On the other hand, don’t wallow hopelessly in the bygone, or run into the past to escape the here-and-now. The lasting stuff will persist or offer new revelations. Add outsider status, loner status, and a dash of Neitzsche.īut you know, it’s all just “stuff.” On one hand, yes - archive the past, and reconsider it from time to time to assess its personal value to you. I suspect this happened to a lot of monster-magazine generation kids, which is one way monster mythology “became” our substitute for religion: Fixed times for worship (per TV Guide) knowledge of chapter-and-verse (our gospel) secret language ( “melodrama” meant “monster movie”) vampire rules and werewolf rules you dutifully memorized whether they made any sense or not. I couldn’t wait to get back to my room, my books, my cave. When the law doesn’t vindicate them, when the cops don’t save them, when God-or-whomever doesn’t straighten everything out for them, they spend their lives perpetually disappointed, and a lot of times you discover these are the people who peaked in high school and remember those days with misty yearning. Their recreation becomes complaining about everything, and how their life is a living hell, and oh-if-only. Those people I pity (the few times I think about them) because they’ve never been touched or moved by something magical, nor are they likely to be as they ossify in their beliefs. Some cherished things from childhood are indefensible - we all have ‘em - and some are the sort of thing that make the so-called “grownups” around us shake their heads sadly, prescribe medication, and glibly state that we’ll never face adult responsibilities.
But his interests were always practical, not fanciful - on the order of trade skills.ĭJS: As with a lot of things, it depends on what flies through your “kid window” when it’s open at a certain age. But he was the perfect guy to ask, “If I wanted a thing to do this, how would you do it?” He always had an answer. My first application of this knowledge was to open up a TV set and figure out how to run wires from the speaker, splice them to a jack, and plug that into a tape recorder so I could make audio tapes of monster movies and yeah, Outer Limits episodes. Leo eventually became an electrical engineer, so the credit is his, too, for getting me interested in electronics. I got to observe as he lived through the purgatory of his own high school mating rituals. Thanks to him I took a two-hour drafting lab in high school and got my first set of drafting tools - he bought me a T-square and a drawing board, and I swiped the compasses and such from the high school. Wiring up a TV so you could turn it on from the other side of the room, before remotes. I can’t credit the man enough for influence and encouragement.
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