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Tom

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I first met Tom in college. But I’ll get back to that in a second.

It was the first day of when I was to attend San Francisco State University. My previous foray into education was a decade prior, and now I was about to do it all over again. Only, this time I decided I was going to do the whole college experience, including living in the dorms, something you didn’t really get when your first run through college was at one of the military service academies.

Anyway, this time they were going to set me up with a roommate, and as it goes, the roommate was going to come as a complete surprise. And boy, did it ever. My roommate showed up and that’s immediately when sparks started to fly. Well, let me explain.

The roommate who showed up was someone with green hair. That should have been my first warning. The second warning was that she was a she. And boy, did that make her angry.

Even though the roommate “choice” was a crapshoot, and none of the roommates actually chose each other, she lit off like a firecracker. Well, more like a firecracker that explodes over and over again.

She immediately blamed me and started yelling at me nonstop, like I had secretly arranged this with my patriarchal cousins who were obviously snickering nextdoor, just out of earshot of her.

This went on for about half an hour before I left the room to retrieve the dorm manager downstairs, and as the two of us came back to the room, she was still yelling. At whom until he returned, neither of us knew, but she continued to be red mad.

So, the dorm manager took her out of the room, at which she started screaming that the guy (me) should have to leave, not her, even though all of my stuff was unpacked and her stuff was still in suitcases ready to be moved to wherever they needed to go.

So, for the first night, I had no roommate. The second night, my new roommate arrived, and that’s when I met Tom.

For my second roommate, they decided to link him with me because the two of us were veterans. He was a former Marine and I was former Army. There was an age difference; he had fought in Vietnam, and my time was Grenada, Panama and the first Gulf War.

Because the timeframe of our first nights on campus coincided with huge bouts of noise on campus, on one evening after lights out the campus band and glee team was practicing at what had to be after midnight in some impromptu blast of music. I just assumed this was a normal thing and struggled to get back to sleep, but then like a bolt of lightning, Tom came rushing out of his room and straight out the door of our dorm. The next thing I heard, he was yelling at the leader of the band, and someone yelled back at him from out there, and then there was dead silence.

Then Tom came back to the room and said, “They’ll shut up now.” And then he went to bed. I never heard another sound from the band again. As no police units showed up knocking on our door, I assumed he settled that problem without any violence.

Over the years, Tom and I bonded as most roommates do when they get along and have a common frame of reference. A few years into our friendship journey, one of my debate partners and I decided we were interested in starting a radio program with the school Broadcasting Department, even though we weren’t part of the Broadcasting Department.

But we couldn’t even get the Broadcast Department to give us an opportunity to try out. But when Tom overheard us talking about the failure of our plan, he said that he knows the director of the Broadcasting Department, and he’d talk to him. We kind of took it half-heartedly but then a few days later, he handed me a piece of paper with the director’s name, a date and a time, saying that he would see us then.

So, my friend and I put together or best elevator pitch and presented it. Next thing we knew, we were told we had some studio time to create our vision and then we could present that as proof that we could do the job.

When we got to the studio, we encountered the first bit of politics in the Broadcasting Department. Everyone in that department was competing for airtime, and as outsiders, we were infringing on their territory. But the director had told them to give us access and one of them took that obligation to actually show us the ropes. So, we finished the demo tape and then had to present our elevator pitch to the students who ran the radio station. They heard us out and then said no.

We were devestated, and Tom listened to our entire group commiserate over how we gave it our best shot, and unknown to us, Tom took the demo tape to the director so he could hear what we had done. The next day, we were given air time and the students running the station hated us forever after that day.

But we had our air time.

Years later, Tom and I remained good friends, and after I published one of my novels, Thompson’s Bounty, about a Coast Guard crew that gets pulled through time to the age of pirates, Tom called me and said that he loved that book and felt it needed to be a movie.

You see, after Tom graduated, he got into the movie industry and was a huge advocate of science fiction. He wasn’t high up in the industry, nor was he ever working to get up high into it. He took those types of jobs that are necessary, but most people don’t generally acknowledge. In other words, if there’s a guy who drives around on movie sets and takes the director around, or picks up the luggage for a cast member, he was that guy.

But being in that position, he was always talking with people who made movies, and he hyped my novel to some of the biggest names, itching for me to send him a screenplay, so he could pass it onto someone who had asked for it.

To put it simply, Tom was my biggest fan, and when you’re a writer, that is such a great thing to have. Every couple of months, he would call me, or send me a message, and he would love to talk about something I had written, depending on what kind of movie he was working on at the time.

I just received a Facebook message that his funeral has been announced and will occur in a few days. I didn’t even know he was sick. Only that I hadn’t talked to him for awhile. And I’m really sad about that. If there was any consistency in the universe, it was that Tom could brighten your day in a few seconds of a conversation. I don’t really mean to make it about me, but I really needed those moments. And now they’re gone.

Well, at least the San Francisco State University drill team can practice at midnight without the fear of some guy from the dorms scaring them half to death.

When Best Friends Aren’t Best Friends Any More

Relationships, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , , , ,

lilduane1
Back when things were a lot different

I’m sure my story isn’t that different from everyone else’s story. Most of us grew up with a best friend or two (over the years) and then life may or may not kept us together. If you watch a lot of the movies that get released starring the usual suspects of male friends, you get the impression that these friends stay close friends forever, basically until they reach middle age and go through their middle age crisis moments together.

Unfortunately for me, that didn’t happen. And strangely enough I kind of wish it did. Let me explain.

I’ve had two really close best friends over the years. One was my friend Roland, who I believe I met when we were both about two or three years old. We lived across the way from each other in a low-income apartment complex, and my first memory of Roland was a fight we had where both of us went home crying to our parents. Immediately after that, I remember his mom and my mom conducting some kind of UN conference where the two of us were forced to become friends again. We remained friends from that moment forward, proving that, yes, the UN sometimes DOES work.

Our friendship lasted most of our childhood. Both of us bought the same blue Schwinn bicycle and we rode miles and miles on those things together. It was not unusual for the two of us to race 26 miles down the beach to Redondo Beach, California and then back to Santa Monica. For us, the enjoyment was the journey of traveling down the bicycle trail together, back in the days when you could actually ride down those paths without running over a million girls on roller skates.

Some of my most memorable moments were with Roland, including when we would run into Dom Deluise at the local department stores and then at McDonalds shortly after. We explored the world together and learned about the world as a shared experience only friends can truly appreciate.

When I was a young teenager, my mom died after a horrible illness that slowly drained her of life. When she died in the hospital, I remember calling Roland because he was the only person I wanted to talk to. Shortly after, he showed up with his mom and dad to the hospital, making sure that I wasn’t alone on that horrible day.

Soon after, I moved in with my older sister and her husband, which forced me to move away from Santa Monica. Roland and I kept in touch by phone, and every now and then I’d figure out a way to take the bus for a few hour trip to visit him, and sometimes he’d do the same to come to me. But as we were further and further away, we sort of drifted apart until we stopped calling and then never saw each other again. It’s one of those things I regretted deeply over the years, but life takes you where life takes you.

In Moorpark, my new home, I made friends with the person who was to become my next best friend, Ken. While we didn’t have the history that Roland and I had, we quickly built a friendship and quickly made up for the lack of history by inventing all sorts of adventures together. One of my favorite moments in high school was when the two of us were taking a Spanish class, and we were the two students who had already finished alll the lower level Spanish stuff so we were kind of put into a corner by ourselves to study on our own because they didn’t have a high enough level class for us to take. Because we were always together, we made a lot of noise and had a lot of fun. So the teacher felt she had to separate us. Therefore, we did what any normal duo of friends would do: We invented a sign language that allowed us to communicate from across the room from each other. We learned it quickly and immediately really pissed off the teacher who decided she wasn’t going to win this battle, so she let us sit next to each other again and never tried to separate us again.

A few years later, after graduation, I joined the Army and Ken joined the Air Force. At one point, we were both in Germany at the same time, so I decided to hop into my Volkswagon Scirroco (sic), pick up Ken and drive the two of us to Paris, France. It was a wild, fun adventure that involved some young girl we found to help us find a hotel (because neither of us could speak French) who the hotel owner thought was a prostitute because she was negotiating the room for two American GIs (and then left with a smile right after she secured us the room, which caused the old woman working the hotel to suddenly realize she had played the wrong cards in her assumptions).

That was pretty much our last get together. Ken ended up being accepted to the Air Force Academy and is a colonel today, probably going to be a general one of these days. I wish him well, but I regret that our friendship faded and we really don’t talk any more.

Strangely enough, both Roland and Ken have connected with me through Facebook, so every now and then I see what’s going on in their lives, which when I think about it is actually kind of sad because at one time I was very close to both of them, and like that one hit wonder song “now they’re just somebody that I used to know”.

Weirdly enough, when I made contact with them on Facebook, I immediately had this feeling that I had found a long, lost friend and then things were going to be great again. And we rarely even communicate, which forces the “You Can’t Go Home Again” by Thomas Wolfe to play through in my head (which is funny because it’s probably one of the most often quoted titles of a book that people have never actually read themselves, so when they pretend to have read it, I always say “Stop Twampling!” just to see if there’s a reaction, which when there’s none I know they’re bullshitting me about having read it). Wolfe’s idea is somewhat true, and you never really understand it until the events play out that show you how true it really is. I read that book a decade or so ago, yet until I made contact with those two former friends, I never made the connection to what he was truly saying.

Why Social Networking Never Really Worked For Me

Social Networking, Writing, , , , ,

I know this is going to sound a bit strange, considering the amount of time I put into social networking sites, and the amount of energy that I expend actually working with them, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I’ve never been a fan of social networking sites. And it’s not because of reasons you might suspect.

You see, part of the appeal of a social networking site is that you can revisit the past by contacting people you used to know and get reacquainted with them. And that’s great. I’ve run across a lot of people I’ve known over the years, hooked back up with them on social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, and it’s been great. However, there’s been a sinister underbelly to this whole thing as well. And I suspect it’s one of those things that really only affects me more than anyone else. Let me explain.

For years, I have had great relationships with a lot of people, relationships that I have valued greatly. But it’s only through the use of social networking that I began to suspect that quite a few of those relationships were quite one-sided, in that I think I may have been the only one to actually have thought them to be as significant as they really were.

An example: When I was a young kid, I had a friend in fourth or fifth grade who gave me a stuffed animal who has been with me practically my entire life. At the time, that stuffed animal was pretty significant to her, and a friend of mine and I used to play catch with him in class. And at one point, I guess he became even more significant to me because she gave him to me, and I thought that was such a thoughtful gesture. Over the years, I remembered her name, mainly because she gave me that stuffed animal. And that little guy and I have been through a lot together. I went into the Army, and he went in with me. Other soldiers used to call him Lieutenant Elmer, and there was a time when I tossed him out to little kids to play with, as a sort of “get to know us as good people, not just occupiers in green uniforms” and they played with Elmer, throwing him around kind of like my friend and I had done in fourth and fifth grade. Like I said, that little stuffed animal has been with me for nearly forty years, and he’s seen more of the world than most other people ever will. And he may have had a serious impact on the lives of people who experienced his friendly stuffed ways.

But years later, when I made contact with the person who gave me that stuffed animal, her response when I mentioned I still had him nearly floored me. I got the impression she didn’t even remember him. And those memories of the connection that we had back then, shared over that little green frog who has touched so many lives, were forever tainted.

This same phenomenon has radiated also through other relationships I have had as well. There are a number of people I have known through the years who don’t seem to remember our relationships as fondly as I have. So when I went to contact them, after finding them through some search algorithm that Facebook or whatever site I was using used, I realized that they had almost completely different memories of our special times together. In some cases, they didn’t even accept friend requests, which gave me the impression that not only did they think back fondly on our wonderful times together, but they may not have remembered them at all.

Memories are like that, in that not always do both people remember an event the same way. I have a former best friend of mine who I actually went through a lot of work to find again through a social networking site. When I finally found him, it was a ho hum connection, which meant that no matter how fondly I remember our great adventures together, time destroyed the real bonds of friendship. Like Wolfe’s book warns us, sometimes you can’t go home again, no matter how much you long for how great home was at one point in time.

That’s what social networking has shown me, and it hasn’t been the experience I hoped to have. Sometimes, I think it might have been better to keep some of those past relationships in memory where that shared fondness still existed, never to be replaced by the reality that that person I would have done anything to be with a few more seconds longer in that relationship we once shared hasn’t spent one instant thinking about us since we parted ways.

What’s with all of the Spam Comments on WordPress Blogs?

Business, Social Networking, Writing, , , , ,

Sometiimes you have to back up your words

For those of you who are reading this through an RSS reader or because it was imported from the original blog, you might not understand the concept of this post, but it’s getting to the point where I really have to say something. I have a WordPress-themed blog, where I have taken a great deal of work to configure the blog itself. It’s not your average thrown together blog, mainly because that’s how I designed it. But one of the things I’ve noticed is that no matter what I do, I can’t stop from getting hundreds of spam messages a day. And they’re ridiculous, too. I have yet to figure out WHY, and it drives me freaking nuts.

I get comments like this: “You’re definitely on the right track with this issue, and I read this blog every day because not too many people can deal with an issue like this one like you do.” Now, on the surface, you’d think, wow, someone reads my blog and agrees with me. But they don’t. They don’t read my blog, AND they don’t agree with me. Instead, they somehow spider into my blog and send random shitty comments that are generic in nature, meaning absolutely nothing whatsoever. Which causes me to have to go through and delete HUNDREDS of comments a day that are all stupid, ridiculous, and a waste of time.

Another one: “I love your WordPress theme for your blog. Did you do it yourself? Can you give me some hints on how to design my own?” In the beginning, when I received the first of 300 of these, I actually believed this was a sincere question from someone. But again, you have to focus on the generic level of the comment to realize this person is sending out these questions to EVERYONE who has a WordPress themed blog. Why they do it? I don’t know. They’re probably selling some stupid piece of shit spam thing that no one is EVER going to buy, but they’re convinced if they keep spamming people with their garbage, they will eventually get someone so stupid to respond that that person will also be anxious to give them money for ridiculous crap. Or maybe they’re trying to hack systems. I don’t know. I don’t really care. I just wish they’d stop.

Now, I’ll add this as well. Every time I make a comment like this, someone thinks he or she is inventive and sends me a generic response as a joke. Well, please don’t. It gets deleted with the rest of them because if it sounds remotely like one of these comments, I go at warp speed and delete them all. Which means, if you thought you were being clever, no one will ever know. I don’t say this to sound mean or uncaring; it’s just you don’t realize the magnitude of this problem. It is so out of control that I devote zero time to dealing with it as humor.

The problem with this is that I am pretty sure there are actually people who do comment on my posts and actually read what I have to say. This makes it that much harder to connect with them, and I really do want to connect with the people who read what I have to write. So, it would not surprise me if real comments are being thrown into my spam filter and deleted with the hundreds of others per day. I wish that wouldn’t happen, but what can I do?

Anyway, back to what I’ve tried saying before. If you’re really interested in communicating with me, PLEASE, and I emphasize PLEASE, make your comment have relevance to the particular post you’re responding to. Avoid being generic. If I post about Smallville, please talk about Smallville in your comment. If it’s about writing, please respond about something that has something to do with the topic of writing I was discussing. THAT will get a conversation going, and I’d LOVE to talk to you. It’s almost to the point where I’m thinking of just removing the comment feature completely because of how useless it’s been so far and how much spam I have to filter out of it on a daily basis.