⚡ September 10, 2014
How to Get Back Into That Fictional Place ❦
Now that I’m becoming a little more satisfied that Jekyll is, indeed, the cat’s meow and all that and more, I will now attempt something creative because I’d better write something nice and pretty soon or I will lose the ability to do it at all. I am so far away from that place I was when I gave myself the excuse of a professional deadline to wander deep deep into the fields of reverie and imagination.
There is a wrought iron fence around that sacred space and most people stay on the outside and on the sidewalk, wandering in crowds and watching the storefronts change and the seasons move like a carousel across the familiar faces and chairs. I always miss whatever I had yesterday and I know it’s a trap, but I’m afraid to appreciate the moment too much, you know. Don’t want to tempt fate.
Well, since I was ever-so-rudely snatched from that secret garden of the imagination and forced to labor by the sweat of my brow again, a whole lot has happened. I would link back in this particular incarnation of Perforated Lines, but sadly, for all my Jekyll-learnin’, some of the simpler things are now a mystery wrapped in taco of coding. Simple things such as internal links, and once I figure it out, see below, I’ll come back to these pages and add them in.
I have lots of time for activities now that I’ve been fired from just everything. I’m free to start a brand-new magazine, and I am tempted. Just tonight on Future Theater, we learned an incredible fact about one of the big bestsellers in ufo-dom, a place I am trying to leave, but you know the rest of the sentence about being pulled back in. On this particular show, our guest mentions a short story by the great science-fiction writer James Blish.
Ironically indeed, Monday was the 48th anniversary of the premier of Star Trek and of course Blish wrote adaptations of all the episodes from 1967 to 1975. And here’s what makes him important for our time. His short-story called “Tomb Tapper” originally appeared in the July 1956 issue of Astounding Magazine.
What a time that was! A time when a magazine could be called astounding and actually sell copies, albeit to children and the curious and the strange. Not unlike my old readership for the past ten years. And there you have it. I love this stuff. Can’t stay away from it. I set out to find my way back into the secret garden of edenic clarity and I ended up googling and carefully tending to a vintage part of our remembered past so that I can pass it on. I’m making a nice little package of the Bliss story and why it’s oh so important to modern-day ufology. I’m basically working on a magazine, in spite of myself.
It’s all about preserving the past as carefully as possible now.
Not to sound too paranoid, but there will be those who will try to erase things. Your job, as a curious reader, is to make your own private collections that you preserve and replicate any way you can. Hoard your ephemera, within reason, and broadcast it heartily whenever you have the chance. We will all be the better for it! 🐔