Short Circuits
Authors: Dorien Grey
Short Circuits: A Writer's Life in Blogs
By Dorien Grey
Copyright 2011 by Dorien Grey
Cover Copyright 2011 by Dara England and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
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Short Circuits: A Writer's Life in Blogs
by Dorien Grey (Roger Margason)
CONTENTS
The Hill of Time
On Birthdays
Happy Birthday
High School
Remembering Family
The Teens
The Yeast Years
A Simple Man
Emotions
Softie
Puck Was Right
The Power of Touch
Requited Love
Laughter
Identities
Pennies
The Lazy Perfectionist
Delusions
If Only
That Which I Should Have Done
Political Correctness
Rejection
The Doctor Is In
An Agnostic's Christmas
Beliefs
Three Rules
Simple Rules
Life in a Sardine Can
Grandpa Fearn
Grandma Fearn
Aunt Thyra
Uncle Buck
Time and Coffee Cups
Anticipation
Frustration
Secrets
Role Models
Impatience
My Garden of Phobias
Phobias Redux
Embarrassment
On Being Bubbly
God's Snowflakes
Why?
On Dreams
Questions
On Being Naive
Confessions
In Praise of Me
Fretting
Neverending
The Other Side of the Window
Perspective
Worthless
As Ithers See Us
Leaky Boats
Flotilla
Cars
First Jobs
Jobs from Hell, Part I
Jobs from Hell, Part II
Jobs from Hell, Part III
My Days in Porn
OK, More Porn-Days Stories
Pebbles
Ice Cream Social
Pride
The Mind's Eye
Unforgiving
Unforgiving, Follow-Up
Laziness and Priorities
Sing Out, Fagin!
Nausea
Coffee Time
Bureaucracy
Routine
Habits, Routines, and Ruts
Naps
Revisiting Naps
Domesticity Yet Again
Fairdale
The House on Blackhawk Avenue
Homes
The Lakes
Harry Morris
Northern Memories
Now Playing
The Bittersweet View
Chicago Life
Time and Dreams
Earthquake
Letter to a Nun
Modern Science
Aliens and Hypocrites
My Life of Crime
Gnats
Triumvirate
The Man Behind the Curtain
To Each a Dorien
Dreams and Dorien
Teeter-Totter
Losing Roger
Me and J. Alfred Prufrock
Change and Endings
A Spot in Time
Mind and Body
Poor Loser
The Spelunker's Rope
Things
Things, Again
Tangibles
PJs
Time in a Jar
The Pity Pool
The Glass Half Full
In the House of Cancer
A Bologna Sandwich
Off to Mayo
And Thus Are the Days of Our Lives
Oh, the Nobility
The Train to Omaha
The Captain and the Ship
Dirty Old Men
This Way to the Egress
Teapots
Friends and Ships
A Seat on the Bus
Backward, Turn Backward
Condescension
In, But Not Of
In, But Not Of, Part 2
Epiphany
The Shallow Pond
Letting Go
Giving Thanks
The
Trompe l'oeil
Mind
Navy Talk
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Tar Bubbles
Obsession
Get a Horse
Chicago Then, Chicago Now
Shaping Clay
Trains
A Day at the Movies
Time Was
Generations
Worst Enemies
The Likes o' Me
Normal
To Catch a Raindrop
Endless
Falling Short
Conspiracy
Paranoia Rides Again
The Computer Conspiracy
AT&T and Me
Charlie Brown
Shiva
Logic
Why and Because
The Ice Cream Cone
Alice Ghostley
Gratitude
Colds, Specific, and Stoicism, General
You Is or You Ain't
Reading the Signs
De Profundus
The Pleaures of Drear
Potpourri
Pebbles II
Compared to What?
Phil
Simple Delights
Friends and Time
A Letter to Norm
Aftermath
Miss Piggy's Nose
Lief
Russ
Bye, Bye, Birdie
Stu
Pat
Nick
Requiem for Uncle Bob, Part I
Requiem for Uncle Bob, Part II
Lost Friends
Robert
Robert's Return
Kids' Play
Pets
Catharsis
A Cat's Tale
Marching On
Dangling Wires
The Sound of Music
Songs
Marches
I Sing the Body Electric
The circuitry of the human brain is often compared to electrical wiring. In most people, thoughts flow smoothly, like direct current passing through a wire. But for some thought processes more strongly resemble a downed power line, whipping about madly, spewing sparks of random thoughts. I am one of those people. I channel as much of the power flow of my mind as I can into my books, and the random sparkings and sputterings result in blogsâbrief flashes of one man's life and thought.
The short-circuitings contained herein are gathered loosely into general topics, but there is no smooth flow to them, no direct link between most of them. Each is a separate sparking; each is a spontaneous response to some random stimulus. Put together, they outline and define a life.
While they all stem from my personal experiences and opinions, they aren't purely an exercise in egocentrism, but a game I hope you might find some pleasure in playing. And as to who you will be playing with....
The beginning is always a good place to start. But I'll skip the traditional “I was born in a one-room log cabin on the prairie on a cold winter's night...” bio. You may or may not already know who I am (Dorien Grey, author of the Dick Hardesty and Elliott Smith mystery series as well as the western/adventure/mystery/romance
Calico
). But you are obviously curious enough to be reading these words, and I thank you for that.
Actually, I'm in effect two people: in everything having to do with writing, I am Dorien Grey. In all other aspects of my life, I'm Roger Margason, the name with which I was born. It's a complicated arrangement, but it works very well for me.
I've written a total of 17 books so far, and well over 500 blogs. This compilation is the first of two planned. This first one is primarily designed (though the words “designed” and “blogs” really don't go together all that well) to let you get to know me and how I got to be a writer. The second book concentrates more on the fireworks display of topics which piqued my interestâand hopefully, yours. And, also hopefully, by the time you're done, you'll be able to see where the various themes and topics come from. All were gathered over four years of my Monday/Wednesday/Friday postings on my website (
http://www.doriengrey.com
).
Perhaps because I've always been acutely aware of the human tendency to feel uniqueâwhich we areâand aloneâwhich we are not, I am compelled to emphasize our commonalities and how they bind us. To that end, I write books and I write blogs. Books tend to be more complex, generalized and cohesive than blogs. They require some degree of control on the part of the writer, and considerable structure, and tend to connect with the reader on a different level than blogs, which tend to be more spontaneous, shorter, wide ranging and therefore in a way more personal. If books are a painting, blogs are an Etch-a-Sketch drawing.
I also write to leave some evidence, once I'm gone, that I was here. As a gay man with no children, my words are my progeny. And while I'm here, I write to let you know I'm aware that you are here, too, and to hope you might find in my words some connections to yourself. But at the foundation of it all I write, quite simply, because I cannot
not
write.
Though you and I have probably never met, I like to think we know each other. I hope by the end of this book, you might feel the same. I would be truly delighted to think these little short-circuiting sparks and sputters might not only illuminate some of who I am, but might afford you a glimpse or two of who you are.
Roger Margason, a.k.a. Dorien Grey
THE HILL OF TIME
One of the relatively few advantages of growing older is that the higher you climb on the hill of time, the more you can see when you look back over where you've been.
I was born fourteen and a half years after the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I; eight months and eleven days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first swearing in as President, in the darkest days of the Great Depression. I had just turned eight when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and remember listening to President Roosevelt's declaration of war. I was eleven and a half years old when he died. (Because I was too young to yet realize the importance of history, my primary concern was my unhappiness that, for three days following his death, all regular radio programming was cancelled, the radio playing nothing but music, forcing me to miss out on my favorite kids' programs.)
I was raised in a world of iceboxes and Dixie cup ice cream, of 3-cent postage stamps and twice-a-day mail delivery; of black-and-white movies with newsreels and travelogs and cartoons and 10-cent bags of popcorn. Railroad trains were pulled by steam engines, and there were no interstates or four-lane highways. Cars had running boards. Laundry was washed either by hand or by machines with wringers. Wet clothing was hung outdoors because driers hadn't been invented yet. To call someone, you picked up the phone and, if no one else was talking on the party line you shared with one or two other families, asked the operator to connect you to the number you wanted (“Forest 984”; “Central 255”). The rotary dial came considerably later.
During the war, gas and food were rationed, and everyone received ration stamps. I remember paper drives, Victory bonds and victory gardens, blackouts and air raid drills (though I lived in the heart of the country). My parents had a small grocery store, and on those very rare occasions when they were able to get a box of Hershey bars, they kept them under the counter and distributed them like gold nuggets to only their best customers. And WWII was followed by the never-declared Korean War, the Cold War, and Vietnam.
Fully 2/3 of the entire population of the world alive at the time of my birth are now dead.
I was born into a world so far different from today's as to be all but unimaginable to most of the generations who have come after me. It was a world with no computers, no television, no cell phones or iPods, no drive-by shootings or road rage or school massacres. A world where anyone traveling from America to Europe did so by ocean liner because there was no commercial trans-oceanic air service. Up until the mid-1960s, when you did travel by airplane, it was a Sunday-best occasion, and men always wore suits and ties. Diseases all but eradicated from today's worldâdiphtheria, smallpox, polioâregularly claimed tens of thousands of lives. Hospital patients were anesthetized with ether dripped onto a cloth cone held over the patient's nose and mouth. Even penicillin was not discovered until WWII. A diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence.
I served in the U.S. military at a time when, as a Naval Aviation Cadet stationed in Pensacola, Florida, a black serviceman could be asked to move to the back of the bus to let whites sit down. And now we have a black president.
I witnessed the televised assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and Martin Luther King; man's first landing on the moon, school desegregation, the civil rights movement. Governments and nations rose and fell, as they have throughout time.
Each of us has our own hill of time, and the future is a thick blanket of clouds obscuring the top so we cannot see just how much more hill lies ahead of us. I hope my hill is a very high one, indeed. As may yours be.
* * *
ON BIRTHDAYS
Because I truly do consider myself blessed to have been given as many November 14ths as I have, and realize that to complain about getting older is ungrateful of me, I have resolved that henceforth on each November 14th I will celebrate my 21st birthday.
I was born, not in a log cabin, but in St. Anthony's Hospital in Rockford, Illinois, at 11:15 p.m., Tuesday, November 14, 1933. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been in office just short of a year, and he remained the only president I ever knew until I was 12 years old.
The only child of 22 year old Franklin Guerdon Margason and 24 year old Odrae Lucille Margason (nee Fearn), I entered the world a bright yellow, thanks to jaundice (not uncommon at that time, I understand) and it could be said that I've been jaundiced ever since. My mother refused to speak to her best friend for a full year after her friend, upon seeing me for the first time, said “He has really big feet!” Since I was, in my mother's eyes, absolutely perfect (albeit yellow), she took great affront.
My 21st birthday was spent in Pensacola, Florida while I was a Naval Aviation Cadet. I celebrated the event by catching a bus into town and going to the San Carlos Hotel, where I went into the bar and ordered a Tom Collins.
On my 22nd birthday, I was given a wonderful gift: the continent of Europe, of which I caught a through-the-fog early morning glimpse as the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga approached the port of Gibraltar.
I've had a numberâ¦well, actually, a rather great numberâ¦of very nice birthdays since, but my first 21st and my 22nd stand out above all the rest.
But as the birthdays became more numerous, they also tended to become less singularly noteworthy. The effect was rather like too many people trying to get onto the same elevator, and I've been increasingly uncomfortable with their all pressing in on me. So I think my decision to make this and every subsequent birthday a celebration of my 21st is a good and practical one. I may alternate them between my 21st and 22nd, now that I think of it. I will ignore the toll each subsequent year takes on my body, and concentrate instead on those two birthdays, when I and the world were young, and everything wonderful lay ahead. For in my mind, at least, it still does.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll catch the bus into Pensacola and have myself a Tom Collins.
* * *
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Our parents give us birth and shape our lives, and leave us with a debt we can never fully repay or, tragically for a very few, with scars that can never be healed. I was infinitely blessed with the former.
Each of us hasâor hadâour own parents, and our own memories. I hope you treasure yours as I do mine.
November 11, 2010, would have been my mom's 101st (??!!) birthday, and the 42nd anniversary of my dad's death. I hope you'll indulge a bit of reflection on the two most important people in my life.
Though they've both been dead for far more time than is possible for me to comprehend, they are still with me in my heart and soul. The three of us are as interwoven as the threads in a blanket. I have only to close my eyes to see them and hear their voices. So there is no way I could cram 38 years' worth of the warmth and love and happiness and sorrow I experienced with them into one blog entry, or a thousand. Still, I'd like to give you just the quickest of sketches of them.
Neither Mom (Odrae) nor Dad (Frank) graduated from high school. They met and married in 1929, when Mom was twenty and Dad was twenty-two. That they ever got together, or stayed together, is something of a miracle. Mom's family, the Fearns, could have stepped out of the pages of a book on the All-American Family, even though Grandma Fearn was born in Norway. Think of a Norman Rockwell painting, and you've pretty much got it.
Dad's family, the Margasons, was a study in dysfunction. His parents divorced when he was quite small, with the result that he spent some time in an orphanage, an event which left its own deep scars. His mother remarried several times. Margason family reunions inevitably ended in near brawls as members rehashed the same old real and perceived wrongs they'd rehashed at the previous reunion and would at the next one.
Both my parents worked hard all their lives. My mom held down a full-time job and managed to care for me and Dad and the house at the same time. Dad, I fear, was of the old school, in that cleaning, cooking, and housework were woman's work, and Mom did it without complaint. (I remember distinctly that she always buttered his toast for him, and that she always took great pains to see that not one quarter inch of the surface was left unbuttered.)
Please don't get me wrong, Dad wasn't a tyrant: he was simply a man of his time, and that's just the way things were. He was also, regrettably, something of a womanizer, which of course deeply hurt Mom. They fought (verbally) constantly and at one point Mom and I moved briefly out of our house to another small one my folks owned. They really, really should have divorced, but they didn't. Mom loved Dad too much, and he loved her in his own way. In the last three years of his life, they grew much closer, and both were the happier for it.
The recognition of one's parents as being individual human beings apart from being “Mom” and “Dad” is, I've always held, the point at which one truly steps from childhood to adulthood. Mine were far from perfect: they were simply average, flawed human beings who did the very best they could. And despite my momentary fear of being sent to an orphanage (a threat Dad made on a couple of occasions when I was particularly incorrigible and without really realizing that, since I was just a child, I did not know he didn't mean it), and my numerous other self-imposed insecurities, I never had the slightest doubt that both my parents loved me more than anything else in the world. Dad tried very, very hard to fit his own mental image of what a father should be, and I'm afraid I far too often treated him very badly. I would give the world if I could only go back and undo some of those hurtsâ¦but as you have noticed, life doesn't work that way.
It was Mom, primarily, who gave me my love of words. She loved to read: O'Henry, Mark Twain, and Guy de Maupassant were her favorites. She had a great sense of humor and a surprisingly deep laugh for a woman of her size (5'2"). I don't recall Dad reading much, but then I don't think reading exactly fit his idea of what a real man should be. He worked. Work was what men did.
When I think back now on just how deeply and completely Dad loved me, though he found it so hard to express it other than by being what he saw as his “Father” persona, I truly ache with regret.
Dad died of a heart attackâhis second within six or eight monthsâwhen he was 57 years old. Mom died a horrible and lingering deathâpartly because I refused to let her go when I should have told the doctors to stop treatmentâfrom lung cancer at the age of 62. I have never forgiven myself for that, and never will. I am now 19 years older than Dad and 14 years older than Mom. Incomprehensible.
Should you wonder why I thought you might have any interest at all in people you never met, the primary reason for writing this blog is to remind you of your own parents and what they mean or meant to you, and establish a bridge between us, in hopes that we might meet in the middle of that bridge and, together, look down and watch our similar reflections in the waters of time.
* * *
HIGH SCHOOL
For someone who is generally able to dredge up vivid memories of the past, my four years of high school are something of a blank. The fact that I can remember so little of them might imply some sort of negative trauma associated with it, but I don't think there was one. I simply did not like high school. I did not fit in. To say I didn't want to fit in probably wouldn't be true, I'm sureâ¦we all want to be liked. But high school is in effect a four-year class on The Joys of Heterosexuality, and I wanted no part of it.
The high school years are an endless sea of raging hormones, and mine were raging in quite a different direction than the vast, vast majority. It did have some slight advantages, though, in that males that age are often open to experimentationâ¦with the unspoken but absolutely ironclad rule that you were never,
never
to talk about it. So as a result, I was able to do my own sexual experimenting with about half my high school classâthe male half. I'm sure that 99 percent of them went on to marry nice girls and follow the Biblical instructions to be fruitful and multiply. (I was fruitful, too, but didn't multiply.)
Oddly, now that I think of it, I cannot remember encountering even one other gay or lesbian student. Though statistically in a school of 1,200 there had to be at least 120 of us.
I had two friends during my high school years, one of whom did not attend the same school as I. And I feel obligated to point out that both were notable exceptions to my “half the class” statement. One went on to join and make a career in the Air Force, marrying his high school sweetheart not long after graduation. I'm sure I must have had other friends, and I do recall several names and faces but for the most part I was a loner through both choice and circumstance.
I was a somewhat-above-average student, though not all that much above average, probably due to the fact that I prided myself on never having brought homework home. Perhaps as a result of that dubious distinction, I remember an English exam in which I totally and completely froze, and was unable to remember the answer to a single question. In desperation I wrote a note at the top of the paper saying: “I'm sorry, but my mind has shut down. I could have cheated, but I didn't.” It was an obvious bid for sympathy or at least leniency from the teacher, but it produced neither.
Throughout my somewhat checkered academic career up to college, my parents collected a sizable assortment of notes from teachers all saying, in effect: “Roger could do much better if only he would apply himself.” Applying myself would have involved patience, and we all know where I stand on that one.
So when I walked out of the doors of East High in June of 1952, they closed behind me and I never looked back. I occasionally, even today, get announcements of reunions and news of my classmates, none of whom I can remember. I'm sure I might be able to remember some, if I really tried, and I'm sure they are all very nice people who have gone on to live happy, heterosexual lives. But each bulletin I receive only serves to remind me of the fact that I did not belong in their world in 1952, and I still do not belong in it today.