I’m a husband and father of two. I’ve written fan fiction and published fanzines. I’ve assumed the role of custodian for my friends who created a fanzine called Contact. I founded a convention called Farpoint, which has run for almost three decades. I’ve been a comic book writer and a comic reviewer. I ran Prometheus Radio Theatre, and used to put out a (mostly) weekly podcast. I’m publisher for Firebringer Press. Finally, I’m a recovering librarian, a retired IT Director, a part-time politician and a full-time IT contractor. And yes, I do all this because I’m allergic to work. I figure as long as I look busy, I won’t have to perform actual labor. It’s worked for more than half a century so far…
Every Father’s Nightmare
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“…Take these pinions, fly behind me: I’ll go ahead, you
Follow my lead. That way
You’ll be safe.
…While he talked, he was fitting
The boy’s gear, showing him how to move
Like a mother bird with her fledglings. Then he fixed his own harness
To his shoulders, nervously poised himself for this strange
New journey; paused on the brink of take-off, and embraced his
Son, couldn’t fight back his tears.
They’d found a hilltop – above the plain, but no mountain –
And from this they took off
On their hapless flight. Daedalus flexed his wings, glanced back at
His son’s, held a steady course. The new
Element bred delight. Fear forgotten, Icarus flew more
Boldly, with daring skill.
Then the boy, made over-reckless by youthful daring, abandoned
His father, soared aloft,
Too close to the sun: the wax melted, the ligatures
Flew apart, his flailing arms had no hold
On the thin air. From the dizzy heaven, he gazed down seaward
In terror. Fright made the scene go black
Before his eyes. No wax, wings gone, a thrash of naked
Arms, a shuddering plunge
Down through the void, a scream – “Father, Father, I’m falling –”
Cut off as he hit the waves.
His unhappy father, a father no longer, cried “Icarus!
Icarus, where are you? In what part of the sky
Do you fly now?” – then saw wings littering the water.
Earth holds his bones; the Icarian Sea his name.
From Ovid, The Art of Love: Book 2, translated by Peter Green
Anyone judging by our popular culture would have trouble distinguishing between an American father and any of the many residents of a clown car, unless maybe that father happens to be a murderous ogre.
On one hand, we have Dad jokes and Dad bods.
On the other, the Latin root-word “Pater” is largely familiar to us for lending the much-despised “Patriarchy” its first syllable.
Viewed through that lens, fathers are either a bit ridiculous, or more than a bit menacing.
But then…
I came across this passage in my reading this morning. The ancient Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Daedalus and Icarus, oddly enough in an erotic poem attempting to illustrate how a male lover might attempt to pin down the wings of Eros, god of love. It’s an odd placement, in one way. Or is it a cautionary tale? A man who ensnares a woman, as Ovid proposes here, risks becoming a father.
If he becomes a father, he risks ever so much more.
Daedalus, it now occurs to me, is quite the figure of a father. At first glance, perhaps, foolish, even ridiculous. Who makes wings out of bird feathers and wax, and proposes to fly with them? Who gives them to a boy, and expects him to follow instructions while using them?
But Daedalus was desperate. He and Icarus lived as slaves under King Minos, who used the father’s genius to his own ends. Daedalus had betrayed Minos, resulting in the death of the King’s beastly son, the Minotaur. Perhaps Minos would not kill his genius slave, but would Daedalus’s son be safe? It seems like a no-brainer that the best revenge for the death of one son would be the death of another.
Daedalus had to get his son away from the isle of Crete. Since Minos controlled shipping and a giant bronze robot guarded the shores, the only way out was up. If he wanted his son to grow to manhood, Daedalus had to give him wings, risk him flying too close to the sun, let him soar. Driven, desperate, ingenious, loving. And this classical example of a concerned father fell prey to every father’s nightmare. The boy flew too close to the blazing chariot of Helios, the Sun, his wings melted, he plunged to his death.
Like Daedalus then, fathers now want to protect their children at all costs. We don’t want them to come to violence. We don’t want them to suffer disease, addiction or poverty. We don’t want them to fly too close to the sun.
And yet we must give them wings. And we must fly on and let them take to the sky.
Oh, we look back a lot. And we cry out a lot, demanding to know where they are. And the nightmare flies beside us all the way, right to the end. We lose sleep, and hair, but probably not weight. We’re ready at any moment to swerve, to fly back, to build any ridiculous device we have to in order for them to escape.
But we let them soar. We have to.
Feeling Nostalgic?
I guess I’ve seen and done a lot in 43 years of work. I’ve done interesting work and known remarkable people. I’m never at a loss when someone says, “Tell me an interesting fact about yourself.”
A dozen books published, three times that many conventions planned, countless articles, stories, novels, scripts, software packages written, fifty plays written, directed or acted, and half again that many radio plays. I’ve found mentors and coached promising young people. I’ve developed a reputation as a guy who will find the answers.
But, when I look back… I feel no nostalgia. Not for my time on the job, not for rehearsing all those shows and running myself ragged at those cons… maybe a little for the people I’ve met along the way, the ones who are no longer here, or who are just distant. I’m almost always happy to see old friends when they emerge. I will tell stories about funny things that happened.
Continue readingI Voted for Governor Larry Hogan. I Hope You Will Too
Well, friends, I’ve been a bit quiet about the world scene. About politics. I went through a few years of losing friends around the madness of the Covid pandemic, and that made me gun shy. It seemed every time I opened my mouth to comment on an issue that mattered, I lost a friend.
But there’s a little cartoon voice in my head saying, “If they don’t respect your opinions when you talk about the issues, they never respected you at all. And, if they don’t respect you, they were never your friends to begin with.”
Yep. Kindergarten-level stuff, right. Turns out we all tend to forget what we learned in kindergarten.
So, blocks and unfriendings be damned, I’m here tonight to say that I am supporting Governor Larry Hogan in his campaign for U.S. Senate, and I think you should too. I think this especially if you’re concerned that the Republican Party will take control of the Senate. I think that takeover is inevitable in this election. When it happens, our state must be represented, not by a partisan operative, but by a strong, ethical and courageous leader who has a history of putting his constituents ahead of political expedience.
Continue readingEulogy for Evelyn Briggs Wilson
As with my father, I was asked to deliver the eulogy for my mother’s funeral. What follows is the text from which I worked last Saturday. I can’t promise that this is exactly what I said, but it gives the reader the general impression. And if you’re just catching up because Meta has failed spectacularly in the duty it assigned itself to be the principle medium of the communications of life events: My mother, Evelyn Briggs Wilson, born Elizabeth Evelyn Briggs on December 7, 1926, died on August 25 of this year. Her obituary related the facts of her life. And now for a more personal perspective:
Do you ever lie awake at night,
Just between the dark and the morning light,
Searching for the things you used to know,
Looking for the place where the lost things go?
Memories you’ve shared, gone for good you feared,
They’re all around you still, though they’ve disappeared.
Nothing’s really left or lost without a trace.
Nothing’s gone forever, only out of place.
Those words aren’t mine. They were written by a man named Scott Wittman for the Walt Disney film Mary Poppins Returns. It’s sung to children who have lost their mother. We saw that movie on Christmas Day in 2018, on one of our last Christmas trips to Rehoboth Beach, one of my mother’s favorite places.
The memories we’ve shared are all around us right now. Dementia changes people, but some prominent traits were with her to the end: her concern that everyone was getting fed, and that everyone had a bed to sleep in; her insistence that all the bills be paid on time–she was sure to the bitter end that she owed someone eight hundred dollars, and that her taxes were late. I never told her that the Maryland Comptroller had mistakenly sent her to collections this Spring for a tax bill she didn’t owe.
Continue readingOpen Letter to Meta – This Time Your Algorithm is Personal
Meta, via Facebook, has taken the place of the newspaper in society. In the pre-Internet days, newspapers did significantly more than report on foreign wars and partisan multi-generation duels. Newspapers were the backbone of our social network. From the newspapers we learned which old classmates had died, who was getting married, who was holding a picnic, what the local schools were up to. Newspapers were critical to our engagement in the community.
Then came social media, and, let’s face it, to most of the American public, that means Facebook. Those who once relied on newspapers moved to this new technology for sharing community news. Newspapers required days of lead time and were not free. Facebook made it painless to announce meetings, deaths, births and marriages, and even to request help in crisis. Papers lost this folksy market, and, predictably, people also stopped subscribing.
Continue readingRational Rebel: When Did This Happen?
My apologies to the handful of you that already read this under a different title. The fact is that most of my traffic comes from the social media site that’s recently added a new algorithm to “curate” content. A fair number of pieces of content that I’m very proud of have been getting buried. So I’m experimenting with titles and posting styles.
From the Rational Rebel Blog
I started The Rational Rebel a couple of years ago to share thoughts related specifically to my home in Howard County, Maryland. These may not be of interest to all my regular readers, either because of the specificity or because of my political philosophy; but I’ve decided I will start sharing them here so you’re aware they exist. This essay was inspired by a recent trip Renee and I made to Niagara Falls, a return, after 35 years, to the site of our honeymoon.
There I Go.. Turn the Page
I keep my political life relatively quiet here. I don’t necessarily keep my opinions about issues quiet, but I haven’t talked much about my day-to-day political activities. I have friends across the political spectrum, and I mostly don’t want to drive wedges based on labels.
So many of you may not even realize that, for the past four years, I have been an officer of the Howard County Republican Party, and, for two of those years, its Chairman.
A few weeks ago I resigned from the Republican Central Committee, with apologies to the over 4,000 voters who put me there. I could not do what they elected me to do. The committee and I, indeed, were just in each others’ way.
But my conscience forced me to share with the voters—all the voters—my concerns about the state of politics and government in Howard County, Maryland and the U.S. I wrote a brief Op Ed for the Baltimore Sun, and that led me to be interviewed by the insightful Claudia Barber, Esquire for her Being Well Informed podcast. I wanted to give everyone a chance to read and hear what I said. My most-used social media platform, no doubt trying to improve user experience by sheltering users from hearing things that would make them think, seems to have kept my post about this off of most people’s feeds. So here it is again.
A lot of people are already angry, and no doubt more will be when they hear what I have to say. But some, like Claudia, might be pleasantly shocked at this Republican’s words. Please keep your minds open. Of course, if you’re a friend of mine, I know you’ll do that anyway.
Goodbye to Kirby and Other Life Changes
July 25, 2023
It was 22 days ago that I wrote that Kirby was home. It was three days ago that we said goodbye to her. Start to finish, our journey with her illness was 28 days. I knew on July 3rd that the future was uncertain (isn’t it always?) and I said I was grateful for every day.
In between, we had learned that her tumor was still on her abdominal wall, albeit reduced in size. Cytology revealed almost nothing: necrotic cells and spindle cells. Could be a sarcoma, could still be a hematoma that was dying. We opted against surgical intervention in an almost 12-year-old dog. She was happy, she was outwardly healthy. Then, on July 19th, she refused her breakfast. We were concerned, but then she ate dinner ravenously. The next day (sorry if this is gross) her stool was black. That means blood in the digestive tract. We took her for bloodwork.
Continue readingKirby is Home
The headline is the important thing here. Inverted pyramid style, I put the most important fact even above the lede. That Kirby is home is the most important piece of news I have to share this week. And then I can tell you how she almost didn’t come home.
Kirby is my family’s dog, a shepherd/husky mix. She has a drinking problem, but only with water. She has a bad habit of silently creeping from the room where the family is and slinking upstairs to see if anyone left a toilet lid up, so she can binge. Barring that oversight by a human family member, she pulls up the bathmat in the tub and licks from it Every. Drop. of Water. She loves peanut butter and ice cubes. She will stare fixedly at you if you eat in front of her. If she slips her leash, she approaches escape velocity and quickly leaves the zip code. She pulls hard on the leash, because, if you come from Siberia, everything and everyone looks like a sled. She has barked less than a dozen times in her life–about once a year. She talks frequently, especially if she believes it’s time for peanut butter and none has been delivered. (If you have never heard “husky speak,” visit YouTube and search the term. It’s enlightening.) More than one friend has referred to her as a “therapy dog,” because he very presence relieves tension and anxiety.
Continue reading