My father played pool with two contractors named Joe, and Carlio. One was my father’s friend, or so he thought, and the other one, less so. So they built us a split level ranch in the suburbs of Syracuse New York in 1973 one summer, creating a clean break with our old elementary school, as we moved in before the new year began.

We moved less than two miles, from the city, to the suburbs, part of a vast white migration away from city centers into unsustainable suburbs. Nobody had run the numbers, or if they had, nobody cared, about the fact that as the infrastructure aged, in many suburbs, the taxes didn’t support fixing anything; the spread out houses, with the big lawns, with all that breathing room, were connected to grids that were stretched to the breaking point. Maintaining all the electrical and sewage stuff, fixing and plowing all those roads, for that population density, was kinda…

Stupid.

Oh, but the space a middle class person could afford. The distance from the neighbors. The two car garages, and the unfinished basements that could and often would be finished, the back yards into which decks could expand, into which swimming pools could be sunk.

No sidewalks for the kids to walk on, but who cared? Who needs parks with the swing set and sandbox in the back yard.

It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

My parents were academics, at that time one Ph.D, and one in the making. My mother from the deep south, with an accent that waned in the Northeast, and waxed on visits home, but was always there. My brother and I attended a city school, maybe 50% minority, which is and was something that is hard to sustain. The white people get scared and move out.

The school was I think, mediocre, in the way such things are typically measured. I scored very high on the Iowa exam, learned to read and do arithmetic by 4th grade, learned a bit of what we called social studies. I spent a lot of time in the library, looking at picture books of space travel by Willy Ley, whose paintings now looked kinda stupid as Apollo unfolded in the real world.

I was involved in a fight, in some way—we called it getting beat up, because me and my friends didn’t fight very well. Many of our classmates were much bigger than we were. My mother came in for a meeting with the VP in charge of discipline, (all schools have them. This way the principle can seem nicer.) and when she asked what was going to be done about the attack, the VP wanted to know what I had done to provoke it. What words I may have used.

She heard my mother’s southern accent loud and clear.

My parents decided to move that night.

About that word– my parents never used it, and my best friend taught me to never use it either, not even when we were alone, for reasons having less to do with social justice than survival. Or maybe my best friend had just figured out how horrible the word was. He was gay, I think, though I left town before that surfaces. Likewise my mother’s family, and her racist mother, never used that word, either. 

The word branded you as white trash. We weren’t necessarily enlightened. We were classist.

I can’t honestly remember being happy or sad about the move. It just was. But I loved watching the house be built that summer; pacing the foundation in the sea of mud. Walking into the basement from the backyard, as the property sloped downward and on that side, the basement had windows.

It would have been nice, if we had ever finished it. Or built a real deck onto the back of the house, where Joe and Carlio had hung a tiny balcony. But my parents salaries weren’t huge. Their retirement funds grew fantastically, but they weren’t allowed to ever touch them, which of course, is why my parents generation retired well, even the people in the middle class. So we never even poured a driveway over the gravel strip to the two car garage we started out with; which of course made plowing and shoveling the thing in the hideous Syracuse winters problematic.

My father hired a pickup with a plough, and it gouged up dirt and gravel.

My father hated any and all manual labor, so the large yard did nothing for my parents. My mother talked for seventeen years about putting in a garden, but only ever filled a little brick window box on the porch with petunias. They weren’t outdoor people. We never went camping. We never hiked. They never took us to parks. We never even got a swing set in that back yard, as we were ten and eleven and presumably needed to only wander the streets of the subdivision, or explore the vast tracks of undeveloped land surrounding us.

Which we did, and loved doing.

All this aside, I loved the suburbs, not knowing what I was missing, and for everything we missed, perhaps something was gained. Or did it it make into a person who enjoyed long lonely walks along mostly tamed wilderness? Who shrinks back from knowing the neighbors? We enjoyed the autonomy which would now be branded as neglect.

We never locked our doors. There was no mass transit. We rode bikes, but it was very hilly, glacially dumped Hobbiton mounds that were difficult to build on, and so, remained wild and lovely, poking up through the landscape sporting only the occasional pale blue water tower. Places for teens to drink and gaze out over a world of golf courses and ranch houses and drainage ditches, a vibrant but fading middle class, dying on the vine, like a cut flower, still colorful and bright as the manufacturing died and the big businesses all went bankrupt. The downtown that died, turning into a museum of a time gone by, shuttered by six o’clock every evening.

Except the University, Go Orange, which did just fine, becoming the cities biggest employer. My father had tenure. So we weren’t going anywhere, and we would never, ever want for anything, or even have the fear of wanting for anything.

Our only enemies lurked within. The restless madness of adolescence, the reason for armies and monasteries, the sequestering of violent young males. But there were no wars to send our testosterone poisoned, so instead, we went slowly mad in the weird toxic gasses given off by the cold war, the constant threat of annihilation, which troubled the thoughtful and which, like COVID today, was ignored by so many that the myth of the 80s now is one of patriotic exuberance, and not the punk counterculture gnawing at the tender trap of the fading post war dream.

Suburbia aged badly, like our Danish modern furniture, the nicks and scratches made it look like what it was; hastily constructed, a momentary fad, kinda cheap, and in the long run, not a good investment.

A shiny momentary dream of modernity to match the rockets racing to the moon, sputtering on the martini powered fumes of black and white JFK speeches, powered by Eisenhower’s prophesied monster, the military industrial complex. 

I am old enough to love my childhood uncritically, minimizing the paralyzing fear of the dark, my ostracization and the suicidal misery of middle-school, the homophobic bullying, the hatred of high-school, the absurd early morning bus rides to wait forty five minutes for homeroom.

Instead I remember the gleaming hardwood floors of the new house, the light coming through the windows, sledding on the golf course with my friends, who all lived with a ten minute walk, snow forts and spelunking in drainage tunnels, junkyards, quarries, hallucinogenic adolescent ecstasies,  vivid, violent, sexual awakening.

My first girlfriend, half nude in the steamed up car, her long, pale perfect body, the electricity of our touch. Orgasms like tactical nuclear explosions. 

The skunky sweetness of burning weed, the icy cold cheap American beer, the future an endless road to anywhere and nowhere. I tested well, in school, very, very high, so high my half assed grade hardly mattered. We had enough money. I could and would go anywhere and do anything.

I close my eyes and I’m listening to the weekend drone of lawn mowers, smelling freshly cut grass through my open bedroom window, prowling stacks of discarded periodicals for Playboy magazines, tucking centerfolds in my back pockets, organizing my comic books, penciling dungeons onto graph paper, mastering my first campaign.

We went to war with orcs in middle earth. We initiated ourselves and each other with powerful drugs in cemeteries and on golfing greens. We kissed in steamed up cars. Made out with strangers in finished basements.

We waited for the futures to unfold, ready to spring away from the joyful, perfect, soul numbing safety and isolation of our subdivisions. To leave suburbia behind, and in my case, never go back.

Which we never did. But some part of me lingers, never leaving, roaming that undeveloped land that is now packed with newer, even more souless McMansions. The past a different country, that boy a stranger I don’t really remember being.

Back when the suburbs seemed like a good idea.

Back when the suburbs sang.

In the immersive, wrap-around staging of the play Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, a truncated War and Peace sings all around you, while at the middle, in a little alcove, a middle-aged Tolstoy sits and watches and scribbles in a notebook.

He’s the writer, at the center of life, an omniscient perspective, old enough to fear death and decline, but young enough to remember passion and primary colors.

Not one thing or the other; barely in the story, there for a moment to witness, understand, forgive, pity and envy the characters swirling around him.

So you’re the writer; you have at best as many conscious years ahead as behind, and the milestones ahead are greasy with despair. With the occasional hopeful beacon. A grandchild? Some professional accomplishment, perhaps? 

Time to get writing, friend.

So you grow up and grow older and one day you find yourself wanting to buy all the toys your parents never bought you. Read the books and do the things and visit the places and eat the food and drink the drinks that were passed over, discouraged, forbidden or forgotten. 

Sexual  maturity is one of the first of these toys you take for yourself (God, if you’re lucky) and eventually autonomy of every kind. To eat and drink and drug and work and sleep the way you see fit.

But the toys you were never given, you can never get… those toys were needed by a version of you that isn’t any more. Buying them now doesn’t work. If anything it excites that nameless ache. The sense of something missing which is perhaps the essence of life.

Still. People do it. They can’t help it. They seek these things out. They threw them out, or their mother did, with or without permission or they never had them but a neighbor did, a friend did, a person they secretly loved had the entire set, you had one, too, for a week but then your brother broke it.

And it was never replaced.

I grew up in the age of Television, Movies, Radio and print. And print was full of these mosaics of tiny ads, mostly horrific frauds of one sort or another (x-ray specs; one dollar submarines.) But some were just things that hadn’t shown up in your toy store, or they were old toys that had been discontinued. 

Famous Monsters issues hung around for decades in pleasantly moldering stacks in the bargain basements of bookstores, sometimes with covers half torn off, and they were filled with tiny grids packed with strange objects of desire.

I did own the Forgotten Prisoner…

Lost in Space was poorly syndicated in central New York in the sixties and seventies, and my unmet desire to see the show manifested in daydreaming about the these three models; the saucer shaped Jupter 2, Television’s knock off of Robbie the Robot from Forbidden planet called imaginatively, Robot, and the Chariot, a treaded fishbowl that for some reason excited me tremendously.

I never owned any of these.

But sooner or later, the toys and the TV shows and the movies and the ads lead you down a path to the end of childhood, which, if you were born in the sixties looked something like this:

Vampirella lurked at Childhood’s End clad in an impossible crimson bikini kind of thing, with fangs dripping blood staring into your soul with some impossible to decipher emotion.

Sometimes threatening, sometimes being threatened.

The Warren Publication, including EERIE and CREEPY were big, not sold on the comics racks but with the full-sized magazines, and they had black and white interiors. 

I have no memory of any Vampirella story. But she looms large in that landscape, gazing through that pre-adolescent haze of inchoate lust.

Frank Frazetta’s women were the end of the road. You could still look back, at the candy colored super heroes printed on the giveaway fast food cups, at the legos and action figures and wacky pack sticker encrusted doorway, but… the way ahead beckoned.

Cemetery forts with pony kegs and crimson lipped girls from alien high-schools smoking cigarettes in darkened basements blasting with Led Zeppelin.

Beyond lay the sexist-you’re-soaking-in-it kaliedoscope of Playboy magazine and National Lampoon and late night R-rated soft core and the long hard slog of adolescence. Eventually leaving your toys behind in your parents basement, shedding childhood as if it were some embarassing cocoon as you escaped suburbia and plunged into university or city or apartment or job.

Until finally, like Tolstoy, your own children now fleeing, you remember the acrid tang of annealing plastic, the blackened steel birthing creepy crawlies, the monotone of the Robot, the flashing saucer slicing the sky, the monsters hands and face glowing greenly in the dark, and this crazy hot goth girl that just might eat you alive.

If you lived long enough.

If you could be so lucky.

So I had these kids (to be honest, my wife had them, I watched) eighteen years ago and after taking care of them, doing long stints as the primary caregiver, I eventually graduated to the status of medical and after school appointment driver, cook and bedtime book reader.

My wife read them picture books until they were in grade school, at night, every night. We hauled fifty or sixty books at a time from the library; I stopped shopping for titles after a few hundred, and just worked my way alphabetically through the stacks, counting on Cambridge to curate the experience, which worked just fine.

But then came chapter books and I took over, quickly reading through every chapter book that I could remember, then on to contemporary stuff mixed with any classic stuff that I could get them interested in. Books I’d dodged and missed somehow, the historical stuff assigned to other classes, like Johnny Tremaine; The Wolves of Willouby Chase, The Westing Game, and others. I worked my way through various lists. Newbury Award winners; various Best Ofs.

So, together we walked and played and ran in terror and cried through Narnia and Prydain and the Potterverse, The Wrinkled Time stuff, pretty much everything by William Sleator’s of House of Stairs fame, a favorite of mine, but also the first ten Redwalls (a favorite of my youngest child). John Cristopher’s The Tripod’s held up really well. A few hundred books in all.

There were explicable rebellions. The LOTR? No. Dad singing poems full of made up words to the same bad improvised melody didn’t go over well. But oddly, also Earthsea was denied. (Why?) But mostly we had successes and we read and read and read together, at night, them in their twin beds with me between them with my lovely glowing e-reader.

I found new stuff to love; Ellen Potter, referred to people who want more Roald Dahl, (she isn’t really like him but this makes sense), Rebecca Staid, and Suzanne Collin’s brilliant and horrific Hunger Games. Alif and the Unseen was a modern favorite, a sympathetic and magically inflected portrayal of modern life in an islamic state on the verge of spring.

But kids grow up and older, and yes, that horrible cats in the cradle song is now playing in your head, if you have had kids, and had them do this to you. We built lofts for them, so they had more room for their stuff in the tiny condo, and so the pair rose up and away from me on wooden stilts. I sat beneath them on the carpet, periodically yelling up at them to get the hell off the cellphones or I was going to stop—do you hear me?

But I didn’t want to stop.

When did I realize this was the best time of the day? The best time of my life? I don’t know. But that realization came and I did my best with that, knowing of course that it would one day end…

My eighteen year old graduated and had an early schedule, working in public schools, doing good work for Americorps, and my fifteen year old went to bed later and it all fell apart. The kids never admitted we were done, because my kids are happy and even if growing up is okay, who wants a happy thing to end? This is why kids hold onto old toys. Why file away those memories? Who is to say the Polly Pockets or Tamagotchies might not one day become fascinating again? Who wants to tell Dad they’re done being read to? Well, I guess normal teenagers would, but my kids are far from normal.

I thank the stars every day for that.

We started slowing down seriously as we read Marissa Meyer, which is not a knock on her work in any way. I was initially resistant to reading them, something about science fictionalized romantic quasi fairytales didn’t appeal to me in the abstract, but my wife kept insisting, “read them and see,” and so I did and I was hooked.

I fell hard for these things.

Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter form the main cycle, a braid of fairy-tale themed and inspired (but in no way derivative) middle-grade / YA science fiction adventure romances.

We bogged down in book four at the climax of these intersecting romance arcs—which were so compelling to me; three pairs of characters; A cyborg Cinderella and her uncertain Prince, a pugnacious little Red Riding Hood, and her shifter-romance-inspired mate to be, Wolf, and a frail and retiring but ultimately heroic Rapunzle, known as Cress, freed from her metaphorical tower, a spy satellite where she worked for the Evil lunar Queen, who is every evil queen, ever, and Cress’s love, a charming Rogue of no clear origin to me who grew to be utterly delightful.

Both kids came out, while I was reading them these books, and maybe the relentless heteronormativity was one of the reasons I found them so infectious, while my kids never needed to race to the oh so wonderfully rendered Happily Ever After? There’s no way to know. I’d sought out and read some GLBTQIA themes YA titles with trans teens in them, but they were a little stressful and on-the-nose for my eldest and so I didn’t push them after awhile.

So finally, flying back from San Jose after a week long vacation with my brother-in-law and his husband, I let myself finish the last book, Winter, and found myself caught up in this story that I’d had on pause for at least a year. I didn’t need any refreshers. I remembered everything. As did the author, revisting and reprising the various elements of the stories as the characters completed their arcs, had their moments of heroism and growth, experienced epiphanies, and found true love and friendship.

It was so fucking good.

But I finished the journey I’d started with the three of us by myself again. Reading a solitary pleasure once again.

I suspect my younger son will reread the Mayer books to the very end; he’s a reader, and we still do read things together, just to ourselves. We talk about them, afterwards. Not the same thing, really, but it’s something, and it will have to do. Because the kids are mostly grown, and reading aloud time is done.

Queue that awful song. Little boy blue and the man in the moon.

Taking care of children is a seemingly endless chore, brightened by these wonderful moments that remain, while the endless tedium of it washes away, little hunks of gold lodged in your brain, left behind as time swirls away the silt and sand.

God I loved reading time.

But now it’s time to write.

So I know it’s hard.

The president obstructed justice, or maybe he’s just too stupid to be president, or both, is what we got out of the Comey hearings. The congressional GOP won’t care until their base starts threatening second amendment solutions the way that non-GOP voters have started to do.

But the top line takeaway from the last few months is this: fascism is not our future.

It’s not that a portion of the electorate wouldn’t welcome it. It’s that that 30 percent has a hard time getting traction with their ideas when non-ideological go-along get-along tax cutter  mildly sociopathic types start actually having to vote for policies that amount to blue collar genocide or ethnic cleansing.

It’s not that genocide or ethnic cleansing really bothers these conservatives—it’s just that they’re bad for business. Some business. It’s bad for enough business to break the coalition, just enough, to let democracy sort of work. Eventually.

So, kicking twenty three million people off their health plans to suffer and die on the nightly news? Starving old people and kids in huge numbers? Abandoning sustainable energy that is actually paying for itself? Mass deportations of law abiding non-citizens facilitated by blue state governments? Massively cutting taxes for the rich, slashing safety nets allowing huge swaths of the country to experience untold misery?

None of that is going to happen. That’s not how any of this works.

I’m not saying they can’t, and won’t, and aren’t, making things worse at the edges. they can and will do those things.  They’ll fuck the environment, as much as they can; if it can be vandalized with an executive order, it will be.

For now.

But there is no majority of frightened uneducated-but-middle-class-enough-to-actually-vote, eager to slash safety nets, even their own—if the only upside that ever materializes is tax cuts for the rich and punishing immigrants, GLBTQIA, and women. That majority exists nowhere. Not in France, not in England, not even in the US. Trump lost by 3 million votes.

We didn’t know this, before France, before England. We thought maybe a wave was rising to engulf us.

Nope!

The labor party gave young Britons something to vote for. Affordable college. You know, that stuff that HRC laughed at. (The brits already have single payer. The other idea HRC found ridiculous.) So. Let’s stop laughing at healthcare and college. It won’t fix inequality, it won’t stop the coming tide of tech based dislocation, but JESUS FUCK ITS A START.

Nothing else is possible, until we do those two things. We have to KNOW that everyone that wants to train themselves to work can do this, that everyone who can be healthy and contribute is getting the medical care needed to do that, before we take the next steps, of renegotiating the social contract around the coming tech and climate based upheavals.

Health care. Education. Not ‘affordable,’ but as human rights. Thats what we want. That’s the minimum we need in a democratic candidate. The minimum. Sure you are gonna have to negotiate to move towards these ideals. But for god’s sake, you have to articulate them and not be afraid to defend them or…

YOUNG PEOPLE WON’T VOTE.

It is so devastatingly simple.

How do we ply the dead enders? Turns out if you buy green energy, wind and solar, from the farmers who are always going bankrupt in red states? Yeah, those farmers aren’t against taking blue state dollars. They may not believe in climate change. But they like the color of the money of the educated, wealthy people who do.

We can buy off the dead enders, and a sane democratic party would have done this and won the last election cycle. We buy them off with education, training, relocation, subsidized green energy IN THEIR DISTRICTS, infrastructure IN THEIR DISTRICTS. They’re not actually threatened by immigrants, mostly, because they live in post-work hell holes no sane person wants to move to.

Oh my God it isn’t hard. I assumed HRC surrogates were doing this, but they weren’t. They piled up votes in California and insulted the stupid flyover people, who, let’s be clear, are stupid and racist, but they’re not irrevocably suicidal; if we’d cared enough to buy them off, we could have had enough of them to carry the electoral college.

A lying orange rapey irreligious sack of shit got their votes for a handful of magic beans.

Oh, and when I talk about dead enders? Jesus I’m one of them. I was sweated out of the real economy over a decade ago. I made art and wrote and took care of my kids and did some activism and refused to maintain the proper set of skills and networks to remain in the medically insured class. My contempt isn’t for those being bypassed by the changing world; it’s for those who think there’s a time machine where they get 80k a year jobs that can be done by robots for 20k a year.

We are going to have to make the transition from the knowledge economy to the meaning economy. The first step in that is making sure that everyone is allowed to pursue as much education as they want in any fucking thing they feel like. Gradually we subsidize the living fuck out of a huge quantity of science for the sake of science and culture, so the Ph.Ds in Video Game World Building and Klingon studies and Catfish communications have shit to do, and find people to play meaningfully with.

There are lots of ways to do this. That’s what we can fight over.

The only alternative is the Hunger Games. We see it now in the House GOP budgets and proposals.

AI, robotics, nano and biotech will remake the world in the next century. Without all these things we’re dead as a species. Capitalism can be patched to work via basic income, or via other means. But we have to start out with a populace educated enough to let reality into their brains when making policy decisions. Two thirds of humanity is educable. It’s why we are still alive.

We just have to do the work, and never despair.

Oh, and calling people stupid is dumb. I’m dumb. I have too much anger to be the one doing much of this work. I speak here to people better balanced than I am. My fury at the utopia that could be makes me unreasonable. We need people filled with zen compassion, with Christian, turn-the-other-cheek-level unconditional love, with Jewish Tikkun Olam… we need all the fairy tales on Earth pulling hard for a livable future.

I think we get there. I think we make it as a species, in a last minute, adrenaline-fueled Hail Mary orgy of last second cramming and heroic effort and a bit of luck; we will construct a nested series of Rube Goldbergian solutions  as we lurch into an unknowable future that will intermittently stall, shudder, and slip but ultimately, bend towards justice.

Fascism isn’t the future.

The future will be shiny and weird.

I’ve made the bulk of my income over the years as a graphic designer; during the tech bubble, graphic design got mixed up with software development and ‘information architecture’ and User Experience and Branding and became briefly valuable and deeply respected by a lot of business people who were trying take over the world with web pages.

Since web pages lack the ability to shoot tear gas or launch grenades or mesmerize like a TV show these people figured that Design would have to suffice, stand in for armed Pinkertons shooting up striking workers or the other traditional methods Important People had used in the past to stay on top and own everything.

I’d been to art school; I loved photoshop and the Mac and graphic software and I was, and still am, smart. Standardized test smart, I mean. I’m smart in the same way a crow is smart—smarter than I need to be, for the things I generally end up being paid to do. Crows periodically get themselves electrocuted messing with wires and things. I’m smart like that.

During the tech bubble, briefly, that kind of smart could make you rich.

You’re a crow, doing mediocre crow things, and you start poking into the wires, and a farmer shows up, and says, “you know about wires? Can I pay you six figures a year to keep doing what you’re doing?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” the Crow (me) says.

“That’s OK,” says the Farmer. “Nobody does. Please take my money.”

In the beginning I was absolutely terrible at everything I did; I knew how to use the software to make UI elements, buttons and panels and whatnot, but I had no taste. None whatsoever. After I’d been working for a few years, I was paired up with a variety of designers and art directors with taste, and I learned from them, to the best of my ability, what taste was.

I began to be able to emulate taste, to a degree; I could look at exquisite things made by talented people and extract a visual language, a vocabulary, and ape it, crudely. This makes me better than about 95% of the people who practice design professionally.

Branding was the most interesting part. This futile but seductive attempt to compress pure meaning into visual form, hopefully, into something that could be instantly recognized at any size or distance. It was a kind of endless wordless ache, working on these things, but for awhile, I was paid handsomely to do so. There was so much to be branded, you see; every company in the world was pissing all over things trying to own them forever, with a name, a brand, a logo, an animated thingy.

But, in the end, it was all wordless. It was dumb, in the sense that what I did for many years wasn’t about words but about a feeling, a moment of gestalt, when something was glanced at. I would work on something for days or weeks or months which you could glance at in three seconds and form your opinion on. If you even had an opinion.

Anyway, nowadays I’m mostly doing design work for my own projects, most of it genre related, and for the first time, in decades, that work is pretty fun. I’ve stopped trying to be this thing I wasn’t, this super sophisticated minimalist typographic hero, this protean figure compressing meaning out of form… in the end I was never that guy anyway.

I didn’t dress nearly well enough, for one thing.

So when I did Fantastic, I shopped for existing wordpress themes which did what I needed them to do, and I found a logo of the magazine with google, different than the one Warren had been using, which I liked. It was simpler and cleaner and involved no typographic, ah, perversion. The one on the left. Alas, this version of Fantastic wasn’t the version we were reviving, so it had to go.

But I spent some time, with the existing logo, crafting something that had a similar feel, and was happy with the result, bottom right.

Oh, we should probably focus group it, figure out what it says to people, create a brand statement and creative brief and run it through a real process…

But oh, it’s been fun, just flying by the seat of my pants.

Oh! So if you’re interested in hiring me for design related things (book covers, ebook covers and production, and such) email me at ejayo1963 (at) gmail (dot) com. I do genre stuff cheap. If your company plans on taking over the world I cost more.

I have principles.

So it’s 2 am and I’m not sleeping so I wanted to share something that has been going through my head since my younger son got his contact lenses last week, a little story I told him, which I now tell you.

I was in college, in a between relationships epoch; I’d finally broken up with my on-again, off-again, high-school girlfriend, Ellen, or she’d broken up with me, or her boyfriend had vowed to kill us all if we got back together, or something. (OK, it was the boyfriend killing us.)

I remember thinking, “Well, we can’t let that stop us, right?” (her breaking up with him, and going out with me, again.)

Her response. “I’ve seen his gun. Yeah. We’re not happening.”

So, this story isn’t about that, but funny, yeah?

No, this story is about a time afterwards, as I meandered my way towards the completion of my seven year BFA degree in Selected Studies, when I was, in the parlance of the day, high and dry. I know, ick. But we said such things, and my friend Ed Reynolds told me about a girl who worked the reception desk at the hotel he was a security guard for, and how he thought I should meet her.

I was interested. I guess that goes without saying. But, I said, I need to get some contact lenses. I’d stopped wearing them, after five years or so, for various reasons (My eyes didn’t’ like them) but I knew I could wear them for a few hours at a time, and I wanted to make a good impression. You see, I had two personalities, back in high-school, pre and post contact lenses, and the post lens personality got the girlfriend.

We have to talk about my eyes for this story to make sense. I have bad eyes. Very thick glasses. My childhood was replete with bigger guys grabbing my glasses off my face, putting them on and saying things like, “HOLY SHIT YOU MUST BE FUCKING BLIND.” Before the invention of high-index plastics, the lenses of my glasses resembled the bottom of coke bottles.

Hence, my middle school nickname, coke bottles. Thanks Ricky Ferraro. May you burn in hell. Oh and the optics gave me beady eyes.

My friend Ed looked at me in shocked disbelief. “Dude,” he would have said, if we said dude, but let’s go with that, “I can’t believe this. We’re adults. You think I’m going to hook you up with someone so shallow as to rejected you instantly, out of hand, because you wear glasses?” He smiled and laughed and I agreed. Yeah. I’m a self conscious dick.

We figured out a scheme, to save myself any possible embarrassment, where I would come by the desk and ask to see him, and I could see the girl, and she could see me, and then he could ask her, well, would she go out with me? Yeah, we were grown ups.

What does it say about me that I am telling this story with no clear memory of what she looked like? I see a pretty girl with long blonde hair in my mind. That may be Marsha Brady, now that I think about it. Was she skinny? I don’t know. All I know is, I was interested enough to ask Ed, afterwards, “so, Dude,” if we said that, “what did she say?”

Ed cracked up. Couldn’t make eye contact. “Oh. No. It’s not important, but no, she doesn’t want to go out with you.” He laughed some more.

“Tell me what she said, Ed. Exactly.”

“Maybe if he lost the glasses…”

What can I say? It hurts to be right? That we know how others see us, really, deep down in our guts? What does this have to do with writing, you ask?  Maybe it’s that we know our weaknesses. And as much as we would love to think that people will just overlook them–they don’t. Ever. So if you know there is something bad, about your prose, fix it. You’re not fooling anyone.

Marsha Brady will not be amused.