"TAKE ME HOME"

Have you ever been looking out over the cornfields  while a real front was coming in?  It’s rather like science fiction—first the edge of the disc not solid but with wisps of downflowing jellyfish tendrils advancing like a diaphanous trembling curtain; in front of the darkest of blue-grays rather like gun metal, and just as threatening.  One looks for whirling anywhere in this mass which stretches over the entire Western sky. Seeing nothing to 911 about, I head for shelter and the cowering shelty…

I suppose the above was inspired by TNY’s science fiction issue, mysteriously published just a few days before the death of my beloved and much admired Ray Bradbury.  As could be predicted, like a good futurist or prophet, I have read whatever TNY said about science fiction, not too surprised that after all these years they would give a nod to the master workers of the sci-fi genre.  I don’t exactly mean comics and B movies and carnage in which so many exult—the science equivalent of the 3 Stooges—“so bad it’s good.” Although they get more than their due, too, in this “ish.”  Gotta use them irony muscles or they’ll rust on ya, doncha know?

My Dad, bless his heart, got me the complete TNY on about 8 discs, for the brief time that they were offered. So I was able to search the entire archive up until about 2-3 years ago when they withdrew the deal and the updates they promised.  Sure.

So I was able to search back in my time machine and see what they had published in an author’s lifetime.  As I mentioned before, Flannery O’Connor, zero, Walker Percy, zero.  And the few reviews of O’Connors work were disdainful and sounded a bit like the ghost of H.L. Mencken.

They did publish one work by Bradbury, about of all things an undocumented alien—not the MIB kind but a very gentle unassuming Mexican who happened to be arrested in –where else?- NYC!  Certainly in many ways Bradbury’s vision was more than a little prescient—Farenheit 451 especially—and many other stories wherein our technological society becomes an enforcer and a kind of a “cement mixer” as described by visiting Martians who are overcome not by force but by our materialism—“You’re kinda cute…

Then they go to the movies….and flee back to the fleet…invasion from Mars cancelled forever!!!

(This story was undoubtedly chosen because of its setting so familiar to TNY readers—but Bradbury found large cities thoroughly dystopian and disruptive of reality and fantasy both. As do I.)

That’s kind of how I see the EMR monster—the electronic medical record. But time does not allow me to draw the many parallels which would make our predicament semi-clear.

So they gave Ray, the author of many books stories and screenplays including “Moby Dick,” one page.  One page.  But in that page is packed a brilliant summary of the trajectory of his life and his works, which was rather a seamless garment.  But as one commentator on his work pointed out, he was always going back to an agrarian boyhood in Illinois, from whence came such books as “Dandelion Wine.”

He speaks of “fire balloons” from his childhood, made by his Grandpa, something I only saw once in a movie.  But this is the end of the article, and I urge the reader to lay aholt of the rest:

“…Late that night, I dreamed the fire balloon came back, and drifted by my window.

Twenty-five years later, I wrote “The Fire Balloons,” a story in which a number of priests fly off to Mars looking for creatures of good will. It is my tribute to those summers when my grandfather was alive.  One of those priests was like my grandpa, whom I put on Mars to see the lovely balloons again; but this time they were Martians, all fired and bright, adrift above a dead sea.” 

And as  I read this again, a gentle rain is coming down after a long withholding, and the jellyfish have brought the sea to me….my books are still safe…