Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 14

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: UPDATES

Last week I told you that I would share the outcome of my one day promotion of Wolf Weather and Sinner's Cross on Amazon (for twenty-four hours, both books were available for free in electronic format). I do things like this because I believe there is some interest out there, not just in writing itself, but in the business of writing as it exists for the independent or semi-independent (hybrid) author.

SINNER'S CROSS was downloaded 1,197 times, including a number of paid purchases and KENP reads.
WOLF WEATHER was downloaded 711 times, and a small number of print copies (not on sale) were purchased.
THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER, which was not on sale, was downloaded 4 times as a purchased e-book.
THE ACTION, a short story of mine, was read via KENP reads.

The next day there was some overflow, as there usually is after a promotion of any kind, with 50 additional downloads, many of them paid. So the total number of people who claimed my works was 1,970, over about 36 hours. The amount of money I made on this was minimal, say $30, but of course the whole point of allowing readers a free download is to expand my audience and gain more reviews. Independent authors do not have publishing houses to promote their works: everything in the promotional sphere must be taken on by the author himself or by those he hires, in cash, to do the job for him. So while there is a small portion of me, mainly ego, which resents giving work away which took so long to write and required so much effort and passion, I would rather have people reading it for free than not reading it at all.

Paid book promotions are tricky things by nature. I have spent large sums to sell a few dozen books at the most, and I have spent trivial amounts and had surprisingly large successes. When Book Bub, far and away the most powerful, influential and hard-to-retain promotional service out there agreed to do a campaign for SINNER'S CROSS two years ago, I sold 200 copies on the first day alone -- and this, despite the fact Bub was only promoting CROSS overseas, not in the United States (if they had run it in America, I'd have sold ten times as many books: then again, I would have paid five times as much for the job).

Actually, when it comes to the business end of independent authorship, most promotions are big money-losers. In order to even get a promotional service to run a campaign for you, you must radically discount the e-book versions of your novel, often down to 99 cents, so that your royalty per book becomes something like 33 cents per sale. Only extremely high volume over a sustained period would make such a system profitable. However, the concept of the "loss leader" obtains: sometimes you gotta spend money to make money, and every sale or free download is another perspective reader, another perspective fan, who may choose to purchase physical copies of your next work. And that of course is where the real money lies. (This, incidentally, is why I have my own online bookstore:

https://www.mileswatsonauthor.com/

...which I just realized hasn't been updated to include WOLF WEATHER, which I will be taking care of later today. Sorry for the shameless plug, but if you don't understand why I have to shill for myself relentlessly by this time, you haven't been paying attention.

The greater issue, however, is not money. The vast majority of money I make writing does not come from my novels, novellas or short storie: it comes from book proposals or work on studio projects. I have made twenty times as much money doing these things as I do on my fiction. Indeed, I could not support the lifestyle I presently enjoy if not for such projects (none of which I can ever discuss here except in the very broadest terms due to nondisclosure agreements). Nevertheless, my central and abiding passion is storytelling. It was what I was born to do and what I have spent almost my entire life learning how to do well. I am always going to find ways to expand my audience, even if it means taking the occasional financial hit. It's what I signed up for when I decided to keep my fiction at the independent/hybrid level. And if there are any aspiring or new-to-the game authors at that level who can benefit from my experience (my failures as well as my successes), so much the better. In the mean time, the mechanics of independent authorhood may be of interest to the reader as well as the writer. If not, don't worry: this Wednesday we will once again visit Memory Lane.

THE THINGS I'VE SEEN

Tonight I was leaving the YMCA after a hard workout, and as I walked to the door, I suddenly became aware that the overhead radio was playing "Intelligence For Your Life," a popular podcast narrated by John Tesh. I often hear this podcast on my kitchen radio as I cook, or wash dishes, or feed the cat: but it occurred to me tonight, almost with a shock, that I had once gotten drunk with the man.

Well, to be specific, I had tossed back a few whiskies with the man at a wedding in North Hollywood. It was a peculiar experience for me, who had watched him as a child co-hosting Entertainment Tonight. In fact, Tesh hosted Entertainment Tonight until I was an over-aged college student, before departing to begin a musical career. I found him friendly and personable in the extreme, which is not always the case with well-known, wealthy people who have spent most of their lives in front of cameras or microphones. I'm not remotely sure about the date, but I believe this encounter occurred about five years ago, when I was living in Burbank, California rather than York, Pennsylvania.

I mention this because every now and again I completely forget that a quarter of my life was spent in the Los Angeles area, toiling in the entertainment industry. You won't believe that, because I so frequently reference Hollywood in this blog: but it is true. Memory is the most peculiar of things. It allows us to remember things that happened to us in a cold, dull, purely factual way, as if they happened to someone else, and it also allows us to relive experiences so intensely they may as well be happening now...even if they are fifty years old. Most of the time I hear the voice of Tesh in my kitchen, it's just that -- a voice, coming impersonally over the radio. I make no connection with the photo I have on my nearby wall of Tesh and myself, grinning like maniacs, clutching tumblers of whiskey on that hot summer evening a few years ago.

When one leads the restless, sometimes almost rootless life that I have, one accumulates huge amounts of experiences, many of them utterly improbable. I used to be annoyed, even outraged, when I would tell a story about my life and be greeted with disbelief by the listener: I later realized that this was a profound compliment. The way I live my life has not been easy on me (or others), and it has seen its share of disasters, failures, disappointments and humiliations, but no one can say it has not been filled with experiences -- in some cases, experiences I myself find difficult to believe actually happened. There are times I feel very much like Beatty, the doomed Replicant in Blade Runner, who laments that when he dies, the vast fund of his experiences will be lost forever, "like tears in the rain."

In that spirit, I thought I'd write a not-poem about some of the images which come to mind when I look back upon the fifty years I have spent occupying space on this troubled planet.

* I've seen Fourth of July fireworks from the White House lawn

* And been knocked silly by the blast of the President's helicopter

* I've arrested a hooker in a sleazy hotel and driven her, cursing, to prison in a driving snowstorm

* And

* I've given comfort to countless victims of crime

* And shaken hands with Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist

* I've tied a black belt around my waist

* And been beaten up in front of the California State Athletic Commission

* I've driven the length of the United States, three times

* And been caught in an Arizona thunderstorm with lighting blasts that filled up the entire sky

* I've seen an eel devour a fish in the waters off St. Maarten

* And been stung by a poisonous fish in the surf of Santa Monica

* I've published stories in long-defunct foreign magazines when I was barely old enough to shave,

* And written Amazon bestsellers

* I've stolen an ashtray from George H. W. Bush

* And stood above the clouds in Malibu, breathing in the air of other people's money

* I've seen the Eifel Tower, the Colliseum, and Buckingham Palace,

* And peered out at Washington, D.C., through the tiny windows of the monument

* I've worn a Union uniform while walking the hallowed ground of Gettysburg,

* And seen Ian McKellen on the stage

* I've made monsters in studios in Los Angeles, and video game trailers in studios in Vancouver

* And had a beer with the man who killed Che Guevera

* I've interviewed one of Hitler's most devoted soldiers

* And seen Van Halen with Roth behind the microphone,

* I've watched John Williams wave a baton in the Hollywood Bowl, and Mike Ness strum a guitar at the Greek, and Hope Sandoval sing "Fade Into You" live at the Ventura

* I've been cut open by the teeth of the Jaws shark (or maybe it was the fangs of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park

* And fist-fought a crazy man in a courtyard in the rain

* I've been under the knife, gassed, hit by a car, and had a gun held to my head

* I've been hit in the face by dead blood driven by a pathologist's circular saw at an autopsy

* I've looked inside the gutted remains of a human body and seen within it a lake of blood

* And held my infant nephew when he was no larger than a kitten

* I've owned a Jaguar

* And gone so hungry I couldn't sleep.

* I have seen Micky Ward fight Arturo Gatti as the crowd of ten thousand roared

* And stalked Don Johnson through the halls of a make up effects shop.

* I've shaken hands with three heavyweight champions, met two men who played Jason Voorhees,

* And had my picture taken with Captain Kirk.

* I've stood outside the house where Halloween was filmed, on Halloween night, beneath a full moon,

* And lunched with Nicholas Brendon while he gossiped about who he slept with in the cast of "Buffy."

* I've been in courtrooms, boxing rings, and cages; I've kept sixteen years of journals and have a glass case full of trophies nobody cares about but me; I've written books and shot skeet and cooked a Thanksgiving turkey to perfection. I've seen a boat come over the horizon at Martha's Vineyard and a rocket streaking into the skies above Culver City and got an allergic reaction to fiberglass when I was helping make a musical instrument for Lady Gaga. I've met four members of the original cast of Star Trek and lived with a stripper and been sued by my own bank. I've been interviewed by a former Mafia soldier and been appalled at how fat I looked in the YouTube video of the podcast. I've made love with two women in the same week and two in the same day and two at the same time.

I've been haunted by ghosts, perhaps one of them real.

All these things I have seen, and done, and many more besides, and the good gods willing will do many more, and set them down on paper for your pleasure or your pain, so they don't just wash away.

Like tears in the rain.

SUNDAY EDITION

I've once again missed my Saturday deadline for this blog. I actually have a good excuse -- my oldest friend, who I've known since 1988, was in town, and we had to celebrate the occasion. The older I get, the more I prize friendship as a thing-in-itself, and the older the friendship, the greater the prize. However, in the spirit of at least trying to keep my resolution to blog twice a week, I thought I'd share a little news.

Tomorrow my new novella Wolf Weather, and my most recent novel, The Very Dead of Winter will be available for free download from Amazon for one day only. I am not generally one to give away the store, but sometimes it's necessary for promotional reasons, and at other times, well, it's also nice to get the message out to the largest possible audience: people who won't spend a few dollars on an author they've never heard of are a lot more amenable to clicking the button when the risk is the same as the price, zero. The last time I offered a book for free, it was my short story collection Devils You Know, which immediately streaked to a bestselling slot on Amazon, albeit in the "free" category. (I suppose this is roughly the equivalent of an amateur championship: it's nice, but it doesn't pay the bills.)

To brush up quickly: Wolf Weather is a novella somewhere between horror and dark fantasy. It is the story of Corporal Crowning, the sole survivor of an Arctic fort besieged by werewolves. It is a story about discipline versus desire, civilization versus savagery. Pardon the egregious and possibly criminal pun, but it was a howl to write.

Wolf Weather

The Very Dead of Winter is the second novel in my SINNER'S CROSS series which has won numerous literary awards, including a Best Indie Book Award, a Book Excellence Award, two Literary Titan Gold Medals, a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, a Reader's Favorite "5 Star" rating, IAN Awards Finalist, etc. This novel takes place in the near-immediate aftermath of the first book, and follows the protagonists Halleck, Breese and Cramm as their lives, and possibly their deaths, intersect during the opening phase of The Battle of the Bulge. If you like deeply-written characters with complex motivations and a lot of atmosphere, this WW2 novel is for you.

The Very Dead of Winter: A Sinner's Cross Novel

I hope to have more news on the literary front for you this Wednesday, but for now I am going to blow out this candle and hit the rack. Do give one or both of the books a download. You have nothing to lose and, I hope, much to gain.

Happy father's day to all.

THINGS I LEARNED PLAYING "CIVILIZATION"

Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy video games, first released in 1991....The series is considered a formative example of the 4X genre, in which players achieve victory through four routes: "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate."

This introduction, courtesy of Wikipedia, spares me having to summarize the game which never fails to amaze me: Civilization. For it is by playing Civilization, more than history, that the present course of affairs in Europe and Asia becomes readily understandible to me. So too do past historical events -- wars, depressions, blockades, colonizations, religious crusades, genocides. Indeed, it isn't an exaggeration to say that everything a person needs to know about what Bismarck referred to coldly as Realpolitik -- "a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral, ethical or ideological considerations" -- can be taught simply by playing this game. Put simply, Civilization is a tutorial on the real world. Not the one diplomats and politicians and a willfully credulous public pretend exists: reality. Cold, hard, and cruel.

I first started playing Civilization sometime around 1993, and was immediately addicted and obsessed. The initial version was, of course, terribly crude and clunky by today's standards, and the artificial intelligence of my computer opponents was at best mediocre. Nevertheless, the game had intrinsic appeal. It not only required a knowledge of strategy, it demanded a deeper knowledge of how civilizations come into power, how they maintain it once they have it, how they expand it, and -- if incautious or cowardly -- how they lose it. Like Game of Thrones or The Sopranos, it was as much a study of power as a thing-in-itself as it was a form of entertainment. And it taught its lessons in the most brutal way possible: by punishing ignorance, mistakes and failures without mercy. Success meant survival, failure meant destruction.

As the years went by, Civilization became more sophisticated and nuanced, and the computerized opponents more intelligent. Features were added or expanded; other features were removed or replaced. But the basic nature of the game remained unchanged. Simply put, it was this:

Beginning in the stone age, you were tasked with building a civilization, expanding it, acquiring strategic resources, raising its level of technology, keeping your people happy, negotiating trade deals, building infrastructure, and protecting yourself from the aggression of hostile barbarian tribes and unfriendly nations. If successful, your society would last until the end of the game, roughly 4,000 years after it began. So you started with stone clubs and bearskins and ended with atomic bombs and orbiting satellites. How you achieved that end was up to you. Players had choices in styles of government, and they also had choices in foreign policy. But -- and this was key -- they also had to react to the choices of their neighbors. The computer played different rival civilizations in different ways. Some were outwardly friendly and simply wanted to trade, others were aggressive and bullying and preferred to take what they wanted by force of arms. Some were scientifically bent, some crazy about trade, and others concerned only with war. And some were unpredictable -- or simply treacherous. As I said above, playing Civilization did not require a tutorial: it was a tutorial. A completely amoral one. The human player had nearly absolute power over his society and was largely free to craft a strategy and a policy entirely in keeping with his own personality. Sometimes vice was punished; sometimes it was rewarded. Sometimes virtue led to downfall, other times to triumph. There was no right answer that covered every situation. Whatever worked was right. The goal was not to achieve some Platonic "ideal plane" but simply to survive -- and thrive. At any cost.

By playing Civilization, I came to see that while every form of government was represented -- despotism, monarchism, feudalism, republicanism, democracy, fasicsm, communism -- their ultimate ambitions remained the same. And when one's ambitions are the same, one's methods tend toward sameness. In 25 years of playing various iterations of the game, I began to grasp that its ongoing popularity stems from the fact that, when you scrape away all the rhetoric, there's nothing to distinguish a good campaign of Civ from a study of human history. Literally almost nothing. All the horror, all the carnage, all the cruelty and misery, all the seemingly needless tension and confrontation between nations and tribal groups, the complete inability of those nations and groups to act in unity even on issues of seemingly mutual interest, such as pollution or climate change...it's all here. So here, in a nutshell, is what I learned:

1. Resources are everything. In Civilization, there are strategic resources which are beneficial for the populace -- fish, for example, or game, or gold. There are others which are beneficial to trade, such as dyes, jewels, wines, or furs. But there are certain resources such as iron, horses, saltpeter, coal, rubber, oil, aluminium and uranium, which are indispensible to warfare. Iron makes swords and armor; saltpeter makes gunpowder; coal fires warships; oil fuels tanks and aircraft. In ancient times, the society which has access to things like iron has a huge advantage over societies stuck in the stone/bronze age; thus, the early phase of the game is a scramble for iron, and for horses to provide chariots. Later, as technology advances, different resources come into play, and so the scramble never ceases. Today's civ with the best swordsmen and archers and horsemen is mowed down tomorrow by the musketeers, rifleman and infantry of the society that first acquired gunpowder. Trade is always an option, but only a fool or a desperate king indeed trades away resources that can be used to slit his throat at a later time, and so an aggressive foreign policy is usually necessary, lest a nation fall behind in that never-ceasing quest for the earth's riches. In short, those who have, dominate, and those who have not, steal -- or die.

2. All alliances are of convenience. In world history, countries speak of "friendship" and "cultural bonds" and "international brotherhood." In Civilization, any nation that offers friendship either does so because they wish to trade (you have something they want, but can't or don't want to take it by force), or because they are weak and fear offending you, or because they are at war with a third power and hope to enlist you in the fight against them. Friendships in Civilization are transactional and never last longer than necessity dictates. Today's generous trade deal and mutual protection pact is tomorrow's unprovoked sneak attack. There is no loyalty and no gratitude. From a leader's POV, the world is divided into "threats" and "assets." There is no extra category for "buddies."

3. Technology is mainly for killing. All technological advancements lead to corresponding improvements in quality of life for the people. Granaries, aqueducts, hospitals, mass transit systems, etc., etc. are all wonderful for John Q. Public. On the other hand, the very first use of any new technology usually has a military application. Iron makes great tools: it also makes fine swords. Coal builds warm fires: it also fuels battleships. A nucelar power plant can light up a city; a nuclear bomb can flatten one. The first priority of a leader is to make sure his Civ has all the best weaponry technology can afford. Benefits to society are a secondary consideration, and any society that reverses this model and puts sanitation, medicine, infrastructure, etc. ahead of making barracks and handing out rifles will soon find itself invaded by a Civ with a different set of priorities. On the other hand, a society which doesn't feed its scientific research and build universities and so forth will not produce competetive technology, and it too will go down in flames. Leadership is a balancing act between guns and butter, brains and brawn. But ultimately, the nation that doesn't find a way to make a microchip lethal ain't gonna last.

4. There is no mercy. Just as there is no real friendship in world society, there is also no mercy in world affairs. In trade, one must drive the hardest possible bargain. In war, one must make the most rapacious demands the enemy will accept. In diplomacy, one must pile on alliances for the purpose of carving up once prosperous rivals like roasts. Why? Because this is what your opponents will do. They will never give you what you want in trade without demanding much more than it is worth. They will never offer peace terms in war which you would wish to accept. They will never hesitate to build multinational alliances to destroy you, and they will never hesitate to frustrate your ambitions in passive ways -- by hemming in your borders, colonizing resource-rich areas you covet for yourself, refusing to trade needed items, or signing trade embargos with your enemies. Act ruthlessly in your strength because you will be treated pitilessly in your weakness. And never forget the enemy you spare today will be at your throat again tomorrow. As Clauswitz once wrote, "The mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst."

5. Wars are like fires: starting one doesn't mean you can put it out. Nothing is easier than starting a war. However, once war is engaged, you may find the fighting going against you, and seek to make peace once again. Or you may achieve your limited objectives and seek to end hostilities before your army takes too many losses or your opponent bribes a third party to come in on his side. In either case, you may discover your enemy in no mood to come to the treaty table, what with the fact you burned down six of his cities, robbed him of his best agricultural land, and cut him off from the ocean. War is necessary in Civilization, but it should never be carried out offensively unless you have a) a clear idea how you plan to win it, b) contingency plans if things go badly, c) can afford to lose all the men you commit to the initial battle. Rulers always see war as the easy way out of economic or political troubles, without considering they may actually lose. Just ask Napoleon. Or Mussolini. Or Putin.

6. Conquest is easy (occupation is not). In Civilization, capturing an enemy city doesn't mean the local population wants a change of master. They will always be discontented, may riot, may even openly revolt and overthrow your rule. I have had to burn occupied cities to the ground and leave nothing but electronic ashes because I couldn't get the natives to recognize my claim on their land and their lives. There are limits to what pure military force can accomplish. The stick must be accompanied by a carrot. Pure power must be balanced with some kind of appeasement. Otherwise you will simply end up with a case of tyrannical indigestion, the inability to absorb what you have conquered. The practical alternative, genocide, is not appetizing even for a video game, though it does solve the larger problems posed by occupation. This leads me to...

7. Karma is consequence, not judgment. There is no morality in Realpolitik, but actions do have practical repercussions. Violating peace treaties without cause, betraying alliances, employing atomic weapons, burning down cities, etc. are all great ways to become an international pariah. The computer has a long memory for treachery, and today's actions of amoral convenience are tomorrow's moral retributions. The funny thing about being totally amoral -- neither good nor evil but simply opportunistic -- is that it does not spare you the consequences of your decisions. This applies not merely to warfare but to the environment as well. Chopping down forests, draining wetlands, using coal-fired factories, dropping A-bombs...all of this comes back to haunt you.

8. In for a penny, in for a pound. When two armies have exhausted each other without decisive results, the natural inclination for both sides is to make peace. This is the height of foolishness. No matter what the cost, it is necessary to keep fighting until you have broken the enemy's army -- broken his ability to keep an offensive-capable army in the field. To make peace while he still has a functioning fighting force means that he will inevitably reinforce himself and attack you while you too are rearming, and lock you in a perpetual cycle of starting over again. This is the reason why Ukraine has laughed off any suggestion of making peace with Russia. It must keep fighting until Russia's ability not merely to wage war, but to wage another war, is shattered.

9a. Government adapts itself to suit necessity. Playing Civilization in a "human" manner, i.e. adopting a democratic government, seeking trade and negotiation, etc., is all well and good until it is necessary to start a pre-emptive war: say, to deny a rival access to uranium. But since the population of a democratic country doesn't like pre-emptive wars (or even large militaries), it may be necessary for the player to overthrow his own government and institute a fascist or communist dictatorship, one in which public opinion is irrelevant.

10. Ultimately, no law, pact, treaty or code of ethics which threatens your survival will itself survive contact with harsh reality. A person who, in real life, abominates war and militarism, bemoans huge defense budgets, is environmentally conscious, preaches for social justice, etc., etc. will immediately become the most bloodthirsty and ruthless tyrant imaginable when handed the electronic reins of power. He will betray allies, bomb defenseless towns, massacre captured workers, conduct scorched-earth policies, launch nuclear missiles. Part of this comes from the fact that the killing in Civilization is, of course, not real killing, any more than the violence in a novel or a television show is real. But a significant part of it comes from the fact that ideology seldom stands up in the face of necessity. Pacifism is an easy stance to adopt when no one is actually trying to kill you. Environmental responsibility is common sense right up to the moment the alternative to burning coal is freezing to death. Civilization is a great counter to the clever, smirky, debate-society arguments, because it puts all the power in your hands and then says, "The enemy is at the gates. They refuse to negotiate. What will you do?"

You may think all of this is horrible. That these are manifestly not the lessons people need to be taught about world affairs, especially given the generally awful state of the world today. That maybe a game should be designed which only rewarded the most moral, the most ethical, the most benificent and merciful decisions. There is, after all, nowhere near enough compassion in the world, nowhere near enough empathy, and it would be grand if we could artificially stimulate a previously numb area of our brains and coax a greater affinity for these things. And I am all for such a game. But the stark fact is that the appeal of Civilization lies mainly in the fact that it is not a game. It is a reasonably accurate, if stripped-down-to-its-essentials reflection of the world we actually live in. To succeed in playing Civ is to demonstrate, to a small degree, the qualities necessary to succeed in the real world. This in itself is perhaps appalling, but that does not make it less true. As Sergeant Barnes opined in PLATOON, "There's the way it oughta be...and there's the way it is."

This, then, is what I learned playing Civilization. You may not like it, but if you can play a few rounds of this game and not come away with a better understanding of why nations do such cruel, destructive and ugly things, and why even vastly different forms of government often make startlingly similar errors in judgment, chances are you're either deluded or just very, very thick.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: REFLECTIONS OF ME

Tonight, as I watched an episode of the largely forgotten television series China Beach, I was moved by the show's opening theme song -- The Supreme's lovely, heart-wrenching hit "Reflections:"

Through the mirror of my mind
Time after time
I see reflections of you and me
Reflections of
The way life used to be
Reflections of
The love you took from me

While not at the moment lovelorn -- at least no more so than usual -- I must admit that with the three-year anniversary of my return to the East coming up in a few months, I am certainly in a reflective frame of mind. I have already written a blog about the passage of time, and how it becomes subjectively faster as each year passes ("Not Wheels But Wings") and have no desire to take a trip to that well tonight. On the other hand, the speed with which everything is going by is not something I can ignore. Every now and again I am jarred by a reminder that some event which feels as if it belongs in my immediate or near past is, in actuality, a decade or more behind me. I had occasion to dig up a passage or two from my 2010 journal the other day, and the fact that some of the events recorded therein are more than a dozen years in the past is almost impossible for me to comprehend. Likewise the fact that a high school reunion photo I discovered by accident on the internet shows, in 2015, that I bore a completely different hairline than I do today. In fact, if you read Wednesday's blog ("As I Please XIV"), you will remember I recently shaved my head down to a Marine like 1/4 to 1/2 an inch in length, for the simple reason that I was tired of plastering dwindling numbers of follicles over ever-increasing quantities of bare scalp. It seems only yesterday that I was still able to grow out my hair to truly epic proportions. But it wasn't.

In my novel Sinner's Cross, one of the protagonists, Martin Zenger, is so rattled by a mortar blast he loses all sense of time. Past, present and even future seem to be happening to him simultaneously. In my estimation, those sequences are the best-written in the book, and if they are, it's because I can relate to them. I have always had a very tenuous grasp of time: my brother constantly joked, when we were growing up, that three days and three weeks were essentially the same to me. This, of course, is both blessing and curse. As a writer, my ability to lose time is an asset of the highest value. When I'm truly in what I call The Writer's Place, an hour feels like a few minutes, with the resulting effect that I can write for eight, then, even twelve or fourteen hours straight, without feeling the least bit of discomfort or boredom. On the other hand, when my ADHD is in full effect, even a few minutes can seem interminable. And there is no real middle ground. Either I am entirely absorbed by what I'm seeing or doing or hearing, or I'm bored out of my fucking wits, unable to concentrate, unable to do anything but suffer. My view of time is similarly skewed. Either it's blurring past me with terrifying quickness or it is dragging like an anchor on the sea floor.

I recently saw an interview with William Shatner, who is now 92 years old and still kickin' as hard as Bruce Lee ever did. Shatner counseled the man who interviewed him to "say yes to life" and take every opportunity that came his way, because "it all goes by in a blink." He expressed dismay that the 50th anniversary of Star Trek had just passed: "I remember it like it was yesterday." Being only 50 myself, I can't fully relate, but by God I can do it partially. In my afformentioned journal, certain passages brought back memories so clear and sharp they cut my emotions into raw and bleeding ribbons. So much of my old life, which under ordinary circumstances exists in my mind like dusty old heirlooms in a fourth-floor attic, burst forth in life and color. I don't mean my reaction was nostalgic: a lot of what I was reading as unpleasant, or just sad. In 2010 I was still waging a brutal and bitter war to break into the entertainment industry while simultaneously trying to save a relationship which was dying by inches before my eyes. No, I just mean that...well, with a little prompting, I remembered it all like it was yesterday. As vividly as I sit here, tying over my cat, vaguely aware of the candle burning on my right, somewhat more aware of the dull thud of the bass from the bar below my apartment coming through my floorboards, I remember sitting in a similar office chair in my apartment (14G) in Park La Brea, hammering away on a similar keyboard, attached to a similar computer. It seems like yesterday. But it wasn't.

Oh, I'm all alone now
No love to shield me
Trapped in a world
That's a distorted reality
Happiness you took from me
And left me all alone
With only memories
Through the mirror of my mind
Through all these tears that I'm crying
Reflects a hurt I can't control
Although you're gone
I keep holding on
To those happy times
Oh, girl when you were mine

Three years I've been back, and boy, have they been busy. My "day job" as an advocate for victims of crime is as demanding as a job can possibly be, both timewise and in the emotional sense, but I have also managed to release a novel (The Very Dead of Winter) and three novellas (Seelenmord, Deus Ex, and Wolf Weather), and complete, finally, the first draft of my horror epic Something Evil, which took me six years. There have been other accomplishments as well...and there have also been defeats: personal, professional and otherwise. And yet for all this, I can't reconcile myself to the fact that three years have passed. Or to the fact that so many people from my past, who still reside here, seem to have aged out of recognition: not physically, but in terms of their outlook on life. For all my failures, all my hypocrisies and stupidities and self-sabotage, I feel as if I am still very much a work in progress, rather like a rosebud which is bursting into bloom with torturous slowness, shedding haphazard petals yet still growing. But so many people I cared for once with that terrible intensity of love, or lust, or comradeship seem to have wilted entirely, or else become like flowers under glass -- artificially frozen in time. It's as if time is passing differently for us in the Einsteinian sense, that I am a man-child who acts as if he will live to be 200 years old and thus learns everything slowly and clumsily, but is still learning nonetheless; but they have either given up on life and grown old prematurely, or stopped evolving, stopped hoping, stopped dreaming. There are those, too, who are addicts and seemed locked in a cycle from which they cannot or will not escape, and there are a few, not many but a few, who are no longer among the living, whose images haunt me on certain nights -- not because they are dead, but because they are forever young. There is something mocking about the way they smile at me in their photographs, as if to say, "Damn, lookin' kinda middle-aged there, sport."

As I peer through the windows
Of lost time
Keeping looking over my yesterdays
And all the love I gave all in vain
(All the love) All the love
That I've wasted
(All the tears) All the tears
That I've tasted
All in vain
Through the hollow of my tears
I see a dream that's lost
From the hurt baby
That you have caused
Everywhere I turn
Seems like everything I see
Reflects a hurt I can't control
In you I put
All my hope and trust
Right before my eyes
My whole world has turned to dust

I'm sometimes told that the writerly convention of describing a character by having them look into a mirror is a cliche strictly for hacks. In reality, the mirror is the only place where one comes quite literally face to face with oneself. A great deal of us lies within our eyes and what they reveal, and who can look into their own eyes without a mirror?

What do I see?

Reflections of
The love you took from me
Reflections of
The way life used to be

Is this nostalgia? No. Self-pity? Also no. It's more of a phantom pain, of the sort people who have lost limbs feel -- a leftover of something that was. And this is a necessary process. You cannot change, cannot accept change, without that pain. That dismay. That realization that time is a blur and the mirror is pitiless and undefeated. That people are not going to follow the paths you set for them, or grow in the way that you would wish them to grow. They are not yours to control. Hell, you are not always yours to control. We are all of us standing on a neon-painted streetcorner in the night, still as statues, while the traffic flows past on intervalometer, a silent and continuous blur of headlights, flowing ceaselessly toward destinies we cannot guess. What we feel, witnessing this, may frighten and hurt us, but it is not evil. The bad pain, the pointless pain, lies in trying to hold on, to make time stop. But as Leonard Nimoy once remarked, "Life is like a garden: perfect moments can be had, but not preserved -- except in memory."

We ourselves are like that. We can be perfect, but we can't be preserved.

Not even in reflection.

AS I PLEASE XIV

Wednesday has rolled around at last, and as it rolls toward its conclusion it leaves behind the crushed remains of your humble correspondent, who spent hours writing a blog for you today, only to be unable to finish it before exhaustion overtook him. In the interests of keeping my promise to resume posting twice weekly, however, I offer these scattered thoughts and observations instead:

* My sixth novella, WOLF WEATHER, is now available for purchase on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats. This is my first expedition into horror- fantasy, and I greatly enjoyed writing it. Some stories come upon me quickly and are written just as quickly: others percolate for years within my mind before being served. This one falls in both categories. The vague ideas I had were old residents, but the speed with which they came to life once I scribbled the first few lines of story -- on a whim, and not meaning to seriously produce anything -- was impressive and a little alarming. I say "alarming" because there are times when a writer feels as if he is creating something out of his own materials, which is a proud but laborious sort of feeling, and other times when he feels as if he is a mere conduit for creative forces flowing through him. That one's humbling. And kinda scary.

* Kinda scary....While hiking in the woods on Monday evening -- beneath an orange sun shrouded in smoke from the Canadian wildfires -- I encountered the leg of a young deer laying on the path at my feet. Hoof and shank, just sitting there with some bones jutting from the fur. I stared at it in wonderment. How the hell did the poor thing lose the lower part of its leg? Foxes are too small for such a job and there are no wolves in Pennsylvania. Perhaps it was a coyote. But they aren't common in these parts. At any rate there was no body, just the leg, so I suppose it might have been dropped by whatever animal tore it off in the first place. If it was an animal.

* When I lived in California, wildfires and the resulting smoke and poor air quality were an aggravating part of yearly life. When I moved back East, however, I thought I'd left them behind. Wrong. The huge wildfires burning in Eastern Canada are supplying the local air with enough particulates to make my eyes water, to say nothing of the mess they leave on my windshield. I guess there really is no escaping climate change.

* In regards to California, I just had a go at my journal for the year 2010, and what struck me first and foremost was how miserable I plainly was at the time. I was working my first real gig in the entertainment industry, and getting a brutal education in how hard, unfair, and unstable the business really is. At the same time, I was plainly reveling, in a rather a shallow and sniveling way, over the fact that I was in the entertainment industry, which just goes to show you that people in abusive relationships can live for years on crumbs.

* I just finished Lois: Chronicles of a German Nurse, 1945. This is a highly readable if somewhat appalling account of the end of WW2 as witnessed by a war-widowed nurse witnessing Nazi Germany's collapse firsthand. Her description of the behavior of Soviet troops in Germany -- looting, raping and destroying everything in their path -- is so strongly reminiscent of descriptions of the Russian army in Ukraine that it struck me as rather eerie...the way history repeats itself.

* Speaking of history repeating itself: while looking at that 2010 journal, I had to laugh at descriptions of my workout routines, diet and weight. Nothing has changed. I'm still fighting the same battle against the same 5 - 10 lbs I was back then -- or for that matter, ten years before that. I suppose that is actually a small victory. At least I'm not one of those guys who has grown unrecognizably fat in middle age. I wore 34" jeans in 1993, and I wear 36" jeans today. That's not too terribly shabby.

* On the other hand, after two years of growing out what was left of my locks in a vain attempt to recapture my youth, I finally bit the bullet and had my barber shave my head the other day. Well, not shave-like-Kojak: just run clippers at 2.0 setting over my skull. This proved insufficiently short, so I had her try a 1.5, and that did the trick. Actually, I like this look quite a bit. It's liberating, and a lot easier than trying to plaster ever-diminishing strands of hair over ever-increasing amounts of scalp. Part of being 50, in my case anyway, is learning to adapt to the fact that I am, in fact, fifty. The urge to compete with previous versions of myself never goes away, but I am steadily battering it to the edge rather than the center of my mind.

And now my mind needs rest. On Saturday I will roll out the blog that should have posted tonight, which may or may not include an update on my next novel, EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLE OF MAGNUS, tenatively slated for release in the fall of 2023. In the mean time, here's a link to WOLF WEATHER:

Wolf Weather

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: JUXTAPOSED LIFE

If you're not jacked in, you're not alive. -- Fritz, "I Robot, You Jane"

Sooner or later my life will settle down enough for me to return to blogging twice a week. Until then, I seem condemned to an apology tour. Sorry I forgot to post Wednesday. You see, I forgot. The massive damage done to my 200 year-old apartment building last December, when the 5,000 gallon water tank burst in one-degree temperature and flooded everything, is now finally being repaired, so everything here is a mess. Work was also insane. I caught a $200 ticket for making a right on red in a "no right on red" zone whilst on my way to a hike, and and on top of that, my new novella WOLF WEATHER went live in both paperback and Kindle versions on Amazon. So maybe I can be forgiven. Or not. But that is at any rate why I missed the mark again.

Now, to cases.

The other day I went for a hike in the woods. Nothing new to report there: from the spring to the mid-late fall I generally abandon the gym for outdoor exercise. What made this excursion a little different from the others was the fact that, when I arrived and did a quick inventory of the items in my bag, I saw I'd forgotten to pack my cell phone.

At first I was annoyed and a little alarmed. We are all so used to having our mobile devices with us 24/7 that to be separated from them even for a few minutes can be unsettling. Then, however, a curious sense of relief settled over me. After all, I was surrounded by nature: I didn't particularly want to be bothered with my electronic choke-chain. So off I went.

While trampling along the path, I encountered a lot of sights which would have been worthy of a picture -- a muscular blacksnake with a stark white belly, a comically fat groundhog, two foxes, an enormous brown frog, fragments of a robin's egg so blue they almost hurt my eyes, a pond teeming with tadpoles, the skeleton of a deer, half overgrown by weeds. We live in an age of shared experiences, and it's become almost instinctual to upload anything our cameras can catch for the amusement of the tribe. But of course it doesn't stop there. For many millions of people, the very act of existence is now bifurcated, a sort of juxtaposition with some Jekyll & Hyde schizophrenia mixed in for bad measure. The once mildly annoying internet phrase "pics or it didn't happen" has become an actual view of reality shared by countless humans. They exist -- we exist -- in two worlds simultaneously. There is the real world, the body we occupy and the senses that body possesses which interprets what we see, hear, touch, taste, etc., and the electronic world, where our electronic personality manifests itself. In some ways this latter world is a phantom, for it has no physical actuality: cyberspace is not really a space. When we "go on the internet" we are, of course, not going anywhere. Our computers are simply displaying information, much of it completely disorted or flat-out incorrect. Likewise, our personalities, too, become distorted when they take on their electronic guise.

I first noticed this in the late 90s/early 00s, when e-mail was still the principal form of online communication -- before chatrooms or instant messaging, the precursors of social media, had really taken hold with the masses. I noticed that friends of mine who I had known for years, in some cases for much of my life, had a distinctly different tone when communicating by e-mail than they did in person or over the telephone. Some were much more assertive or aggressive, even nasty. Having time to compose their thoughts, but also not having to look someone in the eye or face an immediate reaction when the thoughts were expressed, gave them a boldness and a sharpness they lacked in real life. Little did I know that the mid-00s would give rise to social media, and that most disgusting of all creatures, the internet troll: but even this phenomenon was only part of the overall change taking place. The advent of the text message allowed people to become much more aggressive...or passive-aggressive...than they would otherwise be. The advent of the cell phone camera, and social media platforms upon which to post its pictures, allowed people to begin sharing snapshots of their experiences with friends, family, acquaintances...and complete strangers. In what seems like no time at all, everyone had their own island in this new world, an island where they were at once the undisputed master and, at the same time, fully exposed to all the other islanders. And the more time passed, the larger and more complex the structures upon these islands grew, until, for some people, actual physical reality became an adjunct to the electronic space. The level of investment many made into this place-that-isn't-a-place far exceeded any investment they were making in their own lives. Everyone reading this knows someone, or several someones, who spend far more time scrolling, posting, uploading, downloading, swiping, disliking, and generally reacting to online content than they do anything else. People who can't be separated from their phones for even a moment, who insist on sneaking glance after glance during movies or at dinner, who seem distracted and not fully present even when sitting with their closest friends. They are here, but not here: they are there. Occupying space in the physical world but mentally online.

Such people are the ones who coined the dreaded "pics or it didn't happen," and they coined it because to a very frightening extent, they believe it. Within their minds, the importance of the real world is far less than that of the electronic one. The very idea that one can simply live life without an iPhone, a TikTok account, and a wi-fi hotspot is mind-blowing to them, because to do so would represent an lessening rather than an increase in the quality of life. After all, when half your mind (or more) is occupied by the online space and vice-versa, to withdraw from that space would be a akin to abruptly losing one or two senses: you would continue, but in a diminished form. One could argue, of course, that this is simply a question of comfort: in my own formative period, the 1980s, I was one of the sad legion of kids more at home playing Atari and watching re-runs of "Star Trek" in my parents' basement than I was at a a dance or a football game. Reality was of little interest to me: solace came from solitude, or meet-ups with individuals similarly disenchanted with what junior high school had to offer us. The pudgy nerd with greasy hair, dandruff and hand-me-down clothes was a joke in school and a disappointment at home, but when he played Dungeons & Dragons or Dark Tower or read comic books by the pallet-load or stayed up 'til 3AM to catch a static-filled episode of "Doctor Who," he felt at home: "among his own kind" even when alone. It is the nature of human beings to seek out a place where they are content and accepted, and if this place does not exist, they will invent it, even if that invention means retreating, as I did between the ages of 10 - 15, inside my own head. Had I lived those years during the age of the internet, I have zero doubt that I should have ended up like Comic Book Guy on "The Simpsons." Fortunately for me, my unrequited interest in girls forced me to lose weight, master hygine and to some extent, fashion, and eventually make a belated entrance into adult realities. By the time the internet arrived, and then evolved from a novelty to a tool to a lifestyle in and of itself in a single decade, I had learned to balance the demands of the real world with my still-keen interest in nerdly things. Enough to get along, anyway. But once I finally warmed up to it, I saw how easily, how fatally easily, it would be to lose oneself in that electronic space. It is for this reason that, even though I worked in the games industry for nine years, I have never had a gaming system more advanced than a PlayStation 2. The siren-song of the imaginary world, where one can attain massive if intangible glory, struck me as extremely dangerous. I waste too much time on YouTube as it is.

Even for those with less engagement online, however, the juxtaposition exists. Anyone with a mobile device spends significant time upon it, scrolling through news and checking text messages and e-mails and so forth. Also snapping photos which they share with others. These devices are now part of our basic out-of-house kit, like clothing, shoes and car keys. We don't take them with us because we need them: we take them because we are anxious when we find ourselves untethered from the electronic world, even for a short period of time. We have trained our brains -- or our brains, which are fond of dopamine, have trained us -- to require that electronic connection. And this connection raises important philosophical questions about the nature of reality and consciousness. We used to ask, "If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a noise?" Now we ask, "If we go on vacation but don't take a camera and don't post about it online, did we really go?" Do people who live "off the grid" really exist in a world where it is theoretically possible to record everything we do, all the time, and share it with the world via continuous livestream?

The German writer-philosopher Ernst Jünger, who traveled extensively and chronicled his travels in his books, once remarked that he never took cameras on his journeys because "photographs handcuff the memory." In some sense he was absolutely correct. Any time I have attended a televised sporting event and then watched tape of the telecast afterwards, the images on the screen quickly obliterate my actual memories of the event. I have seen, almost from ringside, epic boxing matches which I cannot describe any better than those who watched them on television. In a broader sense, too, photos tend to reduce an experience to a single image or series of images, leaving out the much fuller and richer substance of the memory. This probably sounds hypocritical to anyone who has seen my apartment, which is a veritable shrine of framed photographs from floor to ceiling, but I maintain that Jünger's assertion has some validity: any medium which shuts out imagination and memory in favor of pure imagery is bound to be reductive to some degree.

I once wrote in these pages about how much fun it was, back in the 1980s, to climb into the family car with a mix tape and go cruising on a long, lazy summer evening. One of the chief pleasures of this activity was the sense of disconnection it produced from the world. There were no cell phones, no GPS, no way of contacting or being contacted by anyone. To some extent that 1977 Olds Cutlass Supreme was a diving bell, and myself a diver, submerged beneath the ocean, suspended in a sweet, humming silence, totally alone and yet not lonely, experiencing a kind of quiet bliss, the bliss of being alive and conscious and free and unbothered -- with, as George Thorogood once sang, no particular place to go. The essence of such an experience was its privacy. As Orwell's wonderful character George Bowling remarks in COMING UP FOR AIR: "I was just old enough to know it's good to be alone sometimes." No such privacy exists today, and what's more frightening, an increasingly large number of people do not want such privacy and perhaps cannot even envision it. They must be connected, must sleep with the iPhone under the pillow, must scroll and swipe every waking moment they are not physically prevented from doing so. And it goes beyond dopamine addiction. It is a shift in the way we experience reality, experience consciousness itself, whose long-term effects are as yet still unknown; but, I think, potentially very grim.

I know that I have a luddite streak in me, a distrust of technology and a dislike of change. I know that I tend to view certain aspects of the past with a rosy glow, somewhere between ordinary nostalgia and hiraeth. Nevertheless, I feel my apprehension toward the bifircation of the human mind via technology is not mere middle-aged crankism or techno-paranoia. It is a recognition of a fundamental shift in the way human beings exist upon this planet and interact with each other, and it is a shift I will be watching with considerable anxiety in the days to come. It's hard enough to get by even in one world.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: SUNDAY EDITION, AGAIN

Last week I was attending a national crimes conference in Dallas, TX, and was thus unable to make my bi-weekly contributions to this blog. Since I have promised to be consistent in this regard, and in fact have been for many months now, I feel it necessary to kick off by making this explanation/excuse. There, I've done it. Moving on.

Having just traveled by aircraft for only the second time since late 2019, I feel compelled to make a few comments about what the experience told me about the state of the travel industry, and writ much larger, on the state of us, people living in today's post-Covid world. This path gets a little twisted and rambling, even by my standards, but if you can reach the end without rolling your eyes too hard, you may find yourself in agreement with me.

When I was a kid, back in the last century, I looked forward to any family engagement which involved flying. I did this in spite of the fact that my father invariably had us at the airport hellishly early, often up to four hours before the flight. This was pointless and unnecessary, but reflected his obsession with wanting every detail of a vacation planned down to its finest particular, with numerous contingency plans and built-in safety margins. In any event, flying was still quite enjoyable in those days. First and foremost, the airports were not as crowded, and the flights often had numerous empty seats. There was no TSA, just routine security, and airport employees were much friendlier and less harassed and put-upon. Checking luggage was free. On the flights themselves, proper meals were served -- not snacks, but actual meals that came in segmented trays. The food was bad, of course (I remember in particular one compartment filled with eggs so spongy you could have bounded a lead weight off of them), but it was actual food.

In the post-9/11 era, the nature of flying changed dramatically. It became much more of a hassle. Security lines dragged on, sometimes for hours, and passing through TSA checkpoints was like entering a minumum-security prison...as an inmate. Airports began to treat the people coming through them more like a potential threat than as customers. Airlines began to seek ways to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of passengers while reducing their comforts: seats got smaller, leg room shrank, food service was canceled, flights were deliberately overbooked, and customer services were slashed or carried out with such ill grace that "air rage" became a problem worthy of magazine covers. It's typical of how the press carries the ball for corporations that this phenomenon was blamed upon "entitled passengers" and not on the airlines themselves: on two occasions in the past I can clearly recall having to overmaster strong desires to smash an airport employee in the face. This was not entitlement. I was the natural response of a tired, stressed-out human being who had been treated with deliberate disrespect.

I know there is a tendency, bordering on mania, for people who have lived long enough to unfavorably compare the present with the past. I am definitely guilty of this sometimes, and have been so even in this blog. That having been said, I am not remembering my 20th century travel experiences "with advantages." No human enterprise is ever consistently excellent. Things did go wrong: bags got mislaid, flights got delayed, connections were missed, et cetera and so on. But the overall experience was more one of adventure than endurance. It wasn't until the 2000s that everything began its slide to the present, expensive and uncomfortable nadir.

Now, some would say that me even talking about this subject reflects that dreaded and previously used word: entitlement. First world problems, anyone? After all, if I have to endure some discomfort and boredom and humiliation to travel across a continent in six hours, what of it? Why should anyone care?

My answer to that question, which seems like a side-step into another subject entirely but really isn't, goes like this:

The idea that aspects of society are getting worse rather than better with the passage of time flies in the face of the faith we have generally placed in technology. After all, technology exists for one purpose: to make human lives better. And if we accept that as true, then logically it follows that every technological advancement should improve life. But in my own lifetime, the experience of flying has become noticeably worse and more expensive, and while technology has softened some of the sharper edges of travel, it hasn't compensated for the general decline in comfort or the increase in cost. In short, travel is simply a bellweather for the curious backwards trend of society as a whole.

I would say the same phenomenon applies to many aspects of modern life, most noticeably in terms of the internet. When the internet first emerged as a readily available tool back in the late 90s, it seemed to have very little downside (slow, screeching, 56K modems aside). And it developed in a positive way for perhaps as long as ten years afterwards, becoming increasingly efficient while providing more and more expansive services. In the later 00s, however, the ascent of Facebook and the advent of Twitter sharply changed the trajectory of how the internet influenced our lives. The years following this have seen an increasingly negative, combative, destructive relationship between the humans who created what we used to call "the worldwide web" and the web itself. What was intended to spread knowledge now spreads disinformation. What was intended to provide service has led to a vast increase in entitlement. What was intended to unite the human race has savagely divided it. For the generation born around 2000 or so, the psychological and spiritual costs of growing up online are now becoming clearly evident. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, and misanthropy are exploding, especially among younger people. Everything from body dysmorphia to dopamine addiction to destructive narcissism, murderous fantasies and suicidal ideation have become commonplace. This is not what was supposed to happen.

As a final example, we have the present writer's strike in Hollywood. This strike was caused by, of all things, the looming threat that Artificial Intelligence poses to the creative sphere. These self-refining programs are now coming dangerously close to replacing humans in the one area of activity which we all believed safe from intrusion by technology: art. Our machines can now not only paint for us, they can write scripts and compose music. And while their first efforts were comically poor, the very nature of algorithms allows them to improve with each effort. A great deal of what defines humanity is about to be appropriated by machines we designed to make our lives easier. Except that these machines are now poised to render writers, artists, musicians and even actors and directors as surplus to requirements as saddlers were in the age of the automobile. And this goes all across the board. From the self-driving car to the unmanned naval vessel, from the essay-writing program to the robot on the production line, we are increasingly allowing our own tools to render us redundant, all while lowering rather than raising our quality of life itself. Everything is faster, but everything is also more expensive and less pleasurable. In every aspect of our existence, the technology which we rely on to help us live longer and better is conspiring against us, driven by greed and a more difficult to define motive, best summed by Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park: "Just because we could doesn't mean we should."

Orwell, who I quote so often in these pages, once remarked that the human instinct to make continuous refinements in tools was a new instinct in the species, and a very dangerous one, since it often occurred for its own sake, without regards to consequences. He predicted that the endpoint of a fully mechanized society was a human being who was little more than "a brain in a bottle." He might have added that a being in a mechanical body might eventually ditch the brain, too: why rely on a sticky, foible-prone lump of organic tissue when a neat little hueristic algorithm can take its place?

Human beings are remarkable things. We seem to have an inborn ability both to innovate and to refine, both to imagine the impossible and then, somehow, to achieve it. Alone among God's creatures we have the power to shape our environment in a truly meaningful way. Yet hand in hand with these gifts comes our ability to turn a positive into a negative: the caveman who learned to sharpen the first stick probably used it to spear his neighbor before he did anything else, and his civilized descendant spends a lot of the spare time civilization has given him finding ways to cheat those around him. We have a two-faced gene which compels us to make miracles, and then promptly screw them up. And I don't know if there is a solution to this problem. That is to say, I don't know if the only possible solution will ever be embraced or seriously considered before it's too late.

What is the solution? It seems to me it rests in changing our relationship not only with technology, but innovation itself. With the idea that some areas of technology simply need not be explored, not at least outside a laboratory, and that "just because we can doesn't mean we should." With the notion that tech exists to serve us, and must do so in a controlled rather than an uncontrolled manner. If we begin to think of technology in the same way we think of pharmaceutical drugs, we would surely experiment with any new tech for years before allowing it to flood the market. First, we examine potential consequences, then we package it for sale. But only then.

This idea is not quite as naive as it sounds. Scientists and economists from Adam Smith to Gerard K. O'Neill have posited variations on the idea of the"steady state society" and "steady state economy" since the 1700s. This subject is far too complicated to discuss in depth here, but a modern take on it would be a society in which resource-use was strictly monitored so as to eliminate all unchecked growth. A kind of governmental and economic thermostat which regulated humanity at a level and pace which preserved both the species and the planet.
Such a society raises the specter of authoritarianism and the dreaded "world government" so cherished by conspiracy theorists, but it also provides our species way out of the seemingly insurmountable problems which unchecked technological growth have created. If nothing else, it's food for thought -- because God knows you won't be getting any of the former on your next flight.

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "MATT HOUSTON"

Better cock your pistols. -- C.J. Parsons

Way back in the 1980s, there was a tall, handsome, mustachioe'd private eye with a flashy lifestyle, a taste for danger, a tendency to bumble, and a way with women. This Vietnam vet was was tough, but tender: occasionally immature, but also deeply committed. A terrific friend, but a terrifying enemy. He sleuthed, fist-fought, romanced, cheesed off the cops, sped down highways in a vintage auto to bombastic music, and generally reminded us how lame we were in comparison with him...somehow without ever once making us dislike him. His more Mary Sue characteristics were offset by enough flaws, foibles and quirks to be relatable, even as he dodged shotgun blasts and got thrown off cars. He gave the ladies something to look at and the men something to admire.

Am I talking about Thomas Magnum? Oh no. No no no. I'm talking about Matt Houston. You know, Matt Houston? Surely you remember Matlock Houston! In 1982 he was as inescapable as American flags on the Fourth of July, and nearly as American. Just the sort of rough-and-tumble (yet suave) hero this nation required during those shaky first years of the Reagan presidency, when we were all desperate for a distraction from seemingly imminent nuclear destruction.

When HOUSTON made its debut in 1982, MAGNUM, P.I. was already a worldwide phenomenon, the show every other action-adventure-cop-private-eye show wanted to be. In Hollywood, imitation is the highest form of flattery, and other networks (and even the same network) did their level best to try and imitate what the legendary Donald P. Bellisario had created: but none were so brazen in their imitation as the equally legendary Aaron Spelling. His intention from the start seemed to be to out-Magnum MAGNUM in every possible way. What he came up with was this:

Matlock Houston (Lee Horsley) was the only son of a famous Texas oil baron. An outstanding collegiate athlete who served in Vietnam as an intelligence officer, Matt -- "Houston" to his friends -- was supposed to follow in his dad's footsteps in the Lone Star State. Instead, he decamped to Los Angeles, ostensibly to supervise the family's offshore drilling assets, but in reality to indulge his true passion: working as a private detective. Houston flew his own helicopter from his West Side ranch to his penthouse office in downtown L.A.: drove his open-topped Sparks Roadster around town; and wore Western suits with cowboy boots and a gold belt buckle, and was accompanied at all times by his best friend and lawyer, the lovely C.J. Parsons (Pamela Hensley). For background information, Houston relied on "Baby," his sophisticated Apple III computer, which was basically just a modern internet connection as it was imagined in 1982. For help with the cops, he had his friend Lt. Vince Novelli (John Aprea). For financial dope, he had his anxiety-riddled accountant Murray (George Wydner). There were a number of other ancillary characters as well, and thereby we come to what initially made MATT HOUSTON interesting to potential viewers.

Noise.

As concieved and initially executed, MATT HOUSTON never attempted subtlety. It never attempted nuance. It never attempted depth. From its relentlessly bombastic score to the utter improbability of its central concept, from its tongue-in-cheek humor to its equally cheeky departure from any sense of realism, this show was a fifty-piece marching band complete with elephants and fireworks, advertising what amounted to a new flavor of gum. It was boldly ridiculous: garishly, cheesily up in your face, like a harmless but demented rodeo clown. It was a ton of energy circling not a helluva lot of substance. Even at the time, it was considered to be vulgar in a literal sense.

HOUSTON's early structure went like this. Some friend or former flame of Houston, accused of murder or threatened by evildoers, would reach out to him for help. Houston would investigate the suspects, usually composed at least in part of faded stars of yesteryear such as Alan Hale, Janet Leigh, Cesar Romero, Chuck Connors, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Wilhem Klemperer, etc., as well as various reliable character actors (think Bradford Dillman and Vic Tayback) and hot bikini-babes. Houston would quickly become targeted by the unknown bad guy, leading to chases on foot and chases by car, fisticuffs, and inevitable scene where Houston gets thrown off a moving car. Finally, after a drawing-room confrontation in which Houston exposed the killer or bad guy, there would be a final chase & fistfight, followed by a last snort of humor before the credits rolled.

You will note I said "fistfight." One of the peculiar qualities of early HOUSTON is that he never, or almost never, carried a gun. Nor, for a single, handsome, virile young man worth millions, did he make a fetish of bedding his damsels in distress. Houston existed as a man out of time, an idealized Old West hero, occasionally with the horse, but always minus the six guns. Like the Duke Boys, he'd sock you on the jaw if you had it coming, but he'd never kick you when you were down. The show even referenced "The Cowboy Code," an actual code of behavior sometimes referred to as The Code of the West, which was Houston's guiding moral star.

The series was also notable for its sense of humor. A running gag which took center stage in the credits was Houston's inability to knock down a door with his shoulder, but the fact is Houston was the butt of at least three-quarters of the shows physical comedy, one-liners and comebacks. In this regard Lee Horsely, a real-life Texan who really does embody the Cowboy Code, was the perfect choice for the role. He could play tough and dramatic when the role called for it, but seemed to be at his best when playing for laughs. HOUSTON was often absurd (radio-controlled sharks, killer robots, little green men) but it wasn't the sort of absurd show that cringe-inducingly takes itself seriously. There was a wink-wink quality to (most of) its early episodes, a clear understanding that the viewer had voluntarily entered the theater of the ridiculous.

All shows undergo refinements and changes as they progress: MATT HOUSTON suffered massive overalls, probably as the result of critical attacks and wobbly ratings. The changes started subtly, by getting rid of C.J.'s horrible Texas accent and the equally dumb expositive narration, which only served to slop words into plot holes best left to the audience's indifferent shrugs (who watches shit like this for the plots?). Then the side-character massacre began: two pointless, painfully stupid cowboy sidekicks were dispatched without ceremony, followed eventually by Novelli's annoying Italian sterotype of a mother, who ran (of course) an Italian restaurant and was forever cartoonishly berating her son in Italian. Murray, the one side guy who really worked well, was reduced to recurring status. And a few episodes -- "Get Houston" and "The Hunted" -- jaggedly changed the tone from lighthearted and comedic to dark-as-death in an eyeblink.

HOUSTON's second season permanently changed the tone of the series. Gone was the sense of humor. Gone too, were the Western suits, gold buckles, cowboy boots and Sparks Roadster. The parade of faded guest stars ended, and so too did the big, set-piece drawing-room confrontations. Houston wore a Member's Only jacket, carried a Walther PPK (later upgraded to a big old .45) which used frequently, and drove a contemporary sportscar. He was also quick to bed with his hot female co-stars. In short, the quirky, noisy, over-the-top, G-rated ridiculousness had been thrown out in favor of a grimly generic TV detective show, indistinguishable from most others. This didn't particularly suit the modest audience, so its third season tried to revive a little of the razzamatazz and humor of the first, and brought in Buddy Ebsen (famous for BARNABY JONES) as a series regular, to no avail. MATT HOUSTON crossed its finish line with 69 episodes beneath its (no longer) Western-buckled belt, and was promptly forgotten, except by a small core of devotees and, of course, the mostly female fans of Lee Horsley. It is now a footnote in television history.

So where does MATT HOUSTON stand in retrospect? Why am I even bothering to talk about a poorly-written, derivative knock-off of a much more successful series? Why write about a show which limped through three seasons before it was canceled with absolutely no fanfare? Why spill ink over what one IMDB commentator referred to as "the show you flipped to when the show you were watching was on a commercial"?

One word: fun

The first season -- only the first, really, but with the occasional lark in seasons two and three -- was just plain old silly fun, of the sort I so rarely encounter nowadays that it seems to me completely extinct. Houston's banter with C.J. was not exactly Shakespearian, but they had a wonderful comedic chemistry, and as I said above, Houston himself was often a source of humor simply through his outre facial expressions and bullet-induced pratfalls. Even in the 1980s, there was a place for prime-time detective dramas which were thoughtfully written and skillfully acted, like SIMON & SIMON, and there is also a place for entertaining nonsense. Even as a boy of ten, I grasped that sometimes you want prime rib, and sometimes a McDonald's hamburger. It's a question of mood, of what level of engagement feels right for you in the moment. An episode like MAGNUM, P.I.'s "Did You See The Sunrise?" demanded the maximum from its viewer: it was a brutally violent, intricately plotted, tragic and finally shocking story that changed the course of television history. (The first time I saw it, I felt as if I'd aged a year overnight.) The average episode of MATT HOUSTON, in comparison, was about as demanding as putting a quarter in the slot of a bubblegum machine. But who doesn't like a fistfull of brightly-colored bubblegum?

There is a second word I'd like to employ: hero.

Yesterday I saw a preview for Fast X, the tenth and, I hope, last installment of the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise. Watching this slickly produced trailer consecrated to the monstrous ego of Vin Diesel just served to remind me of how the very idea of heroism is dead, buried and mummified in the mind of modern Hollywood. And while I understand the difference between a protagonist and a hero, I also grasp what the near-complete lack of heroes in film and television today says about us as a society. A country that regards traditional heroes as unrealistic, saccharine, hokey, dumb, dated, fake, unbearable -- that is a country which is on its last legs, has already filed for emotional bankruptcy and is just awaiting liquidation. Matlock Houston, in his Season 1.0 form, was a dyed-in-the-wool hero, falling short of Mary Sue status only because of his eccentricities and foibles, and his tendency to get knocked unconscious. He felt fear, but always overcame it: the quality we call courage. He lusted after beautiful women but did not take advantage of them: the quality we call character. He'd beat the hell out of a bad guy but wouldn't kill him: the quality we call morality. He'd stick by a friend come hell or high water: the quality we call loyalty, and he'd also stick by the little guy, treating the janitor with the same respect as a CEO, the quality we call decency. In short, he had a code, the cowboy code, and he stuck to it unfailingly no matter how badly he wanted to shoot the evildoer or get double-teamed by the bikini babes who came onto him in the middle of a foot chase. It wasn't exactly realistic (the babes were far more appealing than the foot chase), but it was refreshing, and in any case, who the hell watches television for realism?

What we want -- what we ought to want -- in our entertainment is a broad variety of central characters. There is absolutely a place for Vic Mackie, Walter White and Frank Underwood in our pantheon of protagonists, but there is also a place for Matt Houston, for the Matt Houstons of the celluloid world. People who treat their word as bond, who won't shoot a man in the back or cheat at cards, and who will tip their hats to a lady. Even as a child I understood the need for this sort of thing, and I have always viewed people who lack that need as weak, malformed, and sickly. People who are repulsed by light because, like mushrooms, they are more comfortable sitting in the dark and eating shit.

As I have said, MATT HOUSTON is largely forgotten today, and after rewatching the series, I can't say that I entirely blame audiences, even audiences who grew up in the 80s, for forgetting it. In terms of objective quality, it hovered somewhere at the level of T.J. HOOKER...but like T.J. HOOKER, it also took (at least initially) a firm moral stance, which, even when weighed against all of its silliness and shortcomings, seems to count more in this age of moral terpitude than it ought to.

HIRAETH

No man ever thinks of himself as anything but twenty-five years old. -- Robert D. MacDougal

Hiraeth is a Welsh word which translates rather poorly into English. It is often defined as mere sentimentality or nostalgia, but it goes quite a bit deeper than that. Deeper definitions would start here:

A blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing, "hiraeth" is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.

Not bad, but not deep enough. Let's try again:

Homesickness for a home to which you can never return, a home which maybe never was. A nostalgia, a yearning, a grief for the lost places of your past.

Very good. Perfect perhaps. But note the caveat: "which maybe never was." The human heart is an infinite mystery, but few of its secrets are more, well, mysterious than the longing for something which perhaps never existed.

I was thinking a lot of hiraeth today. It was an absolutely lovely evening, temperature in the sixties, cool breeze, fiery orange sunset in a sky of pale, dusty pink. I came home from my evening hike, ate pork tenderloin and green beans, and watched a few episodes of Millennium, a half-forgotten jewel of a television show created by Chris (X-Files) Carter, which ran from 1996-1999. I will visit this show in my Memory Lanes series at some point in the future, but for now I wish to explore the feelings that revisiting this series kindled within me.

To begin with, what initially stood out was how little the world of the late 1990s differed from the world of today. I saw no egregious changes in fashion, be it clothing, makeup, hairstyles or automobile design. The technology was recognizably the same -- cell phones, computers -- just clunkier in design. Pop cultural references were infrequent and did not seem the least bit dated. There was a decided (and wonderful) absence of references to the yet-unborn phenomenon of social media, but this was noticeable only by said absence: it was not obtrusive. In short, Millennium has aged superbly well, and for all gross intents and purposes, might have been filmed last week.

Nevertheless, when I watched, what struck me was the keen, piercing sense of nostalgia, of yearing, of longing I felt for the time period in which it was shot and appeared on TV: the 1990s. I am somewhat sentimental by nature, but the intensity of the emotion rattled my cage to the bruising point. After all, what were the 90s to me? A seemingly endless, often troubled ramble through college (several colleges, actually). A professional job I strongly disliked, which led to a different professional job I soon actively hated. A period of extreme financial hardship that included privation and hunger. A relationship that crashed and burned like thermite just as the decade drew to a close. So despite the manifold experiences, the occasional dizzying triumph, many wonderful individual memories -- and let's face it -- some spectacular sexcapades, it was hardly a period of unblemished joy.

I noted above that I am prone to nostalgia, and nostalgia has been defined as a form of self-pity. If that is true, why was watching the grim, stylishly written, atmospherically-lighted investigations of Frank Black such an emotional tumult for me? Why did it make me feel sorry for myself?

I came to a realization as I watched the sun burn down over the three-way streetsign this evening. As much as I like the show, it isn't about Millennium. And it isn't about the 90s, either, because clearly the past I was yearning for did not exist in the way my emotions insist upon remembering it. No, it's not about the decade, folks: it's about who I was in the decade. Who I used to be.

I don't mean in a creative sense. Creatively I was frustrated beyond belief, a "writer" who couldn't write anything. Nor do I mean as a human being: I began the decade callow, selfish and superficial, and ended it battered, embittered and even more selfish, albeit in a more refined way. The fact is that my hiraeth is rooted simply a longing for the physical properties of youth, i.e. the lost places of my path. My mother recently found a picture of me from 1990. When I showed it to a female co-worker half my age, she signed and murmured, "A young Rob Lowe." That is an exaggeration, but not by much. I was imperially slim. I had an impossibly thick head of hair, a Hollywood jawline, and a twenty-nine inch waist. I tipped the scales at 155 lbs. Now, when I catch glimpses of myself in mirrored surfaces, what I see is someone who could be that boy's father. Indeed, I see more of my father (and my uncle) in my 2023 face than I do myself. The boy has been consumed by the man. And not to put too fine a point on it, and though I have lost eight pounds since last December, I also note that the boy could fit inside the man with room to spare.

Now, I'm not as stupid as I probably come off in some of these blogs, and I am not exactly stunned by the fact that, as a man of fifty, I feel a certain jealousy toward who I used to be, phyisically. Nobody likes to be shown up, nobody likes competitions they can't win, and nobody likes to be the butt of dad jokes when one is not even a dad and still thinks of themselves as being firmly in the game. In short, nobody likes to watch Millennium and remember exactly what you looked like when you first saw episode such-and-such in 1999. Because to do so just reminds you of all the follicles you've lost and all the pounds you have gained. And yet there is comfort in hiraeth, too, because this intense longing for the past is mercifully bound up by a cold awareness of just how shitty the past was to Miles Watson. 1999 sucked. The full head of hair, the flashing smile, the leading-man jawline and unquenchable sex drive masked tempestuous inner turmoil and pain. I was unfulfilled, frustrated, constricted, cramped. A big fish in a small pond, swimming in futile circles. And I was permeated with fear: the fear that I would never do anything, never amount to anything, never achieve any of my goals, ambitions, dreams. I looked good, but I often felt rotten. And in a sense, I was. Every young man is. Outside is muscle and white teeth. Inside is Hamlet, stuck on repeat.

As you grow older, and thoughts turn to such things as "I need reading glasses" and "I'm shaving my head because women like that better than a fucking combover," you also realize that as false as ordinary memories can play you, emotional memories can be even more brutally dishonest. They attack suddenly and piercingly, and fill you with longings which, upon close examination, do not always hold water. The quote with which I began this missive was delivered to me many years ago by a World War Two veteran who was well into his eighties when I interviewed him about his life. During our conversation, he casually dropped that remark, which I have never forgotten. At the time, of course, it meant something very different to me than it does now, when I realize that it was aimed at me personally -- not the man he was speaking to, but his future self, the self that sits here now, writing this. "No man sees himself as anything but twenty five" is literally true, and a rather eloquent comment on the male mind, but it's also an explicit warning against the perils of self-competition. And it's a warning I'll be thinking about tomorrow, when my barber shaves my head, and with it, the last remnants of 1999.