Some Assembly Required by Michael Strelow

Author:Michael Strelow [Strelow, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-628-5
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2017-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter VII

Doctor Sewall had changed and kept changing like a flower blooming. He held sway; he was the bold expression. He manifested himself in ever more fruitful ways. He was like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “great and crescive self”—the 19th century ideal for American Romanticism. I was trying out all this for the article, the article, by the way, that I still had no idea where it was headed. I started out in one direction with Rex-the-cute as center. Moving on then to the slaughter-of-the-innocents new center with Rex blasting over the human consciousness like the PA system in Brave New World.

At the beginning of my journalism-for-money career, I had a tendency to get interested in my topics and then wander off into self-indulgent research that was going no place in particular. I ended up with articles that were the parings of stacks of research and compilations of endless hours I chased around in a particular topic—chased my tail it turned out. I met a journalist who did only what was necessary for each article—interviews, research, background—and made three times the money I was making. I was having my own kind of fun to get a living, I suppose, by straying constantly from the point. So I self-corrected and got better and better at, as they say in grade school, staying on task. The voices would seem irrelevant here, but they weren’t. I recognized fairly early on that some of the voices were showing me the stuff that was off task, the ever-branching subjects that led me further and further afield from … the task. I also realized, but not so quickly, that the task itself was negotiable. Someone else was supplying the task while the voices were jolly and irrational in directing me to anything else, everything else.

But this Dr. S business had me back into old habits. First, I wanted to chase down the whole intellectual hybrid of computers and DNA replication. Then, there was the cult of personality: Dr. S’s apotheosis to the head of the class, the scholars’ internecine jealousies and backbiting as reputations rose and fell with finer and finer distinctions in the disciplines. The pecking order. The ladder up and who was standing on whose shoulders. What Nobel Prize was slowly descending from the clouds and choosing one aspirant for immortality. Then there was also the comedy of Rex the cosmic goof. That’s a Jack Kerouac term, if I remember right. The cosmic goof that consumes all high seriousness into the True. Dharma meets karma meets Abbott and Costello. Rex as high comedian was the real story I wanted to pursue, but also the hardest to write and damned hard to sell no matter how entertaining I made it. I knew that the best shot at a sale was what I came to call, “It’s alive!” Man makes critter and amazes the scientific and philosophical world. Period. Skip the hijinks.

Marnie to the rescue—at first. She helps me redirect and focus. She talks me out of

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