Last night Brenda and I were watching
Todd Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse when a knock came at our front door.
A visitor.
It was Dick Vajs, who lives in West Virginia now, but comes down
to Florida to do work at the Navy base.
Dick and I worked together at Vitro
Services, in Fort Walton Beach, circa 1975.
We lived near each other, us
on Newcastle and him on Mayflower. He still owns a house there, which he is renting
out.
I showed him what I was writing, at Vitro. It made fun of the company,
our customers, local politicians, the national press corps, and the broadcast media.
This was before cable TV and talk radio.
They had a few talk radio stations,
radio evangelists, flying saucer nuts, the dead raised in Miracle Valley, Arizona,
a few right-wing political demagogues, but nothing like Rush Limbaugh, yet, nothing
like every station on the dial.
It was gratifying to have an engineer for
a reader.
Dick also liked bluegrass music and rode a Harley. As one of Potter's
early bands played at a biker bar at the west end of Panama City Beach, he felt right
at home when we drove over there to hear them play.
He watched Owen come
up, as a fiddle player. Less so with Balder. By that time we had moved to South
Florida.
Dick and Brenda and I talked about how crazy things were under Bush,
how deluded the people who voted for him were, what trouble the country seemed to
us to be in, while the media carried on about Terry Schiavo, Michael Jackson, Deep
Throat. Toby Keith.
Huh? Achy Breaky Heart. Pro wrestling. Hunter S.
Thompson writing wrestling promotion for the Playground Daily News.
About as authentic as a lap-dancer at the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theater.
Dick said he was reading my stuff at The Daily Bulletin, and enjoying it.
He was one of my lurks who didn't count in the statistics. A stealth reader.
I've got a lot of stealth readers.
Potter dead now.
Potter used to
hunt ducks around the dune lakes in South Walton County. With a springer spaniel
dog. A retriever. Now it's wall-to-wall houses, in vernacular architecture, an
anachronism, a decadent revival, a corruption of the simple beach cottages with tin
roofs that once were scattered here and there, far enough apart for privacy, solitude,
communion with nature. Far from the madding crowd.
Stand still and the madding
crowd will come to you.
They will price you out of your unpeopled void.
You'll have to move to West Virginia and become a male nurse.
Dick Vajs was
working as a paramedic and studying to become a nurse.
We talked about the
shape our health care system was in.
I said I thought I was too old to learn
anything new and he said, well, the younger people don't know much. It's been dumbed-down.
Everything has been dumbed-down.