Wi-Fried

I stepped out of the harness and let the glider fall to the sand. The wings collapsed and it looked like nothing more than a stick with palm fronds tied to it. I felt like I had flown it, had made the perfect landing, a stall but really had I? My hands had fit perfectly into the wings and I had been one with this thing.

But even as I had landed my attention was riveted on Hollywood Beach. Somehow I knew that this re-build was 12 feet higher than the original or else it would be under water and that it would settle back as the Atlantic fell over the next century or so. The boardwalk was different. It was wood as it had been in 1966 when I was selling Paradomes in Florida but I would not have known that since I never visited it then. I didn't even know then that this was the murder scene where Candy had had her very rich husband beaten senseless, or more precisely dead, with that vintage coke bottle. The boardwalk was now, 2011, a clean ribbon of paver stones. The boardwalk was finished, rebuilt in wood, circa 2166 where I was with the glider, it was the rest of Hollywood Beach that was under construction.

I was fixated on the robots and the noise they made. There were many sizes but they all seemed to have six wiry legs attached to a black central pod and with similar smaller pods on the end of each leg. These leg ended pods made a soft click every time they touched anything including other pods, walls, materials. It made for a cacophony of noise you can't imagine. They were rebuilding every element of Hollywood Beach as it had been in 1966 and not so different than it was in 2011 other than that wood boardwalk.

Margaret and Frances were there, 2166, no Patrick. And for the life of me I cannot understand why they took such childish delight in my landing. Laughing and giggling like six year olds didn't seem appropriate for a couple of centenarians plus. They sensed my awe of the robots and answered as the question was forming in my brain. Yes there are a lot of them, trillions would be suggestive but orders of magnitude wrong. They didn't know in fact since robots were being created at an astounding rate at any moment and they ranged in size from the nano to the thousand foot tall varieties. None of which were on display here. Think of how many nano robots it takes to recreate a living reef in Indonesia. Get the picture?

I was back on the beach in 2011. A little girl, black as you can possibly be, was staring at me her red shovel held straight out seeming to be holding up the parasail that was drifting slowly along the horizon. Maybe I had been storing, maybe it had all been a dream but I don't think so because I could also see Margaret and Frances walking away deep in conversation. A conversation I could not have heard anyway because their lips were not moving. She was what was once called a pickaninny, the four year old black girl that is, all eyes, all energy, always just a second from a squeal of delight, she was gorgeous. She stared down at this ugly old honky that had just been making that conversational sleepy racket.

I had known for a while that I was not part of most of their discourse. They spoke to me so that I could understand. But I was receiving information, more now than earlier, another way. They were connected directly to my brain. They just put things there like how to fly a glider. It was not what you may think. It was not paranormal. Much more prosaic, it was Wi-Fi. We were wireless. They had computers in them and so did I. Probably one of those robots or a group of nanobots had put it there and they probably were still there, in my bloodstream maybe awaiting further instructions.

Margaret and Frances knew anything they wanted to know about me but I knew only what they wanted me to know about them. This was a one way street. As they would explain to me later, "You could not handle it, the noise would drive you mad."

Anyway I lay there on the sand of Hollywood Beach 2011 knowing somehow that tomorrow we would be going to Patagonia 2300, or there abouts, to inspect the tethers for the bubbles that would be arriving soon. Margaret was determined that this was going to happen. Most of the coastlines were repaired, all of the themes were in place, the seas had subsided and there was no more time anyway, in 2300 that is. There was a wall there where they lived in 2300. They could not go into the future, their future that is, but they somehow could visit, work in and manipulate the past. I was part of that past. They could do anything with me and I didn't care. Had they made me that way or choose me because that was who I was?

Before they showed up I didn't care much about anything accept staying alive and that thread was growing quite thin. OK I did like Waffle House and I did like thinking about how to survive but despite the crying I was really sort of flat, zoned out. Maybe it was the meds, obviously it was, or was it them, did they even exist. I had to pin something down, something concrete. Maybe Jason could help.

Patrick told Margaret that there were things happening in the bubbles that he did not understand. Jason, all of twenty and very precocious, was all but out of control. He had gone missing for more than a month. Into a dark place. One of many that they as students had been mapping as an exercise. Find and measure the matter there and map any black holes and their activity. There was only one black spot that was off limits. The artificial one that our friends used to mask the Earth and its environs. Patrick was worried that Jason was thinking of breaking the rules. Jason was thinking too much for himself Patrick thought.

What Patrick didn't know is that Jason could move things. Jason had moved a black hole, OK a little one, and Judy knew it because she was a tracker and checked in on all data points in that black sector and it had gone missing for a week. She knew Jason had moved it because when it returned to its exact former position its spin was reversed. That is what Jason would do. Jason scared Judy and that was a new sensation. Judy had never been scared before. Judy was 12 years old, one of the youngest, Jason was her big brother and twenty. Jason was different. " How do you change the spin of a black hole" Judy wanted to ask Jason, " do you have to take it all the way around?"

I remember being twenty. A number of times it seemed that my mind went into overdrive, that it was for brief periods in hyper-drive, that my mind was experimenting with a new more intelligent state. This seemed to happen after I had had an especially good T-bone steak. That did not happen anymore, it stopped before I was twenty two. Still like salty T-bones though, well done.

The little black girl was still there, when I again opened one eye in 2011, but she was now talking over her shoulder to someone about me in another language and waving that shovel menacingly. I said "boo" and she, startled at first, laughed and then hit me over the head with that shovel, sand was in my eye. I wondered what she would have thought of the robots that would ply this beach later especially the ones I would sic on her chasing her back to her sand battlements all clicking and clattering. I sure couldn't chase her.

They knew I had a problem and they were not going to do anything about it. And I was not going to ask. That was understood.

My mind was putty in their hands but when I was with them I felt fine, could do things, could think, could wonder. And in Patagonia I would experience something from the past, a sense of excitement tinged with a bit of fear. The first from Margaret and the other from Patrick.

I was Wi-Fried and well done. I felt part of the team with nothing to do, at least for the moment.

The Stall

Procrastinate, stall, put things off, it works sometimes, sometimes problems resolve themselves and you breathe a sigh of relief. It can become a habit like waiting for your muffler to fix itself for instance. So far that is not working for me. I have a hole in the pipe before the muffler and it is getting noisier. Here at Hollywood Beach in Florida they have no inspection, no little labels to stick on your windshield so I can stall.

Laying on the beach that day I was going over another type of stall in my mind. Had been working on this for many years and hadn't progressed, no breakthroughs yet. It was one of many recurrent day dreams I had on different subjects and one would just pop up now and then and I would work on it.

It involves a plane or a glider, either with no power, and coming in for a landing where-ever. I am not a pilot so this is just my own senses that are being exercised here. Your coming in but there is no landing strip but that doesn't matter in this problem. The idea is to stall at just the right second so that your at zero altitude and speed at the same time. I don't know if it is even a real problem. An aeronautical engineer may laugh at the idea.

Margaret is probably a very advanced aeronautical engineer among many other such things. She didn't laugh just made the simple statement that it was easy and I could do it with the simplest of gliders and that I should try. Why I simply accepted that a stranger suddenly standing in the sand hovering above me should answer a day dream I was having I don't know but there they were, her and Patrick, standing there, time travelers, mind readers and wanting me to answer some questions about Hollywood Beach and a big wave.

Now these people may be way advanced beyond anything we can even imagine but they are not perfect. They had made a mistake and it could mess things up considerably though they did not seem worried. Maybe they had one of those flash devices that Men in Black had in the movie where they could erase my memory. If so I hoped it was selective.

Anyway they asked me about the wave and the wave had not happened yet. I did not know anything about it. What they really wanted to ask me about was Candy and my obsession with a murder that had taken place here in 1964 but they got their notes mixed up and there it was a wave was going to happen to Hollywood Beach, a big wave, not the kind that came with the hurricanes but the kind that came with landslides, in this case half an island many miles away slid into the Atlantic that just so happened to be triggered by a large 9.2 earthquake a thousand miles from that island. It was the interaction of those two wave producing events that had Hollywood at the very epicenter of a wave that would make Southern Florida an island, an uninhabited one.

I wasn't supposed to know any of this and they didn't ever tell me when it would happen but I could surmise that it would happen in the not to distant (my) future since here they were trying to find out all about Hollywood Beach for some kind of re-enactment or theme thing. They were talking about restoring this and that and Candy was integral to it all.

My ego was stoked by these aliens from the future who were asking me questions until I realized that they bounced around like jumping beans talking to all kinds of people at all times of the past. They had talked to Candy. That is why in 1966 she had looked at me that way, a sullen stare that she would not break even as her boyfriend and her lawyers went an talking and eating around her. She knew that they had talked to me in the future and I had told them something about her that she did not want to hear. That she was painted, that she was afraid of her future and would die in a few years. Getting off and getting rich for a murder was not all she thought it would be, they had told her when she would die.

And they had told her that she would live on in infamy in their instructional world.

And they took me with them and they gave me a glider and I landed it perfectly with a stall on Hollywood Beach coming in over the waves and simply standing up at the moment of stall, just putting my feet down like an eagle on its perch.

But there was nobody there.

Forsaken, almost human He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

I like Judy Collins and her songs but this is not one of them, but she makes it hers with her singing. The line that ends " like a stone" anchors it for me.

A Walk In The Park was the title of my novel that I never wrote. It has rattled around in my head soul-less for years but never a word written. I want humor in it but so far can't find any. Can't stand fiction myself anymore that is too serious, no matter how bleak, filled with horror or just tragic it must have humor for me to be interested.

Margaret is smiling, she is talking to her husband who sits in a bubble on the lit crescent of a waning moon. Her sister Francis smiles beside her they both watch that crescent as it descends over Ojos del Salado the second highest peak in what was the Americas setting between and in what had been both Argentina and Chile. This part of the world was remarkably well preserved. Even the oceans here were close to pristine and the work of the many like Margaret and Francis was starting to show in even the worst parts of the globe.

"It's time" she said and the smile on Frances face widened with a bit of joy. This was an ongoing argument but this time Margaret was pressing her case. Patrick held the other side and not a weaker one but once removed from Margaret's experience. "They will never forgive us, they are not ready" he responded. They had not seen each other in two years. Patrick with his teaching and shuttling to the far sites, Margaret with her hands dirty in the soil of Mother Earth, her eyes focused close on seedling she had been planting now most of her life.

She did not know her children and they did not know her. He was once removed, she was twice. They were far smarter, intelligent, than she or they with their planning and science could ever have imagined. She, Patrick, Frances and the others had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Patrick knew this to a degree. Margaret did not.

The time of the human/machine singularity had come and gone. The graph of human/machine interaction and growth achievement was almost vertical The Earth itself and it rebirth was testament to that and yet they were smarter, more intelligent and they knew nothing of what Margaret spoke. They were in the dark, all 250,000 daughters and sons of Patrick, Margaret, Frances and the others, the last of the dieing. They had never met and they did not know that each and every one of them was truly the son or daughter of every remaining remnant of this dieing cult.

This new breed knew the stars and many thought their mission was to go there but none knew of the existence of Mother Earth or Margaret's plan.

They would never forgive her.

Clouds

In my life I haven't laid in the grass and looked at clouds to often. When young you looked for faces and animals in clouds, not so much anymore. When I was older as I am now I look at clouds a lot more from down, looking down from airplanes. I like to look at clouds from airplanes. I still find it incredible that we can fly and there is nothing out there but clouds anyway.

Recently, on Hollywood Beach, I am looking up at clouds a lot more, laying in the Atlantic looking up. Last night, the 4th, I watched dirty clouds blowing west from the fireworks while laying on the beach.  Watching clouds may be good for you. This past week I had a respite from the poison and gained back seven of the ten pounds I lost in recent weeks. I felt really good this morning but now the poison is back.

My Dad is dead. He died coming on two years ago. I cried at his funeral, didn't expect to, the next time I cried was at the Waffle House. The last time before his funeral I cried was when I called my parents to tell them the news that I had been DXed with MCC. I told my mother, no problem, but when she handed the phone to my
Dad I could not speak.

Earlier when I was in Michigan staying with my parents to help my Mother take care of my Dad he was there across the kitchen table, breakfast, a scowl on his face, something in his two minute short term memory was focused on his eldest son. "Bob do you pray?" I didn't answer. Then with as much ferocity as I have seen from him since I told him early on a Saturday morning that I was not going back to my senior year at Mt. Calvary Wisconsin Seminary, he said " Bob you have to start praying before it is too late!

I think, no, I know that he had not been happy that I went in the first place but now to stand in the doorway of their bedroom and tell them that I had sent back the postcard saying NO I will not be returning, well it upset his world and his world was rapidly becoming not mine.

His was a world of the universal, the Catholic, a simpler world, a world of the greatest generation, a world with lots of veils you couldn't see through like clouds. He ddn't try as far as I know, I had to since reality stuck its raw putrid guts right in my face. In my world the veils had parted, some of the clouds took strange shapes.

When my parents dropped me off at the seminary and entrusted me to Father John they did not know he was a pedofile. I didn't either until setting on the sofa on Roosevelt Island reading Time magazine thirty five years later I found out. You see there were others. How many? Who knows but the victims, there are many more than those who have come forward. Twenty to one may be low. Look at me. When I turned to my wife and said that Time Magazine says that the Capuchin priest my parents entrusted me to back in 1958 was a pedofile it was it was the first time I had even thought about what had happened back in 1960. I had blacked it out. I told her that Father John had not molested me, another priest had, starting in the confessional. Big black clouds were raining then and I changed.

How do you tell your parents, true believers, blindly following the guy on the sticks, that if you died tomorrow, a distinct possibility, and found that their was a God who was going to judge me that I would use those powers that he had given me to spit in his face and proceed to judge him. Bob damn Him.

There was no way I could even imagine telling them why I was not going back. It was incomprehensible in a home where the word sex simply didn't exist.

On the phone that day I was trying to tell my Dad that I was dieing, probably before he would. It was the ultimate failure for an eldest son to me. Clouds got in my way. He had Prostate Cancer and Diabetes and had had a stroke ten years before. His short term memory was shot. I could tell him anything, he would not remember in five minutes. I could tell him nothing.

" It is life's illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds at all."

"Both Sides Now"
(Clannad & Paul Young)

Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere, I've looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun they rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud's illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and ferris wheels the dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real, I've looked at love that way
But now it's just another show, you leave 'em laughin when you go
And if you care don't let them know, don't give yourself away

I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud, to say, "I love you" right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds, I've looked at life that way
But now old friends are acting strange they shake their heads, they say
I've changed
But something's lost but something's gained in living every day

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all
Judy Collins

Voters Card

I declare I am a full time resident of Florida, have been since early June but today I got my voters card which is another notch on my cinnamon stick. First came the drivers license, four days of intense work, then the plates for my 1998 Ford Ranger pick-up and now I can vote. Applied two weeks ago.

Here on a mission as a Democrat to vote out the crook of a governor they have, Rick Scott. No need probably since he has six out of ten thumbs down with voters at the moment. Recall time. Why did we elect so many fools this last election, 2010?

I declare that I have been a full time resident of Florida since June 5th when I crossed the state line from Georgia. I am not going back to New York, except to visit, for the rest of my days, whatever I am graced with. The brain is a little addeled. Making all kinds of dumb mistakes. Picked up a bottle of cinnamon sticks the other day at Publix, I wanted ground cinnamon. What do you do with cinnamon sticks?

Talked to two young guys about Hollywood Beach today. Both confirmed my first take which is highly positive and getting more so. The first, Scott, owns a small inn of efficiency apartments on A1A, the road here on the Intercoastal and parallel with the beach one fifty yards East. He was high on Hollywood Beach,  "They have repaved the boardwalk with paver stones and the side streets back to A1A, all the wires are now underground and they will give you $10,000 to fix up your property." and he went on.

The Pousada Inn is where I stay and is definitely not taking advantage of this largess. Had a gas leak today. That is after two weeks of trying to get management to fix my stove. They worked on it, an unpaid handyman who is working off his back rent that is, for a couple of hours today. The solution? I have to turn off the main gas shut-off switch when I am not using the stove. I will sleep better that way but hopefully not a deep sleep.

This "suite" also has a wiggly wall socket with a missing plate, a nice combination if you also have a gas leak.

The Boardwalk

Hollywood Beach has a boardwalk 1.83 miles long, almost the same length as Roosevelt Island in the East River of the New York archipelago where I lived for the last thirty three years. As a former New Yorker I like lots of people on the street and even now as the sun sets the boardwalk is busy, bicycles and tricycles, runners and swimmers, acrobats and old people like me but with walkers.

Forgot how the ocean can float your boat. I am wearing a baseball cap all the time even now as I await the next three inch swell, never liked any kind of hat. Helke says I will need it as she handed it to me as I left New York and I do or I think I do. It's a cover-up narcissistic thing I do even in the surf.

It is a bathtub, warm and liquidy, my hands are under my head as I watch the sun set thru my toes and the palm trees back on shore. In the airspace of my half open right eye a turbo-prop beats its way quickly down toward the sun and Ft. Lauderdale airport followed later by a heavy and then another intermittently grinding their way so slowly, landing gear coming down, gray silhouettes against the Eastern mist. I wonder why gray, why not glinting yellow and orange from that setting sun.

South of the boardwalk tall condos rise. I have looked at some of them, one a foreclosure that the bank has priced below market was full of bargain hunters one of whom will outbid the rest and find themselves underwater next year. Well that is my opinion. The banks are keeping a lot off the market to manage the price but their inventories are still growing and sooner or later they will have to dump. Again my opinion. I have been wrong before.

The boardwalk is low rise, lower class million dollar properties. Low class if you think Trump is high class. Personally I would not want to live within a mile of any building with the Trump name on it, to high class for me. They say they are building a Margaritaville in the middle of the boardwalk. I like that though I am not a drinker.

When we had our photo lab in New York, I had a partner, we did a large Ciba color print of the front facade of Grand Central with a very large banner draped across it saying Trump. He was renovating Grand Central and this must have been part of the deal. The classic Trump touch.

I had to hang the print over Trumps desk in his fourth floor offices across the street from the still unfinished Trump Tower on Fifth  Ave. The young Donald supervised and complimented and shook my hand after but that is when my opinion of him started to drop from hero to the unfathomable depths. There would be no Trump Tower on the boardwalk of Hollywood Beach. At least I hoped not since I was serious about buying a place here. After all somewhere on Hollywood Beach the body of Candy Mossier's multi-millionaire husband had lain bleeding from his coke bottle wound back in the day when I was so naive, 1964 maybe, two years before I would first arrive. Now that scene adds class to the boardwalk of Hollywood Beach, a little history.

Naive? I knew so much more then, twenty, totally clueless now, sixty-seven.

Jobs

I joined Twitter near its inception sent a twit and another the other day I think. Same with Facebook, joined and then nothing. Getting to old I guess but the other day I went on Facebook and updated my account by listing most of the jobs I have had.

Interesting how many jobs you can have in 67 years, Worked in a Coke plant, the stuff they feed blast furnaces with to make iron and steel. Civil War vintage plant with a blacksmith's shop to make individual tools for workers like me. Most dangerous job I ever saw including those on TV today. Maybe with the exception of TV tower technicians. That is a dangerous job but at least it is not as filthy as a Coke plant.

And there was the job selling Paradomes, eight screen doors connected in a circle with a circus top and one door which opened. I was hired because I was 6' 3" and tall enough to put it up. And that job took me to Florida in 1966

And there was Candy Moisser as old as my mother but looking  older, I being  22. My mother was a beauty but Candy was trying to be painted Hollywood and not Hollywood Beach Florida where they, she and her boyfriend, killed her millionaire husband by bashing in his head with a coke bottle. She and her lawyers were there in the bar on Key Biscayne every night. She looked at me with a dull stare. She got off even though her boyfriend's bloody hand-print was found right on the counter next to the body. He did to. Very strange days.

Forty-five years later and here I was living on Hollywood Beach Florida. Living here is the last job I probably will have and the one that will pay me the best, around half a million just for living here. Candy would like that.

Maybe if I am lucky I will find a cure for cancer, that could be my last job. Pay is good. Read today that a cure for cancer would be worth fifty trillion dollars for the US or $100 trillion for the whole world. Even a one percent cure for cancer would be worth $500 billion just in the US. And I am working on it. Right I never had a course in Biology but it is not always what you know but what you don't know that counts. For example I don't know that I can't cure cancer same as the guys that invented Kodachrome. They didn't know that everyone in the photo business knew that the theory of Kodachrome was not doable.  If they had just asked we would never have been besotted with Kodachrome all those years and Paul Simon would be shy one song.

There is a good chance that my cancer cure idea will generate a clinical trial by a major drug company this year. You never know where a cure will come from, this one will be a big surprise. If I live long enough I plan to take a course in Biology so I can better understand my cure.

Then there is broadcasting. When my photo lab failed, made large Cibachrome murals and other stuff, we were the best but that was before computer driven photocomps and Ink Jet mural printing appeared, that was  when I got into broadcasting. Didn't know a thing but two years later or less I was an expert witness before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications with the august Billy Tauzin its leader and the question at hand the modulation to be used for a digital TV transition in the US.

Billy along with his cohorts choose wrong for us, probably right for himself, and we got stuck with 8-VSB the worst modulation in the world. I was there to support DVB-T, the European standard, the best modulation at the time though now maybe the Chinese have the best. Helped Intel test that modulation a few years ago. Classify that job as unpaid.

Today, 11 years later, broadcasters and the FCC are trying to find a way to now transition again to you guessed it, either the current DVB-T, DVB-T2 or the Chinese standard. I told anyone who would listen then, 2000, or later that the US would have to transition to a modern standard that worked sooner or later. Told Kennard to his face and the laughter of a large audience. Told Powell through his minions, he would not see us. Told Tauzin but he was to busy making an exit from Congress to the green of drug land. Told most of the FCC commissioners, department heads and top technicians and many agreed with me but could or would not do anything. Told Congresspersons and Senators to no avail. Can you call that a job? Worked hard for years but did not get paid until now. Now it is going to pay off.

Almost got a job in Nam. Radio room operator in the central highlands. No I did not know a thing about operating a radio room. Also didn't know that a bribe of $1500 was required. Didn't get the job. My army draftee intelligence job almost got me a job with Air America (the CIA), partly because of my intelligence background and partly because I knew where to go to ask for the job, the Vientiane Laos airport where somebody in a quiet hanger talked to me for an hour or so about the war recession and how they were laying off. That was 1970 maybe July. Anyway the radio room got over-run a year later and a lot of guys died. One job I lucked out and didn't get. Add the oil platform roughneck job off Sumatra I didn't get while in Bangkok. That was probably a bad idea to.