: lower black pain.

Right out of college I dated a few people. Most of the relationships had an ebb and a flow to them, a natural half-life, seemed to make sense.

But one was particularly memorable because of how it ended.

I made her a cup of tea.

She hadn’t asked for one, but I knew she liked tea and I was getting one for myself. I hadn’t asked her first because we had both been reading in my room, and she was very into her book; I didn’t want to disturb her so just kind of got up quietly and left the room.

In the kitchen, I started some water boiling, then made toast (it was in the morning).

I remember thinking, “Why not just make another piece?”

So I did.

Then I looked at my mug, sitting so attentively, waiting for the water to get hot and thought, “Why not just make another cup?”

So I did, and five minutes later I walked back down the hall to my room, quietly pushed open the door, placed one cup next to her with the piece of toast on a little plate I’d balanced on top of it, and then sat back down and picked up my book.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s tea.”

“Why did you bring me tea?”

“I was getting some for myself and thought you might like some. I made toast too… we haven’t eaten in a while.”

There must have been a beat of four. One. Two. Three. Four. That sounds about right. It couldn’t have been longer than that.

Then she closed her book, stood up, and began putting on her shoes. Once they were tied, she stood right in front of me and said, “I can’t go out with you anymore.”

“Whapfh?” I had a mouth full of toast. “Phfwy?”

Exhale. “You brought me tea because you thought I might like some?”

This question was a trap, I knew that, but I couldn’t figure out where it had come from. I swallowed the toast as fast as I could.

“Yeah. You don’t have to drink it, it’s… just… tea.”

She winced, as if I had entirely botched that answer. “See? I can’t do this.”

“We didn’t have coffee. Do you want coffee?”

“Listen,” she began putting her things back in her shoulder bag, “I normally would just walk out, but you’re a nice guy and I want you to understand. My last boyfriend made me do his laundry. If he said he was calling, I would wait all night and sometimes he’d be four hours late. I made him dinner once and he ate it and left and I think he went out on a date with another girl. He even called me fat once in front of my friends.”

“Wow.” I kind of said.

“The boyfriend before that was ok, but he cheated on me all the time.”

“Did they both make you toast or something?” I had this theory that I’d triggered a deep memory by accident.

“No, that’s just the point, they would never make me toast.”

Ok, now I was just confused, and this was obviously not gonna go my way, and I had this distinct feeling of just wanting to understand what was happening, even if I knew I wasn’t gonna like it.

“See, in both of those relationships, I was the good one. He would do all this awful stuff, but eventually come beg for my forgiveness, and tell me I was an angel for dealing with him. I didn’t really have to do anything.”

“…ok...?”

“See?”

I did not. My face must have said that.

“You open doors and ask me about stuff. You have NEVER been late to meet me, not once.”

“…uh, I can be late....”

“I’ve ASKED you to now, it… it’s not the same. I try to think of nice things to do for you, but it’s a lot..”

“I’m sorry if I haven’t been appreciative - “

“ - no, you DO appreciate it, and then it’s MY turn again. It’s exhausting. I am not the good one, here. You are. You win. I’m the one trying to be on time and be considerate, but I don’t like it. I don’t feel good anymore. I’m sure there’s other girls who would love this, but it’s just not my thing. You see?”

I did. “Sure. And I’m sorry about the tea.”

“It’s not really the tea, but…it is. Y’know.” She gave me a hug. “Take care, ok?”

“…ok.”

And she was gone. Less than a fortnight later we all saw her at a cafe, walking with her old boyfriend. Well, behind him, kinda.

I was in my early twenties and had experienced a breakup, so my friends took me out drinking – but I did not tell them this story. It had occurred to me, as it must have occurred to you in reading it just now, that it sounded like an excuse, an easy way to let me down for some other reason… but then why give me all those details?

I asked if I should maybe try to be more standoffish and demanding. “You’re not gonna be good at that.” my friend told me. “Just stay in your lane.”

A few weeks later I met someone who knew my breakup from before / somewhere, and for no good reason I DID tell her the whole story.

“Oh no, that’s just the way she is; it’s all about her. I don’t think she likes the people she’s dating, she likes who she is in their reflection or shadow or whatever. She’s been like that forever. Why would you go out with her?”

I did not remember the beginning, but that was the end, and it’s one of those stories that, for various reasons, I do find incredibly supportive from time to time, when I’m lost in Not Understanding someone, because the glossary of human interactions and motivations I built from these experiences is one that I still use, even to this very day, to try to make sense of confusing situations. In this case, I thought it was about the guy…I was too focused on him. But in the end it wasn’t really about him at all.

Anyway, I’m sure the two of them are incredibly happy. Well. Maybe one of them.

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I took the day off today, which I don’t do very often. I’m one of those people that even on Saturdays check their email every 90 minutes and leave my work phone on the charger but turn up the ring volume real loud (just in case).

I’m not playing hooky: I just put in for a vacation day. I have plenty saved up - I just thought it might be nice to be home on Halloween to…I don’t know,

* take a bath,

* or start a soup going

* or get my costume ready

* or straighten up the house while a scary film is on.

None of these things sound very vacation-y, I understand that – but these are the MOST relaxing things I have planned today. I also have to drop off the air conditioner at the storage unit, get the groceries, and take back the kitchen garbage can they sent us because it wasn’t the one that we ordered.

Who am I kidding…I’ll never have time for a bath.

Hailing from the midwest (and the 1970’s), I grew up thinking that vacations were always supposed to involve beaches and books of light fiction.

But then the AT&T company ruined that fantasy with a series of commercials titled “You Will”. These were futuristic scenarios involving how technology was going to impact our lives in a few decades.

They were amazingly accurate, predicting GPS, videophones, hand held computers, and the internet, but the one that really hit home asked the question “Have you ever sent someone a fax from the beach?”  Besides the fax part, they predicted the “working from home” scenario pretty well.

I just learned that those spots were directed by a young David Fincher, who now is an award winning director of psychological thrillers… super disturbing ones like Se7en and Fight Club, which explains why those spots, voiced over by the dulcet tones of Tom Selleck, held such a steady undercurrent of uncomfortable tension.  In each spot, Tom asked us if we had done any of these (at the time) impossible things, then answered, sort of ominously,

“You will…”,

which sounded a little bit more like a threat than a promise.

But when I first saw this man writing on an electronic tablet (impossible) with no wires (impossible) then sending what he wrote to an office thousands of miles away with just a touch (crazy impossible), I felt insulated from this impossibleness due to the fact that those were 3 impossible things all stacked on top of one another.

“Wow!” Young Me said, “That sounds amazing!”

“Ugh.” Me says now, unable to get even an arm’s length away from my work since my email also shows up on my watch.

I suppose that a real day off would involve being disconnected. Off-line. Maybe in a cabin, deep within the woods, away from everything, with no cell phone service - whoa, no, that sounds terrifying. Way too Halloween-y. Wouldn’t want that. Yeesh.

A perfect day off would involve everyone at work ALSO being off, so that there was no reason for anyone to call anyone about anything, but the reality of my current surroundings does not allow for that.

So every moment, my unread emails expand, like The Blob, absorbing time not yet spent. Papers stack, unfiled. Updates aren’t updated, statuses stagnate, the world moves forward but my desk is left behind, covered in weeds and vines and moss … I will return to a ruin where nature has once again taken hold.

Oh yeah. I absolutely have no idea how to do this. I think I’ll start with a cup of tea, then listen to “Disney’s Chilling Thrilling Sounds of The Haunted House” in the car while I do my errands.

I suppose I’ll be dressing as “FOMO” this year.

Thank you for joining me for my annual series of Spookytime columns,all six loosely tied together by a wee precious title conceit:

     Creepy     Cookie Mysterioso    Scooby     All, Together     Hooky.

Do you see it? Need a clue? May I suggest that snapping twice, with both hands, might be just the Thing.

Happy Halloween.

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The amount of actual energy I actually have to actually say anything right now reminds me of last Saturday morning when I finally put gas in our car.  We pumped 16 gallons into the tank, which was odd because it’s a 15 gallon tank. That’s how empty it was. The car was running on hope. We were half a block from putting our feet through the floor and Flintstones pedaling to the grocery store. That’s me, right now.

It’s been a very long couple of weeks, a lot of major events. The second most important was this year’s ComicCon convention. I’ve been to quite a few of these, most of them for work for one reason or another. Once, I was able to bring my daughter, though she was only six at the time. Last year my wife worked the con and my daughter got another chance to take a lap around,

But this year we all got to walk around together, explore the floor as a unit, navigating the negative personal space between Thors and Batmans (Batmen?), speaking to our favorite artists, and braving the way-too-sparse restroom situation.

It’s great that our ComicCon is so close to Halloween, because the costumes are terrific. Folks really go all out. Many, many photos are taken.

I dressed as Doctor Who, a common costume for me as the character wears, for the most part, regular clothing: a red bow tie, a leather coat, suspenders, a Moroccan fez. I won’t go into it, but this year I wore my very long scarf (12 feet long: knit by Zoe after she saw my sad attempt to do so), a leather kilt, and a blue pinstripe suit coat with a sprig of celery in the pocket.

My daughter dressed conceptually, not as an established character but one she created from the world of her favorite television show. Every element of her costume held unique backstory and function. My wife was working, but she looks a bit like a superhero no matter what she has on.

ComicCon is an arts festival at its core. It’s different from a museum, where those who appreciate art roam around and look at it: this is an annual gathering of creativity from both exhibitors and audience.

The primary irony is that the images, stories, films, objects, and costumes on display required a great deal of isolation to create. Hours alone spent writing or gluing or editing are balanced by this weekend in a giant room filled with 200,000 people. Add to that the two story high displays, giant video screens and a vast maze of aisles between booths, and it pretty much looks exactly like the mayhem one would imagine.

We met my wife after her shift and began to navigate the chaos, stopping here and there to pick up a lemonade or an interesting book or a mystical golden staff powered by an infinity stone. We took photos of folks whose costumes must have taken a year to create, as detailed as we’ve seen in any movie, complete with lights and sounds.

Our favorite part of the event is in the basement, where over 250 visual artists set up tables to sell original work. This is where I had taken my daughter the first time I brought her, to make certain she saw all the women and folks of every kind united by art, that art was more than an “elective” in school, but to some of us, our primary identity.

This time we roamed the tables together, each pointing out images and styles that we thought one of us might like, stoping to chat with the illustrators as they signed a sketch or a postcard for us.

But the best part was when some folks stopped us to take a photo. A few people had taken a picture of me because I was wearing a vegetable, but this time they wanted a picture of the three of us.

Again, we didn’t have capes on or anything, but we got to do the whole thing where we put our bags behind us and everyone politely stepped around us as we served our most authentic “adventure” pose.

“You guys are beautiful. That’s amazing. Thank you.” the photographer said.

“Who did he think we were?” my wife asked. “We’re not dressed as anything.”

“Honestly,” I replied, “besides the garnish, I wear most of this stuff to work.”

“We’re us.” my daughter said,

“We just look like us. A family of happy weirdos.”

Yeah. Well said, Kid.

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We have adopted a new kitten. This one belongs to the (now) middle cat, who is (now) less bored and more able to express his inner child: growling (in a friendly way), running about the house, leaping and pouncing. New family is often a contentious time, but as autumn chills the air, we find our three felines sleeping ever closer to one another, first rooms apart and now within a foot of one another, the encroaching frost turning strangers into bedfellows.

The kitten isn’t afraid of much. Even large things that make loud sounds only cause him to step back for a moment and observe the situation, then he is right back where he was, investigating. The splashy water room we each step into every day. The hot box in the kitchen with the door which opens down. The tops of bookshelves, the fireplace, door frames, and our heads. His world is adventure undaunted, and we have tried to protect him while allowing him enough life experience to build a map of things-best-not-to-do.

We don’t want him to be afraid. The other cats are not so subtle: they teach him through a steady barrage of growls and ninja strikes (in a friendly way). Do not attempt to ride me like a horse, one says. Do not attempt to bite my tail while I’m sleeping, expresses the other. The kitten jumps back, frozen for a few seconds, then licks his paws and jumbles onward - but he has indeed understood what he is not-to-do. Meanwhile, our human attempts to keep the kitten from jumping on our shoulders like a pirate parrot while we are eating have been, on the whole, less successful.

I do not believe that this wonderful time before Halloween is supposed to be about fear. Instead I associate Spookytime with bravery, with an admission that the world is a scary place, but here we are, dealing with it. Yay for us.

One night a few years ago, back during our National Season Of Near Constant Panic And Crisis, my six year old daughter told me to leave the lights off in her room when I was tucking her in for the night.

“You don’t want the nightlight?”

     “Nope. I have to face my fears, Dad.”

I was kind of shocked. “You actually… DON’T. You’re SIX. Did I miss Twilight Sparkle saying this on My Little Pony?”

She sighed and looked at me with the furrowed brow of what seemed to be a much older person. “I can’t sleep with the lights on, but I’m afraid of the dark. So I have to learn sometime.”

“Again, sweetheart, while you have described in metaphor the very essence of human existence, you can deal with all that later because you’re SIX. Plenty of time to ease into the “facing darkness” thing.”

She told me that she just “thought it was time”,so I turned the nightlight out,but I kept the hall light on.

My daughter was teaching herself not to be afraid. I thought that was tremendous, and tried to mirror her tenacity by listening to Morning Edition everyday, and BBC World News after. But eventually I was overwhelmed, and had to winnow my intake of current events down to YouTubing Colbert, Oliver, and Meyers monologues.

While my daughter was intelligently attempting to deal with whatever life brought her in the moment, I was chasing fear down the street, yelling “YOO Hoo!”, pursuing what frightened me like an enthusiastic Beatles fan, literally looking for trouble.

This was not the fault of Twilight Sparkle, but instead a dog named Scooby Doo.

I had the metal lunchbox, complete with the thermos with the cap with the little handle so you could drink soup without a spoon. I watched the cartoon every week. I wanted the Underoos, but they were way too expensive. When we adopted a dog, I had the perfect name, because the dog was brown and black, so it was totally obvious, although Scooby Doo was a odd name for a Pekingese (but he more than filled the role - up for adventure, ready for anything, able to ride in a backpack or escape danger down the slide of the swingset in out backyard).

The television show first broadcast when I was three, so I saw every episode over and over again. If you are not familiar, Scooby Doo is an animated program about four friends and their dog who solve mysteries. Each week they uncover the plot of a greedy, jealous, or overambitious person who terrorizes the locals with theatrics, incredible engineering and special effects, and the use of a truly impressive selection of rubber masks, which are pulled off during the last minute of the program as the villain is revealed. Highlights are the custom painted Ford van they travel in (“The Mystery Machine”) and a recurring set piece involving a corridor with doors on both sides where people run in and out of them in an impossible manner. Oh, and the talking dog. The dog talks.

But the program’s greatest gift was the lesson that there is always an explanation for everything.  Maybe the Caretaker really wanted the deed to Farmer Jones’ land, or the older sister wanted revenge for the younger sister taking credit for her work, but there was always an explanation. (Later, when the show added real ghosts and creatures to the mix, even the reasons for these hauntings were logical.)

There was a lot to fear out there, particularly in the maker / costuming community, but I learned that I didn’t have to carry dread around with me all the time. Life wasn’t awful, just, y’know, people. Some of them. The ones with masks, mostly.

We used the formulaic certainty of Scooby Doo (and a bit of John Cena WWE wrestling) to teach my daughter how plot worked on tv and in films, to not get so scared in the middle that you didn’t watch to the end to see what happens, to extrapolate situations and motivations in characters, to be able to step back and guess the next twist, to not be afraid of the storytelling. It worked. She then watched and read hundreds of hours of mystery books, movies, and tv shows. Even in the National Season Of Near Constant Panic And Crisis she expressed her concerns with a calm sense of perspective that we, as adults, had to reach on our tippy-toes to match.

Barring our instinctive reaction to the word “BOO!”, humans, like kittens, have to learn to be afraid. I was lucky enough to grow up with a cartoon therapy dog to talk me through all that, which I’ve now made into a family tradition. I hope my great-grandchildren feel the same way about all this, and celebrate courage at Spookytime. Hopefully they won’t take it too far and get a van with some other kids and start meddling with people.

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We used to hold a storytelling party every year in autumn. Each guest was required to bring three things; a bottle of red wine, a candle, and a story. Zoe and I provided the food, usually a large pot of something warm, filling, and comforting – we lit the candles and opened the wine, and began telling the stories, which could be about anything, as long as they were true.

They didn’t have to actually happen, mind you, they just had to, in the space of the event, be told in such a fashion that the story was about the person telling it. We had a wonderful mix of tales from around the world, from explanations of true-life experiences to a very special person exploring a loophole in the proceedings and dressing as Dr. Suess’s Lorax.

We did this for about 13 years, on and off, each time with different people and in different places (and parts of the country). Each event was at least five hours long, and it took us about three years to realize that if everyone brought a bottle of wine and there was no wine left at the end then each of us had drunk about an entire bottle of wine. Ah, but we were young and the wine was well intentioned but clearly in the realm of “getting what we paid for” (which was very little)…it was a grand party, even when there were only three or four of us. At one point I think we had seventeen.

In any case, I had to tell a story every year. The poem below was my favorite - I composed an orchestral score and recorded it a few years ago. Our event was never exclusively Halloween based, although the candles did influence an all around cozy mood… I think this is a cozy piece, a memory I thought would be nice to have, of events imagined but emotions real.

If you’ve known me for a while you may have heard it before (one of you read it aloud at one of my shows!). In the best of all worlds we would all be together and at the end of the page it would be Your Turn. Alas, time and space: please settle in, adjust your lights and enjoy a glass of something.

every star that ever was was in the sky that night

and the river was a ribbon glowing blue and bright

and somewhere between here and now lay tiny Harrison Bay

set half between roads that have been and newly planned highway

every headlight was a diamond every car a star

people didn’t mind the traffic; they weren’t driving far

the time had come for the yearly fair; the men had brought the rides

but all my little town cared only for one barker’s cry:

“Step right up, folks, see for yourself a man who has no fear!”

Mr. Mysterioso had come back again this year to entertain the old and young with bravery to spare

it was the only reason most of us went to the fair.

each year brought greater danger in the challenges he made

we wondered how and why he did it, how much he got paid

we never quite believed

the feats of derring do we’d seen

(excitedly we’d speak of it, sometimes ‘til Halloween.)

he chewed on glass when I was nine

he swallowed fire at ten

eleven he ate razor blades, surrounded by four men

when I was twelve, he cut a gal in half while we all gaped

but on this year I was thirteen. the year that he escaped.

Mr. Mysterioso got inside a wooden box

blindfolded,

gagged,

and bound in chains with heavy metal locks.

the box was nailed shut from all sides, but to add to his plight

around the base were several sticks of top grade dynamite.

I won’t aim to create suspense, (I’m not so good at that)

this isn’t Edgar Allen Poe or “Casey at the Bat” the box blew up.

to smithereens and back, orange as the dawn.

and when the smoke drifts cleared,

box, chains, and man were simply gone.

we clapped and yelled hurray

until our hands and throats were sore

we stomped and whooped and whistled loud. we couldn’t ask for more.

but when the barker came out frowning, looking left and right

our noises stopped quite suddenly, as glee transformed to fright.

it seemed that the entire town went searching for a clue.

they looked inside the wreckage for a grisly residue.

when nothing of the man was there, the fair just kind of stopped.

we’d seen a man blow up himself, that wasn’t easily topped.

i walked home with my sister cause we didn’t live that far

and dad and mom were taking other folks back in the car

it was as if our lives had changed somehow, there wasn’t much to say

and past the crickets we could hear the night train on it’s way

“so what’d ya think?”i asked her as we crossed the Prichart’s field

“heck, I don’t know…that was a little strange. he disappeared! I mean –he should come back and bow to show that he’s alright.”

then something passed in front of us, fast, out across the night.

so instantly we chased it by the moonlight’s chalk white glow filled with a lack of common fear that children only know

the moon revealed a jet black cape that seemed to limp in pain

on a course to intersect that of the coming train.

and when train and stranger met, there was no hesitation

cape, limp and all jumped right aboard as if by levitation.

then he was on the freight car roof,

moon shining through his hair.

looked right at us.

gave a bow

and yelled out “Y’all take care!”

we clapped and waved until we barely heard the whistle call.

we danced the entire way back home, and barely slept at all.

the next year when the fair returned to town it was bizarre

to see the rides and games and such, but not our favorite star

the rumor was he ditched the show to marry a brunette

(who wasn’t too spectacular, but good as he could get)

they moved to Coney Island and set up a little life.

he blew himself to kingdom come to get himself a wife.

and though, my dear, this tale i tell

is absolutely true, you may well wonder why it is i’m telling it to you.

love is a strange and silent thing, a soft and heavy load.

sometimes it makes us run away. sometimes we can explode.

but every moonlit night’s a paradise when love’s in bloom

and every night is moonlit when you walk into the room.

my only memory dearer

is when I first held you tight

for every star that ever was was in the sky that night.

Harrison Bay - Jd Michaels - 2001

https://litraedio.com/000-2/

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The classic monsters are, of course, Frankenstein, The Wolfman, and Dracula…

(Oh, sure, you can add in the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon if you want, but no one dresses as them for Halloween.

Well, maybe the Mummy, if you’re not planning on dancing or walking very fast all night, but the Fish-Man would take professional grade make-up work and seems like a really uncomfortably hot costume, even for a brisk October night.)

…these are monsters that live in black and white worlds, in times far from our own, whose stories embrace what it means to be human, as each of us struggle to navigate an often unforgiving world.

So I mean, they’re ok, but in my opinion, the best monster (and the very FIRST for my generation) is pure bright cobalt blue.

In 1969 Jim Henson premiered a fuzzy puppet on the new educational show he was producing for public television. After a bit of character development, that puppet earned a name - Cookie Monster. I was 3 years old, so this was kismet, synchronicity, a meet-cute through our console tv as my wide little eyes met his great big googly ones. He liked some of the same things I liked, he was learning the alphabet (same as I was!)…if this was a monster, then I was all for ‘em.

This is where I first learned the word “monster”: a fuzzy lovable talking pile of fluff. Full disclosure - I’m with Grover: his curious optimism and entirely boneless arms soothe me to this day, but all of the monsters of Sesame Street are an amazing demonstration of difference without threat, acceptance without fear, because the children on the program spoke to them and weren’t afraid, so neither was I. On Sesame Street, to be a monster was to be open and vulnerable, unique and authentic, honest and courageous.

Then there was Godzilla. Not the computer rendered mutant horror dinosaur of today, but a middle-aged man dressed in a 200 pound rubber suit. The original TOHO movies (on after school TV) all ended with children in short panted school uniforms waving and thanking Godzilla, most often for shooing away another giant creature with a grudge of some kind. This monster fought other monsters - the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

It went downhill after that. Cinematic technology made it easy to create more horrifying visuals, and filmmakers seemingly steeped in nihilistic ennui began to crank out more horrific plots. Now the monster was us, the creatures were we; zombies and aliens and demons and serial killers. Dread itself became the star of all these films, served at a bargain price since you got to take so much of it home with you, like the uneaten popcorn in that extra large bin you decided to buy.

I had felt compassion for the Frankenstein monster. He didn’t ask for all that. The Wolfman was an unwilling victim of a leash law violation, and Dracula was a guy with a food allergy dealing with a houseful of uninvited guests. Even Godzilla was just chillin’ until Mothra and Mecha-Godzilla decided to bring all that noise.

But I could never dredge up sympathy for these new disappointed killing machines, unsatisfied with their summer camps, neighborhood clubs, or high school experiences. They weren’t monsters - they were maniacs, and there seemed to be an endless supply of them.

Which brings me to Air Supply.

They were a soft rock duo from Australia who became super famous in the 1980’s for songs about love. We had a lot of love songs on the radio back then, in every style of music, but Air Supply created tunes you couldn’t help but memorize - power rotation tone poems.

Our current popular music is filled to the brim with virulent break-up songs, but the music of Air Supply made love seem like something wonderful, not only to be survived or afraid of.

They did lean a bit on the clingy side, but so did the work of Chicago, Lionel Richie, Foreigner, Journey: each offering a selection of hits fully appropriate to be “Our Song” to any couple.

But they couldn’t be written today, as through a contemporary lens, they all seem a bit…suspicious; the syrupy lyrics now read as obsessive, giving an “I just wrote these lyrics with letters I cut out of magazines”  kind of vibe.

To be fair, I did try singing one of their songs to my date at a high school dance, soon realizing that the words,“you're every woman in the world to me…you're my fantasy, you're my reality…you're everything I need…” were a bit much for a 9th grade second date.

My point is: I don’t think that only movies have gotten scarier - EVERYTHING has: love, bread (well, I’m allergic to both gluten and dairy, so a grilled cheese sandwich looks like a ninja throwing star to me), the sun, traveling, laundry detergent (apparently we shouldn’t eat it, even if it’s delicious), each other, ourselves...

The stories of Frankenstein, Wolfman, and Dracula span all the core conflicts - person vs. nature, person vs. person and the hardest of all, person vs. self. All three characters are in circumstances beyond their control, doing the best they can with where they are with very little help, facing ultimately (in all three cases) the insurmountable distraction of torches and pitchforks.

But they’re not maniacs.

I mean, we all have days we just don’t feel put together right, or our hair seems to have a life of its own, or we eat something we know we shouldn’t.

In a world that’s gone from monochromatic creatures to 4K maniacs, each of us has the choice to still be open and vulnerable, unique and authentic, honest and courageous.

You know. Monsters.

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I wear contact lenses to see far away, and glasses on top of them so that I can read up close.

“Why not just get bifocals?”

Well, during the pandemic, I wore my contacts like tiny little Captain America shields for my eyes - I could practically hear the near constant ricochet of infectious particles and allergens bouncing off of them.

Consequently, I hadn’t bought a pair of prescription glasses in a very long time, which is why I was practically giddy when the family took a trip to “use our insurance before the end of the year” at the optical shop.

We all got eye exams, I got a picture of the inside of my eye taken with a new large white optometrist robot thing, then everyone chose a pair of glasses that suited them. My daughter got two.

For my turn, I chose Ray Bans. Normally, these make me look like a blues musician, but there was a new style that actually did suit my face. And besides, I was only going to wear them around the house to look at movies, given my still active reticence toward naked eyeballs on the NYC subway.

So I chose the Ray Ban / Metas.

Again, they really do fit my face, and I like the matte finish.

They talk, of course, but I really was focused on the fit. And the matte finish.

About 10 years ago I bought a pair of sunglasses from a vending machine in England: the bright yellow box held a worldwide rarity at the time, a wearable camera that connected directly to your smartphone. They were advertised as the best way to take photos for social media, a more natural way to capture the world around you.

I’m not 17 years old, or 24, or 32 even - the world around me is filled with laundry and dishwashing and grocery shopping. In the ads were happy people on beaches and in convertible cars with the top down. They should have had a little sticker on the box reading, “Lifestyle Not Included”.  But they were a summer novelty, and we each took turns taking random photos of coffee cups, clouds, and each other.

When choosing these current glasses, I honestly didn’t realize they had a camera in them. Unlike their predecessors, the design is incredibly subtle, and I was happy that I could afford to at last join in that “Risky Business” fashion trend from 40 years ago. Better late than never.

But these glasses do more than take pictures. They capture video and have hidden bluetooth speakers that only the wearer can hear. Which is cool for when you don’t want white earbuds in.

But they also have a feature I didn’t really understand. With a click of a switch they become semi-sentient, able to not only tell you the time and weather but LOOK AT WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING AT and TELL YOU WHAT IT IS.

Their example for this feature is a woman holding a vegetable.

“What can I prepare with this for dinner that will only take 20 minutes?” she asks.

The glasses reply, “You are holding bok choi - cut into 1 inch pieces and sauté with garlic and olive oil for 7 minutes.”

Most of us are used to being heard by our technology, speaking to our watches or phones or speakers. But being seen by them is different, isn’t it? It’s cool, but it’s a little…creepy.

We bonded with the staff of the optical shop. Try as we might, we do not portray the typical American family: our more than occasional dance breaks and obscure foreign movie references spotlight us as, if not eccentric, then casually unconcerned with public opinion, both of which are true. We had a great time, and when we were ready to check out we brought our selections to the front desk, and after an hour of chatting, the woman who was helping us felt as if she could be totally honest.

“You’re getting those?” she asked me, regarding my selection.

“Yes!” I enthusiastically said. “It’s like being Iron Man!”

Her smile did not dim, but it did freeze… it ceased, for a moment, to organically evolve. Her eyes did not move from mine. “What are you going to use them for?”

“Well, we just got a new kitten, and he is really fast, so I’ll be taking photos of him, and then listening to music when I can’t find my AirPods™, and then translating non-English language newspapers at work.” (Oh, they read foreign languages too. Forgot to mention that.)

“Oh!” Her smile started to move again. “That’s great.” she said, then added “You know, we have never sold a pair of those glasses to a woman.”

“Really?” I asked. “Why?”

“Because” my daughter said, “they’re creepy, Dad.”

“How are they creepy? Do I look creepy?”

“No!” The sales associate lowered her voice a bit. “It think they sound like fun, but most of the other men said they were getting them for the beach.”

There was a beat while I caught up.

“Eeew.”

“Yeah,” she continued.

“Oh, I’m not looking at people, I’m just taking pictures of dishes and laundry and clouds and stuff.”

“Yeah, Dad, it’s not you.” My daughter patted me reassuringly on the shoulder. “They’ll be fun.”

We are now at the eve of Spookytime™, when the wind doesn’t just blow, it howls, and each creak of the floor just slightly echos through the crisp night air.

Some focus on fear at this time, but I’ve always felt it’s more about bravery. The John F. Kennedy quote “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” seems a bit meta in a world where everything is screaming at you to be afraid of something new everyday. But I’ve gotten used to that.

What gets me are the subtleties, where innocent and maturely fashionable items like eyeglasses combine with headphones (totally normal) and a camera (also totally normal) and then some optical Dr. Frankenstein puts ‘em on that lightning table and brings them to life, where your glasses are LOOKING AT YOU. I mean, I’m no Luddite, I’m absolutely impressed, but I do have to admit that they’re just a little… well….y’know.

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When I enter a used bookstore my shoulders automatically lower (even if I thought I felt relaxed on the way in) and I exhale much deeper than the inhale just before it. Paper, stacked sometimes literally to the ceiling, offers the safety of ten thousand silent voices. What others might classify as clutter, I see as a garden.

I love words. Not merely the printed word, but words themselves, and the ability to make them mean something through juxtaposition. Not many things work that way. Tarot cards, sure, but stone fruit, socks, formal flatware, Toyota Prius™es… arrange them all you want. Nothin’.

My favorite collection of words is the handwritten letter, and my favorite time period of letter writing began in 8th grade.

We would face the front of the classroom, pretending to pay attention to the teacher while drafting free association masterpieces between the blue lines of our notebook paper. Then at the end of class, we’d open the binder rings, pull out the sheet, and fold it into a rectangle via an intricate pattern that left a little triangle pull-tab to open it with.

We wrote about just about anything - the class we were currently in, a class we dreaded going to, movies and tv shows, and eventually who we liked and who we “like” liked. If the intended audience was in the same classroom, a dangerous gamble of “passing the note” to that person could be attempted.

That is how I ended up eating a note meant for me because the social studies teacher saw the pass and was notorious for reading such letters aloud in front of the entire class. To spare my friend, I popped the whole thing in my mouth and feverishly started chewing, hoping at least to ruin it enough to render it illegible. But the teacher did not bring the garbage can over; instead he told me that I could either eat the note or go to the principal’s office.

So I kept on chewing and swallowed the whole thing - opening my mouth as proof. I was a teenage boy - I was always hungry.

Unimpressed yet defeated, the teacher slowly returned to the front of the classroom, muttering “probably die from ink poisoning…”. I hadn’t actually considered that, and with no internet to reassure myself as to the chemical composition of BIC™ pen ink, I spent the next few restless nights wondering what symptoms might suddenly occur as my epistolary snack worked its way through my system.

Through high school, college, and eventually after, I kept all my letters in an honest-to-goodness shoebox. When the shoebox fell apart, I spent an afternoon transferring the collection to plastic sleeves in some 3 ring binders I had around. They followed me everywhere, and after we were married, my wife ran into them while looking for something.

“Who are these from?” she asked curiously, casually flipping through the collection.

“I don’t know…anybody who wrote me a letter.”

“Are they all love letters?”

“Nooo. They’re just, like, about what we were doing at the time. Long distance calls were too expensive.”

She slowly nodded in agreement, but then asked, “Do the people who wrote these know that you kept them?”

Well, that was a weird question. I thought about it.

“I don’t know most of those people anymore.”

“So why would you keep the letters?”

“I don’t know… it feels weird to throw them away. Disrespectful or something.”

“You’ve moved all of these pieces of paper across the country. Twice. You know you can’t physically carry the past with you forever.”

She was right. That Sunday I culled the archive. They had each done the job they were meant to do, communicated the information entrusted to them. I filled a recycling bag and put it on the “back porch” of our strange little attic apartment. But as I stood there, I couldn’t help but feel that all these personal artifacts deserved a better sendoff.

The next evening, while walking home from the train in the brisk autumn air, I spied a bright pink leaf at the bottom of the long steep hill we lived on. The blustery weather was making my eyes tear up even with my glasses on, but as I bent down to pick it up I saw ahead of me a turquoise leaf, and another…

and the leaf… seemed to… have my name on it.

Then I looked up the hill.

High in the trees, in the bushes, and scattered on the sidewalk were my letters. Apparently a nosy squirrel had opened the bag they were in, then a windstorm efficiently distributed my letters everywhere.

The past, as installation art.

I picked up the ones I could reach and stuffed them into my pockets as I made my way home. I didn’t want to litter, and it would be easy to figure out who was to blame for all this. Some of the ones up in the trees stayed there for months.

You’re not gonna have that happen when you’re texting. Sure, it’s instant and can go around the world, but our words to each other have gotten smaller, and no matter what font you use, it’s not your handwriting. Pen to paper is heart to hand.

And phones are way too hard to swallow.

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I was mistaken for Neil deGrasse Tyson once at the Museum of Modern Art. I had taken a friend there for lunch, and we decided that we’d eat at the fancy place on the ground floor because we’d just finished a huge project.

I hadn’t made any reservations, but they sat us immediately at a very nice table, and then the head waiter came over and said,

“It’s great to see you again. How is everything?”

“It’s great!” I responded.

“I see you came back.” he added.

Ok.

“Well, I really love it here.”

“That’s great to hear. I’ll get someone to take care of you. Let me know if you need anything. Enjoy yourself!”

My colleague and I stared across the table at each other cautiously.

“Did that seem weird?” I asked him.

“Incredibly weird.” he said. “Who does he think you are?”

“I don’t know.”

A less head waiter came to take our order. “Hi, how are you guys doing?”

My buddy pointed at me and blurted out “Do you recognize him?”

The waiter looked at me for a second. “My boss thinks you’re Neil deGrasse Tyson. He was in here the other day with his son, and was wearing the same hat.”

It was a fact that I was wearing a NASA baseball cap, inspired by a recent movie I’d adored called “Tomorrowland”.

It is also a fact that I look nothing like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Not even a little bit.

“Does he eat here for free?” my friend asked the waiter.

“No, but you got a great table, and I won’t tell anybody.”

I looked around and yes, a full to capacity restaurant of Fancy Folks were stealing little glances at us.

“I’ll try to eat as scientifically as possible.” I told the waiter, and I pulled my cap lower, and my friend and I enjoyed a lunch that neither of us could actually afford.

We tipped generously.

I didn’t really know how to grow up and “be a scientist”. Becoming a scientist seemed a very bold career choice. Dr. Bruce Banner experimented with gamma rays and became a green giant. Dr. Reed Richards and his family traveled to space and were bombarded with cosmic radiation. And Dr. Octavius was always so mean to Spider-Man, trying to hit him with those mechanical arms and whatnot. Science seemed dangerous.

But I liked science - it was the answer to every “how?” question, the art of making sense of things. It made the world both more and less mysterious. For instance, as a child I was told that if I lifted heavy things, it might stunt my growth.

How would I ever know if that happened? How tall was I supposed to be? It’s not like my “full height” was written on the bottom of my foot or anything. Could a couple of grocery bags hefted up the steps when I was nine keep me out of the NBA? That couldn’t be how the human body worked. It didn’t seem very scientific.

There I was, spellbound by my Gilbert Home Chemistry Set in its bright blue metal case, following instructions carefully, alert when using the rubbing alcohol bunsen burner, fingertips stained with sulfur and iodine, all the labels on the little bottles gently blurred by first attempts and miscalculations. I caused liquids and litmus paper to change color, solids to vaporize, and crystals to appear as if from magic.

TinkerToys, a popular children’s building set, introduced me to physics, while my Erector Set (another popular construction toy) brought engineering to the mix. We put together a model called “The Visible Man” with clear plastic skin covering brightly painted bones and organs that fit together inside him. I raised a tadpole in a jar with holes poked in the top until it became a baby frog and we returned it to the lake.

After a while I saw science everywhere, from boiling water in a kitchen pot to soap suds in the washing machine.

What I didn’t see was scientists.

Recently I discovered a color film of George Washington Carver taken when he was older. He moves about his day as you’d imagine a scientist would - spending part of his time in his home laboratory and agricultural experimentation space. Surprisingly he also spent a significant amount of time crocheting a new blanket.

At the end of the film, he leaves his simple home and travels to the campus of Tuskegee Institute, where he taught for many years.  As he stands in front of a building bearing his name, complete with a life size bust of himself, I thought about how bizarre it must have felt to have been both a slave and an international advisor to Mahatma Gandhi in the same lifetime.

I never heard about Katherine Johnson’s time at NASA until the popular “Hidden Figures” movie, and I only just learned of Gladys West’s work on GPS, or that the Super Soaker water gun was invented by Lonnie Johnson. There weren’t trading cards for black scientists, only sports heroes, which was a shame really, because it is only recently that I’ve come to realize how many African Americans have made significant and world changing discoveries. I would have collected those cards in high school and enthusiastically traded them with my frenemies in Chess Club.

I wish I’d known more about these folks early on - more about their lives and adventures. As it was, I believe I got a C on a third grade test because I wrote that George Washington Carver invented the peanut, rather than 300 innovations derived from it. He was the literal poster child of black science, but as impressive as his career was, as I looked up at his painted image every year on the science classroom bulletin board, I didn’t know enough about his life to want to BE him.

Which is ironic, because I actually resemble him a great deal more than I do Neil deGrasse Tyson.

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At my grade school, it was just reading, writing, and arithmetic for a while, and then science and social studies came along.

Science focused on nature at first, eventually evolving into fun experiments like baking soda volcanos and lemon batteries. Social studies began as cartography: the class would look at giant maps requiring WWE strength for the teachers to pull down, like huge window shades mounted on top of the blackboards. We learned the names of different colored shapes -  Earth’s continents, countries, states, counties and cities. Eventually the lessons began to describe how the lines defining these colorful shapes had been drawn, which led us to the joyful huffing of purple mimeograph sheets filled with Important Dates.

Declaration of Independence signed - July 4, 1776

That was the main one. I’m sure there were more, it’s just been a while. (Ooo! Norman Conquest! 1066! #stillgotit)

Social Studies evolved into History class, which should have been easy lists of “things that happened”. But for me it was always “why” they happened that was the most interesting part. There was an 80’s PBS series titled “CONNECTIONS” that offered a few clues as to the complexity of history’s WHYs, but in class our teachers would shrug and tell us they didn’t know, and SOCIETAL CONTEXT would not be on the exams.

In recent years the world of academia has gotten a bit more Indiana Jones and unearthed further detail about society’s recent past, often shifting our perspectives. For instance, I was shocked to learn that the past didn’t smell all that great…I hadn’t actually thought about it, just had the urge to visit London in the 1860’s if a time machine showed up - but then I was taught about The Great Stink, which wasn’t in any Dickens novels or Sherlock Holmes stories. Eeesh.

Also, the past isn’t moving, but it’s creeping up on me. I used to think of “the past” as far away. Words like “established” and “historical” meant that somebody’s grandparents had to be involved… horse-drawn carriages rumbling down cobblestone streets while tinny tenor voices spring from Victrola™ machines through open bay windows.

Now words like that are used to describe breakfast cereals, and I own objects that are on display in museums. There is more history being discovered, and more being created, every day.

One would think that more information offers greater clarity, like the resolution of pixels in a photoshop document. The context I longed for in school should be easy to plot out now with a few internet searches; in many cases that is true, as information springs to light that I either forgot or was never aware of. It’s weird to think that even though the past has happened already, it can still surprise us.

For instance, my mother turned 21 in 1962. As viewed through my life, that meant that she could legally vote and publicly enjoy as many adult beverages as she wanted.

Turns out she wasn’t an adult beverage sort of person and did NOT have the right to vote in 1962. This was confusing because the 19th Amendment secured voting rights for American women in 1920, yet the right for black women to vote (of which my mother is one) was not legally established until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (The VRA nationally barred discrimination and overruled all state and local restrictions.)

So my mother’s first legal vote was at 27, which she remembers because I was there - I was a two year old, probably in a little suit and bow tie and a jaunty hat (she dressed me up for special occasions).  This event happened IN MY LIFETIME, her basic right to vote in her home country.

She didn’t have the right to open a bank account without a man’s signature until 1974 (she already had one because the local black owned bank was more progressive). Credit cards weren’t available to her until 1974, two years before Star Wars opened. Carrie Fisher couldn’t get a MasterCard. And I could not have been a legacy at Yale as my mother could not have attended until 1969. All of these changes were truly historical, but uncomfortably recent.

One more thing: I am now, for various reasons, paying much closer attention to laws and their creation. Dozens of people scripting and revising specific language until it defines a situation which can be enforced and defended. Pretty impressive.

A few years ago I bought 6 very thick books about the United States Constitution and all the fun and hijinks that surrounded it. Did I read all 4268 pages? No, I did not. I did read the Constitution, and really enjoyed a pop-up book about the Bill of Rights, but the main thing I realized is that the United States is written on paper.

Imagine people standing around until someone writes down rules of a game on a sheet of paper to start folks off. Society is that fragile sheet of paper. Not a stone tablet, or even a lower back tattoo, just PAPER.

Even in this age of absolute miracles, when humans have visited the moon and traveled at the speed of sound, if an idea is really important, what do we do? Write it down. Sure, we use computers to print it, but we still sign actual pieces of paper. That makes it law. That makes it real. That makes it history.

Paper is what ties history together. Books, maps, handwritten notes, sketches and calculations and for-goodness-sake MONEY. Paper holds our clues to the past, and is what we are using to plot our future. Wow. I thought it might be gunpowder or salt or oil or something, but those things don’t last.

Paper. Explains why I could always check out without a receipt, but I feel so much more secure when I get one.

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