On This Day: Your History

[ER]

June 28, 2021 There is a park in the northeast of our county, built atop what for decades had been a small airport---til a tornado kind of ate it in 1999---and one of its attractions is an open-air observation tower from which you can see for a score of miles in every direction. Well that morning as I went there I learned a teenage boy had recently leaped off it to his death, which gave me a sick jolt since I'd spent many hours on the top-floor deck, always feeling a sense of peaceful retreat up in the sunshine and ever-present breeze. Shortly after the suicide the city closed the tower for "improvements" which included raising the height of internal railings, and somehow it didn't feel the same there anymore caged-in by bars and with the place tainted by some poor young man's tragic decision. I've rarely gone back since.

[ER]

June 29, 1995: Although I didn't know til afterward, and it freaked me out to learn about it, my boyfriend asked my dad if they could meet, and my ever-perceptive dad, who'd known about him for a lot longer than I thought he did, agreed. So they met in a restaurant and talked, my overly-confident, high-achiever boyfriend and my ice-cool, uber-genius professional tactician father. What could go wrong?

Dad told me he didn't want to kill Brian when he got there and didn't want to kill him when he left, but at some point in the middle he did want to kill him.

I raised my eyebrows and asked, "Where was your service pistol?"

"In my car."

"Oh, thank God."

But he also said he thought he was a nice young man who had strong feelings for me, and he could understand why my Aunt Christie, who'd bonded with him, said so many kind things of him. It wasn't so much that my dad gave his blessing as that he pragmatically let things proceed.

Besides, we had that deal that as long as I didn't do drugs and I kept my grades up, I could mostly do whatever I wanted; for the record that's a deal I'd never offer my kids, should they ever read this. (And if you're reading this, quit before I send you to convent school in Connaught.)

[ER]

June 30, 2013 It was 115 in the Pacific Northwest and almost that hot where we lived, and I did something called a modified Ganzfeld experiment, that uses visual deprivation and auditory input to bring on an altered state. I've never done psychedelic drugs but have delved into hypnosis, sensory deprivation, meditation, fasting, sleep deprivation, and many etcs, and have always been interested in restructuring perception. For an hour I laid in a large dark closet and listened to white noise til I felt like I was bobbing in water like a cork, experiencing an actual conflict between rationally knowing where I was, and the testimony of my bewildered senses telling me I was floating in a lake.

That same 90-something degree evening my husband and I went to a Matchbox Twenty/Goo Goo Dolls concert in an open air amphitheater beside a river. I wore a tee and shorts and was glad we were so far back on the lawn I could lie on a blanket and look up at the sky, where bats chased moths and the lights made the clouds purple and hid the firmament behind humid mist, like a bridal veil. It was close to midnight when we got out and on the drive home I hung my bare feet out the window on the expressway and let the rush of air cool my skin, feeling drowsy, and happy with my life.

[ER]

July 1, 2012 Scooted across to Hoosierland on this broiling day for our annual fireworks run, retrieving pyrotechnics illegal in our nanny state---the fact we have to look to Indiana for our wild times says a lot. I should have gone on a weekday, because there was an hour wait in the hot sun, and it annoyed me to see an obvious undercover cop sitting in a truck surreptitiously taking pictures of Ohio license plates to text to colleagues in patrol cars waiting across the state line. Really, couldn't their time have been better spent catching child molesters or password sharers? If someone had been there to hold my place I would've given the cop tips on blending in and told him that hiding makes you stand out, so be seen doing something appropriate to the setting, though in my experience no one clings to a mistake like someone who thinks he isn't making one. Anyway I had a solution to confound busybody law enforcement and dropped off my haul of festive explosives with an Indiana friend who'd bring them to our party on the holiday, so, I thought, let the yokels search my car if they wanted to, let them search....

[Alex]

1st July 2014.

I was working late last night and didn't get to leave until about half-eight. Just as I left the camp gates some guy stops me and asks if I work at the base. Not seeing how I could answer no, I sort of had to say yes.
He then proceeded to tell me at great length about how he was in psychic communication with his higher self and the voices had told him he had to come to Lossiemouth to serve. I was starving and badly wanted food but I didn't want this guy following me home. He seemed harmless but you never know for sure. I phoned security and let them know about the guy. The next year he was mentioned when I did my next annual security brief.

[ER]

1st July 2014.

I was working late last night and didn't get to leave until about half-eight. Just as I left the camp gates some guy stops me and asks if I work at the base. Not seeing how I could answer no, I sort of had to say yes.
He then proceeded to tell me at great length about how he was in psychic communication with his higher self and the voices had told him he had to come to Lossiemouth to serve. I was starving and badly wanted food but I didn't want this guy following me home. He seemed harmless but you never know for sure. I phoned security and let them know about the guy. The next year he was mentioned when I did my next annual security brief.

If he was recruited that night to put his psychic expertise to work on foreign policy, it might explain the general direction of things.

[Alex]

1st July 2014.

I was working late last night and didn't get to leave until about half-eight. Just as I left the camp gates some guy stops me and asks if I work at the base. Not seeing how I could answer no, I sort of had to say yes.
He then proceeded to tell me at great length about how he was in psychic communication with his higher self and the voices had told him he had to come to Lossiemouth to serve. I was starving and badly wanted food but I didn't want this guy following me home. He seemed harmless but you never know for sure. I phoned security and let them know about the guy. The next year he was mentioned when I did my next annual security brief.

If he was recruited that night to put his psychic expertise to work on foreign policy, it might explain the general direction of things.

Over the years I have had a lot of A) crazy people and B) clueless morons telling me a lot about foreign policy. *shrugs* They are entitled to their opinion, but I am just bored of listening to them.

[ER]

July 2, 2017 And now for something completely different. Ever experienced synchronicity, that odd repetition of themes played out within seemingly unconnected events? Carl Jung spent years speculating on it, saying both that it existed, and that it hinted at the presence of something greater than ourselves.

For several weeks I kept encountering story after story, account after account, of people having run-ins with shape-shifters. I bet across 99% of my life, except for Deep Space Nine and Peter Straub's Ghost Story, I never heard an utterance about such things, yet in the summer of 2017 it was like something wanted me to contemplate the concept, since the subject was everywhere.

Well, after being buffeted for weeks with references to beings changing form at will, on this day I read a Howard Stern interview with Billy Corgan, who told of witnessing someone change bodily into "something else" right in front of him, and claiming it was "evil and demonic." (About a year later he'd hint the person who transformed may have been himself.)

I shut the book of Stern interviews because that was too much, the topic of shape-shifting had been all around me for weeks, and I'd just discovered it showing up even in a book by a shock jock? Was God telling me something? Was I a shape-shifter and never knew? As far as I can tell, sadly I'm not, though after reading that, the baffling references abruptly stopped.

Existence is strange.

[ER]

July 3, 2007 For eighteen years my maternal first cousin Celia and I shared some wonderful times, before things went bad. On this day she was with me at my house, finally in the US after dreaming about it for years, and I'd never seen her so happy. I'd gone to work early that morning on a military base and she slept til almost when I got back, then we went swimming and I showed her some crazy dives, and we played Indian Poker in the woods, and fed sugar cubes to ants while we laid on the ground and watched them swarm, looking drunk with joy. Celia drew a bright-colored flower on the arch of my bare right foot with magic markers while we were out there. Toward evening we took cans of food to semi-feral cats that lived behind a Taco Bell, and went saw the second Hostel movie, then met my almost sister-in-law Clare at Starbucks and listened to a mellow steel drum performance out on the sidewalk in the hazy-hot pre-holiday night, and gave the players five dollars. Celia and I drove home and I talked about all the good stuff we'd soon do together, saying we now had years in which to do it, not yet getting how good she was at playing people: me most of all.

[Alex]

3rd July 2012.

I heard an op being called, one I (or anyone else in the office) had ever heard called before. I tried googling the name and all the results I got involved vaginal mesh surgery. It turned out it was the code word for an airplane crash. Two 15 sqn Tornado's had crashed into the north sea. Three out of the four aircrew would die in the crash, the fourth survived but had no memory of the event. I never looked at the official crash report, but we all figured with the platform coming to the end of its life, the crew had been messing around a little and ended up colliding. This would have various short-term effects on my life, attending the memorial with prince Andrew (who I didn't like even before the allegations against him) and his daughters, Jim Holt sniffing the seats the girls had been sitting on (urgh!) and sorting out the personal effects of one the dead men, but all that would be in the coming weeks. Years in to the future I'd be involved in tracking down some missing paperwork behind the aircraft. It would eventually be found shoved into various cupboards somewhere in Marham which to be fair was about the standard I'd already come to expect from that place.

I went to see 'The Amazing Spiderman' with a guy from where I had just started working. I tried hard to like him, but he turned out to be what we termed a 'briefcase wanker'. I felt the film title had lied a bit and it should have been called The OK Spiderman.

[ER]

July 4, 2007 It stormed severely that Independence Day, and that afternoon Celia got to experience her first tornado watch, fearless and even jovial about it, but avidly focused on an environmental hazard we learn to live with in this part of the world, and in fact we may have seen a small funnel while we were coming back on the circle expressway, her nose pressed to the glass while demanding in a tone of excited curiosity, "Is it going to come down behind us?" It didn't, and when the front moved out around sundown things cooled off nicely and went great. After so much rain there was almost no chance of our illegal fireworks setting the woods on fire, and the patriotic sushi was a nice novelty. I introduced Celia to everyone I invited, and people seemed happy they stopped over. See, here's something about Celia words don't tell: she's beautiful. So beautiful she attracts people, so charming she makes you want to like her, so winsomely Irish she disarms American sensibilities, and to put it mildly, she was a hit, and I looked on, proud of her. To see her come over after we'd planned for so long against the odds, and for her to be succeeding over here.... I was very happy that evening.

[Alex]

4th July 2001.

I woke up in the barracks having arrived the night before we were due to start training. We were all marched off to the administration section where we'd spend the next 3 days filling in various paperwork required for joining up. Johnny McAlany had managed to be the first one of us to get a bollocking when he called my name out. He took the shouting. For myself, I'd have pointed out I wasn't in yet and told her to shut up. Wasn't my drill instructor.  I was rooming with two other guys, an English guy called Steve Brown who I am still vaguely in touch with and a guy from Paisley whose name I can't remember, but who picked up the nickname of Mike because his hair looked like a boom mic. Every person I've met from Paisley has always thought of themselves as some hard-as-nails villain and Mike was no exception. He decided he was the toughest person on the course because he'd been present while one of his friends had been shot by a drug dealer. The guy was training to be a Dental Assistant. I figured his family were most likely notorious on their local council estate. He was quite offended when he told me his family name and I didn't recognise them as some notorious crime family.

While we were waiting for some briefing or another, one of my DI's called me up to stand in front of people and tell jokes. I still remember the joke I told that day.

Q) What is the biggest drawback in the Arctic?

A) A Polar Bear's foreskin.

After I'd told that one I instructed to sit back down and not tell any more jokes.

While people were still being shot at in Bosnia, the threat of any kind of a war of real size seemed to have retreated beyond the horizon. Our training was now geared towards smaller, what are termed 'police actions'. My my, but how the world would change in just a few weeks.

[ER]

July 5, 2021 On this night, one person's death made macabre waves in my brain.

It began when I learned a woman named Sally, whom I knew in Austin, had died suddenly in apparently perfect heath, and only a year older than me. Once, for four years, she had been part of my world, coming to know me because I was friends with her husband, who shared the same employer. She'd invite me to their house in one of the rich new neighborhoods in booming '00s Travis County, and we'd all do things together on Sixth Street and out in the Hill Country, and she and I would shop, see movies, I'd watch her explosive episodes of I-35 road rage, and it was fun as long as I let her basically decide every detail of what we were doing, since she had a controlling personality on steroids. She used to ask me to write papers for her in her college class, but I'd always decline. There came a time though that Sally absolutely hated me, blaming me (mostly unfairly) for having a role in the ending of her long-troubled five-year-old marriage, and I later found out she even toyed with the idea of hiring someone to throw corrosive liquid in my face. (Jewish princesses....you don't f**k with 'em.)

When I heard of her death, I was shocked, then when night came I was filled with unshakably morbid thoughts, recalling a time she was bent double laughing while gripping my arm, and she burst out, "Can you laugh so hard it kills you?"

In my phantasmagoric moments I kept thinking of Sally lying right then, in darkness, wearing something designer, her always gorgeous hair perfect, her makeup doubtless without flaw, her cosmetically-reshaped nose pointing toward the casket's roof in a Jewish memorial park in Connecticut, where she was originally from, her headstone reading her favorite Hebrew saying:

"Hakol dvash!" ("Everything's wonderful!")

I imagined her hands folded over her, and had this crazy, pseudo-funny realization about how her breast implants were going to lie atop her skeleton forever.

For hours I was creeped out.

In the morning I was fine, but it made for one of the most intense nights of my life, because I don't do death very well, especially when it's sudden and unexpected.....and involves someone who'd surely come back as a revenant, if ever anyone would. (Uh, kidding?)

[Alex]

5th of July 2019.

Someone I know in the US had asked if I'd play a war game recreating the American revolution with him when I was over. I said, of course, I would and asked if he could send me a guide to the uniforms worn by the troops defending the airfields so I could paint them accurately. This joke spread a little and made its way to facebook where a debate started up on whether they should be painted cofveve, and perhaps it didn't matter just as long as the style was bigly and the skin colour was a bad tan, nicknamed Cheeto colour (Barri's suggestion on the skin colour).

5th of July 2010.

I got back in Scotland after a 6 week course in Marham. It had been lovely weather the whole time I was down there, but who the hell wants to waste good weather spending time in a swamp? I was glad to get back home, particularly setting my watch 30 years ahead to get back to the right time.

[ER]

July 6, 2001 It was a miracle, early July and our high was only about seventy. It was a day to be outside, but after my regular job I spent thirteen hours alone in a massive empty house, cataloging a deceased bibliophile's library so his grandchildren could have certain volumes appraised for individual auction. It was a creepy place, old, isolated, slightly Gothic Revival, lots of interior wood, many creaks and groans from the flooring upstairs, the furniture covered with sheets, the electric cut off, so I had to bring battery-powered lights, and only because I made it a point of personal honor not to let the ambience get to me did I make it through being there into the night without getting the heebie jeebies. (The contract stipulated I worked alone, and would bring no one with me.) The books were something else though, many rare and first editions, one signed by Charles Dickens, another in German inscribed by Bismarck to a friend, some works on parchment that I was instructed only to handle while wearing silk gloves, and I entered a description of each and every one for a flat fee. It was a job my father got me because he said he figured I'd think it was cool, which I did.