The Wanderer

 

Cynewulf’s The Wanderer. That’s me.

[Click pic to enlarge]

I’m going to make a connection here I didn’t make like some aha moment at the time. I was in my consultant phase and very nuts and bolts about personal matters.

My Corporate Ronin selfie

Working with GM’s Inland Division in 1987, I’d met a Professor from the University of Dayton, a gray-haired elfin man with a badly arthritic hip and a good mind. He was providing some guidance on technical design issues for the division’s JIT pilot cells. My principal partner agreed it might be worthwhile to explore his interest in joining our firm. We met in my office in the grander part of old Dayton and got acquainted. He told me he had one requirement I might not approve of. His wife was a famous local psychic, dubbed ‘The Witch of Yellow Springs,’ and he would want her to do a reading of me before making my decision. There would be no need to meet her. He hadn’t talked about me, so it would be a cold reading. He just wanted my permission for something I might consider invasive. I told him to go right ahead. 

When next we met, he agreed to join the firm and I asked if the Witch had approved his decision. Yes, he told me, but they’d both been surprised by what she’d seen. Unusual, she reported. (Me, paraphrasing what I remember…) An old soul, hasn’t been here for hundreds of years now but wanted to come back (not many like that apparently), unfinished business or something to be set right. He has a very deep sense of physics, not book learning, just inherent, a feel for it. He prefers to work in partnerships because he knows that even though he’s trustworthy, a lot of people don’t trust him. He’s kind of overwhelming. If he doesn’t get what he’s after, his first reaction is to dominate the hell out of you. Then, if that doesn’t work, he starts getting reasonable. He’s very smart, very bright. Might be an interesting opportunity for you. 

So we shook hands and went to work together. I believed most of what the Witch said at the time, and I believe it now. It’s always been about unfinished business and setting things right. I do have a deep sense of physics. It’s true that my first response to long odds is to try to dominate the hell out of it. And it’s also true that I can be reasonable, which is why I have kept writing long after the regulation plot schematic suggests I should have died shortly after I got blackballed by the American Publishing Industry and its Chief of Staff the New York Times.

Back to Dayton, Ohio. Saul got a replacement hip to improve his mobility. He seemed to be enjoying himself. By then, we had about ten partners, all told. Business was good. But we had been at this JIT business with GM for a couple years now, and my old wanderlust was kicking in. I felt a clock ticking. I knew that if I didn’t get serious about writing The Boomer Bible, it would never get written. I began a long leave-taking process from my life as it had been for five years at least, me coming back from the purgatory of being a Harvard flop to a real world success.

I had a lovely blonde wife, born and raised like my mother in Ohio, a 19th Century double house in Dayton’s historic Oregon District. Even had a 3-story garage(!). Still had my cool black MR2 and a cool cat who was half-Siamese, half-Burmese and smart as a dog (not really). Had had some nice vacations, to the Bahamas and to Cancun, where I got to climb to the top of the pyramid at Chichen Itza and peer into the black water abyss where they entombed their sacrificial victims.

And I was also starting to feel a bit like Dr. Seuss’s Thidwick.

I had acquired partners along the way over the years since Philadelphia and even from before that. With the conspicuous exception of of my Big-8 Main-Man Mark, they were all operating in a realm and at a level they had not anticipated before meeting me, I had made them believe in themselves enough to follow me as my course changed for the better. For a couple of them, I was the last hope on a bumpy road they thought I could smooth out for them. I won’t tell you who the bear was, but my antlers were home to talented people learning new survival skills as knowing apprentices, which meant they’d get an assignment and, after too much time, hand me a half-finished document and tell me I’d have to fill in the last ten percent “doing what you do.” One of the ones nesting in my antlers was nested in my home as well. The rental part of our double house was occupied by my father-in-law and his wife, who had their own issues and fears about the future. Depending on me made them predictably resentful. 

My response was to start getting serious about The Boomer Bible. Which I had never not been thinking about for some part of each day on my comeback trail. It wasn’t actually a pipe dream, except for the part about how hardly any of it had been written down yet. A lot of work had been done and not all of it in my head. The majority of a manuscript about the punk writers who wrote The Boomer Bible had been written down. The Bible was a necessary spin-off from the Punk City manuscript because without it there was no way to answer how the punks knew what they referenced with no sign of formal education. They didn’t magically become knowledgeable about the world they lived in. They had to learn it somehow. What the Bible was there to do. 

I knew almost everything about TBB except what exactly it said. I knew the names of the bands who worked on it, I knew the hardware and software they were using to write it, I knew the geography of the community in which lived and worked together and battled their outlaw enemies. I had their short stories and scraps of autobio files. I had a lot of their artwork. I knew a lot of their 7 year history but not all of it, particularly the end, because the Bible would change all that when it was done. I even knew something about the researchers who would came later to learn about them or cover up what they already knew about them. All I had to do next was write The Boomer Bible.

Time to stop getting ready to write and start writing. I had been working on the names of the books in TBB over the years. I decided to start writing at them, knowing that each was self-contained to a certain extent, though all had to be source material for the Intercolumn Reference. I sat down at the computer console behind my pretty, neoclassical, one-drawer desk, surrounded by my lush emerald carpeting, tall walnut bookshelves and covered by a finely chandeliered, Gothically vaulted ceiling in Old Town Dayton, Ohio, on a street drowned in a valley-wide flood exactly 40 years before I was born, and started back to work on my Pentateuch.

Then something amazing happened. Subtly, then more undeniably, the manuscript to come made its presence known to me, not as legible words but as a sense of expectancy. The way lightning works, as those clever scientists have learned. The ground sends up a streamer notifying the electricity where to find a path and the current flows to the streamer and into the ground. I had to sit down at the keyboard, frame a thought, and begin typing. Then the words would flow as easily as an informal conversation with the universe. The book was there, waiting, and would help me write it down.

Looking back now, I’m reminded that I’d told people the book was ten years in the writing, because my memory of beginning it in an old Underwood’s Standard typewriter in my Philadelphia apartment across from the Art Museum was so crystal clear. The Book of Kinesis, from the very beginning was typed in with column dividers for the ICR. When I had enough text for two columns of the first page I did the measuring and math to write the top line of the first column, the dividers, and then the top line of the second column. And so on, until I had the complete first page of The Boomer Bible (sans ICR notations of course) to look at. I had to see it.

That’s the part I was right about. Absolutely right. I was wrong about the contents though. If I were to dig around in some of my old paper-filled boxes, I’m sure I could come up with one or more of my lists of names for the books. I was planning about a dozen or so books, a high speed race through human history, made possible by allusive cues to the superior education readers would have over the punk writers.  (Maybe that’s why I thought the ICR wasn’t a Mount Everest in waiting.) For example, where TBB has a book of “Ziggie,” the original placeholder for Freud was called “Minoans.” When I actually started writing it though, it came out way too fey and smug somehow. If you didn’t know a lot about Freud, you’d be lost from the start. How much did people in general know about Freud? 

Where the ten years went. Actual writing of the TBB manuscript that was published in 1991 took about two calendar years while I was also running a management consultancy in Ohio and Michigan. I relied on the 10 year timeline because I didn’t want people think there was anything slapdash about the writing of TBB. There wasn’t. Ever since I first transitioned from an Underwood keyboard to a DECmate II keyboard in 1981, my writing speed has been blazingly fast. How my corporate career producing text for executive speeches on zero notice made my ascent to lucrative engagements so swift. I could write a 20 minute speech requiring no changes and deliver it to my client’s home in under four hours, even in the middle of the night. (“Fast on the draw.”)

Writing TBB was a shockingly efficient process, almost out of my seeming control. I had a laser printer next to my computer, and I wrote in the two column format from the start. I always needed to see the copy. But I also rarely revised it. What I typed stayed in, although there were times I needed to add something I’d left out, and I wound up spending more time changing chapter and verse numbers than wordsmithing text. It’s an oral document, deliberately. Just as Amos (according to Julian Jaynes) was telling the paper to say these words to the reader, so was my MS-in-waiting telling me to say these words to the paper. In my head I spoke every word I typed and made instant edits based on meter. By the time I finished a chapter, it was done. 

How do I know I wasn’t really in charge at that point? Because when I finished work every night, I knew what I was planning to do first thing tomorrow. I hardly ever did, except when I was on a roll in a super long book like Yankees or Dave. I’d sit down the next morning and start work on something altogether else. Usually the beginning of another book I hadn’t thought I’d been thinking about. Why had I changed the schedule. Because the manuscript knew the interdependencies between books better than I did, consciously at least, and continuing yesterday’s text would have omitted the setup for an ICR reference from the current text and miss a golden opportunity. Writing from day to day was ping-ponging from book to book in no linear fashion at all. Like watching a Discovery Channel animation of a city growing up from the ground simultaneously in all neighborhoods.

How did the book know what to do better than I did? Because all those years of not writing TBB had been spent listening to what other people who thought themselves well educated knew or thought they knew. A friend of mine once characterized such (un)knowledge as “an awareness of,” translated variously as I’ve heard that name, seen that date, saw a movie where characters mentioned it, seen a book title featuring it, had something about it in school but I don’t remember much (anything) now. We all do this to one degree or another, but when you’re monitoring the Lingua Franca of pretend literacy you become more sensitive to the signals and the most likely symbols of the scraps that litter the mass media. You learn how to start talking about something who want to pretend they know it too in such a way that they can follow what you’re telling them about it now. As to topics where ignorance is most likely, practically everything but movies and music is just a queasy mish-mash of false memories.

That’s what I’d been tapping into over the years. Why TBB didn’t turn into an American version of 1066 and All That. When that little clsssic was written, Brits still knew enough of their own history to get the jokes and chuckle ruefully at their own mish-mash between, say King Alfred and King Arthur. They could be brief because their readers actually knew quite a lot. The Boomer Bible had to tell all of it, in the words the Baby Boomers still remembered from their own slanted mis-educations. That’s what TBB is. 

At some point in the writing I began to lose touch with day to day business and let the antler kids deal with their own consequences, I moved across the hall into a small white-walled office with a computer, a printer, and two comfortable chairs so that the ones with real problems could petition for help, which I tried to provide. One of my partners was midwifing the book, reading every page that came out of the printer. He professed himself blown away and delighted to be of any assistance he could, though hex was definitely feeling the pinch of my absence in his own business efforts. I owe him and the others for their forbearance. I was not an ingrate, but I was busy.

I’ll save the controlled rush to the final publisher deadline for another time, but I will leave you with this fact. I wrote the whole book to be able to do the Intercolumn Reference. Why I made that first page as deliberately as I did in 1981. The technology to computerize the ICR did not exist in 1981. There were no hyperlinks until the Apple Macintosh, about which I wrote the first product review published by Datapro Research Corporation, my employer at the time. Thing is, there was still no technology to computerize the ICR in 1991, when I finished the manuscript on a state-of-the-art personal computer and had to finish each manuscript page by gluing in a strip of paper containing that page’s references. 

The whole thing was in my head. All at once while I was inserting it after the text was final. No one will ever understand what that experience was like. 

Later, I will show you some of the results. Until then…

You can make up your own lyrics. I’ll be happy with the title and the refrain.😎