“I love you.” “I know.”

watched a carrie fisher stage show and the next day she had a heart attack.

wished for nothing except freedom from a weak link in the chain mail. a chained ankle. now resolved for the year. 2016 was supposed to be a victory lap around 2015 but instead became a mad, tortuous exercise in containing rage and conquering flaws. overcoming impulse and enjoying what’s present. stripped of what powered my brightness and left a quiet heap of madness to be sorted through. like an old box or a ransacked house.

she was our first real taste of a love slave, a princess an armed goddess, calculating, fighting, driven, beautiful.

12/26/2016

Colonel Hottie, Wilma Deering

Thanks to the magic of internet television, I’ve officially rekindled a love affair that started over 25 years ago, an unrequited, pre-adolescent obsession that almost led me to enlist in the military. If only it were the 25th century!

Her outfits had to literally be sewn around her body, silver spandex with a holstered laser gun, oh the power she helmed! It was a 1980’s 4th grader’s toss-up between Col. Wilma Deering from the Buck Rogers TV show and Lynda Carter’s glamorous Wonder Woman. Wilma was hardcore, who had a sense of realism, no invisible jet, just an alpha strut of sleek uniformed authority. Wonder Woman may have run around in hot pants and a bustier (bless her), but Wilma Deering was almost always covered, never having to show skin since her business was all about whipping ass instead of wasting time with alter egos or using cleavage to dispense justice. Erin Gray portrayed one of the first leading ladies of television who was truly intelligent and independent from the will of men, a woman who outranked the leading male character while making all other men (and budding little boys) dutifully tune in each week for a glimpse of her doling out seventies sex appeal like the stern sci-fi military queen she was.

Moreover, Wilma Deering wasn’t bioinic or wore bracelets that could deflect bullets from a gun. But she was, by god, a superhero both boys and girls could look up to, and the first woman to break this little boy’s heart.

Phone Me Home

The film “2010” was the sequel to Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s heroic classic “2001: A Space Odyssey”. The actual year 2010 is a little over a year away and I don’t see one commuter on a jet-pack. Not one. I don’t see any colonies on the moon or sky traffic, or transporters or pushbutton meals. All I see are a bunch of cell phones and people glued to the internet (heh heh) and the same old cars, elevators, lines at the checkout stand and police issue revolvers. I mean Glocks. No ray guns, no starships, no alien invaders or alien visitors. No astral Mayflower with persecuted ET’s looking for a better life with only diseased blankets to offer us. We have laser beams but all they do is retina damage and are really worthless without a following bullet. No talking computers or truly self driving cars, man, it’s almost 2010 for god’s sake. This is the future. For my entire life this was the future, sliding doors and cool sound effects, hover cars and 6 breasted non carbon-based life forms. How are we supposed to build shopping malls on the moons of Jupiter when we’re busy fiddling around with civil war re-enactments and coveting relics like pentium processors? This is the 21st century, an advanced human civilization, a new millennium, Y2FK, this is supposed to be either a technologically perfect utopia or dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland. People are either all svelte in white, shiny jumpsuits or all filthy, ragged and killing each other for gasoline.

I still see tea kettles and denim jackets, console televisions and dirty buses, film cameras and tape decks, home phones and some people even get out of their cars to open their garage. Barbarians. Then, as soon as I think that we still have the ability to expand the human legacy through technology and wisdom, I see automobiles like this and folks like this.

Dare I say this future ain’t looking so good.