Well, this past month has been rather trying, hasn’t it?
In the Top 3 for the Google Image Search “This Year Sucks”.
Oh, all right, this entire year thus far isn’t going to win any Good Citizenship Awards, but that’s speaking on a national, nay, global level. I’m actually just talking about the only level that I can speak on with any authority whatsoever, and that is the personal level.
My son turned 18 this year. He graduated high school as the Valedictorian. He is attending a good college in August on an academic scholarship. All these are awesome achievements for a kid the regular school establishment wanted held back for a year and more because of his dyslexia. I am justifiably proud of him. I also had to track down music and make a synchronized slide show for him and his graduating class. Of eight.
Oh yeah, he’s the reason my wife created a private school for children with learning disabilities. That’s eight kids who would have dropped through the cracks. Eight kids who might not have graduated high school at all. Several of them, like my son, are going to some pretty high-powered colleges. On academic scholarships.
This is because my wife is awesome.
Any achievement I want to claim for myself looks pretty paltry after that, but it’s all I got. I did pull some remarkable stuff – for me, anyway – while I wasn’t scanning photos and cursing the vagaries of projection systems. The Great Villain Blogathon, which necessitated watching and writing up six movies. The Blood Bath Box Set, which required watching four even though all four were basically the same movie.
In the Top 3 Google Image Search for “Me and Everybody I Know”.
Now here we are in Summer, and I find myself in the financial doldrums as I cast about for another writing contract or another part-time job or gee maybe a full-time job whattaya think are the chances I’m only 59 years old. Some things have to give. One of those was the overpriced-yet-still-somehow-unreliable-anyway home broadband.
My son thinks it’s the end of the world. Too much of his beloved gaming requires the Internet. This is cold turkey before you head off to college, my boy, I tell him. It will hurt less when you head off to Academic Land. He doesn’t believe me. Neither do I, really.
The book cover that glared at me from the Science Fiction Book Club flyers forever.
Watching ten movies (and that’s not counting the five at the last Crapfest) in a rush has taken the blush off the rose of movie-watching. So I’ve been using the time which was normally spent being distracted by social media to re-visit my older passion, reading. I’ve read something like nine books in the past week. This is, really, something I should have been doing all along but there wasn’t time. I was too busy being distracted. How could I call myself a science fiction fan when I’d never read isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy? I’ll probably finish that this evening. I’m enjoying it but I’m surprised that an acknowledged classic breaks so many rules; almost all the action takes place offstage, in defiance of everything I’ve ever been told. It is a tale composed of conversations, literally a story of ideas.
This brings us to the odd announcement that next week will probably be a book review. Oh, don’t look at me like that, it’s a book about movies, and it’s been quite interesting. But it’s also so dense I’ve only managed a chapter a night.
Hey, Alex Proyas! Whatever happened to this movie?
It turns out that over the years I’ve squirreled away a ton of e-books on my hard drive, and it’s pretty satisfying to finally give those the once-over. The aforementioned Foundation Trilogy. Finally read Harry Harrison’s Deathworld. I’d read Robert Heinlein’s The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag in my youth, and didn’t remember the first thing about it (I now realize there was a reason for that). I’ve read several of Basil Copper’s Sherlock Holmes pastiches about Solar Pons (a name which, while unlikely, has the appropriate number of syllables), who is even more of a condescending dick than Holmes, and I find the mysteries are rather transparent when they aren’t outright copies of other writers. Yet I cannot stop reading the things. They are the damned Pringles of detective fiction.
Back when Remo looked like Daniel Craig.
And most surprisingly, I have a number of The Destroyer novels, or as you might better know them, the basis for Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. About the time I ran out of Doc Savage novels in my teen years, these came along, like The Executioner but with kung fu and ridiculous 70s casual sex and even more ridiculous 70s casual racism. These were always very fast reads, and I re-read the first three in the same number of non-consecutive nights. The most amazing thing to me is that it took the writing team of Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy three outings to realize how essential the character of Chiun, the aged Korean master assassin, was to the success of the series. How when he was promoted from a background character to a full partner, the odd master/pupil father/son dynamic elevated it from stupid action porn to something actually interesting. Still stupid, admittedly, but interesting. The Destroyer went on to have a downright silly number of entries. Don’t ask me how many, I don’t have access to Google right now.
I’m telling myself that this is actually essential stuff to be doing. That my own writing had become rather unsatisfactory to me of late. That I had done too much writing by committee for the contract work, and I need to start writing for myself again, and to do that, I needed to get back in touch with what worked for me, way back then, when I was writing every night instead of being questionably clever on Twitter.
God knows I have the time now.
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drfreex.com 
Oof. I share your pain on the work front. I’m trying to figure out why the heck old farts like us can’t get some sort of work based on all we know in a world where a lot of younger folks who know LESS seem to be the vanguard. Ugh. Well, keep forging ahead. I need to finish the Foundation Trilogy myself one day. I’ve had a thick double-size paperback edition since the 80’s and made it through two of the stories and about 1/4 of the last. May as well start over again, as it’s a good read.
We live in troubled times, my friend.
We seem to be building toward a breaking point of some kind, though I’m not sure what’s going to break or what will result from the ultimate repair. I hope something better will be the result; my cynicism doubts that.
Or maybe I’m just seeing Seldon Crises everywhere.
Heh. That book IS a timely re-read, isn’t it? I think it’s the strangest time of my life in terms of stuff going haywire. Tornado zone, just on the outskirts so stuff nearby gets sucked in as the storm passes by. But the stuff pulled in is kind of important because it was holding other stuff up. Well, I think we’ll be fine because age and wisdom work a bit better among some people. Smart ones, at least.
Yeah, Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station just used the example of the Foundation taking apart a speech by an Empire “fop” to reveal it meant absolutely nothing, to do the same with a speech by Trump.
Wow, and yeah… THAT thing going on there make me question the sanity level of a whole lot of people. Lots of invisible thread sewing machines all running at once 24/7 propping up the coiffed agent of chaos. Maybe Elon Musk was right in his kooky idea that we’re in the Matrix or whatever he said that almost made me choke on a glass of water a few weeks back.
I honestly think if we were in some sort of simulation, things would make more sense. This sort of chaos can’t be planned or pre-programmed. (I hope)
Or, it’s the longest Twilight Zone meets Outer Limits crossover episode and it’s still filming…