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Strangers On A Train.

Author: October 21, 2024 2 Comments

Source: Amazon UK

The combination of Halloween and the recent passing of Donald Sutherland reminded me of one of my favorite horror films, Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors, and, in a roundabout way, that reminded me of Dame Maggie Smith who also passed away recently.

Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors is about six strangers in a train car, played by Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Max Adrian, Peter Madden, Roy Castle, and Donald Sutherland. Cushing, the eponymous Dr. Terror, produces as pack of Tarot cards and tells each man’s future. This provides a frame for a series of stories dealing with werewolves, witches, monstrous plants, and even a disembodied hand. Sutherland, who gets a vampire story, was the last survivor of the main cast; they’re now all reunited which is, if you’ve seen the film, darkly fitting.

It’s a fun watch, especially if you like Hammer films–Amicus Productions was kind of a rival–and because it’s an anthology you can jump in and watch the stories in any order; only the opening and closing are connected, and it always makes me think about at least part of what gives trains their romance. The number of stories about trains is seemingly endless, ranging from Murder On The Orient Express to Silver Streak and I think Hitchcock even made a film about an encounter on a train. From the very beginning trains offered a mobility no one had ever experienced before and also brought together a whole spectrum of people. That’s why one of my favorite parts of living in Britain was taking trains regularly.

On one trip I sat next to a man a few years older than me and across from a woman who, well, looked like the sort of character Dame Maggie Smith would grow into. She had a nice dress and a large hat, also a pair of owl-like glasses, and even walked with a cane. But unlike the Dowager Countess this woman was friendly; she didn’t say anything about my scuffed shoes and jeans, but chatted nicely with both of us. The man next to me told us he was from southern India. She said she’d been there and had always wanted to go back because she loved it so much. Then she turned to me and said she’d never met an American before but was “gratified” I was so polite and charming.

Source: The Guardian

When we got to Waterloo Station we all got out. The Indian man let her hold his arm and I carried her very large suitcase. While we were doing that she yelled out, “Oh porter! I say, porter!”

A guy in a railroad worker’s uniform came over and she said, “My dear porter, these lovely young gentlemen have been kind enough to assist  me with the stairs and my valise. Would you please hail a hansom cab for me?”

I was trying so hard not to fall apart laughing, feeling like I was suddenly in an E.M. Forster novel. It got even funnier when the railroad worker asked if we were together and the Indian said, “Oh no, we’re just strangers on a train.”

“No criss-crosses, though” I said and we smiled at each other.

I know this has taken a lot of turns, from horror to Edwardian manners to, well, a joke about a murder mystery, but that’s what’s great about trains. The lines and destinations are fixed but inside you never know what can happen.

Adventures In Busing., Hail & Farewell.

Hop To It.

Author: October 19, 2024 4 Comments

Source: Letterboxd

When I ask people what their favorite Poe story is the same ones come up over and over: The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask Of Amontillado seem to top the list, and The Fall Of The House Of Usher, The Black Cat, and The Masque Of The Red Death are always popular. Usually they’re ones most of us read in school, the ones that were our first introductions to Poe. I also remember The Murders In The Rue Morgue being talked about a lot, though it would be a long time before I read it, and in fifth grade watching a strange, and very loose, adaptation of The Gold Bug with a young Anthony Michael Hall.

One Poe story that never seems to come up is Hop-Frog. It’s one I think deserves a lot more attention. In eleventh grade I wrote a term paper on Poe and read a biography that kept referring to A Descent Into The Maelstrom as Poe’s most autobiographical story. Oh no, I thought, if you have to single out one Poe story as “autobiographical” then it’s Hop-Frog. Even his most sympathetic biographers describe Poe as a touchy guy who took criticism personally, but people also liked him because he was funny. The image of Poe as the gloomy goth misses the fact that he wrote satire and humor pieces too. In Hop-Frog the title character is an abused servant, a jester, who—spoiler alert–finally gets revenge on the royalty, and, I think, is as clever and funny as it is brutal. Hop-Frog has dwarfism and maybe that’s why we didn’t read the story in school, but he’s also the hero. Ultimately he succeeds over those who think they’re better than he is, and I think that would have been a good message for a lot of us.   

Two things came up recently that reminded me of Hop-Frog. The first is the new AppleTV series Time Bandits, based on Terry Gilliam’s 1981 film. The original cast five little people, and I understand the new series didn’t want to go that route for fear of seeming exploitative, but the casting got some well-deserved criticism for that. The original film wasn’t in any way making fun of its characters for their stature. The five “bandits” in the original are complicated characters who, it’s been pointed out, resemble the Monty Python gang in their personalities, with filthy, mute Vermin representing Gilliam himself.

The other thing is PBS just released a documentary called Judy-Lynn del Rey: The Galaxy Gal. As an aspiring writer and science fiction fan I read a lot of Del Rey books growing up without knowing, or even thinking, that Del Rey was a person, and I wish I had. Judy-Lynn del Rey was a little person but, obviously, that’s only part of who she was. She was a smart, passionate publisher and editor who helped make Del Rey a publishing powerhouse. Among other things she spotted the potential in the novelization of a little forthcoming science fiction film called Star Wars.

And finally there was an adaptation of Hop-Frog, also on PBS, titled Fool’s Fire. It was directed by Julie Taymor before her groundbreaking stage adaptation of The Lion King. The two stars are two little people, Michael J. Anderson, probably best known for being a dream character in Twin Peaks, and Mireille Mossé, a French actress with a few credits, as the woman Hop-Frog rescues. The rest of the cast is puppets. This made sure that, as Taymor said, “These two little people, so often used in the theatre and cinema as special effects themselves, were deeply and painfully real.”

And of course Hop-Frog is the hero.

American Graffiti.

Can We Talk?

Author: October 18, 2024 4 Comments

I believe life exists on planets other than Earth, and even life that’s intelligent in ways we could recognize and even communicate with. I don’t think that’s a controversial idea but this week I did get into a conversation with someone who said that if intelligent life forms are out there surely we would have found some evidence by now. After asking them not to call me Shirley I think I made a pretty good case for why we haven’t found evidence yet. For starters we haven’t really been looking for that long. Telescopes in the modern sense have only been around about five hundred years, and that’s just the ones you use to see Saturn’s rings or what your neighbors are doing. Even the most powerful telescopes are extremely limited. The first planet outside our solar system wasn’t found until 1992, and even though a lot have been found since then we haven’t gotten any up-close view of any of them. A few years earlier, in 1990, Carl Sagan convinced NASA to use the Galileo probe, on its way to Jupiter, to see if there was any evidence of life on Earth. The answer was, “Maybe.”

We don’t even know how many planets could potentially have life because we’ve got a sample size of one out of an unknown number. And there’s the question of why intelligent aliens, if they’re out there, haven’t visited us yet. Maybe they have—I’m not sure about that—but if they haven’t it’s probably because, as Douglas Adams said, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” Here’s my own perspective on that: you may think a one-hundred thousand mile warranty on your car is a sweet deal but that would barely get you one percent of the way to the Sun, and that’s the closest star to us. Even if super-intelligent aliens have somehow discovered a way to travel between stars, even if they’ve found a way to travel beyond the speed of light there’s so much space out there the odds of aliens even passing through our neighborhood are, literally, astronomically low.

So what about communication? Why haven’t we heard from anybody? That’s where I think things get really interesting because, yes, we can beam radio waves out into space, but we’ve been doing that for less than a hundred and fifty years. There are a lot of stars within that distance but anybody out there listening would have to have something that could pick up those signals, interpret them, and send a message back. If they’re at the farthest point it would take just as long for their message to get back to us and we’d have to be still be listening, and have some way to filter the message out of all the galaxy’s background noise. Now imagine aliens on other planets having the same issue with their signals.

That’s assuming they even communicate the same way we do, which makes it even more complicated. We can’t even communicate with our closest genetic relatives on this planet. In stories about animals it’s funny to me when different species all speak the same language—when birds can talk to rabbits, skunks can talk to raccoons, and so on. It’s a nice ideal but, let’s face it, I’ve watched enough real backyard wildlife to know that even squirrels and foxes have vastly different priorities. And what if creatures on other planets don’t even communicate through sound? In the sequels to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama humans meet, among other things, spider-like aliens that “speak” with bioluminescent rainbow patterns. In an episode of Star Trek: Voyager the crew encounters a spacefaring giant centipede that communicates through chemical emissions. And speaking of that there’s the alien Kurt Vonnegut imagined who came to Earth to tell us how to prevent war and cure cancer in its native language of tap dancing and farting which, now that I think about it, isn’t that strange—I had an uncle who communicated by farting, but that’s another story.

And this doesn’t even get into one of my favorite science fiction tropes which is that alien species are so often monolithic, speaking the same language, even having the same culture, across an entire planet. Every time that comes up in a science fiction story I want to ask the writer, “And how long have you lived on Earth?” Admittedly it’s plausible that there are advanced alien species that are like that—it’s a big universe and there are a lot of possibilities.

And speaking of monoliths, or rather monologues, no, I didn’t spout all this out at the other person—I’d have to have been babbling away longer than Hamlet. These are all just thoughts I had and that I felt the need to share with the universe.

Keep Looking Up, Nature Talks., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

All These Worlds…

Author: October 14, 2024 4 Comments

Source: NASA

Even the most dystopian science fiction is hopeful since it imagines a future where people are still around. And when something that sounds like science fiction becomes science fact, no matter what else is going on, it gives me a little hope. The Europa Clipper mission has launched on a six-year trip to study one of Jupiter’s moons that may be a home to life elsewhere in our solar system. Europa’s an intriguing little world that’s only a quarter the size of Earth but may hold twice as much water in an ocean hidden by an icy skin. The launch was delayed by hurricane Milton which is oddly fitting: Europa orbits Jupiter, whose storms are so enormous—that famous great red spot could hold three Earths—that studying them can teach us a lot about storms here on Earth. So there are good reasons to go more than four hundred million miles for a closer look at our biggest neighbor.

In Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 Europa becomes the one place in our solar system that’s off-limits to humanity even as the rest of it opens up to us, and the 2013 film Europa Report imagines people making the trip to study the frozen world for possible life. It’s an interesting premise but it doesn’t seem plausible; Jupiter itself generates an intense amount of radiation, twice as much as it gets from the sun. Any life on Europa will have adapted, but it’s more than our fragile little bodies could tolerate. We can learn a lot from Jupiter and its moons, which currently number ninety-five and counting, but I don’t think it will ever be a place we can get close to.

The Europa Clipper reminded me of another science fiction story, Contact, and Jodie Foster saying, “They should have sent a poet.” Engraved on the spacecraft is a poem by Poet Laureate Ada Limon. That also gives me hope.

You can listen to her read her poem here.

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

Arching under the night sky inky

with black expansiveness, we point

to the planets we know, we

 

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,

we read the sky as if it is an unerring book

of the universe, expert and evident.

 

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:

the whale song, the songbird singing

its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

 

We are creatures of constant awe,

curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,

at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

 

And it is not darkness that unites us,

not the cold distance of space, but

the offering of water, each drop of rain,

 

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.

O second moon, we, too, are made

of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

 

We, too, are made of wonders, of great

and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,

of a need to call out through the dark.

 

The Weekly Essay

You’ve Got A Friend In Them.

Author: October 12, 2024 7 Comments

It’s that time of year when the Monster Cereals come out. They’ve really been out since September, but I like to hold off until a little closer to Halloween. Maybe I should start earlier too, though—I’m getting older and, since my wife doesn’t like them, finishing off five or six boxes of family-sized sugary cereal by myself isn’t as easy as it used to be, and is a reminder of the passing of time.

I’d really like to say a sincere word of gratitude to the people behind making the Monster Cereals—not just the cereals themselves but also the packaging. I’ve worked in enough businesses to know that nothing happens quickly, especially with established brands. The Monster Cereals are seasonal, not really promoted, and, I suspect, not even that profitable anymore. Their target demographic is a dwindling subset of Gen Xers who grew up eating them—or, in my case, not eating them but wishing I could—and yet there’s care and thought put into making each year’s release just a little bit different.

Carmella Creeper, introduced in 2023, and the first new Monster Cereal in thirty-six years, has made a welcome comeback for this year, and I’m glad. It was about time they brought a woman into the mix and while the “caramel apple” flavored cereal doesn’t taste like either caramel or apples it does have a distinctive tangy flavor that I like. She’s also gotten her own retro-style box, confirming her place as one of the gang.

 

The other big change is the return of the Monster Mash, introduced in 2021 for the 50th anniversary of the first Monster Cereals. It’s not, as the box would suggest, a mix of all four flavors but rather a combination of green Carmella pieces and gray pieces—gray being such an appetizing color for food. The box is also missing my personal favorite Frute Brute (I like werewolves) and Yummy Mummy. The latter’s name has taken on a meaning of its own, and I’m sure Tony The Tiger can sympathize, but that’s another story.

The biggest change has been that the this year’s Monster Cereals have gotten “pets” with their own back-of-the-box stories and a new batch of marshmallows. Not even monsters live forever. There will be a year when it’s just not worth it to bring them out. In the meantime it’s nice that they’ve got friends.

American Graffiti.

Tainted Love.

Author: October 11, 2024 4 Comments

Source: Wikipedia

I have mixed feelings about a new Creature From The Black Lagoon movie. On the one hand it seems like everything these days is a reboot, remake, or remix. On the other hand there’s a belief that there are a limited number of stories to be told and that everything already is a reboot, remake, or remix, the prime example being Shakespeare’s plays which were based on other sources, and he didn’t even pay royalties. And on the third hand, since we’re talking about monsters and anything’s possible, because I’ve always loved all things aquatic and went through a long phase of wanting to be a marine biologist like Jacques Cousteau, before I realized that job was already taken by this guy named Jacques Cousteau, I grew up fascinated by The Creature, even before I saw the original movies. Because the Saturday matinee on the UHF station mostly stuck to various versions of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, with occasional appearances by The Wolf Man and a few disappearances of The Invisible Man, I even wrote my own Creature story. It was loosely based on Jaws, although when one of the crew says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” they actually go back to land and get a bigger boat, which just gives The Creature more time to wreak havoc, though it’s good because it’s ultimately discovered he’s going after polluters. I was an environmentally conscious kid, and also influenced by Namor Of Atlantis, but that’s another story.

There’s also already been a modern retelling of The Creature From The Black Lagoon: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water. Not only did I really enjoy it for its lovely, strange, and dark story but, in spite of only being inspired by, not connected to, the original three films, it seemed to pick up where the original three films left off. Although only very loosely connected the three Creature films still, taken together, tell a story of first love, maturity and marriage, and finally love turned toxic.

The first in the series, the 1954 The Creature From The Black Lagoon, has The Creature as the villain, but there’s also a side story of scientist David Reed and his girlfriend and fellow scientist Kay Lawrence. She’s the one who’s kidnapped by The Creature after he sees her swimming above him. Like a lot of classic monster films there wasn’t any interest in exploring why The Creature would find a human attractive, or even interesting, but what stands out for me is she’s resisted David’s pressure to marry because she wants a career of her own. The Creature is a not-so-subtle metaphor for the pressure put on women to be dragged down.

The sequel, coming out just a year later, was Revenge Of The Creature, with a whole new couple, animal psychologist Clete Ferguson, and his assistant, ichthyology student Helen Dobson. Clete and Helen fall in love and The Creature becomes a surrogate child. Clete is the father figure, disciplining The Creature with a cattle prod while Helen is more nurturing. And because they thought it would be a good idea to keep The Creature in an oceanarium open to the public it escapes and goes on a rampage. Things turn Oedipal—another story thrown into the mix—when The Creature kidnaps Helen and Clete has to come to the rescue.

The last of the original films, The Creature Walks Among Us, gets a lot of hate, and, I admit, deserves it for the ridiculousness of the Creature miraculously developing lungs so it can breathe air, but I like how dark it gets. Also it’s the only one that makes The Creature sympathetic. Finally it’s the humans who are the villains. We get a whole new couple. This time it’s Dr. William Barton—no relation to the real life engineer Otis Barton who designed the first bathysphere—and his trophy wife Marcia. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia is willful, independent, and enjoys shooting at sharks. She attracts The Creature’s attentions when she accompanies the men on a dive. That’s the extent of its interest in her, though. The reduced budget of the third film created a story focusing mainly on the human relationships, and making them more complicated than ever. Barton murders another man who made a pass at Marcia, not caring that she wasn’t interested, then tries to blame The Creature. Somehow aware of the danger it’s in The Creature escapes its cage, kills Barton, and goes to the sea, never to return.

There were plans for at least one more film that would introduce a female Creature, which could have been interesting, but it never made it past the early stages and it would take sixty-one years for The Shape Of Water to make romance central to the story, keeping the third film’s sympathy, and even love for, something not human.

Del Toro’s film seems like a fitting end, and yet relationships are as strange and ever-changing as the sea itself, and if there is a new Creature From The Black Lagoon, I’d like to find out what it says about who, and what, we love, and how love connects us to all life.

Not Non-Fiction, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Strange Magic.

Author: October 7, 2024 4 Comments

I have a strange but very vivid memory from childhood, from a time just after my family had moved to a new house, which, itself, was kind of a strange and disruptive event in my young life. It wasn’t negative. I was only four when we moved, though the memories from our first house seem so much longer than that. And though the new neighborhood wasn’t that far from the old one it still seemed like a very new and very different world.

The early experience I remember so clearly at the new house is a day when there was fog. The new house was on a hill and I could stand in the driveway, or look out my bedroom window, over the backyard and see for miles, all the way to a very distant row of hills where radio towers stood. The fog had spread out over the low lying area between me and those radio towers, and had even reached up to them, obscuring the hills, but I thought I could see construction equipment—tall cranes and bulldozers. Maybe I’d seen them earlier, before the rain and the fog. This seems plausible; at that time there were a lot of new buildings going up in that area as the city expanded.

I was in the driveway looking at this scene and my new friend Troy, who lived at the bottom of the hill, was with me. I thought I could hear the construction equipment, the clanking and grinding of gears, though this was probably just my imagination. Maybe it’s something my mind has added in the intervening years. Maybe none of this even happened and it was all something I dreamed, but I distinctly remember Troy saying, “A cloud fell. They’re trying to put it back up.”

I don’t know if he was serious. He was four too and we both had really active imaginations, and maybe he thought that was really how the world worked: clouds as something people made, shifted into place, controlled. It was a wonderful idea, and I think my mind has held onto it for so long because it makes the world a little more interesting, a little more magical to imagine clouds work that way.

I still like fog, too. It has a wonderful way of making the familiar unfamiliar, renewing my appreciation of the world around me. And then it goes, leaving only a memory, because it can’t last. Or, as King Arthur once sang,

By eight, the morning fog must disappear.

In short, there’s simply not

A more congenial spot

For happily-ever-aftering than here

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p style=”text-align: center;”>In Camelot.

Adventures In Busing.

The Root Of It.

Author: October 5, 2024 6 Comments

I stopped to get a bottle of wine as a thank-you for a friend and as I was walking past the beer I noticed a certain…theme. October is the month for pumpkins, though they’ve been popping up since August. I like an occasional pumpkin latte or a piece of pumpkin pie but I try to restrict my indulgence to the witching month. Pumpkins hold a special place among vegetables even though it’s not really the pumpkins themselves but rather their role as a delivery system for a combination of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger. And that got me thinking that maybe there are other seasonal vegetables that deserve some attention as well. Here are the pros and cons of a few contenders:

Potatoes: We’re spoiled by having potatoes available year-round but technically they’re a fall crop. The fact that you can get your potatoes mashed, boiled, put in a stew, and of course fried at any time of year knocks them out of the running.

Turnips: Although turnips can be harvested in the spring too they’re a cool weather plant which makes them ideal for fall. Both the leaves and the root are edible and the original Jack-o-lantern was a turnip. Carved turnips, a Celtic tradition, are so much creepier than pumpkins. So I’d definitely put them in the category of being worthy of consideration.

Source: The Scotsman

Broccoli: This is another fall crop that’s available all year, most often as an overcooked side dish or taking up space on crudité platters where it begs to be dipped in ranch dressing. Broccoli’s resemblance to miniature trees would make it great for decorating but you can’t really stick a candle in broccoli so I’d give it a pass.

Gourds: Aside from pumpkins there are lots of gourd varieties that are great for turning into birdhouses and other craft projects. Here’s a fun idea for your Halloween porch: get a pumpkin and a tall skinny gourd for a Bert and Ernie theme.

Beets: I think beets are delicious so I’m biased here but there are dozens of varieties in colors ranging from blood red—which is perfect for Halloween—to orange and even striped. If you’ve read Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game you may remember that, before the hunt begins, General Zaroff serves borscht, the soup named for the noise it makes as it passes through you, with a big dollop of sour cream in the middle. It’s very evocative, resembling blood and bone, or an eye with the colors reversed. Why aren’t they more popular around Halloween? Beets me.

Source: Giphy

American Graffiti.

Time And Tides.

Author: October 4, 2024 6 Comments

The Moon is finally getting a time zone. This is exciting because, though there still aren’t any residents there, giving it a time zone seems like part of a long-term plan to eventually establish lunar bases. Time zones are also very important. My wife and I realized this once when we drove three hours to a concert. The whole trip was almost due north but time zones have jagged edges, as though time cares about geography, and we ended up being an hour late. This worked out perfectly because we didn’t want to see the opening act anyway, but that’s another story. For most of human history time zones didn’t matter because going from one place to another, especially crossing oceans, was such a slow process no one noticed the time difference. Faster ships and, more importantly, trains created a need for standardized timekeeping, which is at least one thing most of the world can agree on. Trains also created word problems, which is at least one thing most of the world can agree are terrible.

A specific time zone for the Moon also addresses a big problem I’ve had with most science fiction. I’m willing to suspend a lot of my disbelief but in most science fiction shows and movies that involve people traveling from one planet to another how is it they almost always manage to arrive during daylight hours and when everyone’s awake? I can accept that somehow ships that are able to travel vast intergalactic distances in a matter of hours, or even days, have somehow found a way to deal with the time distortions that would be caused by traveling at or even faster than the speed of light, but statistically someone who’s on the run from space pirates or aliens or trying to get a shipment of cargo delivered has got to arrive at a spaceport at two a.m. on a Tuesday and sit in a holding pattern until the planetary rotation moves it into a reasonable hour. I’ve gone to parties and because I’m very concerned about being on time I’ve ended up circling the block because three hours is stretching the idea of “fashionably early”.

Star Trek, especially The Next Generation, did address this occasionally. Less experienced officers got the graveyard watch, and on at least one occasion an important message from Starfleet arrived in the middle of the night so Admiral Narrative Device had to start by saying to Captain Picard, “I’m sorry to wake you.” Although that just made me wonder how a ship on a long-term space voyage, where there is no “day” or “night” determines what time it is. No matter what the ship’s standard time was they’d eventually show up at a planetary bases or space stations at odd times. Shore leave always goes in shifts and it would be inevitable that at some point Yeoman Smith would have to beam down at two a.m. on a Tuesday after the bars were all closed and he’d be wearing a red shirt.

At least Doctor Who never had this problem. When your hero is a Time Lord they never have to circle the block waiting for the right time to show up at a party. A Time Lord is always right on time. And there is some science fiction that does deal with time zones. At the start of Larry Niven’s novel Ringworld Louis Wu is celebrating his birthday and starts hopping into transporters so he can go from time zone to time zone, extending the day until he hits the International Dateline. Imagine having a day so amazing you wanted to keep it going as long as possible and had the potential to do it by bouncing around the globe. Alternatively if you were having a really bad day you could use the same technology to head in the other direction, making your day shorter. That’s what I’d do if I had a math test with a bunch of word problems.

Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Old Friends.

Author: September 30, 2024 2 Comments

Source: San Francisco Art Exchange

An old friend of mine came to Nashville and we met for lunch. And “old friend”, I realized, has taken on a whole new meaning. We’re both close to the same age and haven’t seen each other in person in over twenty years. Instead of talking about old times, as I expected, we ended up talking about everyone we know who’s died and comparing medications.

Even though we haven’t gotten together in so long we’ve stayed in touch and I have a pretty good idea that he’s open to, well, just about anything, but going back and forth making plans prompted me to post this online and, funny enough, it hit a nerve:

Maybe this is just my experience but any two people making lunch plans need a third person to say “Here’s where you’re going, here’s when you’re meeting, and you can thank me for sparing you fifty text messages over twelve hours.”

I had a similar experience when Ann Koplow came to Nashville. To be clear I really enjoy doing things with people, whether it’s an old friend or a new friend, and I’m sorry scheduling has prevented me from meeting some fellow bloggers—I keep hoping there’ll be another time, and that will be another story. Meshing schedules and deciding what to do can be a fun puzzle but a puzzle nonetheless. I want to be a good host. I want someone visiting here to have a good time, to do things they enjoy doing. Most people are agreeable and upfront about what they like to do and, thanks to the internet, it’s a lot easier for someone who’s never been to a place to figure out what it has to offer regardless of your likes, dislikes, and general interests.

On the other hand I know some people like to be surprised. Some people—yeah, I’m thinking of myself here—will, when asked what they’d like to do, say “Whatever!” and mean it. I’ve visited friends and family in other places and, for example, go-kart racing is never something I’d have thought of, but some friends and I had a great time doing it.

I also know how badly that can go. I know someone who once hosted a well-known writer. He’d written a book about educating children and she thought it would be fun to take him to the circus. It wasn’t.

My friend and I had a really good lunch at an Indian place and then we just walked around, going nowhere in particular, and that’s when I realized that, really, it’s not the place or the activity that makes for a fun experience—it’s the company. And though we didn’t talk about old times or drink any beers we are both still crazy after all these years.

Adventures In Busing.