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.

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

Why? Why on Earth?? When I have so many other things around the house that need doing.

So I’ve been doing some “downsizing” here at Casa del Garrett, mostly getting off of old computer manuals and documentation I will never need again (these go to recycling so at least the paper can have another life), plus some other items in my extensive (not kidding) library that I will probably never read again, and don’t seem likely to ever be reference material. I’m still trying to find a second hand book repository for these.

It began when I had to buy a new furnace/AC unit and had to move around a bunch of furniture for the contractors to work. That gave me an opportunity to clean in places that are otherwise hard to get at. In addition I had a duct cleaning done, which had probably not ever been done since the house was built, judging by what the duct cleaners found. So I had to move around a bunch of other furniture too. 

Before putting it all back, I decided to use the opportunity to do a little downsizing. The fact is I have too much Stuff. I’ve lived in this house since the summer of 2001, but moved into it with a lot of stuff I’d accumulated over the years. Much of that, like my hand and power tools, and all my spare parts, proved to be even more useful when owning a house than they were when I was living in apartments and the basement of friends. But I’d also managed to collect a pretty large library of books and LPs…a fact the movers probably didn’t appreciate since both are very heavy when boxed up. And I was already loaded with computer stuff, since I was by then making a living as a software engineer, which was what enabled me to buy a house of my own in the first place. And before that I was into computers partly as hobby, partly as a means of communicating over a modem. When I discovered modems and BBSs I dove into it. That led me to volunteering on a local gay BBS, and that led me to my first jobs writing software.

Which brings me to this. It’s an IBM PS2 Model 80…the top of the PS2 line once upon a time. My first big W-2 software gig was at Baltimore Gas and Electric Home Products and Services, which was an exclusively IBM worksite The big iron downtown was all IBM, and in the offices where I worked everything on the desktops was a PS2…usually a model 50. or 55. So when I came across this model 80 for sale at a computer flea market years later, I was already pretty familiar with them. 

Poor thing has just sat in my basement storage area for over a decade, beside an Apple PowerMac G5 I bought for the art room and eventually replaced with an Intel based Mac Pro. As I began deciding what to downsize around here, I looked at both of those computers and the space they were taking up. It seemed ridiculous to just be holding onto them when I knew I’d probably never need either one ever again. But I didn’t want to just take them to the city recycling place. This wasn’t like giving up an old VCR or TV…both those machines were the top of their lines back in the day. I knew some collector would want them both. But how to find them good homes? 

And the more I thought about the PS2, the more I remembered the days of DOS and how the advent of the personal computer seemed to open up fantastic new worlds…worlds which, surprisingly I found I could navigate pretty easily. I didn’t have a college degree in computer science and wasn’t likely to ever get one since I had no money for college. No matter in retrospect. Computer logic just seemed to click with me.

Long before that first job, and those first days volunteering at G.L.I.B. (The Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau) I discovered I could build my own IBM PC compatible from parts. There was no way I could afford an actual IBM PC, but I could buy a part here and a part there until I had all that I needed. I remember after I built that first IBM compatible and got it to boot, just sitting on the edge of my bed staring at the monitor with it’s 640k memory test still on the screen and an ‘A’ prompt (that first computer initially booted PC-DOS from a floppy disk) and looking at the blinking caret in something like awe. Until that moment my computer was a little Commodore C64. Now I had a Serious computer…and IBM no less. Well…a pretty good copy since it booted genuine PC-DOS, not the more generic MS-DOS. This was no toy. This was International Business Machines serious business. I sat there for I don’t know how long stunned at the awesome computing power I suddenly had at my control. What have I got myself into…

Well…what I’d got myself into, though I didn’t know it then, was a career that would pull me out of near poverty and eventually into the space program. Walt Disney was fond of saying his success story all began with a mouse. Well mine began with a boot to DOS. And I rode it all the way to the James Webb Space Telescope Mission Operations Center and Integration and Test Lab.

So that PS2 machine had more of my life wrapped up in it than the PowerMac by light years. I began to wonder if I could just find a place for it in my den where I could work on it again as a kind of hobby.

I tried booting it the other day and it threw a couple error codes that I needed to look up, but I was pretty sure what they were. The PS2s need a small internal battery to maintain their configuration memory and the one in mine had likely died many years ago. It’s a simple fix…replace the battery and boot with the configuration disk and restore your configuration. But while Googling the error codes I discovered there are hobbyists out there who love to work on these machines. And they know where you can get parts. So that notion of keeping the PS2 as a hobby became lots more attractive.

So I got it running again and I’m just going to let it run for now and see what I can make of it. See if I can give the PowerMac to a good home later. 

And try to get all my other stuff around the house done. I still have a lot of Stuff to sort through and decide what to get off of, and what to keep. It’s going to take weeks, but I’m 70, on retirement income, and I need to simplify. 

I’m still decompressing a bit from Valentine’s Day, which isn’t helped any by it coming in the dead of winter here in central Maryland. So I thought I’d just repost a little something I’d blogged about many years ago…

This is from an old Polaroid a friend probably snapped of me while I was sitting on the balcony of the apartment in Rockville (now North Bethesda!) mom and I lived in during the 60s/70s/80s. I would have been in my twenties. I would have still had the Pinto and probably was working at the Best Products just on the other side of the fence between them and the apartments.

I can tell a lot about the timeframe that this was taken because it has to be sometime in the mid 70s, before that awful couple years I wrote about yesterday. It’s in my face. I look at this and see someone still comfortable in the life he has, confident that even better times are just around the corner. A boyfriend. A good job that paid well (I was going to be a newspaper photographer). A place of my own. Everything was still possible.

As to why I had it taken…I’m not sure. This would have been before the microcomputer days, let alone the Internet, so it wouldn’t have been to post to an online profile. This is a Polaroid, I had no scanner then, and getting copies off a Polaroid wasn’t simple. So this was a one-off. I think I had it taken just to have a couple of me that I actually liked. There are a few other poses in the set but I liked this one best. Which explains why it’s a Polaroid: I could look over each one and decide if I needed another.

The problem was always that I didn’t have many of myself that I liked. By then I was well aware that I wasn’t very good looking, but every now and then I saw a good photo of me so I wasn’t overly concerned about my looks at that age. My teeth were very crooked though, and I was extremely self conscious about that. In every photo of me from that period I’m always smiling with my mouth closed. You almost can’t see the smile here, but it’s there in the corner of my mouth. That problem wouldn’t get fixed until I was in my thirties when a friend kindly financed some dental work for me and pointed me to a super good dentist.

This image is from a time before the Internet, personal computers, cable TV, and cell phones let alone smartphones. I’m pretty sure this was before 1977 and Anita Bryant’s rampage on gay civil rights in Dade County Florida. I had listen to my shortwave radio to get the result of the vote in Dade County because none of the mainstream network news companies bothered to cover it until much later. News for and about gay Americans was not fit to print in those days. If I wanted that news, and I didn’t want to drive into DC to the Lambda Rising bookstore, I had to go to a seedy adult bookstore in Wheaton and walk past racks of pretty hard core heterosexual pornography to get a copy of the Washington Blade and The Advocate. The subway wouldn’t be built out beyond the beltway in Montgomery County until 1978 when the station at Silver Spring opened. After that I could drive into Silver Spring and hop on the Metro to get to DuPont Circle and Lambda Rising. When the Twinbook Metro station opened in 1984 I could just walk from the apartment to the subway and it was a straight shot down the red line to DuPont Circle and back.

I was so happy not to have to go past those heterosexual porn magazines ever again. I mean…okay…whatever floats your boat. But…jeeze… And yet, in many quarters of American culture, not just the pulpit thumping churches, but also mainstream news media, TV, movies, and magazines, the youngster you see in this photo was regarded as a deviant threat to American society, family values, and civilization itself.

That is the world you are seeing in this image. TVs still had vacuum tubes, telephones had a wire connecting them to the wall, you got your news from the morning or afternoon newspaper, or the nightly network news broadcasts around dinnertime. Am radio played mostly music or sports, music came on vinyl LPs or cassettes, big box department stores were still a thing, and bookstores and newstands were everywhere, but you couldn’t get any gay publications in them because gay people like the kid in this photo were almost universally regarded with contempt and loathing. But the kid you see there was still pretty confident of his future. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to meet tomorrow. He never found a boyfriend.

Some time ago I read an article about safety regulations in some profession, I forget now which. A trainee sat in on a class with an instructor who would go over OSHA law as it applied to them. He began his class by telling the trainees that every regulation he was about to teach them was written in blood.

I spent just over three decades of my life as a software engineer. You could say that my job didn’t involve any hazards to my own health. True enough, I sat at a desk staring into a computer screen trying to mentally picture the algorithms I was creating in program code. Not very dangerous stuff. To me. Unless you count all the alcohol and nicotine I consumed to manage stress (I worked at an IT firm back when I was a youngster as the mailroom clerk, and a programmer there called his inevitable pack of cigarettes his “programmer’s candy”). But what I did was potentially extremely dangerous to others if my program didn’t do what it was supposed to.

One of the contracts I worked on ages ago, before I came to Space Telescope, was for a large medical diagnostic company. I had a piece of their new diagnostic machine’s reporting system. The machine it was hooked up to would identify specimens that had whatever disease they were testing for just then, and the report terminal would keep a database of results and generate reports for individual patients and disease rate of spread in a population for the CDC. The federal government imposed requirements on the software process for medical equipment, including allowable software tools, multiple code reviews, and independent verification of requirements as the software matured. Because lives were at stake.

I wasn’t subjected to that level of oversight at Space Telescope because I was not involved in creating any of the actual flight software. I did business applications mostly, science needs business applications too, although I could also build you a PC if you point me at a source of parts for one. I attended meetings, issued progress reports on my work, discussed requirements with managers. Those I gave my output to, both during development and when it was in production, were able to verify that my software was correct or not from their own experience with their numbers.

I would occasionally get a call from one about something missing from one of their spreadsheets. I was almost always able to trace that to the data not yet being entered in the “problem report” or “discrepancy report” databases. I could re-run the program for them when that was fixed. But now and then I found a bug in my software that I had to fix that was making the numbers wrong. That was unlikely to get anyone killed, but it could have given management a false idea of progress being made. So it was still very important to get it right.

At the major public utility I once contracted for, I worked with an accountant who Knew His Numbers. He could look at my output and go…”ah…you know…I don’t think you’re picking up…” and he would refer to some number bucket, one of many such, that I needed the report to digest. And I would go to my code and look and sure enough I wasn’t doing that. So I’d fix it and run the output by him again. I loved it. He didn’t know software but he knew his numbers, and I didn’t know his numbers but I knew my software and it was a perfect working relationship. He was my independent verification.

I can’t stress enough how important independent verification of your software is. The more mission critical it is, the more thorough that must be. It gets to a point, and I lived this while working on that medical diagnostic machine report, where periodically a group of other programmers get together with you and beat up on your code. It can be brutal. Ask me how I know. But when it’s that important, like with medical diagnostic software, it Must happen. Lives actually are at stake.

But beyond bugs, there’s also making sure both you and your users understand what the software is, and is not doing. Most of the business software I wrote wasn’t about life and death situations, or so you’d think. But that’s not always cut and dried. Like the one at my first big contract at a major public utility where I was tasked with designing and coding a report that would tell management how much revenue each of their field technicians were generating and at what cost. My report uncovered such a massive subsidy of one department by another such that, so I was told later, jaws dropped in the boardroom. Annapolis was Not going to be happy.

Then came the layoffs. I heard later that one of those laid off had a sudden heart attack at his dinner table in front of his wife and kids and died. You could say it was management policies that did that…they knew they were putting money where it did not belong, that they were subsidizing something they weren’t supposed to, but didn’t realize how badly it had become until my report waved it in their faces. So they did what management often does, they just started laying people off to make the money stop going in that direction.

They did that. But…my software did that. Management wasn’t just using my report to tell them where the money was coming from and going to, they were using it to tell them who their best workers were. And I still deeply regret it. I wonder if I couldn’t have done more in meetings to remind them a computer program can’t substitute for human judgment. There was a union that was supposed to be protecting the workers from that sort of thing. You could say none of that was on my plate. But my hands were in it too. He was a nice guy. Always had a friendly smile for me.

I never doubted after that, how dangerous my tools could be.

The procedures and best practices of software development have evolved over the decades from big iron to little silicone for a reason. Maybe they aren’t all written in blood, but they are all at least written in sweat and tears. They say mistakes are human but to really foul things up takes a computer. But no. What it takes, is thinking you can get away with bending the rules. Maybe just this once. Because we have a deadline. Because we have to get it out the door. Because there isn’t enough money for best practices. Just this once. And then the next once. And the next once. And the next. And the next. Take off your engineer’s hat and put on your management hat.

There are reasons for all those practices and procedures. And especially, there are reasons developers do not test their own software before putting it into production. Yes, do your unit testing, but then you hand it off the testers. Testers are your friends. They keep crap from going out the door that worked fine for you but that’s because you were running it on a workstation with all your software tools on it, and the test data you cobbled together that you always use. Out in the wild it will be different.

The physicist Richard Feynman once said (paraphrasing) that science is a way of trying not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. I think that’s a good general rule for software testing too. Testing is a way of trying not to fool yourself. And since you are the easiest person to fool, because you wrote it, you hand it off to an independent tester. Or put another way: beware the result you wanted because you had a deadline. It needs looking at by someone with no stake in the outcome, other than honestly reporting did it pass or fail.

There are reasons for the procedures and best practices of software engineering. They need to be respected. Not for the sake of tradition, but for the sake of not screwing things up badly. Because we are human and it takes a human to screw things up badly. But we can be aware of this, and build our guardrails accordingly. We do that, and we are capable of wonderful, marvelous things.

Why am I telling you all this? Just venting. I’m old and cranky is all.

Nate Postlethwait, who I follow on Facebook, writes about healing from childhood trauma, but I find that much of what he says makes sense from the point of view of gay adults like myself, who had to endure decades of emotional abuse starting in adolescence, when our sexual orientation began to make itself insistent. You can argue that we started feeling it even before then, when it was only a half awareness that we were different somehow, in some really really bad way, that we had to hide from the world, and ourselves…

A Coming Out Story – Episode 18, What I Learned About Homosexuality Part 2

…but it was when those first crushes happened that you really knew you weren’t just different, you were an abomination. And back when I came of age, the abuse came from every direction. From the pulpit of course, but also from the TV, the newspapers, the magazines…

A Coming Out Story – Intermission – What I Learned About Homosexuality. . . And Myself (Part 2)

And it did its work on you, even if, like me, you came out to yourself in the magic of first love. I was 17 and I thought it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. And I never felt a shred of shame about it. He was beautiful. He was decent. He was the sort of guy I could have brought home to mom in a better world, knowing she would take to him instantly and approve of our relationship. But it wasn’t that better world that I came of age in.

In my early twenties I went to my first Pride Day in downtown Washington DC’s gay neighborhood. Anita Bryant had waged a war on a simple non-discrimination law protecting gay people by throwing every filthy lie about us she could think up and it went down in flames. I was angry, and motivated to activism. I swore I would not allow the homophobia I just witnessed to touch my heart.

But it did. I’m 70 now. I will die having walked an entire adult life without finding love, with the scars all over my heart. Proud though I was, I came of age in a dating pool that was mostly terrified, or in denial. For a while I would post stories every Valentine’s Day about being a young gay man trying to find love in a culture that threw contempt and hate at us from every direction…

The magnitude of what was taken from us, so righteous people could make their stepping stones to heaven out of the pieces of our hearts, is nearly impossible to grasp.

And I have tried for decades to understand that mindset. The books I have read. The studies I have examined. The conversations I’ve sat in on. And I’m thinking, What’s Wrong With Them??? No, seriously, what the Hell Is Wrong With Them??? Read about Christian Identity, the religion of the Neo-Nazis sometime and see if it doesn’t make your head spin.

I have never found any answers I could be satisfied with. But now at last, at the doorstep to 70, I think maybe I can just let go of the question.

Postlethwait put this up on his Facebook page today…

It feels so much like just throwing up your hands and giving up, and that runs against every inner instinct I have. I’m a geek…I have to know. It might even be hard wired into me like my sexual orientation. But I’ve done my best and all I have to show for it is a better understanding of how bigotry and hate embodies in people, how culture shapes the forms it takes, how to recognize the bedrock of hate in mass movements though they may claim a landscape of heritage, faith, and moral tradition. All that is good, but the why of it is as elusive as ever.

It can be that. The physicist Richard Feynman once wrote…

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”

There’s a scene in the TV miniseries, The Winds of War, I forget which episode now but it taps me on the shoulder at times, with Pug in FDR’s rail car and he’s talking to the president about what he’s seen and experienced in Germany. FDR says wistfully that Germans are a hard people to understand, and Pug replies “The only thing we need to know about the Germans is how to beat them.” Now, that’s a military man talking and I can appreciate that from his vantage point that’s really all he needs to know about a potential enemy. But FDR would want to know more because his job isn’t as focused on the one thing that Pug’s is. Still, it’s a good line. I’ve thought of it often during the course of this civil rights struggle.

The only thing we need to know about bigots is how to beat them. You will never make sense of their hate because there is no sense to it.

Activism can be a way of not dealing with your personal pain, even as you acknowledge it. And prejudice taught me there was something wrong with me. Despite all the activism and all the pride, deep down inside I believed it.

I’m my father’s son. I’m the product of a broken home. An only child. Weird. Not masculine enough. Takes excessive interest in personal art projects, as my first grade teacher wrote in my file. The kid that uses big words. Introverted. Homosexual. Ugly. No fashion sense. 

This is how being bullied, not just by the other kids but by adults in your life, corrodes your sense of self. There was nothing wrong with me. I was a kid, finding his way in the world like all the others. And if you’re reading this and you feel it too, then know that there was nothing wrong with you.

I’m my father’s son, but I am not my father. I was raised by a single divorced mother but she loved me and set a good example for me and I’ll have the so-called broken home I grew up in over every traditional family I’ve ever witnessed that can’t stop fighting with each other. Only children aren’t the selfish self centered stereotypes we’re made to be; self motivation and independence are our strengths. We make friends and fall in love like everyone else, but we are almost preternaturally good at keeping ourselves company and we are not going to beg for your attention. Gay people experience the joys of love and desire like anyone else. Introverts just need a little more quiet time than others is all; we get that time to recharge and we’re fine. Ugly is as much a slur as any racist slur against the person within because of how they look. There is no such thing as having excessive interest in your art because art is the joy of being alive. I didn’t use big words so much as I had a big vocabulary because I read so much, and that’s a good thing because reading grows you from inside. If there is no such thing as having an excessive interest in your art, there is also no such thing as having too many books. And I have lived long enough now to see fashions come and go and all you need is to be good with what you see in the mirror.

Sensibility. For when senselessness rears it’s stupid head. You don’t need to know the why of it. There is nothing wrong with you. Do not wear someone else’s labels. It’s not good fashion.

There is no growing up, I used to say, there is only growing. Then today I came across this comment I made in a Facebook post about technological change:

Something I’ve noticed: progress makes some people feel old and others always feeling young…

…because you’re always having to learn new sh*t. All this time I’ve been attributing that constant twenty-ish mindset I have to a state of arrested development and that’s not it. It isn’t that I never grew up, it’s that I never got tired of growing up.

Never get tired of growing up.

The Telescope of Christmas Past…

The Telescope of Christmas Present…

The Telescope of Christmas Yet To Come…

This coming February will be my first retirement anniversary. It’s been a life. I may not live to see everything James Webb discovers, but I had a small hand in it, so in some sense I will be there too.

Regarding the previous blog post…here’s one of me after the dental work…

This would have been taken while I was living in a friend’s basement apartment in Rockville for passport I thought to get as a second form of ID since I didn’t have any credit cards. I didn’t get the passport after all, but I kept this because I liked it. Finally I had a smile I could wear openly and happily.

There’s two classmate friends in my life that I owe bigtime: one for letting me have a place to live in his house when I was unemployed and had no idea what to do with my life. The other for giving me a smile again.

Throwback Thursday (are we still doing that?). This is from an old Polaroid a friend probably snapped of me while I was sitting on the balcony of the apartment in Rockville (now North Bethesda!) mom and I lived in during the 60s/70s/80s. I would have been in my twenties. I would have still had the Pinto and probably was working at the Best Products just on the other side of the fence between them and the apartments.

I can tell a lot about the timeframe that this was taken because it has to be sometime in the mid 70s, before that awful couple years I wrote about yesterday. It’s in my face. I look at this and see someone still comfortable in the life he has, confident that even better times are just around the corner. A boyfriend. A good job that paid well (I was going to be a newspaper photographer). A place of my own. Everything was still possible.

As to why I had it taken…I’m not sure. This would have been before the microcomputer days, let alone the Internet, so it wouldn’t have been to post to an online profile. This is a Polaroid, I had no scanner then, and getting copies off a Polaroid wasn’t simple. So this was a one-off. I think I had it taken just to have a couple of me that I actually liked. There are a few other poses in the set but I liked this one best. Which explains why it’s a Polaroid: I could look over each one and decide if I needed another.

The problem was always that I didn’t have many of myself that I liked. By then I was well aware that I wasn’t very good looking, but every now and then I saw a good photo of me so I wasn’t overly concerned about my looks at that age. My teeth were very crooked though, and I was extremely self conscious about that. In every photo of me from that period I’m always smiling with my mouth closed. You almost can’t see the smile here, but it’s there in the corner of my mouth. That problem wouldn’t get fixed until I was in my thirties when a friend kindly financed some dental work for me and pointed me to a super good dentist.

This image is from a time before the Internet, personal computers, cable TV, and cell phones let alone smartphones. I’m pretty sure this was before 1977 and Anita Bryant’s rampage on gay civil rights in Dade County Florida. I had listen to my shortwave radio to get the result of the vote in Dade County because none of the mainstream network news companies bothered to cover it until much later. News for and about gay Americans was not fit to print in those days. If I wanted that news, and I didn’t want to drive into DC to the Lambda Rising bookstore, I had to go to a seedy adult bookstore in Wheaton and walk past racks of pretty hard core heterosexual pornography to get a copy of the Washington Blade and The Advocate. The subway wouldn’t be built out beyond the beltway in Montgomery County until 1978 when the station at Silver Spring opened. After that I could drive into Silver Spring and hop on the Metro to get to DuPont Circle and Lambda Rising. When the Twinbook Metro station opened in 1984 I could just walk from the apartment to the subway and it was a straight shot down the red line to DuPont Circle and back.

I was so happy not to have to go past those heterosexual porn magazines ever again. I mean…okay…whatever floats your boat. But…jeeze… And yet, in many quarters of American culture, not just the pulpit thumping churches, but also mainstream news media, TV, movies, and magazines, the youngster you see in this photo was regarded as a deviant threat to American society, family values, and civilization itself.

That is the world you are seeing in this image. TVs still had vacuum tubes, telephones had a wire connecting them to the wall, you got your news from the morning or afternoon newspaper, or the nightly network news broadcasts around dinnertime. Am radio played mostly music or sports, music came on vinyl LPs or cassettes, big box department stores were still a thing, and bookstores and newstands were everywhere, but you couldn’t get any gay publications in them because gay people like the kid in this photo were almost universally regarded with contempt and loathing. But the kid you see there was still pretty confident of his future. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to meet tomorrow. He never found a boyfriend.

I was unemployed for an extended period of time back in the early 1980s and I remember how badly that mucked with my wake/sleep patterns. There was probably a marginal case of depression along with it that kept me from being more energetic about finding work. I did manage some odds and ends…usually Manpower type temp work for a day or so. But mostly I just sat in my room listening to music or reading. And smoking pot. All night long.

By day, if I was awake, which usually I wasn’t until mid-afternoon, I would take long winding walks around my neighborhood, or along the railroad tracks. Then it was back into my room, door closed, to smoke some pot and zone out with some music or a book. Oddly, or not given we were Baptists, mom was actually very very glad it wasn’t alcohol and said nothing about the pot. On my walks I’d often smoke a cigar because even then I didn’t want cigar smoke in the house. I knew mom would have a fit about tobacco. This was before I had my first computer.

I remember how it distressed mom to see me so aimless and sad all the time, but from my own point of view I don’t think I’ve ever been down in that dark pit so deep since. I’d broken up badly with Strike Two (he’s straight so it wasn’t his fault), and I was thinking that this was going to be my life now (romance wise it was…but that’s not what I’m thinking about now. Or the pot). It was my first extended period of time where the clock didn’t matter. And it royally screwed up my sleep/wake patterns.

I can see it happening again. The difference now though is I am at least as active as I was when I had a full time job. I’m not just sitting around the house listening to music, and last California visit I discovered, to my regret, that pot does unpleasant things to my head now so I can’t indulge like I was hoping to after retirement. Maybe it’s, as they say, the stuff is stronger now. Or it’s I’m old and my brain is full enough of a lifetime of art kid strangeness to take in any more strange. Or both. Maybe. I’ve read my Don Juan. I know what you have to do when the ally turns on you. I think I’m finally past that ingrained Baptist fear of things that make you feel good, but not so post Baptist that I can’t grimly accept the pleasures of the past are no longer mine. Life, veil of tears, and all that. Dust we were and dust we shall be…so on and so forth. Just leave it alone.

Now it’s I go to bed super early, like 7 or 8, wake around midnight, do housework, laundry, dishes, work on a project, blog, whatever, until sleep beckons around 4 or 5, then wake up again around 10 and lay in bed reading social media until nearly 11. I was taking stock and thinking that I’m not living a full day when I realized that, well, yes I am, just in random fragments.

It’s just…spooky…how it’s beginning to feel like that time back in the early 1980s when I was unemployed for like…a couple years I think it was. This was also when I stopped doing art. Somehow I roused myself out of it. I think it was I got hooked on the personal computer. When I saw my first one it grabbed my attention somehow and then I had something for my brain to engage with, that didn’t have to touch my feelings. First it was I wanted to tune in to those mysterious shortwave teletype signals. That segued into online computer bulletin boards and my first real connection with the gay community. And from there I learned programming, networking, got work, built up a resume…

You’d have had to see that kid back in the 1980s all alone nights in his room zoned out without any prospects at all to appreciate how different his life became. And how spooky it feels now, to experience that same mucking up of my sleep/wake patterns I did back then. Good thing having a house is like having a second job.

I still need to buy frames for these.

23 years and a few weeks working for the Space Telescope Science Institute, a year and a few weeks as a contractor, 22 and a couple months as staff, I managed to get a few awards and recognitions for the work I did. Plus some photos with the astronauts. At the moment I’m not sure I have enough space on my den wall for all this. But I will make some if I have to. Maybe take down the dry board and the cork board and put them on the back of the door to my den.

The little DayTimer page there at the bottom is where it all starts. Where everything that was wondrous and wonderful began. Although I would have told you I was doing pretty good already then. No love life, I would never have a love life, but I had work that I thoroughly enjoyed and which made me a good living. I had an apartment of my own. I was able to buy a new car. I was living the life. Mostly. Somewhat. I don’t think Keith had dumped me just yet.

When I became a contract programmer I started using the 24 hour day DayTimer pages as a work diary. The page in this photograph is Monday November 16, 1998…the day my life changed. That was when a Maxim Group recruiter named Rodney cold called me at the contract I was working, and asks if I was interested in some part time side work for the place that operated the Hubble Space Telescope. There in the section for Phone Calls is the number he gave me to call Lee Hurt at the Space Telescope Science Institute. I see that I worked until 6PM that day, with a half hour break for lunch at 12:30.

Rodnay didn’t have to ask me if I wanted that work twice, and would not have even had I not been upset that the work I was doing was not the work I was promised.

I’d been told I would be creating a system to migrate all the local databases of the regional insurance companies that the big one I would be working for had gobbled up into the big one’s master database. It sounded great. But when I got there I found out that system had already been written and put into production and I would just be doing some bug fixing and maintenance.

The guy who had written it had converted to a very conservative form of Mennonite and was renouncing the use of computer technology. He was only staying on long enough to hand the system over to me. When I took a look at the code I was horrified.

It was written in Visual Basic. Okay…I was one of Maxim’s VB experts…I actually taught classes in it for them by then. No problem right? Well…Yeah…this guy had written the backend engine in a very primordial form of Basic…which VB would allow but….why would you? It was awful. His code was full of GOTOs and GOSUBs and the variables were all global and yes, mostly declared at first use, which sadly at the time VB would allow unless you put “Option Explicit” at the beginning of your code. He used friggin’ Numbers for the labels his GOTOs and GOSUBs were supposed to go…I guess to make it look like the Basic of old. His variables were weirdly named. It was excruciatingly difficult to read, let alone follow the program flow.

The only thing I can think is VB was mandated by corporate, and like a lot of degreed programmers he had no respect for what Microsoft had done with it and very little grasp of how to program in it other than everything he’d heard from CompSci professors who hated it. Microsoft gave the language structure and scoping since DOS days. I hadn’t needed to deal with line numbers since the Commodore C64 I started with. I had subroutines and functions (MS Basic had both). I could scope variables tightly and pass them either by value or by reference…although under the hood it was always by reference…when you passed by value a temporary variable was created and the reference to that was passed. It just acted like you were passing by value. And you didn’t have pointers, you had pointers to a descriptor which had the actual pointer in it. You needed to know that distinction if you were doing mixed language programming and needed to throw a pointer somewhere.

The only fly in the ointment was error handling, because then it was On Error Goto, which everyone hated until Dot Net came along and gave us Try-Catch blocks. But you could finesse it with a centralized error handler and some fancy resume 0 resume next footwork.

Anyway…I was appalled at what I saw in there and was immediately primed to get the hell out. The codebase was a rat’s nest. Maintaining it would be a nightmare. Everything I had written up to that point had, in some sense, User Interface stuff, Processing stuff, and Backend stuff, as isolated as I could make them. Even before I heard the term three tier programming and saw it modeled. I considered it self defense. What I saw had everything mushed together in five huge Dot BAS files that had no logical rhyme or reason to them. It was the worst Basic code I’d ever laid eyes on, and by that time in my career I’d seen some whoppers.

Then Rodney called. It was like the gods saw my anguish and decided to cut me a break. He gave me the number of Lee Hurt at STScI and I called and it turned out to be full time work and I begged Maxim to let me out of the contract I was working and go over there. I’m not doing anything creative here I cried. I’m being asked to maintain code I don’t even want to touch without rubber gloves. Every time I open one of those Dot BAS files I feel like I’m walking into the Addams Family house. Get Me That Space Telescope Job!!!!

When the contract boss, who was listening to that conversation just outside the conference room door where I’d gone for privacy, heard all that he gave me the boot anyway and I was free to go.

So I interviewed with Lee Hurt, and then her supervisor at the time, Mark Kyprianou. And I was in. Did my first work there Thanksgiving week. A little over a year later they asked me to come on board as staff and for the next 22 years and 2 months I made the Institute and the Hopkins campus home. It was like the myths say about having to walk through Hell before you get to Heaven.

I’m going to need to look for new signs of summer’s end now, since I’m not always walking around campus anymore…

That day eleven years ago I was taking a stroll over to the Student Union building to get some student food for lunch at the cafeteria there. On the way out I saw two ladies, possibly administrators, trying to manipulate a very large wooden framed blackboard on wheels out the door and up some stairs. I offered to help and we get it up up to the ground level plaza. Then I tell them I can walk with them it to wherever they are taking it and they thanked me and said no. One of them says they can always get a “strapping young man” to help them up the last of the stairs.

It was on the tip of my tongue to cheerfully reply, “They’re back in season aren’t they” but I kept my mouth shut.

This Facebook memory brings me back to those days that only ended recently. I forgot sometimes how wonderful it was to be working there, and not in some sterile soulless office park. I’d worked in lots of those before then, plus some outright industrial slums. Those were the worst. You just felt the whole environment you were surrounded by beating your soul down. By comparison the Hopkins campus felt like what Heaven must be like. The campus is situated next to a Wyman park which is fairly large, and situated next to Hampden with its row houses and eateries on The Avenue. On that side Hopkins feels very much like a park, with lots of trees and paths to wander. The students would come and go along with the seasons and you felt it like a rhythm of life. There was the season of new students, the arrival of the Institute swallows, the season of graduations, the swallows going and the parking garage suddenly quiet…a harbinger of winter. At the end of my workday I might walk down San Martin drive, over the bridge and through the woods, then to roads leading to The Avenue where I’d have dinner and a drink. 

The other side of the campus, alongside Charles Street, is city. Step outside the campus and there are food trucks, eateries, high rise apartment blocks and city busyness everywhere. Sometimes for lunch I would wander that side of Hopkins and grab a sandwich before going back to the office. The city has its seasons too…at least near the campus. There was the season of students moving in…most of the high rise apartments near the campus housed Hopkins students. There followed the season of food trucks and busy streets. Then came the season of students moving out…often announced as having arrived with the sprouting of signs telling the kids where they could sell their used textbooks. There would be students in their caps and gowns posing for family pictures by the big Johns Hopkins sign at the Charles Street entrance.  

In 23 years I built up a lot of memories wandering that campus. I felt so much at home there. I had my office space there fully equipped with a little fridge, a microwave and a coffee maker; everything I needed if the day was going to be a long one. It didn’t matter. I loved my job, and there was always the campus to take a think-walk in if I needed one. I saw the seasons come and go. I lived a life there. I’m only now beginning to realize how much.

I’ve been writing my bio for my upcoming high school reunion. It’s turning into a multi page thing because there is So Much stuff that’s happened to me over the course of my life, but so far I haven’t been asked to trim it. As of this morning I was still tweaking it, still adding things here and there, because it all comes together to put me at the Space Telescope Science Institute where I retired last February. There are some who might wonder how the hell someone like me, with no college degree and let’s face it, a confused unkempt little high school dork got a job like that and was suddenly executing tests for a billion dollar space telescope over the deep space network. What the hell anyway??

And it occurs to me that my life was a lot like one of those episodes of James Burke’s TV series Connections. If you haven’t watched it I highly recommend it. In it he makes the point repeatedly, it’s the basis for the entire series, that change happens, not exactly randomly, but from people working on things in their own area of interest, borrowing or inspired by people before them who did things in their areas of interest, and nobody really knows while they’re working in their areas of interest, what might come out of it…

An invention acts rather like a trigger, because, once it’s there, it changes the way things are, and that change stimulates the production of another invention, which in turn, causes change, and so on. Why those inventions happened, between 6,000 years ago and now, where they happened and when they happened, is a fascinating blend of accident, genius, craftsmanship, geography, religion, war, money, ambition… Above all, at some point, everybody is involved in the business of change, not just the so-called “great men.” Given what they knew at the time, and a moderate amount of what’s up here [pointing to head], I hope to show you that you or I could have done just what they did, or come close to it, because at no time did an invention come out of thin air into somebody’s head, [snaps fingers] like that. You just had to put a number of bits and pieces, that were already there, together in the right way. -James Burke, Connections – The Trigger Effect

So I’m looking back at my life and how I got here, to being retired, comfortably if not fabulously, in a little Baltimore rowhouse after having worked on two of the great NASA space telescopes, and I still have no college degree, and in many ways I am still that unkempt little dork I was way back when.

First, I wanted to be a cartoonist and a painter. My high school art teacher introduced me to photography as an art form. I did cartoons and photography for my student newspaper, which led me to also wanting to be a news photographer. I became none of that, but it led me to a job as an architectural model maker. I could simulate various building materials with paint and a little ingenuity. Because…

As a kid I became fascinated by building model cars, submarines, airplanes. But eventually the kits bored me and I began improvising. So that fed into making architectural models. I began learning how to read and then scale architectural drawings. You don’t build those things on the fly, so I began learning how to think a process through from an initial set of requirements to the finished thing, before I started work. I began to essentialize shapes and forms in my mind. A complex model could be reduced to basic forms that you could build on.

My maternal grandfather was a radio pioneer back in the days of the first radio stations. He made, then sold and serviced other company’s radios. He died in his middle 40s, in the middle 1940s. All though my childhood anything that mom saw in me that reminded her of her dad she encouraged, even though we didn’t have a lot of money I got Heathkits, Radio Shack kits, and such. When I developed an interest in shortwave radio, because it was kinda fun to listen to the world and before the Internet shortwave was how you did that, I also began dumpster diving for old radios, and getting them working again. Which led me to…

I bought my first computer, a Commodore C64, so I could read radio teletype broadcasts. There was a program cartridge you plugged in, and tuning box you could attach to the speaker of your radio, and see the words appear on the screen. The Commodore’s user interface was a Basic interpreter, written for Commodore by Microsoft. I began fiddling with writing simple Basic programs, just for kicks. In programming, it helps to be able to visualize the program flow in your head because you can’t actually see it. You can reduce the basic operations of a program to simple forms you can build on. There’s the architectural model making…weirdly enough.

At a HAM radio fest where I was searching for tubes to fix a radio I was working on, I discovered I could build an IBM PC compatible from parts being sold there, because the HAMs were using them for their own radio teletype broadcasts. I could have never afforded an actual IBM PC, or any of the compatibles being sold then. But I could buy a part here and there until I had enough to build one. And when I did, I continued teaching myself to write programs, but now with a much more powerful computer, that had access to much more powerful software development tools. 

After one particularly successful project for the architectural model maker I was working for, he gave me a bonus, and with it I bought a copy of Microsoft PDS (Professional Development System) Basic. It came with Microsoft’s first cut of the Jet database machine, which would later become Microsoft Access. So again…there’s the architectural model making. I began learning relational database design and wrote my own contact manager.

With the PC I also began surfing not the internet, which wasn’t yet open to the public, but the world of amature computer bulletin boards. It started I was looking for “shareware” software to run, and message forums to talk with other computer hobbyists. I began learning about networking, and network protocols.

I’m a gay man, and I was also looking for online community, not being comfortable with or good looking enough for the bars. There’s the dork again. I connected with some gay BBS message boards and there I saw what the technology could do for us. At the time everything I knew about homosexuals and homosexuality I got from the culture around me, which was either venomously hostile, or rancidly pitious. Now I saw we no longer had to see ourselves with heterosexual eyes. No matter where we were, in the gay friendly city neighborhoods or hostile rural zones, we could talk freely to each other. It was a revelation that committed me to computer networking…

…which led me to G.L.I.B., the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau: a gay BBS whose owner wanted it to be an information and knowledge resource for the gay community. There I met, naturally, a bunch of other computer nerds. I volunteered to help out with operations, and began to write software for them.

One of our members worked for a wire service and he got us a daily news digest of all the gay related news articles off the wires. I was stunned at how much of it there was, that you never saw anywhere. We were still people best not spoken of in family newspapers. I wrote a program to take the daily wire service news digest, break it into individual articles and upload them to the BBS along with updated menus for the users. I began learning how to design and write software systems, individual pieces of software that came together to fulfill a task, and which could be reused for other tasks.

Late in the 1980s, the Silverado Savings and Loan scandal bankrupted the people I was building architectural models for, and I was  left desperate for work. A classmate let me live in his basement and there were months I could not pay him rent. He let it slide and I am forever grateful. I posted a message for help on GLIB and one of the men who ran it gave me work writing business software for his company.  There’s where it all comes together. My lucky big break, though I didn’t know it at the time. 

I wrote several business systems for him, including a membership tracking system for a local gay activist group. They had licensed copies of Word Perfect and dBase4, and I wrote a menu driven membership database system that let them print welcome letters with envelopes every month to new members, reminders of coming dues, and enter and edit the data of existing members.

That eventually led me to getting work as a contract software developer. I did contract work for a number of companies, including Baltimore Gas and Electric, Sorbus, Litton-Amecom, and Becton-Dickinson. Eventually I got a contract at the Space Telescope Science Institute. A year later they made me an offer to come on board as staff and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I continued writing business software, because science needs business software too, to track money and progress, for the Hubble Space Telescope Grant Management System, and eventually for the James Webb Space Telescope.

I was still building my own computers from parts because then I ended up with exactly what I wanted in a computer.  My team needed computers to test our applications on but we didn’t have a lot of money in our budget for it, and so, because I’d told them I built my own computers, I was asked to build my team a set of test computers for the software we were deploying to the community. I built them four from all the spare parts and castoffs I could scrounge up. I used swappable hard drive trays to allow me to load whatever operating system I needed to run tests on. I set the test lab up with a custom set of iptables firewalls and every morning ran a program that went through the system logs looking for anyone trying to break into any of it and it sent me a morning digest. From inside our firewalls anyone on the team could run tests once I set a machine up with the right operating system.

That got me notice from management and they put me to work on the team that was building the JWST Mission Operations Center. There I set up and administered a small testing lab for JWST science operations software systems (store bought computers this time…we had money now…), wrote more business programs that tracked progress, captured and catalogued telemetry from the spacecraft cryo chamber tests, and eventually ended up in the flight operations room, conducting the early initial end to end tests in the Flight Operations room, across the NASA deep space network.

After that was turned over to Goddard flight engineers, I did performance testing in the backrooms of the MOC, almost all the way to Launch.

So. From cartoons and painting, to architectural models, from radios to computers, online gay activism to contract software engineering, to Hubble and then to James Webb.

And there’s a bunch more off on a different path…cartoons and painting to architectural model making to computers to online activism to cartoons and photography for local gay papers to work on a film documentary and getting screen credit and an entry in the Internet Movie Database.

As I wrote in my high school reunion bio, it’s not a life I ever expected to have when I graduated in 1972. I had a lot of low expectations dumped on me when I was a kid, growing up with a divorced single mom, which wasn’t helped by being part of a despised minority. But mom loved me and set a good example, and I did some really good stuff along the way. I marched with other gay folk out of the shadows and into the mainstream. I kept on doing my photography, my artwork, had a couple shows, got my cartoons into newspapers. I worked on two of NASAs major space telescopes. We harvested light from near the dawn of time and gave it to science to study. We added a few lines to the book of knowledge.

What a trip it was. Connections.

The question is in what way are the triggers around us likely to operate to cause things to change — for better or worse. And, is there anything we can learn from the way that happened before, so we can teach ourselves to look for and recognize the signs of change? The trouble is, that’s not easy when you have been taught as I was, for example, that things in the past happened in straight-forward lines. I mean, take one oversimple example of what I’m talking about: the idea of putting the past into packaged units — subjects, like agriculture. The minute you look at this apparently clear-cut view of things, you see the holes. I mean, look at the tractor. Oh sure, it worked in the fields, but is it a part of the history of agriculture or a dozen other things? The steam engine, the electric spark, petroleum development, rubber technology. It’s a countrified car. And, the fertilizer that follows; it doesn’t follow! That came from as much as anything else from a fellow trying to make artificial diamonds. And here’s another old favorite: Eureka! Great Inventors You know, the lonely genius in the garage with a lightbulb that goes ping in his head. Well, if you’ve seen anything of this series, you’ll know what a wrong approach to things that is. None of these guys did anything by themselves; they borrowed from other people’s work. And how can you say when a golden age of anything started and stopped? The age of steam certainly wasn’t started by James Watt; nor did the fellow whose engine he was trying to repair — Newcomen, nor did his predecessor Savorey, nor did his predecessor Papert. And Papert was only doing what he was doing because they had trouble draining the mines. You see what I’m trying to say? This makes you think in straight lines. And if today doesn’t happen in straight lines — think of your own experience — why should the past have?

-James Burke, Connections – Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

I’ve had my website for just over two decades now, originally to showcase my cartoons and photography, but it also included a blog, which back in the day were simple online diaries. I keep telling people that mine is a life blog, because most of what you find in the blogosphere are topical blogs, most of them political, and I get political lots on mine. But it’s a life blog. You might find me writing about “Adventures in home ownership” in my “department of random complaining” as much as pulpit thumping about prejudice toward gay folk.

I was looking at my server logs this morning and saw that someone, via a Google search (Google doesn’t let you see the search strings anymore) hit on a series of blog posts that I tagged with the keyword “Prejudice”. So I decided to see what they saw and followed the link back to my blog.

Is it unforgivably vain of me to look at the old stuff an be impressed with the quality of my writing? There’s a lot of good stuff in there going back years. But also, browsing a lot of old blog posts on the topic of homophobia really drives home how the current torrent of hate mongering toward us isn’t all that much different from previous waves of it. It’s like nothing ever changes in the American sewer. But at least I could get a few things off my chest. Beats yelling at the TV.

I don’t know how much longer I have, hopefully enough to finish A Coming Out Story. I’ll be 69 in just a few weeks and the way I’m feeling lately I’m finally at the point of admitting to myself that I’m actually old now. I’m tired all the time now. But I could hope that something of my art, something of my photography, and maybe my blog have a life after mine. On the blog, which is after all just a life blog, I’ve said things I felt needed to be said whether I had an audience for it or not, and my blog has never had a lot of traffic. But at least I got it out there and I’m happy with what I wrote.