I’m a Freak

I have to admit it.  It’s partly due to being raised by Brits.  You see, it’s their fault I had British grandparents.  So I grew up with the Beano, Dandy, and Danger Man comic books, and the great Empire fiction stories from writers such as Enid Blyton, in which jolly pals used words like “gosh” under circumstances which would prompt somewhat stronger sentiments now.
 
But the time comes to put away childish things, and one Christmas my Grandma and Granddad sent me “The Face of Evil” and “The Hand of Fear”. From then on I was a changed person.  The death of the original series sometime around 1989 was a personal tragedy, although I have to admit that by then I’d discovered something I liked better.
 
But Doctor Who had something going for it that neither later clones, nor the many rather morbid attempts to resurrect the show have.  Perhaps it’s best defined as an air of innocence.
 
I always felt that the show could afford cheap-ass special effects in return for providing great, usually imaginative storylines.  It was also usually devoid of any saccharine morality for its own sake.  What saccharine morality there was was actually an operating principle of the central character.
 
So why is this relevant to me today?
 
In 1963, Doctor Who launched what was to be a thirty year run, starring a little old man in the title role. Of course you may have noticed that he died shortly after its twentieth anniversary.  In fact, he left the show after three years.
 
So what to do?  The producers came up with the most audacious bit of television to date:  They simply killed off the central character and carried on with him.  Yes, with him.  The central character was now played by a new fella.
 
Audience Member: Yeah, yeah. . .so what?
 
The name they used for the process was “regeneration”, and it was so successful that over forty years it’s been used seven times in the BBC series alone, not counting the piles of add-ons, hopefuls, and gawdelpus fanfic (No offense to Thirty-Something, but no.  Just no.  And possibly ugh. Actually, strike that “possibly”).
 
Audience:  Is this gonna take long?  I have something—an appointment, yeah, yeah, that’s it . . . uh, with  the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce . . .  

So:  This is the beginning of my regeneration.  In the beginning, I wanted to be a train driver.  Somewhat later on I realized (dimly) a little something about the futility of manual labor, and realized that girls dug poets.  So I strained my adolescent heart and produced a fairly good assortment of crap of adolescent outlook and quality (which being as I was an adolescent was only reasonable, right?)
 
Later on, having realized that girls might love poets but full-blooded women dug uniforms, I was a soldier for a while (and am toying with re-applying simply to see if they’ll let me back in!).
 
I drove trucks for many years (since women tire of uniforms but rarely stick with men who have no paycheques—the SO being a well-beloved exception that proves the rule, I hope), and for a short term I enjoyed rebirth as a damn fine garbage man.
 
But the time has come to put away adult things, come full circle and meet my 14-year-old angst-ridden (not to mention spotty) self coming the other way.  Time to reconnect with that hormone-awash little screwball and start turning out some pages.
 
I AM, goddammit, a writer, and as the saying goes . . . can’t find it—think it’s Mencken. But the sentiment is “If you want to write, write!”
 
So I’m off to work on my car.