Getting Out Of Bed: The Most Dangerous Part Of The Day

            In 2005 my wife and I moved out of an absurdly expensive cabin in the woods and bought a 38 foot motor coach.  We had decided to make a major change of lifestyle.  It was an audacious and risky move, loaded with potential pitfalls.  But it worked.  We got out of our "stick house" and moved into a slightly cramped but homey RV. 

            Our original plan included travel.  We crossed the country once, and went on assorted adventures, but the price of gasoline kept rising and our incomes kept falling.

            The RV became a home in a campground where the rent is cheap and all the normal conveniences of civilization are available.  Internet: check.  TV: check. Phone, water, power, sewage: check check check check.

            We love our 38 foot motor coach and we live amicably with two dogs and three cats, surrounded in a campground by a motley bunch of people from all walks of life.

            Our flat screen TV is in the bedroom.  There are cabinets and drawers, windows and fans.  The arrangement of space and the existence of five animal friends imposes one giant fact of life upon us: the only way on or off our bed is from the bottom.  Crawl in, crawl out, head first or butt first or any way you can.  It's a form of gymnastics.  Adding to the complexity of getting in and out of bed is the fact that there are two sets of doggie steps at the bottom of the bed.  Our actual exit/entrance is about two feet of space between these steps.  What's the story? you may ask.  The answer is twofold.  One, our bed sits higher than the normal bed because that's how RV beds are designed.  They are set on a swinging slab of plywood that can be opened to reveal a large storage space. 

            Our cats could get up and down without a problem, but when our teeny miniature poodles arrived we found ourselves being constantly disturbed by whines and whimpers.  I want down.  I want up.  I want down.  I want up.

            We ordered this cool set of pet steps: a five step staircase that fit perfectly into our domain.  Gabriel, the smaller dog, loves them.  Bear, the bigger dog (Gabriel's dad) is terrified by the steps and no amount of cajoling or training will get him to use them. Being the utter saps that we are, we left Bear's stool in place at the right end of the bed, put Gabe's steps on the left and there you have it!  No whines or whimpers.  Gabe up, Gabe down, Bear up, Bear down, end of story.  Each of our poodles is about the size of a shoebox.  They're half the size of our smallest cat.  They like sleeping and lazing underneath blankets or within piles of pillows.  There is a rigorous discipline involved in the act of moving to and from the bed.  We must ALWAYS know the location of the animals.  It has become second nature to make a mental map of the bed before moving in any direction. We feel our way, hands, eyes, entire bodies recording the positions of our loved creatures.  And it's been good; no one's been hurt.  Perhaps, even, the exercise and stretching keeps us loose and more fit than might otherwise be the case.  There are times when I find myself in familiar yoga poses, contorted but otherwise successfully moving to my destination.

            Getting out of bed is a job.  Getting out of bed is a job that has to be done cheerfully in spite of wake-up wrath, grogginess, the pukes, piddles or poops.

            I might interject here that my spouse and I live this way with very little inhibition.  We show tender compassion toward one another's aging bodies.  Life is inherently humiliating as it is; we are careful to grant ourselves some dignity as a couple.

            So...if I say that we have a rare intimacy, I believe it's true. There isn't any choice.  An RV is an environment that is not conducive to privacy. 

            Getting in and out of bed is a procedure that induces uncommon positions and viewpoints.

            It is time now for me to give you another piece of information about myself:

I tend to fall asleep in unusual positions and at unusual times.

            Talk about full moons!  At this point, if you are a bit prudish or tightly wrapped about certain normal anatomical realities, I suggest you stop reading and find an issue of Vanity Fair or O(prah).

            The Fox and I are in our sixties.  I'm not sure how this happened.  The God Of Hippie Fantasies promised that we would never get older than thirty five.  Anything after that was like one of those thirteenth century maps of the world.  HERE LIVE DRAGONS, says the map and that's how we felt.  Old age didn't exist.  It would never exist. 

            We weren't going to be sixty or sixty five.  Hell no!  Something would intervene to ensure our youthfulness.  We would discover that the juice of wild onions mixed with the nectar of rare orchids would halt the aging process.  Or something like that.  Getting old just wasn't real.  It would never happen.

            Before we met, The Fox and I lived wild and crazy lives.  We were in dangerous places, courting viruses or murder and dismemberment, to say nothing of derangement of the senses, intellect and terminal brain damage.

            Somehow we ducked under those scythes.  We survived, and the onion juice/rare orchid miracle didn't happen.  What is it that people say?  That today's sixty is yesterday's fifty?  What bullshit.  Today's sixty is more like seventy.  Baby boomers have lived risky lives, imbibed quantities of exotic stuff, participated in the great Poisoned Democracy, watched fifty billion bullets and ten billion bombs explode all over the world, fled from toxic clouds and radioactive dust storms.  We've lived in apocalyptic terrifying times!  It's stressful!  It beats down those lovely anti-oxidants that we're supposed to cultivate.  

            What the hell do we do now?  Am I going to have to be seventy?  Just wake up one day, bam!  I'm seventy? No!  Nuh-uh.  Fuck this.

            Time moves awfully fast.  Time is sneakier than a weasel stalking a raven's egg.

            I can fall asleep with a book in my hand and a mouth full of raisins.  I can look perfectly awake but I am sound asleep.  I can raise myself up on my left elbow to look out the window and fall asleep, halfway between up and down.  I can, so I am told, walk to the fridge, make myself a waffle, then walk away and get back into bed.  Eyes open but sound asleep.

            The Fox and I have had a rough year.  I lost a job I'd had for nearly thirty years.  I had worked as manager of a large commercial property.  Great job.  Name my hours.  No supervision.  Decent pay. Then the property owner died suddenly.  One day last year I got a letter giving me thirty days' notice.

            It's been that kind of year.  The Fox suffers from auto-immune diseases. 

I have the feet of a hundred year old longshoreman. I don't walk, I hobble.

When an opportunity comes along that gives us a good belly laugh, we cherish the moment like precious treasure.

            Last week I woke up to take my two o'clock pee.  I'm lucky I only pee twice a night.  My prostate must be the size of a football.  What is a prostate, anyway?  It seems to be a gender-specific time bomb buried just behind men's nuts.  Thanks, god.  Thanks for the prostate.  Great invention.

            Anyway, as I was sitting there taking my usual ten minutes to pee, The Fox woke up and slithered from bed.  It was time for her two-fifteen pee and she stood before me in the dark, waiting patiently.

            "You know what you did last night?" she asked, unexpectedly.  We don't talk much in the middle of the night.  We mumble and stumble, grunt and nod until our missions are accomplished.

            I didn't say anything.  She was going to tell me.

            "You got to your knees, turned around and started getting out of bed, head first.  Like you did just now.  Except that as your head reached the bottom of the bed,  your elbows folded, you laid your head in your hands and you fell back to sleep."

            I already had the picture.  I am a big hairy Jewish man.  As I crawled forward, dodging three cats and two dogs, I ran out of steam and fell asleep with my ass in The Fox's face. 

            I started laughing.  It was late and our neighbors are pretty close so my laugh was a high pitched "heee heeee" but it was still satisfying.

            "Your snore was so rhythmic" Fox continued.  "The night lights gave me a complete view of  your full moon and I thought maybe I could play bongos on your butt, maybe they would be tuned to nice pitches, maybe a minor third between them so it would sound like 'Sing Sing Sing'.  But I didn't want to wake you."

            I was tweeting like a canary I was laughing so hard and trying not to roar as I might in broad daylight.

    

     

   "I thought you'd wake up eventually and finish your chore.  As long as you didn't fart or something, what harm could  your ass do to me?  I was willing to take my chances.  You were so deeply asleep; and of course I think you're cute from any angle, so I figured 'what's the harm?'.

            We were both giggling like children.  Oh my god!  You just had to be there.

            I did of course wake up after about five minutes and complete my forward facing slink off the bed, snaking my way down with the help of the doggie steps, none the wiser regarding the comic episode I had gifted to my spouse until she told me this story the following night.

            Have I embarrassed anyone by telling this tale?  I couldn't care less.  We have been betrayed by the God Of Hippie Fantasies.  There is no magic wild onion/orchid juice to reverse our neuropathies, our arthritis, our pops and twinges, our encroaching deafnesss, blindness and dithering mental acuity.  I hereby decree that growing old is an activity of heroes, that it takes major guts to manage the passages that lead us to the Great Light that waits beyond death.

            And if there is no Great Light?  Then we will turn back to behold our brief and insignificant life experiences and know that this WAS the Great Light, one that we weren't able to recognize until after we had lived it.

            

I Surrender! A Capitulation To The Internet

I Surrender

            I surrender.  I raise my hands, throw down my weapons and kneel before the Internet.  I am now its prisoner, I am now its slave.  I let my attention wander, and before it returned (it was a ten second daydream), the Net had morphed into a new paradigm, had spawned a thousand new concepts.  In order to be computer literate, I must understand and master each of these thousand new concepts.  I give up.  I don’t have the time.  I don’t have the speed.

            Around the time Twitter arrived, my grip began to slip. 

            Twitter:  what the fuck is this?  Oh, I get it.  A giant global billboard.  Every person living must now BE a brand, and Twitter is the brand name town crier. Twitter itself generates a thousand spin-offs, becomes an industry.

            “I’m selling new software called Twitterbee to get you thousands of followers on Twitter!  Be in everyone’s face, all the time! Twitterbee.  Subscriptions begin at $4.50 a month.”

            Facebook.  I’m really lost with Facebook.  The word “friend” meant something in the past, it was a powerful concept.  It, the word “friend”, has become utterly devalued.  A friend is now someone who has permission to get in your face who has given you permission to get in his or her face.  What can we do with all these friends?

            It’s obvious!  Sell our Brand!

            Let me see, just what is my Brand?  What am I selling?  I’m an artist, a photographer, musician and writer.  That’s what I sell.  What do I call myself?

I know!  I’ll call myself AARTT!

I sell entertainment with a sideline in Insight.  It isn’t AARTT if it doesn’t have insight.  You’ll learn stuff when you consume my work.

            Among the things you will learn are the following:

How to tolerate yourself.  You are convinced that your flaws are so grotesque that no one will ever love you and you want to puke every time you look in the mirror.

            I can show you how to tolerate yourself.  I can teach you how to look in the mirror and say “hi there” and move on.  You just aren’t important enough to make yourself puke. Also, you're not alone.  Everyone feels this way at some point in a life.

            I can show you how to believe in God without being a fool.  Now that is hella useful.  Everyone needs to believe in something but that need is either repressed by your own subculture or it’s converted into a simpering set of clichés that are not worthy of you. 

            I can make you laugh.  Really, give me a few minutes, I’m just warming up.  Look at yourself!  Look at all the drama you’ve created.  How can you take yourself seriously?  Stop trying. What a Schlemiel, what a Megilla!
            This is my super-secret mantra and tantric yoga procedure for curing negative thinking.  Step one,
take your left hand and put it to your forehead with the palm facing outward.   Tilt your head slightly to the
left.  Make it look dramatic.  Now, in your most self-pitying voice, cry out, "Oy Veyzmir!  Oy Veyzmir!"
(For the goyim:  It's simple.  Oy vay z'meer).  The cry must begin on a mid-tone note and rise half
an octave higher with a strong accent on the final syllable. You MUST repeat this procedure at least eight times, closing your eyes  half way and letting your body droop.  Don't worry about getting the notes right, so long as you sound sufficiently self-pitying. If you fail to reach eight repetitions I am not responsible for potent side effects such as warts and a pungent odor of gefilte fish rising from your body.

            So come on, folks, step right up, buy some AARTT.  Oops, I have to get on Twitter, Facebook, Crazenook, Struttmutt, Hurdlelnurdle, Flank, Bubgut and all those other internet gizmos to sell my Brand.  And I’ve surrendered.  I surrendered in the first sentence.

            I think I’m fucked but I’ll figure out something. A podcast, a webinar...something.

Sit-Coms, Ray Romano and MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

Ray Romano and MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

           

            Sometime during the era of Norman Lear's dominance over the television sit-com landscape there arose a formula for writing scripts that haunts us still.  I call it the "three lines to insult to laugh track" gambit.  It's simple.  Character A enters the scene through what appears to be the kitchen or back door.  She asks a question of character B, who is eating a bowl of cereal.  Character B guiltily evades the answer to the question.  Character C throws an insult about Character B to Character A.  The insult is a clever quip exploiting Character B's weight or habits of personal hygiene.  The audience chuckles (or canned laughter of the proper intensity is supplied.)  Another character enters from the living room and asks the same question, i.e. "Who drank all the milk?"  Character A responds with a variation of the same insult, but it's a little stronger.  Audience laughs again, a little more fulsomely.

            Line one is the exposition, it moves the story line along.  Line two reveals the learned helplessness of a character.  Line three insults that character.  Then there's a laugh and the dialogue returns to another insult, another laugh before the cycle returns to the expository dialogue that moves the story another inch further along.

            All the laughs are from the insults or the escalation of the insults.  These imply long audience familiarity with the characters; the audience participates in the humor of the insults because they are, in a sense, members of the family, entitled to

exchange barbs with the characters.

            Shows such as I LOVE LUCY were constructed differently.  They were real Situation Comedies, i.e. Lucy would get herself into a comic situation.  The humor was provided mostly by lies that Lucy told to Ricky.  The lies were made necessary due to some transgression Lucy had committed against one of Ricky's personal rules. Each lie led to further complications as Lucy tried to protect herself from Ricky's notorious Latin temper.  The lies would lead to crazier and crazier situations until Lucy's fib was unmasked.  Yes, she broke Ricky's favorite bongo drum, yes she defied his order not to audition for the part in a TV commercial.  Somehow Ricky's temper never explodes.  The audience knows that Ricky loves Lucy and that he would never harm or abuse her.  Ricky's most fearsome outburst is "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do." He's merely playing the part of the fiery Cuban, in a time when Cubans were still hot-blooded band leaders.  Lucy has never been in any real danger. The threat of danger, and Lucy's fibs and their escalating complications to avoid this imagined danger are the meat of the show's humor.  The situation is comic, as is Lucy's physical humor when she inexorably loses control of the Situation.

            I may find I Love Lucy dated and no longer very funny, but I see a moral and imaginative collapse in the quality of the formulaic nit-coms we see today.  Insult comedy is a venerable stream in the great delta of comedic history.  Co-opting insult humor as the driving engine in the bottomless plethora of mediocre sitcoms only serves to allow laziness to rule the writer's room. 

            Producers and writers seem to have learned nothing from the formula-busting brilliance of Seinfeld.  True, since Seinfeld's long run on the air there is room for wackier premises and looser story structures, but these too have played into the propensity for lazy writing.  It's been an awfully long time since anything as good as Seinfeld has appeared.

            Ray Romano has never been on my psychic radar.  I didn't watch his sitcom. 

I don't watch many sitcoms for the reasons outlined above.  But Romano surprised me with his beautifully calibrated drama series "MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE".

            The series revolves around three middle-aged men.  They are old buddies from high school and they meet at a restaurant several days a week to eat breakfast and hash out their personal problems.  Scott Bakula plays out-of-work actor Terry Eliot.  His boyish charm still works on the ladies but it's proving to be an unreliable backstop for whatever pitches the future may throw at him.  At fifty, his face is falling and his prospects have dried up.  When he's offered the role in an  updated commercial that was once his greatest hit, he cringes with embarrassment.  Instead he takes a job with the second old friend of the trio, Own Thoreau, played by the redoubtable Andre Braugher.

            Owen is the son and heir to Big Daddy Owen Thoreau, the towering figure in one of Los Angeles' venerable auto dealerships.  Owen Junior still calls his father "daddy" and is struggling to overcome the iron-clad dominance of his monolithic father.  "Daddy" is ready to retire and hand the business over to his son.  But he makes it clear that he has no confidence in young Owen.  He feels that his son doesn't have the drive and charisma to sustain a competitive business.  Owen Senior's pompous contempt for his son, his constant undermining of younger Owen's efforts makes him the perfect bully and the ideal target for an audience's wrathful involvement.  He is what every good drama needs: a villain.

            Romano plays Joe Tranelli, owner of a store specializing in party supplies.  He's a compulsive gambler, recently divorced and trying with all his heart to connect with his adolescent children.

            These three very different characters share breakfasts, jogs in the hills above L.A. and as much intimacy as any American male can achieve.

            Using these simple ingredients, Romano has produced an absorbing drama that is utterly lacking in strain, self consciousness and over acting.  The obstacles and tensions each character endures are convincing yet played with a precision that draws no attention to itself. 

            This may not be a series that will attract a younger audience looking for a high level of stimulation.  I may not have been drawn to EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND but in the future I will be watching any project with Ray Romano's name attached to it.  He's demonstrated a quiet mastery of television drama. 

            The series went two seasons.  That was all it needed to achieve its goals.  A third season would have gone against the grain and defiled its own modest yet profound ambitions.
          MEN OF  A CERTAIN AGE has no laugh tracks, no set-ups to predictable put-downs, no generic sitcom kitchen-with-living-room set.  It has, instead, several great characters, three of whom are honestly struggling with the onset of male middle age and its challenge.  The series ended with satisfying resolutions without ever seeming pat or forced.  The struggles of life would continue but these three men could rely on one another's support.    I can't think of a greater gift  that can bestowed out of friendship.  Support equates to a guarantee that in times of trouble your friends have "got your back."
          

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I will happily email you a MOBI or WORD file of my SF/Fantasy epic if you request it.  I am at artsdigiphoto@gmail.com. I can convert it to other formats should that be required.

How Santa Claus Stopped Smoking

Yep, that's me

       I ended my smoking habit with almost breathtaking swiftness.
       This wasn't a planned assault on my disgusting addiction.  It was an intervention by forces beyond my conscious control.  In short, I got so sick, I had a lung infection so severe that I was given a view into what my future would be like if I didn't quit smoking.  It was terrifying. For once in my life I made a rational choice; I put away the tobacco and stopped smoking.  I got nicotine patches.  That part of the process, the nicotine withdrawal, is seldom a great problem.  Patches work.  Gum works.  A person can get off nicotine without too much difficulty.

          The other part is the hard part.  The body rhythms, the daily self-soothing, the hand to mouth nipple sucking, the inhale-exhale, the whole gigantic gestalt of what goes into a smoking addiction, the social rituals and emotional processes...that's the gritty work of quitting a tobacco habit.

          And there were the feelings.  Our emotions are seldom under control, they're like the weather, they just ARE.  But my god, the experiences I had during this awful month were like a roller coaster without the fun.  It had the emotional contours of an amusement park ride, one of those ultra-modern devious twisting machines.  Instead of pleasantly thrilling chills there was just the terror, intense despair, claustrophobia and a hundred other nasty feelings.  All of these feelings had been laid under provisional control and masked by smoking.  Now they were naked and pulsing, bare nerve endings of horror, and I was experiencing them.

          It wasn't brave of me to do that...I had no choice in the matter, so how can I call myself brave?  Had I  attempted to smoke I would have all but lost the ability to breathe for several minutes. If you have asthma, a lung disorder, or are prone to panic attacks, you know that being unable to breathe is the most terrifying experience in the universe. 

          I consider myself incredibly lucky, or blessed.  I probably had pneumonia.  I didn't go to a hospital.  I called my doctor, explained the circumstances, and was given a course of antibiotics.  I survived and healed thanks to modern medicine,  a resilient body, the grace of God, and the tender loving care of my wife.

          The rest of the story can be told by relating what I call "The Santa Claus Incident."

          Every year in December I have a little job.  I  dress in my Santa Suit and hand out gifts to three and four year old children at a Montessori pre-school. On December 14 at five thirty p.m,  I was scheduled to appear in a big class room with about fifty kids and their parents.  I would pretend to have just dismounted from my sleigh as I walked through the door. I would boom "HO HO HO!" and spend about an hour  having my picture taken with each child as I dispensed little packages provided by the school.

          At ten o' clock that morning I was reaching for my phone, with great reluctance, to cancel my appearance.  I was in no shape to be Santa Claus.  I was exhausted.

          The phone rang before I could dial the number.

          It was the school principal.  "You're coming, aren't you?" she asked anxiously. "The kids are looking forward to seeing you so much!  I got nervous and wanted to call and confirm."

          "I don't feel very well," I said. "I've got a little cough, but don't worry, I'll be there.  See you a bit after five, right?"

          "Oh thank you thank you thank you!  Wonderful!  We're so looking forward to it."

          What else could I do?  Santa doesn't get pneumonia.  I would soldier through, I would do my best. 

          I had been sick for about two weeks and thought I was on the healing part of the curve.  I was wrong about that.  I wasn't contagious, but I had another two weeks to serve in this particular zone of Hell.

          My wife dropped me off near the door that I customarily use at the back of the school.  As she went to park the car I had one of those attacks: the breath left my body and the next breath wouldn't come.  I put down the box with my costume, spread my legs and told myself the attack would pass.  There was nothing else I could do but fight for breath. I don't know how long the gasping lasted.  It was no more than three or four minutes, but those can be very long minutes.

          It passed.  I started to breathe.  I pulled myself together, found the school principal and went to the dressing room to work the transformation from air-sucking sick man to SANTA CLAUS HIMSELF!

          A Santa Claus costume is a torture device.  It's hot. It's constricting.  Between the wig and the beard there's window about four inches in diameter through which I can see.  The beard and mustache almost completely block my nose and mouth.

          I had been doing this little holiday job for years but in my condition I wasn't prepared for the  shock of being inside that all-consuming outfit. 

          I walked into the class room, managed to go "HO HO HO, MERRY CHRISTMAS!" and crumpled onto my special throne.

          Then a tsunami of children raced towards me, screaming with delight (minus a few toddlers hanging back, cringing with terror).  Behind the kids, the parents were firing their cameras and I-phones, smiling and laughing.

          I had a pure unmitigated panic attack.  I couldn't breathe.

The fake white hair was teaming up with my congested lungs.  My airways were completely blocked.  My heightened sense of claustrophobia was thrown into overdrive.  My field of view was constricted to a couple of inches.  I was wearing gloves, boots, a hat, a red fuzzy tunic, a wide leather belt and big baggy red fake fur pants!

          The impulse to get up and run was overwhelming.  Yet, I couldn't do that!  What a predicament!  Then the kids surrounded me and the ritual had begun. My decision had been made for me.

          If I was brave at all throughout this month of madness it was in that moment: that refusal to run in the face of panic.

          I had that two seconds in which to leave.  I could have thrown up my hand and said "STOP!  I CAN'T!"  Well, I doubt I could have spoken at all.  I was panting and trying to squeeze breath into my lungs and then I had a giant hacking cough.  A huge wad of phlegm exited my lungs at high velocity and stuck immediately to the inside of my fake beard, which then attached itself even more firmly to my chin.

          I could breathe again.  I could hang in there, talk to the kids, pose for the pictures, get my pay check and go home. Which is what happened.

          The worst of it was over but I will never forget the raw unchecked emotion that rampaged across my psyche. 

          I realize that something profound has taken place within me; I've been given a second chance, a dispensation, a grace.

Some immense force, something from WITHIN, turned me upside down, shook me hard, then set me back down....smoke free.

          I am deeply grateful. 

FRINGE: A Review Of The Creepy TV Series

          The scene:  A bicycle messenger zings his way through a crowded city street.  He's wearing his helmet and backpack and he's panting slightly as he evades pedestrians, snack vendors and taxi cabs.  He pulls up to his destination, quickly locks his bike to a traffic sign and runs towards the glass doors of the high rise office building.  He bumps into a woman emerging from the building.  His face is suddenly troubled.  His coordination seems to be failing.  He bumps into a man.  Something is clearly wrong.  He almost makes it to the front reception desk but now things accelerate: little stalks are growing out of his forehead, popping out of his eyes, wriggling from his mouth.  A woman screams.  The bike messenger topples to the reflective marble of the lobby.  He is writhing, his heels kick the floor.  The stalks multiply rapidly.  Each stalk, slimy and weaving, is topped by an eye; a very human looking eye.  More screams.  The bike messenger's clothes tear into hundreds of pieces and there is nothing left of the young man but a football-shaped creature with two hundred eye stalks.  At the creature's center a toothy opening appears, and many sharp teeth are exposed.  The creature exhales a brown vapor.  There are screams everywhere.  The brown vapor spreads and is breathed into the lungs of dozens of unsuspecting people.  Within seconds, each of these people is metamorphosing into a football-shaped creature with two hundred eyeballs on stalks.

          Welcome to the television series "FRINGE."

          How is it possible to have affection for a TV series, to watch it faithfully, yet know in our heart of hearts that it's crap?

          Somehow FRINGE pulls off this stunt.

In the foreground, actor Joshua Jackson as "Peter"

          There is such a thing as too much suspension of disbelief.  It's acceptable to let the craziest notions fly around in science fiction stories.  But FRINGE wants to have it both ways.  It asks our permission to fly the freakiest flags imaginable: parallel universes, re-animation of corpse brains, hairless time travelers, shape shifters with mercury for blood.  Yet it wants us to accept these ideas as somehow supported by fact. Maybe, the show implies, the state of our current science is almost, but not quite, developed to this point.  But it's close!  It's credible!

           However close, however credible, in the FRINGE world there are only two scientists who are advanced enough to work with these facts and one of them is either 1)dead 2) in a parallel universe  3) dead and in a parallel universe or 4) dead, in a parallel universe and temporarily occupying the body of an FBI agent.

          Every episode has us scratching our heads.  "Do you know what's going on?" I ask my wife.

          "Not a clue," she responds, equally perplexed.  Then I hit the remote and start the next episode.

          And there you have the big question: why do I watch the next episode?

          It's obvious that the writers are improvising. Don't get me wrong; improvisation has a large place in the writing process.  It is not, however, an adequate substitute for a well planned story arc.  The producers of the show got one thing right and they've been leaning on that one thing for five seasons.  That "one right thing" is the character of Walter Bishop as played by actor John Noble.

John Noble

          I've seen great actors, but I've never seen an actor like John Noble.  He has such exquisite control that he can hover on the edge of tears for minute after minute; the water pools at the bottoms of his eyes.  It hangs at the edges of his lower lashes, yet never quite falls.  His facial muscles convey the most delicate sadness.  It's as if he's so sad he CAN'T cry, the very act of weeping would sully the feelings he's experiencing.

          John Noble plays multiple roles in Fringe, since he must play not only Walter Bishop in THIS  universe, but the OTHER Walter Bishop (called "Walternate"), as well as various Walters in various time periods and states of exultation and/or decrepitude.  The other universe's Walter Bishop is The Secretary, that is, the political boss and chief boogie man.  Walternate is not warm and fuzzy like OUR Dr. Bishop.  He's much colder and more vindictive, but as is the nature of the competing universes in FRINGE, he is in a sense a mirror image of the sweetie-pie genius nut-case Walter Bishop who carries so much of the series' plot.

Lance Reddick

          The uber-story of FRINGE is that of a war between the two universes.  The viewer should understand that this so-called war is a political construct, that it's been cooked up by evil powers to serve their own ends.  We are familiar with many such wars in our own "real" universe.  That much is simple.  We get it.  It's a phony war but it has devastating consequences.  It was ostensibly "started" by OUR Walter when he built a machine that enabled him to cross over into the "other" universe in order to kidnap a version of his son.  The reason for the kidnapping: his real son, the one in HIS universe is dying from an unspecified disease. Walter can't let go of his son.  So he steals an exact copy from the other universe.

          By crossing into a parallel universe, Dr. Walter Bishop inflicts a deadly wound into the space/time fabric and thus damages both universes in ways that slowly become apparent as the series progresses.

          His son, Peter, grows up to live in "our" universe but there are a lot of facts about his past that are obscure, both to himself and to the audience.

          I could go on..and on...and on..for at least five seasons worth of FRINGE but there's no point. I don't really understand what's happening, who is who, where they are, which version represents which universe, and so forth.

          Somehow FRINGE holds our attention.  Every character is well played.  Actor Lance Reddick as Agent Broyles is so spooky looking that he could dance the waltz in a tuxedo and still scare the crap out of me.

          FRINGE is a crazy hodge podge of plots, subplots, superplots, and (let me invent a word here) unplots.  It hits you with a left hook when you're expecting a left hook, yet it still maintains an element of surprise, and, more importantly, an element of super-creepy fun.  FRINGE laughs at itself.  Hence, it's fun to watch.  The actors are having fun.  The show's producers are having fun.  Nothing is too outrageous, the genie is out of the bottle and FRINGE will soon pass from our television universe to go into pan-galactic syndication.

The two Agent Dunhams, one from each "universe"

          FRINGE is not brilliantly written but its actors compensate us with performances that turn the series into a drama that is greater than the sum of its parts.  Few such dramas can survive the leaden hands of less gifted writers, but the series somehow acquires fresh infusions of blood (uh...uh....) as it progresses.  By the time Season Four rolls around, I have the feeling that all the improvisations are finally gelling into a real story arc and that a few "high fives" are being shared around the writer's table.

          "We got there!" they congratulate themselves.  "We know what FRINGE is about!  Now we'd better pull our shit together before we start to grow boring, tiresome, repetitious and trite."

          They have, after all, been flirting with these show-stoppers since the pilot episode and have just narrowly missed the bullet with each new season.
          Addendum: We have now seen all of Season Four and unfortunately
my prediction has come true.  Aside from a couple of decent episodes, the series was puerile, the writing lazy, the plots derivative.  I understand that Season Five only recently ended its network broadcast.  If they had cut the cord at the end of Season Three they would have escaped with their dignity intact.  Alas, television production is subject to pressures of which we have no idea.  I can only say that my wife and I have a new slang term: we've been Fringed.  This is not a good experience, being Fringed.  It leaves one with the taste of stale hyperbole, like two day old coffee that's been endlessly re-heated in the office coffee urn.

          

Agoraphobia, Astronomy, and Healing Affliction With Passion

Photo by Art Rosc

          Once upon a time I was agoraphobic.  For years I had a terror of strange spaces.  I was limited to my house, my yard, my car, and my place of work.  If I attempted to break this tight little orbit, I got sick.  My stomach churned, my heart raced, my breathing grew difficult.  At the time I didn't know the term "Panic Attack."  My symptoms were classic; trying to go anywhere outside my tiny race track brought on a general collapse.  I had no social life, I did nothing but read, watch TV and watch the animals that visited the hillside behind the house.

          One day I was out in the yard in the deepening twilight of an autumn day.  I had a pair of binoculars in my hands for watching a herd of deer who came to feed on the ripening pear trees at the top of the hill.  It was almost dark and I had an impulse to turn the binoculars towards the sky.

          I was stunned.   The binoculars showed thousands more stars than could be seen with the naked eye.  It was visually confusing but so beautiful that I instantly fell in love with the night sky.

         I spent the next several hours scanning across the heavens, trying to locate familiar stars in familiar constellations.  Not that I knew many constellations.  I knew The Big Dipper (which is only part of a constellation), I knew Orion and I knew Cassiopeia  because of its distinctive "M" shape.

          I saw things through the binoculars that I couldn't name.  I saw clusters of stars that looked like back-lit luminous cotton. I was lost, in the topographic sense.  The big bright stars took on a new relation to one another because of all the intervening stars that were less bright.

          There was the end star in the Big Dipper.  I could find that star.  But it was difficult to maneuver to the next star in the line without first taking my eye off the binoculars, locating my target, then carefully measuring my angle of movement.  Otherwise the sheer abundance of stars was confusing. I learned, that night, that the second to last star in the Dipper's handle is actually a double star, the pair known as Mizar and Alcor.  They can be seen as double with the naked eye in a reasonably dark location.
There's a legend that the Ottoman army checked the eyes of its soldiers by discerning whether or not they could separate Mizar from Alcor.

          I was lucky to live in a dark suburb sixty miles from San Francisco.  There were no streetlights.  In late summer the Milky Way can be seen with its glowing fleece and its lanes of darkness and dust.

          It breaks my heart to think of the billions of people who will go from cradle to grave without seeing a dark sky, without seeing The Milky Way in all its majesty.  People who will live without giving the night sky a passing thought.  To me, a life without awareness of the sky's beauty is like an amputation of the soul.  You're cut off from your ancestors, from the thousands of generations who measured their lives by the movements of the heavens.

          I'm not a scientific person.  I have no math skills, no understanding of chemistry.  I slept through those classes when I was in school.  But I was determined to give myself some training in astronomy.  I learned to read sky charts and I subscribed to magazines.  I joined a club.

          I needed to see a darker sky.  I needed to go places more than a hundred miles from a large city.  There is a substantial difference in what's visible from a sky that isn't compromised by light pollution.

          The problem was that I was agoraphobic.  The idea of getting into a car and driving to a new place hundreds or even thousands of miles from home made me break into a cold sweat. I have since realized that my agoraphobia was but a subset of phobic responses to a larger meta-phobia that I call Neophobia: Fear Of New Experiences.

Photo by Art Rosch

          This is a common posture for people with PTSD.  I consider that almost everyone has some kind of PTSD, that PTSD is another name for the experience called "Life".

          There are, however, people who have more severe life  traumas, longer lasting and more intensely painful body memories. I qualify for this troubled group.

          My life has been difficult.  No more needs to be said. The point of this little article is the way I pitted a powerful passion against an equally powerful terror.

          I was corresponding with people who had been to places like Joshua Tree and Anza-Borrego State Park.  They measured the sky darkness and clarity by referring to the dimmest star visible to the naked eye.  Stars are rated by magnitude, with the lower numbers indicating greater brightness.  This system was first used by the Greeks around 150 B.C.  It hasn't changed very much since that time, which is remarkable.  That's one of the appealing things about astronomy; much of its lore connects to ancient cultures without the intervening technology altering its nomenclature or mythology.

          Let's describe a star of Magnitude 1 as a star visible even in a well lit suburb of a major city. The star Sirius, the brightest naked eye star in the sky (excepting the sun), is a magnitude -1.4.  That is Negative One Point Four. The brighter stars go into negative numbers.  A bright full moon is Mag -12.6. The sun is magnitude -26.8.  The stars where I lived were visible up to about magnitude 3.  That wasn't good enough.  My friends in the Mojave Desert were describing skies rated at Magnitude 6!  In practical terms that would describe a sky so rich in stars that the outlines of well known constellations would almost vanish in the profusion of surrounding stars.

          I was yearning to experience dark, beautiful skies.  At the same time I was terrified to leave my yard.  I could barely cross the street.  But I wanted to go to the high desert, down to the Mojave and cross into Arizona, where the cities are distant and the sky is dark and the colors of the stars sort themselves into distinct categories of white, red, yellow, green and blue.

          I struggled, I procrastinated, I beheld my fear like a chain and a set of padlocks, and I was angry with myself.  Everyone goes places!  Millions of people jump into cars, get into airplanes, leap from coast to coast, continent to continent without giving such travel a second thought.

          I was barely capable of making the twelve mile drive to my place of work, to my solitary manual labor position as a janitor for a large commercial property.

          I had an acquaintance who spent a lot of time in Yosemite Valley.  She was planning a drive from the Bay Area in two weeks.  I asked if I could come along.  I explained my situation, my phobia.  She was willing to help.

          The big terrors that we harbor in our fantasies usually turn out to be less taxing than the grief we've given ourselves in anticipation of the event.

          On the appointed day, I got into my friend's Honda, carrying my binoculars, a book of star charts and two changes of clothes.

          As we drove up Highway 80 I sat in the front seat as rigid as setting concrete.  I was desperately ill for the first sixty miles.  An hour-long panic attack savaged me like a hungry wolf.  I felt as if I would never be able to get back, to get home once I had left.  Then I  had the sensation of hitting a giant rubber band.  It stretched and stretched, urging me to reverse my direction, to turn back. 

          I had deliberately trapped myself by this arrangement.  I couldn't tell my friend to cancel her trip because I was phobic, because I was, basically, a great big scaredy cat.

[        I knew I had to break through the rubber band. 

          I was so sick with fright that we had to stop on the side of the road three times so I could puke.  My friend was beautifully patient and supportive.

          Just beyond Sacramento, about eighty miles from home, I puked one last time and the rubber band broke.  The pressure vanished.

          I was free.  I could go.  I was still scared but I could go to see the sky from Glacier Point, from an altitude above five thousand feet, from a place where the sky's clarity is utterly pristine. 

          Nobody really wants to face their deepest fears.  We would prefer to get through life dodging and weaving, minimizing our risk.  But some fears are debiitating.  My phobia was preventing me from pursuing a love affair with the sky.

My phobia was crushing my life, and if this was the only way to deal with it, pitting terror against passion, then so be it. 

          Passion won the contest of psychic forces.  Since my breakout to Yosemite, I've traveled thousands of miles, lugging telescopes, cameras, attending star parties and living a wider and more satisfying life.

Photo by Art Rosch