A speculative mind

  In The Body by Stephen King (which became the movie Stand by Me ), King writes “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 . . . did you?” I first met my friend Richard when I heard a knock on our door. I was 8 years old. We had moved to Salem, Oregon a month or so before, and I had made a friend named Dick. Dick had told me about his other friend, Richard, but I had not yet met him. When I answered the door, Dick was there along with some other kid with strawberry jam stain on his sweatshirt (gross). This other kid was Richard. Dick asked if I wanted to go out and do something with them. I was in the middle of watching a Twilight Zone rerun and I declined. Richard and I were not impressed with each other. He was a jock (as much of a jock as you can be at 8 years old) and I was a nerd. Over the next few weeks, the three of us would occasionally do things together. Richard and I barely tolerated each other. We were just so different, and on top of that...

  For twenty years I was engaged in a project to remap our county. I redrew all 1200 Assessor’s maps from scratch, every lot, and every street. While there were many challenges in this project, probably the biggest one was the mapping of roads. Many of the county roads were created over a hundred years ago. This poses two challenges: 1. Roads tend to move over time. Drivers cut corners eventually moving the roadbed. Also, things like floods and landslides make the road as it existed impassable, so drivers cut new routes around the obstacle, often without any formal action to change the road. 2. Surveying techniques and equipment were not as sophisticated a hundred years ago as they are today. The original survey and formal order that went with it, established the legal location of the road, but it is not uncommon to find errors in the original surveys. In fact, some of the original legal descriptions of the roads are so poorly written that there is no way of determining the locatio...

  I am finding myself on the older side of life, and it occurs to me that there are benefits to being this old: I got to grow up with the Beatles, the Doors, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Mamas and the Papas, Steppenwolf, Heart, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Chuck Mangione, Janice Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Boston, Cat Stevens, Jefferson Airplane/Starship, Herb Alpert, Carole King, The Eagles, and hundreds more. And no Autotune! The soundtrack of my childhood and early life was amazing. I witnessed the civil rights movement, the recognition that we need to treat all people like people. I witnessed the environmental movement, the recognition that we need to take care of our planet. I, along with every other person on the Earth with access to a television, watched men walk on the moon. Live. We watched it collectively in a brief moment of worldwide unity. There was also something communal about regularly scheduled TV broadcasts. Everyone could discuss what the...

  The other day I was watching someone on YouTube react to the movie Die Hard . As John McLain was running around the building trying to get communication with the outside world. The reactor commented, “oh, this was before cell phones. I guess there wouldn’t be a movie if they had cell phones.” As a writer, there is something I have known for a while now. Cell phones ruin everything. If Romeo and Juliette had cell phones, neither of them would have died, but it would have been a much less moving story. I write fiction and sometimes write plays. If I have a plot device that is set on a communication or lack of communication issue, I must think about how to deal with that. Do I want to set it prior to 1990? Do I want to set it in a place that has no cell service? Or do I just change the story? Because cell phones ruin everything! This is generally not a problem when I am writing a science fiction story because hey, I can do whatever I want with technology in science fiction. It bec...