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.)

I’ve been thinking lately about “misinformation” since Facebook removed one of my posts about Project 2025 as being false (it wasn’t), and comparing the slippery way Meta is defining “disinformation” with what I and most of us in the gay community have witnessed from the homophobic right over the decades.

I’ve been doing a takedown of Dick Hafer’s horrifically homophobic comic book “Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle”, and I mentioned in the last post I made in that series being stunned at the outright lies I uncovered, simply by following a cite to its source, which was almost certainly something Paul Cameron published.

You dig up various articles about Paul Cameron and you will read that he was either expelled and/or denounced by The American Psychological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association for his consistent misrepresentations of psychological and sociological research. But to call what he’s doing “misrepresentations” is itself a misrepresentation of sorts.

I’ll admit that use of that word in regards to Cameron had me bamboozled for a long time. You dig into his cites and you expect to see some sly twisting of the data. But that isn’t it. He straight up lies. He pulls facts and figures out of thin air and presents them as though the study he’s citing says what it clearly does not say, and it isn’t even close. He lies. And lies and lies and lies and lies.

I can appreciate that men and women of science don’t like making declarations that are quite so certain. To work in science is to be well aware of all the areas of uncertainty in the data that you have to navigate on your way to a conclusion. But a decent respect for the human status tells us there have to be limits. When the lies are obvious it does none of us any good to soft peddle that fact, let alone what it says about the person(s) dispensing them.

And if we can’t point out the staringly obvious lies, then how do we deal with the slippery conniving falsehoods hiding behind a lot of word salad?

I’m looking at You Meta…USAToday…

Okay…he said he wasn’t a monster, not that he wasn’t crazy. But I like this take on it better.

There’s a story you seem to like telling me. It’s about the psych class you attended and the professor who said that the most important thing to remember is to not let “them” know that you’re crazy because then they’ll take away your freedom. You’ve told me that one so often I have come to expect hearing it from you at least once per encounter. Last time you told it to me you stood up and said it right in my face.

I’m not sure what the point is you’re trying to get across here…whether it’s a personal life lesson you’ve taken to heart, because let’s face it the gang of friends we hung out with back in the day were all a little odd bunch of outcasts…or it’s you think I’m crazy and you’re just warning me to keep it toned down.

Look…I’m an artist. All these years and it still feels pretentious to say so, but you saw my art room. I’m an artist. I don’t have a lot of works to show for it but I’ve lived almost my entire life under a lot of stress and that’s cost me focus. We tend to present as a bit odd, crazy even. I wear my heart on my sleeve. It’s what we do. I admit some of it can be a tad disturbing. But if I kept it bottled up inside of me it would damage me even more. And besides, there is also this quote of Shaw’s I think is good to bring up from time to time whenever this comes up:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man persists in adapting the world to himself, therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Go against the flow and you will get called crazy. Among other things. Until the world catches up with you. Then you’re a visionary. I’m not crazy, I’m just ahead of the curve.

Anyway. If you think you might be crazy don’t worry about it. I worked for a time as a stock clerk in a private psychiatric hospital and I’ve seen crazy. You don’t qualify.

If it’s Me you think is crazy, you should know that I prefer the term neurodivergent. 

Good thing this little life blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic, especially from anyone I ever loved.

I swear it’s the biggest joke or comedy or tragedy or whatever of my life that the one guy out of all the other’s I’ve ever loved, who turned out to possibly be the best match, is the straight guy. He was visiting briefly on his way here and there and in that short time we talked as I’ve never talked with any of the others, and felt a deep soulful synergy as I’ve never felt with any of the others. And I can see clearly now that none of the others were really a good match. We never talked like that. We never shared ourselves like that. And he’s straight.

Maybe that’s not entirely true. I know I talked lots with the others. Strike one and I talked for hours on the phone after we reconnected…for a while…before others began listening in. We would talk for house past closing time at his place of work. But that had to stop too. Strike three and I lived hundreds of miles apart and would talk on the phone for hours between visits. Before cell phones strike three and I would talk so long the batteries on our cordless phones would die and we’d have to switch to the wired landline. The cordless phones were a godsend. We would talk for hours while we each went about our household chores, untethered by a wire, like we were there together. But then it stopped and I got dumped.

It always stopped. I never stopped wondering what was wrong with me.

For a moment, for a few short hours, I had it back with number two. It was wonderful. My heart sang. And he’s straight.

Good thing I’m an atheist, because if I died right now, right this moment, and there actually was an almighty god creator of the universe, I’d spit in its face. But there is no god. So it’s all good.

This year on my 71st birthday, I signed the letter I got from HR at the Space Telescope Science Institute offering me part time work. I am happy to return to the office. No…delighted. I am part of the space program again.

Part time was initially what I wanted to transition into instead of belly flopping into full time retirement, but I was told at the time that it was not a possibility. Then a couple months ago my project manager contacted me and asked if I was interested in coming back part time after all. So whatever the difficulties were they’ve been worked out now and I’m back starting late next month.

I did an interview onsite with my project manager and a co-worker who’d been bumped up the ladder and while I was there people I knew would wave and smile and made me feel like I was home again. Everyone was happy to see me again. It was a great feeling.

I’ll be basically doing what I was doing before for James Webb, but now for the next space telescope, named after Nancy Grace Roman. I’d done some work on that one just prior to retiring so it’ll all be familiar ground. I’ll have to reestablish all my clearances probably, and get all new access cards and security tokens, but that’s all familiar ground too. I’ll have the same benefits and since I’ll be getting a paycheck I can stop feeding from my 401k and just let it grow. Social security and an annuity take care of the gap between a part time paycheck and what I was making before I retired.

At my age I’m pretty sure I don’t have the stamina anymore for full time work but I feel now like I can do part time indefinitely. And this puts some structure back into my life. You retire and you suddenly have all this free time you didn’t before and you think about all the projects you want to work on, but eventually you become a bit aimless and unfocused. And at this age being able to take a nap any time you want is a dangerous thing. I’m single, I live alone, and the solitary life wears you down without a place of work and the human contact that comes with it.

It felt so good to be wanted back.

It was the late 60s and I was just barely a teenager. I loved with mom in an apartment along Parklawn Drive in Rockville. Back then, before they built the Metro system all the way out to Twinbrook you could walk across the railroad tracks to get to places along Rockville Pike. I used to visit Congressional Plaza that way often, walking up to Fishers Lane where the big HEW building was built (later to be called Health Resources and Service Administration) and walk across Twinbrook Parkway to where Fishers turned into a narrow road barely a step above gravel. It went almost right up to the railroad tracks and then took a sharp right and connected to Halpine Drive where there used to be a railroad crossing that was since taken up because it was too dangerous.

I tried to illustrate that often taken walk in Episode 36 of A Coming Out Story…

Not entirely happy with the left hand panel there because it doesn’t quite get it, but I was trying to get it out. I might revisit it later. All of that is mostly gone now since they built the Twinbrook Metro station and a bunch of other commercial buildings in that field to the left. As you can see there used to be some small houses on the right. In one of those houses lived a boy only a few years younger than me, who looked to be severely handicapped.

His legs were visibly withered from unuse. But instead of a wheelchair he moved around laying on his chest on a small board on wheels. I would see him from time to time as I walked down Fishers and wonder why his family didn’t provide him with a wheelchair. Were they too poor or was there some problem with his back also that prevented him from sitting upright. I felt sorry for him, but also confused. Why did it have to be a board? Couldn’t someone do something for him?

Later I noticed that I hadn’t seen him for a while and he never showed up again, at least while I was walking down Fishers. Eventually I concluded that he’d most likely passed away due to whatever medical condition it was that was severe enough it kept him out of a wheelchair and on a board.

But he hadn’t…

I came across this on a Rockville memories Facebook page the other day and I read the Post article and the comments to it hungry to know what had become of that kid I’d seen on the board. There’s more images from that Post article but I won’t put them here. But judging from that Post article, and all the angry comments on that Facebook page, his memory isn’t a very good one.

He seems to have been brutally mean to everyone he crossed paths with, sometimes venting racial insults, sometimes pulling out an “Old Timer” knife and getting into it. If it’s like the one I have carrying that thing on him all the time says quite enough about the person he was. I only used mine for wilderness backpacking because it’s useful as an all around woodsman’s knife. As a personal weapon it’s way overkill. But that was probably the point. He would roll up behind someone and trip their legs then flop on top of them. One of his knife fights earned him 20 stitches. His wheel tracks were often found around the sites of recent burglaries. The police and courts in Rockville knew him so well that they informally named the handicapped access ramp to the courthouse after him. 

He earned a living apparently as an automobile mechanic, and he drove and raced cars by way of a device that allowed him to manipulate the pedals with his hands, though sometimes according to the article it was family and friends working the pedals while he worked the steering wheel. This tells me he could have used a wheelchair if he’d wanted to, but I reckon that board had become a part of his outlaw persona. According to the Post article he’d won several racing trophies. But he had no brakes. Not just emotionally but so it seems not literally either on the night he died, killing another man. He’d been was cited at least once according to the article for driving along the centerline. That night he was driving 100 miles an hour in the wrong lane. He just didn’t care.

That Post article provoked a bunch of letters to the editor complaining about fairly canonising this guy (“a man of the fiercist pride…”) and ignoring the good man he killed. It didn’t have to be. But then, maybe it did. I’m 71 now (as of a couple days ago), and I’ve met people like that…mean, racist, quick to start fights, as willing to steal as earn their money…who were whole in body and rotten to the core in mind and spirit. And also people who were severely handicapped and did great things with their lives. It wasn’t his body, it was him.

I kinda wish I didn’t know the rest of the story. I’ve been thinking back to that time in my life since. It was a time before the Metro, when I would walk everywhere and let my eyes behold horizons that were full of promise, and I still believed like Anne Frank that people are basically good at heart.

Seeing some hits in my website logs on early blog posts, I took a walk down memory lane and re-read a post I made back in November 2008, concerning a small not mormon church in Utah that wanted to place a monument to the Seven Aphorisms of its faith near a Ten Commandments monument in a public park in Pleasant Grove City. The following exchange took place in the Supreme Court according to the New York Times (which I was still reading back then…)

The following is excerpted from that blog post…

“The questioning suggested that the justices were finding it hard to identify a principle that would compel the city to accept the Summum monument without creating havoc in public parks around the nation.

“Would it be all right, Justice John Paul Stevens asked, for the government to exclude the names of gay soldiers from the Vietnam memorial?

“Mr. Joseffer had to be pressed to answer the question about excluding the names of gay soldiers. In the end, he said the First Amendment’s free speech clause, at least, places no limits on whom the government chooses to honor.

“Justice Scalia agreed. “It seems to me the government could disfavor homosexuality,” he said, “just as it could disfavor abortion.”

Dig it. This was back in 2008 but nothing has changed apart from the hate being even worse now than it was then. If the government wants to exclude the names of gay soldiers, who gave their lives for their country, from the Vietnam memorial, that would have been fine with Scalia, and never doubt it, it would be fine with the soulless creep that McConnell made sure would replace Scalia, and all the other Trump/McConnell justices. They would have people like me erased.

I reread this post and it sent a chill through me. A friend who was visiting asked me what I thought of the current political situation. I told him it scared the hell out of me.

So via my blog reader (Feedly) I’m looking at this post from a blog I only follow occasionally, but this particular post interested me when I saw it in the feed. Its author, a rock musician, is writing about posing nude for a rock magazine he’s often written for. Supposedly it was a turnabout is fair play issue, since the magazine often features lovely ladies wearing not very much if anything.

I was curious because throughout my life whenever the opportunity to get naked, at a clothing optional resort for example, I just could not, though I remember once skinny dipping with some friends. In retrospect I think I managed it by mostly staying in the water. That discomfort I have is the punchline in that first episode of A Coming Out Story. I actually had a conversation about this with a friend recently back from Burning Man where the celebrants wander around in various stages of undress if they want.

So I’m reading this blog post because after all these years I am still intensely curious to know how it is that people who can do this manage it. And I came to the following verbiage…

Having been on stage nude several times it was both a no-brainer to ask and a no-brainer that I would consent to doing so for their publication…But swanning around the room nude, very much in my element I had had a thought. Since nothing is quite as disappointing as the nude male…

Huh? Really? Really?? Okay…tell me you’re a heterosexual male without telling me you’re a heterosexual male.

I kinda skimmed the rest of that blog post, but I think I get a better sense of my own reticence now.

Some people journal. I Daytimer.

When I started getting actual W2 work as a contract software developer (as opposed to freelance work for pay I did initially for one of the GLIB admins) I began keeping a work diary on planner pages I initially bought at an office supply store. Those are the small three ring binders at the left. One of those is just a bunch of free form notes about my work on the BGE Home work measurement system.

Later I discovered DayTimer’s 24 hour two page per day planner and that worked for me LOTS better than the Franklin-Covey business day only Planner (because Highly Effective People only work business hours I reckon). A software engineer’s work is almost never just nine to five, and there were times while I was working on James Webb that I pulled some overnights.

(Sometime around then I started a New Yorker-ish cartoon I was going to submit to Christopher Street showing two guys on a first date sitting across the table from each other at an outdoor bistro, and one is saying to the other “I’m sorry hon, but it won’t work. You’re Franklin Planner and I’m DayTimer” But then Christopher Street went belly up…)

Then, just before I retired, DayTimer got bought out and the 24 hour two page per day desktop refills became lost in the mists of time and the new company’s business model. I was really PO’d, but eventually accepted an almost as good but only barely good enough substitute. I keep complaining about it on the new company’s website. They’re actually Still making the pocket size wirebound 24 hour two page per day planners but those don’t work for me.

Anyway…I keep my planners because I’m weird about things like that, and sometimes you need to have that paper time machine.

So I’m trying to tidy things up at Casa del Garrett (east) in anticipation of a very dear friend coming for a short visit, and I wanted to organize these a bit better. What you see in this photo compasses my entire working life as a (W2) software developer/engineer.

You can see where I was storing them on their sides under the bookshelves and dust accumulated. I’ll be tackling that with the Kirby later.

I was browsing through the old pre-Daytimer entries when I found the day in 1994 I put a deposit down on the last and best apartment I ever lived in, and a bunch of work I did for BGE Home when they were transitioning away from paper timesheets to a mobile data terminal system. There are repeated entries about a batch editor that I had to think about for a moment to remember what exactly it did (it processed the field tech’s digital timesheets to make them ready for ingest into the work measurement system). I see in there a problem I had to address when timesheets crossed day boundaries and the system wasn’t picking up on the fact that the tech was still on overtime after midnight.

One little corner of my life…

No need to wonder why…it’s right there in front of you…

Something to keep in mind as we get closer to election day here in the land of the free and the home of the brave…

(via Lawyers, Guns and Money blog)

Okay…how about…

I didn’t notice the box was delivered to my office by mistake until I opened it and saw four glass quart bottles of liquid lithium inside.

Or…

Shortly after I drove off he took a can of soda out of his jacket and I realized we’d almost been shot.

And then there’s…

Scared the daylights out of mom when I told her my bedroom was full of wet black birds.

This is kinda fun…

It sounded like the voices of the old Navajo gods talking past me, having a conversation in the air around me, in a language I could not understand.

Anyone wanting to play along just click on the React! link below…

I’ve had trouble with squirrels at my bird feeders ever since I bought the house and started putting the feeders out. I’ve had to relocate them multiple times to try and find a location where the squirrels couldn’t jump from the trees to the feeders, all to no avail. So I started buying “squirrel proof” feeders. The only one I found to be effective is the Yankee Flipper from Droll Yankees. But I like putting suet feeders out for the woodpeckers too, and the squirrels would get at those. So I started using hot pepper suet. The pepper has no effect on the birds but the squirrels take one bite and run off.

It was getting tiresome. So I decided to bribe them. I put out a corn cob squirrel feeder and once they figured it out the squirrels were all over it. And that seems to have worked. I’ve seen no more attempts at the bird feeders.

So just now I was watching a squirrel going away at one of the corn cobs and thinking to myself it’s getting fat and happy. But no. An instant later the little dickens starts burying the kernels in the ground nearby, like they were acorns or something. I guess its a reflex with them when there’s a surplus.

So maybe next year I get corn growing in the front yard.

Yesterday afternoon I took a walk to The Space Telescope Science Institute building on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus to be interviewed for a job there. I haven’t done that since the week before Thanksgiving in 1998.

A few months ago the project manager I had when I retired asked if I would be interested in returning to the Institute to work part time. I told him yes, definitely. That was the way I wanted to retire initially; not belly flop into full time retirement but gradually, starting with part time work. But at the time my project manager said that part time work wasn’t a possibility. So I retired full time. Now it seemed it was on the table and yes I was still interested. Very much so.

So then he and I talked on several occasions about my coming back part time. We would meet for lunch or dinner at one of the local eateries. He indicated that part time work was something they were working on setting up and was I still interested. It would be, he said, for the same work I was doing before I retired, but mostly for the next generation space telescope, named for Nancy Grace Roman. I’d already done some initial work on that project, coding a progress report in python, that was to be sent to NASA.

For a while I heard nothing, and began to wonder if the idea had been shelved. Then about a month ago I was informed that a part time position I could apply for was being posted, doing basically the same work I had been doing when I retired. There was also a full time position of the same kind opening. So I applied for the part time position.

About a week ago I got a call from HR to schedule an interview with my project manager and another co-worker who’d been bumped up the chain. That was the interview I had yesterday. It went very well.

They still have some people to talk to, but I think I’m in a good place to get the position because it’s doing stuff I was involved in when I retired, so I won’t need any training on any of it, and a lot of the work will be tweaking code and systems that I either wrote myself or helped to build. I know the culture at the Institute and how things are generally done. I think I’m a pretty good fit.

But nothing is final yet, and so I was told, most likely won’t be until possibly end of September to mid October. But this felt good. In fact, I’ve felt more alive since the interview than I ever have since retiring.

Retirement has a lot of perks, but I’ve found it to be very confusing too. There is always housework to do, and I can travel more freely. But some days I just don’t know what to do with myself and at this age that isn’t good. I don’t think I have the stamina for full time anymore, but part time is good. They say it’s a permanent, not temporary position. I could see working it all through my 70s if the position stays viable that long (space work is always at the mercy of the Federal budget) and my health stays good. Maybe even longer. And I keep getting excellent reviews from my cardiologist so there’s that.

It’ll mean no more months long stays in California anymore, but I’ll still get vacation time so it’ll be more like it was all along when I was working. And supporting two different living spaces on two different coasts was starting to stress my budget. It’ll also mean I can stop feeding from my 401k and just let it grow which is Very Good. They’ll be making contributions to the 401k again and I can make my own as well. And I’ll still be getting social security and my annuity to make up the difference between a full and park time check.

And I can enjoy a morning walk to the office again, weather permitting. Not having to deal with commuter traffic was one of the best perks I worked out for myself by getting this house so close to Hopkins.

So we’ll see. I think I’m a pretty good fit for the position but I’m not going to count my chickens before they’re hatched. What I’d really like is to be working on Space Stuff again, and having that purpose and structure back in my life. It was a great trip. I could take it again.