Control: Entropy and the Way Things Used to Be…

American Starfleet Interdiction: An American Starfleet Novel

I, Dalton Lewis, wanted to note things that were true but are no longer true. These are things that have been lost to time. I decided to use a numbered list.

1. My dad can’t walk unaided anymore. He used to walk and move around just fine and teach tennis. He was a good athlete who worked out regularly. He taught teenagers tennis for forty years and loved every day of it. He can’t walk anymore because of the Parkinson’s. He has a walker and a wheelchair now.
2. Rylan Hooke was alive. He loved role-playing games and Magic: the Gathering and had a beautiful sister and wanted to go into engineering but got bad grades. He mowed our lawn in high school. He died many years ago now. I still miss him.
3. Keith Meyer used to be alive. He was an English major and a friend. He loved comic books and comic book movies. He role-played and helped run a writer’s group in Iowa. I remember that he sang along with “The Unforgiven II” while he, Clint Stober, and I drove to some local town fair in Iowa. He is missed.
4. I used to be a young person — a teenager and then a college student. I had potential and was a bright up-and-coming person with an unlimited amount of ability to make something of myself.
5. I used to go to the bar/restaurant and go to trivia night with friends and lose at trivia night to some other table with smarter, savvier people. We no longer do this.
6. I have read most of the classic novels. I don’t get to read a classic for the first time very often anymore. If I do it’s one that I never really wanted to read anyway.
7. Marvel Crisis Protocol was a fun and thriving strategy game. I enjoyed playing it regularly until it died out and everyone stopped playing it.
8. Music stores — we used to go to the music store to buy CD’s from our favorite bands and talk and hang out and try to listen to new music. Music stores were fantastic places.
9. Video stores — it was great fun to walk through a huge store full of movies, searching for the exact one to watch that evening. Video stores were excellent.
10. I remember grunge music. The Smashing Pumpkins were one of my favorite bands in college because they were artsy and arrogant and still rock and roll at the same time…their song Muzzle was the perfect song for me.
11. I used to have no worries or responsibilities.
12. I used to go to sleep whenever in the hell I wanted. Now I go to bed at midnight.
13. I used to have such innocent, hopeful dreams.
14. I used to be sane. Now paranoid schizophrenia makes it more difficult to accomplish anything. I used to have a clean and healthy brain. I used to be skinny and young and healthy and I’m none of those any more. Let’s just hope that I can deal with the current reality the best way that I can.

Thanks, and take care, friends.