Short Circuits Read online

  Short Circuits: A Writer’s Life in Blogs

  By Dorien Grey

  Copyright 2011 by Dorien Grey

  Cover Copyright 2011 by Dara England and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Short Circuits: A Writer’s Life in Blogs

  by Dorien Grey (Roger Margason)

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  “AND YOU ARE?”

  The Hill of Time

  On Birthdays

  Happy Birthday

  High School

  Remembering Family

  The Teens

  The Yeast Years

  A Simple Man

  Emotions

  Softie

  Puck Was Right

  The Power of Touch

  Requited Love

  Laughter

  Identities

  Pennies

  The Lazy Perfectionist

  Delusions

  If Only

  That Which I Should Have Done

  Political Correctness

  Rejection

  The Doctor Is In

  RULES OF THE ROAD

  An Agnostic’s Christmas

  Beliefs

  Three Rules

  Simple Rules

  FROM FERTILE SOIL

  Life in a Sardine Can

  Grandpa Fearn

  Grandma Fearn

  Aunt Thyra

  Uncle Buck

  Time and Coffee Cups

  INSIDE THE BONE-BOX

  Anticipation

  Frustration

  Secrets

  Role Models

  Impatience

  My Garden of Phobias

  Phobias Redux

  Embarrassment

  On Being Bubbly

  God’s Snowflakes

  Why?

  On Dreams

  Questions

  On Being Naive

  Confessions

  In Praise of Me

  Fretting

  Neverending

  The Other Side of the Window

  Perspective

  Worthless

  As Ithers See Us

  Leaky Boats

  Flotilla

  THE LIFE OUTSIDE

  Cars

  First Jobs

  Jobs from Hell, Part I

  Jobs from Hell, Part II

  Jobs from Hell, Part III

  My Days in Porn

  OK, More Porn-Days Stories

  Pebbles

  Ice Cream Social

  Pride

  The Mind’s Eye

  Unforgiving

  Unforgiving, Follow-Up

  Laziness and Priorities

  Sing Out, Fagin!

  Nausea

  Coffee Time

  Bureaucracy

  Routine

  Habits, Routines, and Ruts

  Naps

  Revisiting Naps

  Domesticity Yet Again

  PLACES IN THE HEART

  Fairdale

  The House on Blackhawk Avenue

  Homes

  The Lakes

  Harry Morris

  Northern Memories

  Now Playing

  The Bittersweet View

  Chicago Life

  Time and Dreams

  NOTES ALONG THE WAY

  Earthquake

  Letter to a Nun

  Modern Science

  Aliens and Hypocrites

  My Life of Crime

  Gnats

  WE TWO

  Triumvirate

  The Man Behind the Curtain

  To Each a Dorien

  Dreams and Dorien

  Teeter-Totter

  Losing Roger

  MINE ENEMY GROWS OLDER

  Me and J. Alfred Prufrock

  Change and Endings

  A Spot in Time

  Mind and Body

  Poor Loser

  The Spelunker’s Rope

  Things

  Things, Again

  Tangibles

  PJs

  Time in a Jar

  The Pity Pool

  The Glass Half Full

  In the House of Cancer

  A Bologna Sandwich

  Off to Mayo

  And Thus Are the Days of Our Lives

  Oh, the Nobility

  The Train to Omaha

  The Captain and the Ship

  Dirty Old Men

  This Way to the Egress

  Teapots

  Friends and Ships

  A Seat on the Bus

  Backward, Turn Backward

  Condescension

  THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR

  In, But Not Of

  In, But Not Of, Part 2

  Epiphany

  The Shallow Pond

  Letting Go

  Giving Thanks

  The Trompe l’oeil Mind

  Navy Talk

  Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

  Tar Bubbles

  Obsession

  Get a Horse

  Chicago Then, Chicago Now

  Shaping Clay

  Trains

  A Day at the Movies

  Time Was

  Generations

  STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

  Worst Enemies

  The Likes o’ Me

  Normal

  To Catch a Raindrop

  Endless

  Falling Short

  Conspiracy

  Paranoia Rides Again

  The Computer Conspiracy

  AT&T and Me

  Charlie Brown

  Shiva

  Logic

  Why and Because

  LOOSE CHANGE

  The Ice Cream Cone

  Alice Ghostley

  Gratitude

  Colds, Specific, and Stoicism, General

  You Is or You Ain’t

  Reading the Signs

  De Profundus

  The Pleaures of Drear

  Potpourri

  Pebbles II

  Compared to What?

  THE HUMAN FACTOR

  Phil

  Simple Delights

  Friends and Time

  A Letter to Norm

  Aftermath

  Miss Piggy’s Nose

  Lief

  Russ

  Bye, Bye, Birdie

  Stu

  Pat

  Nick

  Requiem for Uncle Bob, Part I

  Requiem for Uncle Bob, Part II

  Lost Friends

  Robert

  Robert’s Return

  Kids’ Play

  Pets

  Catharsis

  A Cat’s Tale

  TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BREAST

 
Marching On

  Dangling Wires

  The Sound of Music

  Songs

  Marches

  I Sing the Body Electric

  INTRODUCTION

  The circuitry of the human brain is often compared to electrical wiring. In most people, thoughts flow smoothly, like direct current passing through a wire. But for some thought processes more strongly resemble a downed power line, whipping about madly, spewing sparks of random thoughts. I am one of those people. I channel as much of the power flow of my mind as I can into my books, and the random sparkings and sputterings result in blogs—brief flashes of one man’s life and thought.

  The short-circuitings contained herein are gathered loosely into general topics, but there is no smooth flow to them, no direct link between most of them. Each is a separate sparking; each is a spontaneous response to some random stimulus. Put together, they outline and define a life.

  While they all stem from my personal experiences and opinions, they aren’t purely an exercise in egocentrism, but a game I hope you might find some pleasure in playing. And as to who you will be playing with....

  The beginning is always a good place to start. But I’ll skip the traditional “I was born in a one-room log cabin on the prairie on a cold winter’s night...” bio. You may or may not already know who I am (Dorien Grey, author of the Dick Hardesty and Elliott Smith mystery series as well as the western/adventure/mystery/romance Calico). But you are obviously curious enough to be reading these words, and I thank you for that.

  Actually, I’m in effect two people: in everything having to do with writing, I am Dorien Grey. In all other aspects of my life, I’m Roger Margason, the name with which I was born. It’s a complicated arrangement, but it works very well for me.

  I’ve written a total of 17 books so far, and well over 500 blogs. This compilation is the first of two planned. This first one is primarily designed (though the words “designed” and “blogs” really don’t go together all that well) to let you get to know me and how I got to be a writer. The second book concentrates more on the fireworks display of topics which piqued my interest—and hopefully, yours. And, also hopefully, by the time you’re done, you’ll be able to see where the various themes and topics come from. All were gathered over four years of my Monday/Wednesday/Friday postings on my website (http://www.doriengrey.com).

  Perhaps because I’ve always been acutely aware of the human tendency to feel unique—which we are—and alone—which we are not, I am compelled to emphasize our commonalities and how they bind us. To that end, I write books and I write blogs. Books tend to be more complex, generalized and cohesive than blogs. They require some degree of control on the part of the writer, and considerable structure, and tend to connect with the reader on a different level than blogs, which tend to be more spontaneous, shorter, wide ranging and therefore in a way more personal. If books are a painting, blogs are an Etch-a-Sketch drawing.

  I also write to leave some evidence, once I’m gone, that I was here. As a gay man with no children, my words are my progeny. And while I’m here, I write to let you know I’m aware that you are here, too, and to hope you might find in my words some connections to yourself. But at the foundation of it all I write, quite simply, because I cannot not write.

  Though you and I have probably never met, I like to think we know each other. I hope by the end of this book, you might feel the same. I would be truly delighted to think these little short-circuiting sparks and sputters might not only illuminate some of who I am, but might afford you a glimpse or two of who you are.

  Roger Margason, a.k.a. Dorien Grey

  “AND YOU ARE?”

  THE HILL OF TIME

  One of the relatively few advantages of growing older is that the higher you climb on the hill of time, the more you can see when you look back over where you’ve been.

  I was born fourteen and a half years after the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I; eight months and eleven days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first swearing in as President, in the darkest days of the Great Depression. I had just turned eight when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and remember listening to President Roosevelt’s declaration of war. I was eleven and a half years old when he died. (Because I was too young to yet realize the importance of history, my primary concern was my unhappiness that, for three days following his death, all regular radio programming was cancelled, the radio playing nothing but music, forcing me to miss out on my favorite kids’ programs.)

  I was raised in a world of iceboxes and Dixie cup ice cream, of 3-cent postage stamps and twice-a-day mail delivery; of black-and-white movies with newsreels and travelogs and cartoons and 10-cent bags of popcorn. Railroad trains were pulled by steam engines, and there were no interstates or four-lane highways. Cars had running boards. Laundry was washed either by hand or by machines with wringers. Wet clothing was hung outdoors because driers hadn’t been invented yet. To call someone, you picked up the phone and, if no one else was talking on the party line you shared with one or two other families, asked the operator to connect you to the number you wanted (“Forest 984”; “Central 255”). The rotary dial came considerably later.

  During the war, gas and food were rationed, and everyone received ration stamps. I remember paper drives, Victory bonds and victory gardens, blackouts and air raid drills (though I lived in the heart of the country). My parents had a small grocery store, and on those very rare occasions when they were able to get a box of Hershey bars, they kept them under the counter and distributed them like gold nuggets to only their best customers. And WWII was followed by the never-declared Korean War, the Cold War, and Vietnam.

  Fully 2/3 of the entire population of the world alive at the time of my birth are now dead.

  I was born into a world so far different from today’s as to be all but unimaginable to most of the generations who have come after me. It was a world with no computers, no television, no cell phones or iPods, no drive-by shootings or road rage or school massacres. A world where anyone traveling from America to Europe did so by ocean liner because there was no commercial trans-oceanic air service. Up until the mid-1960s, when you did travel by airplane, it was a Sunday-best occasion, and men always wore suits and ties. Diseases all but eradicated from today’s world—diphtheria, smallpox, polio—regularly claimed tens of thousands of lives. Hospital patients were anesthetized with ether dripped onto a cloth cone held over the patient’s nose and mouth. Even penicillin was not discovered until WWII. A diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence.

  I served in the U.S. military at a time when, as a Naval Aviation Cadet stationed in Pensacola, Florida, a black serviceman could be asked to move to the back of the bus to let whites sit down. And now we have a black president.

  I witnessed the televised assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and Martin Luther King; man’s first landing on the moon, school desegregation, the civil rights movement. Governments and nations rose and fell, as they have throughout time.

  Each of us has our own hill of time, and the future is a thick blanket of clouds obscuring the top so we cannot see just how much more hill lies ahead of us. I hope my hill is a very high one, indeed. As may yours be.

  * * *

  ON BIRTHDAYS

  Because I truly do consider myself blessed to have been given as many November 14ths as I have, and realize that to complain about getting older is ungrateful of me, I have resolved that henceforth on each November 14th I will celebrate my 21st birthday.

  I was born, not in a log cabin, but in St. Anthony’s Hospital in Rockford, Illinois, at 11:15 p.m., Tuesday, November 14, 1933. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been in office just short of a year, and he remained the only president I ever knew until I was 12 years old.

  The only child of 22 year old Franklin Guerdon Margason and 24 year old Odrae Lucille Margason (nee Fearn), I entered the world a bright yellow, thanks to jaundice (not uncommon
at that time, I understand) and it could be said that I’ve been jaundiced ever since. My mother refused to speak to her best friend for a full year after her friend, upon seeing me for the first time, said “He has really big feet!” Since I was, in my mother’s eyes, absolutely perfect (albeit yellow), she took great affront.

  My 21st birthday was spent in Pensacola, Florida while I was a Naval Aviation Cadet. I celebrated the event by catching a bus into town and going to the San Carlos Hotel, where I went into the bar and ordered a Tom Collins.

  On my 22nd birthday, I was given a wonderful gift: the continent of Europe, of which I caught a through-the-fog early morning glimpse as the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga approached the port of Gibraltar.

  I’ve had a number…well, actually, a rather great number…of very nice birthdays since, but my first 21st and my 22nd stand out above all the rest.

  But as the birthdays became more numerous, they also tended to become less singularly noteworthy. The effect was rather like too many people trying to get onto the same elevator, and I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with their all pressing in on me. So I think my decision to make this and every subsequent birthday a celebration of my 21st is a good and practical one. I may alternate them between my 21st and 22nd, now that I think of it. I will ignore the toll each subsequent year takes on my body, and concentrate instead on those two birthdays, when I and the world were young, and everything wonderful lay ahead. For in my mind, at least, it still does.

  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll catch the bus into Pensacola and have myself a Tom Collins.

  * * *

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY

  Our parents give us birth and shape our lives, and leave us with a debt we can never fully repay or, tragically for a very few, with scars that can never be healed. I was infinitely blessed with the former.

  Each of us has—or had—our own parents, and our own memories. I hope you treasure yours as I do mine.

  November 11, 2010, would have been my mom’s 101st (??!!) birthday, and the 42nd anniversary of my dad’s death. I hope you’ll indulge a bit of reflection on the two most important people in my life.

  Though they’ve both been dead for far more time than is possible for me to comprehend, they are still with me in my heart and soul. The three of us are as interwoven as the threads in a blanket. I have only to close my eyes to see them and hear their voices. So there is no way I could cram 38 years’ worth of the warmth and love and happiness and sorrow I experienced with them into one blog entry, or a thousand. Still, I’d like to give you just the quickest of sketches of them.