"I ain't even liked it yet"

A reader's guide to Sundman figures it out!

Précis

This post is mainly a brief review of the 17 entries in the Sundman figures it out! project so far. It has been my intention that this narrative have at least some kind of linear structure, in the sense that themes and incidents in earlier posts are recapitulated in subsequent ones, kinda fugue-like. The more of the earlier posts you’ve read, the more resonances you’ll pick up in the later ones. That’s the idea, anyway.

Since many subscribers have joined us recently (Hello! Welcome! How are you!) and since only a handful of people have read every post no matter how long they’ve been a subscriber, I thought it might be helpful to take a brief pause to look back a bit & look forward a bit.

I also discuss the new ‘reader referral’ rewards for helping me spread the word.

And of course there’s a micro-story or two and a few free-book giveaways to promote.

Moving man

Clarence “Trip” “Trippy” Barnes is retired furniture moving man here on Martha’s Vineyard. One of the irksome things about Trip is that while he believes that he is a larger-than-life, virtually legendary Vineyarder and that anybody who knows anything about this place has at least one Trip story to tell, he is in fact a larger-than-life, virtually legendary Vineyarder and anybody who knows anything about this place has at least one Trip story to tell.

Trip at worldwide headquarters of Barnes Movers, International. — Photo by Randi Baird for the Vineyard Gazette

Over a period of a few years in the early part of this century I was — intermittently, when writing wasn’t bringing in any money — a truck driver and furniture mover for Barnes Movers. I drove Barnes trucks as far north as Lewiston, Maine and as far south as Key Largo, Florida. I moved household effects and expensive artworks and inflatable lifeboats for use on Steamship Authority ferries. One time I (quite illegally) drove a woman and her 47 cats from a stately harborside Federalist house in Edgartown to a penthouse at United Nations Plaza in Manhattan. I never got too far west, but I did make one run to Nantucket.

I have quite a few Trippy stories to tell, but I’m not going to tell any of them here and now. I do have one quick story about a short conversation from my truck-driving days that I had with a fellow I met while seated next to him in the ‘truckers only’ section of a truck stop lunch counter in central Maryland that I’d like to share with you. We’ll come back to that one in a bit.

Reader referrals — bring your friends — and tell me what bennies I should give to paid subscribers

Yesterday I announced rewards for helping me spread the word about Sundman figures it out! If you’re a free subscriber, it’s easy to get upgraded to ‘paid’. If you’re already a paid subscriber it’s easy to extend your subscription, on me. And if you become a power-referrer, there are even more exciting benefits. And all you gotta do to earn them is get a few friends to sign up — free or paid. Here’s a handy button for you:

Bennies

As of today, free and paid subscribers to this gazette get the same things — all posts, with the ability to comment on them. (Founding members get a whole ton more. You should definitely be a founder if you can afford it.) Basically the only thing that paid members get that free subscribers don’t get is the warm glow that comes from helping me keep this thing going. But that’s going to change over the summer. I don’t plan to subtract anything, but I do plan to add some benefits for paying subscribers. I’d appreciate your guidance on what to offer.

Here’s are some additional capabilities that I’m considering for paid subscribers:

• Priority consideration for ‘beta reader’ access to my novels in progress;

• Access to a discord channel to discuss topics here to discuss these posts, my books or whatever else you may feel like talking about (within limits, naturally);

• Previews of cover designs for my forthcoming books, with ability to comment on them;

• Easy access to essays from my earlier newsletter Technopotheosis, about ‘art, ethics, synthetic biology, and my glamorous life as unsung literary genius and working class hero’;

• live discussions, (Zoom meetings or whatever)

• access to some of my antediluvian online diaries and essays on Wetmachine, HuSi, and maybe even Kuro5hin and Salon (if I can figure out how to import them to Substack).

Art for my Technopotheosis newsletter, done by Mark Gibbs, co-author of the forthcoming (some day) novel Creation Science

If you’re a paid subscriber, which of these (or what else) would you like me to provide first? If you’re not a paid subscriber, what might induce you to ante up? Let me know in the comments!

A Reader’s Guide to Sundman Figures it out!

Sundman figures is out! is an autobiographical meditation written by a 70 year old man.

Unlike some of my earlier writings, it doesn’t concern itself much with technopotheosis ( the apotheosis of technology), or the convergence of the biological and digital realms, or with philosophical implications of the impeding (or not) singularity. It’s mostly just me looking back on my life & telling stories, trying to make sense of things, trying to get the story of my life to cohere, just like you are.

The easiest way to vector to any of the posts I list below is by way of the archive page.

Here’s my synopses:

In the first post, Figuring it out, I compare myself to Jason Bourne being prodded by his companion Maria to figure out, forthwith, what the hell is going on — inasmuch as the entire universe appears to be collapsing on them — so that they don’t both end up dead, or worse. The role of Maria is played by my wife Betty. Backstory is given.

Still staring into the future from my hut in Fanaye

In Dark Side of the Hut, 50 years later, I talk about one of the truly extraordinary things I experienced during the nearly two years that I resided in a mud hut in a small village in the Senegal River valley during a time of pestilence and drought.

Easy Was (Apologia pro substack sua) gives a further rationale for this thing, with allusions to Keith Richards’ ancient art of weaving and to the theologian, academic, intellectual, philosopher, polymath, historian, writer, scholar and poet John Henry Newman’s defense of his conversion to Catholicism. Also, this really awesome photo also discussed:

‘Easy was.’ Easy for you to say, maybe. Not for everybody.

“One crowded hour” on the road to Telluride concerns a true but also mythic road trip I made in 2007 with my dying brother Paul, his nearly dying wife Jennifer, and their two children. The notion of a ‘crowded hour’ is implicit.

A Scared Firefighter, up in the Bucket (parts 1 -3) concerns the only time in my ten year career as a firefighter that I was ever scared, and my encounters with some pioneers and philosophers of artificial intelligence, and the song Crown of Creation by Jefferson Airplane, and my wife Betty’s back porch gardens.

Fire Engine Memory Science. I think the title pretty much explains what that one’s about.

This fire hydrant ramifies

What’s the Frequency, Tom? Concerns my disorienting return from Africa, my equally disorienting introduction to Silicon Valley, my experiences with the legendary ur-geek Tom West, and some disconcerting encounters with New Age mystic woo-woo.

Catholicism and Human Sexual Response. My forced metamorphosis from country boy to city kid, plus some other stuff.

Mountain of Devils and Creation Science: notes on the two novels I am (still) working on.

Albert, Unforgotten: My boyhood best friend, murdered in Atlantic City long ago. Albert cast a long shadow over much of my life, and now he looms large over Creation Science.

Creation Science, the novel. Further notes on Creation Science, given the Albert backstory.

Every cosmic vacuum is filled with cosmic energy concerns a crowded-hour dinner party, friendship, a dramatic fire, a cemetery. This essay has echoes of many of the foregoing ones, including Easy Was, Crowded Hour, Scared Firefighter, Frequency Tom and Memory Science.

Looking forward from here I can promise a herky-jerky ride of at least 17 more essays before we get to Jerry Cans in Utica, the story of one of the crowdedest hours of my entire life. So you’ll want to have read ‘em all to really be ready for that one.

Promo’s

Sign up for an author’s mail list, get a free book. The first of these promos offers my Biodigital. The second one offers Cheap Complex Devices. Every click on one of these images helps me out, whether or not you chose to download any books.

Touki Bouki

So anyway I was sitting there in the ‘trucker’s only’ section of the lunch counter, experiencing a wee bit of imposter syndrome, since not only was I driving a ‘straight’ moving van (and not an 18-wheeler like a real truck driver), I didn’t even have a CDL, a commercial driver’s license. (Trip has ways around such niceties. I’m glad no cop ever asked me about them.)

But yet I was, in fact, a professional truck driver, so whatever.

My chance truck stop companion and I were not very far along into our conversation (he was having the meat loaf special; I was just drinking coffee) when he confessed that he had such a fear of driving over bridges, especially ones with a steep incline (‘You can’t even see the road in front of the truck. It’s like you’re driving into thin air.’) that he had once, at the conclusion of a drive across the continental United States, driven around the San Francisco Bay, from Oakland south through the East Bay to Milpitas at the bag end and north through Silicon Valley to San Francisco to avoid driving over the Bay Bridge.

A long way to go to avoid driving over a bridge. Especially after driving across the whole country.

But truck driving was the highest-paying skill he had, and he had a family to feed, so truck driving is what he did.

“It’s eighteen years I’ve been doing this job,” he said. “And I ain’t even liked it yet.”

That conversation occurred well over 20 years ago. I’ve thought about it a lot since then. Like that trucker, like you, I’ve sometimes found myself in barely tolerable circumstances from which I saw no reasonable way out, doing a job that I ain’t never even liked.

But I do like the job I have now, being a biodigital novelist and Substack autobiographer. It’s hard, it’s scary — is the gamble going to pay off or are we going to go bust (again)? — (a terrifying proposition) — but I do love it.

And if you love what I write here just a little bit at all, won’t you please help me to be able to keep doing this? Will you subscribe if you haven’t already? Will you upgrade to ‘paid’ if you can afford the $5/month? Will you become a founder and really boost my spirits? Or if none of those, will you share this post, pretty please? (Remember, you get credit for any new subscriptions that result from your sharing.)

Touki bouki, by the way, means ‘flight of the hyena’ in Wolof (a language in which I was once reasonably conversant). It’s the name of the 1973 movie by Djibril Diop Mambéty. More to the point, it’s a phrase that you used to see painted on Senegalese trucks and cars rapides.

I couldn’t find any pictures of trucks or cars rapides with ‘touki bouki’ written on them, but I’ve sure seen plenty of them.

Did the drivers of those vans and trucks like their jobs, or did they feel trapped like the guy at the Maryland truck stop did?

I have a story about that. Stay tuned.