Old Notes I

It’s hard for me to believe 2025 is already sliding into fall. The leaves are starting to turn — the trees are ending their annual breath. Some geese are heading south — unmistakable signs that winter is coming. There’s been a chill in the air.

Another orbit around our star, another year torn from the calendar. For an old farts like me, it pulls my thoughts backwards through all those discarded calendar pages.

The usual stream of the new pushed aside a pair of ancient note piles (mid-sized spiral-bound notebooks, actually) that date back to college and high school. It’s time to let the new abide a bit and dig up these time capsules (so I can at long last throw away those agèd notebooks).

And, being a good bit over 40 years old, they are agèd. They sport an embarrassing relic of the era and my youth. To wit, they’re covered with stickers, both on the front:

And on the back:

Stickers fill the inside covers, too. Some are just humorous; some are reflections of me at the time (and, I suppose, to some extent still). Full disclosure, I’m still a little sticker happy, though I have more restraint these days. And as an adult, I don’t get many stickers to play with.

Anyway, on with the show, starting with the “stories” notebook. These are notes from back when I still had thoughts about being a fiction writer. So, there are a lot of story hooks or ideas, but also notes about thoughts I wanted to pursue.

Starting with:

“Now” is the fundamental unit of time like one is the fundamental unit of counting. The counting numbers are to math what the alphabet is to language.

An interesting metaphor, but I don’t think it has legs. There is some element of truth to the notion that we personally measure time as a string of “now” moments.

So hard to forget… VW buses, redheads, lemon-juice and distilled water, the desert, tall supple ladies, Mill Creek lotion and Rachel Perry, …

Oof. Just a memory of a grab at romance. Rachel Perry, if memory serves, sold natural cosmetics. Likewise Mill Creek, I think. The redhead in question was a “hippie chick”, but it never worked out for us.

Driver Daniel. Point of life is to drive. (Future, a little, when all world is like L.A.)

I lived in Los Angeles at the time and actually loved driving on the freeway. Good thing, because both jobs I had, one after the other, involved considerable driving. Pickup and delivery in the first case, and driving to accounts to fix their machines in the other.

I have seen some movies featuring characters who live to drive, but not so much the “driver’s world” envisioned in the note. There was a 2007 episode of Doctor Who that did, though.

What if video games were a government thing for training future space warriors?

The Last Starfighter came out in 1984, but I’m pretty sure this note predates that (and in the movie it was aliens and a specific game, if I recall).

PAM – Portable Analysis Module?

OSCAR, FRED – ??

POWER UP; VOCAL ID

USER INTERFACE SYSTEM (UIS)

UIS grows to the owner and reflects his personality and approach, his logic and procedures. OSCAR is proud of his advanced specs and manages to work them into most conversations.

A story about a robot, obviously, but not much of a seed.

Weird noise on ground wire; ultra high frequency.

The rest of the note (in red felt tip pen, no less) is so incoherent I won’t bother including it. I have no idea what it means. I think the idea was that a top-notch audio tech notices a weird signal in the ground line of some system and, in tracing it down, discovers something wonderful or awful or horrific. Dealer’s choice.

The Computer Tech story (carries card). Tie-in to space pilot holograms. Mining for crystals machine. Synthetic crystal manufacture. M/T devices.

The one idea I ever had for a series concerned an expert tech for hire. The kind you call when your intelligent machines lose their minds. Each novel would be an adventure dealing with some situation. But I could never come up with situations that didn’t seem derivative or just lame. (M/T = matter transmission)

Space piloting as driving on a road. Holographic simulation.

Humanity hasn’t grokked space yet, but the hyperspeed computer that handles FTL needs conceptual input to navigate. So, it presents a highway metaphor to the human pilot.

“Ultimately, it was a matter of economics. It wasn’t all that difficult to write a navigation program. It was just that the Horigan Effect device was smaller and used much less power.

“Still, it was ironic that it was the mind of man that lead him through space. It took surprisingly little gear to stimulate a pilot’s mind to seem like it was driving on a freeway.”

Still got my mind on freeways. And I’m obviously channeling a little bit of Dune here in terms of space navigation difficulties. Speaking of freeways:

Freeway traffic jam as life allegory.

Couple in car (thread along road) see things that cause reactions and self-examination.

SF?

On the same page, another one about driving:

He was born in the car. He took over from his parents. He meets someone in the traffic jam, they have kids. (What happens to her car? Combined?)

They stop for scenery, gas, food, etc. Gas imported from Jupiter and Saturn (cheap). Whole world covered by huge roads. Hardly anyone owns land — some prejudice against those who don’t.

Sounds vaguely like Snowpiercer, maybe? Don’t know, never saw it.

Very modern passion play. Jesus is very real, realistic, and practical.

The musical Jesus Christ Superstar was popular back then (a great album, musical, and movie).

Undiscovered primates living in 1981 alone with no knowledge of anything beyond their world. But they’re smart and evolved to around 1600s technology or so.

And then stuff happens.

Scientific experiment goes wrong and scrambles timelines.

That could be a fun one to play with.

Musician becomes mayor of L.A. He is ruthless in getting the city together.

“The mayor opened with a few old-time rock-and-roll tunes from the early 80s.”

A story idea based on that single line about opening with a few tunes. I just loved the sound of it as an opening line. It sets up a dissonance for the story to resolve (ideally, in some sort of “final chord”).

Band vs Symphony. People’s music vs intellectual music. Age at rock concerts versus at classical music concerts. Modern music studios vs orchestral settings.

Can you say “reverse music snob”? I learned to like classical music, but I still consign it to background or sleeping. Thing is, if Bach or Mozart were around today, they’d be writing very different music than they did.

But then, my parent’s relationship with classical music was ultimately the same as mine with rock. For a long time, I never understood how they (or anyone) could hear a few bars of a symphony and identify it. A power utterly beyond me. As they said about rock, “it all sounds the same”.

I realized I have that power with my music. There are bands I can identify just from their sound (Boston, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, Pink Floyd, many others). It really is about ear training just like scent training makes one more aware of scents.

One the same page as the last note:

Notice how you can listen to a piece of music over and over? But not a movie or book? (Poetry exception.) Right brain/left brain thing?

No to that last. The left brain/right brain thing is mostly myth. But the general observation has stuck with me. Music and poetry don’t get old with repetition the was narrative works do. We may have a few cherished books or movies we revisit repeatedly, but I know many who find the idea of rereading foreign. Certainly, most movies are one-and-done (at least for a span likely measured in years).

The Witch. Combats evil forces.

Man (or group) who absorbs evil in the world. Works by day.

Those might be separate notes. The second line is at the bottom of the page. The first line is pretty generic and generally the plot of any “good witch” story.

The last note in the stories notebook:

Digital vs Analog

Shades of gray really can be broken into little steps of yes/no, black/white, 1/0, on/off, cold/hot, existence/absense, Yin/Yang.

The note title is actually “Dig vs Anal”, which is a bit misleading. The note’s content is true as far as it goes, but my understanding of digital and analog has evolved to the point I no longer agree with “really can be broken into little steps”. I think something is inevitably lost in the process.

So, that’s the end of that notebook. Into the trash it goes. It joins the rest of the 3.5″ floppies that I didn’t toss back when I tossed all the never-to-be-used blanks:

Now I’ve thrown away all the 3.5″ floppies that had data on them. So many carefully preserved bits trashed. It’s a weird feeling to increase entropy like that.

I think that’ll do it for today. Next time (hopefully tomorrow, but definitely soon), I’ll reveal my youthful attempts at song-writing (which never got lyrically further than mostly callow idea lines).

Dear Reader: You’re not expected to find any of this interesting — this is just part of my self-documentation project. But if you do find a nugget of value, please help yourself. Everything here, as always, is up for grabs. I’m an old-timer with the (bad?) attitude that, if it’s on the internet, then it’s public domain. You post it, you lose it.

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Stay sane, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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