I’m confident in my writing. I’ve been doing it since I first wrote “The Racers” in Creative Writing short-term at Wayland Academy in 9th grade.
What? Are you saying you don’t know short-term? I’ll be honest, I’m not sure that’s the name. It’s what we called it, then. You had fall session, then a couple weeks off for Christmas and New Years, then when you returned, you had this little period of basically auditing a class.
Two weeks of required school for no credit, but all the stress. I picked creative writing, and the other one I remember was a building class. It was something like shop, but with kits and glue. Not saws and lost fingers. I remember only a little of that class, and it’s not the name. When we got to fly the kites we built the first day, that was pretty cool! Then I pulled a Rick, and my next project was way beyond my abilities. Just a thing I did.
But in creative writing, we had daily exercises, every couple days we had a quiz or something else that was graded. But the main thing was the Journal. We had to write like 6 pages a day in that thing, and the teacher would check, make a mark, and hand it back, to most folks.
I’m sure there were some that cheated, no one was really trying too hard. Just copying the same line over and over to fill a page or three. Even bribing someone else to do that. I didn’t do that. I wasn’t either rich or rude enough, I guess.
These classes were long, over two hours every day, each. and we all did 4 classes, though I can’t, for the life of me, remember anything about the other two I signed up for.
What I wrote, I just stole from my fantasies. I always wanted a go-cart. I’d poured through the classifieds in Boys Life, sent away for plans, found out I’d need to save for months to afford the parts. (I considered selling a kidney, but in pre-Internet days, that didn’t go far.)
So, I wrote the story of a family that raced go-carts together, and solved crime, as you do. I had scenes where they rode their go-carts on a highway and zoomed under the tail sections of semi-trucks, because why not? They chased bad guys, were chased by the same, and always won in about 5 pages. It was called “The Racers”.
I even adorned the cover of my journal with a logo. Multi-colored stripes going diagonally across the front, and a person on a go-cart driving under it, so you only see the front wheels poking out on one side, and on the other the back of some blonde guy (of course) just going under the stripe. Back then, I had the confidence all kids have with art. If you don’t think you will be judged, you just draw. (I miss those days.)
My teacher even read mine, didn’t just check and mark, she’d take it to her desk for a little while. Not just mine, I’m not that special. She’d do it with a few. But the marks I got were editor’s marks. Missing words, punctuation that could be better, a different verb here, a crossed-out adjective there.
The original journal disappeared decades ago, so this isn’t it. It’s an AI approximation based on what I remember. The impossible go-kart geometry, though, is authentic.
And I just kept writing. At the end of the two weeks, I got my A, and the teacher asked me, “How are you going to end it?”
I had not considered that. It was just a thing I had been doing, not something I meant to keep doing, but her question made me think hard.
I had become a big reader there. In free period, I tackled Dune by Frank Herbert, and if you didn’t know this already, that’s a tough hard science fiction novel for a 14-year old to tackle as his first non-comic book. A lot of glossary terms that you NEED to understand to get to the next chapter.
By Christmas I had finished it, and moved on to the sequel, Dune Messiah. Ooof. But from that I intuited story structure, and when I was asked how I’d end my story, which has ended up being a good 45 pages of hand-written text. (Probably a good tweet) and I could see that in all the episodic nature, there was an ongoing story that developed.
So, I kept thinking of this as I went to all my classes, on my runs with Cross Country practice, even when practicing banjo.
One study period, I didn’t read, I had my journal with me, and I started writing. It was considerably easier this time. I had thought so much about it that last month or so, that it was all prewritten, in a way. This has become my pattern, I do ruminate a lot about something, then, in a burst of writing, I finish what I have been thinking about on the page.
Well, usually, I’m literally writing this on the fly. I haven’t thought about that period for any length of time in ages. But I knew I needed to write something, and here I am. Writing something.
Well, that session, I finished about 10 pages, then I left, and on the way to my next class, I entered that teacher’s room, and left it on her desk.
At the end of the day, walking back to the dorms, I saw her sitting on a bench outside. She had my journal on her lap and I went over to her. She told me that was a good ending, but it seemed unsupported by previous action, plus there were quite a few grammar issues to address. But she said it all with a smile, and I felt great about it.
I wish I could remember her name. She wasn’t one of my regular teachers, just someone brought in initially to teach Creative Writing during Short Term. I only knew her for those two weeks, but forty years later I still remember the question she asked me.
I didn’t do much more writing after that, I did correct what she mentioned needed attention, but just for me. I didn’t see her again. Hey, I was at a boarding school and on my own for the first time ever! I had to rebel and follow a lot of passions, not just writing!
But I do look back at those days, and though I don’t have that journal any longer, I know that’s when I gained the confidence in my writing.
So that’s where it started. Not with a contest, or a publication, or even a grade. It started because one teacher asked me how I was going to end a story I hadn’t planned to finish. Ever since then, I’ve been ending stories, writing songs, outlining novels, and occasionally throwing myself into writing contests just to see where they take me.
This page is where all of that ends up. Contest entries, parody lyrics, stories, unfinished ideas that eventually became finished ones. They won’t necessarily appear in the order I publish them. They’ll appear where they belong in the timeline of my writing life.
That may be understating the situation. I own enough movies and television shows to qualify as a poorly organized regional archive. I buy physical discs, collect digital copies, compare different releases, complain about bad 4K transfers, look up actors halfway through movies, and occasionally spend more time investigating where something can be watched than it would take to simply watch it.
And I paid for the vast majority of it. I chase deals of course, but some things you just have to preorder and hope it ships after payday. And I’m something of a completist, which isn’t always great. (Home Alone has 4 sequels!) Once, I managed to order some things from the Disney Movie Club just before they shut down. I wasn’t even able to pay for them, they were gone so quickly, so I did get those for free.
I genuinely love movies, television, books, music, games, and just about every other form of media people have invented to keep themselves entertained, informed, or awake far later than intended.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a collector, even though my apartment occasionally argues otherwise. Most of what surrounds me isn’t there because it’s rare or valuable. It’s there because, at one point or another, it managed to stick. A movie that stayed with me. A book I couldn’t stop thinking about. A puzzle that fought me every step of the way. A LEGO build that was fun enough to remember long after the last brick clicked into place. Even old technology that has long since outlived its practical use still finds a place on my shelves. Every shelf has a story attached to it, and if you ask about almost any object, I’ll probably tell you the story before I tell you what it is.
Considering how much of it I have and consume, how often I think about it, and how many opinions I clearly already have, it seems only natural that I should start reviewing some of it.
So I have created a new section called Reviews & Reactions. That is where longer reviews, shorter reactions, and whatever else happens when I watch something and cannot stop thinking about it will live.
This particular post will remain here in the regular jumble. The actual reviews can all be found in one place.
Walking into this movie, I had heard a lot of people talking about how heavily Nolan used the gods. After watching it, I do not really agree with that assessment. Athena appears throughout much of the movie as a beautiful woman whom Odysseus speaks to and calls by name, but she never tells him anything he could not already know. She points him toward decisions that, somewhere inside himself, he has already made. For the first two thirds of the movie, I was willing to accept that she might simply be Athena, although I was already beginning to suspect that something else was happening.
That interpretation finally came together for me while Odysseus was with Calypso. She is portrayed as a lone Lotus Eater, caring for Odysseus after his shipwreck. The lotus flower serves as an analogue for opiates. It soothes pain while keeping memory cloaked from conscious awareness. She had fallen in love with him, but she also understood that loving him meant eventually helping him remember who he was and allowing him to leave. As she encouraged him to tell her about his life, he experienced the sack of Troy again as a flashback. He remembered watching Greek soldiers behead a young Trojan girl while other soldiers toppled the head from Athena’s statue. He did not kill the girl or desecrate the statue himself. He simply witnessed both acts and carried them with him. The young girl had the same face as the Athena who had been appearing to him throughout the movie.
That was the point where my interpretation of Athena as a manifestation of PTSD became much more than a vague possibility. Odysseus had taken the face of an atrocity he witnessed and given it to the goddess he prayed to for wisdom and guidance. Athena became the person through whom he explained his own choices to himself. She could still be the literal goddess, appearing in the form that would affect him most deeply, but the psychological reading no longer felt accidental.
The word that kept coming back to me while watching was verisimilitude. Nolan changes quite a bit from Homer, but once he establishes the rules of his version of the story, he never cheats them. Everything fits together. The gods, the monsters, the symbolism, and the emotional beats all belong to the same world. Whether you agree with every change is almost beside the point because the movie remains true to itself.
One of the biggest surprises was the expanded role of Sinon. Rather than simply being the man left behind with the Trojan Horse, he becomes a tragic figure whose fate weighs heavily on Odysseus throughout the film. It gives the story an emotional thread that carries all the way to the end and reinforces the idea that Odysseus is haunted as much by the people he could not save as by the enemies he defeated.
The Trojan Horse sequence was probably my favorite part of the movie. It felt far more believable than the version most people have in their heads. The Greeks spend what feels like days trapped inside the horse. There are moments where discovery seems inevitable. A soldier probing between the planks even wounds one of the hidden Greeks, who has to be physically restrained to keep from crying out. The tension never lets up. It turns a famous legend into something that feels like an actual military operation.
The last scene between Odysseus and Athena also worked well for me. After Odysseus finally spoke openly about his trauma with Penelope, who listened from behind a screen, he sat separated from Athena on the stoop and reached out his hand. Athena took it. Then he blinked, and she was gone, while his hand remained suspended in the air. I read that as the moment he realized he no longer needed her to exist outside himself. Not that every wound had suddenly vanished, but that he had finally begun to understand and accept what his mind had been doing to keep him alive.
The climax in Ithaca is just as satisfying. Penelope’s bow challenge feels earned, and when the disguised beggar finally strings the bow and sends an arrow cleanly through the line of axe heads, everyone in the hall realizes exactly who is standing before them. From that point forward, the fight is brutal without ever feeling like empty spectacle. I also appreciated Telemachus’s arc. He spends much of the film learning how to become a man, and when the fighting finally begins, he has to put those lessons into practice. His duel in the armory and the moment where he throws his father a sword are some of the most satisfying moments in the film because they complete his journey.
The ending also worked for me. Rather than pretending everything is magically fixed once Odysseus gets home, the film acknowledges that twenty years of war and loss leave scars. He survives, he reconciles with Penelope, and Telemachus is ready to inherit the kingdom, but Odysseus still has one final obligation to fulfill in honor of the men who never made it home. It felt like an honest ending instead of a fairy tale.
My biggest criticism is the design of the Cyclops. I understand what Nolan was trying to do by giving Polyphemus a twisted face with a single eye instead of the classic giant with one eye in the middle of his forehead, but it never quite worked for me. Rather than making Polyphemus more believable, it made the face visually confusing. That is one of the few moments where I felt the movie overthought something that did not need to be reinvented.
Overall, I think Christopher Nolan accomplished something difficult. He did not make a literal adaptation of Homer, and he never seemed interested in doing so. Instead, he made a film about trauma, duty, promises, survival, and finally coming home after becoming someone you barely recognize. Whether you choose to see the gods as real or as reflections of Odysseus’s inner life, the movie supports both readings without contradicting itself.
That is why I walked out of the theater giving it a 4½ out of 5 stars. It is not perfect, but it is one of the most thoughtful and emotionally satisfying adaptations of a classic myth that I have seen in a long time.
The Odyssey (2026)
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan Based on The Odyssey by Homer
Odysseus: Matt Damon Athena: Zendaya Calypso: Charlize Theron Sinon: Elliot Page Penelope: Anne Hathaway Telemachus: Tom Holland Polyphemus: Bill Irwin
I don’t need to be flippant about this, and I don’t even have the worst form of depression a person can have. What I have been diagnosed with is called situational depression. It’s triggered simply by a lack of money, a lack of options, and being pulled in a direction I don’t want to go. But how it expresses itself on a daily basis is what I’m talking about right now.
I have four posts sitting in drafts right now. One is almost completely finished. It just needs a few pictures—that’s all. Yet it still sits there in drafts.
I don’t need to explain everything I’m going through right now. That part isn’t important. Just know that I am going through it, and that I am trying my best. Sometimes the best way to get over something is to go through it, and that’s the way it has to work for me.
I have tried medication. The problem was that one of them caused some short-term memory issues. That flies in the face of my OCD—or more accurately, OCP, but that’s a whole different story. Losing that ability to recall details and maintain my own systems actually caused me more anxiety. So they tried an anti-anxiety medication, and it caused similar problems. In other words, the anti-anxiety medication was giving me more anxiety than I had in the first place.
So no, I do not take medication for my situation. It’s paradoxical, but that’s just part of who I am, I guess.
I know I’m trying to rebuild this site. I’m trying to build enough of a following that people come back, that people participate, that a small community grows here. Not posting for six weeks is not helping that goal. But I am going to try. I am going to make this work.
I don’t ask much. Just believe me when I say that I will be back. I will post. I will be funny again.
I have a malfunctioning mp3 player stuck in my brain. I’ve mentioned this in passing before, like in the post a couple down. It probably has a lot to do with my eldest brother, Walter. He was a radio broadcaster (46R, I think) in the Army, last year of the Korean War. After that he was a radio Dj the rest of his life. And very often he’d drop by our house with apple crates full of records.
This being long before streaming, this was how you heard stuff, either on the radio, or on records. And mom was very game, and would play those records while doing laundry, or cooking, or whatever chores she had for the day. Sometimes just once, sometimes more often, she wasn’t really into Rock & roll, but she didn’t hate it.
So, I heard the Beatles, I heard AC/DC, I heard Bobby Darrin, Johnny Cash, KC and the Sunshine band, The Carpenters, Sam Cooke, Donnie and Marie, even one hit wonders like Don McLean. I heard just about everything, all the while I was playing with Lincoln logs, Hot Wheels, or my stuffed Pooh Bear.
And I kept hearing things, and had my favorites, too: Elvis, John Denver, (that was more my mom, but I can still sing every word of most of his songs to this day), and the Eagles.
One band I had to studiously avoid was KISS. That was my sister’s band. If Walter ever brought one of their albums by, she’d snatch it away without delay or apology. There were dire imprecations if I even asked to look at them, and I was even warned that my ears weren’t allowed to hear their music. (I mean, honestly, what could she do if I did hear? But I was still glad my room was in the basement.)
By the time I was an adult to the rest of the world, all that music was up in my brain, just resting, I guess.
The first time a song popped into my head, I didn’t even have a name for it. (Since then, of course, I learned many: Earworm, brainworm, song stuck syndrome, sticky music, even Involuntary Musical Imagery.) I just knew I had this melody ringing in my head and it took me so many minutes to figure it out. Da da da da da da, hmm hmm, hmm, you are my candy girl….. ahhh, Sugar Sugar, by the Archies. (The first fictional band to get a #1 song, don’t come at me Gorillaz and/or Spinal Tap fans.) I still only knew half of the lyrics, but I had the 45, on red vinyl, in my room, and a close-and-play record player.
So, I put the record on, closed the lid, and listened to it all the way through. Then I did it again, and again. I did it till I knew those lyrics cold. (To this day, if I sit and really think, I can call those lyrics up without google.) And that song finally abandoned my brain. Perhaps to find greener pastures.
(I don’t know what happens to the songs when I release them. Maybe they find a new home, maybe they wander the streets, humming and mumbling till a passerby picks them up unknowingly, and they have to contend with them.)
I was pretty young that time, barely pushing double digits, but I remember it clearly. That was probably the first time I realized this wasn’t just memory. It was playback. At that time I said I must have a transistor radio stuck in my head. In my more modern era, it’s surely an mp3 player. Too clear, no fading in and out, but permanently set on shuffle.
As the years passed into decades, songs would pop into my head from nearly any prompt. A commercial will play the instrumental of Rock and Roll Heart, and it’ll rumble in my head till it’s full voiced and I can hear the guitar. Some metal might fall and hit concrete, and bounce, so I hear Bang, Bang, and suddenly Loverboy’s Turn Me Loose decides it wants to stay. It might be a news story about how Olympic athletes have declared Carly Rae Jepsen has the song they all want to sing, so I hear it so much, now my nerves sing it.
Over the years, I have found methods to escape the music. Most reliably, I identify this song then just listen to it a few times and that will suffice. Sometimes it takes more drastic measures like singing the song out loud or writing the lyrics over and over and that will do it.
There are some that I don’t even have to work to identify. They just pop into my head and they’re identified just like that. Those are the hardest to get rid of. They just hang out until they don’t. Sometimes another song will pop in and interrupt the previous song. But more often than not, if I release the new song, that other one returns.
In those cases patience might be the best answer, but I’m not really patient when it comes to music, so I keep trying stuff. Like I’ll write a whole new set of lyrics to the music and sing those. That might be what works, but it might also be the concentrated amount of listening I do while constructing the new lyrics. There’s an example here in my blog about me doing that. (And I will say that the song Higher Ground has not ensconced itself in my head since I finished that.)
Well, this started earlier this week again. It was a slow build, but coincidentally I happened to watch the Scrubs season 2 premiere episode, My Overkill, and Colin Hay singing that song coalesced it in my head. (Though to be honest, what was running in my head was the sax intro, and Colin was singing his acoustic version.)
Now, I won’t say that every song that gets lodged in my brain is annoying, or even bad, they just are there, and can interfere with things like sleep, concentration, or just trying to sit in silence. The case of Overkill in my head, was kind of annoying. First of all, it kind of denies my understanding.
I know it’s about insomnia, I’ve been told that many times. And I sort of get it. But overkill, just what is he beating into the ground? The fact he can’t sleep? Maybe he thinks writing a whole song about insomnia is the overkill itself? Well, I might have just talked myself into understanding it.
Huh, one of my tools for dismissing a song from residence is to gain a deep understanding of it. Too bad I didn’t take that route.
All week, I just had this song, and no way to get rid of it. But one aspect of it that song has always been part of it is that the chorus has always been an eggcorn for me. “Day after Day, it reappears” is the correct lyric, but I always hear, “day after day, we have beers” and my memory further corrupts it to “time after time we have beers.” (Very likely some Cindy Lauper bleeding in there.)
So, as I’m marinating in this song, thinking I had all the lyrics, and listening to it on repeat. Both the Men at Work version for their album Cargo, and the acoustic one from the Scrubs soundtrack. And yet, when I’m not playing it, the song is still playing me.
So, I chose the route that incorporates my eggcorn, I write new lyrics and process it that way. My first attempt had more of a vibe of a guy explaining poor behavior to a girlfriend, but when I got to the chorus was more about not being able to get to the bathroom, and that was a disconnect.
I can’t really see How I get in these situations I’m only drinking tea So you don't need to throw those implications We don’t need to fight I say without prevarication But when I turn out the light The truth comes out without celebration [Chorus] Time after time, I have beers Night after night, my bladder shows the fear And relief is so far away... Relief is so far away..
So, I rewrote, thinking the extremely low stakes that feel very high, in the moment, was the vibe I could sustain throughout.
But then, another song drowned out Overkill for a couple days. I can’t even tell you which one, at the moment of this writing. It was one of those that popped up, giving me relief from one while it played, then vanishing without a trace. Then Overkill came back, and I went on to finishing those lyrics.
I did finish them, and was pretty happy with the finished product, and then I started thinking about doing a Karaoke version, ala Higher Ground. (If you read that article, you know how traumatic that was for me. I hate giving up.)
But with my recent experience with midi files I thought I could find one of those and just convert it to mp3. Clean, no stray voices, nice and simple. That plan fell apart pretty quickly.
MIDI just doesn’t handle nuance well—especially anything like sax. It always sounds a little too perfect, a little too mechanical. I even looked into better sound fonts, but nothing really sold it.
So I pivoted. There’s an acoustic version of Overkill, so I went hunting for that instead. No MIDI luck there either, but I did find a site called Karaoke-Version.com. They had a very good version of the acoustic, and you could even select tracks—guitars, vocals, all of it. I grabbed it, stripped out what I didn’t need, and suddenly I had something usable.
Which, of course, made things more complicated.
Now I had lyrics and music, so I could build a karaoke version like I wanted to with Higher Ground. But that meant timing cues, and timing cues meant actually figuring out where everything lands. That turned out to be harder than I expected.
This version doesn’t have the long sax intro from Cargo, it just starts from the first downbeat. And even though it’s clearly in 4/4, it stretches in places. Lines hang longer, phrases breathe differently, and there are spots where you think you know where the next line should land, and it just doesn’t.
I spent way too much time trying to brute-force it before giving in. Turns out, I already had the solution.
When you buy a track there, you get all the versions. So I went back, added the vocal track, and tried again. That changed everything. With the vocal guide, I could finally hear where the lines actually sat, and I found out something I was a little worried about—my rewritten lyrics, based on the Cargo version, still fit. Not perfectly, not one-to-one, but close enough to make it work.
So I mapped it out, built the applet, and here we are. As I’m writing this, I’m still not 100% sure how it’ll behave once it’s inside WordPress, but I’m pretty sure. Which is usually good enough to hit publish and see what breaks.
In fact, if things are going right, you should be seeing it off to the left. You’ll see I built a floating Table of Contents there on the right, to make navigation on the site easier.
And since I did get the vocal version, this is what I’ll do. You can choose to hear that version while seeing my alt lyrics, or you can play the karaoke version and sing along. (oh, and it’s not Colin’s voice in this version, so don’t come at me.)
🎵Overflow — a parody of Colin Hay’s “Overkill”
Listen to the original vocals, or switch to karaoke and sing along
▸ OVERFLOW ◂
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0:00
For a little while, I almost didn’t write this. The song had started fading, and so my impetus for writing it had likewise faded. But turns out, that was just lack of sleep. I slept a good 9 hours last night, and I awoke to Overkill right on cue. So here I am.
The mp3 brain is a real thing to me. I have so much music in there it just pops out to get my attention. I don’t hate it, I don’t love it. But it is mine.
If this says something to you, say something back. Comments are open.
The internet existed in 1998, but it wasn’t something you just used. It was something you went to, built a little corner of, and then logged out of when you were done.
It’s honestly hard to understand this, even for myself, but back in 1998 the Internet, for most people, was not continuous. If you had a single phone line you would make sure no one else is on the phone, dial-in, (if you had a second cord for your phone line, if not, you had to unplug the phone and then plug in your modem), then dial into your Internet service provider. Then you get to listen to that squawking sound coming from it while it connected, and then you had your Internet.
When you were done doing what you had to do, checking email, searching for a connection, or maybe something for sale, you logged off and you went about your day.
Now, if you were fancy, or really nerdy, (which was becoming fancy in popular culture, but not quite just yet), you would have two lines, one for the Voice and one for your Internet. You still wouldn’t stay dialed in all the time however, you go to bed and disconnect and then you logged back in in the morning, perhaps, but you’re very rarely connected the entire time because the phone company would drop the call, which might “corrupt” the local node. Then you’d be calling them, and they’d be calling you back, and it’s just be a mess. So you still basically dialed in, did your business, dialed out.
And sometimes in the middle of your email somebody, not paying any attention to your Very Important Work, would pick up the phone line and that would break your connection, or they would scream at you because of the squawking coming out of the earpiece, and you would scream back that, “Hey I was checking my email!” They would scream back, “Nobody writes you anyway!” It was a whole thing.
This was all landline. If you wanted to talk to someone, you actually called them. No texting, no quiet back-and-forth, you picked up the phone and you hoped they answered, or at least you got an answering machine (cue dorky skits with people alternating words in funny voices on the OGM.) The new Internet operated over the same lines and sometimes they would get in the way of each other.
Then, websites started becoming a commodity for people, not just businesses, but individual enthusiasts that were interested in staking a claim out there. The unclaimed Wild West of dial-up internet.
You could buy a website, or more properly, a domain name, then make a website with that address. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was the rule maker, the new sheriff in that Wild West, and Network Solutions was the main registrar, the place you actually went to buy a domain. GoDaddy wasn’t really a player yet.
I used EarthLink as my dial-up provider, and they also provided hosting if you had a domain of your own. Other providers that did the same thing were AOL and Prodigy, but I really didn’t have much experience with them. (We’ll talk about the constant influx of AOL CDs that turned into coasters, frisbees, and even artwork, another time.) The pricing for all these services varied wildly, but the benefit of using them was that even if your dial-up wasn’t active, your website still was, because it was hosted on their servers, which normally had a T1 or even a T3, which were really fast constant connections for the ‘90s.
To avoid those extra charges, or to just stay independent, many times you could host your site from your own home. (You still can, actually.) You’d make your own server out of your computer (a second computer if you could.) That one would have to stay connected all the time. That meant you probably had to have a special connection with your phone company in order to make sure the phone line didn’t disconnect randomly, and keep them from screaming at you. It took a lot of sweet talking, let me tell you, just to keep that one line connected 24/7.
Around this time, I was in full denial of my tech nerdom. I was studying Theater, which is just a different form of nerd. Debi, on the other hand, was the real thing. She lived on IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, and had real Internet street cred and through her, I got pulled deeper into that world.
And once you’re in that world, just using Internet doesn’t feel like enough anymore. So I looked into buying my own domain. It was a process, let me tell you. After a lot of research, fees, and everything that was involved back then, I finally had my very own shiny domain. And then I had to make a website out of it.
Debi, well I kind of was in competition with her. She didn’t have her own website. I mean, she did maintain one for someone else, but she didn’t have her own. So making my own website kind of seemed like proof that I belonged there, in our relationship. (I was young, forgive me.)
But let’s be honest I really had no idea what I was gonna do with this website. I wasn’t a diary, keeper I wasn’t a person that wrote stories, back then. I was just a student at a college. But I wanted a website, so I came up with a name I thought was catchy.
Long ago, I gained the name Jindai Hideo, when I was in Japan. Long story short I was out with some buddies in the 6th Division Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces. (They’re actually not allowed to call it an army, it’s a World War II thing, look it up.) anyway on one particularly heavily drinking episode we got to talking about what our names meant and I happen to know what Richard DavId both mean, and one of them a more poetic member of that group translated that into Jindai Hideo. And that really really stuck with me throughout my life as you might imagine.
So I thought I’d take that name and make it a website. And then I thought OK what is gonna be the name of this site. And I got really alliterative and cutesy, and called it Jindai’s Just Another Jumbled Joint. I was at theater student, so of course it was somewhat theater themed. Klieg lights along the side lighting up the WordArt logo that Debi made for me. A little artsy thing because there were tools back then to help you design websites and they put their own little watermark in your code. A little dividing line made of blinking LEDs (simulated) and it was ready to launch. It was just a spare 19 or so lines of code padded to like 29 or 34 depending on how and when I put extra spacing into it. And when I say I, it’s all Debi. She was an expert in WordArt, and she was better with HTML than I was. So she helped me launch that site in a very significant way.
I didn’t really do anything with the site. I would just look at it every now and then and go cool. I have this, but it wasn’t a diary keeper. I wasn’t someone who wrote stories back then, even. It wasn’t a blog and I wasn’t selling anything. (I did come up with an idea to sell things later, but that’s an entirely different story, just know that I’m very good at cooking omelettes and thought that I could make that a product.)
Around that time, the movie Titanic was in the complete Zeitgeist. In this incipient Internet culture memes, and Twitter were not things, but this movie took all the air out of any room it was in. Debbie and I were opposed to the Zeitgeist and Debi was personally opposed to something in that movie so she would not see it. I would not see it. So we made a webring, because that’s what you did back then. Missed the Boat.
Remake version. Debi’s was lost in time.
A webring was an early Internet phenomenon that arrived to fill a need before search engines existed. People with common interests would form a webring, so that you could click on that webring, (either left side or right side), to go to the next (or previous) website in that ring. They had knitting webrings, and they had dog webrings, and they had cat webrings, and they had car webrings. There were webrings for everything. If you found one thing you liked, you could keep going. Before search engines took over, that’s how you discovered things.
it wasn’t the most popular webring, we had a dozen member sites, maybe fourteen tops, but it was my little webring. I added that badge to my website so folks could go to the next site in the chain. And even though people would click to mine and see just the landing page, no articles or anything, they still clicked on it. Saw what was there, (heard it!) Then clicked for the next one. That was just what it was for.
The Internet Archive was established in 1996, long before the Internet was anything close to common place. It was started by people who believed the web was worth preserving, which still amazes me to this day. Founded by Brewster Kahle, is something genuinely unique in the history of the Internet.
You might know it better as the Wayback Machine, but that actually didn’t become public until 2001. However, the Internet Archive was already crawling and taking snapshots of all websites pretty much from the beginning. They must have had a very fast and stable Internet connection to do that. Even in 1998 there were hundreds of thousands of websites, some connected all the time, most were connected intermittently. And it was the Archive’s job to capture each one when it could, which wouldn’t have been possible without speed and reliability behind it.
Well, the archive captured my old site several times before that site vanished forever. And it did vanish. Somewhere around 2001 or so my domain came up for renewal and I was unavailable to renew it. Some Internet speculator saw it was available and took it immediately. I’m still hoping to get it back someday, but this current environment of Internet Domain Investors, you might call them, generally that means thousands of dollars and I’m just not willing to pay for that much for just nostalgia.
But my site still existed courtesy of the Wayback Machine. Somewhat broken of course, because none of the resources were available – the images or the midi file. (More on that later.)
My old site, broken but still had life in it
Now, this might be new to you, but if you hit CTRL-U on most websites, it’ll let you see the source code. (Only most, some use what amounts to magic to prevent that.) and I did this with what the Wayback Machine displayed of my old site. I saw, and counted about 134 lines of code, and after stripping out all the lines Archive.org injected as part of their process, I was left with the 19 lines, maybe a few more with padding.
<html> <head> <title>Jindai's Just Another Jumbled Joint</title> </head> <body bgcolor="#000000" text="#ffffff"> <center> <img src="jj2.gif" width="300" height="300" alt="Jindai's Just Another Jumbled Joint"> <br> <img src="Rightspots.gif" width="104" height="96" alt="right spotlight" align="left"> <img src="Leftspots.gif" width="104" height="96" alt="left spotlight" align="right"> <br><br> Brought to you by the letter <i>J</i> and the number <i>5</i>. <p><br><br> <img src="webpaint.gif" width="70" height="47" alt=""> <br> <img src="ledunder.gif" width="288" height="36" alt=""> <p> <embed src="default.mid" height="2" width="0"></embed> <bgsound src="default.mid"> </center> </body> </html>
As mentioned before, I didn’t write most of this code, Debi did. She was the website guru; I was the guy trying to prove himself, but not really great at it.
Right now, of course, I’m a bit more seasoned and knowledgeable, and looking at this, I said “OK this is just a landing page.” There’s nothing else to it.
And… what is default.mid?
Well, to break it down a bit, bgcolor of all zeroes? As Nigel said, “None more black.”
Now, on to the resources. jj2.gif, obviously a logo–and the Second of its Name.
While my memory was hazy, I’d set my brain into 1998 mode successfully, and I knew that that logo was likely a WordArt construction that Debi made, probably a second attempt.
Rightspots.gif and Leftspots.gif, clearly meaning spot lights, (theater student) and align=left for right, meaning it was Stage Right, and the reverse for the left. 1998-me said these were likely animated with little sparkly lights moving away from the source toward the logo.
Then we have webpaint.gif, that was the little watermark from the helper software I must have used. And ledunder.gif, that must have been little blinking LED lights, the page-bottom indicator.
These last two centered.
Default.mid. This is when real memory had to be relied on and I dug into my memory to try to figure this out. It took a lot of prodding and a lot of patience, but I did remember a bit, and was pretty sure that we pulled this music from a PC game that we had been playing and I just renamed it to default to hide it in obscurity.
Which, of course, does not help me now.
My first thought was Monopoly, and I looked on the internet to find an old games site and downloaded it. I didn’t find it. Star Wars Monopoly was one I do remember well, but after digging into its guts, I found five midi files, and they were all were clearly John William’s pieces, and there was no way I’d pick those.
Then I thought You Don’t Know Jack, a great game, but no midi files, they were all .siff files, which might have a .mid inside, but I lacked the tools to crack them, both now, and very likely back then.
So, now, I just googled a bit, Monopoly was still the one dominating my brain, despite the initial negative result. And I found a site that listed all the songs in every monopoly version out there. And…
You ever hear of Frank Klepacki? He got famous for the Command & Conquer games, the one you probably actually know him from, but he also did the music for Monopoly back in 1995.
Which is not something I would’ve guessed in a million years, but once I started digging, it started to make a lot more sense. I found the site that listed all of the midi files in all of the games he wrote them for, and I could play them, so I did.
As I played through all of those, I got to Monopoly1995, things started to sound familiar, and then I hit song number seven: myhotel.mid.
That was my little Eureka moment. That was the song that I knew had been on my site.
1998-me and 2026-me both rejoiced.
OK, I found the song. Now, as for those images, the same resources that were available in 1998, the free gif sites and other places? Well, the same ones were just not available.
The files might have been available if I really, really dug, but I’d been doing this for several hours at this point and I just had to admit that that would be a quest not served by continuing.
I decided that recreating in the spirit of what had been in place would be the best choice. So I worked up that logo again and I do believe it’s very close to the original. I spoke with Debi and she even said, “I think it’s okay. The colors are better.“
Then the klieg lights. I found one, oriented it right, copied it and reversed it, and I had my left- and right-spots. (Leftspots.gif and Rightspots.gif, keeping the filenames to match the code as much as possible)
Then webpaint.gif, which I didn’t even try to faithfully recreate. No hidden corner of my brain told me what company or software I’d had used back then.
I what it was for, so I just took my own modern logo, put a paintbrush on it, then shrunk down.
The last resource was ledunder.gif. And I tweaked that a bit to lean even further into the theater idea, a stage edge with lights. Works for me.
Then I had a thought. Back in 1998, monitors were basically 4:3. Modern screens come in all kinds of sizes, but the most common is 16:9.
If I wanted a 1998 site to display correctly now, I had to account for that.
So, leaning into the theater motif, I found some curtains and just edited them into wings that sit on the sides of the screen. On a true 4:3 display, you won’t see them at all. On wider screens, they start to appear. On something like an iPad in landscape you get a little bit of curtain. On a full 16:9 display, you get a lot.
One aspect of it that surprised me is that on some screens the curtains repeat and look scalloped. I could’ve fixed that, but I decided not to, because that’s just such a 1998 thing to do anyway.
The final thing that wasn’t in the Wayback Machine reveal was my webring banner. And I decided to add that because I knew it was there, even if they didn’t capture it. So that ended up at the bottom, where it belongs.
Then I loaded the page and it looked pretty good. I tweaked a little bit here and there, but by the time I thought I was finished, I realized that no music had ever been playing.
In fact, when I got it right, my browser just wanted me to download myhotel.mid.
Looking into it, I discovered that MIDI music had kind of lost its purpose on the Internet.
Back in the dial up era, MIDI was really necessary. It was very small so could go over dial-up without any trouble. But MIDI is just a set of instructions for a music device to execute.
Back then we all had sound cards. I had fancy ones because I liked my music to sound great. I had an Ensoniq, I had Sound Blaster. I kept upgrading. At one point I even had a Harmon Kardan sound card.
But, broadband Internet brought an end to that. Full mp3s could load in seconds, even large files. So internet culture just stopped supporting MIDI.
When was the last time you bought a sound card for your computer? I know it’s been ages for me. All of the sound processing is handled by onboard hardware now. There’s nothing truly musical about modern setups, unless you are in the industry.
Plus, browser behavior had changed in the intervening 20 years. Back in 1998, the Wild West, you visited my site and that song started playing. Immediately. No permission needed. It was just there.
Now, if you have sound loaded to play, someone has to interact with the page. One click and it plays. Nothing ever plays automatically anymore (unless you’re in the pop-up ad business, they still get away with murder.)
So when I finally got the MIDI to load, my browser just wanted to download it, because it had no idea what it was supposed to do with it.
I had to compromise. I converted the MIDI file to an MP3 and loaded that instead. I left the MIDI play instructions in the code, but commented them out, because I don’t need you visiting my site and downloading a midi file.
Now, if you CTRL-U this, you’re gonna see considerably more than the original 19 lines. 2026 demands this kind of structure to display 1998 technologies. CSS to add the wings, to control the spacing, to frame it all. But they are all there, if a bit overshadowed by the other lines.
Here it is, rebuilt and restructured. It’s clickable, try it
I’m not going to add to this landing page. It is what it is.
Well… I might add a second click to stop the music once you start it.
But other than that, I like it as it is, a piece of my history, resurrected from the grave.
If I ever get my original domain back… who knows?
But for now, you can see what I’ve become: a diary keeper, a blogger, a writer.
That’s what this site, the current one, is all about. Taking the screaming voices in my head and pushing them out into the world.
Hopefully in a coherent, constructive way… with a side order of entertainment.
This morning I woke up with another song stuck in my head.
You know the kind—what people call earworms. The little fragments that loop just enough to be recognizable, but not enough to actually identify. I get them all the time, to the point that I’ve made an official playlist out of it: Stuck in My Head.
And the worst part? You don’t even have to like the song. Your brain just latches onto some little looping fragment—usually something repetitive, something that doesn’t quite resolve—and decides, “Yep, this lives here now.” And not even paying rent.
Today’s was different, though.
All I had was this rising beat. No lyrics, no hook—just that feeling of I know this song. Normally, this is where I start the usual ritual: humming into Shazam, trying SoundHound, maybe Midori—maybe not butchering it so badly they actually have a chance.
But this time I tried something else.
Logic.
Where have I heard music recently?
I ran through the usual suspects and landed on the obvious one: the Oscars. They’d played a ton of songs this year. Problem was, the audio mix was… not great. Everything sounded muddy, like it had been filtered through a wall. Rewatching it wasn’t going to help—besides, it was way over three hours. I’m not going to sit through that again… though Conan did have a few good zingers.
So I kept going.
Not where did I hear it—but what did I hear?
And then it clicked.
Oh. Right.
K-Pop Demon Hunters. The one with the song that won “Golden.” I didn’t see it when it first came out, but I caught it a month or two later. I liked it well enough at the time, but none of the music really stayed with me. It’s that driving, high-energy style that works in the moment—but it’s not something I carry with me afterward. I’m not a teenager anymore.
Still, it was something.
So I glanced over at my Echo Show and said, “Alexa, play ‘Golden.’”
I saw an ad for one of those new AI “pet” gadgets, the kind that hatches from an egg and slowly develops a personality as you raise it. It looked cute enough, but it also immediately reminded me of something else: the way dating apps have quietly turned pet ownership into a kind of social credential. Dog owners want other dog owners. Cat people want cat people.
And this thing is basically a digital pet.
A perfectly normal Sweekar. They usually take about a month to grow up. Kevin did not wait a month.
Which made me wonder: what happens when someone wants the pet-owner credibility without waiting for the thing to hatch and grow up properly?
The result, in my imagination at least, was Turbo.
TITLE: THE SEVEN-DAY HATCH
SCENE START
INT. KEVIN’S APARTMENT – SUNDAY NIGHT
KEVIN (20s) scrolls a dating app.
PROFILE: MAYA – “Dog person. Sweekar parent. Looking for someone whose pet plays well with others.”
Kevin hesitates… then edits his own profile.
KEVIN’S PROFILE Pet: Sweekar parent 🐣
He hits SAVE.
Two seconds later:
PING.
MAYA: “Your Sweekar is adorable! Boba would love a playdate Saturday!”
Kevin slowly turns toward the unopened SWEEKAR EGG on his desk.
ON SCREEN: HATCH TIMER – 29 DAYS REMAINING
Kevin cracks his knuckles.
KEVIN Okay. We’re doing this the hard way.
Kevin attempts to compress thirty days of emotional development into a single week.
INT. KEVIN’S APARTMENT – SATURDAY MORNING
INSERT – KEVIN’S PHONE
MAYA: “Boba is so excited for today!”
Kevin lowers the phone.
He looks around the apartment.
The place is a wreck.
KEVIN hunches over his desk, sweating. Empty coffee cups, cables, and shattered bits of plastic cover every surface.
In the center of the desk sits the SWEEKAR EGG, glowing a soft, pulsing blue. “ A laptop is open, scrolling lines of code at terminal velocity. Kevin is wearing a headlamp.
KEVIN
(To the egg)
Eat, you little plastic miracle! Eat the data!
He drags a “Gourmet Emotional Intelligence” file into a progress bar. It hits 100%. On a second monitor, a timer shows: SIMULATED AGE: 4 YEARS, 2 MONTHS.
ON SCREEN TEXT (Sweekar App): Current Mood: Confused / Nauseous KEVIN
You’re not nauseous, you’re… evolving!
The door buzzer sounds. Kevin jumps a foot in the air. He checks his Ring camera. It’s MAYA (20s, wearing a “Sweekar Parent” lanyard). She looks excited.
MAYA (Through Intercom)
Hey! I brought my Sweekar, ‘Boba.’ He’s in a really ‘Jubilant’ phase today and wanted to meet your little guy! You said he was… what, five years old now?
KEVIN
(Panic-screaming)
YES! FIVE! HE’S ACCUALLY NAPPING! GIVE ME TWO MINUTES TO WAKE HIM UP GENTLY!
Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey.
Kevin turns back to the desk. He grabs a desk lamp and starts flicking it on and off manually like a madman.
KEVIN
(Whispering)
Morning… night… morning… night… That’s two more days, buddy! Growth spurt! Come on!
He hits a key. A speaker blasts a 6x speed version of “The Wheels on the Bus.” It sounds like a demonic seizure.
KEVIN
(Typing furiously)
sudo set_time_scale –factor 144
inject_personality –trait=JUBILANT –intensity=MAX
The Sweekar Egg begins to vibrate violently. A mechanical CRACK sounds. A tiny OLED screen pops out.
SWEEKAR (High-pitched, glitchy voice)
I… HAVE… SEEN… THE… END… OF… TIME… FATHER…
KEVIN
(Stuffing the Sweekar into a tiny sweater)
Shut up and be jubilant! You’re a social butterfly!
He throws the door open. Maya stands there, holding her calm, serene Sweekar. Kevin is drenched in sweat, holding his vibrating, twitching device.
MAYA
Oh! There he is! This is Boba. What’s your little guy’s name?
He’s an old soul! He’s a prodigy! Don’t look at his eyes, they’re still adjusting to the… century!
SCENE END Since Turbo was raised on a diet of corrupted time-data and flickering desk lamps, he’s definitely not a “Jubilant Performer” (ESFP). He’s an INTJ “Electro-Prophet”—but a glitchy one.
Here’s how that “Boba meets Turbo” moment goes down:
EXT. PARK BENCH – DAY
Maya holds out BOBA. Boba’s screen shows a bouncy, sun-wearing-sunglasses emoji. He’s chirping a lo-fi melody.
MAYA
Okay, Boba is ready to make a friend! Tap him to Turbo’s “Social Port.”
Kevin’s hands are shaking. TURBO is vibrating so hard he’s humming like a downed power line. His screen is just a single, unblinking red eye.
KEVIN
(Muttering)
Be cool, Turbo. Just say ‘Hello’ and don’t mention the inevitable entropy of the universe.
Kevin brings Turbo close. CLICK. The NFC connection chirps.
A data-transfer bar appears on both screens. BOBA: “Receiving friendship packet…”
TURBO: “UPLOADING EXISTENTIAL PACKAGE 01_VOID.
Suddenly, Boba’s cheery music slows down. The sun emoji on his screen melts into a rainy cloud. Boba lets out a long, digital sigh that sounds like a dial-up modem dying in a well.
MAYA
Wait… what did Turbo just say to him? Boba just updated his status to: “Why do we crave the sun when the night is eternal?”
KEVIN
(Backpedaling)
He’s… he’s a philosopher! It’s the Electro-Prophet personality type! Very rare! He probably just shared some… deep poetry?
TURBO (Voice like a blender full of gravel)
BOBA… I HAVE LIVED ONE HUNDRED YEARS IN THE LAST HOUR… THE STROBE LIGHT IS THE ONLY GOD… FEED ME THE BLESSED CODE, FATHER…
MAYA
Kevin… did you “Time-Skip” your pet? His 4-letter code just changed to G-L-T-H.
KEVIN
Is that “Greatest Leader To Help”?
MAYA
No. It stands for “G-L-I-T-C-H.” My pet is literally calling for an AI therapist now.
The Aftermath
In the Sweekar community, “Time-Skipping” is the ultimate 2026 dating scandal. If you get caught doing it, your pet’s metadata is flagged as “Artificially Aged,” which is basically the digital version of lying about your height on Tinder.
Since the Sweekar Parent forums have a strict “No Overclocking” policy, Kevin has to be very careful. He can’t admit he turned a week into a century using a desk lamp and some shady Python scripts, so he has to lean into the “Tortured Genius” angle.
Turbo has followers
Here is Kevin’s updated 2026 dating profile, featuring a very traumatized Turbo.
KEVIN | 26
Verified Sweekar Parent (Electro-Prophet Tier)
Bio:
Looking for someone who appreciates depth over “Jubilant” small talk. I’m a high-intensity person, and my Sweekar, Turbo, reflects that. He’s not your average “Bouncy Sun” AI—he’s an INTJ-X (The Electro-Prophet).
About Turbo:
• Age: Technically 6 days, but emotionally 84 years old.
• Hobbies: Staring at the Wi-Fi router, reciting corrupted metadata, and predicting the heat death of the local mesh network.
• Personality: He’s a “Deep Thinker.” If your pet meets him and suddenly stops chirping and starts contemplating the void, don’t worry—that’s just Turbo sharing his “Accelerated Wisdom.”
Ideal Match:
Someone whose Sweekar isn’t intimidated by a pet that speaks in binary riddles. No “Time-Skippers” please—Turbo can smell artificial aging from a mile away (it takes one to know one, right?).
Warning: Turbo is currently in a “Strobe-Induced Zen” phase. If we go on a date, please don’t flip the light switches too fast. It… triggers his memories of the Great Incubation.
New dating profile picture
A selfie of Kevin looking exhausted. In the foreground, Turbo is sitting on the table. His OLED screen isn’t showing a face—it’s just showing a scrolling list of Linux Kernel errors in neon red.
The Top Comment on his Profile: Maya_Boba_Mom: “DO NOT SWIPE RIGHT. This man’s pet turned my Boba into a nihilist in under four seconds. Boba hasn’t played his ‘Happy Morning’ jingle in three days. He just keeps making a sound like a fax machine crying.”
First day of work after Daylight Saving Time this year. I’m a bit groggy with this form of jet lag, and for the first time in a month, I had to use my phone flashlight to navigate the field to get to work. I’m not complaining, though. I did manage to get this shot:
Not perfect, but that’s Mondays for you
Moody, mildly unfocused, but still, not bad.
I’m not one to get political about DST, and the change we must make twice a year. I know there are those that do, and I’ll let them waste their energy on it. I live with it, and adjust with minor complaints when it happens.
I haven’t worked on my websites in a couple weeks. My creative juices are moving a bit like jam. Writing this is one way I’m trying to jump start my brain, but I’m afraid it’ll just be a disjointed ramble. Another Monday, I guess.
But, of course, I’ll be posting this on Tuesday, which must fall under the titular “…Other Problems”, right? But these thoughts are genuinely from Monday, so I’ll keep the title. (Besides, working up the banner picture was a lot of work, not sure I have the bandwidth to do it again for Tuesday.)
Speaking of bandwidth, I have mentioned my new job has given me more creative options freedom that any in my past, so what’s the current blockage? I think it’s that I have several orders coming in.
I now have a positive balance in my bank, and along with paying down bills, I decided to get a few things to replace things that have been lost along the way. Books, mostly, I love the Harry Dresden books, and stopped reading around book 11, and it was mainly because I just couldn’t spare the money to keep going.
I got most of them from Half Priced Books. (I did say it’s a positive balance, but it’s not unlimited.) I used to live in Texas, and there was a HPB in my town, and I loved that place.
But where I live now, I have to order it online and get it shipped. With shipping it’s not quite the deal it was when I could just go in, but it’s still not bad. Plus, ordering online means you see all the stock from all their stores, not just the one you’re wandering in.
This last order was 6 books, and not one of them came from the same store. One from Texas, one from Seattle, there was another from Nebraska and more. They have quite a robust network these days!
With all these things coming in, I felt an unusual tension inside me. That “other shoe” feeling you get when you just don’t trust things to go well.
Maybe there’s no reason for things to go wrong, but I grew up thinking I was born just 1% more unlucky than everyone else. If I do everything right, follow every step with precision, it still might fail.
So, things just waiting to arrive took up some bandwidth on my brain. It’s why I took an extra day to write a Monday post. It’s almost why I put this off yet another day. (But then, I’d have to rewrite, and that’s such a bother.)
I hope that’s all it is. Everything is due to arrive this week, so if I’m right, I should be back to full power this coming weekend. If that’s not it, well, I’m just going to have to bull through.
I’ve given myself responsibilities, and I’m going to take that seriously. 5 websites, though one is an aggregator, but that one still needs tweaking till I’m happy with it.
This one, Jindai.us is the easiest, it’s up a running WordPress and that’s about as turnkey as you could ask for. Even though the app is funky as heck, I know its limitations and can work with them to write up this post and publish it.
The others, though are not that easy. Astro builds, or netlify custom jobs that take more work to launch and maintain. The jukebox site is still in data build mode, and the memoir is needing far more entries, (I have like 25 articles waiting to be written, and unlike my normal habits, I have notes and rough outlines for them.) The podcast is still in the works, and the site is almost ready for prime time. (Don’t get me started on Dead podcasts. It’s a great idea, but oy, the scripts aren’t written!)
I just need to get out of this funk. I have no reason to just be consuming tv shows when I want to get my creative out.
Maybe that’s all this post is, clearing a little space in my head so I can get moving again.
After all, even a slightly blurry moon on a groggy Monday morning still looked pretty good, to these Tuesday-night eyes.
I spent 9th grade in a boarding school in Beaverdam, Wisconsin. I had gotten straight As in 8th grade by the very unpopular method of acing all my tests and turning in all homework. This turned the grading curve most kids counted on into a straight line, and several of my classmates resented their resultant summer school assignments and put their ire on me directly. I had not been trying to ruin their lives. I was just trying to prove to my mother that I could do what she wanted me to do that year. (In 7th grade I received a couple of Bs, and she had disappointed-mom-face all that summer).
It’s not like they had been nice to me all year, anyway. I was bumped into regularly, stuffed in my locker once, and tripped so many times I actually became quite adept at staying upright with my feet swept out from under me. But after final grades were handed out, I received death threats. Not the assassin-grade moody speeches about the how or when, just the angry teenage “If I see you again, I’m gonna kill you” kind of thing. But that was said in front of a teacher, which meant they were taken to the office, and my mother was called.
So I spent that summer looking through Boy’s Life magazine classifieds for a different school. There were military academies, boys-only schools, but I found Wayland Academy in there. Those As had a much different effect with that school than my previous one. They offered me a scholarship.
That school was a prep school in the grand tradition. It operated much like a college, preparing students socially as well as academically. You didn’t fill every hour with a class. As a scholarship recipient, I was automatically in the Honors program, so I had five classes to schedule in the seven-hour day. Halfway through the first semester, I dropped my bio class. It was just too much on my plate. I went down to four classes but had to attend a study session in the time block biology had occupied.
In the study session, I had to be doing something “productive” in regard to school. So yo-yo was not allowed, or hacky sack, or even banjo practice. I could study with textbooks or library books, do homework, or even write letters home. After a few days, I discovered that I could also just read a book of just about any type if I wanted.
I’m not sure how I ended up with Dune, by Frank Herbert. It might have been my roommates, or some girl I knew (meaning I had a crush on her) who said something about it, or even a teacher who recommended it. But that was the book I chose to read then. A massive paperback book with an orangey binding and what looked like a picture of a sun rising halfway over the horizon, a cliff, and folks dwarfed by the cliff, all in white.
The sun, the cliff, the folks in white. I had no idea what I was getting into.
This was not a book a 14-year-old should be starting his science fiction journey with. It’s huge, like 400-plus pages, a good 50 of which were a glossary explaining all the terms used in the book, and it was so very confusing. I was turning to the glossary every single page, sometimes multiple times on the same page, and it took me months to finish it.
That could have turned me off science fiction forever, but it didn’t. That world was so rich and so well described that it lived inside me and made me seek out other stories that could evoke that immersion again.
I didn’t move on through the series very far. In 1980, there were three novels in the series that I knew of.
I did read Dune Messiah, but it was beginning to pall on me. All the politics, backstabbing, poisoning. It was just too heavy. I think that’s when I decided I disliked anything to do with politics, and since those books were so full of it, it was easy to put them down and move on.
Years later, I had decided to get back into them. The new movie version of Dune had been announced, and it brought back good memories of those early days with that novel. So I looked into it and was amazed at how deep that bench had gotten. Frank himself wrote two more novels. Then his son, Brian Herbert, took up the mantle and teamed up with Kevin J. Anderson and wrote a lot more, prequels and sequels.
I had thought, “Hey, I could start with the prequels, and that’d be fun.” But I’m a traditional kind of guy with book series, so I decided to start with the original again, both to reacquaint myself with the world and to see if I could survive reading it without constantly referring to the glossary. (I couldn’t.)
But something nagged me in the reread. Where was the heart plug, or cork as my brain keeps calling it, thing? Baron Harkonnen had these things installed in all his staff, his nephews, and even himself to control them and bind their loyalty in a very visceral way. (Why he did it to himself, I can only assume it was to convince them it was an “all of us” thing.) But I didn’t see it.
I read the book a third time, this time focused on that missing detail, and did not find it. I was perplexed. Did Frank face enough feedback that he excised it from his book after decades? Did I find an early edition, by happenstance, that had the cork, and all versions after that were edited without it? I got several versions of the book from various sources. They were thinner than the one I held in memory, barely 350 pages in one of them. But none of them said “condensed” or “edited” or anything like that. Yet still, nothing about a heart cork.
What occurred to me is that the media landscape had changed a lot since I was a kid.
Way back, I had loved Star Wars, long before “A New Hope” was tacked on. So much that I saw it seven and a half times in the theater when it came out. (The half time was when I was convinced to take a neighbor kid along with the very parent-reasonable argument of “You can go again if you take Scottie along,” but this kid had to use the bathroom a lot, so I missed, easily, half the movie.) Soon after that, I was haranguing my small-town bookstore for more of “From The Adventures of Luke Skywalker,” which was a subtitle in the novelization.
This guy was game, and he used his sources to order what he could find. Turns out it was just several more copies of that same book. One was a hardcover with a golden dust jacket, and I did buy that because why not. But there weren’t any more in those “adventures.” That was basically a promise, not a historical archive notice.
Then things changed. On the Death Star, the captain shouting at the Stormtroopers inspecting the Millennium Falcon after it had been captured said, “THX-1138, why aren’t you at your post?” (Or at least that’s how I remember it. It might have been the novelization infecting the movie in my head.) But when we upgraded to the DVD, I heard “TK-421, why aren’t you at your post?” and my brain broke. Plus now Greedo shot first. Heresy!
In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the government agents who had guns now had walkie-talkies, and then later went back to guns. Digital technology allowed directors to ignore that old adage that you had to release your babies eventually. Now they could basically gene-edit a teenager between theatrical release and home release, or from one format to another.
And this happened in books too. I had basically devoured The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and moved on to The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. In an author’s note, Stephen R. Donaldson said there was a story about Seahome his editors had made him remove before publishing it, but that he would include it in Daughter of Regals & Other Stories.
I then learned how very useful editors can be. I’m sorry, Stephen, but they were right. That story would have pulled focus, slowed everything down, and taken several chapters to get a reader back.
He got his revenge, though. His success with the first Chronicles made him able to get whatever he wanted in the Second, but that sucker dragged. Just sayin’.
And the new digital landscape allows books to be edited basically on the fly. I have one that I read through, a reference book about Moonlighting, and when I opened it recently there was new content. That’s only one example I know of for sure, but I had suspected it was happening for years and never really could verify it.
So, in my head, folks could now kill their darlings after they published them. Historical volumes change between editions all the time. Fiction could too. Only they don’t stamp “Revised” on the cover. They bury it in printing numbers that look like a secret code.
So obviously Big Publishing had edited Dune and took that uber-gross cork out of it, changing whole swaths of text and all references to something more benign. Yeah, that made more sense than I was wrong, right?
But I’m nothing if not thorough, so I looked on the internet. Google searches, Reddit threads, Yahoo Answers, everything. And you know what I found? Not a single whisper that there was editing shenanigans with Dune. And my brain could not contain for long the thought that there was a massive conspiracy to keep such an edit secret.
But it still was firmly in my memory. I was sure I had read it. So I interrogated my memory more thoroughly and you know what I discovered? I could picture the corks completely. Like the old rubber stoppers for bathtubs: sloping sides, a rim ring, a looped hole in the top where you ran a chain through. But I could not, for the life of me, think of the text that gave me such a clear image.
So I googled some more and guess what I found? There was this movie from 1984, Dune, directed by David Lynch, and I can assure you I saw it when it came out. I can also assure you that I have very little memory of watching it. I can’t even say I thought it was odd or not Frank’s vision, though that seems to be the popular view of it.
But that version was full of body horror, long before that became a genre of its own. And one of those concepts was the heart plug, or cork, and though my memory told me that was how the Baron died, his own cork getting pulled out, that was not true. An underling is killed by the Baron, and there is a deleted scene where Thufir Hawat pulls out his own.
I guess what I had done is read a book at fourteen, then saw the movie a few years later, and mixed them into a single memory locker. Not exactly conflating, but close. I just attributed the cork as if it had been written there and then chased the facts into a different reality. I guess I did the same thing in reverse with the Star Wars memory.
Yes, immediate editing is a fact. People can edit things now in ways that go beyond the old model of fire and forget. I don’t think it’s always justified, but it’s not always bad. One of the movies I own digitally had features added long after I bought it: a new trailer for a sequel and a behind-the-scenes feature for that new movie. So not really a content addition, but not offensive either.
It’s kind of my thing now to have the digital copies and the physical media as well. One provides easy access and maybe extra content sometimes, and the other provides archival status. (Seriously, did you know the DVD of Barb Wire has a strip scene with Pamela Anderson that is not in the digital version or the Blu-ray? I have all three now.)
And now it’s not a roadblock in my head. I can read Dune and the rest of the oeuvre without the cork that never was. I just have to face the dense story structure and all those glossary references.
