...just how little you have achieved in your own life

Tom Leherer once wrote that when Mozart had reached the age he (Mr. Lehrer) had that he had been dead for three years. He also said that it was people like that that really made you realize how little you had achieved in your life.

When I was just discovering Science Fiction the only writers you could get on a consistent basis in the GEMCO book department were Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, maybe with a smattering of Frank Herbert or collected stories from some pulp digest or another. OK, well there were some ERB reprints but those were like guilty pleasures we don't speak of.

SO needless to say I read a lot of Clarke, and he had a profound influence on my developing mind. It was like the Silly Putty of my cranium was spread across the Funny papers of his writings. I picked up a lot of the "images" of his writings but am afraid that it was so deep at times I left important bit behind, like getting all of Snoopy but leaving Charlie Brown's head behind on the page. I wish had those pieces of intellectual pulp now, gone, gone,gone down to dusty waste bins of time.

Clarke is one of those giants who will be temporarily lionized by the media, and then they will move on to a bit about surfing dogs to lighten the mood. The people watching CNN will say "OH! I remember 2001, my Dad liked that! (He said it was great to watch when you were stoned)". Then they will watch the dogs hang 20 and look for the link on YOUTUBE.

The irony is that they have no clue that they might not even have YOUTUBE without Clarke's work. People are like that, they care more about the mana that is delivered to them so easily and ignore the heroes who died bringing it to them.

I am so confused

There is an old TALKING HEADS song called "ONCE IN A LIFETIME" that has haunted me since it first come out when I was in college. In it there is a line, the main pest...

"...and I ask myself, WELL? HOW DID I GET HERE?"

Here I sit at a kitchen table in Upstate New Yawk, my lungs congested, my head pounding and surrounded by kids who treat me like I am made of saran wrap. It is not that they don't have any respect for me, it's just that it doesn't matter if I am here or not. I am not of their lives, just an artifact from their mother's, and we will all get through this best if they reassure me that my presence here isn't so much annoying as unnoticed.

WELL...How did I get HERE?

The first time this song had an effect on me was profound. I was driving home from a long shift at my first big job out of work. I had a head full of useless, and eventually futile, dreams and was pretty much sick of life. David Bryne's quirkiy voice bleated from the radio in my 62 VW beetle and within a month I was on my way to to Los Angeles to try my hand in the city.

Fast foreward to a walk near San Pablo Bay, the gravel path between the filled in sewage treatment plant where ILM blew things up for the movies and the chicken wire gulag where Marin County held all the playground toys painted with lead paint hostage, awaiting their eventual execution in the furnaces of a recycling plant.

Within a Month I had left what was probably the cushiest job in the art world and was off to start a company with some of the most talented, and annoying, people I ever worked with.

Over and over my life takes odd turns and twists based on decisions I made (good or bad) or incidents that I had no control over. Over and over David Byrne swims across my cortex with this atonal meloodic request for clarification.

Well, how DID I get here?

Move along citizen, if I knew that I would tell you.