I just finished reading World War Z, which means I’m like three years late to the zombie party, right? Well, fuck you. I was like fifteen years early. I was memorizing the locations of balconies and gun-selling sporting goods stores in shopping malls in case of a Romero-like outbreak that would require me to hole up in the Scottsdale Mall probably around the time most of the country was still obsessed with the artistic masterpiece of Baywatch.

Really, it all started in high school with Faces of Death movies, and then segued into those classic Troma movies, Surf Nazis Must Die being a favorite, even though it wasn’t even a horror movie as much as it was a dystopian disaster movie filmed for like $17. (“Who rules the beaches?” / “The surfers!” / “Who rules the surfers?” / “The surf nazis!”) In college, I got into death metal, and every other letter I’d get from some freak in rural Georgia or Sweden or Japan would include a giant list of horror movies I was supposed to worship. So me and Ray spent a whole summer renting every conceivable horror movie we could find in our shithole Indiana town. This was limited somewhat by the fact that I worked two full-time jobs and during the week slept in two shifts of two hours each and pretty much walked around like a zombie, minus the brain-eating part.

Seems like some comparative lit class I took in college had a professor that told us that zombie movies were really about the communist scare. That still true? I don’t know. The Brooks book seemed to be pretty left-wing in some aspects, like the strange parallels between the zombie wars and Iraq/the war on terrorism. In both, you’ve got a military trained to fight the cold war in Germany, armed up for a giant thousand-tank battle, and a stealth bomber isn’t going to do much when you’re fighting an enemy with no radar, i.e. a zombie or an insurgent. But it’s appealing to right-wingers in the sense that it’s almost like military armament porn for chapters and chapters, descriptions of battles and weaponry and tactics and whatnot.

I don’t know why I didn’t become obsessed with zombies back in 1993 or whatever, but it’s probably because I’m always overly obsessed with things for a week and then it’s on to something else. I haven’t had my main computer for a week, and decided that would be a great time to take a writing holiday, partly because I’m burned out on this book I’m writing, and partly because I didn’t want to spend two weeks trying to recapitulate and resynchronize two computers’ worth of files and changes and additions and deletions after working on my spare computer for that week.

So I spent most of that time obsessed with the idea of building a PlayStation 2 portable. Not a PSP, but I mean buying a dead PS2 or ten, dremel-attacking the motherboard, scoring a surplus rear-view camera monitor from eBay, digging through my giant boxes of junk for some old camcorder rechargeable batteries I could repurpose, somehow duct-taping the whole business together into a little ball so I could waste infinite amounts of time playing SOCOM 3 instead of writing. A week later, and I realize this is the stupidest fucking idea I’ve had since I thought about building a serial killer-themed miniature golf course on my land in Colorado. Actually, that still sounds like a good idea. But you get the point here: I can only be gung-ho about this stuff for a week, maybe ten days. It’s why I don’t write five books a year.

I wrote a story about the zombie movie Burial Ground. It’s in Air in the Paragraph Line #13. I think it’s one of my best short stories ever. You have to go buy a copy to read it - I never put it anywhere else, and I haven’t posted a PDF of #13. If I had ten more stories like it, I’d bind them together in a little book and zap it straight to the kindle store. But I don’t, not yet anyway. But that movie, Burial Ground, is this bad/awesome Italian zombie movie that has a completely fucked and incomprehensible plot line, and although all of those horror movies have the one chick who somehow manages to get away, in this movie, the zombies totally win, and I like that.

Speaking of the dead rising, I’ve got new life and new batteries in the laptop. I’m writing this while sitting on the couch, and the battery is designed to hold 6900 mAh and it actually holds 7100. It was down to only holding 4800 and started freaking the fuck out and giving me a warning message that I should cut the shit and get to the Apple Store immediately. They sent my computer off to Tennessee (why? Apple’s just down the road.) and replaced the battery and the motherboard - I had a couple of random crashes, something with the video card. They don’t call it a motherboard anymore; they call it a “mainboard”. I think it’s some anti-sexism thing, like how you can’t say cables are male and female anymore, or how you can’t use master/slave in your tech writing. So I got freaked out by the whole thought of surrendering the machine and having it come back completely blank, but it’s fine now.

I remember one time in 1993, I stayed over at Ray’s when his parents were out of town, and we watched four or five zombie movies in a row, until they all melded into each other. (Actually, one was a vampire movie, called Vampyres, a bad 70s thing with some half-naked lesbian vampires that lured guys into their old house, then killed them and drank their blood. One of the dudes seriously looked like a late-70s David Letterman, and the movie used every conceivable excuse to get these two women out of their clothes and dyking out.  This was also before the whole vampire thing got co-opted by the cool kids and completely fucked over.  Go check it out on imdb and you can see a trailer that’s essentially three minutes of soft-core porn, prefaced by a stupid XBox ad.) Anyway, the next morning, Ray’s asleep and I knock open his door with my arms outstretched and walking slowly like I’m one of Romero’s Day/Dawn ghouls, and Ray wakes up and freaks the fuck out and immediately jumps out of bed and goes for a bat or a piece of wood or something he can use to bash my undead brains in with, until he realizes that the zombie apocalypse had not in fact arrived.

The only other time we got seriously freaked out by a movie was when we went to a midnight showing of Saw in the theater. I don’t know if it was because we went to the midnight show or because the theater was empty, but after the final credits rolled, the first words out of my mouth were “dude, we need to go to Wal-Mart and buy some guns and enough shit to board up every window of your house.”

One of the things I liked about World War Z was how the news of the living dead propagated around the world in such a distorted fashion. The whole book takes place as a series of interviews after the war is over, like one of those World War II/greatest generation books. And in every zombie movie, you’ve got this start-of-act-2 disbelief rap going on, like when the scientists land on the zombie island and the one idiot says, “what, is this a village of lepers?” and then gets eaten alive. There’s always that part where you are screaming at the screen “RUN YOU STUPID BITCH!” and you know if you were really there, you’d get the fuck up on the roof and nail shut every door and get the closest deer rifle and plant some 12-gauge slugs into the brains of the undead. But of course, you wouldn’t. You’d go to read what the hell happened on twitter to see if the zombie thing was real or just some viral social networking astroturf campaign to sell the new Nissan Sentra or some bullshit. News would get suppressed, or distorted, or spun. If the zombie apocalypse happened tomorrow, every idiot on Fox News would be blaming it on Obama. In WWZ, the outbreak spread through China because they kept their mouths shut. Israel was smart enough to close their borders, which of course made all of the Palestinians believe it was a big Jewish conspiracy. Etc. etc. It’s not like President Morgan Freeman is going to call a press conference to tell us all that we’re under zombie attack, and Bruce Willis is going to steer a nuke into the center of the zombies and save everybody as a shitty Aerosmith song plays.

So yeah, good book.  I was expecting something aimed at 14-year-olds, like a Mack Bolan book, but Brooks looked at a lot of different angles, and I enjoyed the hell out of that.  I’m not exactly going to retool and start cranking out genre fiction here, but I got at least a dozen good ideas thrown into the plot-o-matic over the whole thing.

I get a lot of shit for the “museum of obsolete technology” I have in our storage locker right now, the electronic toys I’m paying $30 a month to not see.  But I’ve pared down almost all of that inventory now, and it’s down to a single C-64 and 1541 drive, and a Sony Magic Link PDA that I bought on eBay and will probably never be able to connect to the internet.  I’ve given up on collecting, but I’ve still got that collector’s gene, and if I had unlimited space and unlimited budget, I’d probably spend all day and night on eBay, trying to buy back every piece of electronics I ever owned and every gadget I ever coveted, until eventually the hosts of Hoarders showed up at the house to film a two-part special on me.

I found this site a while back called Wishbook Web, and it’s extremely dangerous for me.  It’s scans of a bunch of department store catalogs, like Sears and Monkey Wards, which is great, because those things have largely been landfilled and there’s no archive of them anymore.  When I was a little kid, I would spend the entire year memorizing these catalogs, poring over the toy sections until the pages fell apart.  I guess now kids can just get on the web and go to Amazon and look this stuff up, but I would scrutinize these things like a NASA engineer trying to figure out why the latest Mars lander crashed.  Me and my sisters used to fight over who got to read each catalog, and instead of wish lists, my parents tried to institute some kind of system for us to denote what stuff we wanted that year.  It involved one of us putting boxes next to things, and the other annotating with circles, or maybe it was stars.  Anyway, I’d just mark the entire Lego section and any single thing that said Star Wars in it.  And of course, all new toys had come out before the actual holiday, and we’d have to revisit our greedy little lists based on the commercials shown during the Saturday morning cartoons.

So at least two of these catalogs came out during the prime of my childhood, and I can still tell you almost every damn thing on every page.  Going back to these again is like going back to a home town after twenty years and still being able to find your way around.  It’s also interesting to see how much the times have changed as far as copy goes, because I could write better stuff in my sleep.  Anyway, when I first found this URL, I went through every page, trying to find the stuff I used to own, and the things I really wanted but never got.

Here’s a good example of this: the stereo I had as a kid.

When I was little, I had one of those crap record players with the removable lid and the plastic handle on the side, the kind with the speaker built into it.  My parents had a “real” stereo record player with separate speakers, but I had to listen to my read-along books and Disney records on this orange cardboard piece of shit.  When I was in maybe the 6th grade, I asked for a “real” stereo for Christmas, and I got item #2 from the picture above, taken from a Sears catalog.  And at the time, this was about as technologically advanced as the computers from Minority Report.  It had a record player AND a tape player AND a radio AND an 8-track.  Not only could I record songs off of the radio, but I could make tapes of albums.  And the speakers were separate, the kind of thing you plugged in and sat on shelves in the corners of the room.

The 8-track was a bit of an oddity; this was like the last death rattle of the failed format.  This stereo had a front-loader, and it had the program button, which jogged the tape heads sequentially across each of the four tracks of an album.  But it didn’t even have a fast-forward or rewind button.  Our family had no 8-track tapes, so we went to the Sears at Pierre Moran mall, and found them liquidating the remainder of their 8-tracks at some ridiculous price, like maybe four for a dollar.  These were all “cut-outs”, items with a groove cut in one side because they were returned or whatever, and they were pretty picked over.  I think I ended up getting a Steve Martin comedy album, a Ringo Starr solo album (I had no idea who the Beatles were, except in the most conceptual of terms), and a Jefferson Airplane album.  Much later, my mom’s second husband had a collection of a few 8-tracks, with the only notable ones being the first Cheech and Chong album, and Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick.  (Albums with only two side-long tracks didn’t work as well for a format where an LP was essentially divided into four; I’m not sure how they handled that.)

I had almost no budget for music, so I spent a lot of time trying to record songs off the radio, which was a maddening process.  I’d listen to U-93, the local top-40 radio station, and hope some song I liked would get played.  There were a whole slew of problems that would occur: the tape would not be queued to the very end and I’d erase some previously recorded treasure; the idiot DJ would babble on about being the 93rd caller for a set of free tickets to a monster truck rally; I wouldn’t recognize the song until 30 seconds in, and then only record half of it; the song would fade into some other stupid song I wouldn’t want, and I’d have a pristine copy of this Journey song I really wanted, except the last ten seconds would be fused to the beginning of a Toni Basil song.  (Yes, that song, which I won’t even mention by name or it will be stuck in your head forever.)  It would take me maybe a month or two of diligent listening to fill one side of a C-90 with useful tunes.

The big shortfall to this new hardware was that it only had one tape deck.  Most of the new stereos coming out had two decks: a play-only unit, and a player-recorder.  And my unit was a “closed” system, without an AUX input or any sort of input jacks.  Most of my friends would buy their albums on cassette tape, and I had no way of making copies of them.  My best hopes were either to have a friend that had a dual-tape deck who would be willing to make a dub for me, or find someone who bought everything on vinyl and would let me borrow their album.  Another problem was that I had no way of recording from the TV.  I watched an insane amount of MTV back then, and I would have given anything to capture some of their new music on cassette for repeat listens, especially since they played much cooler stuff than the behind-the-times station in my redneck Indiana town.  I remember trying to record a Genesis concert off of MTV by holding my sister’s little jambox up to the TV cabinet, which worked about as well as taking a picture of the night stars by dragging a photocopier outside and making a copy with the lid open.  (My sister later tried recording some song on MTV - that “don’t put another dime in the jukebox” song, and every time it would come on, I would yell at the dog and she’d start barking, totally screwing up the recording.)

It’s always interesting to me how we have such a tactile nostalgia for old technology like this.  Like I’ve got an old cell phone sitting on my shelf, a Windows Mobile phone I used for maybe six months before I wised up and got an iPhone.  And I hated that phone at the time, but it was my daily driver, and I used it constantly, for email, google maps, web browsing (or what approximated web browsing in a crippled version of pocket IE).  And I pick it up now, and its heft, and the feel of its keys, and the glint of its display remind me so much of that period in late 2008 and early 2009 when this thing was permanently attached to my hip.  And I get some of that when I look at pictures of old technology like this.  I remember the smell that stereo had, the new electronics smell of components heating up for the first time.  I remember the snap of the silver knobs going across their detents as I cycled through the inputs.  I remember playing with that tuning knob endlessly, trying to get a clear signal on WAOR so I could record Dr. Demento on Sunday nights.  I haven’t seen this stereo in at least 25 years, but I think if I found one at a garage sale, it would instantly transport me back to 1983 again.

Anyway, that’s my story.  Now I must go waste the rest of my writing time finding this stereo elsewhere on the web.  I’ve just found there are a ton of eBay sellers with demo videos of their wares on youtube, with many similar stereos.  Not sure which is worse, the waste of money and space hoarding this stuff, or the waste of time finding it.

I’m sick.  Strep throat.  It happened suddenly, this urge to drink a gallon of water every five minutes, then a difficulty swallowing.  I didn’t wait for it to play out, and got in to a doctor right away.  They’ve had so many cases of adult strep throat, they were out of the test kits, and had to dig up an ancient kit that was almost at the technology level where you had to kill the rabbit and look at its ovaries to determine if it was positive or not.  Okay, not that bad, but it was one of those things where we had to sit and stare at a little stick in a vial of chemical solution and wait to see if it changed colors.  And if I wasn’t sick, I would have come up with a great punchline containing “the last time I had to sit and wait to see if the blue line appeared…”

So I got an antibiotic, zithromax, and I googled out all of the side effects, and it’s not much except the usual stomach stuff that you’d get from ordering the five dollar box at Taco Bell.  I don’t take antibiotics that often, because I’m allergic to penicillin and all of the other -cillin drugs.  I think I last took penicillin when I was five or six, and that ended with a stay in the hospital.  I think this was the first time I ever spent a night anywhere away from a parent or family member, and I know it was the first time I’d ever seen a Mennonite kid with his arm cut off from a tractor accident, which was the case for my roommate during part of my stay.

I think the last time I took any antibiotic was maybe ten years ago, a bad cold that I probably wrote about in here somewhere, a thing that eventually turned into strep, or maybe it always was.  All I remember was that it was during a time when my stupid piece of shit landlord in Queens was not running the heat, and it was definitely a time when you needed the heat, and then the hot water also gave out, so instead of taking a shower or a bath, I’d put every pot and pan on the stove, fill them with water, and then bathe by standing in a plastic bucket in the kitchen and sort of washclothing it and pouring this hot water from the stove over me, which is damn fine behavior to engage in when it’s 48 degrees in your house and you’re hacking away at a death cold.  I also remember trying to drink diet soda and loathing it, because someone told me at some point that drinking regular Coke was just going to feed sugar to that bacteria colony breeding in my tonsil area.  And I tried to gargle with apple cider vinegar, which is supposed to be some kind of damn miracle cure, but it usually just made me gag.

I haven’t been writing much in here, because I’ve been saving all of the crazy for this book I’m writing, which is well underway, aside from the whole thing about being sick.  If you graphed my success at writing versus the word count, it’s definitely a bell curve with the middle being in the thousands-word range, which means writing a hundred thousand words is definitely way out there to the right where that bell threatens to hit the axis again.  I’ve found that if I just write and write, by the time I get 30,000 words into it, I’ve completely forgotten what I’ve written in chapter one.  And when I start to keep an outline is when I start to get distracted, because I start to think about plot and arc and proportions and golden ratios and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory, and I get derailed dealing with all of that shit.  So it’s a balancing game.  And it’s hard to keep writing here with all of that balancing going on, but I feel a need to get back to it.

It’s also starting to get nice enough outside to crack open a window or two during the day, which throws me, because that smell of fresh air, the beginnings of spring, the mid-afternoon sunshine after a brief Bay area rain shower, that’s the kind of stuff that throws me down an emotional k-hole. It has me teleporting back to random spring days in 1993 or in Seattle or whatever else, and I can spend all month digging through old journals or old emails trying to find some thread to pull me back into that.  And that also makes me think about writing about some of that nostalgia, about trying to find some structure again like the NecroKonicon that I can use to briefly riff about those times when I think about Garcia’s Pizza or the guy I knew at Ball State who was growing weed in the suspended ceiling of his dorm room, or the feeling when I got into a primer-black $300 Camaro in 1987 and drove to drive nowhere, just to get through that side of a Black Flag tape and kill another 88-cent gallon of gas.  Sometimes I think I should start another blog or maybe a wiki or tumblr or something else as a way to link together all of this shit.  I’ve tried multiple times to write a big epic novel containing all of this, but I also think in many ways the big epic novel is dead, or at least in deep sleep, and it’s all about the randomness of small pieces.  Maybe.

I’m writing this from the comfort of my bed, while on my old computer, the 2007 MacBook.  Talk about nostalgia - I remember being in Denver that summer, selling off all of my old, dust-collecting toys on eBay to get together the cash for this thing.  Seems like yesterday, but this machine is slowly yellowing and wearing and that little beach ball spins more and more every time I try to load two things at once.  That brand new, top-of-food-chain MacBook Pro is about to turn a year old, and is now displaced by a faster, sexier model that costs less.  In three more years, that thing will be the backup beater machine, and some 32-core beast with 64 gigs of memory and no moving parts whatsoever will be business as usual.  This is the dance we do.

I watched a documentary a bit ago on the Baltimore Colts marching band, which I guess continued to exist after the Colts left town for Indianapolis in 1984. (It was part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series. I find that even though I don’t like or understand all sports, I love pretty much any well-done documentary about sports, and all of these have been excellent.) The story itself was interesting, but what caught me was the 1984-ness of it, and the fact that I only peripherally remember football coming to Indiana. (I only remember it at all because my mom still bought my school clothes for me when I was in like the 8th grade, and she got me a Colts shirt, and this was the season when they went like 4-12, and dressing your kid in a Colts shirt and sending them to school was a virtual death sentence, probably two steps worse than dressing them in blackface and a Confederate uniform and dropping them off at an inner-city.) But some of the footage pulled my memories back to that time window for whatever reason, that era when I was in junior high and the EPCOT center was brand new and the future, and everyone thought “The Superbowl Shuffle” was cool as hell.

I guess I don’t think of the difference between network TV news now and then until I see old newsreel. I don’t know if it’s the timely look of the reporters - the hair, the clothes - or if it’s something about the production values. Like, when it was the late 80s/early 90s, I don’t remember thinking “this looks horrible”, but now when I go back to a TV show of that era and see everyone with the giant, giant glasses (like I had) and the sweaters over their shoulder and the generated graphics that look like they were done on a ColecoVision, I think “what the fuck were people thinking?”  I never turn on the TV news now and think “wow, this looks 100% different than it did last week”, but then I see a clip from 1995 and it looks like it could have been produced on 1947 equipment.

There are a couple of things I immediately think about from that period. One is the Fiero. I don’t know why, but I really wanted a Fiero when they came out in 1983. It was like the future of cars to me, and the way they marketed it, they made perfect sense: the slick design, the EnduraFlex body panels, the Italian-style mid-engine, only two seats. I didn’t care that you could only carry one bag of groceries in it, and I didn’t know anything about the engine fires or the fact that the whole drivetrain was cobbled together from the leftovers of a Chevette and a Citation, and performed accordingly. I just remember getting a glossy brochure when I saw one at the Concord Mall, and I memorized the thing, wishing that after the four years or so passed when I got my license, I’d somehow magically get the money to get such a cool and futuristic car.

The Fiero shared the philosophy of a sports-only car like the Corvette, the “fuck you, family man - it’s a two-seater”, and it had the styling of the Pontiac Trans Am, the Knight Rider car, but in a smaller cousin. And this was an era when people in Detroit were trying to put performance back in cars. Every coked-out Miami Vice wannabe person rich off of Reagan-era stock market rapings was going out and picking up a Ferrari. And the big three were coming off of a horrible decade where performance cars were all but killed by wimpy engines and EPA guidelines and DOT requirements. But Delorean was trying to win people over with his future (albeit underpowered) car; the Knight Rider third-gen F-body was on the road; and the high-end Vettes were getting into fuel injection and computer controls that would usher in a new era of performance. It was the start of a good time.

Another consumer mind bug that caught me back then was the Apple IIc. I had a love/hate relationship with the Apple; my schools always had them, and when I got a crack at them, they were always great, but they cost an insane amount of money, at least compared to the Commodore and Atari computers built up around the same 6502 CPU. But then Apple released this new machine, essentially a portable “all-in-one” version of the II line. And once again, I got a slick multi-page brochure booklet, maybe at the mall, maybe at Templin’s Music, which sold some computer stuff (although they mostly stocked Atari gear.) The brochure was part an implementation of Apple’s Snow White industrial design language in the form of a pamphlet, and part the genius marketing philosophy Apple was hacking out back then. And for whatever reason, I pored over this book, and tried to count out the number of lawns I’d need to mow to get one of these things to myself.

The genius of the IIc was that it heavily advertised itself as a “portable,” but it was, at best, a “luggable.” The computer did seal in everything that came with a IIe into a single eight-pound unit, maybe two or three times the size of a large laptop, but that didn’t include the power supply or monitor. Back then, they announced a small LCD screen that would sit on top of the computer, and had the same snow white design.  It didn’t solve the problem that you had to haul around a giant power brick and be within arm’s reach of 110 AC (or bring along a Honda generator).  Also, from everything I’ve heard, those LCD screens completely sucked.  But those shots of the IIc plus LCD looked absolutely mind-blowing to me, especially since I spent forever hauling around my Commodore and earlier Aquarius, jumper-cabling them onto my dad or grandma’s TV sets on the every-other weekend divorced child shuffle. In fact, the Commodore was infinitely more portable than the IIc, but the Apple looked like a cleaner solution. And it had a floppy disk built into its side, which was a first at the time.  (And yes, I know they made a luggable version of the C-64 with a built-in monitor and 1541 drive, but that was way out of my price range.  And a quick look at eBay shows that they still are.)

I never got a IIc.  I spent a lot of time on the IIe and IIgs at school, but never even saw a IIc during that timeframe.  Years later, when I worked at Wards, this girl Michelle had one, and once she talked me into coming over to tutor her on BASIC for some class she was taking at IUSB. Of course, they were using GW-BASIC, probably on the piece of shit Leading Edge computers I’d later have to maintain when I worked at IUSB, and she had the Apple IIc, which was just different enough BASIC-wise to throw off the whole damn thing. We sat in her bedroom, hacking away at it, and I don’t remember how I felt about the computer, although it wasn’t a slam dunk like the brochure made me think.  (And there’s part of me that thought this tutoring session was about more than just computer tutoring, but I was so stupid about the opposite sex back then, even if she chained me to a wall and started raping me, I’d still be like, “wait a second, we could use a GOSUB here and save five lines of code.”)

I never got a Fiero, either. When I lived in New York, I would occasionally see one on eBay and wonder if I should jump on it. The interiors look really dated now, the boxy gauge panel, the 85 MPH speedo. Most people bought these things either to become donors for some kind of kit car (Ferrari, Lambo, etc) or to drop a V-8 into and completely fuck up the balance of the thing. I still wonder about doing a full restoration on one, keeping the sleek exterior body but maybe transplanting in some 21st century powerplant and a real suspension system, plus a cool digital dash and some modern sound system bits.  And then I start thinking about buying a 1970 Z28 and a 2011 Camaro, and taking the body of the ‘70 and putting it on the fuel-injected, 4-wheel ABS, all-modern electronics chassis of the 2011.  And then I remember that I drive about 40 miles a month now, and even vacuuming the floor mats of my current car is way beyond my patience level, let alone some extreme welding project involving $30,000 of shit I’d have to scrounge off the internet or at junk yards across the country.

And now I need to close the damn eBay window, and stop looking for a cheap SX-64, or even worse, a cheap PSOne monitor and C-64 innards in order to roll my own C-64 laptop.  It’s better for me to fire up x64 in an emulator window and get bored of it after ten minutes.  Or even better, I could shut off all of this and actually WRITE.

I don’t know how I remembered it, and managed to do the time calculation correctly, but last week, about five minutes before it happened, I suddenly realized it was the day of the last Discovery Space Shuttle launch.  And my Roku box now has the NASA channel (which will be essentially useless after this mission, except to maybe watch some scientist drone through a powerpoint on why some speck of dust on a telescope’s long shot is relevant.)  So I fired that up, and watched the stack sit on the pad down in Florida, and waited for the countdown, and thought about that stupid Rush song, but also thought about how I watched the very first Shuttle mission as a kid, and now I’d be watching one of the very last ones.

It’s pretty cliche to talk about how we’d all have jetpacks by now or be able to go out to LaGuardia and catch an American Airlines flight to Mars three times a day in 2011.  I spent a lot of time in those pre-Shuttle years as a nerdy kid reading every single book I could find about the Apollo and Skylab.  And it always disappointed me that the era right before I was born had tons of launches, capsules that orbited the planet and launched to the Moon and back.  And in my childhood, we had a space station made out of leftover junk from moon missions that only got any name recognition whatsoever when it finally fell out of the sky.  Meanwhile, the evil Soviet empire was sending cosmonauts up there constantly, living for years in those Soyuz orbiters, eating tubes of borscht in zero G and laughing their asses off at us Yankee bastards.

The Shuttle was a big deal for me as a kid.  I spent all of my time playing with a Millennium Falcon, thinking that if the Space Shuttle got off the ground in ‘81, by the time I got my driver’s license in ‘87, they’d have a ton of those things in the air like Southwest currently has crappy Boeings criss-crossing amongst second-tier airports, and by the time I finished college and entered the much-distant 21st century, it would be no problemo jumping on a high-speed train to O’Hare spaceport and getting on a commercial flight to the moon for a long weekend.  So I was riveted to those early launches, the long delays and the shaky cameras from a distance.  I guess they flew the tail end of the Apollo missions when I was a baby, and Skylab and that joint Apollo/Soviet flight went up in the early 70s, but the grade school didn’t drag out the giant wood-encased TV on a cart from the AV room for those ones.  This was live, and real, and we all stared at the video footage of this tiny airplane-looking thing shoot an insane amount of white smoke and orange flame as it crept upward from the Florida swamp and into orbit.

We watched a couple of those launches back in the 4th or 5th grade, and then it seemed like a Shuttle was going up every other month.  It was really 24 missions between the start and the loss of the Challenger, but they had four Shuttles going at once, and it pretty much fell out of the news unless you dug for it.  This was long before the days when you could fire up google and point your browser to all sorts of time-wasting distractions detailing every small aspect of manned space flight; typically, the Elkhart Truth would run a paragraph or two per launch, buried somewhere after the local bowling scores.  To get any real news, I had to go to Osco Drugs and hunt down a copy of Omni magazine, which typically included a ton of articles on mind-melding and peyote experiments and whatever the hell else they used to write back then.

I didn’t think much about the Shuttle for a while, but when I was a sophomore in college and bored out of my mind at IUSB, I discovered usenet news, and spent a lot of time reading the sci.space newsgroup.  The one thing I loved about it was this guy Henry Spencer at the U of Toronto who posted endless amounts of news about the space program.  I probably have a bunch of floppy disks somewhere in storage - the 5 1/4 type of floppy disk - that contain endless numbers of those usenet posts.  I remember poring over those Shuttle news reports, that showed details of the schedules, what was sitting at what pad, what was being assembled, and so on.  And I remember being excited as hell when a nameless OV-105 started appearing on the list, as parts and pieces of the future Endeavour arrived at Rockwell.

The Shuttles kept flying, and after those evil Soviets became our pals, we started swapping Cosmonauts and Astronauts, and Americans hung out on the Mir, and eventually they found a way to hang a Shuttle off the side of that firetrap and give the Russians some hamburgers and Pepsi to go with their caviar, porn collection, and frayed combustible wiring harnesses.  But around that time, I realized how the whole space exploration thing was under attack from both sides of the aisle, and how we’d never dump the money in it to get any man to Mars, let alone this man.  The left-wingers saw that NASA budget as a bottomless money pit that went to defense contractors; the right-wingers didn’t like the idea of non-Jesus-related science research or the flight of any space hardware we couldn’t use to kill brown people from orbit.

So yeah, you boomers got golf on the moon, while us GenXers got a nearsighted space telescope, a couple of exploding Shuttles, and too many Mars landers and orbiters that blew up or crashed or otherwise went MIA.  But not only that, but the children of the 60s had this whole legacy put forth that had to do with a space race.  They had a President that pulled out of Marilyn Monroe long enough to say, “God damn it, we’re going to put a man on the moon even if it kills us”, and even after the CIA/Mafia/freemasons/Scientologists/aliens blew his head off, everyone still followed the order and put a damn man on the moon.  Nowadays, if the President took a 31-minute lunch break, he’d come back to find some bastards dismantling and defunding every single thing he tried to do.

And honestly, I know almost nobody is interested in drinking Tang and crapping in some adult diapers 86,000 miles from home in zero-G.  But space exploration is more like a side effect of a well-fed science research and education program.  When we had an arms race and a space race, we also had an education race to produce scientists and engineers to build weapons and technology to send men into orbit.  Education means a higher quality of life.  Take a look at a place like Liberia where there’s absolutely no education and kids live in shitholes (LITERALLY shitholes - they use the beaches as toilets), snort heroin, eat human flesh, and fight in wars at the age of twelve.  Then look at a country like Sweden or Finland, which has excellent education and an overwhelmingly positive quality of life.  Here in the USA, we now gravitate between not giving a shit and wanting to completely remove all education, especially science education.  And a country with more education not only has a bigger talent pool for jobs more technically advanced than ditch digging, but it means companies who want to attract top talent are going to have an easier time when said employees can send their kids to a decent school.  And people with kids tend to want to buy houses in good school districts, which means the prices of those houses goes up, and property taxes are based on home sale price.  That’s why you can buy a house for $18,000 in my old home town of Elkhart, Indiana.

So now I’m sad as I watch blurry streaming video of the Discovery tethered to the ISS, knowing it’s pretty much the end of the line for this stuff, at least in my lifetime.  Bleah.