For those of poor you who have not had the experience, a cross between a fritatta and an omelet and some other unnamed breakfast dish, which contains Potatoes, Green Peppers, Onions, Mushrooms and some Garlic, an occasional chopping of sausage or ham (once I think even a meatball), fried in a large pan until it becomes a mass by some transmogrification of and in itself. Something new born in the universe.

Then well beaten eggs poured over top so that they sizzle as they hit the wonderfully hot skillet floor.
        
A spatula turn and a scramble and a jostle or two and then cheese over the top, any variety in the fridge lunch meat drawer. Put a high arching top cover over the pans, shut off the heat and let it all just meld together.

Serve it in the skillets that bore it. So hot that the pan warms the whole house as it is carried to the table . Coffee orange juice and plenty of hard crust Italian bread. And oh yes,

the thing that I forgot to mention,

my father always added a secret ingredient which he would not divulge.

Ever.

He was a hard guy with a very sentimental soft core. Me, I keep up the tradition because I am a sentimental soft guy with a mushy core. We are both very much like our versions of “Colucci” eggs

Suspicion about the secret ingredient abounds. Some say the old man admitted in later life that it was “love” that was the secret ingredient. Some have guessed that it was a condiment preferably found on the lush floor of some magical forest. Some have even claimed that it was all a fake. Secret Ingredient? There is no secret ingredient in Colucci eggs! Oh, yes, we even suffer fools in our own family.

I am here to confirm that there was such an ingredient. I know because I now endeavor to embody the tradition.

One of the clues comes from the fact that our last name is Coluccio and we have proudly and sometimes rudely proclaimed that any one within the vicinity of the three rivers that define the city of Pittsburgh with final “O” on the name must be our relatives. (With the exception of one Cosmo Coluccio who disappeared from the phone book a number of years ago. Nobody knew who the hell he was. Possibly the UberColuccio!) Sure, you’ve got you’re Coluccis but we are the Coluccios. My father was one of the biggest guardians of the name. So how came these eggs to be called by him “Colucci” eggs?

It could be because every one called him, as they call me Hey, Colucci or Coluch! Language and the easy way out, no final aspiration. His friends and fellow workers all called him that.

I think the dish was not named at all.

That morning of the Colucci Eggs, he became a spirit that would awaken children out of a beautiful sleep even if he had to pull off the sheets and stand them up straight out of the bed, so that they would waddle to the kitchen tables and sit with little enthusiasm, eyes red and watery, begging for just fifteen minutes more. Until the skillet cover was lifted and the feast revealed.

He became a fulfillment, the promise of new days and fat times. He became dawn. And our proud name could not possibly contain the overwhelming brightness of that meal. Every mouthful spilled over into a welcoming cosmos. The O leaked away and carried that spirit.

And, believe me, that’s all the secret ingredient you ever need!

Buon Natale!

I’ve been tossing around a few ideas like the contents of wooden bowl full of greens before vinegar and oil. The one that has most recently topped the salad is I have been imagining putting together a periodic podcast. (Yes, it is true that I hate the word podcast. It has a certain slimy sound of sucking souls growing in the greenhouse. but I will give in to the term that has been spawned without one whit of consultation with me.)

I decided to look around on the internet for ideas about creating a podcast.

How is it that no matter what the endeavor, I always come with the same such perverse notion?

I seem to be forever reading about character development and the relationship between the arc of the plot and how the setting can affect the balance between the action and the meaning …Blahgity blahgity blah! Or someone blathering about programming style and its importance to the overall coherence to the project (we all use software, we all know how well that seems to work) , or the proper way to handle the guitar pick (plectrum?) in a splickity lick (I have yet to manifest the smoking speed of John McLaughlin. I prefer fingerpicking anyway, p-i-m-a, hand in a curve not a claw) , the proper use of persepective, the position and composition of a name block on a mechanical drawing, the absolutely necessary use of a smarmy Sincerely yours at the close of a letter, the pretense Dears Sirs at the beginning.

I find that people giving instruction about screenplay writing are the worst of the bunch. (The evidence for that is at the cineplex.) There are more rules that shouldn’t be broken planning a TV or movie script than found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy .

The stricture about only using Courier 12 Point for submissions, (I’m guessing ’cause it looks like a typewritten manuscript ) is both interesting and irritating. I don’t like any more than a couple fonts myself, but I have found that I can still read and understand things written in Times New Roman. And, though, I admit that I would have some trouble reading anything in, say, Stacatto 555 or Bernhard Schoenschrift, there are many many fonts that just aren’t beyond the reach of a literate person. Believe it or not whole works of literature are written in different type styles. Perhaps I just can’t imagine the pain of a poor tortured producer who would have to read scripts in several differing fonts over orange juice in the morning? Very messy, so distracting! Mein Gott naeste vi will be submitting zem in foreign tongues!!

What I find, after a very few minutes of review of these sage articles that I am prone to consult, is I am compelled to to figure out how I can break every rule that has just been put down by that good hearted person who was just trying to give the benefit of experience and bon ami. I am a terribly hard case. If I thought about it for a some period of time, I would be embarrassed.

Alas my search for Podcasting instruction fell into the same sad pattern.

In one online tutorial about podcasting I was told that podcasting was work intensive but that it could be a tremendous amount of fun.

For about a year and a half I put together a Comedy Radio Program. The group that I was part of wrote, performed, recorded, composed music for and edited an hour long program once a week. It wasn’t just work intensive, it was a horror! And I never really felt all that good about it, even though I think we were very good and that the broadcast was relatively solid. It became a push of a stone up the hill that managed on access to the peak just to slip to the bottom once again. I think I will skip the notion about about how much fun I will be having and pass over into some other realm, which may even be become evident to me as I write this blog post. (Blog, don’t like that word either, but I’m only one person and we grow accustomed to things)

The article went on to explain that it was only worth it to podcast if you incorporated your passions.
I was immediately on board with that whole idea about my passions until I started to reflect on my passions. It wasn’t so much that I don’t have them. I certainly do! but so many people are doing so many podcasts about similar ideas that I feel I could add very little to the mix.

Then I was advised that the best thing that I could do was plan the podcast out in detail.

It was a blow. I am incapable of planning out anything that has to do with creating. O, sure I can put a schedule together at work, I can even adapt and change with conflicting demands. In short, I can and do make decisions quickly and accurately and on the spot. I live with the consequences. But this idea of planning stymies me.

I believe that planning in the beginning is counter to production.

When you start something you have to be willing to stumble in the muck, build a structure, find the weakness then totally destroy it to build a better one. To me this is the method that works and yes it does mean massive amounts of confusion and work. How can I possibly know what is going to develop until I start scratching and clawing through the process. Planning comes afterward. Dreaming is what is required in those first steps, and failure, destruction and rebuilding are really part of the joy of exploration. No matter that the dream can become nightmare.

The vaster problem with dreaming is that often it is all there is, but I figure if dreaming is enough, maybe the rest of it wasn’t all that important.

The remainder of the article was about microphones and mixers and hardware configuration.

I didn’t pay attention to it much either.

Tomorrow I’m going to go on to editing techniques.

I admit it I am a criminal! I am a thief. I stand as accused, Javier.

This confession comes only after software designing companies have bludgeoned it out of me.

I have recently purchased a Mac Book Pro. I normally steer as clear of brand name proclamation as I do of political discussions. For many of the same reasons. All claims are spurious and unimportant, But the OS change from Windows to OS X is some of the problem I am about to discuss.

I began shifting software to the new computer mid last week. I expected a nightmare and I got a nightmare. I have not yet completed my descent and have yet to see a Virgil around to help me. All is phantasm and horror. A couple toothy wolves and a panther attacked late this morning.

Sure the software loaded in a tame enough manner.  At the last "load a computer orgy" a couple years ago I actually took all earlier install discs that I could find and placed them in the box that contained the latest edition of  that particular software. It made for some very thick stuffed cardboard containers and a bunch of black magic marker magic over the software logo, but it paid off like the money roll of a carny shill at the chuck-a-luck wheel this time around. I had proof of purchase!

Now that I think of it, I am amazed that the confirmation process before any installation doesn’t include using some of the 5 1/4" Floppy Discs of the my original Win386 installation. Of course, there really doesn’t seem to be much play for my DOS copy of DBase IV. Oh, dear, I hope I haven’t let slip to these software providers another idea for a torture to use on the way to our perdition.

So I had gathered my forces. But I never reckoned with activation.

It is hard to do, but I must at this juncture still remind myself that it was my dollars (mostly as the cliche demands, hard earned) that bought these programs, but what do my dollars matter against INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?

The install discs loaded. I accepted the terms, without which the program would not work and I would have spent my earnings on but a dream. Did the companies every think to ask this question of agreement to terms before you put our credit card number on the line and click Proceed? Then I arduously with fat finger typed the ridiculous serial numbers with dashes designed so that you just can’t copy and paste . The program itself installed itself admirably. Then it booted and started.

The first screen was an activation screen. "Do you", it asked with a cloying kind of guile and innocence, "want to activate this program online."

"Do I", I asked each time, "have any choice?"

Send in the activation by Pony Express? I activated! Online!

Time and again, even though I only have most of this existing software loaded on one computer, I was told that all the activation slots were filled and that I would have to deactivate my copy on the other machine.

Who filled the slots? Why are there slots?

I scrupulously deactivated my offending copy!

In almost no case did it work. Now, I have to email or call during regular hours and have a conversation about the fact that I did nothing wrong other than pay my money and religiously buy the upgrades. Foolish me!  I wanted the software I purchased and upgraded to be usable as well.

My mind began to work in overclock. How the hell had I had managed to fill those damned slots of activation? I spend the nights sleepless, spinning.

I think part of the problem is that I wanted in many cases to change the software from Windows OS to Mac OS. Was ever there a crime more heinous in this country? I can’t even imagine what it could be. The perfidious box that contains the software in every instance about which I am writing claimed to support both Windows and Mac.

Were these claims written by home land security to entrap really bad guys like me?

I have concluded on my way to the gallows that I must be guilty. I tick the points off on my fingers and everything points to me. So learn from me brothers and sisters. Buy a computer, but think twice about getting any software. It will lead you to a life of crime as sure as it did me. Better you should download and find some cracks. You don’t have to activate them.

So I wet and I rub and I dry and I sparkle. Each of the two weeks it has taken less than an hour to deposit, out of a clear blue and sunny sky, a rain storm laden with tubs of water on the vehicle that I have just made pristine.  Life can be a cartoon. I watch from the rear picture window drenching rain blowing almost horizontally. Smile at the Saturday Funny.

Baseball usually catches me for a month or two early in the season and I dream of the home run king that I was sure I was going to be when I was a kid playing in a stubbled field just a short bike ride down Maple Street and up into the housing plan. We had as many on the team as there were kids that showed up. Sometimes the outfield positions would be doubled. On occasion there would be another roving shortstop and redundant second baseman, but I alone always played first base. Not because I was a lefty, but because I was the only one with a first baseman’s mitt. I wasn’t bad and I could hit the ball a ton.

When it finally came time to join a little league team I was sorely disappointed. All the fun was gone and the game became serious. When we played in our rough field, everyone played, regardless of age or ability. When we competed it was against the group at the far end of the field who had an identical ethos. The organization was more than democratic and it worked just fine. Score, Who cared about score for more than a minute. It was exhilarating. It was real life. Adult supervision and "organized" little league brought the fantasy of limitation, the fantasy of real life. It is happily a lesson that I have never forgotten.

I never made a little league team. I quit after one try out.

Spring is that season for rebirth and I take it with some seriousness and I crack out of my egg. It is more important as I grow older. More miraculous.

I am sitting presently on the side porch and writing in the chill of the morning as church going cars whine up the hill. I have on a corduroy jacket and I can feel the wind cool my hands above the keyboard, the sun is making the laptop screen dim. Life ain’t so bad.

In Pittsburgh we have a passion play each year in the Easter Season, called Veronica’s Veil. The church, St. Michaels, and the Passionist Fathers are gone, but the auditorium and the passion remain on the climb up the hill from the South Side. It is a drama writ in tableaus of Veronica as she wiped the sweat and blood from Christ face as he struggled with the cross on the way to Golgotha. The veil captured his sacred visage.

The thing that most folks remember, often because they were moved to spiritual lethargy watching the posed scenes, was the giant surprising clap of thunder and flash of lightning that occurs when Christ dies on the Cross. It definitely is an eye opener. But that isn’t what I remember about the passion play.

What I remember is the dense wet feel of my winter coat on the way into the auditorium. Squeals and whispers of the children that had been delivered from my automobile to the drama. My shoes streaked with muddy snow and my socks soggy, heavy on my feet. The smell of cooked cabbage and sweet foods being sold in the gymnasium. The even more overpowering odor and feel of the ages of that spiritual and local community that seeped its way into the walls. You could peel some of it off when you brushed past as you slowly walked up a set of stairs: The thrill, some young woman being chosen to play Mary, Mother of God. Soldiers, who had been in the crowd scenes only last year, uniformed returned from or off to any of the wars, embracing the people they loved and who loved them in a silent moment of hope that would soon lead to despair. The son who was Christ. The father who died short weeks before the performance. Fingers fashioning the shrouded veil that Veronica’s kindness created. The chatter of the ladies as the robes, shawls and costumes were sewn and assembled. Laughter. Tragedy. The Spirit. All greeting you. Smothering you in a palpable wave of warmth. The mothers cooking bowls of golumpki and buttons of pastry in their kitchen for transport to the Passion. Day after day season after season session after session building memory and life into hard surface of the plaster walls.

The way that I view my life is in tableau, like those presented in the drama, but peeled haphazardly off the accretion of brushed against walls and formed like those silent static scenes with an occasional thunderclap to awaken me. There is little seeming to do with progression but everything to do with causality.

So I glimpse, a dead summer night of the close to midnight sun on a funeral mound, wind blowing against me and the Limfjord down the slowly falling fields not a inch of sleep in my mind. Late at night. And the dirty dank dungeon smell of listener sponsored radio, floor uneven like a German expressionist film, walls covered with inexpensive ineffective paint and tons of reel to reel tapes sitting on a table while I argue with someone about their shift on the radio, it’s too long, it’s too short, it’s too shout, a day on the San Francisco Bay when we caught a crab and yes by god a boot with our fishing gear, the crab was boiled and swallowed the shoe thrown back, a summer day on a lake at a farm of our neighbors when I got both sun blitz and sea sick, a precursor to a day on the North Atlantic when I became as sick as any I have ever been, so much so that even dry land couldn’t heal me for a couple days.

So I glimpse, all manner of friends family and strangers around me. When I think of them I believe that they all know one another. I believe I know the lives and names of the strangers. When I send a letter or email to acquaintances they all must be confused by mentions of people that have no particular meaning to them.

Eventually, it comes to me. I am the great integrator. We are all the great integrators of our lives. Of course everyone knows one another. How could it be otherwise? They know me. I know you. I mix work relations with school relations with virtual relations with home relations with childhood relations with family relations. I discover that here lies my great wellspring. Here is the central tap of my creative power that carries the energy and flow of my living.

I’m not much taken to mysticism. I only visited Veronica’s Veil once and that was only as a favor to deliver a portion of a CCD class from a church that I attended out of duty. I did find, at my church, a spirit of community that I thought was powerful. Which will suffice as spirit. I consulted the I Ching once. The coin oracle because I could never conquer the dexterous mathematical concepts of, much less find, yarrow stocks. I don’t exactly remember the question but I suppose I was asking after the nature of my essential being. I threw the coins, yes they had holes in the center, and the answer calculated was six unbroken lines, primal power, light giving, active, strong and of the spirit, Ch’ien, The Creative. I took it as a wonderful affirmation. I still do.

On further reflection I believe that they are just trying to raise my dander to a full case of dandruff. It has become personal.

A recent example from this here fin d’annee is the movie entitled “I Am Legend”. I viewed it at a local plex with some of my family. It was a rousing Christmas sensation. Full of ghoulies and zombies and vampires (I think) that moved with a speed that would put a wraith traveling on the bullet train to shame and alas an intellect akin to a wild boar that has just been gored with a spear. They would definitely not make good neighbors. It is not clear how anyone but a movie hero with a couple hours and a story to finish could have survived this animated onslaught.

You know, I would have been happy if they had just titled “I Am Legend” something different, like “The Last Man on Earth” or even “The Omega Man”, and exposed in the credits that the movie was loosely based on a Richard Matheson story.

True, then I’d most likely have stayed home to enjoy the goodies from my stocking…come to think of it, that is an entirely better reason to be happy.

I won’t go into the rather simple plot of “I Am Legend”, the blockbuster, except to say, “Wrong Legend!”

I have decided to turn to the inauthentic and commercial side myself and present several works of fiction that have had impact on me and I think everyone else. I rework them in treatment here only so that they can be made more interesting than the unimaginative gunk created by the original dunderheaded authors.

Little Women, I find, is in bad need of a remake.

An updated story of Joe and his relationship with both the boy and his gray haired papa next door. Having, if you will, the son in the morning and the father at night. Joe’s sister, Amy, will turn the young naïve neighbor lad , Laurie (go figure), into a raging heterosexual when she meets him at a Southeast Asian Inn on a tour de monde designed to show the proper young lady not only the Occidental infusion of the Orient but to teach her the proper application of credit cards. They adopt a “cute chubby” indigenous baby, marry and come home to sponge off Joe and his poor dead mother. Joe will write a soft boiled mystery story about Siamese twin detectives, possibly two, and fall in love with a roadie, nicknamed Boperino, from a fusion band, who dies in an air disaster involving a blimp and an experimental kite carrying a large skeleton key somewhere over Nebraska. Joe dies a lonely old spinster on a cold brownstone in a field somewhere near his home town. He is curled up on his sled with the logo “Rosencrantz Limburger”. The flames lick the sled. The cheese runs. The film flickers out. Finis.

War and Peace which is too long by half also needs a serious make-over.

Raskolnikov, (I know, but to have a hero called Pierre would muck up the whole French side of the plot with Napoleon and his lover Joe who makes a brief appearance from Little Women), doesn’t kill his landlady but he does take a dancing bear on the road and meets a dazzling ingénue, Katherine Ivanovich Kalashnikov, on the vaudeville circuit. He marries this lovely Kat with dynamite chachkas, who passes away within a year from a virulent form of acne. Rassie, as he is known to all, then dates his landlady who kills him. The story moves to the Western Front where Alois Schicklgruber dances a jig on the grave of the Arch Bishop of Canterbury and war ensues. Massive gouts of CGI bare a realistic representation of WWII, WWI, WW0, and Agincourt, a smattering of Paris coyly making eyes at a definitely underdressed Helen, who is bidding farewell to Aeneas, who astride a Trojan Horse travels with Seven League Boots to the Italian peninsula where he kills Seven-at-One-Blow and subsequently feeds the multitude from a bowl of gravy. After this heavy representation of War artistically tinted in a flush of rude sanguine, the only Peace you will find is to hurry home, climb into your hammock and bludgeon yourself to sleep. RIP.

I dream of a career positively thwarting the creative wash of the ever present shadows of conglomerate film studios. Do they truly believe that they are the only ones who can twist a plot beyond recognition? Surely the delicate thrust of my corkscrew and my vigorous parry must convince them otherwise.

Roll over Orson Welles and tell Margaret Mitchell the news.

I believe my parents thought it would teach me a thing or two about responsibility. So each morning at the crank of something that I later in life came to recognize as the pre-dawn, new to me in that summer of my lost vacational, I would awaken to the smell of coffee that was too adult for me to drink.

I was a scant 13.

I couldn’t drink wine, hell, the Roman Mass was still in Latin, wine was for the priest, and I found the wafer a pasty sticky transubstantiation, and the heavy smell of incense as mind expanding as Baba Ram Dass tempting Tim and his Harvard colleagues. Or beer, thrust thrice down my young gullet, a trick that my old man was sure would keep me out of the trough and upstanding. A puff on a Camel was a stark impossibility for years to come.

How I longed for the totem.

There was milk and a cake donut that had been minted from the Mayflower Coffee Shop where my mother worked.

“As you ramble on through life dear brother, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the donut and not upon the hole.”

My mother’s waggish boss once suggested, when she asked him to sponsor her bowling league, that he would only do so if the team wore that slogan on the back of their shirts. He surrendered. A smile on his face. A cup of steaming coffee stitched on their blouses.

Summer of 1958.

I am in working clothes and heading down the North Side of the Allegheny River in the back seat of whatever clunking mobile that we owned in those days. The car smells of cracked abused leather, years of construction cement and lime and dirt stuck deep in every recess, under the rug even in the glove box and a heavy hand fashioned wood tool box that holds my feet aloft loaded with bastard files, red headed hatchets and golden plumb bobs. The heat is blowing in the window with the breeze as we slowly travel with the traffic, mixes with a summer musk off the river. It is still dark.

And we are on our way to make a living.

The traffic light at the HJ Heinz plant, hang a left down to River Avenue. There’s always an old barge or derelict river crane to feed my sense of dark adventure. A sneak on to the Sixth Street Bridge, now named for Roberto hitting .311 or .314 in those days the Pirates two years away from glory. Over the hump and split into downtown Pittsburgh. Pull up close to the curb on Penn and let my mother off. Sixth and Penn. Walk. Don’t Walk. I believe there is a glint of day to come.

Then a vigorous course through every alley and back street, under skeletal fire escapes, garbage cans with loose round tops, the odor, grease, hash browns and buttery eggs from breakfast eateries turns to urine and beer out of the back of saloons. Which leads to

The Smithfield Street Bridge. Trolley’s to the left and scant room for motor vehicles on the right. Pedestrians on the walk. An early wooden version the bridge burned in minutes, the fire of 1845. The Mon River gray. Barges beat their way to and from the heated heart of the steel valley starting a mile or so up the stream.

A turn to the left and we are at a long thin gas station build into the steep side of the hill. My father is talking to the owner Bill, a small man in soiled dark blue coveralls. His forehead his cheeks his chin are trapped with dirty grease. He reminds me of Charlie Allnut as played by Humphrey Bogart in the African Queen. I imagine that his stomach is making a loud grumbling sound. My father laughs. Bill explains the ins and outs of the lives on the South Side of Pittsburgh. Gasoline spills over the rear fender of the car. Wiped with an oil dirt rag. On to South Sixth and Bingham Street.

The building is still there. Houses a similar business. At the head of the street on Carson a wild field leads up to the train tracks. One year hence Rennekamp will build a concrete yard, built gray with concrete block. We park at the rear of Beighley Hardware and Tool close to the garage door that never opens. One of my lifetimes ago.

I began.

Look at that guy

That guy right over there

Bet half a billion I could fall

        faster

in a well of gravity

a twinking twirling

                decay

a bloated supergiant

depleted of hydrogen

way above the main sequence

Think about it

They say my name is Raimundo

Can anyone believe that

A    squall

A        squeek

A      skew

All sleezy fully blown

like a carbon black ball

berry shot from the snout of

a

third stage rocket burning the

Mesosphere

Damn but I believe I am arriving

in the nick of time

I know what you’re thinking! I am not a Martian. (Alien? Perhaps. Outré? mais oui!)

surely a fan of EC Comics?

but marginally.

Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear, Vault of Horror used to scare the stuffing out of me. Too dark! Disgustingly graphic! Sinful fun, nonetheless.
The picture of Bill Gaines on the inside jacket of the book that I have in front of me as I sit here and write, “Horror Comics of the 1950’s” is more than a little frightening in itself.

I was a fan, however of Weird Science, Weird Fantasy and the amalgam Weird Science-Fantasy. What could be better than Science Fiction created by “the usual gang of idiots”? I manage once or twice a year to purchase a copy of Mad Magazine. Laugh? You bet!

I feel that, in these ending years of my life, it is not only natural but necessary to explore the notions and conceptions that are somehow at the base of my being. ‘It’s what older folks do.’ Hollow echoes. Empty corridors. Furthermore my psyche seems in tune with this search and the deeper I probe, the further it resounds, the more comes to light. I bypass all the pain and hurt that is the constant bother of scores of memory. The same that keep me tossing fitfully as I sleep at night. The ones that are like a cold, hard steel poker thrust into a raw wound. I’ll deal with those as I can, but it is more important, at the moment, to dive deep, maybe even into those proclaimed archetypal depths, the ones that may link us all.

Ah Popular Culture!

It doesn’t matter what beach you inhabit when you see “…the world in a grain of sand…” or in what field you stand when you “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.” By God, Mr.Bloom, Harold or Leopold, Western Canon or Buck’s snot-green, a color for poets, I am truly astounded by the breathtaking span of intellect and intuition that Shakespeare can provide, but have found much of the same sense and wonder plucking at me in what, for lack of a more imposing name, is called Popular Culture. The Popular Culture that clots twists and tangles my own peculiar mind.

I started the quest with the idea that I would find repose in the science fiction that I devoured in my preteen years. I have on my shelves, close at hand, among a myriad of others, almost the entire run of the Winston Science Fiction Juveniles that I first read in Junior High School. I have copies of science fiction magazines from the 1950’s through the ..well.. really through the present. The thirteen Heinlein Juveniles. Anthologies prepared by Groff Conklin. Articles by L. Sprague De Camp, criticism by Damon Knight, history by James Blish. I admit it, both as a guilty pleasure and with an occasional glimpse of deep insight, that I enjoy them all. Can think of a little better in the evening than to sit and re-read and re-experience the wonder the awe the horror that those titles provoked in my dreaming foaming psyche. Are they much of a mature literary pleasure? No! It is far more solitary and complex. I would not recommend it to everyone. But I assure you there is something there for my world to see. I can feel it. Synesthesia.

My early journeys to worlds dreamed then published are not the only entrance to the underground mine. By turns I have looked to B List movies and listened to the radio programs that covered the AM dial in the second to the fifth decades of the twentieth century. To what used to be called comic books that have sadly grown into slick expensive graphic novels. AHA! It seems that I am showing my old codgerness, my conservative cultural stripes, but the point here is that in my rash youth popular culture was evanescent. It captured the zeitgeist and then was bundled with the trash. It only seems now that the manifest sweeping panorama of spirit and mind had any lasting value. (Yes, of course, my mother threw away a fortune in DC and EC comics. That’s why God made mothers.) Those heady and primitive stabs of media were formative, part of a transition, part of my foundation. Right and Wrong. Blazing brilliant and blasphemous.

With a strong puff of dust I blow where Professor Maracot has his deep, Challenger his Jurassic plateau and Hans his Pfall; where Johnny Mack Brown hardly ever gets dirty; where Tom Bartlett and his twin brother Pat communicate across the stars; where Sam throws over Brigid or is it Miss Wonderly for popping Miles, who he didn’t even like that much; where on a sloping beach far past even Weena’s demise and the flesh eating horrors of the proletarian Morlock, crab like creatures grasp and then further still until it is further still.

I do not yet wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

1960 was the year. Ninth grade. It had to be very early in the school year. My brother and I climbed the wet leaf laden street to the bus stop at top of the Maple Avenue. After an air brake whoosh and two short steep steps into the oily warm air and a tumble of change into an aquarium of coins, we rode the Harmony Short Line into downtown Pittsburgh. The Eastwood Theater, Father Blacks Church, The bar at Hamilton and Penn, the Liberty, Cameraphone, Sheridan Square, Regent and Enright Theaters, the teeth of Dr. Baum, the rotating Duquesne Beer Bottle at the intersection of Oakland and East Liberty, the dark iron picket fence of Bigelow Boulevard overlooking the heart of the Strip and the Allegheny River Valley, the sprawling post office and then the city itself.

We would meet my mother a couple times a year after her work shift ended. Christmas shopping was always one trip, but I’m guessing that the journey that I have in mind was for new school clothing. Another new beginning in the guise of the school year. And after that a movie.

My mother, always on the look to further the education and the moral position of her children, often embraced the catechism of Hollywood. A couple years earlier she had taken us to see High School Confidential to show us the evils of the inhalation of marijuana. To show her offspring what desperate and wanton dope fiends that they could become if involved with the “wrong” friends. My recollection of the movie revolves around Russ Tamblyn’s aunt, played by Mamie Van Doren. She wore a bullet bra covered by an incredibly tight white sweater. I still am moved by the memory. My mother’s heart, and possibly her head, was in the right place. Unfortunately that was not the part of my anatomy that was paying attention. Although I have to admit that my encounters with grass and sundry psychedelics at a later time remained experimental and slight. Perhaps a direct result of this film.

This early autumn day seemed no different than many of our earlier excursions. I purchased a couple shirts from Rosenbaum’s after an argument of color, material and style - the ever unending clash of my achromatic youth and my more variegated mother. Pants, all dark, with a tuck here and a dart there to fit my chubby frame. Some shoes - black loafers. Socks white. We were ready for a drink, buttered pop corn and the movie. The latest Alfred Hitchcock.

North by Northwest? Still my favorite. But no! Not this day. To Catch a Thief? Nope. Perhaps Vertigo, no, but a little closer. Rear Window? Do I really seem that old? Not bad Hitch, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak and twice Grace Kelly, not bad at all. This day it was to be, all too briefly, the lovely, the lonely Janet Leigh.

Lambs we were to the slaughter. Our sensibilities forever trounced. This is the day Hitchcock cleared the way for the Hollywood carnage that followed in an all American downward spiral that celebrates violence and gore because it cannot deal with sexuality and living - bad taste, loss of intellect. Psycho and The Music Man both. The only trouble in River City was Harold Hill and his disdain for Flaubert. Marian Crane. Marian the Librarian. Don’t dismiss the connections.

We walked, tub of popcorn tight against our chests, cold drinks clutched in hands, right into the Bates Motel.

I revere and appreciate the music of Bernard Hermann, although it forever creased some portion of my brain that afternoon. Forget the shower scene, shrieking violins are all it takes to send me into fits of fear.

Phoenix, wasn’t it. Moving Modrian lines in the title sequence forming the buildings. Am I remembering correctly? Marian takes some money. Makes an assignation with her lover. Then a ride east on the highway and a really bad place to stop for the night. Mild mannered Norman and his extremely temperamental mother. Wrong night wrong place wrong room.

The next day, I was as gory and unforgiving as anyone explaining the movie to my classmates, because something in me changed. I was a lot less sure of my place in the world. A lot of the innocence of my thinking left me to mingle with the dark smoke of the universe. This was not the catharsis of a scary story around a campfire. I like a good horror story as much as the next person. This was a warped vision of the world. A stamp of fear and caution crippled my flights of imagination.

Similar tales of unfounded fears are used continuously and effectively to control rather than to lead the exploration of our essential natures. We are forced to live in the world of the psycho and sociopath in the news that we ingest, in the entertainment that we choose, even in the warnings and labels of food that we eat.

It may be a dangerous, bad, uncompromising world, but I can and do choose not to live in the fear and ignorance that is spewed daily by others who are twisted and caught up in the unthinking mush that more and more seems the stuff of American dreams. My mother wanted to take us to a movie. A movie to feed our minds. Wrong day, wrong place, wrong world.