The Unabomber and Punky Brewster

Two historic events have been in the news recently.  These feel incongruously tied...

The 20th anniversary of the arrest of Ted Kaczynski (AKA The Unabomber) is coming on April 3.  Yahoo! News has published a number of stories about Ted, mostly about his life and writings in prison.  Much of this reporting has been well worth reading.  Ted Kaczynski's life's work in writing is being preserved at the University of Michigan, where Ted earned his PhD in Mathematics.  As far as serial killers go, Ted has to be one of the more fascinating and enigmatic characters.  It is much harder seeing the writing of Jeffry Dahmer being preserved in perpetuity by an academic institution.
I was in college when The Unabomber's Manifesto was published in 1995.  The internet was in its infancy at the time, but it was available online and I downloaded and read it in entirety.  I've tried more recently to read it and its repetitiveness made it hard to complete.  Or perhaps my attention span is now shorter than it once was.
I had graduated by the time Ted was arrested in 1996, but was still fascinated by the story of the Unabomber.  What I found most compelling about him was that, while his methods were madness, his message was hard to argue against.  I've met a few PhD's who I struggled to understand how they got their degrees, but good schools like UofM don't typically just hand them out and, it was easy to see Ted's intelligence.  Still, one must ignore the bombings to think truly think this.
And that makes his message harder to take seriously.  How a few random bombings, often against bit players in technology, will affect any real change is, frankly, a really dumb idea.  It did get his Manifesto published, but the New York Times likely did that to sell more newspapers over any other reason.
One other fascinating aspect of Ted's life was that not only did he believe and espouse the dangers of modern technological society, but he lived what he believed in a small cabin without electricity or running water in Montana.  It is much easier to write about the destruction of the world, Al Gore style, finger-wagging and living a very comfortable existence.
A few years after his arrest and conviction, OFF! Magazine published Ship of Fools by Ted Kaczynski.  I heard a blurb about this on NPR and wrote the magazine editor for a copy, which I still have.  This led to a short correspondence with the magazine's editor, Tim Lapietra.  I continued to get OFF! for a few years, giving me insight into the fringe left of American society - a scary place indeed.  I wish I could find Tim's final editorial from the magazine as he made some personal observations of the fringe left and what it was really preaching.

And 10 years before Ted was arrested, while the Unabomber was bombing computer store owners, the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up over coastal Florida - the other historic event in the news this week.

I can vividly recall the first space shuttle launch in 1981.  I was riveted to the idea of, not a rocket, but of a spaceship blasting off and returning to earth to be reused.  The space shuttle was infinitely more cool than a rocket.  I even had an Estes model rocket designed to look like the space shuttle - painted flat white (with house paint), just like the real thing.
By 1986, space shuttle launches were become routine, at best, and maybe even boring.  In order to bring public attention back to the space program, NASA held a contest, American Idol style (long before reality TV invaded), to transform a commoner into an astronaut.  A school teacher, truly "one of us" was chosen.
Our school classroom was not one of the many which watched the doomed space shuttle Challenger launch on January 28, 1986, but it was all the talk at recess.  Being of a certain age when things blowing up is cool, the initial reaction of many of us was, "Gosh, it is a spaceship, don't they blow up all the time?"
Being probably too old for  the TV show Punky Brewster, I'm slightly embarrassed to still remember the episode post-Challenger that dealt with the Challenger destruction.  Why this memory is stuck in my mind almost as vividly as the actual destruction of the space shuttle is yet another mystery of the feeble mind.  We are not in complete control of our memories!

Space shuttle launches continued after a hiatus, with new o-rings.  Despite Punky Brewster, the astronauts still must have been reminded of that old joke during prelaunch readiness that, "this thing was built by the lowest bid!"
Manned space missions are even more boring now than they were in 1986.  After the 2003 Columbia destruction on reentry into the Earth's atmosphere (Don't make spaceships out of Nerf!), the majority of time in space was spent making sure the shuttles survived launch with a few minutes to look at an ant farm sent into space by a grade school in Topeka, Kansas.
Unmanned missions continue to provide much more data, and excitement, at a fraction of the cost and risk.  Mars Curiosity and Rover provided real data and vivid images long after they were expected to die a quiet death on the surface of an alien planet - something impossible with a manned mission.
Meanwhile, manned missions are now using Soviet Soyuz technology derived from the 1960's to put humans in the International Space Station.

And maybe that is where the connection between Ted Kaczynski and the Challenger destruction actually do come together.  The Unabomber was railing against the technological destruction of humanity and society, while the Challenger brought this to life with horribly tragic and visible consequences.  And now we're reduced to using cold war (ancient, but still probably unacceptable to the Unabomber) technology to put humans into space, to accomplish things of questionable value relative to what modern automation and robotics can do.
So while Ted's message against nearly all technology is impossible to live - not many of us want to live in shacks in the woods, perhaps a Luddite can help us think about what technology can, and should be used for.  And more importantly, an Atavist can help us think about what it should not.

Stories I Tell Myself

A short time ago, I was complaining about the lack of winter having the effect of prolonging 2015.  The 10th day of the year came with winter in full force.  Temperature dropping all day.  Wind howling all day.  So brutal that only a short dog walk was tolerable.  With a planned plumbing project apparently not needed, I sat down to read Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F Thompson.

I've read much of what Hunter S Thompson has written in book form, so when I saw on a website somewhere a reference to the book written by Juan, his son, I immediately requested it from the library.  It was listed as "In Cataloging" which often means a long wait, but it was available within a day.  I originally planned to read this on an upcoming trip, and I rarely sit down and read an entire book in one sitting.  But I did so with Stories I Tell Myself on that frozen windy day.

The book tells the story of Juan growing up in the shadow of his father.  I was sort of expecting something along the line of  Agusten Burrough's Running with Scissors, but Juan's growing up was substantially more normal than that.  If I were to compare it to another Burrough's book, it is almost closer to A Wolf at the Table, but not with the same level of overt brutality.  Largely, it sounded as if Juan's youth was grounded much more in his mother, with his father a figure to be feared.  After his parent's divorce, I read between the lines that there were several years with minimal contact between Hunter and Juan.  Juan alludes to this, but doesn't come right out and say it.
Juan also goes out of his was several times in the book to point out that he is describing things from his memory and that his memory may be incomplete or possibly erroneous.  This is part of the narrative that runs through the book, and I found it interesting as also something I've become increasingly aware of.

The most prominent theme in the book is one of the relationship between fathers and sons.  This almost seems to be more important at some points than the fact that Juan's father is the famous and eccentric Hunter S Thompson.  Still, after reading books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Screwjack, growing up with Hunter does have aspects and events that might be expected.
It was somewhat shocking some of the other figures who appear in the book:  Jimmy Buffet, Kieth Richards, John Kerry - if more than eccentric, Hunter certainly had a diverse A-List crowd he moved in.
Sometimes the right book comes along at the right time and Stories I Tell Myself was one of those.  As my dad's recent death has had me pondering my relationship with him over the years, Juan's book allowed for a different perspective and some introspection.  Not that my dad, although he did work in the book publishing industry, should be compared to Hunter as this would be like trying to compare peacocks and robins, or maybe peacocks and suspension bridges.

The other thread running through the book is the overall theme of growing up.  All of the painful moments of awkwardness, confusion, alienation, childhood difficulties are laid bare.  This is more poignant as Juan appears to be somewhat clingy to his mother and quite an introvert.
Like most of us, Juan eventually finds his own life and ends up surprisingly normal, even somewhat boring at the end of the book.

There was one detail of the book I found somewhat maddening.  Juan first goes to college at Tufts and writes about being lonely and quite unhappy there.  Transferring to Colorado University and spending a year in England suites him better before returning to the US to finish college.  He writes, "Upon my return to Boulder for the first of my two senior years, I declared English literature my major."  And on the next page he graduates.  This implies graduation from CU in Boulder, but his bio states he graduated from Tufts.  So either he transferred back to where he was previously miserable, or his bio is wrong.  Either way, something is missing either in the story here, or in the editing.  While a minor detail, I find this hard not to perseverate on.

There are a few revelations about Hunter I found surprising as I read the 272 pages.
First, I was surprised at the level of money issues he faced.  It reads like this was mostly self-induced, as it often is.  But I would have thought that a famous writer who had sold millions of books could endure poor money habits without as much effect as was eluded to in the book.  More than anything, this probably supports the notion that no matter how successful a person is, living at the end of means is dangerous.
The other revelation was Hunter's relationship with drugs and alcohol.  I had always assumed that his consumption of drugs and alcohol was somewhat exaggerated as part of the persona that sold his wares.  Peter Whitmer's unauthorized biography When the Going Gets Weird makes mention of health issues early in his life from overindulgence, and I inferred from this that as he aged, he was more careful - or possibly he needed to be more careful.  Apparently, overindulgence in both alcohol and cocaine was a daily occurrence and it is somewhat surprising that Hunter lived as long as he did.  Still, the effects of this debaucherous lifestyle become clear through the end of the book and the end of Hunter's life.

The book ends with a narrative around Hunter's ultimate suicide and final, spectacular sendoff.

The book was a good read and a different take on an interesting man.  As with much of HST's writing, it wasn't always clear if the main thrust of the book was about Juan, or Hunter.  I'll end, not with a something about Juan Thompson or Hunter Thompson, both of which would be easy, but I'll end with a quote from Peter Hamill's A Drinking Life.  Because while Juan's story is distinctive as the only son of an eccentric, gonzo father, the larger story isn't unique - but is the same story experienced through history of growing up and becoming an individual separate from where anyone came from.

I was myself now, for better or worse.  I was forever Billy Hamill's son, but I did not want to be the next edition of Billy Hamill.  He had his life and I had mine.  And if there were patterns, endless repetitions, cycles of family history, if my father was the result of his father and his father's father, on back through the generations into the Irish fogs, I could no longer accept any notion of predestination.

2015: Saudade

Somewhere around late August, too early, I started looking for the end of 2015.  Not that 2015 was a bad year ... overall.  I didn't use my vacation time too well, but that which was used appropriately, I enjoyed.  Planned trips worked out and the impromptu ones were a brief hoot.  Some longer term issues at work have (largely) improved, and my work hours allow me to leave when I want more often.
I may have even been pushing for the end of the year, but it was like pushing on a rope; time will pass at its own rate.  Never faster, never slower.

"Certainly a measure of this reactionary navel-noodling can be attributed to the standard metaphorical casting of autumn as the season when winter's deathly breath first fogs your rose-colored glasses, but on a more fundamental level I think it has to do with the reaping of gardens and good intentions, both of which tend to come in well below spring's predictions." 

Michael Perry (Truck - A Love Story)

Christmas came with the winter solstice behind it and the new calendar waiting to be hung on the wall, but Christmas morning woke up to 50 degrees after a Christmas Eve bike ride warm enough to wear shorts.  

On a rational level, I enjoyed the uncharacteristically warm December; my heating bill certainly has.  The warm weather made for more bike riding and some of the most comfortable deer hunting I've had.  Yet, the lack of winter was bringing with it a sense of prolonging a year that needed to end, the warm weather behaving as a nagging sense that something is unfinished, the epoch won't advance until some beastie somewhere is set free.

For the fourth year, I've time lapsed daily pictures of my back yard.  I very likely have the most photographed back yard in the township.  Proof that the year started and is over.

Bronnie Ware's Top Five Regrets of the Dying is repeated all over, so it isn't included here.  But it is worth rereading occasionally.  The last regret is one that seems to request attention after 2015.  Happiness is a choice.  It sounds so easy, and it probably can be.

There are already things to look forward to early in 2016.  An annual trip south is actually quite close.  A trip west, very far west, to scrawl a few difficult check marks on of the bucket list is being planned.

Since Christmas, winter does seem like it may have arrived.  With winter winds and daily highs nearer freezing, the calendar can be changed.  I'm not sure if the beastie has been slain or set free; only time will tell.

Looking back over the four years of time lapsed video brings with it a sense of hope.  Winter, in some form, will always come.  Winter will relent to spring, bringing green and good intentions.  Summer will bring the deliciousness of muggy mornings and evening walks watching the Queen Anne's lace and chicory grow.  Fall will bring the hopefulness of the treestands.  And winter will come, yet again, with the right mindset, accompanied by happy reflection since happiness is a choice.

Thanks for everything.