The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

The Golden Words, Opium, and my dog Charlie

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The big vacant lot, Weed, California, July 4, 2008: I was walking with my dogs, and I got to talking to my dog Charlie, who is young and impulsive. He’s a great listener. I can say any kind of nonsense and he’s still interested.

But I was talking to Charlie and I asked him if he liked poetry. He didn’t answer, being a dog, and I asked him if he like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He didn’t answer that either.

But it got me to musing about that story. Do you remember how Coleridge was an opium smoker?

Well, he was.

And there he was, high as a kite, and in his mind’s eye he saw this really swell poem, and he went to write it down. It’s really quite wonderful. Has several paragraphs, and the first one goes like this …

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”

But at that moment, a guy to whom Coleridge owed money came banging on the door! Interrupted our Samuel, and that was the end of the swell poem.

Bummer.

And while I was walking along with Charlie, who ran to chase some birds, I was thinking how we’re all searching for the … Golden Words.

The Golden Words that will bring us the love of our life. The Golden Words that will banish all our fears forever. The Golden Words that will magically unlock the riches of the internet.

Kind of like ‘Open, Sesame,’ for Ali Baba.

But when the currents of life toss you about, you know how often the quest for these Golden Words can toss us right in among the Forty Theives!

Oh, gosh, it can be confusing.

I’ve felt completely flabbergasted sometimes. Not because there’s any shortage of information. In fact, there’s too much!

There’s gems and glimmering gold all around us, as we go through life, but it’s like glimpsing a treasure while everyone around you is yelling.

Don’t you sometimes wish for something just simple and clear?

Something just simple?

Something clear?

Unlike Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, seems like it’s just swell to be clear-headed, and sometimes I think that maintaining a good sense of balance, a feeling of calm, and a clear vision may be the entire trick to living a wonderful life.

And if, sometimes, we’re all searching for the Golden Words … well, there’s a little artist in all of us.

Law 23 of Project Design: Successive Refinement

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San Francisco, 1976: I got my first computer! It was a high-class Cromemco, in a kit, and had a lightning fast Z80 processor that ran at (gasp) 3 megahertz, and a full 64K of memory.

I had a buddy who knew computers in and out — he wrote code for our satellites to determine whether a field in russia had wheat or alfalfa — and he put the kit together for me, cause I didn’t know how to solder back then. (He’s rich and retired long since, because he went to work for a new startup called Cisco, and they gave stock options; but that’s another story.)

He also gave me a book about beginning to program in Basic.

It showed a simple technique called ‘successive refinement.’ If you are a programmer then you know this technique but for non-programmers here, it’s really simple. And mongo useful.

Here’s how it works …

You first state what the program is to do, in one sentence:
“Manage a mailing list”

Then you refine that, as precisely as possible, still in ordinary words —
“manage a mailing list
input of an address
finding an address
editing an address
sorting the addresses
printout of the addresses
printing addresses on envelopes
printing addresses on labels

And then in similar manner you break these down. Pretty soon you discover that stating what it’s to do starts to look like code, eg:
“bubblesort( addresslistname, ascending )”

After a while it’s all code, and it will have these virtues —
(a) It’s structure will seem logical to a human
(b) therefore it’s easier to debug and later modify
(c) you tend to avoid can-of-worms code that goes everywhere

Now, and here’s my point, what’s really lovely is that this approach will work fairly well for most any project of any kind.

Successive refinement.

With this, you can become … refined. Cool.

Go Thee Forth and Prosper!

Adrienne Searches on Google

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Weed, California, Spring 2009: Adrienne is still somewhat new to computers, and she comes up with things that often elude me.

(Even around the house; she fixed the ‘broken’ garbage disposal; I’d never have thought to use the plumber’s friend plunger!)

She has good results with the search engine, and uses it all the time.

One day I watched, and she types in entire sentences, like “Where can I find a list of all the major dog sanctuaries in the United States?”

I asked her why she didn’t just enter “dog sanctuaries”. [Read more…]

Bravery

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Near Phnom Penh, Viet Nam, 1969: My friend Gregg L. was a writing buddy at Midwestern University. He was a short, loud, burly guy who wrote short-stories meant to be both gritty and insightful, but he once confided that he actually made some money writing … throbbing-bosom Romance novels under a flowery Nom de Plumeria.

An ex-soldier, he’d modified a small and mild-mannered orange Honda motorcycle into a arched-handlebars hog, or perhaps a piglet. He had a very fancy medal for bravery in the Viet Nam war. It happened like this …

After high-school, Gregg needed Uncle Sam’s pocketbook to attend college, and signed up for some program involving the ROTC. I was in it, too, at Midwestern University, because it was a required course. I got a khaki uniform and learned how to shine a belt buckle with Brasso. We had to march, and stand there, and hold a rifle in a certain way. For me, it was little more than that, sort of a mild PE class.

For Gregg, due to timing, it became much more, when Viet Nam erupted and he found himself a lieutenant, in a trench, in a jungle, between two Vietnamese machine guns.

“All around me,” he said. “guys were getting wasted. My men were shot up; we were scattered, crawling and scrambling to get out of the fire.

“The din was incredible. Huge bombs were blowing up nearby, and the air was thick with smoke. The machine guns blared away, the wounded were screaming. You couldn’t see a thing, and we couldn’t tell where the fire was coming from.

“And I freaked out.

“All of a sudden, I thought What the hell am I doing here? and I threw down my rifle and made a run for it. I left my men, wherever the hell they were, and ran like hell to get away.

“Bullets were flying around me. I heard them buzz past and heard them ping into the leaves and branches. I zigged and zagged, and got quite turned around, and suddenly rounded a tree and found myself running into the machine-gun nest from the side.

“They saw me, and there was no time to stop. One guy was reaching for his sidearm, and the other began to rotate the machine gun, so I just ran right between them as fast as I could.

“I had no rifle, but I pulled a grenade from my vest and dropped it as I ran past.

“They recovered from surprise, and began to swing the machine gun toward me, and I saw the bullets stiching in from the side, but I guess they didn’t notice the grenade because it went off and killed them.

A Medal for Bravery“I kept running until I fell down, and just lay there, gasping for breath, scared as a ghost in hell. I was kind of thinking about how deserters are shot by firing squads, when the sargent found me, and he’d brought the company Commander.”

Here’s what happened:

“Soldier,” said the Commander, “That’s the bravest thing I ever saw in my life.”

The Christmas Present

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Newport Beach, California, December 1985: Taking the Startel job was a colossal blunder. It’s very clear now, but not then. All women wish to be loved, cherished, and protected. I was married to Lori, but I failed miserably to show that I cherished her, and I failed to protect her.

And that brought me the most painful days in my life.

Do you believe that all events are foretold? I do. Lori and I had written our marriage ceremony, and when I gave it to Father Bob Cromey, he read it and said, “There’s nothing in here about commitment. That’s a mistake.”

He was referring to the lines where it said, “I will remain with you as long as it shall please you.” Father Cromey was correct, and so were my written words. I was with her as long as it pleased her.

This was back in the time of books like Open Marriage and such tripe, but I was turned on by these ideas. And although I never became involved with other women, when I began to ignore her, concentrating on work, building the Line Seizer device, working on computers … when I ceased being fun, when I ceased paying enough attention, when I ceased demonstrating cherishing … she started going out, I’m sure of it.

It started innocently enough, with Oz Koosed’s jitterbug class at the Avenue Ballroom. Lori, as tall as I, kept trying to lead. Either I wasn’t strong enough or focused enough. And when it came to a move called ‘The Drop’, I didn’t have the physical strength. This is a movie-move, where the woman, with body rigid, tips over and almost hits the floor. By strength of arms you hold her just inches above the floor. I couldn’t hold her. Big mistake.

She started going out to dance with the brother of a friend. I’m pretty sure it became the horizontal mambo. And idiot that I was, because I’d thought this openness was good, I put no stop to it. That was the beginning of the end.

One thing led to another. When Lori asked me to move out, I yielded to anger rather than handling the danger. Soon after, around my 40th birthday, I was offered and took a job working with Startel in southern California, and moved far away.

Oh, the business reasons made sense. We needed some equipment to advance the answering service we ran together. She already ran operations, and my marketing department already had a manager. I would bring in a lot of money. Blah blah blah.

I loaded our Volkswagen, which blew up in the desert heat along the way, continued in a rented car, and stayed with her folks in Covina while I began selling answering service equipment for Startel Corporation. Then I bought a Pugeot, rented the house in Newport Beach, and really shouldn’t have been so surprised, that first Christmas here in Southern California.

Because late at night on Christmas Eve, lying in the dark together in a bedroom at her parents home, she had something to tell me. I can still hear her voice in the darkness. She said that she’d fallen in love with another man.

I saw my errors crashing around me, shattering like glass, like mirrors, timeless and cruel as stone.

Wizard in a Cave

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Henrietta, Texas, 1951: My mother played her nice radio in the evenings, and we listened to Green Lantern, the Phantom, the Great Gildersleeve, the Lone Ranger, and the Inner Sanctum. Not long after, television would arrive, stealing drama from the radio, but in those days radio was one story after another. Hobby time went well with radio. For example, my mother was a great and wonderful crafts person, and made marvelous things.

As we sat in the evening with one lamp turned on, she was making colored flower stencils on pillowcases. I had a project too. She’d bought me a drawing toy called a Magic Slate. This cardboard rectangle has a gray plastic sheet attached, and a pencil-shaped wooden stylus. With this stylus, you write or draw upon the gray sheet. Whenever it’s filled up, or you get tired of it, just lift the sheet and all the writing vanishes, and you can start over. Oh, the sheer magic of it!

That night we were listening to Inner Sanctum, which was a scary show about some sort of bird or a bat. But I wasn’t scared. My mom was making stencils and I was a Wizard in a Cave.

I saw an image clearly — to be a Wizard in a Cave — staying up late, by candle-light, and writing mystical things upon the Magic Slate.

The only problem was, I didn’t know any mystical things to write.

I was staying up late. I had the Magic Slate. I was all set. I scribbled some words and alphabet things. … But they were only the things I knew. It wasn’t really magical. It made me kind of sad, having no mystical things to write.

This isn’t much of a story. I don’t even remember what happened to the bird or bat thing.

But there is this: I think that the Wizard in a Cave has been the guiding image of my life.

I was no good in sports, so I learned to be a wizard. I was fearful of girls, way too shy, so I tried to appear wizardly, intellectual, knowing magical things, wise. Haw! Seems silly, now. Seemed to make sense, then.

I’m writing this now, late at night. One lamp is on. I’m in my workshop, surrounded by magical contrivances. The musical instruments I design and build, and on which I can compose, play, and improvise. A library of books, on arcane subjects such as mysql and investment charting. Computers are here. On them I have written books, made pictures, calculated mystical things such as additive sine wave patterns.

It’s late, I am no longer young, there’s one lamp, and it’s cave-like. Welcome, Arthur. You are now a Wizard in a Cave, writing mystical things.

It’s been a long road, but to arrive at being a Wizard in a Cave is just the way I thought it would be. I know mystical things, and I can write them down here, on this erasable page. Now they are both hidden, and visible to wizards all over the Universe.

The funny thing is, the most mystical of these magical things are the plain truths of human experience, the stories we all share, the open secrets of mankind, the pain and joy of living, the gaining and the terrible, terrible losses. This is the truest magic.

Even a child knows some of this. I knew magic on that night, not recognizing it there before me. The magic was that night, the color of the light, the human dreams, and my mother making stencils of colorful paint, on pillowcases, making some beauty, for her home.

Mick Jagger’s Secret

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San Francisco, 1977. Disco was in full sway, as the Men’s Club — myself, Richard W., Derek S., and Phil Groves — drove to dinner. Somebody was complaining about something.

“You don’t have to do it! Oh, noooo!” I sang, mimicking BeeGees. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Derek had wrangled tickets to the upcoming Stones concert. We were jovial. We were on top of the world.

Earlier that day, I’d visited City Hall. A business license, as I recall. Oddly, there was a San Francisco streetcar sitting on the sidewalk in the square across from City Hall, one of those fake streetcars that run on tires. And a TV crew loitered about.

“What’s going on?” I asked the crowd of gawkers standing on the grand steps leading up to the doorway.

“Mick Jagger and the Mayor,” somebody said. The Mayor. That would be Diane Feinstein. But I didn’t see any Stones, and I didn’t see Ms. Feinstein. My business license beckoned.

When I came out, across the street, hanging from the streetcar while TV crews shot from below, Mick and Diane were chatting it up. Big smiles flashed. Wonderful, so happy, really looking forward. Publicity for the Mayor. Publicity for San Francisco. Publicity for the Stones. Everybody happy.

Huge bodyguards in black suits frowned the casual passersby away. I noticed the long, black limousine parked down below, and made a calculation in my head. Up the block, I crossed the street, and then walked slowly back, on a diagonal crossing the street.

Sure enough, the shoot was done and Jagger, trailed by black suits, was crossing the street. Our paths intersected so we were walking side by side, two feet apart. He looked over at me. I looked over at him. There was something important that I wanted to know.

“How do you stay so thin?” I asked. He nodded.

“Don’t eat much,” he said.

Spare Change?

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[reprinted from my former site How to Tune a Human, May 2, 2007]

A blog that I enjoy is called “Evolving Times,” and recently the writer described the situation of being “spare-changed,” on the street.

People in my parents generation used the word “beggers” to describe people who beg on the street. Or sometimes “moochers,” “panhandlers,” or “bums.” Of course, in tiny Henrietta, Texas, where I grew up, the town was too small to have an official panhandler, so the town drunk filled in part time.

Friends of mine as I grew up didn’t seem to like the word “Begger,” though it would seem to be accurate. And I guess the phrase, “Buddy, can you spare a dime?” from that older time had mutated into “Spare change?” by the hippie period in the 1960’s.

THE SPARE-CHANGER

The writer in “Evolving Times” was describing what we’ve all felt in that situation. You’re walking along and you are suddenly asked, “Spare change?” Which as we all know, means “Do you have any spare change, that you could give to me?” (I guess those beggers are either very lazy, or they are astonishingly efficient.)

And then what happened?

[Read more…]

 
 

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