Those readers (there must be a few of you) who read my previous post about the dark time probably won’t find what I’m about to say as strange as others. I’ve touched on that dark time in other posts…this one from just a year ago for example…when I said that I could see it happening again. I wrote that post during my second year of retirement when, as I said, I could feel myself entering a downward spiral of inactivity. In that post of several days ago I wrote that I’d accepted part-time work at Space Telescope and I was pretty sure it would bring me out of it, like it had that first period of darkness. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much more alive I began to feel. 

Well…at least mentally. Physically I’m still a 71 year old man who never worked out as much as he should have. But even that is abating just a bit more every day. I walked in to the office the first couple days I was back, though the walk back home was more fatiguing than the walk there. The new Mac Pro laptop they gave me is heavier than I expected, almost as heavy as the older Macbook Pro I have that was top of the line in its day, but no longer runs the most current versions of MacOS. This new Macbook Pro is Very Nice and I considered buying one until I saw how much they cost.

So I got a new and up to date Mac laptop, with the Institute’s VPN software and all the other accoutrements necessary to work from home. As I am part time I don’t get my own office, though I think I would if I was expected to be at the office most of the time. I think this is not the case now. The work I will be doing is almost exactly like the work I did before I retired, which means some of the machines I will need to be working on at kept off the internet tubes for security reasons. So when I need access to those machines I will have to be present in the office. 

This first week was for reorientation, getting my access card established, and getting back into the work. So I was there every day, although one of those days I broke early, went back home, and picked up where I left off back in my den with the office laptop connected to the household network. That was mostly to make sure it all worked remotely too. And as I said, I suspect I will be doing most of my work from home. That’s because the Institute is very tight on office space. So tight us part-timers don’t get our own offices.

What they have for us, and for remote workers who need to come in from time to time, is a hoteling system. A bunch of offices are dedicated hoteling rooms with desks that have laptop connections and monitors available by way of a reservation system. If you know you’re coming in one day, or even on the spur of the moment, you go to the hoteling reservation system, see what’s available, and reserve a desk. That’ll work out fine for me, except I tend to want to bring in snacks, K-Cups and ice tea, which I don’t want to keep backpacking in every day. Be nice if I could just leave a bunch of stuff there.

At my old office on the ground floor (which, due to the steep grade around the building is actually two floors below street level) I had a mini fridge, a microwave and a coffee maker. Above my desk I had a lovely poster picture of Maligne Lake and Spirit Island, which I used to joke was my window (it was an interior room). That’s up on my bedroom wall now. I had a bunch of office supplies and computer cables, adaptors and other things I needed every now and then. Plus a bookcase with all my computer manuals, software and documentation. I have no place for any of that now. No official place.

My project manager says I can leave my computer books and stuff in the test lab which is off limits to everyone except those of us in the testing and integration branch. That’s okay…sort of…but meetings and tests are often conducted in there that I can’t be disturbing. And I still need a place for my snacks, coffee and ice tea.

Well it turns out that after I retired, they made the room my desk was in a hoteling room, and I can reserve my old desk to work at for the days I’m in the office. So I’m going to keep doing that, leave my snacks, K-Cups and office supplies in its desk drawers, and see what happens. I could see bringing in a small cooler for my ice tea every day, and maybe a sandwich, but then I’ll have to drive it and the walk into the office is very refreshing.

My branch had a small pre-Halloween party during lunch in one of the conference rooms and I got to socialize a bit more with all the new faces, and a bunch of the ones I remembered from before I retired. All week I kept crossing paths with people I worked with in the before I retired time, and it was more uplifting than I’d expected.

All week I walked down hallways I’d walked a bazillion times in the before time, and not much at all had changed, other than people I’d known were in different offices now. But that was always a thing at the Institute. The main building is small, and they have always been tight on office space, and it was not unusual at all to find your co-workers, computer labs, and conference rooms even had been moved around. I was something of an outlier in that I managed to keep one office for (I think) about 15 years. Which was how it ended up being almost a home away from home.

The employee cafeteria is the same, but the menu is Much better. The shared Keurig machine around the corner from my old office is still there…I checked to make sure while I was scoping out what had happened to my old office. I made some coffee with it and a K-Cup I’d brought with me just in case.

The work is the same, but not in any kind of boring same old same old way. I built and administered several computer testing facilities, wrote software to measure progress on various projects and generate reports for Goddard and NASA. Now the Institute is moving on to new projects and I will be a part of all that, again, working on new things for new space projects. So it’s what I’ve always done for them, but it’s the next steps forward in space telescope explorations. I would not have come back out of retirement for anything else but this.

I’ve put it like this often and every time I do it stuns me to see what it is that I am a part of: We harvest light from near the dawn of time and give it to the world to study and learn from.

So I’m back in the saddle again. And I feel like I’ve been reborn.

I feel…young again. Somewhat. And well of course I’m not actually. I’m a 71 year old man and I really feel my age sometimes lately. Especially that first day I had to be in the office at 9am. For two and and three-quarters years I could just slow walk myself out of bed because I had no schedule to keep. It was wonderful. It was liberating. And then it wasn’t. That first day back was a bit difficult. Getting up on time was difficult. Walking into the office with a heavy backpack was difficult. The walk back home was hard. Some of that is probably that spiral downward and inward I was getting stuck back on. 71 is a hard time to try and regain some physical stamina, but I can feel my body awakening a tad, as my mind is reawakening. I’m seeing the world around me with fresh eyes. Wide awake eyes.

It’s like I’ve been reborn. Those are the only words I can find to describe it. But I am not the same person I was in the before time.

Last day of my first week I set myself a goal to have a new system my project manager wants established online and available for the others to test. Almost right away I ran into a difficulty I needed our IT staff to work with me on. And there was some back and forth and I got stuck and it did not get done. There will be more back and forth next week. But that is nothing new. Our IT people are the best, but even with the best people there will always be things that need to be worked through, and especially when you are breaking new ground with what you are doing. And we are always breaking new ground.

Time was I would have stressed massively over not getting it done. What’s different now is I’m an old man, which doesn’t mean old and tired but someone with more life experience than he had when he was younger. It means I’ve walked down these roads many times and I know the territory. What’s different now is I have felt death tapping me on the shoulder a bit more insistantly than before. It gives you some perspective.

It isn’t that I don’t care anymore; I care deeply that the things I am tasked with get done and get done Right. But I am not going to stress out over it like I would have in the before time. I’ll keep my project leads and my users in the loop and we will work through it and we will get it done together.

Some lessons take a lifetime to learn. I was an only child. Teamwork has been mine. Also, that family doesn’t have to feel suffocating. But that’s another story for another time.

There is no growing up, there is only growing. And…every now and then…being reborn.

…except those who want to be fooled.

This is…amazing…

I don’t think he’s ever made his own bed, let alone his own breakfast, lunch or dinner a day in his life, let alone worked a deep fryer in a fast food joint. My first real W-4 job was at a Burger Chef. I worked the night shift and that included closing up and an hour of cleaning the food prep after closing. Show me the staged photos of him cleaning the prep area after closing…go ahead…this man could not have handled the work involved back when he was a teenager himself, let alone now.

He’s had everything handed to him his entire life and that’s why he gets pissed off whenever he doesn’t get his way.

It seems I am always buying one of these Oaxacan wood carvings every time I go visit Epcot Mexico. But this one was a Must Buy the moment I saw it…

I’d never seen the artists do a crab before, and here in Baltimore and along the Chesapeake Bay Maryland Blue Crab is serious business, so of course I took it home with me.

A couple years ago the city gave us new trash cans designed for use with trash trucks that automatically pick them up and dump them into the truck. I’m familiar with the system used with these types of trash cans as it’s what they do in Oceano. Every trash day out there residents roll their trash cans out onto the street by the curb, the trash trucks come alongside, and a mechanical arm reaches out and grabs the trash can, hoists it up and dumps its contents into the truck. Now they only need one operator per truck, which is good for small town budgets but not so much for the workers.

That system isn’t going to work here in Baltimore and I’ve wondered what giving us those kinds of trash cans was buying the city. Trash here is usually picked up in the alleys, some of which are so old and so narrow the city needs trash trucks specifically made for them. There is no room on either side of the trash truck for those arms to reach out and pick up trash cans.

For almost two years now I’ve watched the trash workers roll our new trash cans out to the backend of your usual trash truck…the ones with an open back and a claw that comes out and compresses trash dumped into the back…lift them up over the open back of the truck and manually dump the trash inside of them, then roll them back to our backyards, It looked to me like all that was accomplished with the new trash cans was giving the workers something with wheels on it, but much heavier to lift and dump.

But there was a master plan after all and I’ve been seeing it now. On the backs of all those standard trash trucks the city has been installing devices that pick up the new trash cans and dump them into the back of the truck. The workers still have to roll the trash cans over to the back of the truck, but then these devices do the work of lifting and dumping. Then they roll the cans back to our yards.

Well, actually they just leave them in the alley and we have to put them back. (shrug)

It’s a neat idea and I can see where both the city and the unions like it. It doesn’t cost workers their jobs, it makes their jobs easier (no heavy lifting), and the city doesn’t have to buy all new trash trucks, just these add-on devices.

Well at least I got it out of me…

…necessarily.

I went to my storage room and brought back the empty containers for my backyard garden stuff because I’ll be putting all that away for the winter soon. While I was there I re-sorted and re-packed the storage unit such that all the stuff I am unlikely to need on a regular basis is in the back and the seasonal stuff is in the front where it’s easier to get at. After Halloween is over I’ll put the Halloween stuff back and take up and pack the garden stuff and put that away too, but it the very front of the storage room. Next spring it’ll be easy to get to then. Probably, if I’m smart, when I put the empty containers back in storage, I’ll put them behind the Halloween containers so they’re easy to get to next Halloween.

I used to think storage rooms were a symptom of excess unless you were living in a small apartment. Which I’ve been. Once I bought the house I figured if I needed a storage room too then I had too much stuff. But seasonal things like garden lights, Halloween and Christmas decorations take up space most of the year when they’re not deployed outside. Eventually they take up space you’d rather be using to live in. I suppose this is why people who have garages don’t have any space in them for their cars.

I tried using the space under my backyard deck as a storage space, but it isn’t weatherproof…I’ve tried several ways to make it weatherproof and could not…and the plastic Rubbermaid storage bins I bought are only water tight for a while. If you leave them to the weather the plastic hardens and cracks and rain gets into them and ruins what’s inside. So I gave in and rented a small storage unit near where I live. And now as I’ve been moving seasonal stuff in and out of it I see the usefulness of having one.

You like making your neighborhood bright and cheerful, and that means decorating your lawn and garden. I have a nice solar light display I put out in the backyard every spring that my neighbors love, and I try to add one little thing to it every season. This week I’m working on my Halloween display. In December it’ll be the Christmas one. I’m not trying to win any prizes with any of this, I just like sprucing things up around the house when I can and doing something to brighten my world a little. That stuff doesn’t need to take up space in your house when it’s not deployed outside. Especially if your house is a little Baltimore rowhouse. I need every square foot of that space to live in.

Oddly enough having said all this, the Christmas stuff stays in the basement, but it’s in a corner between the dryer and the freezer that I really can’t use for anything but storage. I also use space under the basement staircase for storing stuff that isn’t seasonal and I might want to get my hands on right away. Last major power outage we had all my big coolers where in the storage unit and I couldn’t get them out because of the power outage everywhere in the neighborhood. So I lost a lot of food in the fridge that I could maybe have kept on ice in the coolers. Now the coolers stay in the house, under the basement stairs.

On the way home from Bobby D’s (a local rib joint) I saw my lawn cutter guy and we chatted for a bit. I’d told him previously about the fungus that killed my Japanese Maple tree. He said he saw another one in the neighborhood with the bark coming off and dark spots of fungus inside. So it’s spreading around.

My next door neighbor’s tree is showing more dead branches. Probably won’t go completely dead before it drops all its leaves for the winter, but next spring and summer for sure it’s over. Homeowner’s son says dad doesn’t care about the tree. I suppose it’s too late now anyway.

I’ve brought my Halloween stuff out of storage and I need to start getting it put out for the goblins. No tree to decorate with Halloween lights this year.

They asked me why I’d come back out of retirement. A few friendly jokes were made and we went our separate ways, knowing we’d see each other again at the office soon. I could appreciate why they might not have understood. Our lives weren’t all that different, but different enough.

I’ve been trying now for just over a year to get a head of steam up for doing some of the art projects I have stacked up. And…I couldn’t. I have artwork on my drafting table and in my iPad that I can only touch occasionally, and then on briefly. Mostly they just sit unfinished. My cameras sit untouched. I have rolls of film sitting in my darkroom and chemistry to develop them with that I haven’t touched. 

I would lay in bed for hours flipping through the social media posts on my smartphone. Often it’s just staring at the beautiful guys on Instagram or YouTube. I have a Google search string that brings me photos of beautiful long haired guys that I flip through, one after the other. Then I put the phone down on its charger, turn off the light and try to sleep. I imagine stories about gay couples having adventures in science fiction or fantasy worlds until I can finally sleep. Sometimes I try to write these stories but I have no energy to really dig into it.

It began to feel all too familiar. Like it’s the 1980s again, and I’m sitting in my bedroom with the lights turned down, almost off, and I’m staring of into the darkness outside my bedroom window, unable to feel anything inside of me.

I think of that period in my life as the dark time.

In my photo catalogs there’s a note about the discontinuity in catalog numbering. Actually there are two. The catalog numbers begin with a 10000 series. Those are the rolls of film I shot starting in the early 1970s when I was just getting serious with photography. I started counting the rolls of black and white negatives at 10001. At some point suddenly there is a shift to a 20000 series. That discontinuity I explain in the notes, is the gap in my photography that occurred when I lost all interest in my artwork, and for a period of time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I did nothing creatively. It wasn’t just my photography that suffered, but apart from a series of drawings on the topic of gay first love…and these disturbing drawings…

I did nothing. In part, it was I didn’t want to see what was coming out of me. But also, I had lost interest. The urge to get it out just wouldn’t come. When I looked inside, there was nothing there.

The late 70s and early to mid 1980s were a dark part of my life. In 1973 my first high school crush, strike one, suddenly moved away and I had no idea where he went but I was certain I would never see him again. By 1980 I was coming off of a disastrous crush on a straight classmate, strike two. Then I made it to my 30s, which I was told was over the hill for gay guys, without having found that significant other to love and be loved by. That period of time was Reagan/Moral Majority/AIDS time when hostility toward gay people was hot and venomous. I began to believe that I would never have a lover, that I was somehow cursed, too ugly, too weird to be lovable.

Much later in my life some gay guys I’d regarded as friends told me essentially that no, I’m not too weird, and no I’m not cursed…I’m just too ugly.

I was mostly unemployed, save for the random Manpower job. I spent my days walking aimlessly in the neighborhood, and my nights in my bedroom in the apartment I shared with mom, blasting my mind with pot and alcohol, listening to music and staring off into nowhere, long past midnight.

I came close to suicide several times. Once I sat on a bridge over the railroad tracks waiting for a train to come along that I would jump in front of. Some part of my mind wondered what that would do to the engineer who saw it and I backed away. But I kept thinking of ways to do it that would be instantaneous and not involve anyone else. Thankfully I was not in that creative place just then where I could actually think of one. In some ways, oddly enough then, the emptiness may have spared me. I didn’t care enough about living to even figure out how to end it properly, artistically.

I don’t remember much about this period in my life. Sitting here now It’s hard for me to even to get the timeline right. All I remember, is darkness and sitting alone at the foot of my bed. I created no art because there was nothing inside.

In retrospect the pathways out of a darkness like that can seem strange and random but also somehow preordained. There are times I wonder if some kind spirit in the great beyond looked kindly on me and put some lucky breaks in my path. I regard myself as a man of science, and I am an atheist, but I am also an artist and sometimes I can’t help but wonder.

I would spend nights listening to my shortwave radio, as if tuning in signals from a planet earth I could only listen to from light years away. With the money I made doing random jobs I bought an inexpensive Commodore C64 to pick up radio teletype signals. There was a kit you could buy with a software cartridge and tuner box you’d connect to the radio speaker. It would translate the bleeps and chirps of RTTY transmissions into characters on a screen. I discovered teletype news and weather services I could tune into and read.

Then I learned about computer bulletin boards and bought a modem and software to connect to various BBSes. That led me to some gay bulletin boards and FidoNet echos and I began tentatively reaching out to other gay folk on them, and I began to feel less alone. But just a little. Nobody I ever wanted to get close to wanted anything to do with me. One said I was too intense. Another was willing to let my cameras give him some love, but not me.

The Commodore’s user interface was its BASIC interpreter and I began experimenting with writing programs. Later I learned that Commodore PET Basic was written for Commodore by Microsoft.

One day at a HAM fest, while I was looking for tubes for one of my shortwave radios and a stereo preamp I owned, I discovered I could buy parts to build my own IBM PC compatible computer. Building one was easier than the Heathkits I used to build because it was just a matter of buying the right circuit boards and plugging them together with a power supply and case. I got it working, and began surfing the bulletin boards with it. Then I bought a copy of Microsoft Quick Basic I began writing computer programs as I had done with my C64. It drew me in.

I discovered a world that had its own sterile beauty…one of logical structures, cold hard steel and chromium algorithms. I discovered I could build logical structures whose beauty I could admire and love without needing to go near the parts of my heart where I didn’t want to go anymore. It was a kind of art I’d never known existed. The art of pure logic. I dove into it. I got good at it.

It was the time of the dot com boom and anyone who could make the little microcomputers do tricks was in demand. I did volunteer work for a local gay BBS and made a program to distill the file a fellow user who worked for a wire service provided that contained news about the community you almost never saw in print anywhere. We were a people not fit to print in family newspapers. The program I wrote in Basic would separate the articles into individual files formatted for the BBS software we were running and create the menu items for each. Then another program I wrote would upload them into the correct directories on the BBS server.

I got better and better at teaching micro computers to do tricks. I developed and wrote a membership support system for a local gay activist organization, that had a backend user database in dBase 4. Among other things it generated welcome letters for new members, and reminders about upcoming dues.

All of that was unpaid volunteer work, but eventually I began getting temp contract work making very good money teaching those little computers do tricks for various businesses. I got work at a contract job agency and my first worksite was at Baltimore Gas and Electric Home Products and Services writing report software for their work measurement system. It was the lucky break I needed right when I desperately needed one, because by then mom had retired and moved south, and I was living in a friend’s basement with no prospects except maybe to end up starving on the streets someday.

Because of those little computers I soon had my own apartment. Then a new car…a little Geo Prism. I hopped from one contract programming job to another, each time gaining more experience and new skills that made me even more marketable. My income rose. Eventually I landed a contract, and then full time employment where the Hubble Space Telescope was operated. I thought I’d somehow died and gone to heaven. I still had no boyfriend, but I had work I was good at that I enjoyed doing, and it came with a good income and benefits. I still had no love life, but I began to feel less empty inside.

One day, while walking around the campus, I saw them setting up for student spring fair. Seeing that reawakened something inside of me, and went back home, grabbed my camera and some Kodachrome and began wandering around the rides they were setting up, taking art pictures again for the first time in over a decade.

I revisited my photography equipment. By then I’d bought a small rowhouse near enough to the campus I could walk to work. I established a tentative darkroom in its basement bathroom. Back in high school I used to commandeer the bathroom in the apartment I shared with mom to develop film and make prints. So this was another reawakening. The smell of photo chemicals took me back to a happier time.

I discovered I had enough income I could buy all the camera and darkroom equipment I ever wanted but could not afford when I was a teenager. I bought lenses I could only dream about when I was a teenager for my Canon F1. I’d bought that camera on fast food work money the summer between my junior and senior years, but I could not afford the good lenses for it, so I bought generic low costs ones. Now I could buy the good ones. Then I found another newer second hand F1 body in a camera store and bought that. Eventually I bought the Hasselblad I’d always wanted but considered a dream only.

I bought a good film scanner and revisited my film catalog. Now I had a computer with photographer workflow software on it to help maintain the catalog. I created the 20000 series numbering to account for the before and after time. In my refrigerator I’d kept a large tray of exposed film I never got around to developing during the dark time. I’d kept that film refrigerated because while I’d lost interest in the art I could not bear to let it and the images I’d shot deteriorate into nothing. That was probably some thread of interest in life keeping me alive during the dark time. I began to develop and examine what was on those rolls, and rediscovered something of the life I had before the darkness that I’d forgotten. At some point a 11000 catalog series was established to account for the rolls I shot in the before time but never developed or cataloged during the dark time. 

I established an art room in the basement of my rowhouse with my drafting table against one wall, and my art room computer and film scanner against the other. I bought a tabloid size flatbed scanner so I could scan in my cartoons and other artwork and put it up on the website I now had where I could display my photography and my cartoons and other art for the world to see.

I still had no boyfriend. In fact by this time strike three had entered, exited, and then re entered my life giving me another false hope, only to be dashed later on. But having that job in the space program lifted me out of that darkness enough that I could endure that. I was making art again. I felt alive again.

For twenty-three years I worked that job and made art in my spare time, putting some of it on my website. I started a weekly gay centric political cartoon that got me the notice of the editor of Baltimore OUTLoud, a local gay community newspaper. He invited me to contribute my cartoons to the newspaper, and that eventually led me to becoming a member of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Cartooning was the first love and it felt like another dream come true.

I started a cartoon story about my first teenage crush and how I came out to myself. I did it mostly to try and understand what had happened to me back in high school, and how it influenced the adult I eventually became. Then after 34 years of searching, and after being dumped by strike three, I found strike one again.

We began talking. And occasionally, flirting. But he was married and I didn’t want to interfere, just be friends again. Maybe. Hopefully. Eventually I was to discover we were never really all that compatible to begin with. A big cosmic joke. In a better world where gay teens could date and find out who was good for them and who was not, I’d have figured that out and had a good cry over it back then, not 34 years later. We had an argument and he ordered me to stop speaking to him, which I was completely fine with because I was angry at the things he said to me. Logically. But my heart I felt the darkness coming back. I ignored it.

I still had my art and I could use it to get the grief out of me. But grief like that never goes away, it just becomes part of the background noise. He was the first, but it was more than that. If you read A Coming Out Story, what you see is a very confused teenage boy who was fed all the usual myths, lies, superstitions and playground jokes about homosexuals, trying to come to terms with why he was crushing on a male classmate, then suddenly realizing that he’s in love…that wonderful terrifying confusing exhilarating first love…and it told him like nothing else could that everything he’d been taught about homosexuals was a lie and there was nothing wrong with him. There are gay kids who were driven to suicide by that self realization, but it was by loving him that I knew there was nothing wrong with me.

And then he told me to go away.

If I’d had that happen back when I was a teenager I’d have been crushed but eventually I could have got over it and gone on with my life. In theory now that I’m an adult with an adult’s life experience under my belt I should have been able to get over it even easier. But the way it happened then and now just made it worse.

I coasted along with it, and with the knowledge that came with it, that I’d tried to find love and failed all my adult life. Strike one, strike two, strike three, and all the almosts, and nearlies, and could have beens in between. Deep inside after that argument I knew it was over for me. There would be no boyfriend, let alone a spouse to have and to hold. But I buried it and just kept walking.

At age 69, I retired.

I’d had a heart attack a couple years previously, but it was not a serious one. Just enough to remind me that I was getting a lot closer to the grave then I fully appreciated. I got myself to the hospital in enough time that my heart didn’t suffer much damage at all. But after that I was put on meds for blood pressure and heart rate and after an initial bounce up I began feeling tired all the time. So I retired in order to give myself some time to enjoy that was completely my own, and work on the art projects I was now fully engaged in again.

The first year of retirement was wonderful. I had all the time in the world. I could go stay with my brother in California for months at a time. I could world endlessly on my art. I could take a road trip and explore new places with my cameras anytime I wanted. By then I had my dream come true car…a Mercedes-Benz diesel sedan. I drove it for days and days from one end of the country to the other. It was and amazing time. But I was still just coasting along with an understanding I didn’t want to look at…and then it wasn’t wonderful anymore.

In the second year of retirement I began a downward spiral of inactivity. And once again I began to lose interest in my art. You can only coast for so long.

Last summer I spent several months in California with my brother. Knowing I wanted to retire back to the land of my birth but could not afford to, he kindly made a room for me in his house. The part of California he lives in is stunningly beautiful, and my cameras would give it lots of love every time I visited. But last summer I could barely manage to touch my cameras while I was there. I told myself that it was I had covered that ground so much there wasn’t anything left to say about it photographically. But that’s bullshit. When what I think of as my photographic eye opens and I take a camera walk I am always seeing new things to work with. Last summer I could not see anything. The eye would not open. I felt empty inside whenever I tried.

I began to feel fatigued all the time. I spent days out there barely getting out of bed, often taking walks, mostly to my favorite Mexican restaurant where the margaritas and the food are excellent. I would go for walks in the evening, cigar in hand, imagining stories I could write, thinking about places I might drive to on the way back home, pondering ways I could finally move back home to California, thinking about anything except how I had failed at finding love. One day I got so fatigued and dizzy I went scared to the emergency room, but the nurse and doctor there could find nothing wrong with me. I eventually came back home to Baltimore with just a few rolls of film I’d shot and nothing to show for the drawings and cartoons I was working on.

Now there are rolls of film in my darkroom waiting for me to develop them and I can’t find the energy to do that. There is artwork on my drafting table, and in my iPad that I’ve no energy for completing. 

That first period of darkness came about, I’m pretty sure, when I was approaching and then turning 30, still had no love life, and was beginning to think it might never happen. The thought of that scared me and I pushed it down. Of course I’d find someone to love. Everyone does. But no…not everyone does, and I was no one special. I failed and failed and failed again, and it was just too much. But then this was the world I came of age in.

Now I found myself entering another period of darkness. And lo and behold, who comes to pull me out of it…a second time…?

A few months ago my project manager at Space Telescope asked me if I was interested in coming back to the Institute part time. I said Sure! I loved that job, the working environment was wonderful compared to the bottomless pits I’d worked in previously. And it was doing work I was good at, and for the space program. We are adding text to the textbooks. We harvest light from near the dawn of time and bring it to the world to study and learn from. How many times in a lifetime do you get to be part of something like that. Of course I’m interested. No need to convince me. And actually transitioning to part time work was what I’d initially wanted to do, but was told it wasn’t being offered then.

So we had lunch, and we talked, and we talked. And I went back to the office for a new round of talks and interviews about the part time position they had an opening for. And while I was there I was greeted happily by people I’d worked there with previously. Hi Bruce…nice to see you again…  I felt wanted, I felt needed. Those are good things. And I signed the paperwork and later this month I go back to the Institute part time.

And I’m pretty sure this keeps me from falling completely back into it, like it did before. Just to walk around that campus and know that I’m a part of everything going on there will be a wonderful feeling. And at some point I know I’ll be back to doing my art in my spare time, and using my cameras again. And since I’ll have vacation again I’ll be taking new road trips and seeing new sights, and visiting the land of my birth again in a better mindset.

In retrospect the pathways out of a darkness like that can seem strange and random but also somehow preordained. Maybe some kind spirit in the great beyond is still looking kindly on me, still putting random lucky breaks in my path. I had a meeting with my project manager a few days ago to get some detail about what I’ll be working on when I return, so I can hit the ground running. Afterward I met a couple of my co-workers who asked me in a friendly but curious way why I was coming back out of retirement. They themselves are probably getting close to it and cannot wait.

I explained that having so much time all to myself turned out not to be so good for me and they made a few friendly jokes about it but I can appreciate how they wouldn’t totally understand. They have families, they have kids, maybe even grandkids now, and wives they love to keep them company and keep them engaged and active when they retire. I had a lifetime of failure at the one critical task of adulthood to look back on, and nothing to look forward to. And now I have this wonderful adventure in space exploration to look forward to. And I feel alive again.

I’ll keep working it for as long as my health and congressional funding hold out. It’ll be a good life. Not the one I was hoping for, but a Much better one than I had any reasonable expectation of having. I had enough money in my retirement accounts, and in my social security benefit since I waited two years to claim it, to live comfortably until Death tapped me on the shoulder.  And now you know why I came back out of retirement instead.

When you walk through a storm
Keep your chin up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark.

At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet, silver song of a lark.

Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone!
You’ll never walk alone

I’m gaining a little more data this morning about why I was having to listen to bullshit about FEMA’s hurricane response yesterday while I was trying to eat my Texas Roadhouse dinner.  This excerpt from an article in The Atlantic came across my Bluesky feed just now…

“Elon Musk…claimed…FEMA was ‘actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.’ That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. ”

When I tried to view the article I discovered that it was subscriber only. I am already over subscribed to various news sources so I had to pass this one up. Here’s the banner:

I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.

By Charlie Warzel

Good thing it’s not so bad you can still hide it behind a paywall.

I did a little digging for that Elon Musk post and could not find it on his Twitter feed. But this is one of the Google results I got for it.

FEMA is actively hindering relief efforts. Moreover, they’re claiming the Starlinks that I’ve personally delivered as ones THEY’VE delivered.

You follow the link and you see that Musk has deleted the text of that tweet and replaced it with an angry emoji. 

But then there is this tweet which is still up:

SpaceX engineers are trying to deliver Starlink terminals & supplies to devastated areas in North Carolina right now and @FEMAis both failing to help AND won’t let others help. This is unconscionable!!

They just took this video a few hours ago, where you can see the level of devastation: roads, houses, electricity, water supply and ground Internet connections completely destroyed.

@FEMA wouldn’t let them land to deliver critical supplies … my blood is boiling …

This tweet is still up despite that (according to Politico) Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg talked by phone to Musk and walked him through how flight restrictions in an emergency zone and airport closures work, after which Musk agreed that the Secretary was “on the ball”.

This Politico article gives a pretty good overview of the situation with Musk’s disinformation campaign against FEMA. It ends with this:

In the U.S., some Republican state lawmakers have pleaded for conservative influencers to resist spreading falsehoods.

“PLEASE help stop this junk,” GOP North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin implored his Facebook followers on Oct. 3, citing false stories such as Antarctic weather control, land grabs over lithium and FEMA stealing donations.

A fellow lawmaker had received 15 calls in one day about untrue rumors, he added. “I’m growing a bit weary of intentional distractions,” Corbin said.

The next day, Musk reposted some of those same falsehoods to his 200 million followers, with one word: “Wow.”

Go read the whole thing.  Or for an even better insight into the toxic waste dump that’s this man’s nature, go buy a copy of Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

What is the cost of lies? Last night I was watching a documentary on the last stages of WWII and the taking of Okinawa. Towards the end of the documentary, as the Japanese military is falling apart, and the ragged, brutalized people of the island are finally emerging from the caves where they’d either been hiding or held in captivity, we learn the people were terrified to seek help from the American soldiers because Japanese propaganda told them the Americans would rape and kill them, and that it was better to commit suicide than be captured by the Americans.

You wonder how many of them did just that, but what you saw in the footage were a lot of trembling, terrified people, including children and the elderly, physically emaciated and desperately needing care that the Americans were always willing to give to them…and also to the enemy, provided they put down their weapons and surrendered.

This morning I’m reading this:

Keith Turi, FEMA’s acting associate administrator for response and recovery, ticked through false rumors — that FEMA was “confiscating supplies” or only providing $750 in total assistance to storm victims — that he said are already harming the agency’s ability to help survivors.

“The misinformation is extremely damaging to the response efforts from Helene and from any disaster,” he said. “It is reducing the likelihood that survivors will come to FEMA in a trusting way to register for assistance.”

…and this:

A man identifying himself only as Anthony called into Sirius XM’s “Dan Abrams Show” this week to share the story of his father-in-law, whose property near Ashville, North Carolina, was badly damaged by Helene. Despite the destruction, Anthony said his father-in-law is unwilling to accept assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“He has refused all FEMA help because he’s a hardcore Trumper,” Anthony told Abrams. “He literally believes that if he accepts anything from FEMA, they’re going to take his house.”

This is a twisted lie about a good FEMA program that will let FEMA buy your flooded out house if it’s been flooded out four years in a row and they and you can agree on a fair market price.

This narrative that they’re going to take your home — what does that do? Well, it makes people very nervous about leaving their home. And so you hear people now saying, “I’m not going to leave, because if I leave my home, the government’s going to take it.” Those are the real-world impacts of all of these lies.

So people are afraid the government is going to take their house and decide to stay instead of evacuate. How many lives were lost because of this lie, we may never know because the dead can’t explain why they chose not to leave.

On VOX I see this snippet of conversation:

Sean Rameswaram: Back during Hurricane Sandy, I distinctly remember social media being useful for people. It was useful for people going through Sandy, it was useful for government agencies to get out information. Is that era of social media being a helpful tool in a disaster over?

Juliette Kayyem: It’s over. Elon Musk broke “Disaster Twitter.”

You still occasionally hear Musk referred to as a libertarian, but that was never the case. He badly wants Trump to win this coming election because he’s all in on the culture war and what he ridiculously calls the “woke mind virus”. I was a libertarian once. Reagan cured me of it, but I was there. No actual libertarian would ever come near to wanting a man like Trump having the levers of government in his hands. Musk  is decidedly Not in favor of small, or even limited government. He is that angry drunk at the end of the bar babbling about socialism and mind viruses but with billions of dollars at his disposal to impose his pink elephants on the rest of us.

So many of us have forgotten since Reagan coined his infamous nine most terrifying words is that helping the American people cope with emergencies is what government does. Democracy, as Lincoln once put it, is government of the people, by the people, for the people. Government is the mechanism by which we, the people, help our neighbors in times of need. Those FEMA workers they are being taught to demonize are their fellow Americans. They want to help. They are risking life and limb to help. And Musk and Trump are spitting in their faces, and also the faces of those they want to help.

It is not FEMA that’s getting between the survivors of Helene and the help they need. It’s Musk. It’s Trump. It’s Fox News. It’s the MAGA noise machine. It’s what they Have to do, regardless of who it hurts, even if it’s their own voters.

Because once people realize that those men and women from the government really are there help, it might lead them into thinking that maybe big government isn’t the problem after all, that the problem is only how to make government work better for everyone.

And then the game is up.

Valery Legasov: What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: “Who is to blame?” -HBO, Chernobyl 

Before I left for my Disney World trip, I stopped at my local Texas Roadhouse for dinner, and was given an envelope with a coupon of some sort inside. But I was not to open it until their anniversary guest appreciation week, and then it could only be opened by a authorised staff member. Okay…this is some sort of promotion to get people into the restaurant that week, thinks I.  But it did its work, although I’d likely have gone there anyway. I go there regularly because I like the food and the margaritas and it’s not very expensive. But that may be changing.

It is the last possible day to go to Texas Roadhouse and have staff there open the mystery envelope. I get a coupon for ten bucks off a meal, and order their top shelf margarita and ribs. I sit at one end of the U shaped bar where I usually do. This is so I’m not squeezed between other people at the bar. To my left are some folks the bartender seems to know because they’re chatting easily about this and that. 

Eventually someone who I think is a floor manager walks over and asks how I’m doing. This happens regularly at this restaurant so I’m pretty sure it’s not about me or any of my Facebook check-ins here. As always I give her a thumbs up. The food is good, and while I am not a country-western or sports bar kind of guy there’s at least one big screen TV here showing an Atmospheres stream I can glance at. Satisfied, she walks around to the folks to my left and starts chatting with them, with the bartender joining in. Now I’m thinking they’re not just regulars but either personal friends or current or former employees.

They talk with the bartender about a rude customer who would not take no for an answer when he asked her if she’d be up for a date. I almost join in. It’s one thing to gawk at a beautiful face, and I’ve done my share of that, but it’s another to hit on someone whose job it is to be nice to you. But I stay out of it. Then the conversation turns to the recent hurricanes. 

You realize that, at a country-western kind of place, you are going to encounter some percentage of MAGA nutcases, or a best Fox News junkies, even here in mostly sane central Maryland. I can accept that so long as I don’t have to listen to it, and the food and margaritas are good. But there’s an election coming, the drums are beating, and the Fox News/MAGA lies are swarming like locusts. 

As soon as the conversation turns to the hurricanes they start yapping the flavor of the day lies about how Biden and Harris aren’t doing anything for the storm damaged communities, and that FEMA is actively slowing down and/or preventing local relief efforts. This last especially makes me angry, almost instantly livid, because so many dedicated government workers and local national guard troops are doing what they do in difficult and often dangerous conditions to get help to these communities. They are heroes. The Biden administration has set aside millions to hurricane relief, while the religious fanatic who is our current speaker of the House is refusing to call the House back into session to address hurricane relief…a thing that was commonplace once upon a time. And Every Florida Republican In The House voted against giving the afflicted states relief money. Then complained that the feds were withholding relief money!

It is despicable how Trump and Vance are lying about it. And not just to score points, but more insidiously to maintain the Reagan fiction that “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.

Because among white supremacists and the ultra rich, a government that works for all of us cannot be allowed to stand.

So I’m getting angry hearing this crap about Biden and Harris and FEMA, and I reckon it’s starting to show in my face. The floor manager walks around to my end of the bar again and says something about hurricane relief. I give her the Sam Elliot stare…the one dad could and his two sons can suddenly flash when we’re really pissed off. And I get off a couple sentences about how FEMA is doing its best down there and it’s dispicable how so many decent government workers are being lied about. And she instantly pivots to what she probably thinks is some sort of customer neutral ground, because after all this is a hospitality business.

She says, apologetically, that people will believe any bad thing they want to believe and isn’t it a shame. I suppose the look on my face told her not to press it further.

To my left I begin hearing about sleepy Joe and lying Kamila. My dinner is just barely half finished. My margarita only about a quarter done. I ask for my check. The bartender looks surprised. She asks me if I want a box. Somewhat emphatically I say no.

I leave my usual 20 percent tip. Never blame the bartender for the conversation at the bar.

People will believe any bad thing they want to believe…

What is the cost of lies…

I had a lunch meeting with my project manager yesterday. It was a thing I asked for so I could get a more detailed idea of what I would be working on my first days back. Since it’s official now he could give me those details.

But… Oh lord have mercy…someone forgot to put fresh condoms on the buzzwords and they’ve multiplied by orders of magnitude since I’ve been in this trade.

Among all the new ones I am currently learning, I commend “NoSQL” to your attention. I had not heard of such a thing until yesterday as I was digging through the documentation of a tool I will likely be using going forward. The term has been around since the late 1990s, but only since 2009 to describe a non-relational, no schema, non-tabular data store…so I am told. I’m reading about this and thinking it’s like a stream of consciousness Word document that’s copied as many servers as needed to hold it all. But they wouldn’t do that.

I can see why they’re going this way…the firehose of data that some projects have to manage now, and the need for flexibility in how the data is characterised, begins to overwhelm traditional relational database management systems. But seeing line items such as “Many NoSQL stores compromise consistency in favor of availability, partition tolerance, and speed.” and that most NoSQL stores lack transaction integrity assurance mechanisms, makes me skittish. I am still trying to understand how you get data back out of one of these. Oh…and with any assurance that it’s the same data you put into it.

Life goes on. I alluded earlier to a dear friend of mine who has this tick about warning me not to let the world know that you’re crazy. But what else is it to be earning a living in this trade, if not doing just that.

If you are still living in Orlando, leave now! Or at least batten down the hatches. But seriously…get out!

I don’t know why I still care. But I still do. Alas. And now I’m back to tossing these little messages in a bottle out into the sea of sighs like I was doing for decades before October 2006. Life comes full circle I reckon. Except now I have to go on knowing. So it goes.

Seriously…get out!

I got a notice the other day that Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions was finally being published. So I just now ordered a copy. I kinda figured it would take his dying before Last was ever published. It’ll be interesting to see their take on why he never got it out.

It was originally announced for publication in 1973. Over the decades, like the Flying Dutchman, Last Dangerous Visions had become a legendary ghost book. Sightings would occasionally be reported but eventually all were found to be mirages. This lead to more than perpetual fan disappointment. The writers who submitted to this collection did so on the basis of how fantastic the previous two were, and they gave Ellison their best stories…never to be seen again due to the contract they signed preventing them from publishing elsewhere before Last Dangerous Visions was published. Ellison eventually, so I’m told, released some of them from that contract after decades, but it created a lot of bad feelings. Not that Ellison was ever afraid of creating bad feelings. But some of those writers have since died.

I have the first two volumes and I’m really interested to read what’s in this one. Finally. But even more so to understand what the hell happened.

I should add to this, something I posted on Facebook that I neglected to post here after Ellison passed away, about why I like the works of Harlan Ellison, “controversial” and infuriating though he could be. This is the closing narration from the Twilight Zone version of Paladin Of The Lost Hour, a story that’s also part of his Angry Candy short story collection. It is a story he said, capped his preoccupation with themes of friendship, ethics, courage, responsibility, and the gaining of wisdom.

“Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment. A blessing of the 18th Egyptian dynasty: ‘God be between you and harm in all the empty places you walk.'”

That could pass for a good epitaph for Harlan Ellison. Yes I’m quite sure he earned much of the anger directed at him in his life, but also the love. None of us are of a single weave of thread. And those of us who have walked in those empty places knew after we’d read him, that we were not alone. He walked there with more bravery and clarity than most of us could bear, so we could find our way. He could stare down Nietzsche’s abyss, and the abyss would blink first.

This came across my Facebook stream just now…

These aren’t dead birds, they’re drunk on the fermented berries you see scattered around them. Poster says good people move them to a safe place to sober up.

I’ve been backing off the alcohol ever since I began seeing that beyond just one drink I start getting heart flutters. My cardiologist agrees. So I am unlikely to be found lying drunk on a sidewalk. But if the day ever comes I wake up in a little cardboard box with a water dish and some bird seed in it, that’s when I stop altogether.

I went out for breakfast this morning, and saw this on the way back to my hotel…

Seen on the way back to the hotel this morning. The sticker on the rear window says they’re firefighters and sure enough the car turned into the firehouse a block ahead.

I’m guessing it makes for some interesting conversation in the firehouse as, so I hear, the firefighters all pretty much supported DeSantis. But maybe that changed when he took away their park perks along with all the other Reedy Creek employees.

(Disney paid for and operated its own emergency services through the mechanism of the Reedy Creek Improvement District. DeSantis was going to take it away from Disney until someone finally explained to him that would mean Florida would end up paying for everything that Disney was, plus also taking on all its debt. So he settled for stacking its board of directors with his cronys and changing its name.)