My Glorious '70s TV Childhood, Writ Large

I have been reading up on Mech E. I don't know how this came to pass, but it turns out I have been learning some very practical things about how roller coasters work. I surprise myself when I read text from a scholarly article about the application of the new "triple contoid rail shifters" or some such, and I understand pretty much all of it, despite its grounding in forces and principles of physics that probably don't exist. I am so excited by this new area of learning that I am, for the moment anyway, dead-set on changing careers to becoming a roller coaster mechanic.

It's a butch place, though, this coaster shop (a simply vast factory floor, the kind of place you drive golf carts through to get from Point A to Point B) and one of the guys has already expressed his smirking disdain for the new faggot. He's a 40-ish tank with neat graying hair, an old-school 'phobe who, deep down, couldn't be bothered less but feels the need to keep up appearances with the mates. I'm trying to make nice, partly because it's the morally superior, adult thing to do, partly because I don't wanna get beat up, and partly because holy shit I'd suck that in a trice. Anyway, I make a point to thank him, politely and professionally, whenever I can—e.g., on returning a gizmo I have made use of that's not really his to lend but the company's. It's working, I can tell: he'll be fucking my face soon.

I'm off shopping now, seemingly both for hardware and foodstuffs. (There may even be a stupid pun like "mixed nuts" going on here.) I visit the supermarket that's always there, whether the story is about actual grocery shopping, frustration over a mass of humanity in the way, or anxiety about being naked. In this case it's just here to be visited briefly because what I really need is over in a separate space across the parking lot: operated by the same grocery company but more like a hardware store. Except with tacos. They have tacos. I hear some folks in here complaining about how windy it is while I'm looking around. They apparently do not carry what I'm looking for and I don't want any tacos, so...

I step out onto the narrow terrace just shy of the roof of this retail/office building. There's a tired old guy out here smoking, and after we exchange greetings, he mentions that he's "about done with this damn wind". Sure enough, just as I look through the cloudscape in the near distance I see evidence of a cyclone forming. It is far too bright out here—really only partly cloudy—for a tornado, but there one is, and it has just touched ground, maybe a couple blocks away. I say to the senior, "That's it for me, I'm going in" (he seems less alarmed) and I head back toward safety. But the door I came through is egress-only; no handle on the outside. So I find the next door, which leads into a utility corridor, then going through another steel door opposite I end up in a main building stairwell. I am the first in here but other humans start gathering almost immediately; presumably it's a safer part of the building structure than their offices, with all those windows. I am surrounded by shouts of "C'mon, hurry!" and general panicking. We are all trying to determine whether the twister has passed or lingered, and where it is now.

It is here. It is precisely here. We humans lurch and scream as it becomes obvious the building is coming down. The space where we are all standing has become a steel and glass cube, an oversize elevator, and it is plummeting toward the ground. I am faced with that moment I have long contemplated: what happens when the plane is going down? What happens when I fall off a cliff? How do I react and what do I think about in that excruciating last minute before certain death?

There is no right answer. And anyway, Brain declines the question by an unexplained scene change. Brain always pulls that shit when it doesn't know.

Well! Since I'm not dead, I am in Carol Burnett tribute mode. There's a particular episode I remember, with a particular guest, and in which Carol Burnett sings a particular song at the very end. (In real life, the guest is probably Sammy Davis, Jr. but I have no idea what the song is. It may have bled over from Jerry Lewis singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" at the end of this MDA Labor Day Telethon every year.) In what is almost certainly Mary Richards's newsroom, I sit and page through a mountain of old TV Guides until I find the episode in question. Apparently we are pre- or otherwise devoid of Internet research tools; and yet, having found paper reference to it, I have immediate access to the video in stunningly high quality—like being right there by the stage as Carol does her finale.

Once the song is done—and Carol has tugged on her earlobe—I am back in the parking garage, heading for the car with John, my partner in crime. John is played by Paul Newman. The car is played by a generic 1970s workhorse sedan. I am contemplating my performance during the twister/falling tower incident; in retrospect I was more than sufficiently reasoned and calm even as death inexorably loomed.

I have passed the test; I have found the tao; I have faced death without fear; I am a fucking badass.

So it is clear what I need to do: "I need a gun, John," I tell my partner as we open the car doors. He seems surprised. "I've never owned a gun, never even fired a gun." (True in our story, not true in real life.) But I need a gun to go be a hero—perhaps like Frank in God Bless America but this is not what occurs to me at the time: my end goal is left tacit—though one may assume enough thematic linkage with waking life that "overthrowing the oligarchy" is basically it. I need a gun to accomplish it in any case.

There are two women not far from us in the parking lot; they are clearly involved in some other sort of criminal activity and are newly on the lam. I ask John whether we should give them a ride; he declines, opining that that would be asking for trouble. We head out; but for whatever reason John drives the car down the stairs, every flight.

I sit up to grab and pen and paper to make notes about these dreams; except that I do not really sit up. I only dream that I do.

Tonight on the Sigh/Fie Channel...

I wake up on the third floor and remember that we have a houseful of people left over from the marathon, or party, or whatever festivities we just convened over the weekend. There are people sleeping comfortably on the several beds up here. I decide to have a ramble to see what the rest of the house looks like in the aftermath.

The second floor is definitely more crowded; I am surprised to see how many people are crammed on the beds down here. And then I realize, as I'm tiptoeing toward the exit door and the stairs (it's very dark in here and I can't see the floor) that I'm stepping on people. I slow down and try to readjust—there must be a clear path to walk between the sleeping bodies, but I can't find it. Fortunately I don't really seem to be disturbing anyone; occasionally somebody hollers "Ouch!" without selling it much, and then giggles.

I head down the stairs and, like the Haunted Mansion, I'm suddenly outside. There's just an enormous number of people here—sleeping, not sleeping, hanging out in the yard, which is as expansive as a public park. It is fence-to-fence people, like late night/early morning at a folk fest: not raucous but humming with residual party energy. I'm over by the eastern fence chatting with some folks who are, incongruously, still lying in bed, and I'm surveying the whole huge expanse of humanity when a violent commotion, over yonder and moving quickly, commands the attention of all the waking folk in earshot: a small group of humans are fleeing—it's a little more than running; they seem semi-airborne—from a pair of vampires. The latter are bald, pink, huge, and lithe—think Max Shreck meets Corey Stoll—and they chase the humans over the fence and into the night.

The crowd has reacted as expected, with screams and such. I tell myself resolutely: This is a gimmick. It's a prank. There are no real vampires. And sure enough I have immediate occasion to test that theory, because the vampires quickly come clambering back over the fence exactly where I'm standing. One of them jumps on me, knocking me down; the other does the same to a friend on my left. Fortunately, we have another friend who is standing behind us and who laconically narrates the "attack" like Penn Jilette, giving every bit of the trick away: Nice fence-hopping! Must be easy when you're on a wire. Oh, look, there's a crushable vial of "blood"! and such like. Thwarted, the vampires retire.

Later, I accompany Carlos to the basement rooms where he has long executed his sci-fi/paranormal experiments. There is a fatalism about this excursion, a definite "one last time" vibe: it is late in the movie and everything is going to hell above, maybe. The basement space is a classic set-up, with a control room overlooking an experimentation room; but Carlos has always worked solo, never experimenting on anyone: it's always been about communicating or learning more about... x.

Just now he is in the control room doing his sci-fi thing while I putter about the experimental space. I attempt to to put together the contraption Carlos sits on during his attempts—it's an essential condition for reaching the aliens or "the other side" or whatever he needs to reach; but it's also fiendishly difficult to assemble and balance and actually sit down on. It's two pieces of wood: one has five or six prongs all in a row, 2.5 or 3 feel long, fanning out like a splayed fork, which all sit on the floor. There's some sort of seat in the center of them. At the top where they converge instead of a straight fork handle, it curves back and down, like the handle of a mug or pitcher, though disconnected, ending in midair with a curlicue. I need to balance this end on the second piece of wood, which looks like a drum with one leg. So the fork tines and the one-leggèd drum rest on the floor and I try to get into the broom's seat while maintaining this impossibly awkward balance of mug-handle on drum head.

I do not succeed. I have never had good balance.

A hear a voice softly saying "Hello". I cannot tell where it's coming from. I listen for a while and I hear it again. "Hello." I abandon the contraption and head for the control booth to tell Carlos. He thinks the voice is "from beyond", wherever that is, and so he adjusts some controls and says "Hello" into a microphone. But it turns out the voice is entirely more mundane: it came from the other side of a door, heretofore unrevealed, but it's a plain old residential/commercial door, two horizontal rectangles of glass in the top, 20th century all the way, plain old knob, plain old lock, at the bottom of plain old basement stairs from the street level down to these rooms, which are now also a used bookstore.

And, look, it's Jon Lovitz behind the door, saying hello one more time before barging in and arresting Carlos. Or rather, he and his law enforcement brood attempt to arrest Carlos, but the lawyers are right behind LE down the stairs: they are led by Susan Sarandon, who looks fucking amazing in an indigo dress with an elaborate spiderweb decoration on her breast. And she makes quick work of Lovitz, threatening a wrongful arrest suit that'll keep his family unemployed for generations, or some such.

My sinuses are really dry. I need water.

The Bunk Disapproves

The Stress Express, bearing a reminder.

I am planning a movie marathon that is going to start very soon, maybe later today, and I am woefully behind. I have no final schedule, no AV equipment, no video content. No planning for the viewing space, which is new and outdoors: it's a garden setting, a roundish space maybe 30 feet in diameter. I consider a screen on one side, furthest from the house, and chair filling up the space. It occurs to me that this restricts the space for extra chairs just outside the perimeter; there's only one good spot at 135 degrees from the screen where such overflow can usefully occur. So my next idea is two screens in the center, back to back. Somehow this will allow more seating. Don't ask me about viewing angle.

A couple people help me set up the hardware. The speaker setup is freakin' BOSS. It makes me want to start the marathon with a Star Wars movie just for the surprise grandeur of opening fanfare. (In real life, fuck that fucking hack John Williams.)

I need to go score all the video content. In the past I've had a confederate providing some sort of download key. But I have a key of my own now (a new thing) so I really don't need Michael Martin to help me this time, as he has for the last I dunno how many 'thons.

On pulling up my code, however—on the public-use billboard across the street over the stand of palms—I realize my new wireless doohickey has a wheel but no button—a new fucking Apple product, no doubt: simplifying things for the simple user. So I can scroll but I have no idea how to select my download key or copy it to my clipboard. The doohickey is about the size and shape of a rubber or composite grip at the end of a bicycle handlebar. Maybe a little smaller. It is, notoriously, the color of a Mac Plus or any Apple computer circa 1990.

Never mind, says Séain, you can use mine. But when he produces his own wireless doohickey—which has a button as well as a wheel—it turns out his wireless key is locked. He needs a key to get the key, and for some reason his key isn't working.

Yes, an annoyance dream about a technolabyrinth. Hooray!

Anyway, he manages to get his key and we head to the library (ish) to grab the content. Séain is handling the downloads now, so I have time to email, and it occurs to me I have not even sent Michael Martin an invitation to the marathon. And now that it's, like, today, I am afraid he will think I'm inviting him only for his techspertise, so I open with a disclaimer and tell him I would be ecstatic if he could make it to the 'thon. Email in this case is composed, seemingly by thought, on an oversized book frame with text that lights up on the page as you compose it. Each line of text is a good inch tall and trompe-l'œil: is it designed to look like a glowing blue light is shining from inside deep-recessed chiseled text. Or maybe it really is recessed and it just resets once the email sends. Who knows these days.

Over in the corner, someone has set up food for anyone to take, Sterno and chafing dishes on a folding table sort of affair, with a sign that says, Please help yourself to this chifferobe". No, the word is not chifferobe, but it might as well be, because whatever these two foodstuffs are, they are not as described. The one on the left appears to be a conglomeration of flatbreads, stacked one upon the other in a cylindrical dish and covered with...raisins? and some kind of sauce. Yet the implication of the signage is that there's meat in it. I investigate half-heartedly and finally peel a flatbread off the stack and put it on my plate.

At this point a colleague walks up to the table and asks me, with no small talk, where I got that radar we used in the last job we won. Of course, I didn't "get that radar" at all, but I know what she means, and it's accusatory: maybe she is asking why I get all the jobs with the fun toys; or maybe it's that my team has no business with access to a cutting-edge high-tech thingummy that, for all I know, may still be classified. My response is, naturally, that I am merely the proposal side of things; I don't do project work. So whatever tech toys the team uses are not my bailiwick, not my concern. For reasons unclear, though, I sing this response to her: two ABCB quartrains in loose iambic trimeter, to a familiar tune, something like Bowie's "Song for Bob Dylan". The response ends with:

We source a lot of radars
And I don't know which is which.

"Which" is a badly stretched rhyme (on "flips"?) and I am mortified by my improvisation. But the response seems to satisfy my colleague, and she leaves me alone.

The Stress Express, bearing a reminder.

I am planning a movie marathon that is going to start very soon, maybe later today, and I am woefully behind. I have no final schedule, no AV equipment, no video content. No planning for the viewing space, which is new and outdoors: it's a garden setting, a roundish space maybe 30 feet in diameter. I consider a screen on one side, furthest from the house, and chair filling up the space. It occurs to me that this restricts the space for extra chairs just outside the perimeter; there's only one good spot at 135 degrees from the screen where such overflow can usefully occur. So my next idea is two screens in the center, back to back. Somehow this will allow more seating. Don't ask me about viewing angle.

A couple people help me set up the hardware. The speaker setup is freakin' BOSS. It makes me want to start the marathon with a Star Wars movie just for the surprise grandeur of opening fanfare. (In real life, fuck that fucking hack John Williams.)

I need to go score all the video content. In the past I've had a confederate providing some sort of download key. But I have a key of my own now (a new thing) so I really don't need Michael Martin to help me this time, as he has for the last I dunno how many 'thons.

On pulling up my code, however—on the public-use billboard across the street over the stand of palms—I realize my new wireless doohickey has a wheel but no button—a new fucking Apple product, no doubt: simplifying things for the simple user. So I can scroll but I have no idea how to select my download key or copy it to my clipboard. The doohickey is about the size and shape of a rubber or composite grip at the end of a bicycle handlebar. Maybe a little smaller. It is, notoriously, the color of a Mac Plus or any Apple computer circa 1990.

Never mind, says Séain, you can use mine. But when he produces his own wireless doohickey—which has a button as well as a wheel—it turns out his wireless key is locked. He needs a key to get the key, and for some reason his key isn't working.

Yes, an annoyance dream about a technolabyrinth. Hooray!

Anyway, he manages to get his key and we head to the library (ish) to grab the content. Séain is handling the downloads now, so I have time to email, and it occurs to me I have not even sent Michael Martin an invitation to the marathon. And now that it's, like, today, I am afraid he will think I'm inviting him only for his techspertise, so I open with a disclaimer and tell him I would be ecstatic if he could make it to the 'thon. Email in this case is composed, seemingly by thought, on an oversized book frame with text that lights up on the page as you compose it. Each line of text is a good inch tall and trompe-l'œil: is it designed to look like a glowing blue light is shining from inside deep-recessed chiseled text. Or maybe it really is recessed and it just resets once the email sends. Who knows these days.

Over in the corner, someone has set up food for anyone to take, Sterno and chafing dishes on a folding table sort of affair, with a sign that says, Please help yourself to this chifferobe". No, the word is not chifferobe, but it might as well be, because whatever these two foodstuffs are, they are not as described. The one on the left appears to be a conglomeration of flatbreads, stacked one upon the other in a cylindrical dish and covered with...raisins? and some kind of sauce. Yet the implication of the signage is that there's meat in it. I investigate half-heartedly and finally peel a flatbread off the stack and put it on my plate.

At this point a colleague walks up to the table and asks me, with no small talk, where I got that radar we used in the last job we won. Of course, I didn't "get that radar" at all, but I know what she means, and it's accusatory: maybe she is asking why I get all the jobs with the fun toys; or maybe it's that my team has no business with access to a cutting-edge high-tech thingummy that, for all I know, may still be classified. My response is, naturally, that I am merely the proposal side of things; I don't do project work. So whatever tech toys the team uses are not my bailiwick, not my concern. For reasons unclear, though, I sing this response to her: two ABCB quartrains in loose iambic trimeter, to a familiar tune, something like Bowie's "Song for Bob Dylan". The response ends with:

We source a lot of radars
And I don't know which is which.

"Which" is a badly stretched rhyme (on "flips"?) and I am mortified by my improvisation. But the response seems to satisfy my colleague, and she leaves me alone.