Dean A. Grennell
(*well ... hardly ever)
The hiatus since the last appearance of SFFY has witnessed many things, including a detectable exodus of fans from the mid-continental hinterlands to the coastal areas ... as though the helicoptered hordes were emulating the enigmatic lemming, at least up to a point.
The state of Wisconsin, once one of the cooler hotbeds of faanish endeavor, today lies fallow, barren and all but devoid of the faintest crepitance of crifanac. In the days when mastadons the ilk of Bloch lumbered across its frozen tundra, upward of 6% of all FAPA resided within its limits (why, modern medical science is totally at a loss to suggest). Today: pfft: nobody a-tall.
How come?
The obvious metaphor makes treacherous footing: one starts to say that they took off for greener pastures but that hardly explains why Bloch and Boggs and your present scribe ( D.A.G. AMORC) came to rest in Southern California, where months go past without producing enough precipitation to stickify the goo on a postage stamp. Any verdant turf in SoCal exists by the tender soliciture of some grass-worshiping homeowner who coddles it with water that comes from the meter. At a casual glance, one might imagine the this would be a lively thing; that you'd be able to wash your auto for once with little fear the ensuing deluge would leave it all streaks and speckles. However, the aforesaid suburbanites doused the square footage with such fanatic intensity that you can't drive a clean car through the endless gauntlet of sprinklers without getting it just as blasted empockulated as if it had fared beneath natural rain from the heavens on high. In their solicitude for the desiccated shootlets, the sprinklers spray and spew on grass and macadam with fine impartiality and you become accustomed to the sight of surplus water burbling down the gutters in babbly rivulets, the runoff from lavishly drenched lawns beyond counting. Someone, you figure, needs their head bored for the sillies.
The rest of the country views California with considerable askance and its neither portion with a ration even more lavish. From the perspective of a come-lately emigre, I can attest to this with no small degree of authority. Well do I recall the aghastly murmurs voiced by countless friends and acquaintances back in Beerville when I confided that I was proposing to number myself among the 1500 souls who surge into SoCal each day of the year from less magnetic regions. Their general attitude might be compared to that of the compeers of a Buddhist bonze who announces that he is off to the local Shell station for a gallon of their ethyl and a book of matches. "My Ghod, the smog," they expotulated; "It costs a fortune to live out there," "The intense sun of Southern California causes nose-warts." I confess, my imagination is not sufficiently fecund to produce that last one; it is a precise, literal and verbatim quote, which I can document upon demand.
I have hypothecated a tentative theory that all these ideas are but compensative and palliative comfort by which non-SoCalites ameliorate their discontent at not being here. Admittedly, my temporal sampling, after five or six months, is not yet so complete as to be viewed as conclusive but I've yet to encounter anything that makes me want to drag my anchor out of this place and very little to engender faunching for the cool green hills of Wisconsin. I miss the convenience of free and unlimited access to a Xerox. I missed the superb and pluperfect service of the Silver Spring Bank in Milwaukee ... an institution so conscientious that it plain spoiled me rotten. I miss tomato juice in glass bottles and I miss Heilemann's Special Export bheer. I missed the joyous minted roar of the Blue Beetles' corroded muffler but that no more than lightly as I waft about in the silken silence of its younger brother and I miss a good deal more the warm camaraderie of handful of old friends that I had to leave back there. But I remind myself that nothing is bought without price ... nothing very worthwhile, that is ... and, overall, the price seems one helluva bargain.
There are so damned many compensating factors. Contrary to all the dour predictions, food prices are generally lower than those in Milwaukee ... some drastically so. Housing costs? ... the monthly payments are four bucks above those for the hacienda in G'town and between the two houses you couldn't hardly compare. Overcrowding? ... not in the San Gabriel Valley; 10 minutes of easy cruise on the 80 cc Yamaha puts me out of sight of the rest of humanity (even on a clear day) if I crave solitude and communion with nature--which would have taken a four-hour drive in Milwaukee and not on the howling sputterbike, either. Smog? ... well, maybe it's coming but I've yet to see anything very formidable so far. A little haze, a little smarting at the eyes once in a while, but nothing to compare to the peasoup letdowns along Lake Michigan, where we used to shove the squadcar along with one spotlight on the shoulder at 15 mph, praying that we wouldn't have to get somewhere in a hurry. Heat? Intense sun? Fehh: not in the SGV. Perhaps in the San Fernando Valley, maybe at Palm Springs; but not here, Meyer. At the front door of August I've yet to see any of the enervating swelter which is such a pungent memory of Wisconsin's summers, with the towering humidity and the breathless sauna that hardly let up the whole night long. Anyone who endured the midwestern summer of 1966 won't pity me greatly when I note that we've had one night when it wasn't down to 70 degrees by 10:00 PM; that night it was like 78 degrees with the humidity down to sensible levels. Recalling that productive endeavor was difficult when it wasn't downright impossible during a major percentage of the year back in America's Dairyland, I look back upon my years in the mitten-shaped state with the same sort of wistfully yearning nostalgia that one might feel for an aching tooth that has been pulled.
The change in jobs is a personal and subjective thing, but startling, withal. After 17 years of pushing furnaces amid an atmosphere of tense boredom, the Milwaukee years produced three months--minus a couple of days--of living hell followed by nearly three years of placid boardom during most of which I kept reminding myself that there had been numerous interludes in my past during which I would have paid a hundred dollars an hour, cheerfully, for the privilege of being bored. I mean, tech-writing beats swamping gobboons most any day and it's easier on the the viscera than getting screamed at.
However, I have fallen into a pot of glotch and, somehow, have emerged smelling like unto a great hairy rose, jobwise. Nowadays, I get dealth a downpour of ducats for doing substantially when I used to do for recreation back in the old days. In the paraphrased words of a touching old madrigal, now I'm selling when I used to give away. Any veteran faans who slogged their dogged way through the GRUE of the mid-fifties will detect a few familiar undertones in the following paragraph which, s'welp me, is extracted verbatim from a hunk of copy which I stomped out this very afternoon, in the heart of the afternoon office hours, with not only the indulgence but the harried insistence of my present employers. So, as I say, help me:
"Found only upon a chain of tiny atolls lying between McBurney's Point and the Isles of Langerhans,--and then very rarely, if at all--the Screeching Halt grows to enormous size and, in a few semi-documented instances, to adulthood. The Screeching Halt may be distinguished from a slightly less well-known contemporary, the Sliding Stop, by the fact that it has a ruff of feathers located about where the neck would be on a normal creature, the balance of its exterior being furred with hair and pelted with rocks. Moreover, it is believed to be the only known viviparous mammal that lay his feathered eggs."
The foregoing is excerpted from a series entitled "Little-Known Game Animals of the World" that will extend for so long as I can dream it up. The readers profess to love it and a majority of them clamor for more, vociferously. A few edwoodian purists set up febrile outcry but the publisher gives them short shrift and dark umbrage. I know I had found a clot of kindred souls when I first made the scene and saw a sticker on the boss's office door which read, "THIS PHONE BOOTH IS RESERVED FOR SUPERMAN."
Want a few more contrasts? Back at the tech-publishers, you paid a dime for about five ounces of hirrid slok alleged to be coffee, delivered in paper cups the were emblazoned with smarmy mottoes like (s'welp me) : "A ZERO-DEFECTS WORKER IS A WORKER WITH JOB SECURITY. " Here, you can guzzle a gallon of good java per diem--or more, if your kidneys will bear the brunt--and the cost is the same as for dipping into the carton of rolls freshly emplaced each day on Girl Friday's deak; namely: free. No serious, constructive gear-meetings to discuss How We Can Corner Our Fair Share Of The Market; no ernest talks from the Personnel Director on How We Can Stop Unauthorized Postings On The Bulletin Board; no notices on How Employees Aren't Waiting Their Turn To Get Out Of The Parking Lot; no grisly company picnics in August to use up the accumulated surplus from the take of the coffee machines (an unexpected, but welcome, added bonus); instead, when one of the thirteen employees manages a birthday, it's all hands aloft to splice the main brace and free Mai-Tai makin's in the ad-room. And, if it's been too long between birthdays, the boss comes around and says, "Tomorrow will be Hawaiian Day," and girls wear grass skirts the next day and ... well, hell, this you would not believe so what the hell Archy.
Back at the tech-publishers, we were ordained to wear white shirts, with sober earnest four-in-hand neckties (and, of course, trousers, plus shoes, with socks) at all times although, magnanimously enough, this stricture was relaxed if you came into work on Saturday morning. Here, I think they might just possibly raise an eyebrow if I reported for work in a leopard skin loincloth, although I have yet to verify this beyond a doubt. It's just a semiconscious hunch I have. At the tech publishers, you punches the timeclock and if you took 32 minutes out for lunch, you discussed it with the personnel director; here, if we still feels so inclined, we bring out our shotguns and hie off to the trap range 15 miles away for a few rounds and blot up a few beers afterward and amble back to the firing line by 3:30 PM or so. That's if we feel so inclined. We can take an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, and no one says boo. However, the work is so damned much fun that we generally get back to the desk inside of 20 minutes. But once in a while, we go shoot trap just to run a spotcheck to make sure that it's still okay.
Back at the tech-publishers, ElJay and I used to risk instant dismissal by smuggling in a tiny flacon of 151-proof Lemon Hart to fortify our bootleg tea. Here, anytime someone goes to the Party Time--a nearby liquor store and delicatessen--they check around to see if anybody else wants something, so long's they're going, and if you want a bottle of Dos Equis to perch next to the typer for inspiration, you send along 47 cents and you can drink it right out in front of Ghod and everybody. If you can be content with San Miguel, they had a case of that in the library room as recently as last week. The librarian complained about barking her shapely shins on it so I gallantly hauled it away. We tried make life bearable for each other.
The real shocker, for an ex-Wisconsinian, is the shameless way the supermarkets out here display and sell colored oleomargarine right out in the open. Thank gosh we no longer have to drive to the Illinois border for a case of Parkay; it would be a bloody long haul.
--Dean A. Grennell
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"Rosenblums Eliminates Haberackers"
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Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated August 29, 2002. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.