Jack In

Begin with a dead line and the droning tritone bleat of a dial tone. Cut to the squeal and crackle of data-packets over fiber-lines. Fragmented bursts of information, ones and zeroes, resolve into code. Language.

STATUS: NORMAL
ALL SYSTEMS OPTIMAL

A soft pop as a switch flicks and a circuit closes: the sudden 60Hz hum of a live mic, then vox humana:

Welcome back. Welcome to the Heart of Empire.

Communications have been restored here at the all-new House of Fear—have been for some weeks now—but I’ve been too intimidated by the scale of our recent changes to even think of writing.

Am just starting now to get an idea (albeit a piecemeal, kaleidoscopic one) of my life’s new shape: entries over the next few days will begin to map out relevant impressions of that life. Fragmented bursts of information resolve into language. Into pictures. Into categorizable experience.

I am now available for contact at the new address in the sidebar.

I’ll be in touch.

Moving Day.

As of Monday 30 June, I will be losing all e-mail and net access, perhaps for as long as a couple of weeks. Will update when all systems are again Go.

Thank you for your patronage.

Smith and Jones

Heard through the kitchen window the other evening a sound I could not place: a sharp metallic clank at irregular intervals, like the ring of a blacksmith's hammer but too slow—one clank every two or three minutes, the sound obviously far-off but startlingly loud whenever it came.

Slowly it dawned on me that the sound was carrying clear from the ballfields a half-mile away—the ping of aluminum bats on hardballs. Kids playing baseball, on a warm early summer's evening. Perfect.

I have lived in this house for ten years now, and it pleases me that the neighborhood still holds mysteries and surprises for me. That pleasure in no way takes the edge off my keenness to leave, though: I've got a aching for the road, an urge for going.

Soon enough.

...And the Horses of Instruction You Rode In On

Get me—I'm apparently a 19th Century mad visionary and proto-graphic novelist! Rawk!

You are William Blake! Wow. I'm impressed. Not only are you a self-made artist and poet, but you've suddenly become a very trendy guy to like. It's not that we doubt that you have all your marbles, it's just that we're not quite sure what you did with them to come up with those terrifying theological visions. The people of your time were nowhere near as forgiving as that, and all your neighbors thought you were a grade-A nut job. But we love you, so rest happy.

Which Major Romantic Poet Would You Be (if You Were a Major Romantic Poet)?
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(found via Mighty Joe Flyboy, cheers)

Fourteen Things I Know About Her

1. She was my first girlfriend.

2. I never loved her, then, as I should have: I was, at the time, neither equipped nor prepared to do so.

3. In the nine months that we dated, we never slept together.

4. This was my fault.

5. She loved Blue Oyster Cult.

6. Before I knew her, she spent a year in a body-cast to correct a curvature of the spine.

7. She was smarter than I was, in many ways.

8. She was the one who broke off the relationship, if our vague affection could be codified with such a term.

9. She dated, in succession, several members of my loose circle of friends.

10. Thinking of her always left me—not with bitterness, but—with a melancholy sense that I really should have tried harder.

11. I had not seen her in fifteen years, not since an impromptu reunion over a late-night Chinese dinner, in the course of which much was put to rest.

12. She ended up a large-animal veterinarian.

13. She married a photgrapher, and they were happy: they had no children.

14. She died, unexpectedly, in her home, six days ago.

So long, Red.

Jack Fear Doesn't Love Me Anymore

'tother day I had a good long ego-surf, as is my occasional wont: like everybody else, I like to know who's quoting me without permission, and what people are saying about me (more about that later)—but there's more to it than that. While my presence on the Web (however modest) means that the vast majority of the 585 references returned by Google are indeed to me, I'm far more interested in the ones that aren't—in those people with whom I, by dumb luck, happen to share a name—in the obscure connections of fate and chance.

These references to these other people with my name are like an alternate-history novel, or past-life regression exercise—a glimpse at alternate selves, lives lived in parallel. A life as a New Zealander, born 1883: I had a brother named George, in that life, which is just exquisite, considering who gave me my name in this one.

And the odd little patterns, and the puzzle of trying to figure out which hits refer to the same people—this one, for instance: my band and I apparently played the 1953 New Year's Eve Ball at Colston Hall in Bristol, England... and many years later, this notice in the newsletter of Trinity School, a C of E secondary school in Teignmouth, Devon:

We were sorry to say farewell to Jack Fear, who retired at Easter after many years teaching woodwind at Trinity. Jack was very much involved with the early days of the Swing Band and he has always been a tremendous ambassador for the School. We wish him a long and happy retirement.

Same guy? I'd like to think so: wild young bebop Turk settles down and becomes a beloved teacher—it's a bit Mr. Holland's Opus, yeah?

Churches, naturally enough, loom large in my lives: my name's on a plaque in St. Agatha's, at Rudmore, Portsmouth, for dying in World War II: and I'm a parishioner at Trinity Church, (that name again!) in Houghton, Michigan, though apparently I actually live in nearby Bootjack, where I inveigh against gun control in letters to the local newspaper. Ahem.

And I'm a registered New Forest Pony breeder, in Norley Wood, Lymington, Hampshire (where my brand number is 1471), as well as a dinosaur-loving under-eight soccer player from Treorchy Rhondda, South Wales.

That should be lives enough for any man.

Meanwhile, back in this one and only life that I'm a-living, I really have no idea what to say to this, over at Pin's blog, the brilliant Batman Doesn't Love Me Anymore...

The arrival of [someone I know offline] on Barbelith is scaring me.... But then that’s an obvious reaction to have, and what’s far less obvious, and far more dumb, is my reaction to Jack Fear’s reaction to him. The good Mr. Fear, amongst other things, hasn’t bitten his head off. He’s possibly made it all a bit red and sore with his scratchyscratchy beard, but he hasn’t bitten it. I don’t get either from him, instead existing in an emotionally stunted state of pinning [sic]. Frankly, Mr. Fear is just one of those shockingly... something people, and I can’t put my finger on it is about him, or why it rankles me so much that Barber’s getting the attention and I’m not.

Reassurances of affection to Pin, who should hardly need them, as I loves all my children equally—and I did sort of name the protagonist of an unfinished novel for him, after all.

Then there's lovely lovely Andrew Wheeler, writing dismissively in the aftermath of my being banned from The V: when my name came up in a thread about lockouts & gaggings, beloved big-time comics writer Gail Simone asked, "Who is Jack Fear?" To which Mr. Wheeler responded...

I think that's the only name he's known by. He's just some guy, not really remarkable...

Is that irony I smell? (Andrew who?)

...although I think he fancies himself as a righteous firebrand of wisdom and anger.

Fair cop.

He was banned for his frankly rather over-the-top attack on Harry Potter fans.

I blame Gillen.

Or rather, that was the stated reason.

Oh.

Ouch.

Wheeler doesn't love me anymore.

Divine Mercy Sunday

See, that's what I'm talking about.

In other news, my one-man social protest—refusing to get a good night's sleep until international tensions have been ratcheted down from near-apocalyptic levels—continues apace, with no end in sight.

Where Time Itself Was Mad And Far Too Strong

I wish Blogger had a feature to allow you to customize the date on your posts. I mean, it does, to an extent—Thursday, April 17 or 4.17.2003 or even 20030417. Had I my druthers, though, today's post would be headed Maundy Thursday.

When I was in academia, the year moved in a slow march—Fall semester, Spring semester—and so the years went, two by two and one by one: Commencement in May felt like New Year's Day. The business cycle is a nervous waltz—three over four. The Moon moves slow and steady, thin to fat and back again.

For five years I served the Church directly, and gave my life over to the rhythms of the liturgical calendar, the feasts and cycles, the forty- and fifty-day blocks that chart her course, and their peculiar poetry marked my days. Shrovetide, Triduum, Eastertide, Ascension Thursday, Pentecost, Corpus Christi... Septuagaesima, Sexuagaesima, Quinquagaesima... Christ The King is when Winter comes a-howlin' in: Assumption marks high high Summer. Advent, Gaudete, Nativity, Innocents, Holy Family, Epiphany, Presentation: my book of days.

The year since I stepped down as choirmaster has passed in a blur. It's been measured by events, rather than mile markers: the birth of our son, our epic trip West, the places we've been and the things that we've done. Internal measures. The external markers—holidays, birthdays, anniversaries—have all caught me unawares this year.

I've torn away the frame of reference I held for half a decade, and have not settled into another. The days are rhythmless, random. Weeks pass and I wonder what the hell I've been doing with this time, this precious time, my one and only life.

Living it, of course, just like always—but living with nothing to measure it against.

A Time To Speak And A Time To Be Silent

Maybe now is the moment to take a piece of kind advice, offered with a sincere heart...

...and just shut up.