Second Letter to L.S.

College years. We were not on good terms.

The promised letter…

The book I have in mind. Portrait of an Archetypal Baby Boomer. You pick the title. Doesn’t have to be nice. You don’t have to like me. I have all (or many) of the faults of my generation, but I have also been a conscious witness of our journey through the destruction of modern civilization. Plus, I have been a writing pioneer, pointing the way toward a kind of expanded human intelligence that will ultimately transcend this sick and dangerous preoccupation with AI.

Here’s my obligatory letter résumé of my life.

Which doesn’t begin to tell the tale.

Imagine this. If you were going to attempt a fictional iconic portrait of the Baby Boom generation, what might you dream up as a starting point for a narrative that would cover everything? A rural birthplace less than an hour from the nation’s birthplace but with its own documented roots to the Revolution, including its own Tea Party and game-changing local combat with elite British troops. A birthplace that would also be almost impossibly diverse, ranging from NY 400 society elites to a frozen-in-time colonial village just a mile from the impoverished shadow village where the church Harriet Tubbs used as her anchor for the NJ stop on the Underground Railroad was born. Then you pick your point of focus, a guy from a family with generations of American combat experience — from Revolution to Civil War to WWI, and WWII — who will grow up to come of age at the exact cusp of the difference between Baby Boomers who are old enough to be draftable for Vietnam and young enough to escape that draft. A guy with two sets of living grandparents, one from Philadelphia commercial aristocracy sans trust funds, one from the real Ohio part of Ohio, both of whom played a major role in his upbringing. What I’m conveying here is a background so absolutely symbolic that it wouldn’t be believable as a novel, except that it’s the truth, and even more iconic than that because it was populated by so many larger than life characters.

The guy, the boy in the chair in the library who told his parents at the age of seven he was going to be a racecar driver or an author, went on to participate uniquely in almost all the major events of the times he was born into. He went on to write about all of it, with proof of all of it, and somehow contrived to succeed as spectacularly as he also spectacularly crashed and burned, thus experiencing the real “diversity” today’s enemies of the United States think they can preach to the masses about.

The boy in the chair was a born genius, adventurer, warrior, and writer. He did a lot of rich boy things, a lot of loser screwup things, and somehow he managed to be intimately involved in all kinds of major American transformational experiences, knowing the whole time that his real job was witnessing and understanding it all.

In my highly unusual life, things have always happened somehow out of order, as if that was part of the lesson, the utter defeat of conventional logic about cause and effect. If I weren’t an alcoholic since my first drink at 15, for example, I would be dead, a lawyer suicide because everybody always, without exception, wanted me to go to law school, the sickening disease that consumed so many of the best (potential) minds of the Baby Boom generation. From the beginning, everyone has always known I was special, and what made it worse was that I sensed it too, so that over the years of my striving for approval and forgiveness for being different, the more or less uniform response was to deny me explicit approval while implicitly using my specialness for their own purposes. I became early on a power behind multiple thrones, all of whom hid me from their own colleagues. I was the “secret sauce” that made better-than-average people more successful than they would ever have been otherwise.

In return I got to be a player in the computer/microprocessor revolution, the rebuilding of American manufacturing through JIT and SPC technology, the globalization of American industry, and, for my own purposes a redefinition of the scope and toolset available to creative writers in pursuit of literary breakthroughs. I also had life experiences that dug more deeply into what would prove that this was actually a modest summary.

If you read other posts at this website, you will see the scrabbly beach I have washed up on. I am back to the state I spent most of my youth in, alone. My wife is 80, hard of hearing, memory challenged, and so much a fighter that she flares at me all the time anymore and thinks all this writing I do has become uninteresting and an annoyance because she has to read it on my iPad, which makes her neck hurt.

I’ve been through this kind of decline before. I don’t resent it or her. Lost both grandmas and my mother the same way. It’s just that in my solitude, with no one to talk to anymore, I feel the need to do what I can to keep my creative output from being lost upon my death. By linking my writing fate to technology in the way I have, death by disk failure has always been a likely outcome, but I knew that coming in. I have 22 books in some sort of published existence, but much of what I do will expire when I can no longer be here to pay Internet website fees.

What can I tell you? I’m supposed to be here still. When I was ten, I survived a hurricane at sea in the Atlantic Ocean on the Leonardo da Vinci, sister ship of the Andrea Doria, while the crew panicked and all the glassware onboard shattered. I stared into Nietzsche’s abyss from the promenade deck while my family camped on the floor of the main lounge. Nietzsche was right. The abyss stared back at me. Within the week I had been kissed by a bistro singer on the Riviera who sang Piaf songs and saw that I was in love with her, so I shook my head at the abyss and have never been afraid of death since.

I’ve also seen a lot of famous and important people I have ephemeral anecdotes about. In other words I can prove the privilege in my life, even the buried portents. The very same day I sold my over-the-transom partial manuscript of The Boomer Bible for $25,000 I saw Isaac Asimov through the window of my taxicab, less than six inches from my face. Life is like that for me. Since I never speak to famous people, there are no autograph revenues or confirmations available. But I can tell you that my successor as president of Harvard’s Phoenix SK Final Club disgraced (immortalized) himself by standing on a chair in black tie at the Hasty Pudding Society and shouting this while Gloria Steinem processioned down the aisle to claim the first ever ‘Person of the Year’ Award: “What a piece of ass!”

True. In that I was there for her visit.

[I know you won’t reproduce any of this elsewhere, but the glamorous dude who stood on the chair was one of my guaranteed Most Likely to Succeeds at Harvard. Black Irish, pale blue eyes and black hair over white white skin, and an Applied Math major who got disciplined by campus cops when he played Hendrix’s ‘Along the Watchtower’ at full volume for me in his suite at the ultra-modern skyscraper Leverett House. Looked him up a few years back. As I did others. With a couple repulsive exceptions, the ones I looked up were all CFOs. Including the guy who stood on the chair and took my place at the PSK:

]

Forgot to tell you I didn’t give up on the racecar prediction I made as a boy of seven. I’ve driven so much stuff at speed I don’t want to bore you with it. Nearly lost my life a few times doing it. Think you need to spend some time at my YouTube Channel, which doesn’t have it all (extemporaneous and readings behind selfies), but that’s why you get to record interviews with me.

Told you I was archetypal. I’ve been to 5 continents and 30 states (lived in 5), and yet am actually truly from somewhere. [Link] 

I’ve known genuine heroes, male and female, evil men and women, and I can tell you exactly where I was when JFK got assassinated, Oswald got murdered, RFK and MLK got assassinated, the ‘68 Democrat Convention dissolved into a bloody riot, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Cronkite declared the Vietnam War “lost”,  Ronald Reagan made ‘The Speech,’ and Nixon resigned over Watergate. Thinking you can’t do that.

Like, you weren’t there when the drugs came in. Which wasn’t a trickle. It was a wave. My freshman year at Mercersburg, five boys were expelled for sneaking out of a performance of La Bohème in DC to go drinking. By senior year, two whole dormitories were drug dens, steeped in the smell of pot. Knock on a door, it opened to a bedspread lobby construct, designed to give roomies enough time to hide the evidence and spray the room with deodorant. Five guys dead from drugs within a year of my graduation.

And I was there when it became a “movement.” I wrote it down then, And I have been fighting it ever since. You can’t know. Nobody will know. Unless a comparative youngster like you tells them. 

No prig. I’ve been to five Stones concerts. The first time, at Philly’s Spectrum, I was wearing my Dad’s Flying Skull squadron jacket and got approached by kids wanting to buy LSD. I’d stopped looking Harvard by then, Later, I used the BeeGees for cover at the Miami airport when I was sneaking $10K in my boot-chained boot back into the U.S. for no good reason. The customs guy waved them on and sat down on the conveyor belt for a chat with me. It wasn’t drug money I was smuggling. It was personal getaway money I was bringing back in to throw away on a beautiful girl some Ohio psychic had told me was a lingering karma debt. More realistically, she really was beautiful. Thus armored, I held off the Customs agent. He didn’t like me, but we were even on that count. My respiration never increased, what he was looking for. I was already on the downbound train.

Concerts? I’ve also seen Billy Joel, It’s a Beautiful Day, Cat Stevens, Aerosmith, Alabama, Frank Sinatra, Tanya Tucker, in addition to Tom Waits. Some of these stories are connected. All have pungent context.

I also still have memory. I can tell you the names of every girl I ever had a crush on, the make and model year of every American muscle car and British sports car, and the names and uniform numbers of every player on the 1964 and 1980 Philadelphia Phillies teams. 

I have a wardrobe to die for. Dating back to my consultant uniform. Charcoal gray bespoke Brooks Bros. suits, high-count custom white Egyptian cotton shirts, silver Countess Mara ties, and black cap-toe Oxford shoes. And a Burberry that once cost me $450 and now goes for $2,500, along with the watches, gloves, and white silk mufflers that never succeeded in replacing the one my Dad had made from the parachute he he never used from his fighter plane. All of which I wear exactly none of. Just tee shirts and sweats. Not even my extensive collection of rebelliously macho cowboy boots and leather jackets. Once a poseur, like all writers, now a dozeur, sliding into silence.

But I have made breakthroughs in writing none of you are prepared to deal with. 

You’d need to study what I do, not just with words but graphically and organizationally. Not sure you’re up to it. What I’m betting on is that deep perseverant part of you you’re not even sure is there. It is. My only doubt is whether that’s enough…