Short Circuits: A Writer’s Life in Blogs
By Dorien Grey
Copyright 2011 by Dorien Grey
Cover Copyright 2011 by Dara England and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
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Short Circuits: A Writer’s Life in Blogs
by Dorien Grey (Roger Margason)
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
“AND YOU ARE?”
The Hill of Time
On Birthdays
Happy Birthday
High School
Remembering Family
The Teens
The Yeast Years
A Simple Man
Emotions
Softie
Puck Was Right
The Power of Touch
Requited Love
Laughter
Identities
Pennies
The Lazy Perfectionist
Delusions
If Only
That Which I Should Have Done
Political Correctness
Rejection
The Doctor Is In
RULES OF THE ROAD
An Agnostic’s Christmas
Beliefs
Three Rules
Simple Rules
FROM FERTILE SOIL
Life in a Sardine Can
Grandpa Fearn
Grandma Fearn
Aunt Thyra
Uncle Buck
Time and Coffee Cups
INSIDE THE BONE-BOX
Anticipation
Frustration
Secrets
Role Models
Impatience
My Garden of Phobias
Phobias Redux
Embarrassment
On Being Bubbly
God’s Snowflakes
Why?
On Dreams
Questions
On Being Naive
Confessions
In Praise of Me
Fretting
Neverending
The Other Side of the Window
Perspective
Worthless
As Ithers See Us
Leaky Boats
Flotilla
THE LIFE OUTSIDE
Cars
First Jobs
Jobs from Hell, Part I
Jobs from Hell, Part II
Jobs from Hell, Part III
My Days in Porn
OK, More Porn-Days Stories
Pebbles
Ice Cream Social
Pride
The Mind’s Eye
Unforgiving
Unforgiving, Follow-Up
Laziness and Priorities
Sing Out, Fagin!
Nausea
Coffee Time
Bureaucracy
Routine
Habits, Routines, and Ruts
Naps
Revisiting Naps
Domesticity Yet Again
PLACES IN THE HEART
Fairdale
The House on Blackhawk Avenue
Homes
The Lakes
Harry Morris
Northern Memories
Now Playing
The Bittersweet View
Chicago Life
Time and Dreams
NOTES ALONG THE WAY
Earthquake
Letter to a Nun
Modern Science
Aliens and Hypocrites
My Life of Crime
Gnats
WE TWO
Triumvirate
The Man Behind the Curtain
To Each a Dorien
Dreams and Dorien
Teeter-Totter
Losing Roger
MINE ENEMY GROWS OLDER
Me and J. Alfred Prufrock
Change and Endings
A Spot in Time
Mind and Body
Poor Loser
The Spelunker’s Rope
Things
Things, Again
Tangibles
PJs
Time in a Jar
The Pity Pool
The Glass Half Full
In the House of Cancer
A Bologna Sandwich
Off to Mayo
And Thus Are the Days of Our Lives
Oh, the Nobility
The Train to Omaha
The Captain and the Ship
Dirty Old Men
This Way to the Egress
Teapots
Friends and Ships
A Seat on the Bus
Backward, Turn Backward
Condescension
THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR
In, But Not Of
In, But Not Of, Part 2
Epiphany
The Shallow Pond
Letting Go
Giving Thanks
The Trompe l’oeil Mind
Navy Talk
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Tar Bubbles
Obsession
Get a Horse
Chicago Then, Chicago Now
Shaping Clay
Trains
A Day at the Movies
Time Was
Generations
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
Worst Enemies
The Likes o’ Me
Normal
To Catch a Raindrop
Endless
Falling Short
Conspiracy
Paranoia Rides Again
The Computer Conspiracy
AT&T and Me
Charlie Brown
Shiva
Logic
Why and Because
LOOSE CHANGE
The Ice Cream Cone
Alice Ghostley
Gratitude
Colds, Specific, and Stoicism, General
You Is or You Ain’t
Reading the Signs
De Profundus
The Pleaures of Drear
Potpourri
Pebbles II
Compared to What?
THE HUMAN FACTOR
Phil
Simple Delights
Friends and Time
A Letter to Norm
Aftermath
Miss Piggy’s Nose
Lief
Russ
Bye, Bye, Birdie
Stu
Pat
Nick
Requiem for Uncle Bob, Part I
Requiem for Uncle Bob, Part II
Lost Friends
Robert
Robert’s Return
Kids’ Play
Pets
Catharsis
A Cat’s Tale
TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BREAST
Marching On
Dangling Wires
The Sound of Music
Songs
Marches
I Sing the Body Electric
INTRODUCTION
The circuitry of the human brain is often compared to electrical wiring. In most people, thoughts flow smoothly, like direct current passing through a wire. But for some thought processes more strongly resemble a downed power line, whipping about madly, spewing sparks of random thoughts. I am one of those people. I channel as much of the power flow of my mind as I can into my books, and the random sparkings and sputterings result in blogs—brief flashes of one man’s life and thought.
The short-circuitings contained herein are gathered loosely into general topics, but there is no smooth flow to them, no direct link between most of them. Each is a separate sparking; each is a spontaneous response to some random stimulus. Put together, they outline and define a life.
While they all stem from my personal experiences and opinions, they aren’t purely an exercise in egocentrism, but a game I hope you might find some pleasure in playing. And as to who you will be playing with....
The beginning is always a good place to start. But I’ll skip the traditional “I was born in a one-room log cabin on the prairie on a cold winter’s night...” bio. You may or may not already know who I am (Dorien Grey, author of the Dick Hardesty and Elliott Smith mystery series as well as the western/adventure/mystery/romance Calico). But you are obviously curious enough to be reading these words, and I thank you for that.
Actually, I’m in effect two people: in everything having to do with writing, I am Dorien Grey. In all other aspects of my life, I’m Roger Margason, the name with which I was born. It’s a complicated arrangement, but it works very well for me.
I’ve written a total of 17 books so far, and well over 500 blogs. This compilation is the first of two planned. This first one is primarily designed (though the words “designed” and “blogs” really don’t go together all that well) to let you get to know me and how I got to be a writer. The second book concentrates more on the fireworks display of topics which piqued my interest—and hopefully, yours. And, also hopefully, by the time you’re done, you’ll be able to see where the various themes and topics come from. All were gathered over four years of my Monday/Wednesday/Friday postings on my website (http://www.doriengrey.com).
Perhaps because I’ve always been acutely aware of the human tendency to feel unique—which we are—and alone—which we are not, I am compelled to emphasize our commonalities and how they bind us. To that end, I write books and I write blogs. Books tend to be more complex, generalized and cohesive than blogs. They require some degree of control on the part of the writer, and considerable structure, and tend to connect with the reader on a different level than blogs, which tend to be more spontaneous, shorter, wide ranging and therefore in a way more personal. If books are a painting, blogs are an Etch-a-Sketch drawing.
I also write to leave some evidence, once I’m gone, that I was here. As a gay man with no children, my words are my progeny. And while I’m here, I write to let you know I’m aware that you are here, too, and to hope you might find in my words some connections to yourself. But at the foundation of it all I write, quite simply, because I cannot not write.
Though you and I have probably never met, I like to think we know each other. I hope by the end of this book, you might feel the same. I would be truly delighted to think these little short-circuiting sparks and sputters might not only illuminate some of who I am, but might afford you a glimpse or two of who you are.
Roger Margason, a.k.a. Dorien Grey
“AND YOU ARE?”
THE HILL OF TIME
One of the relatively few advantages of growing older is that the higher you climb on the hill of time, the more you can see when you look back over where you’ve been.
I was born fourteen and a half years after the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I; eight months and eleven days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first swearing in as President, in the darkest days of the Great Depression. I had just turned eight when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and remember listening to President Roosevelt’s declaration of war. I was eleven and a half years old when he died. (Because I was too young to yet realize the importance of history, my primary concern was my unhappiness that, for three days following his death, all regular radio programming was cancelled, the radio playing nothing but music, forcing me to miss out on my favorite kids’ programs.)
I was raised in a world of iceboxes and Dixie cup ice cream, of 3-cent postage stamps and twice-a-day mail delivery; of black-and-white movies with newsreels and travelogs and cartoons and 10-cent bags of popcorn. Railroad trains were pulled by steam engines, and there were no interstates or four-lane highways. Cars had running boards. Laundry was washed either by hand or by machines with wringers. Wet clothing was hung outdoors because driers hadn’t been invented yet. To call someone, you picked up the phone and, if no one else was talking on the party line you shared with one or two other families, asked the operator to connect you to the number you wanted (“Forest 984”; “Central 255”). The rotary dial came considerably later.
During the war, gas and food were rationed, and everyone received ration stamps. I remember paper drives, Victory bonds and victory gardens, blackouts and air raid drills (though I lived in the heart of the country). My parents had a small grocery store, and on those very rare occasions when they were able to get a box of Hershey bars, they kept them under the counter and distributed them like gold nuggets to only their best customers. And WWII was followed by the never-declared Korean War, the Cold War, and Vietnam.
Fully 2/3 of the entire population of the world alive at the time of my birth are now dead.
I was born into a world so far different from today’s as to be all but unimaginable to most of the generations who have come after me. It was a world with no computers, no television, no cell phones or iPods, no drive-by shootings or road rage or school massacres. A world where anyone traveling from America to Europe did so by ocean liner because there was no commercial trans-oceanic air service. Up until the mid-1960s, when you did travel by airplane, it was a Sunday-best occasion, and men always wore suits and ties. Diseases all but eradicated from today’s world—diphtheria, smallpox, polio—regularly claimed tens of thousands of lives. Hospital patients were anesthetized with ether dripped onto a cloth cone held over the patient’s nose and mouth. Even penicillin was not discovered until WWII. A diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence.
I served in the U.S. military at a time when, as a Naval Aviation Cadet stationed in Pensacola, Florida, a black serviceman could be asked to move to the back of the bus to let whites sit down. And now we have a black president.
I witnessed the televised assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and Martin Luther King; man’s first landing on the moon, school desegregation, the civil rights movement. Governments and nations rose and fell, as they have throughout time.
Each of us has our own hill of time, and the future is a thick blanket of clouds obscuring the top so we cannot see just how much more hill lies ahead of us. I hope my hill is a very high one, indeed. As may yours be.
* * *
ON BIRTHDAYS
Because I truly do consider myself blessed to have been given as many November 14ths as I have, and realize that to complain about getting older is ungrateful of me, I have resolved that henceforth on each November 14th I will celebrate my 21st birthday.
I was born, not in a log cabin, but in St. Anthony’s Hospital in Rockford, Illinois, at 11:15 p.m., Tuesday, November 14, 1933. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been in office just short of a year, and he remained the only president I ever knew until I was 12 years old.
The only child of 22 year old Franklin Guerdon Margason and 24 year old Odrae Lucille Margason (nee Fearn), I entered the world a bright yellow, thanks to jaundice (not uncommon
at that time, I understand) and it could be said that I’ve been jaundiced ever since. My mother refused to speak to her best friend for a full year after her friend, upon seeing me for the first time, said “He has really big feet!” Since I was, in my mother’s eyes, absolutely perfect (albeit yellow), she took great affront.
My 21st birthday was spent in Pensacola, Florida while I was a Naval Aviation Cadet. I celebrated the event by catching a bus into town and going to the San Carlos Hotel, where I went into the bar and ordered a Tom Collins.
On my 22nd birthday, I was given a wonderful gift: the continent of Europe, of which I caught a through-the-fog early morning glimpse as the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga approached the port of Gibraltar.
I’ve had a number…well, actually, a rather great number…of very nice birthdays since, but my first 21st and my 22nd stand out above all the rest.
But as the birthdays became more numerous, they also tended to become less singularly noteworthy. The effect was rather like too many people trying to get onto the same elevator, and I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with their all pressing in on me. So I think my decision to make this and every subsequent birthday a celebration of my 21st is a good and practical one. I may alternate them between my 21st and 22nd, now that I think of it. I will ignore the toll each subsequent year takes on my body, and concentrate instead on those two birthdays, when I and the world were young, and everything wonderful lay ahead. For in my mind, at least, it still does.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll catch the bus into Pensacola and have myself a Tom Collins.
* * *
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Our parents give us birth and shape our lives, and leave us with a debt we can never fully repay or, tragically for a very few, with scars that can never be healed. I was infinitely blessed with the former.
Each of us has—or had—our own parents, and our own memories. I hope you treasure yours as I do mine.
November 11, 2010, would have been my mom’s 101st (??!!) birthday, and the 42nd anniversary of my dad’s death. I hope you’ll indulge a bit of reflection on the two most important people in my life.
Though they’ve both been dead for far more time than is possible for me to comprehend, they are still with me in my heart and soul. The three of us are as interwoven as the threads in a blanket. I have only to close my eyes to see them and hear their voices. So there is no way I could cram 38 years’ worth of the warmth and love and happiness and sorrow I experienced with them into one blog entry, or a thousand. Still, I’d like to give you just the quickest of sketches of them.