Anxiety

So, here's what was going through my head today, as I walked through Oguchi on a Sunday afternoon.
I am starting to have some real trouble dealing with Christmas decorations and music around here.  Any sighting of a wreath or a tree, or hearing Christmas music playing in a shop, can send me into a despair.  I get really sad and lonely, and very depressed.
Lately I'm just feeling like I will never have real intimacy in my life ever again.  Getting a girlfriend would be tricky enough back in the US; getting one here, with the language and cultural differences, not to mention my own numerous and complex personal issues, is basically a non-starter.
So I just walk around by myself, with no one to talk to or share anything with.  This sucks most of the time, but extra sucks at Christmas.
I'm continuing to gain weight, not at a rapid rate, and I'm still in very good shape, but seeing that number go up still gives me anxiety.  I don't want to go back to where I was.  I mean, I'm running 30 kilometers or more a week, so I doubt I will, but it's still scary.
All of this is ganging up on me and giving me anxiety.  I hate it.

Saturday Writing Prompt: Ransom Note

Ransom Note

“So read it again, please,” said Caroline.

Elena shook the flimsy piece of paper.  “That’s it.  There’s nothing more to read.”

“I don’t believe it.”

Elena handed the note across the plain wooden table.

Caroline took it and examined it.  The paper seemed old, and thin, and a bit fragile, but nothing too extraordinary; the sort one might find in a child’s notebook.

Caroline and Elena had woken up, or regained consciousness, or simply begun to exist, in this room at about the same time, forty minutes ago.  Neither one had any memory of a life before, or of each other, or of themselves.

Caroline was shaping up to be the more inquisitive of the two.  She looked at the note.  Printed in the center of the page, in block capital letters, were the words:

WE HAVE YOUR REALITY.  IF YOU WISH TO SEE IT AGAIN, FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS.  THIS IS NOT A JOKE.  WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE CONVENIENCE.

“I don’t understand,” murmured Caroline. 

The only furniture in the room was the table and two chairs.  There was a door, about which nothing much could be said, and that was it.  Indirect light filled the room, from no ascertainable source.

Actually, there was one thing you could say about the door: there was nothing on the other side of it.  Absolutely and literally nothing.  Caroline had opened the door to exit, and there was nothing there.

“Nothing,” she muttered.

Elena paced nervously.  “I’m confused,” she said.  “What’s the deal with this note?  Why are we here?  The only thing I remember about myself is my name.  And who apologizes for the convenience?”

“The person who wrote this note, apparently,” answered Caroline.  “You don’t remember anything before you woke up?”

“Not a thing.  My name might not even be Elena.  That’s just what popped into my head when you asked me.”

“Same here.”  Caroline glared at the door.  “What do you know about us?”

“I just told you.  Nothing.”

“Yeah, but think.  We’re talking, right?  We have a language; we’re using it to communicate.”

Elena considered this.  “So we have a common vocabulary.  This means that our thought processes have some similarities.”

“Right.”  Caroline looked down at her body, dressed in the same simple white singlet and loose trousers that Elena wore.  “I also know that I’m a female, and that you are, too.”

“Which implies the presence somewhere of males.  Which further posits that we are not alone.”

“Or not meant to be.  Correct.”

“The note is written in our common language, which indicates that we have a society.”

“One based on rational thought.  At least based on our conversation.”

Elena smiled.  “You never know.  We might be the only two smart ones.”

Caroline grinned in return.  “So, we’re on the right track.  Whatever that means.”

“It’s a shared idiom.  I understood the intent, although not the literal meaning.”

“That would mean-“

“-That we had an existence prior to this, yes.  I suspect our memories have been blanked out by whatever entity brought us here.”

“Hmm.”  Caroline’s brow furrowed.  “Have we been ‘brought’ here?”

“Good point,” Elena conceded.  “Everything else might have been taken away.”

“Ooof,” Caroline said.  “I do remember one thing.  I’m hungry.”

Elena rubbed her stomach.  “I think I am, too.  I wonder what we eat?”

Both of them thought about this in silence for a moment, right up until a plate with some cubes in various colors and textures appeared on the table.

Elena picked up a red cube, about an inch across, and sniffed it, then nibbled a corner experimentally.  “I think we eat this,” she said.

Caroline broke a piece off of a larger cube and took a bite.  “I suppose we do.”

The two ate for a moment in thoughtful silence.

“So,” said Elena.

“So,” said Caroline.

“We thought about food, and some showed up.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“What if we thought about something else?”

“Like what?”

“Like something to drink,” said Caroline.

They stared at the table.

A decanter of fluid appeared, with two glasses.

Caroline considered this for a moment.  “So someone has taken away our reality,” she said finally.

Elena picked up the idea quickly.  Caroline was starting to really like her.

“But they didn’t take away the source of the reality, just the design,” she said.  “Like taking away the clothes, but leaving the fabric.”

“Which is why we can think up this food and drink,” Caroline agreed.  A slow grin spread across her face.

A knock on the door startled both of them.  A piece of paper slid under the door.

Elena collected it.

“What does it say?” Caroline asked.

“It says, ‘WE STILL HAVE YOUR REALITY,’” she said.  “’FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS IF YOU WISH TO SEE IT AGAIN.’”

Caroline and Elena looked evenly at each other.

Caroline turned and looked at the opposite wall of the room.  A moment’s concentration, and-

“Ooh, that is nice,” offered Elena.  “You’ve doubled the size of the room. It looks much more comfortable, too.  Let me try something.”  She waved a hand.

“Very pretty,” said Caroline, as another wall became covered in lush, green plants.  “I think we can expand the house further, don’t you?”

“I don’t see why not,” agreed Elena, as the plants flowered and began to bear fruit.

“I seem to remember something called a sea,” said Caroline.

They were well into creating their third continent and had deduced the existence of cheese and quantum foam before another note was slipped under the door, which, despite all other expansion, was still there.  This time it was Caroline who picked it up.

“Well?” questioned Elena. “What are their instructions?”

Caroline rolled the note up into a ball and tossed it over her shoulder.

“Who cares?” she said.

Saturday Writing Prompt: Cameron Allen's Perfect Day

Cameron Allen woke up on his own, about fifteen minutes before the alarm clock on his watch was due to go off.  A slight breeze, rustling through the bamboo grove, blew a fallen leaf past his cheek; he brushed it away.  

He sat up.  He had fallen asleep in the bamboo forest again.  This would be the last day he could do that with impunity.  He looked down.  He’d have to start wearing clothes again, too.  The new neighbors weren’t going to appreciate a naked guy wandering around and sleeping in the forest.

A drone trundled up, holding out a set of underwear, some trousers, and a short-sleeved shirt.  Cameron pulled on the clothing while gazing absently into the distance, hoping to see a sign of the new neighbors.  He squinted into the sun, and then stopped, chiding himself.  They weren’t coming from that direction.

“I don’t suppose you have any breakfast,” Cameron said to the drone.

The drone, for its part, squatted on its six wheels, managing to indicate in doing so that no breakfast would be forthcoming. Cameron sighed and walked out of the grove, turning left along the path.  It was only a short walk of a few hundred meters to a small orchard.  Cameron pulled an apple off a tree and chewed on it happily while grinning at not very much at all.  The sun was bright in the sky and the breeze was pleasant.

Cameron walked on, a slight spring in his step.  If he had felt any jauntier, he might begin to whistle.  Soon, he came to a tidy prefab cabin, surrounded by a small garden, next to a little burbling brook.  He stepped inside.  The cabin was rather spartan, but pleasant, looking for all the world like a countryside cottage, except for the modern communications terminal on the kitchen table.

A light was blinking on the terminal.  Cameron tapped a key and it came to life.

“Good morning, Mr. Allen,” the captain smiled out from the screen.

“Good morning, Captain Khatchaturian,” Cameron smiled back.  “How are you today?”

“Ready to get out of this ship and stretch my legs.  We’ve been on this ship for three months, trying to get out here.”

“I appreciate the effort,” Cameron said warmly.  “That’s a big ship to fly all the way out here.”

“You’re telling me.” The captain was very pretty, with dark, intelligent eyes and short, curly hair. “Four thousand colonists, animals, and supplies, all ready to move in.  I hope you’ve got the station all ready for them.”

“Oh, absolutely.  Twenty-five thousand square kilometers of ready farmland, fresh air, and clean water.  A completely self-contained ecosystem, all ready to go.  Just turn the key and move in.”

“Fantastic.  I hope you’re ready for some company.  Lots of company.  It must have been lonely, living on that place by yourself for four years while the station was going through assembly.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad.  The drones did all the work, and I got caught up on my reading.”

“Still, being the only human in a big place like that.  Nobody on Earth has that much free space to themselves any more.

“Why we’re building these.”

“True, true.  Well, we’re lining up for docking.  Talk to you soon.”

“Yeah.  Heading to Access Control now.”  Cameron switched off the terminal and looked around the cabin for a bit.  He’d spent quite a bit of time getting the place just right.  In the past four years, he’d done a lot of gardening, some meditation, and had finished the research and coursework towards a Ph.D. in sociology.  Soon, the place would be packed with humans.

Well, not exactly packed, as such. One person for every six and a quarter square kilometers wasn’t exactly Mumbai, in terms of population density.  That was the point of these stations: Get the humans off the planet, give them farms, get them growing food for themselves and export the surplus back to Earth.  The stations were designed to be easily expandable.  In fact, Cameron had sent most of the drones off to work on a second section that would double the land area.  Raw materials were delivered from the asteroid belt by drone refinery craft and arrived already processed.

Still, Cameron had grown to enjoy being alone.  With Earth’s population at right around twenty billion, “alone” wasn’t really a concept that happened much.

Cameron strolled up to a bulkhead and looked back, along the curvature of the station, at the vast fields of crops, tended to by farming drones.

He sighed, and stepped through a door marked ACCESS CONTROL.  He sat at a desk and flipped a switch.

“Captain, can you hear me?”

“Yes, we copy.  Braking maneuver was successful; no residuals.  We’ve matched relative velocity and orientation for docking.”

“Ready to transfer control?
The captain reached out to some controls off-screen. “Yes.  Transferring control to station.”

Cameron smiled.  “I have control.”  He swiveled his chair to another terminal.  “Docking controls online.”  He looked levelly at the docking controls.  Cameron was now in command of several tens of thousands of tons of spacecraft, drifting slowly towards the docking ports at the center of the station.  He carefully took the controls in hand, and applied a slight thrust to the spaceship.

“Closing at two meters per second,” the captain announced over the comm.

Cameron’s hands tensed slightly on the controls.  Just one swift movement and the entire craft would be thrown out into deep space; the ship didn’t have enough fuel to shift that much mass back into position.

Just one swift movement and Cameron could go back to being alone.  Solitary.  

Peaceful.

“Still at two meters, Cameron,” the captain said.

Cameron shook his head.

“Cameron?”

…

Several hours later, the Captain rolled over in the cottage’s small bed.

“What the hell was that all about?”

Cameron did his best to look sheepish.  

“Oh, you know.  I’m a bit rusty on the docking procedures, that’s all.”

His wife looked askance at him.  “You kept us at 2 meters a second for quite a while.”

Cameron grinned in the dark.  

“I guess I was just in a hurry to see you.”
Captain Khatchaturian snuggled up to her husband, reunited after four years.

“Well, we’re all here now.  You won’t be lonely.”

“I sure won’t.”

“And in the morning we can do something about that garden out front.  It’s a mess.”

“Sure thing, dear.  Good night.”

“Good night.”

The lights went out in the cabin.

After a few minutes, the sound of whistling could be heard.

Interfaces: Power Plugs

This is actually quite a literal one.  I travel for my job from time to time.  When I do, like so many other business travelers, I find myself taking an ever-increasing amount of tech with me; some of it for work, some for communications, and some just for fun.  So I end up with a laptop, an iPad, a Kindle Fire, a PS Vita, an Apple Watch, an iPhone, Bluetooth headset for the phone, proper Bluetooth earphones for music, a nice set of plug-in headphones for when I'm playing Minecraft on the plane, and so on.
Of course, I also end up bringing along about four hundred linear feet of charging cable, because each of these things has its own gimmicky way of charging up.  A lot of them use Mini-USB, which is handy, and the Apple stuff has its own proprietary cable design, and the watch has that weird magnetic induction thing.
The real problem is that each of these things needs a power outlet.  Now, about half the time this isn't a real issue, since I'm probably traveling somewhere in Japan or North America, or even Trinidad, where they all use the same 100/110 volt system with the same plug.  But last year I went to Mauritius, which used to be French, which means that the house current is about a billion volts.  There aren't even any wires in a building in Mauritius.  If you open up the cover plate on the power socket, you just see random lightning bolts shooting around inside there.  I had to buy this weird adapter thing the size of my fist that cost about fifty bucks just to plug in one piece of equipment.  No way was I going to be able to keep all my electronics alive for the whole two week trip.  I looked at all the charging cables, bound up into a wad the size of a child's forearm, and began to despair.
And then just as quickly began not to despair, because I realized something.  All these devices are weird and different formats at one end, but at the other they are all identical: USB jacks.
I went down to Don Quijote and bought a four-port wall-to-USB adapter for about five hundred yen, and then a four-port USB hub for about two hundred.  I could plug the adapter into the power converter, and plug the hub into the adapter.  Anything left over I could plug into my laptop, which has extra USB ports.
It's convenient when something lives up to its name, and the Universal Serial Bus does just that.  It's supposed to be for data transfer, but since it carries power as well, it's just too handy.  I've started seeing, in newer homes, USB ports in wall sockets next to the regular outlets.
Power cords haven't always been so uniform.  I can remember seeing older appliances with the old braided insulation, which reminded me too much of a fuse for me to be very comfortable in using.  As a musician, most of the cables I dealt with (and still do) harken back to the glory days of radio: 5-pin microphone connectors; quarter-inch audio cables; eighth-inch headphone cables; RCA plugs; coaxial cable; and the like.  There was a legitimate reason for each of these designs to exist back then.  5-pin provided better audio recording and broadcasting quality.  RCA plugs were difficult to knock loose.  Quarter-inch cables could handle repeated connecting and disconnecting.
I'm starting to think that just about everything worldwide should be USB. It seems to be able to handle just about everything, except the heavy power load of larger electrical appliances, like clothes dryers and dishwashers.  A Microsoft Surface Pro is pretty much the same device no matter which country it works in.  By the time the electricity gets to the actual device it's been stepped down a fair bit.
Maybe we'll see the USB become truly universal, until induction recharging gets up to speed.  This might not be a particularly profound topic, but I'm fascinated by it.
Maybe they'll even solve the mystery of why it takes three tries to plug one in.

Saturday Writing Prompt: Dying Houseplant (FICTION)

Jesus, I feel like an idiot.

Not just one of your bargain-basement, everyday idiots.  No, I feel like a top-shelf, A-one, America’s-Got-Talent idiot.

Because I’m talking to a houseplant.

Specifically, I’m talking to a Asparagus Densiflorus, or Asparagus Fern.  I know the Latin name for you, you ungrateful little bastard, because I have traveled to the far corners of Google trying to figure out why you, one of Sunset magazine’s “Top Twenty Unkillable Houseplants,” are completely choking up on me.

I can only assume that it’s personal.  Everyone told me that Asparagus ferns are hardy and strong, and durable.  That’s what the guy at the plant shop told me, the nursery.  Yeah.  The librarian, the botany teacher at the community college, they told me that you guys just need a little water once a week and some indirect sunlight and you green right up.

Nothing.

I went down to the home center and asked one of the dudes working there.  He said maybe you needed a bigger pot, and some special soil, and these plant food spikes that cost more than a dinner at Olive Garden.

You just sit there at the bottom of your new terracotta home and turn browner by the minute, you little jerk.

I even called the plant guy on the radio.  You know, the one with the funny accent.  I dunno where he’s from, Norway or Wisconsin or some shit.  I was on hold for like three hours, snotty intern producer asking me all sorts of questions, finally he tells me that maybe the environment in this home is toxic to plants.  Like I haven’t heard that before.  

So I cleaned everything up.  I vacuumed, and moved all the boxes and stuff out.  I bought a little stand at that fancy shop so you could sit there, like a fucking boss on your little throne, and why won’t you stay alive?

…

Yeah.  Yeah.  No.  We’re good.  It’s cool.  I’m fine.  

Look.  Plant.  I’ll tell you something.  You know, she didn’t leave me because of someone else.  She didn’t leave me because I was a jerk, although I guess I kind of was.  She didn’t leave me because of abuse.  I never hit her, and I never hit Noni, either.  And I didn’t do any of that “Emotional abuse” stuff, either.

She didn’t leave me because of the drugs or drinking, I guess.  I guess I know that because she didn’t come back when I stopped doing drugs and drinking.

You listening, plant?  ‘Cause now I’m talking to you.

I think she left me, and took Noni with her, because according to her I never finished anything I started.  Which is bullshit, I think.  I made it all the way through real estate agent training, and insurance agent training, and travel agent training, and that motel management course, and getting my limo license so I could drive town cars at the airport.  That’s a lot of stuff that I finished.

It’s not my fault that none of those things ever worked out.  I had big plans.  I was gonna do stuff, you know?  I was gonna sell some houses and then maybe buy one for us, fix it up, get Noni her own room-

Yeah, give me a minute.  No, just give me a second.

I guess it’s okay that I’m crying in front of a plant.  I’ve been talking to you for a half hour, right?  That makes us old pals.  

See, I guess Noni has her own room, now.  It’s at Children’s Orthopedic.  I guess she’s got one of those rare kinds of.  Rare kinds of.  Um.  It’s rare.

And, see, I don’t have anything left of them.  Caroline took everything when she left, not that we had much.  And she took all of Noni’s stuff, too.  So I don’t have anything to remind me of my baby-

There I go again.  I guess I can’t be all that “emotionally hollow,” huh.

See, she left you here, which is weird.  Caroline always liked having plants around; she loved to take Noni to the park and show her different flowers and such.  I guess there just wasn’t room for you in the car, plus you were kinda sick to start with.

But I’ve got a plan, plant.  See, if you can get healthy, if we can make you healthy, then that’s like a metaphor thing, right?  If you can turn it around, if we can turn you around, then I can take you right up to the hospital, all green and healthy, and it’ll show both of them.  It’ll show Noni that she can make it, if she tries hard, she can be healthy again.

And it’ll show Caroline that I can fix something, that I can see something through.  I can bring you back to life, I can bring our marriage back.  

We can be a family again.

Just, you know, work with me here, is what I’m saying.

Please.

Interfaces: Tableware

This is part of a larger series involving the interface of consumption. How it will all link together I'm not quite sure as of yet.  I don't know if you have worked this out or not, Dear Reader, but one of the rules I've set for myself in writing on this blog, no matter what series it is, has no predefined structure or draft writing, apart from thinking about it for the 45 minutes I'm on the elliptical at the gym beforehand.  This is me winging it, just to get this stuff out of my head; any editing I do is on the fly.  When and if I write properly, later on, I'll have all this to use as reference.  For now, Blithering Ahoy.

I've already talked a bit about the very basic interface of doors a little while ago, and now I would like to discuss another physical interface we use in consumption, that of tableware.  The manner in which humans consume their daily nourishment says a lot, I think, about their cultural relationship to said nutrition, and we can learn from examining it.

There are, to my mind, four basic utensil systems for the consumption of food.  The first and most basic, and most likely still the most prevalent worldwide, is to use the utensil systems with which we have been issued at birth: our hands.  I can't think of anyone, in any society anywhere, that doesn't eat at least some foods by hand.  There's even a common English name for it: "Finger food."  Every day, we eat something by simply picking it up and shoving it directly into the face hole.  I myself, not five minutes ago, ate a banana by this method.

It's really one of the benefits of having hands, as any simian can tell you, or will if the speech center of their brain is properly developed.  Hands are brilliant, and can do so many amazing things.  You can form a scoop to eat a biryani right from the dish, or make that weird inverted-pyramid thing with your fingers that we do when we grab a piece of cake directly from the serving plate, or, if your fingers are small enough, you can stick a pitted olive or a Bugle corn snack on the end of each one and nom them while watching Speed Racer.  Or that might have just been me at age 5.

Just barely one step removed from eating with one's hands is the concept of wrapping the food in another food, held in one's hand, and eating that way.  This is where we get sandwiches, wraps, harumaki, and other delectables.  Tuna salad, for example, is messy and problematic to eat with the fingers.  So is Ossetra caviar.  But wrap that tuna and mayo in a lettuce leaf or put that fishy jam on a toast point, and you can eat it for days without spilling a drop.  This is also the source of the pinnacle of modern cuisine, the taco.

So the first two utensil systems aren't actually utensils, per se. The third one is, although just barely.  Chopsticks are used around the world, and have been in use for at least 6,000 years.  It's not hard to see the evolutionary line that goes from stick used to poke/stir/subdue food in the pot, to using two sticks for better purchase, to eating with said sticks to prevent burning your mouth, to using them to scarf down a Spicy Teriyaki Chicken with a side of Gyoza from Paul's Teriyaki in Federal Way, Washington, arguably the finest teriyaki shop known to mankind.  (You would think that, living in Japan, it would be easy to find proper Seattle-style teriyaki here.  You would be wrong.)  Every day, millions and millions of meals, possibly billions, are consumed using chopsticks.

Finally, we have the Western knife-fork-spoon combo, the most recent of the group at only a handful of centuries of age.  We Westerners tend to think of this setup as being the best of the bunch and the easiest to use.  We enjoy using the Sharp Cutty Thing, the Stabby Gimmick, and the Tiny Bowl on A Stick for all our foods, as it gives us a wide range of options for quickly transferring food to mouth on those occasions when simply grabbing a fistful of Lobster Thermidor and mashing it into one's head might be seen as somewhat gauche.  It's also quite difficult to eat Kix with milk without a spoon.

These are all tools that serve to establish our relationships with food, in some way.  Some of it has to do with material availability.  Most households had access to some wood and rudimentary carving tools, so making chopsticks wasn't difficult.  Western utensils started with the aristocracy and worked their way down as materials such as stainless steel or silver plate became cheaper.  I think the history of Western utensils seems to indicate a desire to keep food at a remove from one's person.  For quite a large period of Western history, eating was seen as a rather revolting and physical act.  Given the state of both the average set of teeth and refrigeration technology at the time, they might have had a point.  Food was meant to be consumed quietly and carefully and in dainty, controlled bites.   The same went for many Asian cultures, as well.  Keeping your food at the end of a long stick might be the best.

Of course, the people in the street just kept on doing what they've always done, buying and eating food straight from one hand to the other.  There's a weird dichotomy here, and it all revolves around that most confusing of customs, table manners.  The closer we physically are to our food, the more sensual it becomes, and the more it seems to control us.  Keeping our food at the end of some sort of implement seems to create a barrier in our interaction.

Saturday Writing Prompt: The Worst Thanksgiving Ever

(NOTE: Yeah, this is a slightly fictionalized version of events. But not by much.)

My favorite holiday, for as long as I can remember, has been Thanksgiving.  

From the time I was a little kid, Thanksgiving was always the BEST holiday.  Mom started prepping for the big day in advance, with a special trip to Prairie Market to pick up the turkey and all the stuffing and the pumpkin pie ingredients and everything.  Special kitchen equipment, only used a few times a year, was dug out from the back of the cupboard.  Large serving trays and dishes would be brought in from storage in the garage.  The house began to smell GREAT, with the aroma of baking and cooking going on for a few days in advance.  

I was the youngest (and I still am, by a considerable margin), so by the time I was in elementary school, my siblings had moved out, but they would all return for Thanksgiving.  My oldest brother would return home on leave from the Navy and stand around looking cool, occasionally vanishing for extended periods of time.  My other brother came home from college looking like a hippie, with his guitar case painted with the word “Peace” in many languages.  My sister and her husband and their baby would come by, and my sister would help cook while I either kept the baby occupied or stopped her from destroying my Legos.

You got FOUR WHOLE DAYS OFF FROM SCHOOL at Thanksgiving, and you got to eat turkey and mashed potatoes and olives and fresh baked rolls and pumpkin pie with Cool Whip (or whatever the five-cents-a-plastic-tub-cheaper equivalent was called).  You got to go outside and play football with the big kids, and there was football on TV.  Uncles and cousins and other relatives might turn up, and Mom and Dad never kept booze in the house so we never had any embarrassing family squabbles.

Thanksgiving evening was the best.  You had turkey sandwiches and pie, and we would play a board game (we could even play Monopoly or Risk without it turning into a major crisis), everyone was in a tryptophan coma, and Mom would pull out the Christmas records and we could start listening to Christmas music.  That was the rule: no Christmas music in the house until Thanksgiving evening.  (The Christmas tree was usually put up the first Sunday in December.  I don’t know who made these rules.)

Every single one of the first seventeen Thanksgivings of my life was pretty awesome, even when I was fifteen or sixteen and fully wrapped up in Sullen New Wave Teenager Mode.  (“Life is nothing but nihilism and pain, and you bourgeois OH HEY IS THAT CRANBERRY SAUCE?  YEAH, I want some!”)  Most of them were at our house, just because it was centrally located and often the only place with enough space, but as the kids got older and had their own homes, sometimes we went there for the day.  Each one was total bliss.

Until 1981.  In that year, I graduated from high school, and, since it was 1981 and no one in the country had a job, I decided that I might as well join the Air Force and ride it out there until either the economy improved or the Soviets started World War III.  It was pretty much even money on either one.  I was accepted and sworn in and told to report for boot camp in April of 1982, but then Ronald Reagan got an itchy trigger finger or something and it was decided that a bunch of recruits should be called up early, and so I turned up at Lackland Air Force Base a few days before Thanksgiving 1981.

I’d like to say that I learned a lot about myself and my potential while in Basic Training, but mostly what I remember was being shouted at a lot by enormous men in silly hats and having to learn a lot of ridiculous mnemonics to explain various aspects of this weird new world I was in.  I am 53 years old and I can say that I have had a lot of fun in my life, so much fun that I sometimes can’t remember, for example, my address.  But I can still remember the mnemonic device, “How Many New Airmen Will Get Sore Feet?”  It stands for: Headquarters; Major Command; Numbered Air Force; Wing; Squadron; and Flight; the command structure of the Air Force (and one that is no longer in use, no less).  I can remember that I was in the 3702nd Basic Military Training Squadron, slogan: “Second To None,” and that our CO was Major Irby, who sounded just like Richard Nixon.  I can remember almost all of that useless crap, but I have less than a thirty percent chance of remember which side of the road I’m supposed to drive on. (The other one.)

And I would sure like to forget that first Thanksgiving at Lackland.  Holidays in boot camp are weird.  As a recruit, you’re not allowed to go off base, but most of the instructors and staff have the day off, so there’s nothing to do.  The best thing would have been just to leave us alone for a day and let us rest, but anyone reading this who has ever been involved with the military knows that’s not how that works.  Instead of blasting us awake at 5:00 with reveille and making us scream downstairs and be dressed and in formation in three minutes, a voice came over the intercom at six shouting at us to get out of bed.  We did so, got dressed, and were shortly told by an instructor that we were on our own until 6 PM, when we had to return to the barracks.  

“Can’t we stay in the barracks and just sleep?” said one brave recruit, asking the question we all had.  

“No, you may not,” the TI responded.  “You would just make the place messy.”

In the end, it turned out that we were allowed to go to the nearby cinema, or to the recreation hall.  I forget what movie was playing, but I remember that it was boring enough to make the rec hall seem like a good idea.  I figured that I would go there and use the pay phones to call my parents, and then… I don’t know what.  Read a magazine, or something.

I got to the bank of payphones outside the Thunderbird rec hall and realized that pretty much every other recruit had had the same idea about calling parents.  I got in line and waited.  Some time later, I finally got into a phone booth and dialed home.  

“Hi, Mom,” I said.  “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“We’re sorry,” the voice said, “all lines are currently busy due to high traffic.  Please try again later.”

There was a pounding on the phone booth door.  “Give somebody else a chance, foo,” a patient and helpful fellow recruit said.

I visited my fellow airman with a traditional Air Force benediction and went back into the bowling alley part of the rec hall, which had a snack bar.  I bought a cheeseburger and a banana pie, and a Big Red, and that was my 1981 Thanksgiving dinner.  I ate it without too much enthusiasm, and looked around.  

I spotted a videogame machine in the corner.

“Hey.  Tempest,” I said to myself, and got five dollars’ worth of quarters from the cashier, and spent the rest of my Thanksgiving playing Tempest, smoking Winstons, and listening to the worst butt-rock that 1981 could possibly generate being blasted out over the shitty snack bar sound system, and thought to myself that maybe atomic war with the Soviet Union might not such a bad thing, after all.