Awash in Sound

     I don't remember my earliest few years.  8 millimeter film footage from 1965 shows a blonde baby, diapered, white tee shirt, crawling at the speed of a slow-moving bike.  I remember, though, a moment from a year or so later: I sat on the kitchen floor, linoleum squares of alternating colors, playing with Tonka trucks and a Tonka metal jeep painted robin's egg blue.  I looked at my mother's legs passing by as she prepared dinner.  She wore a skirt and short-heeled shoes, a blouse, looked like a TV situation comedy mom of the 1960s.  It's my memory ranked first.  1966 Frostburg, Maryland.
     Living in the East for two years, my family and I took trips together in a metallic green 1964 AMC Rambler my father named Agnes.
     A station wagon can hold a lot.  Nobody wore seatbelts, but my parents, in the front seat, did.  Here's an historical fact young people of today may not know: Up until the eighties, nobody sitting in the back seats of America's cars wore their seat belts.  On all those family trips, some of them amounting to thousands of miles, some of them much shorter excursions, all the camping trips too, I never wore a seat belt--neither did my brother and sister.  My parents knew this.  Somehow, via magical thinking, we figured the bench front seat would stop us just as effectively as a seat belt.
     On February 1, 1981, I felt the sudden dig of a seat belt, forty-two mile an hour impact against a telephone pole on a wintry slick night.  My friend's dad's Cadillac--he had two of them--was totaled.  Jaws of life to get my friend out.  He spent one week in the hospital, recovered.  The impact sent me to the elegant ceiling, my knees slapped against each other so hard I felt it for days.  Got me out of gym class.
     Butter, I switched to it.  There's a half-used tub of margarine by a carton of butter ingots on the door's top shelf compartment.  Crescent rolls in there right now, about two minutes' labor to make a batch, warm up the kitchen in summertime, turn on central air conditioning, get cold watching Berlin Alexanderplatz.
     Later: Didn't turn on the TV, made burritos.  I don't have Amazon Prime these days.  I lost Netflix months ago.  Watching movies for my other blog, Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema (please check it out) has been curtailed, but I use DVDs still.  YouTube, in its bargain bin way, can yield treasures of cinema, like the time I watched on my mother's computer Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso.  Pasolini's Medea, his Teorema, I also saw on that Dell screen.  Days of Windows 7 and Windows 8.  Windows 7 I understood, I liked it.  Windows 8 was worthless.  People who make a good thing worse in the next version should be fired.
     I listened to music at that computer, in the dining room, facing the side porch.  Long white lace curtains, tall windows, southerly exposure, writing e-mails, a novel, and essays, editing manuscripts, rewriting, getting rid of words, making more words.
     I'm a visual artist (movies, collages) who writes (essays--as in blog posts--short fiction, long fiction, novels, poems).  My films can be viewed by going to YouTube channel John Berner.  It's a gross practice to self-advertise, but I want people to see my movies, made under the name Rhombus.  I've been Rhombus since the night of a radio show in October 1998.
     As a writer, though, I'm Vic Neptune.

                                                                                 Vic Neptune