I have to say that this is a novel time to be alive, wouldn’t you agree?

I don’t know which of the seasons of our lives can be stranger, or how the ever-rising generations look at the times in which they live. Terrorism as a concept is not as scary as the notion that we all could go up in an atomic fireball with only a couple minutes warning, don’t you think?

It certainly is not as frightening as a time when Nazi saboteurs landed on our shores with impunity, and everyone went to war in a way that is quite impossible for who did not live then to comprehend.

The odds of being killed by some whack-job radicalized young man may be as rare as a lightning strike, but still…the President’s big address that claimed we could stand down from a “perpetual war footing” seemed sort of strange, coming on the heels of the butchering of a British soldier on the streets of suburban London.

I don’t know what to think, exactly, except maybe this is actually a golden moment, since the whack jobs maybe be back with Atom weapons shortly. Crap. Time to avoid crowds, stay alert, and stop living in major target areas. It is kind of like one of those science fiction novels I used to devour as a kid.

That was very much on my mind yesterday as I boxed up a bunch of dreams and memories, worth nothing and everything yesterday. I looked at the outrageous cover art as I tossed a couple hundred paperbacks in the general direction of one of the large cardboard boxes I discovered in the storage locker left over from the last move.

Cool ones- space-damsels in distress, monsters of all sorts, rockets to forever. I hefted one of them: “The Weapons Shops of Isher,” a fine outing by A.E. Van Vogt, which explored some issues as relevant today as they were then. And of course, that science fiction was real.

That is part of what made the day so nuts- these bits of sudden cognition and memory floating up out of crumbling paper and petrified binding. Funny that so much of it has come to pass, and then gone again, like the idea of manned spaceflight. But I had to work fast, and the memories blurred.

I mentioned that there was a crisis with the movers- “What? Packers didn’t come? Sorry, that is not what we do.” Their truck was blocking the entrance to Big Pink, and the sole freight elevator was out of service, and the usual crap you go through dealing with moving piles of crap, with the growing realization that none of it is worth the trouble, at least the paper stuff.

Then there was the added stress that I had to be in Maryland on a very important job-related mission. The traffic can be manageable in the brief respite between the great imperative of the traffic flow in the morning southbound and the afternoon back north.

But this was the eve of a major holiday, and each minute after noon the great river of steel and steely-eyed drivers trying to get ahead of the rush would make it more and more problematic on the dreaded Beltway.

Specifically, this trip was to the deep northern suburbs Maryland to pick up the proposal that twenty or thirty people sweated bullets creating over the last nine days. It is a novel thing, having responsibility for so much labor and emotion packaged in a sixteen-by-sixteen square of corregated paper- but all I have to do now is navigate to the wilds of Reston, out by Dulles airport, and make the requisite window of time to get it in the paws of the Government contracting officer on Tuesday morning.

DO NOT FORGET.

Then life goes on again. I hope.

Meanwhile, there is some hopefully less fevered activity here today, though I don’t know. Lounging by the pool is no option- I wonder if I can do two trips to the farm? Down this morning, after a plunge in the pool, unload, come back tomorrow and load up again, and then return at a sedate pace on Monday? I could clear out a bunch of stuff, moving crap from one place to another.

There was that moment of clarity while making a command decision about paperback books, cherished artifacts of long ago, of the fantastic and of innocence. “Ace Double Novels,” 35-cent volumes bought with my allowance at the Rexall, recycled novellas commissioned to fit the needs of the old pulp fiction monthly rags aimed at a new market. I was a sucker- there may be a hundred of them, published in a strangely appealing format: one story front to back, ending half way.

Then, to start the next, one flips the paperback over and reads backwards to meet the ending of the other story in the middle.

That is not a metaphor, I think. But things are so crazy, and we are asked to believe so many things that make less sense than an Ace Double Novel, which is a lot more affordable than anything going around today.

Anyway, maybe I am nuts. Maybe we will all meet in the middle, like one of those double novels that disappeared into a box and trundled off down the corridor, and which I probably will never see again.

I think it is OK if I don’t, which is a novel feeling since I have been hauling them around for most of my life. Actually, at least twice as novel.

(Bye, guys. See you again someday? Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 213 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com