Those that have been following know I have ranted about the Kevin Costner movie, Waterworld, before. How if Denver was two hundred feet under water, the entire Front Range would have been poking afar above the water in clear view of the fishman, etc. But another two impossibilities occurred to me.
One, how could that old man live in the hold of the Exxon Valdez? It would have been nothing but petroleum fumes, not hardly breathable atmosphere. And two, when Dennis Hopper and his crazy men on jet skis were chasing to get the girl from the water at the end, and Kevin invented bungee diving to save her, that the bad guys did not notice that they were all headed for each other on a collision course? How dumb a villain was he? All they had to do was steer away from the impact point. Bah.
I am an Old Man. I do not feel old, but by any objective reckoning, I am. You can see from the photo that I have aged some over the years. My hair started turning grey when I was 30. At least I still have most of it. I guess that is a good thing, although a clean shaved head seems better than a fat bald spot.
I retired when I was 60 after 36 years with the same Company. You would recognize it in a heartbeat if I told you who it was. It was Colonial Pipeline, the largest products petroleum products pipeline in the Unites States, maybe the world. I was there almost from the beginning, from 1966 to 2002. These were heady years for the industrial control world. We strode the Earth like giants, designing logic elements to control industrial processes. This was before PLC’s. It was before even IC’s. It was the age of discrete transistor logic using components on a PC board. Transistors. Diodes. Resistors. Capacitors. These devices were designed into logic circuits by us few to allow one person sitting in a Control Center to control large facilities far away.
You might say I grew up with the electronic controls industry. I was there at the beginning, and by the time I left the field, it had changed to all rubber-stamp hardware, with all logic functions being done in software. Now, bad boards are simply discarded and new ones plugged in. No troubleshooting required, no getting down with an oscilloscope and tracking an errant 10 microsecond pulse. But all things pass. I retired.
And began writing. I have written and self-published 31 books, 26 fiction and 5 non-fiction, the latter including the excellent semi-autobiographical Tales From the Coastal Plain, covering my life in Hogville, South Georgia from age 10 to 18. There is no Hogville, Georgia, but there is no Yoknapatawpha either. I personally prefer John, William’s younger brother. Cabin Road and Uncle Good’s Girls are as good as Southern literature gets. They are out of print now, but if you can find them, I advise you to read them.
Anyway, I am done telling About Me. Thanks for listening.
Terrance Bramblett Short Stories & Stuff 