{"id":604,"date":"2008-09-04T19:51:30","date_gmt":"2008-09-05T03:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=604"},"modified":"2008-09-04T19:51:30","modified_gmt":"2008-09-05T03:51:30","slug":"instead-of-watching-the-convention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/04\/instead-of-watching-the-convention\/","title":{"rendered":"Instead of Watching the Convention"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier tonight I listened to Lou Reed and the Velvets singing \u201cHeroin,\u201d\u009d on their 1967 album, The Velvet Underground & Nico<\/em>. \u201cHeroin\u201d\u009d was one of the very last songs we played in our house in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1986, the house empty and echoing, all our worldly goods already in the rental van at the curb, at the time I was kind of laughing with our friend Mike Gambone over the negativity of the song, but as usual loving the swoop of its sound and the imagined glamour of the blanked-out lifestyle\u2014although, of course, in reality, I was moving my family to California to take a job a professor in the then-new field of Computer Science. Some junkie.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Suppose that I only plan to write one more book, what should it be? Wait\u2014why <\/em>just one more book? Well, maybe I have some rare condition that dooms me to die in a few years. Or maybe I just feel like claiming that, because it makes my life seem interesting. Or maybe I have a sense that I\u2019ve written so many books that it might be time to stop…only not quite yet. \u201cJust one more!\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When he was seventy, my father wrote an autobiography called Being Raised. <\/em>He was a good guy, a human, a thinker. It\u2019s an interesting book, and he even put in some fairly wild stories, although of course I kind of hunger for whatever he left out. Certainly it\u2019s inhibiting if you imagine that you\u2019re writing your memoir \u201cfor your children and grandchildren.\u201d\u009d Though, really, by now I\u2019d forgive my father for any imaginable sin, so he didn\u2019t really need to hold back on my account.<\/p>\n

But\u2014still\u2014if I were, like, writing my memoir, would I really want to include stories about crummy things I\u2019d done when I was drunk or high? Well, maybe just a few, so as to give the illusion that I\u2019m being frank and forthcoming, but, really, I\u2019d rather write about the events in the main stream of my life: family, teaching, writing, and philosophical investigations.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And, aside from any purposeful sorts of recollections, I\u2019d like to drift back and muse over some of the earlier memories, the things that an old man misses the most.<\/p>\n

Like the handful of times my father took me fishing\u2014I think of Sleepy Hollow near Prospect, Kentucky. Catching my first fish on a fly line. A bluegill, naturally. He\u2019d invented a device called the Retrieve-O-Ring to rescue an expensive lure when it got snagged on an underwater log, he even sold a few of them via ads in sporting magazines.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Thinking of those times, I remember the G. family who lived in a shiny log cabin in the country near Harrods Creek. The father was the church organist, quite a musician, and the mother was my second-grade teacher. Cultured, pure people. They had an open house party once and my family was there, enjoying ourselves. I was talking to some big kids, telling them I was in the second grade, and one of the older girls said she was in the tenth grade. I was stunned. I had no idea the grades went up that high.<\/p>\n

Mr. G. got my brother and I to come to choir camp one summer, and before each meal we had to sing this song, \u201cHey-ho, nobody home. Food, nor drink, nor money have we none. Fill the pot, Hannah!\u201d\u009d I wondered if the cook was named Hannah. Soon we boys began thinking of \u201cfill the pot\u201d\u009d in a vulgar way, first to our great amusement, but eventually to our disgust, and for me it became a terrible way to start a meal, thinking of that chamberpot image.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I definitely want to write about fireworks and rockets, not to mention dogs and smaller pets like white mice. And the canteen of bourbon that Willie F. fetched for me when he was pledging for my high-school fraternity Chevalier. And my friend Barbie van. C. who got me to play a game where we were separated lovers who\u2019d been looking for each other for years and we walked right by each other in a snow storm, missing each other by only a foot, but not seeing each other in the torrent of ice-crystals. This enactment was taking place in a pasture on a sunny September afternoon on her farm, you understand. Barbie had two older brothers and they had an amazing toy circus upstairs in the play room. I used to dream about that circus a lot, the dream even made its way into my novel, The Secret of Life<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And of course I want to expatiate upon life and death, as in\u2014why, whence, and what\u2019s it all for? When my father was on his last legs, finding his way towards death through a maze of heart attacks, hospitals, strokes, and nursing homes, my brother and my son and I were visiting him in a sick-room, and that afternoon I\u2019d bought my son a black suit, just in case. \u201cWhy…why\u2019d you get him a suit?\u201d\u009d asked my father. \u201cFuneral! <\/em>\u201d\u009d said my brother in a stage whisper, pitched too low for the old man to hear. We cracked up. Times like that\u2014what do you do? Laugh or cry?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Seeing my grandchildren is such a nice bookend to having seen my parents die. The other day, I was visiting my son and his twin girls, and one of them was toddling out the front door to the porch\u2014she\u2019s only just learned to walk\u2014and I was cheering her on, and she got this proud, happy, shy look on her face, for all the world like a great lady entering a ballroom and being announced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier tonight I listened to Lou Reed and the Velvets singing \u201cHeroin,\u201d\u009d on their 1967 album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. \u201cHeroin\u201d\u009d was one of the very last songs we played in our house in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1986, the house empty and echoing, all our worldly goods already in the rental van at the curb, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":605,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions\/605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}