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.

I have one of those memories of being a kid, one of those curated memories, that you still have because you’ve been taking it out and looking at it, every now and then, your whole life.

I’m five or six or seven years old, living in the Ur-House, the first house, the small four bedroom white clapboard house with the bad wiring, the brass fuses that you screw in like lightbulbs, with the tiny window on the top, so you can see when they burn through.

So I’m living in the Ur-house and I’m playing in the yard, like we used to. Mom is nowhere about, Dad is at his job at the University, and I’m making a thing. I’m using white string and sticks and tiny rocks, and I’m playing on the wall that supports our neighbors driveway, that keeps his yard from spilling into ours.

We lived on a giant hill, a drumlin, like a hobbit hill, cobbled in red brick, to give it traction, and each yard is like a terrace. Which, I suddenly realize, for the first time in fifty years, is why the street is named Scotholm Terrace.

The thing I’m building into a gap in the rubble stone wall is a web. A three dimensional web of string, tied to the stones in the wall, tied to pebbles that I reposition to make the thing look cooler. I’m making it for a long time. Back when time was long. Back when an hour could be an endless abyss, a half-hour an aching hole, if spent at the doctors office, or, a heartbeat, when spent with a friend.

I finish it. Or is it finished? I can’t tell. I can’t remember making anyone else look at it. I don’t know if I needed to have anyone else look at it, then. I’m called away. I forget about the web, the thing.

The next day, there’s a sodden mass of pebbles and dirty string in it’s place. The web has collapsed. I try to remember what was so cool about it. I think about rebuilding. It’s not worth it. I do something else.

My writing is like that web. Caught up in it, the logic of it, I’m at peace. In the clear light of the following day, I’m confused. Why is this worth doing, again? Why am I playing with trash?

There are so many things to do, you see.

I have an SST, a drag race car, which I rev up to impossible speeds by pulling a t-shaped strip of plastic through a flywheel gear. I have a model of Godzilla with glow in the dark claws and tiny green plastic army men, and by getting down very low, and shooting up at it with my instamatic, I can make it look huge, forcing the perspective. There are playboy magazines in the house, which I can sneak off with for moments of stark religious wonder. The sixties!

My mom smokes low tar cigarettes and wears cat glasses and my parents throw loud parties, which get louder as the night wears on, preventing me and my brother from sleeping, and so we sit on the stairs and listen to them, the grown-ups, to the rise of fall of laughter and conversation, smelling cigarettes and booze and the infinite possibilities of the country roiling around us. Viet Nam on the TV, LSD and My Lai massacre and Nixon and Sgt Pepper and the things I make.

The drawings. The secondary worlds. The cutaway underground fortresses, the starships and the giant impossible city sized vehicles.

The paperback cover worlds all around me. Spacescapes and abstracts and lush Frazetta women. Vampirella, Puff n’ stuff and Timothy Leary

Oh! The things that I have seen. The trash that has collected in my mind.

And now, to sit alone in a room and remember life.