of my stairs. Yes, I could easily say I felt threatened. I didn't know if the moron was armed or not and I took my best shot & by some strange quirk of fate managed to hit the perp somewhere stalling.
     Would I rather not have to explain?
     Hell yes. I'd rather not have to have anyone unknown to me enter my house with the intent of making off with parts of it or intent on causing me harm.
     Under such circumstances I can see where having a 9mm semiautomatic pistol with a seven-round clip, or maybe two seven-round clips, would be a deterrent.
     And double the deterrent if we talk about a 7.62x54R Russian rifle with a bayonet on the end of it. Poke. Boom.
     Just like that.
     Which, despite all that one can say about protecting oneself in such circumstances, I'd be left having to explain why a possibly unarmed person is bleeding out at the bottom of my stairs from two different holes.
     Yes, I could easily say I felt threatened. I poked the moron with the bayonet real good and then took my best shot and added serious bodily injury on top of serious bodily injury.
     Could happen.
     Maybe.
     The only difference for me is the simple one of not sitting around thinking about having a gun from that perspective. I'd rather think of how the gun – whatever brand, model, caliber, historical unimportance, all that – is an interesting mechanism not too much different from my feelings about a well-written book or the typography of the printed page itself. I can consider the deadly meaning of the firearm – or if it's a relic of a former militaristic time – any time I want, just as I can consider the sort of person the author ended up being many times over in his or her tortured life. But I sure ain't about to sit here and think that I bought the damn thing 'cause I was afraid.

That is, after all, what this comes down to, and it's one of the reasons that I am not too eager to join any of the half-dozen guns-rights groups circling the planet like a series of satellites, preaching the need for preparedness or security or self-assertiveness in defense of Mom, the proverbial applie pie and whatever religious superstitionism is appropriate for the landmass presently under said satellite's shadow.
     All that fear mongering gets me down.
     Much the same as the short-sightedness of those who use fear mongering as their one and only heavy trump card in a hand full of otherwise useless pictures, symbols and numbers.
     In truth, I'd be much more afraid of snuffing someone unnecessarily in the middle of the night 'cause I heard a cat jump on the table.
     Happens a lot around here: cats making loud noises in the night. I think it's a union thing.
     I am at the outset, much more fearful of causing unnecessary bodily harm in an accidental way than I am fearful of a need to defend myself against turbaned ruffians.
     It makes me nervous just to cycle a round into the chamber to check the operation of any gun.
     Once you put that round in the chamber you only have two options: You have to fire the gun or you have to remove the magazine and cycle the mechanism to eject the hopefully unspent round.
     And then, if you're diligent in your safety practices, you'll check to see that there isn't another round in the chamber, even if you saw the one you put in there fly out when you cycled the mechanism again. Maybe twice.
     At which point I then have to say that having a life round in a gun, even if I am fearful of who's makin' the ruckus downstairs, would make me just about as jittery as hearing the bumps in the night that drew me to load a round in the first place.
     Could be a cat.
     Could be someone I know. One of my sons. Maybe it's my wife down there in the kitchen getting a seltzer or an aspirin and I ain't quite awake enough to notice that she's not in the bed with me when I wake up to the noises.
     Could be any cause at all for a noise downstairs. Water heater blows up.
     I hear it, think there's somebody downstairs, go to where the guns are, load a round and then, in a state of awakedness probably a bit more toward sleep than ready, I'm standing in the dark at the top of the stairs with a chambered round in my barely cogent hand.
     
See, this is why I am not good on hypotheticals.

There's too damn many ways of the hypo getting to the thetical parts. Villainous marauders in the kitchen. Cats runnin' around high on nip. Mouse gets loose in the house and the cats go into planned attack protocols. My kid comes over in the middle of the night to fall asleep on the couch 'cause his roommates are all drunk and listening to the racist heavy metal music the guy two apartments down is listening to at 3:30 in the morning.
     Could be anything or anyone and I'll be damned if I'm gonna say that's the reason I bought the gun.

So why did I buy the gun? Well, which one? The rifle, hell, that's easy: It has a hammer & sickle on the barrel. What a trip! Here it is, the 21st Century, there's a "man of color" in the White House, the Tea Party people remind me of Hitler's Brown Shirts and I have a rifle with a hammer & sickle on the barrel.
     The 9mm? Same story. Hungarians built it, back in the day. And it's small, although probably not as small as the one Nancy Reagan had in her purse.
     The CVA cap-and-ball revolver? C'mon, get real. It's old and goofy and it's almost like the one I wanted to have when I was a kid playin' wild-west. (Remember when it was "cowboys & injuns"?)
     And the two BB pistols, well, that's cool. Everybody needs a couple BB pistols, especially if one of 'em looks like the 9mm & the other looks like, well, a BB gun from around 1956, which it is.
     Never know when a ravenous possom's gonna scratch through the back door and use the microwave to make some popcorn so it can watch those tentacle sex DVDs.
     "Make my day, marsupial!" Plink.
     "Oh, shit! That hurt! I'm outta here!"
     

What If . . .

Back when I was working on the ol’ book, I often had to face what would happen if the story took place across a different time frame. Like what would happen if, instead of cats & a savior delusion, the main character had been inspired to kill off, say, Hitler or Stalin.
     Yeah, I know: same ol’ hypothetical bullshit as I usually get into. Nothing new going on, just a chance to bend the time line.
     But you have to ask, as Spike Lee obviously did when he made the movie that few have seen, The CSA. And if you ain’t seen it yit, I suggest you do a Netflix or whatever to watch it. With an open mind, of course.
     The movie aforementioned is based on the situation that would have become the USA, had the South won the Civil War. After all, it could have happened. Only needed one solid victory on the side of the South and a couple European countries would have weighed in, changing the dynamic of the po’ Southern States not having the industrial base upon which to support a truly powerful war effort.
     Which brings me back to the hypothetical situation of Hitler having been blown to bits, if only Hitler had stayed at the podium in the Burgerbraubierkeller back in 1939.
     I suspect that having been blown to bits, Hitler would have become a martyr for the Nazi cause. I also seriously suspect that there would have been a raging monkey bloodbath as the result of a successful assassination.
     How this would have played out over time, of course, would require a serious amount of background knowledge and the ability to coalesce out of all the information, some idea of the possible twists and turns of the subsequently altered timeline.
     Would the Nazi’s have risen to power at all without their hypnotic guru and leader? Good question, even rhetorically.
     If the Nazi’s hadn’t risen to power, would the emperor of Japan been tempted to take advantage of FDR’s seeming lack of attention to what some think were obvious signs of an immanent attack on US military bases in the Pacific. Not many folks like to consider the connection between Japanese militarism and Nazi militarism, even with the story that Hitler had a fit when he heard of the Pearl Harbor attacks.
     And then there’s the military situation between Russia and Japan in the years leading up to the beginning of Soviet military operations resulting from Hitler’s decision to repeat Napoleon’s attack on Russia. This played mightily into the decades of war that had been going on in various levels of simmer between Japan and Russia even before Japan went after US interests in the Pacific.
     And while the rest of the world was bashing it out over Nazism and American liberties, China was going through its own revolution of sorts while also trying to get out of becoming Japanese colonial property.
     Without Hitler at war with Europe and England, the Japanese would have been facing a completely different enemy. Hell, if you want to get real hypothetical, consider the world’s history without Hitler or Stalin.
     A couple planned murders here and there in Europe and Russia and the entire planet would have lived a completely different post-depression/economic collapse. Without Hitler, would Mussolini have had a chance at becoming the political equivalent of Don Vito? It’s a thing to consider. Obviously.
     Consider what it would have meant if the world economy hadn’t gone so seriously into the toilet in the very early 30s. It would have changed the base of discontent and frustration of the average person and in Germany would have made for a different set of speeches and scape goats in the rise of Nazism.
     Without the economic troubles of the 30s, Lenin’s control of the newly-birthed socialist/communist government would have been running on a different set of economic values. You have to ask, had there been no Depression, would Lenin have been able to hold on to Russia?
     Or, for that matter, what if Stalin had been assassinated instead of Lenin?     
     Maybe that’s one of the joys of being a whack-fiction writer. You know: the kind of thing that proposes a world familiar by names and titles but completely changed by the flow of circumstance.
     
All together, and more realistically, these sorts of hypothetical games are useless. They waste time and energy that could be focused on more meaningful pursuits.
     But it’s the hypothetical at the basis of existence that spills over into what some folks might want to call art.
     People make decisions every day on “what if” moves. Cross the street: it’s always preceded by a hypothetical question.
     “What if I wait until after the cement truck passes?”
     It’s the same old dream time stuff that we either get used to running as children or we never get hooked on good enough for us to turn into the fabled starry-eyed dreamers of legend, fame and fiction writing.
     Me? Obviously hooked good.
     If there’s any benefit – other ’n not being struck by a truck crossin’ the street, it provides me with plenty of deep philosophizing time, all of which time I could or should put to other uses.
     But I always end up wondering “What if I don’t ask ‘what if?’”
     I dunno.
     What if you ask it instead? Would the flag be different today? Would Stalin have killed between 30 and 50 million folks? Would Castro have been a revolutionary?
     Would it make a difference to you?