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I was born. The place was Kansas City, Kansas (in the US). The
year was 1956. Now, to be honest, my memory is not all that good,
so there are few chronological details for me to pass on. I can
remember things like the house on Haskell that we lived in until
I started third grade. I can remember a hallway in the building
near my second-grade classroom, but not much else there. I can
remember having some fun neighbors to play with, and how the
neighbor across the street with the steep front hill mowed his
grass with a rope tied around the lawnmower, and visiting the
nice blind man down the street who insisted on giving me silver
dollars for the pleasure of my company. So, there are lots of
images and scenes, but very little narrative.
After my parents moved to the further suburbs of KCK, there's a
bit more -- I can even remember many of my teachers' names --
but little of it strikes me as very interesting. We had
a nice house in the suburbs, a dog (that died from a losing tangle
with a car around Christmas time when I was in sixth grade), some
kids to play with. For the most part I went to school, did my
homework, and didn't get in much trouble at all. I was the
good-kid type, the teacher's pet, usually the one who knew the
answers to the questions.
Some formative things. When I was in the fourth grade (about 10
years old), a music program at school made it possible for me to
start learning to play the 'cello. That made a life change. When
I was 12 I finally got my adult library card; I had been introduced
to the library through the thoughtful intervention of my Cub-Scout
Den Mother. I went religiously every two weeks, checked out as
many books as I was allowed, and worked my way through most of
the real science books. I tended to read rather than play
outside, rather to the concern of my mother. I wasn't really cut
out for Cub Scouts for many reasons, one of which is that I really
hated camping.
When I was in seventh grade, my family spent a year living in
Fort Carson, Colorado (except for my one sister, 7 years older
than I, who got married during that time; I now have 2 nieces
and 2 nephews, all over 20). I had a good year there. It seemed
to be the year when I started discovering the world around me.
That was the year, too, that Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.
Although I didn't realize it at the time, that was also the year
that I fell in love for the first time; if only I could remember his
name, I'd tell you.
High School didn't stimulate me very much either, although I had
some very good, very dedicated, and very influential teachers, for
whom I am grateful. Because of all that science reading and my
discovery that xenon hexaflouride had recently been
synthesized, I got into a good argument with my ninth-grade
science teacher about "inert" gasses -- I won. I also seemed to
pick up geometry faster than my geometry teacher, much to his
irritation. I continued playing cello in orchestras at school
and in the community. I continued reading all the time. I studied
French, and took science and math courses until I ran out of them.
At the time, I was planning to be an architect, and helped to
organize an Explorer's group (of all things) to find out more.
When it was time to go to college, I perversely decided
to study physics and math.
My French teacher very generously said "we always lose the best ones
to the sciences". (Martha: if you read this, I wasn't totally lost!)
Now, just why I chose to study physics I'm not sure, except maybe
that I thought it was the most challenging thing I could choose.
I really knew very little about it at the time.
I went to Cornell College, a wonderful little liberal-arts college
in the corn fields of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and designed a course of
study in physics, math, and music, which is pretty much all I did
except for a French course, and some art courses when I was a
senior. For the music, I continued playing 'cello and studied
composition; my composition teacher's wisdom about many things
still guides me. I graduated with three other physics majors -- our
year produced an unusually large number of physics majors
at Cornell.
I decided to go to graduate school in physics (rather
than math), at Wesleyan
University, in Middletown, Connecticut, another smallish school
with a strong liberal-arts tradition. The physics department
was small, but again I had some good teachers, and matched up
early with my thesis advisor to be, Bob Behringer, who was another
very good influence. We had a good time working together
for the next five years on various projects. I was Bob's first
Ph.D. candidate, a position I took very seriously.
His specialty, hence what mine became, was experimental
low-temperature physics, transport properties, and critical
phenomena. We also did some interesting experiments in convection
and chaos, just when chaos was becoming a hot topic. After I'd
been at Wesleyan for about 3.5 years, my advisor took a new
position at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, and we
moved our entire lab there. I continued to do my thesis research
at Duke, but remained a student at Wesleyan.
I finished my Ph.D. thesis in 1982, writing about my experiments
measuring the shear viscosity and thermal conductivity in
helium-4 and helium-4/helium-3 mixtures near their superfluid
transition. Then I needed a job. I became a Rocket Scientist.
I decided to take a post-doctoral position at the University of
Maryland, College Park, Maryland, with Bob Gammon. At the time,
he was working with a departing graduate student on a laboratory
version of a possible microgravity experiment, with funding from
NASA. If the lab version panned out, funding might continue, and
we might fly the experiment on the US Space Shuttle. The aparatus
did laser light-scattering experiments (optics was a new field
for me, as well as the photon-correlation spectroscopy we did)
on xenon near its critical point (the critical phenomena was
not new). I also continued as an expert in high-precision temperature
measurement and control: our xenon sample was in a small, specially
built thermostat that could control its temperature to about a
microKelvin, or about 3 parts per billion.
The project was named "Zeno". (Well, okay, I named it; I also
designed the project logo, my first design work to appear on NASA
television from Earth orbit.)
Twelve years and $25 million later, and with the effort of a team
of 10 we put together at the University, plus at times 45 people
at our aerospace subcontractor, Ball Aerospace, plus a team at
the (then) NASA/Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, plus our
mission team at NASA/Marshall Space Center, in Huntsville, Alabama,
we had flown two missions on the US Space Shuttle, one in 1994,
and one in 1996. (There is still some information on the
Zeno
web site.) Our high-precision, laser light-scattering spectrometer
had actually worked. It seemed an amazing feat at the time; still
does, in fact.
Other things were basically on hold during most of the Zeno
project, at least in the early days. I stopped playing
'cello, which was a bad thing. I also had very little social life,
which was another bad thing. But that changed, finally. My personal
joke is that when people told me I should get a life, I did! And
boy, were they surprised.
I count as my official coming-out time the few minutes before midnight
of December 31, 1991. I was determined to do something before
1992 arrived, and I just managed. I did it online in the usenet
newsgroup soc.motss, and felt relieved and overwhelmed
by the wonderful community I found there. Not long afterwards I also
discovered Bears, another life-changing event, thanks to a colleague
working on Zeno with me.
To make a long story short, I dated some, I had some fun, I learned
lots of things quickly about life and then, thanks to the auspices
of Bear magazine, I met Isaac in the fall of 1992. It didn't
take us all that long to decide that we should spend our lives
together, and so we set out on that path when he moved in with me
at the house I had bought in College Park a few years before. (I
was pleased to observe later, when we moved to our present house,
that we had lived together in that house longer than I had lived
there alone.) 1992 seemed like the year when I really felt
like I had started to come alive.
After the Zeno missions, the second was in 1996, it was time
for me to move on. (That was also the year Isaac and I built our
new house in Bowie, Maryland, which is discussed elsewhere. That
was also the year that we put together this website for the first
time.) Not really anymore on the career track for a
univeristy physics professorship, and not really wanting one,
I went to work for a couple of years at a small aerospace contractor
in Maryland, named Jackson & Tull. While there I worked on two
interesting projects. One was doing a large test-software suite
for the new computer J&T was building for the Hubble Space Telescope,
that was installed in late 1999. That project also flew a mission
to test the computer on the same Shuttle flight that became famous
from John Glenn's presence.
The other project I worked on at J&T was a collaboration with the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to try building a state-of-the-art
oceanographic research buoy with satellite data communications. It
turns out that my Project Manager on that project had also been my
Project Manager on the Zeno Project -- John Borden and I have worked
productively together now for a long time. The buoy project was
pretty successful and led finally to John's decision (making another
long story very short here) to start a new company to carry on the
work.
I left J&T in the summer of 1999, not long after John had incorporated
Wavix, and started working with
him to get funding for the new company. Another long and sometimes
dreary story ensued, but we finally found an investor and closed
the deal on 2 November 2000, with Wavix constituted as a
satellite-communications company. We're still young, still growing,
still in the early stages.
Lots of other things were happening along the way, too. Thanks to
Isaac's encouragement and the outlet to play at the church where he
is the music director, I returned to playing the 'cello that had
been neglected ever since graduate school. Also around 1996 we both
became involved in an amateur theatre group that he started at the
church, which has done two productions a year ever since, and which
led to my singing in public for the first time. I continue singing
with that group, and with Isaac's early-music group at the church
(where I am probably the best-known atheist non-member of the
church -- being the choir-director's wife is a high-profile job).
In order to help pay the bills during 2000 while we were getting
Wavix going, I also became an independent Web-design consultant,
doing several websites. I continue doing some of that sort of work
in my copious spare time. There's more about that work, my resume,
more about my history with computers and such details, at the
WebCraft & Words site.
In late 1998, thanks to the mentoring of our good friend Charlie
in Baltimore, I also realized a long-time goal of writing fiction.
(See Martha, I told you there was still hope!) The fact that I
happen to write pornography doesn't matter much to me; a good
story is a good story, and it's still a bitch to make one work right.
I write under the name
Jay Neal, and have recently passed my tenth-story milestone.
Most of them have been published by American Bear magazine,
with some appearing in various anthologies. There are a few more
details at the website.
There you go. Obviously, there's more I could write about. I get
to the end of this page feeling that I've only scratched the
surface, but this has gone on long enough. As you might guess (and
maybe it's a side-effect of my poor memory, forcing me to live
more in the present than the past), I definitely find that life
gets better, more interesting, and more challenging as it goes
on. The way things are going, I'll have lots more paragraphs to
write about interesting new projects very soon. Well, as soon as
I find some spare time for them.
[To this point: 15 April 2002. Unpdate below written 31 March 2005.]
What a lot can change in what seems (at the are we are now) such
a short time!
About the time that I was writing the paragraphs above, things were
starting to go badly at Wavix, but we didn't really know it yet. At
that stage, we were optimistic and thought there was a bright light
at the end of the tunnel. We later turned out to be wrong.
The problem was one that is common among high-tech start-ups: cash
flow. We had a cash-flow crisis, we weren't able to find additional
financing to finish and ship our first round of 200 sat-com mobile
radio terminals, and our principle investor himself had serious
cash-flow issues (because his investments in telecom stocks had
tanked) and was unable to bail us out at a critical time.
It wasn't a quick death, alas. We had to quite paying salaries
in March, 2002. Most of our people stayed on as long as they could
stand it, because we all believed that we were doing important work
and we wanted to see it come to fruition. But, reality intruded
and most everyone soon needed to move on. John and I stayed around
to try to locate some money, but even our optimism suffered after
a year of fruitless searching.
So, to my mind, I started my period of unemployment in March 2003.
I didn't know how long it might last; the previous period, in 1996,
had lasted 3 months. Unfortunately, as I write this nearly 2 years
later, it's still going on.
It took me a few months to get actively into looking for a new job,
and to discover that middle-aged rocket scientists are not in great
demand. In retrospect, it seems that I've also been dealing with a
major mid-life crisis about what direction my career should take at
this point.
I can't say I have any clarity yet, but I have some much better ideas.
Writing continues to grow in importance in my life. Science is still
cental to my perspective, and music is still in my bones. When I get
that all figured out, I should have it.
Education has become an important topic, too. Partly, that may be
because of an experiment that started about 2.5 years ago. Some people
at the church, who were virtual strangers to me then, approached me
about music lessons. Their 8-year-old daughter's school required that
she learn a musical instrument by taking private lessons. Said daughter
was interested in learning 'cello. Would I teach her?
That was about the last thing I had ever thought of doing, and I found
the idea terrifying. What would I do? How would I do it? The
whole process of learning was mystifying to me, and the challenge seemed
incredible. For some reason, I said yes. Now, 2.5 years later, she's
playing quite credibly, learning higher positions and advanced bowings,
and starting to turn into a musician. I feel like I still don't know
how it happeneed, but it's been a pretty satisfying experience.
In the midst of all the unemployment (hence: financial) turmoil, we
continue to do musicals at Isaac's church twice a year. Right this
very minute I should be memorizing lines for my part in "On the 20th
Century", but I'm avoiding it. They take time, but they're still fun.
I like musicals alot, and there's nothing to compare with studying them
from the inside out by actually doing some. Watch this space: I might
be directly one sometime, too.
Now, career is not the extent of the life changes for me lately.
Last year, in January, my mother died at the age of 81. She'd been
declining slowly for a few months following a moderate stroke, and
starting to withdraw from life. Isaac and I flew to Kansas City on
a Friday to be with my father and sister, and my British cousin and
her daughter, who were able to join us. We suffered through a
weekend of ice storms and faced dire warning of a blizzard that
didn't materialize.
On Monday, a bright and sunny but bitterly cold day with a few
snowflakes in evidence, we buried my mother.
On Wednesday morning I had a major heart attack. It was a very strange
experience and took me hours to figure out what it was. Finally, it
was clear that it was something significant and Isaac overcame my
midwestern reluctance not to be a bother and called an ambulance. We
made a fast and noisy trip across Kansas City to the KU Medical Center.
Maybe I'll write at length sometime about the experience which, oddly
enough, still seems mostly good to me (and not just because of the
morphine Matt gave me in the ambulance). I had good doctor and great
nurses -- lots of people who cared.
I started with emergency angeoplasty for a couple of hours. Three
stents later the infarction had stopped and I could begin recovery.
I was aware during the procedure, but my memories are curiously
disjointed and fuzzy. What I remember most is hearing the
little percussive sounds when they'd inflate the balloon; I've
decided that it must have caused impulses in my blood pressue that
I could hear.
I spent 5 days in intensive care, lying flat in the bed because of
the yard-long balloon pump running down my left leg. (I felt like
a scene cut from "Alien" when they pulled that thing out of me.) It
was awhile before I realized just how weak I was from the heart
attack. I was only able to get out of bed and sit for a half hour
on, I think, the third day. I watched a lot of Home and Garden
television, mostly without the sound since it was days before I
figured out how to turn the sound on.
Isaac was my mooring during all that time. Without being excessive
about it, he spent a lot of time with me and saw to it that my few
additional needs were taken care of. Dad was there too, as was the
minister from Dad's church, who's a swell guy. There are comic scenes
that come to mind involving my nurses, but I may save them for some
of my more humorous fictional meanderings.
On Sunday I moved to a regular room in the cardiac unit, where I
had my own little EKG radio monitor in case of unexpected trouble,
but there was none.
I had, the following Wednesday, another round of angeoplasty and
2 more stents put in. This, my cardiologist thought, would probably
take care of things for some time to come.
On the Thursday, I was released about noon, and my Dad drove us to
his house in the midst of a major snow storm that dropped at least
8 inches on the area. Nevertheless, we made it and I went to sleep,
exhausted.
Isaac and I returned home on that Friday. At eveyone's insistence
(and they were right), I was whisked through airports in a wheelchair,
and for the first time ever got to do "preboarding" on the airplane.
I want to note that all the airline people were actually pleasant,
understanding, and did what they could to make things easy for us.
We got to Washington DC and we were met my a limousine that Isaac's
church had arranged to pick us up and take us home. The congregation
can be so very thoughtful sometimes. This also became evident in the
following weeks when many of them had arranged a schedule among themselves
of providing our dinner every day so that Isaac and I ate well and
didn't have to worry about fixing things. Nice.
Time passed and I recovered. It's hard at this remove to remember just
how tired I was then, but I do remember that for the first two weeks
I restricted my use of the stairs in the house to just one time a day;
more made me way too tired, and it took too long to go up and down.
I fell asleep a lot and felt like an old man. Then, after a bit, I
could use the stairs twice a day, then three times, then I stopped
rationing. By summer I was mowing our grass and feeling good from
the exercise. Now, I'm easily certain that I feel better than I had
for some time.
One positive benefit, I suppose, is that I haven't smoked cigarettes in
over a year now. As I put it sometime after, being in intensive care
focusses the mind remarkably, or else distracts it. Regardless, while
I was in IC I was so distracted that by the time I was in a place
where I could conceivably have smoked a cigarette, I was completely
out of the habit, the thought didn't really cross my mind, and the
awful period of withdrawl was behind me. It's seemed easier to keep
it that way since then. Occasionally I think about it -- honestly, it's
rare -- but I can always put it off until tomorrow.
These days, my physical health is fine. My mental health has its
ups and downs, which I believe is not too surprising given my major
health crisis just a year ago and this seemingly never ending two-year
stretch of unemployment. It's enough to get you down.
As I thought through last summer about possibilities for the future,
and feeling that no one would hire me, we hatched a plan of starting a
company of our own that would be forced to hire me. I don't
know how serious we were at the time, but I continued to formulate
ideas. They grew, and I thought, and they grew, and I thought, all in
my typically slow way.
In Novemember we actually sent incorporation papers to the Maryland
Department of State: Ars Hermeneutica was officially born. Fortunately,
this space (which is already bloated) is too small to talk sufficiently
about it. As I go, material appears at the
Ars Hermeneutica website. Ars
is incorporated at a nonprofit, scientific research corporation with
a research and educational mission.
Although it seemed almost like we incorporated accidentally, the
goals of Ars Hermeneutica are very, very important to me. I have begun
to feel that my future is Ars Hermeneutica -- I just don't know how
close that future is. My financial situation at the moment is
precarious and I need income. Whether I find it first through getting
work for Ars Hermeneutica or something else for myself first is
the thing that I'm waiting -- breathlessly! -- to see resolved.
I hope it's resolved much sooner rather than later.
[To this point: 31 March 2005.]
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