Introduction

My name is Daniel Latta, and I am a liar.

I don’t really know why I’m such a lying bastard, when I got started, or if I’m actually any good at it. I could theorize. Would you like me to theorize? I’ll take that as a yes.

If I had to guess, I’d say it all started in the early days of the Crimean War. I had a thing for vodka, you see, and women wearing head scarves. Nicola Tesla had just used a massive electron cannon to blot the sun from the sky, and I was using the first ultraviolet-ray-free-day I’d had in centuries to compose a sonnet. Well, it was more of a limerick than a sonnet, but it was pretty long – 14 pages to be precise, and not those tiny, wimpy pages you young whippersnappers use these days. They were the sheets of paper we used in the Golden Age of Civilization, back when Men Were MEN, Women Were MEN, and small children were a cheap source of labor.

Actually, come to think of it, that had absolutely nothing to do with why I’m such a liar.

In reality, it was back in the 14th Century, when I was living in Florida. I had my own professional baseball team back then – well, just a farm team – and I was teaching them to use sniper rifles to steal third base. We’d all gotten trashed on fermented duck milk, and I got the spins. They hit as I was running deep into left field, attempting to catch a pop fly and dodging artillery shells. (You had to be fast during the Renaissance) My head began to swim in a delicious fog of alcohol, and something in my stomach began to lurch, so I wasn’t paying any attention when I tripped over one of those infinite turtles that keep the Earth from falling into the celestial void. I went down like a WoW server on patch day, hitting my head on a rock. When I awoke I was in Denmark.

Wait, wait… no, that’s the time I discovered broadband Internet.

Let’s start again.

My name is Daniel Latta. I’m six foot, one inch tall and weigh about 200 pounds. My eyes are bluish-green and set deep. My hair is brown, occasionally developing hardly-noticeable blond streaks during the summer. Like most men, I have no ass. I am 34 years old, and although I’m told I look 26, I feel 43.

**sigh** No, that’s not the introduction I want to make, either.

Here’s the truth, and I know its coming far too soon for what was supposed to be a 4 or 5 page essay: I’m nobody in particular. I grew up in a place, my parents had jobs, I went to a school, and now I’m here writing this. The End.

Crap! I think that might be a rip-off of David Copperfield.
The problem here is that I’ve written a few dozen introductions to myself on various blogging and social networking sites; I honestly just don’t want to do it again. Who I am just isn’t important. The width and breadth of the Internet has proven only one immutable point to me in the 14 years I’ve been surfing its ocean – I am not unique. There is nothing that separates me from the rest of the flock. In fact, there’s nobody special on this entire wretched mudball, period. If Stephen King had never been born, someone else would have written The Stand. If Barack Obama hadn’t been born, someone else would be failing to get us Universal Healthcare. We are all made up the same decaying organic matter as the rest of the…

…dammit, now I’m cribbing from Fight Club!

It occurs to me, now, that if you’re still reading this, a page later, you might actually give a damn who I am, where I come from, and how I got to wherever it is I am now. Probably not, but its worth a shot, and I’ve got pages to fill, so here goes:

My name is Daniel Latta. My father was a Kansan, raised in Leavenworth, who enlisted in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Trained as an electrician and later as a teacher, he served with distinction as part of the the Naval Construction Battalion(affectionately referred to as the SeaBees) for 20 years. While stationed at Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt, located in Exmouth, Western Australia, he met a young woman from Fremantle who was working for a hotel at a coastal resort. The two of them fell in love (you’ll have to take my word for it – observing them together tends to paint another picture entirely) and married in 1971.

My dad’s military service took them all over the planet, eventually landing them in Spain, where my mom found herself pregnant with me. This was the Spain of Francisco Franco, so my parents decided I was better off not being born on their soil – it would have made me a Spanish citizen, and liable to be drafted into their army should I ever set foot there as an adult. My father quickly transferred to Tom’s River, New Jersey, where I was born in the Lakehurst hospital.

I don’t remember much of New Jersey, but I do feel a strange form of nostalgia whenever I see a chemical plant.

My first memories are of the island of Antigua, in the Caribbean. I recall it as a paradise but I now know it was hardly that, and certainly not for the natives. I mastered walking and speaking on its beaches, made my first friends, got into my first fight(took a Tonka truck to the head), and went through what was once every child’s first serious challenge – chicken pox. I sometimes dream of soaring down a coastal road and watching abandoned sugar mills as we whizzed by them in my mother’s convertible. I will recall until my dying day the first time I could remember crawling under the Navy Chapel and seeing the hundreds of old toilets they were storing down there. I saw Star Wars for the first time at an outdoor theater, falling asleep in my mother’s arms with the image of Alderaan’s destruction now burned into my mind, being woken up before the rebels had even launched their fighters when a sudden rainstorm abruptly ended the presentation. We flew away from the island in 1978, getting locked into a holding pattern over Los Angeles International Airport. I developed a short-lived fear of air travel when the pilot jokingly said over the intercom that, since we had to wait to land, he was going to perform some stunts.

We were then stationed in the town of Port Hueneme, California, and from this point most of my life has revolved around the surrounding Ventura County area, even when I lived far away from it. My father was promoted around this time, I think, and he began teaching young sailors math and electronics in classrooms built into quonset huts. My mom got a job at the Navy Exchange and I was dropped off at the base’s daycare several days a week. I don’t consider this a bad thing – the times I spent in that asbestos-lined building were some of the happiest hours of my childhood.

My father promised my mother than he’d take her back to Australia some day, but Uncle Sam had bigger plans for him. In 1982 they offered him a job with the State Department. It didn’t pay any better than his duties at Hueneme, but it would have opened up a whole new world of career opportunities for my father. But he’d made a promise, and we left for Australia in November.
That’s just the kinda guy he is.

If you are ever given the opportunity, I urge you to visit the Land Down Under, and when you go there, don’t leave until you’ve gone out into the country for at least a week. Don’t get me wrong, Australia is home to some of the greatest cities on Earth – clean and orderly, with a brilliant night life, amazing art and architecture – but, well, shit, you’ve seen the commercials. You’ve seen the movies. I don’t need to tell you anything their tourist bureau hasn’t already crammed down your throats since the 80s. The point is: Its all true. There are places on Earth just as grand and marvelous as the Australian bush, but no place like it, anywhere. (Well, except maybe California). To me, no other place on Earth can hold a candle to it. (Well, except maybe California)

I lived in the town of Exmouth, thousands of miles up the west coast from Perth, for almost two and a half years. The town was a sort of mish-mash of American sailors, Australian sheep farmers, and tourists from just about everywhere. My father often pontificates on the superior lifestyle afforded by small, rural towns, but I don’t think it was Leavenworth he was talking about. His hometown, founded in 1854 and having produced such luminaries as “Buffalo” Bill Cody and Melissa Etheridge (ain’t Wikipedia convenient?), boasted a population of over twenty thousand people when he was growing up. Exmouth, on the other hand (founded in 1964 and apparently having spawned no-one of consequence) had a little more than a thousand resident in 1983, not counting sheep, kangaroos, or flies. I cannot recall any period in my life where I felt more alone, and happy to be so, than when I lived in that town. I returned to the Ventura County in 1985, glad to once again have access to more than one television channel, but every day since I left has seemed a little grayer than it had been. Even today, as long ago as it was, I still feel sort of lost, and sometimes I still go out my front door, expecting to see an Emu eating the lawn.

We moved into a condo in Oxnard, just next door to Port Hueneme, and my dad shipped out to Guam for his last deployment. In the six months he was gone it became very obvious to me that the USA had changed a great deal. I felt a bit like Rip Van Winkle, waking up one day to find the world had transformed around me, and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever caught up. The remnants of disco had given way to hip-hop, although at that time we were all convinced that rap was a fad who’s time had passed. My favorite TV shows had gone off the air, replaced with things like Night Court, The Cosby Show, and After M*A*S*H. We had a teenager next door who wore nothing but jet black and dyed his hair blue. I didn’t know who I was or how I fit into this world, and the only thing I did know was that I wanted a better collection of Transformers than the neighbor kids.

My dad retired from the Navy in 1986 and got a job working on land-based submersible oil pumps for Shell. My mom started temping for the Burroughs corporation – once upon the time, they’d made adding machines, but in the 80s they made computers that no-one was buying. My folks bought a house in Camarillo, 12 miles away, and once again I founded myself dumped into an alien, half-formed world, this one composed almost entirely of stucco. The house was in a relatively new subdivision called Mission Oaks, and most of the other kids were expatriated from Los Angeles because their parents were afraid of brown-skinned poor people. I used to look down on them for their participation in White Flight, but, in retrospect, I can hardly blame them – the L.A. Metroplex was a nightmare back in the 70s and 80s. If you think its bad now, you have no idea what you missed.

I was unhappy in Camarillo. I wasn’t rich, I wasn’t poor, I wasn’t particularly ambitious, I wasn’t a church-goer, and I didn’t particularly care for expensive material possessions. And I was weird and emotionally unstable. I was Luna Lovegood with a temper. I didn’t do well, socially, but I eventually found my niche with the local role-playing geeks, and, later, the BBS scene, although I always seemed to be a sort-of outcast amongst them, too. But I grew up, one way or another, my head constantly swimming in a sort of permanent daydream, sheltered from the real world by fantasy. I vaguely graduated high school, made little attempt to continue my education, and ended up working at a series of McJobs around the Ventura area until about 1996.

I had been doing Renaissance Faires for about a year, you see – all horrific tales of woe spun by young geeks start with the Ren Faire – and I met a girl named Jade who seemed to really dig me. She lived in Fresno, so I moved to Fresno, which is a lot like saying I used to live in Narnia and then I moved to Detroit. Fresno, California, is often said to be the armpit of California, and I, myself, have described it as literally Hell on Earth, if at least because of the climate. But the city is also the realest, most honest place in all the Golden State, if not the entire west coast. I don’t really feel like telling you why right now, but I promise that, in future essays, I will. I broke up with the girl two years later.

I lived in Fresno for 13 years. Four weeks ago I moved to Hayward, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Okay, now that all the preliminary introduction crap is out of the way, let me just get down to the nitty gritty:

This is Essay #1 of 100 essays based around Variation #1 of the 100ThemesChallenge. I promise to put up at least one of these every week until I am finished. Each essay will be at least four pages long and (hopefully) no longer than six. And they will be about whatever the current theme inspires me to write about. Please be advised that the things I write will no doubt occasionally be profane, involve references to illicit activities including, but not limited to, drug use, software piracy, moving violations, threats against the graves of dead celebrities, torture, communism, the weather, stealing candy from babies, and sexual activities of an esoteric and sometimes byzantine nature. I promise that I will not hold back, except when I do, and that I will not be writing any Harry Potter snuff-slash fiction.

(Please note that I said “snuff-slash” – I haven’t ruled out the possibility of finally writing that Professor MacGonagal/Giant Squid slash story I’ve been threatening the world with since 2002, so if you would like to avoid this fate, please continue to deposit payments of $420 in unmarked Euros in that recycling bin outside the Kragen Auto Parts in Scottsdale, Arizona. Remember, if you pass E. San Juan Ave, you’ve gone to far)

Please hold your applause until after the presentation, and thank you for not smoking.