E. Origins

I was born in the eastern mountains to a tiny village where the mothers cling to babes, and cougars stalk in the night. I grew to manhood in emerald forests and in holes in the hillsides. Like many a young man, I grew restless when I came of age. In the spring of my eighteenth year, I bid my family and our people fare-thee-well; the womenfolk packed my sack with light and tasty delights, and the men took my hand offered wise advise, and the children hid behind their mother’s skirts. I was at once melancholy and elevated, for my fate lay ahead of me, awaited me like a maid in her chamber, the Shiva. So, I took to the paths, roads and highways, to seek my destiny.
— The Trial of Jim Dandy 1990?)

My generation was the last for whom comic books and pulp fiction were a formative force, gripping mostly young boys’ collective imagination. We can talk about graphic novels, Mr. Beast, Drake and Web 2.0, but post Covid, hardly anything of my childhood remains intact. At most, what’s left are echoes, nostalgia, skeletons, hardly enough to mock. What the girls were into back then? Because I didn’t have sisters, and my popular female cousins weren’t forthcoming, the preoccupations of the fairer sex were mysterious beyond my ken. As for the macro-culture, I don’t want to infer that TV wasn’t making a dent, because assuredly it was. But it was the golden age of network television, and our viewing options in rural southern West Virginia were quite limited, relatively speaking. Same deal with radio, AM and FM. In Beckley, we had a couple of radio stations, movie houses and record stores. Word of mouth was how you found out about the latest hot number, show, style, etc. Persistent effort was required to be trendy. The economics of cool were much more modest, after the 50’s. Magazines could give you an edge, on top of their utility as diversion. Childhood I thought was divided between stuff you were expected to do: from chores to sports, plays and recitals, block parties, church, parades, holidays and family dinners, that sort of thing, and a lot of it was fun, or not terrible and dull; and the stuff you did on your own, plus the neighborhood stuff, which with us, usually ended with a fight and/or some kid bawling or parents calling the children home for supper. There was greater societal cohesion. I hung out at the hobby shop, where I scored military miniatures, paints and brushes, glue, and at the newsstand. Dad generously supported these habits, and never punished me for swiping a few bucks from his wallet and pants to indulge them. Iron Fist, Sgt. Rock, all the DC and Marvel icons populated my inner world. The passion of my comics fixation proved a gateway drug-like aperture into escapist text, and serial printed matter. As a teen I got hooked on Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, after I’d fanboyed on comic book Conan. Same with Doc Savage. Every so often we’d take a drive to Charleston, which included stops at camera shop and excellent hobby shop, a nice restaurant and maybe even the Sunrise museum.

A funny thing happened. I got hooked on books, and spent hours at our small town public library, after school, on weekends, in summer. It helped to have a labor historian mom, who also voraciously consumed mystery novels, and a dad who assiduously took medical journals and read complete sets of both World Book and Encyclopedia Brittanica, A-Z, just because he decided to. By the time I finished high school, I had read hundreds fiction and non-fiction titles, worked on the school newspaper and literary journal, written poetry, was making music and mixtapes, performing on the stage, collaborating on cool projects, like launching a variety show with kids from school. Mostly, it was a blast! Glorious. Special. All that, plus Star Wars, Jaws, D&D, Parliament/Funkadelic, Devo, and everything, including my jock life, which I haven’t even broached yet, and girls, my dear Appalachian mountains, dance/ballet, the telephone, Myrtle Beach: an amalgamation, this becomes my art, art life, and my original social aesthetic. Europe, the Church and its Reformation, New York, Hollywood, philosophies from Socrates to the 68ers, they were all external factors, of variable determinacy, but I wouldn’t interrogate these influences until college. In the 80s, what I and plenty of others around the world discovered simultaneously was a promising new possible future, juicy beyond belief or measure, emerging from the rubble of previous decades’ 20th Century upheaval and technological acceleration. As soon as our visionary window opened, revenant malevolent forces, mostly bent on retaining, maintaining and obtaining the levers of domination, of control, allied with psychopathic nerd greedheads, run-of-the-mill bloodthirsty thugs, maniacal religious fanatics and untethered amoral spooks, teamed up to crush our living dreams, smash the new planetary consensus, commonwealth, or whatever the blessed movement we were fomenting and which was organically emerging in a manner that some referred to as pre-figuration. Which is too bad, because, as has become plainly, painfully obvious, humanity was being given a final opportunity to mend its ways, level up, mass consciousness-wise, and reconnect with the earthly paradise that was our birthright, which was going the way of the dodo, or Hiroshima, or the moon. We blew it and we knew it, by Y2K, or 9/11, or to present-tense this civilizational train wreck, a few selfishly evil pricks and they botox-faced hoes are spoiling the everywhere forever dream party for the rest of us. About 8 billion of us, not to mention, a whole planet of sentient beings. If you read nothing else, before it’s really too late, read DFW’s Infinite Jest. A laugh a minute. Or cry.

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