dana1007

This is a story about the beautiful Jaguar I owned in the year 1963 (yes, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth!). It’s a rather long entry but I hope you’ll enjoy it.

When I reached the advanced age of 16, my father in his wisdom decided that I should get a job. There weren’t too many jobs available for boys my age, but my father managed to find one. It consisted of delivering Sunday papers all around the surrounding countryside. This was referred to as a “motor route” and my father felt that this was a fine job for me, since I could do it year-round and still go to school.

My own enthusiasm was somewhat less, especially considering that the job required me to get up at a time of day that until then had been unknown territory: four o’clock in the goddamn morning. That was when the bundles of papers were delivered to our carport and that was when I had to be up and dressed and ready to start work. Considering that the experience was one of pure agony I do have to admit that it was an excellent introduction to the true nature of working for a living.

This experience was made a bit more bearable by the fact that I got to deliver papers while driving the car that my father and I had rebuilt over the previous winter: a cherry-red 1957 XK140 Jaguar. This two-seater sports car had been nearly a total wreck when we bought it. After an incredible amount of work, we turned it into a snarling scarlet beast with chrome wire wheels and big loud dual exhausts. It would go around the tightest corners like it was on rails it handled so well. It had three two-barrel carburetors feeding a dual overhead cam engine that produced the magic number of exactly one horsepower per cubic inch. In other words, it was a rolling wet dream, a spectacular pussywagon that I would give anything to own once again. It was so low-slung that you could sit in the driver’s seat and touch the ground with your fingertips.

All that carburetion meant that it took a certain amount of practice before you could get it started, especially in cold weather. Once you had it running though, the sound those big two-barrels made when you gave it full throttle was indescribable. You had to be there. There really aren’t any words to tell you what it was like to be sixteen years old and all alone on new blacktop with that car. That car. That wonderful car.

Once I was out on the road and into the work of stuffing Sunday papers into mailboxes, the whole thing moved from the “agony” category right into the “adventure” portion of experience. For one thing, I discovered to my happy surprise that farmwives don’t wear a whole lot of clothes at that time of day. I could hardly believe that anybody else was even conscious at that hour, let alone females dressed in filmy nightgowns. To my delight, several of these ladies would come right up to the Jag to get their papers and would display about 90% of their boobs in the process. I have to tell you that in 1963 this was a pretty thrilling experience. In 1963 the sight of a woman’s nearly bare breasts swaying in my face was an electric jolt that immediately rerouted three-quarters of my blood supply straight down to Mr. Happy.

This is not to say that every woman I met on my motor route looked like Aphrodite rising from the sea. Not quite. Some were a lot more like dinosaurs rising from the La Brea tar pits. There was one from that category that used to lie in wait for me every Sunday. She lived alone and I don’t think she got out much, because even at my age I could tell that it got her motor running real good when this 16 year old cutie (as I’m sure I seemed to her) would smile at her from that sexy red Jaguar.

I’m sad to say that in my youthful insensitivity I gave her very little in return for her devotion to my brief weekly appearance. A polite smile, a few words and I was gone in a snarl of exhausts down that cold hard pavement, leaving her with a long day of nothing in particular and probably no one but a few cats to share it with. I tell you I would give a great deal to be back in that time once again and give that poor lonesome lady whatever small comfort she might have had from me.

Speaking of hard pavement, there was this one agonizing stretch of brand new blacktop that ran straight as a ruler for three glorious miles. I say “agonizing” because one of my customers had the poor taste to live right smack in the middle of it. That meant that I could only get up to full speed for a few brief moments before I had to stand on the brakes and slow down to nothing again so I could stuff their stupid damn paper in their stupid damn mailbox. That strip of pavement cried out for me to take the little red Jag up to its top speed of 140 mph and keep it there for a while!

Finally one day I just couldn’t stand it any more and I kept my foot on the gas. I just kept going. I was going down that road in the still morning air like sunlight slicing through the clouds, I was going and I was going and now here comes that goddamned mailbox and there goes their Sunday paper right out the window and right into the side of the mailbox WHAM! at 140 miles an hour! I looked up to the rearview mirror as I went roaring away from that moment and I saw nothing but a furious cloud of debris where the mailbox had been. I never went back and I never had to slow down again on that beautiful new blacktop.

This is science fiction, written in 1998 by Iain M. Banks. It is a very subtle form of science fiction; on the surface it is a story of a late-Medieval society on another planet. Nowhere is it stated that the action takes place on another planet, but there are notably two suns in the sky and several moons at night. This is an excellent book, very well written and very entertaining.

There are two narratives throughout the book, one written from the point of view of an apprentice to a mysterious woman who has become the official doctor to the King of Haspidus. The other narrative mainly concerns one DeWar, the bodyguard of the Protector General of Tassasen, a country located far away from Haspidus.

Both stories are very entertaining and gradually we become more and more certain that the mysterious lady doctor is in fact an extraterrestrial who is living on this world for her own reasons. She is evidently possessed of very advanced technology but almost never uses it. Instead she plays by the rules of the culture she is in, except when her life is threatened.

The two stories seem only distantly related to each other until the dramatic end of the book, when it is revealed that they are much more closely intertwined than has been apparent. I was sorry to see this book end and I look forward to picking up any other books Mr. Banks may have written. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Medieval fantasies.

This is science fiction, written in 2000 by David Herter. This is a first novel, and a very good one. It has a very lean and spare narrative, with practically no explanation of the unbelievably high technology that fills the book. Instead, the action proceeds like a dream, having its own logic and making sense only on its own terms. The story is of a young boy named Daric who lives on Mars of the far future, ten thousand years from now.

Daric is a clone of an ancient Leader of the solar system, a man who protected Mars and other planets from the terrible ravages of uncontrolled nanotechnology that destroyed Earth itself. The story has this boy kidnapped by a corrupt “Goldfinger” type of villain who has his own agenda and forces Daric to help him. The tables eventually are turned and Daric escapes with the help of mysterious friends who live outside the solar system’s plane of the ecliptic.

This is a strange, dreamy poetic kind of novel. Normally I wouldn’t care for such a thing, but there’s something about this one that makes it interesting and pleasant to read. I look forward to more works from David Herter and I recommend this book to anyone who likes something a bit different.