Robert Berry’s Web Site

Today I realized something blindingly obvious.

I am aware that I am a champion procrastinator. (The dormancy of this blog for the last half-year is evidence of this, if any were needed.) But what is the net result of my procrastination?

Consider that, in simplified terms, my activities can be divided into two categories: Things I Have To Do, and Things I Want To Do. The former includes mowing the grass, going to work, and washing dishes; the latter includes writing, reading, recording music, and (yes!) blogging.

The Things I Have To Do will, by definition, be done eventually. I might put them off for a little while, but most such activities tend to enforce their own deadlines. I have to turn up for work every day, I have to mow the grass before it obscures the house, I have to wash the dishes so we can continue eating. I do these things because I must.

Which means that by procrastinating — by choosing idleness over activity — I am mainly denying myself only the opportunity to do the Things I Want To Do. I am guaranteeing that my life will be filled only with the Have-To-Dos. This is a stupid thing to choose.

Whether I have the wisdom, or the energy, to change this habit remains to be seen, but I thought I’d start with a modest blog post. Baby steps, you know.

This blog is currently dormant, but I’m trying not to let the same happen to my (apparently quarterly) podcast. Pointless #11 is a little different, and commemorates the release of Star Trek.

My podcast Pointless has settled into a predictable schedule: the episodes are roughly quarterly, but only in odd-numbered years. So it’s about time for Pointless #10.

Use this URL if you want to subscribe:

http://gandronics.com/rberry/wp-rss2.php?cat=10

We appear to have been near Ground Zero for today’s winter weather; according to the local TV news, most of the area got at most 4-6 inches of snow. Looking out the window this afternoon, it was obvious to me right away that we were on the high end of that range:

As it turned out, it was even better than that. Although the depth varied from one spot to another, in unobstructed open areas of the front and back yard we had nearly eight inches:

Just as amazing as the volume of snow was its quality. It was perfect, fluffy, powdery snow, and when we caught the flakes on our gloves we were amazed to see the crystalline structure of the snowflakes visible to the naked eye:

I’ve never before seen snowflakes that looked like that, except in cartoons.

A recent Popular Mechanics feature lists the Chevrolet Sprint as #2 on its list of “Retro Fuel-Efficient Cars.” Naturally I had to smile at this, because my first car was a 1986 Sprint.

I have to admit that its fuel efficiency wasn’t what led me to the Sprint. I didn’t know anything about cars, so when it became apparent that I needed one (I was moving to an off-campus apartment, so walking to class would no longer be an option), I just went where my dad took me: to the local Chevrolet dealer, where my sister had bought a Sprint months earlier. The Sprint’s main attraction was its low price, and I was confident that even my relatively meager pay from summers at Carowinds would be enough for me to keep up the payments.

We met with the same salesman who had sold Barbara her Sprint. There was no negotiation; the only decisions to make were the color (I chose silver), the accessories (air conditioning was a must), and the financing (my parents lent me the $800 down payment, and later forgave that loan as a graduation present).

When the deal was done, the salesman handed me the keys, and also a voucher I could use to top off the gas tank at a nearby station. This seemed a generous gesture at the time, but it was pocket change: the Sprint’s gas tank couldn’t have held more than six or seven gallons, and gas prices were under a dollar. During the years that followed, gas prices fell even further (dropping lower than seventy cents a gallon), and I found that at most — if I drove well beyond “E” on the gauge — I could maybe get five dollars into the thing.

By today’s standards, the Sprint was a deathtrap. Back then, airbags were unheard of in such a cheap car. And its gas mileage was so good partly because of its lightweight construction: the whole car weighed about 1500 pounds, which meant that it wouldn’t have fared well in a collision with anything heavier than a grocery cart.

But I never had a wreck in the Sprint, except for a low-speed fender bender in a parking lot in Columbia. And because the car was so light, its three-cylinder engine provided a surprising amount of power. I customized it with a cassette stereo and aftermarket speakers, added a headlights-on buzzer, and made it my own. It delivered pizzas with me in Columbia, drove me to Carowinds and back, took me to see Lynn, and even saw me through my first couple of years at IBM.

Sadly, I did not take care of it as well as I should have. After I started grad school at UNC, I tended to let the Sprint sit in the parking lot for months at a time, neglect from which its fuel system never recovered. After that, it never again ran as smoothly as it had before; sometimes it would die completely and refuse to restart until after I’d paid a mechanic to look at it and find nothing wrong. These problems gradually got worse, even after I took it to a guy in Raleigh who specialized in the dying art of rebuilding carburetors.

On top of that, all of the car’s nonessential parts started to fail. The cassette player and the rear speakers quit working, as did the cruise control and the dome light; the turn signal’s self-cancel became unreliable; and the upholstery began to split and disintegrate. I was losing all of the conveniences and comforts in a car that was never terribly comfortable to begin with.

When the car started consuming large quantities of oil, I realized that it was time to let it go. Past time, really: here I was, now a working professional, still driving my college-student car. And even though it was paid off, keeping it any longer was going to become a losing proposition.

It could have lasted longer: Barbara’s 1986 Sprint survived years longer than mine did, despite having taken her to California and back. She eventually replaced it with a Geo Metro — a later, rebranded edition of the same car, a version of which Popular Mechanics (rather unfairly) includes as #4 on its list.

But my Sprint had given its all, and in 1994 I finally replaced it with a pickup truck I remember far less fondly. The Sprint itself was so run-down that I didn’t even attempt to sell it or trade it in; I allowed a friend who owned a Metro to harvest its tires and any other parts he could use, and then had it towed unceremoniously to a junkyard, where parts of it may still rust today.

Sadly, I apparently never took any pictures of my Sprint while it was young and healthy. It wasn’t until the very end that, overcome by sentiment, I felt compelled to visit the Sprint one last time, reminisce about our years together, and snap a photograph to remember it by.

Laura has turned her back on all of the little-girl princess and pony stuff; she makes fun of Barbie and My Little Pony commercials when they come on, and she won’t even watch Disney movies with me anymore (except for the Pixar films).

But it’s fun to antagonize her, so the other day I started digging up YouTube clips of Barney and the Teletubbies (neither of which she ever watched) and playing them at high volume. That led me to thinking about some of the shows she did watch, like Stanley and Rolie Polie Olie and PB&J Otter. None of them are on anymore.

Her favorite show back in the preschool days was Bear In The Big Blue House, a cute little show from the Jim Henson Company. It had an engaging cast of characters and some pretty decent music; we bought both of the soundtrack CDs, and at one point Laura’s collection of soft toys included Bear, Tutter, Pip and Pop, Treelo, Ojo, and Ojo’s stuffed toy Snow Bear. Some of those are probably still buried in her room somewhere.

Looking around the study, I discovered that I still had a DVD of Bear episodes, so I slid it into the computer and started playing bits and pieces, refreshing my memory of the show. I hadn’t seen it since Laura was probably five, and naturally seeing it again made me reminisce about those days.

At the end of each show, Bear walked out onto the upstairs balcony of his house and had a chat with his friend, Luna the Moon, about what had happened that day. Then, while brief clips recapped the show’s highlights, they would together sing the show’s farewell song.

Hey, this was really fun
We hope you liked it too
Seems like we’ve just begun
When suddenly we’re through
Goodbye, goodbye, good friends, goodbye…

I used to find that song oddly bittersweet, closing each show by reminiscing about how much fun it all was, but accepting that it was over. And now, as I heard those words again, they took on a completely new dimension I did not expect, as I reminisced about the days when Laura and I used to watch the show — not as an exercise in irony, but because we enjoyed watching it together.

Yes, Bear, it was really fun. That was my life: sitting on the couch with a little girl and her sippy cup, watching Bear In The Big Blue House or Blue’s Clues. Reading books to her, because she couldn’t read them herself (although she could recite some of them from memory). Carrying her, piggyback, up the stairs, and dumping her giggling on the bed. Talking to her while she splashed in the tub.

Seems like we’ve just begun, when suddenly we’re through. Got that part right. How can it be that I flipped through the pages of that story so fast?

She’s still here, of course. But now her favorite shows are Hannah Montana and iCarly, and she won’t let me read to her anymore (too slow). I could probably still carry her up the stairs if I had to, but I might hurt myself. And bath time long ago disappeared behind a closed door, like so many other bits and pieces of her life have started to do.

She makes me laugh, and she teaches me things, and I wouldn’t trade her for anything. But I can’t help wondering what happened to that little kid I remember. Did I make the most of those few moments while they were here? Now it seems like there’s nothing left but some fading memories and some dusty DVDs I haven’t taken to the thrift store yet.

One of the things parenthood teaches you is that children are always in transition. You think you’ve gotten used to the rhythms of life, but you’re standing on shifting sand. Eventually, there was a day when Laura and I watched Bear In The Big Blue House together for the last time; but that transition came and went without either of us knowing it.

And it’s not over yet.

A few years ago I wrote a brief reminiscence about the filmmaking hobby I abandoned in college. In that post I mentioned that I still had the old films in a metal file box, but no way to view them anymore:

One of these days I will dig them out and have them transferred to VHS (or perhaps DVD, when that becomes practical); until then, I will have only a few paper cutouts to remember them by.

Recently I’ve begun thinking it’s time to do something about that situation. Readers of this blog are aware of my fixation on the past, and particularly the bits of my childhood I’ve recorded using various media; it has long nagged at me that there is a potential treasure trove of such memories locked away in the obsolete Super 8 film format, images that in some cases I haven’t seen in thirty years.

The problem is not a trivial one, as I’m beginning to learn. Transferring old home movies to DVD is not really difficult; there are hundreds of places offering such a service, and I just need to find one that will do an archival-quality transfer to video files I can edit and burn to DVD myself. The larger problem is preparing the material for such a transfer. To minimize cost, I need to inventory the old films, identify what’s worth preserving, and then splice the original fifty-foot reels together into longer sequences that can be transferred in one go.

The first step was to find out what I was dealing with. So for the first time in decades, I pulled the old file box from the back of my closet, and was met a rather forbidding warning (a relic from some previous use of the box, which I inherited from Pat):

Inside, just as I remembered, were piles of fifty-foot film reels, along with a couple of longer films from my college days and a tangle of scraps edited out of various productions.

One pleasant surprise was that my old Super 8 splicing block was in there too, along with several packages of splicing tape. I’ll need those, and I’m not sure how hard such supplies are to find nowadays.

I had expected a real challenge just identifying what was what, but I was pleased to discover that I’d apparently been uncharacteristically organized with these films. I found that almost every reel was labeled with a title or description and, in most cases, a date. So, for example, I was able easily to identify where it all started, my first couple of film productions:

Here you see my first film production, the “Crazy Reel,” and my second, a live-action compilation that included a sketch called “Super Virgil.” Other familiar titles included “Life In The Sea,” my educational animated film from elementary school; and its successor, “The Civil War,” which I made for a junior-high history class. (What Ken Burns took eleven hours to do, I did in three minutes!)

There were surprises among the labels, though. There’s a film called “Stupid Man,” about which I remember nothing; from 1984 there’s something called the “Mailbox Movie,” but I have no idea what that might be. One reel is labeled “Beach / Hospital” and dated 1980: say what? I don’t remember visiting the beach in 1980. And while the hospital in question is probably Columbia’s Richland Memorial, where Pat spent that fall in traction, I have no recollection of ever taking my movie camera there.

But maybe the biggest surprise was that some of the films weren’t my old Super 8 projects at all: some of them are older, family home movies that somehow got mixed in with my stuff. There’s a film labeled “Sledding,” which I’m sure records a memorable occasion in the early ’70s when an unusually substantial snowfall made it possible for us to sled down our steep driveway. Another is labeled “Huff Hut,” which was the name of the cabin our family rented in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, when I was a little kid. And a couple of them are 8mm films — not Super 8 — dating from the 1960s.

I can’t view these films yet, but I can hold them up to the light and sometimes make out what’s depicted in the opening frames. Better yet, my scanner has a backlight attachment designed for scanning slides, and using that I can scan a few frames at a time and enlarge them. I tried that with one of the old 8mm films, and here’s what it revealed:

That’s Barbara and me, playing with golf clubs in the yard of our house in Monroe, Louisiana; I’d guess this is somewhere around 1968, when the Beatles were recording the White Album and NASA was getting ready to send Apollo 8 around the moon.

The next step is for me to get hold of a film viewer so I can actually look at these films properly and get them organized (eBay should help there). I’ll also need to brush up on my film editing skills, which I haven’t used since college. But this old material has been sitting in the dark for too long, so I’m determined to drag it out into the light.

Eventually, the moment came. I’ve always found that no matter what Great Event is bearing down upon me, it never hits me until the last minute, until it is impossible for me not to think about it. I think this is probably because of my tendency to insulate myself; I so dislike unhappiness that I will not think about unpleasant things until they force themselves upon me.

When it comes time to face the unhappiness, however, I find a way to enjoy it. Perverse enjoyment perhaps. It all comes, I sincerely believe, from my interest in and love for movies and all things cinematic; even though I have abandoned (for the time being, anyway) my early desire to be a filmmaker, I still think in cinematic terms, and I always imagine my life to be the storyline of a movie. From this I get a flair for the melodramatic. I demonstrated this as I left Carowinds for the last time.

I worked at the Carowinds theme park for six years, starting during my senior year in high school. I spent my first summer on the parking lot crew; but for the five years after that I worked in the Rides Department. It was hot, physically exhausting, and monotonous work; my supervisors were often arbitrary and sometimes incompetent. But Carowinds also defined a large part of my world for those six years. I met Lynn there, and it was through many hours of working together that we got to know one another. Carowinds was the fire in which our relationship was forged.

It was, of course, just a job. Like all formative experiences, it was important not because of what it was, but because of when it was. My time at Carowinds spanned one of the most important intervals in my life: my entire undergraduate college career, and the whole of my courtship with Lynn. I started working there as a school kid, and I left as an adult.

It had started as a childhood fantasy: for a kid, the idea of working at Carowinds seemed like a dream. You didn’t think about changing trash cans or cleaning restrooms, or about hours of stupefying boredom. You just thought about getting to run the rides. And for me, it was more specific than that: I wanted to operate the White Lightnin’ roller coaster, and make the dramatic “Lightning strikes now!” announcement – part of the standard “spiel” that preceded each launch of the train.

Lots of people have left Carowinds forever, and many of them have been long-time employees. But when it’s time to leave, they just leave. Not me: I had to do it in an appropriate manner for my audience, in an appropriately cinematic style. (Someday I might make a movie of this, and I didn’t want to have to exaggerate.)

So first, after I had gathered my cache of going-away gifts from the crew, I had to do it one last time. The childhood dream which now was over, I had to relive – one for the movie, you know. I stepped up into the dispatch booth. “Excuse me, Megan,” I said, edging her away from the control panel. “I’ve got to shoot the train one last time, for old times’ sake.”

“Oh, you’re going to get sentimental,” she said, and graciously gave up the controls to me.

I started my Rides career at the bumper cars, where (after a year) I was promoted to supervisor. But I was a lousy supervisor, and the management was not prepared to put me in charge of a high-profile ride like a roller coaster. For three years I toiled away at less prestigious assignments, all the while figuring out how to be responsible and reliable.

The ridiculous truth is that I learned much of what I know about succeeding in the workplace from my years at Carowinds. I learned how to motivate a team and keep up their morale; I learned how to organize and schedule; and I learned how to keep one’s boss happy. My efforts were finally rewarded in 1988, when I was given custody of White Lightnin’ during its last year at the park.

The train rumbled into the station for what would be my last time. I tried to take in every detail. I took a breath, and I swear, my eyes began to tear.

The train stopped. I began the series of button-pushing and spiel announcements that had become completely automatic, but this time I concentrated and savored every syllable.

“For those of you now boarding, welcome to White Lightnin’. Please pull your lap bar securely to your waist, and secure any and all loose and valuable items. Carowinds is not responsible for anything lost or held during this ride.”

It was a great summer, the best of my Carowinds career. My crew was happy and efficient; I knew my job well, and my superiors trusted me. And, of course, I got my chance to say “Lightning strikes now!” countless times (sometimes using different voices or accents to keep it interesting). It was my ride, and I had earned it.

But 1988 was also my last year there. Engaged to be married that summer, I knew that seasonal employment would no longer be sufficient. And so it was with genuine sadness that I gave my notice in June, and began training my assistant to replace me. Those final weeks were strange: I’d trained a competent crew, and as I gradually stepped aside I got to see for myself that they were going to do fine without me. When my last shift ended on July 24, 1988, the only thing left for me to do was to leave.

I had planned this sentimental farewell to the ride, and had thought about how I would do it. My mother asked me later if I had told those on the train that this was my last time ever to operate the ride. But that wasn’t what I wanted to do: this was a private moment for me. I wanted to sharpen my memory of what it was like to drive this ride by doing it one last time and paying attention to every detail. And it had to be the real thing. It couldn’t be a farewell speech, and it couldn’t be a creative spiel with funny voices or German accents. This had to be by the book.

“Please remain seated at all times and keep your arms and legs inside the train throughout the ride.” The seriousness and longing in my voice must have begun to come through: Megan said “aww…” behind me. I was almost finished.

“Place your head against the headrest and your hands on the handrail in front of you,” I said. My finger trembled on the button.

Sometimes I thought about writing a detailed account of my time at Carowinds; I’d known a lot of interesting people there, and those six years had been filled with drama and soap-opera subplots (my romance with Lynn at center stage, of course). I did write some reminiscences, which someday I’ll pull together into a coherent narrative; but it wasn’t until the very end that I felt motivated to record a specific scene in complete detail. Half a year before I officially started keeping a journal, I wrote an account of my final moments of Carowinds employment: events that took place on an afternoon twenty years ago today.

I had said this last sentence, the ultimate catch phrase of Carowinds spiels, in so many different voices and intonations that I thought there were no new ones left. But never before had I given it the reading I gave it this time.

I took a breath. “Lightning strikes now.”

I pressed the button, and both the train and I were gone.

Alfa’s impression of a dog who has fallen from a tall building:

Sunday 25 June 1989
1:40 AM
Kingswood Apartments, Chapel Hill

I really should be going to bed, but I’ve just had a remarkable experience — so bizarre that it would be easy to believe that this journal entry is entirely fictional.

I spent much of Saturday afternoon fiddling around with the computer. I think I’ve finally got Telix working correctly, so I visited several of the local BBSs, reading the FidoNet echoes and exploring the download libraries. I’ve already installed PC-Write, which I hope to use for writing papers in grad school, and Pat has told me about several other shareware programs that I’d like to try.

But after supper I decided to spend some time working on my latest musical project, a song called “Sun Behind The Clouds,” which I started writing more than a year ago (before we were married). It has developed into one of the most complex recordings I’ve ever attempted, with as many as ten parts (depending on how you count them) packed onto four tracks. But after struggling with it for several days, I’d started to think I had been overly ambitious.

I had just finished rerecording the second guitar part (again) when I heard someone behind me. I thought Lynn had come out of the bedroom, but when I turned around I was stunned to see a guy I did not at first recognize — and then I did. The visitor was me: his face was thinner and more lined, he had no moustache, and he wore strangely small, rimless glasses, but it was me. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and had what looked like a pair of Walkman headphones around his neck, the wire trailing into his pocket.

“Don’t freak out,” he said as soon as he saw me.

I’ll admit that I had been considering it, but I decided to maintain my dignity. “Keep it down,” I said, nodding toward the bedroom. “Lynn’s asleep.”

“Right,” he whispered, looking around. “I forgot how small this place was.”

“It’s cheap,” I said. “So what year are you from?” The question seemed to surprise him. “Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m not an idiot. You’ve seen all the same science-fiction movies I have. I know time travel when I see it.”

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I’m from 2008 … just under two decades from now, assuming I hit the right date. Working at Overby, right? About to start grad school? Dad’s heart bypass? DOS 4.0?”

“Sounds about right,” I said. “I guess DOS is a thing of the past for you, huh? I imagine it’s been replaced by OS/2 or something.”

He laughed. “Or something, yeah. Multiple somethings, actually, if you include people like Ben.”

Ben? “Uhh … if you say so,” I said. “I haven’t spent a lot of time with Ben yet, but I’m not sure he knows much about computers. He drools a lot.”

The other Bob wasn’t really listening. He was looking past me at my studio setup — the Mirage on the folding table, the Shure microphone clamped to a chemistry-lab stand, and of course the Tascam multitrack deck. “I still have that,” he said, pointing at the Tascam. “The Ministudio Porta One. It doesn’t work anymore, but I hung onto it for sentimental reasons. I hauled it out of the attic a couple of years ago to take some pictures for an album cover. I don’t know how I ever managed with just four tracks, but I guess it does the job, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Not tonight, anyway.”

“What are you working on?” he asked, peering at the fader settings.

“‘Sun Behind The Clouds,’” I said, watching for his reaction. Would he remember the song as a notable failure? “I thought I had it all worked out, but the vocals didn’t work, and by the time I figured that out there weren’t enough free tracks to rerecord all of the harmonies. I tried sacrificing the second guitar part to rerecord the lead vocal, and then I bounced that back to the original vocal track along with a live harmony vocal, and then I redid the guitar part. But now it’s just two-part harmony, and …” I stopped. He probably already knew all of this.

But he was smiling, and digging in his pocket. “I want you to hear something.” He pulled out a tiny device into which his headphones were plugged — it was about the size of a small calculator, but with a bigger display; I assume it was some sort of Walkman, although it was too small to accommodate a cassette. I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing it played some small disc format, or maybe even digital audio stored in memory. He handed me the headphones, and I slipped them on.

He pressed a button, and I immediately heard the guitar intro of “Sun Behind The Clouds,” but clearer, brighter, more alive somehow. The lead guitar sounded different, but I could tell it was the same performance I’d just recorded. The mix was more spacious, with rich echo effects on the vocals. *This* was what I was going for. There were still flaws, sure, but this was the song I’d heard in my head, the song I’d been trying to get on tape for days.

I pulled the headphones off. “I don’t get it,” I said. “It sounds great, but why are you playing me this?”

“I just wanted you to know that eventually, you’re going to get that song to sound like what you imagined,” he said. “It’s just going to take some time.”

“How long?” I asked.

“I just finished it,” he said, and vanished.

I sat there for a minute and then turned to face the studio setup. I had no idea how to even approximate the mix I’d just heard, but at least now I knew it was possible. Or would someday be possible.

I turned off the Porta One. I’ll come back to the song later.