Eight miles high and falling fast

It's that quiet time between Christmas & New Year's, a time for reflection, for looking back on the year accomplished (deeds done and gone for better or worse), and the one to come (resolutions & plans). Janus is the symbol, a reminder that I still can make myself better, write my own script that I'll be proud of.

However, I intend here sharing a personal history already written, a plan that didn't pan out, but that nonetheless I feel pride over. And that's a good thing, to make something, in this case to extend oneself wildly, and know that the risk was worth it (I got only one response on this, no one was willing to take any personal plunges). Did I learn something from my "failure"? You bet! :) Based upon the reference to the CDs, I estimate this to have been written in the autumn of 1999, well before any social networking that I was aware of.

And the solo omission, has to do with how much computers know about us, and how little they actually know, all facts no comprehension (and wisdom, that will be a long time coming). A single terabyte hard drive in anyone's computer has enough storage to hold a short story for every American, or the name of every living human. But only people can evaluate, so far. The important information I share has to do with myself, with my values, and is for you the reader (and not robots). But perhaps personal information could be linked disparate databases, then used against me, identity theft. So only my friends will know my mother's name....

Tribe

Subject: Greetings and Felicitations

That's what The Squire of Gothos said anyway; I have loftier ambitions.  Of course, one man's Renaissance qualities may be another's diletantism, but that'll have to be your call, I'm too busy.  Thanks to Christine, I've slowly, for a computing industry professional, come to the realization that I can belong to, that perhaps we can have an extended family, a -tribe-, a subset of the Global Village.

So I introduce myself in four threads (a sinister not dexter thanks to http://www.scifi.com/wildpalms/index.html).  I do so to relatives I've known since the fifties, and those who are only names on email lists.  Yes, the world is a dangerous place, but you whom I've never met, someone I trust has vouched for you.

Those who know me have no need of my name.  An introspective tautology from Stephen Donaldson that I like.  For the rest, {SNIP}.  The moon was 28 days old, so it would have been invisible, but just before the sun rising in the east.  I've wanted to live there, the moon that is, for decades, but my society, my race, doesn't seem to be getting its act together, no colonies, cities, or homesteader cabins for us.

EVERYTHING MUST GO - sadly true, but maybe it's the mortality that makes this moment precious.  My mother has seen all her age cohorts die, friends, relatives, loved ones, and now may even be aware that her mind is passing out of ken.  I spoke with her on my birthday a while ago, thanked her for making all this possible, and she mumbled words to me, the attendant told me I'd made her day :).  That's why the lesson for today, is to focus, to be Here and Now, and to reach out, to share this moment with others.

Myself, I plan..., well, I -plan-, to live forever.  How else can I see all there is to see?  I think I have a reasonable change at it if I can make it to 150, and that may not be so pie-in-the-sky as it sounds.  I'm not talking your petty centuries, the march of time, mind you.  The earth, left to its natural destiny, will most likely be swallowed when our sun swells to a Red Giant in five billion years.  We're pretty sure the universe is open, so a time immeasurably far beyond that all of the free hydrogen that can be will have been bound in stars, and burned up, and the stars will eventually go out.  It will then be the era referred to as Quantum Degeneracy, of black holes and massless particles, and it will last so long that the Stellar Age that came before will be as a flash in the infinite night, compared only by a number that is a decimal point, and page after page, nay book after book, of zeros before we get to that trailing one.  It will end when the black holes have all unergone Hawking evaporation.  Space will be a thin soup of ever expanding photons and other massless particles, mass-energy density asymptotically approaching the ground state (which may or may not be zero, there's some interesting speculation floating around about that which we'll completely bypass in the interest of brevity).  Time will be difficult to measure because nothing will EVER change; I figure it'll be gettin' real interestin' about then.  That's what I'm shooting for.

RISING SONS - Some of us are in ascendence, some in decline.  The wheel turns.  I was a hotshot after I got out of my draftee time in the Army.  I was young, virile, single, had enough money, and I was alone in Hartford, well, almost alone, as I had a girlfriend lover of several years; we'd even lived together in Germany where  I was stationed, "on the economy" off-base.  We didn't handle Hartford well, too many ~distractions, and finally were history when I moved back to Michigan for a Masters degree two years later.  I was poor, but happy, hard at work in realms abstract and academic, having fun as a volunteer telephone crisis counselor, where I learned an amazing amount of stuff about myself.  Then I was hot again in Virginia, alone and lonely, then Boeing Company called, and I was cooler, but lucky to meet someone of character, a mutual chance encounter, and I was married.  I was down in that, we moved to California, I was further down, lucky to drive over an hour to a low-class job as computer operator, and then I was a campus janitor, part-time no less.  That purgatory of self-image as well as finances ended when I took a database programming job in L.A., two months there and I was let go, but the white-hot reference made up for it, and I was still in ascendence, another year computing support for three medical researchers, and I had a co-authorship in a very small paper in a medical journal; pity I don't have a URL for it....  Chance, that's all, let someone see my resume among so many in a newsgroup, and then I was a contractor at Hewlett Packard.  Two more years, and I had the coveted permanent position, and a year and a half later I'm co-lead in my group, several newhires to mentor, important support / admin roles up the kazoo, my boss really likes me, and I already have the freedom to live most anywhere in the country I please, and telecommute in.  My spouse and I are thinking about small towns in the Rockies, Colorado probably, possibly Montana.  Money presumably goes farther in some of those places, I keep my wonderful position, and maybe even can resume my love of amateur astronomy, seeing the faintest smudge of light reflected off atoms of aluminum at the bottom of a Newtonian / Dobsonian reflector, and knowing that the galaxy I dimly perceive contains planets, life, intelligence, maybe even a wisdom that we haven't got around to discovering, inventing, whatever.

The morale?  It's the wheel turning, stupid.  I no longer feel superior when I'm up, inferior when I'm down.  I can't let my self-worth be defined by others, by my job, my possessions.  Further, it's not just a question of self-esteem, of mental stability, but of morals.  If that human is my relation, then s/he cannot be less because s/he cleans toilets, or more because of that unsavory CEO position.  If there's anything that's important, it might be what I once read, in the sheet metal facade around a fireplace in the Mark Twain house in Hartford.  The words are hazy now, I'll have to revisit for the exact quote; it referred to the worth of a house being in the friends who frequent it.

HUNGRY GHOSTS - well, yes, they're around me, they talk to me.  Not really, of course, but then again, yes, really.  My parents moved me from heaven between third and fourth grades, a tiny dusty town in the Willamette Valley between Salem and Portland, you could even see Mt. Hood in the distance, to a Portland suburb, then three years later to Michigan.  I had them, and Grandma lived with us too, but other than the Davis Clan, Linford J. Davis, MD, and family, I had no one, no friends, didn't like the place; I was miserable.  From this side of the terrible gulf of time, I don't thoroughly understand just why I was miserable, in ways it was more like _Tom Sawyer_ come to life than many childhoods I've heard about, but we'll let that be.  I discovered the Hart Public Library, vowed for some reason to read the entire Science Fiction collection, and I was off.  If the stories were mostly shallow, with Buck Rogers technology and plastic people, there were also authors behind the pages, teaching me ethics, goals, friendship, nay, being my friends.

I've grown up, read about the names, those ones just after the word "by" on the title page, and discovered some were Great Men ("Great White Captains", in the parlance of "The Way to Eden"), some were shallow as dinner plates, and a few were genuinely good people, a little of which might just have leaked through when their characters met a challenge or two.  I am most sorry that I never sent a fan letter to Roger Zelazny.  He worked for The Social Security Administration, and he wrote.  Late in his career his friends persuaded him to "give up his day job", and risk it.  He moved to New Mexico, wrote more, and quite possibly died because his colon cancer was diagnosed too late (that's my theory, anyway, no Medical Plan for even successful writers).  I expect to treasure the creation of his mind referred to as the Amber series for a long, long time.  If you're curious, the first of the ten slim novels is titled _Nine Princes in Amber_, and please ignore any lurid swordsman covers; that's -not- where it's at.

Those hungry ghosts?  Newton once said that if we see farther than those who came before, it is because we stand on their shoulders.  You'll see many references to the thoughts, the words of others, in my writing, those who came before me.

I remember my dad, and what he had to say, what asperations he had, and somehow they've become part of me, I live for him; I'm sure he would be pleased with me, too bad I was that janitor when last he saw me.  It's not so direct a connection, but Zelazny lives through me also, I try to be a person proud of myself, feet of clay but head looking at the stars, as he was, and through his Corwin of Amber tried to show.  You there, look around, I'll bet you see hungry ghosts too, someone living through you.

HELLO, I MUST BE GOING - Time grows short, I've been riskier here than I'm used to, maybe even more boring than I had a right to be in front of relatives, let alone strangers :).

One final thing that some of you might be interested in.  Six months ago, give or take a few, I got a letter from out of the blue, than someone named Sara Robertson.  She'd gotten my address through Joan Davis, and was (is) interested in genealogy, specifically what I could tell her about my family, and all those old photos I harvested when I cleaned out Mom's belongings, twice, a move to Ludington and a private but closely watched apartment, then to a much more closely supervised but other wise wonderful existence in a ranchers house with others in her age cohort.  It took months for me to get the equipment together, but finally on a borrowed scanner I saved the best 152 photos to ~1.3_GB, then burned a triple of CDs, the most common format, readable by virtually any computer with decent RAM.  I've only burned two sets, sent one off to Sara, and am awaiting feedback on some that I couldn't identify, UNKNWN03, TINTYP04, that sort of thing.  Yes, there were some tintypes, just under a dozen; some of the collection date themselves to the late Nineteenth Century, the tintypes may approach The Civil War (ahem, The War Between The States for y'all).  Any who are interested, drop me a line, and by and by I'll burn a few sets.

Y'all are welcome in my life; please use only the "Primary Personal" email (unless you're looking for a job :).  What I'm hoping for, as I said at the beginning, is an extended family, a tribe.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

These would seem to be my two favorite sayings these days, courtesy of Katherine Pulaski (a fictional doctor speaking the words of screen writer Brian Alan Lane), and of a former president of Harvard, Derek Bok. Both speak to the cost and the value of learning.

Here begins a great adventure, a learning experience (I'll certainly learn). This is so true of writers; some have told me that I'm a good writer (although several of my immediate managers seem to have preferred the term "wordy" :). We'll see....

I've thought of blogs as narcissistic, but instead intend this to be didactic without however being boring. One of my favorite roles has been mentor. I've frequently advised that you learn from experience, yours or another, and there probably won't be enough time to make all of the mistakes yourself (besides, some mistakes are fatal...), so better to learn from those of others. And because you'll never get to chat with all of those alive, let alone all humans, it's better to read what others have written. That opens up the centuries to your education. That's why reading is so vital. So perhaps I can cast my thoughts into that other Undiscovered Country, "pay it forward", that future readers might find enlightenment, or at least amusement.

But I'd like to devote my first blog to an entirely different and timely subject. Today is Thanksgiving 2009, and I want to be thankful, I want to honor those who have taught me. Some I honor are long gone, but not forgotten, some will probably never read these words anyway, and a very few will know.

• My parents are long gone. To them I owe both my excellent genes and my (IMHO) good values. I haven't shared the former, no children, but have tried to share the latter, enriching the lives of friends and family. To them I give (and gave, past times) the lyrics of a song Mary Travers sung:

I am your child
Wherever you go
You take me too
Whatever I know
I learned from you
Whatever I do
You taught me to do
I am your child
And I am your chance
Whatever will come
Will come from me
Tomorrow is won
By winning me
Whatever I am
You taught me to be
I am your hope
I am your chance
I am your child
Whatever I am
You taught me to be
I am your hope
I am your chance
I am your child 

• My spouse has taught me a great deal, been the second most important influence on my character. And some of our feline children have been most vocal, in their own way, in my instruction.
  
• Various friends & lovers have taught me of the delicate intertwinings of friendship, love, & sex (you were expecting something else???). Some lessons I'll never recover from; East Lansing, Hartford, Cottonwood/Clarkdale/Sedona have all warped my judgements. But there were many good times too, many growings together, even a few whose lasting gifts will be with me to the end. We're neither herd animals nor solitary ones; we need each other. And there's only the one game in town; if you don't play, you won't get hurt, but you also won't learn.
• A legion of science fiction writers have helped shape me. I was in small-town Michigan with no friends, happened upon the library, and arbitrarily picked the Sci-Fi shelf to read. Some of the characters in the books were shallow as dinner plates, but some taught me values, ones reflected from society as well as the more idiosyncratic choices. Of course, it wasn't the characters who were there for me, but the authors. And not only did I learn values from them, I retained the love of the field as well, and over the years branched out into other genres.
• There were some from teaching professions who also taught me. Alas, almost all of their names are gone, it would seem that I remember only their lessons. I've forgotten the beautiful equations of graduate school, but still remember my n-space visualizations of them....

There's another aspect to memory, one that James Tiberius Kirk might have helped me with if I could have only found his "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" quote about pain and memory. Memories that encapsulate our behaviors, our thoughts, things we're proud of and things we're ashamed of, what exactly is there more to "self" than that? If I could reach back, and take away some truly poor choices that I made, then the learning would never have happened, in some sense I wouldn't be "me". So, just like the Captain, I need my mistakes, my pain, my sorrows and shames; they define me.

I can be thankful that I'm alive, that I'm enmeshed in webs of friendship, caring, & love, that there's another sunrise to witness, another starry firmament to wonder at, another smile to share, and another hill to climb (I wonder what's on the other side). But the debts, the obligations, the credits, the rememberings go to others for helping shape me into what I am.

And yes, those managers were probably right.... :)