New Rule:

no lovers quarrels are allowed to take place inside the domicile unless travel outside of said domicile is patently unfeasible.

Particularly when lover done had her ass here 3 damn days straight.

'I am what happens

when one is the marrying type, but cannot make up one's mind'

STDized testing.

So, finally, for the first time ever, I did an HIV screening today.

Screener was, of course amazed that I've never been drunk or smoked.

One can only imagine her incredulity if she'd asked "number of partners".

I had no idea that oral sex is considered a low-risk HIV activity.

(well, lower at any rate)

Or that "pre-cum" is a valid term in these situations.


Dear, non-profit sex-safety orgs:

please, ease up on the condescension a bit - not everyone you talk to is stupid.

interesting experience, though.

Glad I went.

NPR on the chitlin circuit

click

Atlantic slave trade map

click

Photographs of African captives in slave ships

click

It's times like these...

... that I wish I could pause the rest of (reality) while I finish editing these pictures.

Jump the passport

Proving how UN-revolutionary and conditioned I REALLY am,

despite the ethno-crunchy exterior,

I just turned down a marriage for citizenship proposal.

Which seems interesting considering I'm in need of further income for about a month now.

Though I suppose this goes along with my "I don't do anything for money" thing I've been working on.

(shurg)

I am sitting

In the ferry terminal in Manhattan where a guy just slide-stumbled his way onto a seat. A key clip including a fobbed car key was clipped to his waist. On his feet are socks. Just socks. And it looks like he has been walking in standing water.

I wonder if he knows where his shoes are.

Or whether HE'LL be wondering where in the morning.

Air - Playground Love (vibraphone stylee)

I'm tired of fb getting all my music love.

So here.

Dammit.

Theatre is a strangplace

when the room is full and you're the only one there.

There are days when I really wish I was married.

There are days when I really think I'm louse.

There are days when I really think progressive.

There are days when I really think I may still change the world one day.

There are days when I really wonder if anybody'd notice I'm gone.

There are days when I really feel my body conceding.

There are days when I really feel stronger than ever.

There are days when it really feels like I can't remember anything.

There are days when it really seems like I'll never forget.



The earth spins; it rotates.
The solar system spins; it rotates.
The galaxy spins, rotates.
The cloud* spins as it rotates.

No matter the way you turn,
No matter how fast you run,

you are always coming and going.

So, if I let go - simply:

Root my Self in the Ground,

I will always be going;
I will always be coming.

∞.



(*the cosmic one)

Life in the city

Was recognized ny person who recognized by young lady who knew me from college and even had that story that Chikiezie wrote on me while there...(wow)

just heard ''I don't know you, when you see me, don't speak to me'' escalate to water in face after 3 refrains retaliated to by pink grapefruit Simple across the back.

For future reference, throwing water in someone's face is, well... Is well wack.

Ghost Rider

It seems the motorized community has taken a cue from their
Human-Powered kin.

prayers to the families of both involved.

Drivers: be patient, pay attention.

Riders: slow down, be vigilant.

selah & amin.

For the first time in recorded history.

I am feenin' for something to read.

Preferably without pictures.

My metamorphosis into a dowager is complete.

I believe I have turned myself

into one of those people who must read before going to sleep.


Also, it's official: I'm nocturnal again.

I wonder

if the evil onE can overhear my private conversations with God.

Thus, it knows how to bait me.

"Be self-controlled and alert.

Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour."



1 peter 5 : 8

garba chap 3, v113

"Live life every day as if it were the first and the last

for they are both a celebration."

The Stage

WARNING: There's probably some NSFW language mixed mixed about this incomprehensible raving

The G.O.A.T. Barb

just texted me that she's in her "garage gym" hula hooping.

This is why I love my Barbar,

and further entrenching her as the G.O.A.T.barb .

There was a period in my life

when I used to savor things. This seems to me to have been right after I got out of college. It may have been happening before, but I mark it then because I was taken out to eat by a friend who remarked that she loved how I savor things. At the time I would do it consciously for performance sake, but I think that instance caused me to invest in it more.

Thinking about it now, I believe it probably started while in school at least. I think I took flavor for granted growing up in The Boot State. I never even liked Tabasco until I had to deal with the comparatively bland campus food.

I bring this up...because I think I've lost that ability to savor...or am in a period of protracted separation from it.

And it feel like it's been since coming here to a place (geographically, metaphysically) that seems primarily to be about subsistence, survival. I eat the food I can get to. Even when I go to taste something, I feel like I'm wolfing it down, having to hurry up and finish it so it's consummation poses the least burden on my travel.

And things are hurried here.

At home/before here I had time to taste.

To savor.

Perhaps I should make a purposed effort to be somewhere* where that time exists again.

Or maybe there must be balance to stimulate action?

Hm.

(*Geo, though I can hear you already saying meta.    You nerds)

(shrug)

Occupied by....bronze?

Occupied by fall weather

Occupied by chant practice

In that order.

This sign is a hater.

Peanut

On September 10th, while on an assignment, I found out my cousin Brian Lundy, Jr. had been killed on Marjah, Afghanistan.

He is not the first of my famliy to die.                                                          

He is not the first of my family to die young.

He is not the first of my family to die in violence.

But this struck me....and it took, I think, a day for me to start to figure out why: he was the first family member that I've personally known from a succeeding generation to die.

You see, Brian is my second cousin - as much younger than me than I am my older brother. His mother (my first cousin), was born roughly the same time as my Aunt Gwen. The last time I saw him he at roughly the same point in his life that my first nephew is now. I remember them discussing Pokemon or some such 10 years ago when they were both at my apartment after my knee surgery.

They reminded me of each other in ways...both given to shyness....but perhaps not really much more than the way I see my nephew in just about anybody I look at and think of as young.

It took days, weeks even maybe, to discern the emotion I was having. I knew him and we spent some time together, but I was closer to his older sister. More then despair there was this anger rooted in the idea that he was young. Perhaps I should say that he's young to me - despite the fact that he was 25. Because the last time I saw him, he was 18. So I think that's how I'll always think of him...

And rooted in that anger - or what the anger was rooted in  - was that I would never get to see the man he'd become/was becoming.

And in the more universal sense, it made me face in the way that none of us are comfortable with the prospect of our children dying and specifically for me my nephew. I'd known that it's hard to watch someone younger than you die; now I knew...KNOW what it feels like.

synpathy->empathy

I suppose I should have put this up sooner than a month later, but it really did take me a while to be able to put into words how I felt about. Being lazy...I guess I was waiting for necessity to be the inventor.

(but was prolly just being my usual lazy self)

The inventor showed up when dealing with a bit of family discord. I'd been feeling a bit useless during the day before and of the funeral, not having/knowing anything to say to make it better, awkward in attempts at humor... Then some of that inevitable family discord showed up. And I just had to project my probiscus into it... the following was part of an attempt to quell it and in it I think I was finally able to express where I was or had been at for that past week:

I am Brian K. Lundy Jr.'s second cousin. I used to lived in Austin for four years, during which B and his family were my only family there - and for the first year the only people I knew there at all. I spent one summer with them. I helped teach Jos how to drive and helped B fix his bike. The three of us drove 500 miles to a family reunion where they met much of their extended family for the first time. He and I played ball (and won) against (people) hours before we had no idea we were related to. He helped me pull the interior of my car out. I helped him install a cd player in his first car. 


I am one of the people who goes back and forth between anger and sadness that he's gone...



So. I don't know. Maybe that says something. Maybe it only made sense to say in that moment. Maybe the strangeness I feel now putting it here doesn't compare to the first time I sent it.

Maybe this is all really just me yacking about me...looking for the internet to pat me on the back for so deep and personal.

(shrug)

Or maybe it just a long-@ss way of saying death has a funny way of letting you know who you love.

:-#

Despite having been illuminated thusly several moments hence & more than once,,

it still strikes me to realize that the way I feel about TheNerdBoy (Nerdy Walker (the Thurd??) may have/must have been/was* the way My Gwen felt* about me/us...the neeces...the nephs.


Sometimes I miss My Gwen, but she never stops making me smile. That's why I still love her.


*is?

*feels?

today

Shipping company left crap that I had to move in truck.

Tweaked back while lifting large mass of vinyl.

(see what bad posture on off days gets you)

Made fateful decision to take cab from Jerz back home thinking it's not far and got hit for $57 ride because driver didn't have ezpass.

Got home and remembered I had job to do city which is why I was supposed to go back to PATH instead of take cab.

Headed back toward city to do said job and realized phone was left on bed.

Saw NYPD, for first time in personal history, busting fake bag sellers near Broadway and cdn't document due to forgotten phone.

Chose to miss chance at 10:00 boat to take care of personal errand, 10:30 turned into 10:45, lost transfer.



>:{#

I want to throw a brick

every time I bother trying to listen to "Sky Full of Lighters".

I'm sure there's some idea there I'm supposed to like, but I am adamantly against such unwarranted warbling or music that's so obviously an attempt to be "moving" and emotional.

Fake strings make me (blech!).

dir

55 Austin Pl Staten Island, NY 10304

Walk to Victory Bl - Austin Pl

About 2 mins (0.1 mi)

Victory Bl - Austin Pl

S62 Bus towards ST GEORGE FERRY via VICTORY

2:44am - 2:51am (7 mins, 8 stops)

St George Ferry - Ramp C Bay 4

Walk to St. George Terminal Staten Island

About 2 mins (9 mins to make transfer)

St. George Terminal Staten Island

Staten Island Ferry Ferry towards Whitehall Terminal Manhattan (South Ferry)

3:00am - 3:25am (25 mins, 1 stop)

Whitehall Terminal Manhattan (South Ferry)

Walk to Whitehall St

About 3 mins (16 mins to make transfer)

Whitehall St

Subway towards To DITMARS BOULEVARD

3:41am - 4:10am (29 mins, 16 stops)

Queensboro Plaza

Subway towards To MAIN STREET FLUSHING

4:11am - 4:24am (14 mins, 10 stops)

Junction Blvd

Walk to Junction Blvd/Roosevelt Ave

About 1 min (16 mins to make transfer)

Junction Blvd/Roosevelt Ave

Q72 Bus towards Q72 - LaGuardia Airport - Central Terminal Building

4:41am - 4:55am (14 mins, 3 stops)

LaGuardia Airport Main Terminal

Walk to 100-15 Ditmars Blvd, New York, NY 11369

About 1 min (161 ft)

these are the directions to the airport via public trans. from when I went down for BKL, Jr's memorial. now I know why I didn't show up in my email......

Danny & Annie

Periodically...

secretly...

I wish I could believe this much in love again.

I just spent the

better part of 5 hours (at least) looking for a SD Card that I should have been more careful about putting away. In the process I prayed for forgiveness, humility, clarity and diligence.

and finally cleaned underneath the bed and cleared away some clutter.

I'm pretty sure I can say now that I know the valleys are just ThePower's way of putting you in perspective,

but now I know that in the beginning of the bad stuff.

I figure I'll continue to get to know that better.

I love these posts where I doubt I'll even know what I'm talking about later.

:-P

(this happened back in, like early Sept. or something....still getting used to the "updated" blogger interface)

Linda sells seaweed be the sea.....something.

(click)

eat Fresh

the beautifully polite,

wonderfully courteous,

graciously attentive women

currently working at the Subway

in Smyrna on Church near Country Inn & Suites

have done NOTHING to quell my Indian woman fetish.

at all.

Particularly the particularly curvaceous sandwich artist who made my sammich.

(and my day?)



[munch]

{yum} 

what i had just said

"I'm a slut. I would say I'm a whore, but I'm an actor and that would be redundant."

Shoulders

The first time I came too New York City, I was a youth...eight or nine I guess...maybe 10?

(doubt it)

Of all the experiences had here then, the one that stuck out to me was the Atlas statue at Rockefeller Center. I seem to remember being interested in seeing the statuary, and that being my favorite.

Why that was, I don't know. Maybe because one could get closer to it that most of the other large and better known statues in the city. Maybe it was due to having seen it on a brochure.

(shrug)

On my way back from performing a duty of my current bit of survivalry, I passed by the statue. It doesn't seem quite as massive as it used to (of course), but something that I'd never thought about occurred to me:

while I was in grad school, I had this idea that if I ever got a tattoo, I would have the words

"Place your pain here"

stenciled across the top of my back near the shoulders*. I think this was also not far removed from the first time I had the fantasy of dragging people (blackfolx?) up out of (bad stuff, ignorance?) up a mountain.

And since that point in life particularly, I think I've always been occupied with the idea of the strong back - of being one who takes on what others cannot; how is it is...or could be one's contribution to humanity.

(Particularly for one who doesn't contribute enough?)

Well, it was in that moment while walking past that figure holding aloft the Mother Sphere that I, for the first time, ever made a connection with my preoccupation and the attraction to Atlas when I was little...

though I don't really remember thinking about it much then.

but I guess that doesn't mean it wasn't there, right?

hm.


*

:-#

Basura

During the past three days of torture, one of my promo co-workers*, who'd already commented me on my m.c.'ing, took another moment, with some consideration on her part, to say that she thought I was being "....well....w-..wasted".

Then I took a bit of a moment to decide whether I was going to say that I knew that it was nothing I'd not heard before; show that I knew that she meant. I probably said something like "yeah". I mentioned that I don't plan on doing that particular job for forever.




But, hey, if you're great (and I mean YOU) - as long as your being it - even in a place that doesn't seem to be where it most fits or you're not rewarded with the money or notariety others that others have been afforded for similar greatness...

if somebody is getting to experience it, and your not letting it grow stale from disuse,

is that still wasteful?

Favor.

Today, I pulled myself up after lying down (not sleeping) for a few hours before trying to make a print call before making an 11a background set call.

AND manage to make the union payment that I couldn't the previous night/wee hours to be ALLOWED to work on said bg call.

Managed to get muffin and tea before boat left, despite whatever caused all the service people (nat'l and PD) to be in the terminal. (small favor?)

I got to print call and saw several people I haven't in a while, including young cat I dig from A&C, dude I did a dude play with and money that keeps booking the print jobs I don't 'cuz he all gorgeous an' sh!t. Despite chatting each of them up for a sec, managed to get in ahead of the line - DESPITE not being dressed properly for said call (definite favor).

Made call a few blocks away AT 11a, got in and set about doing weekly expenses and got dues paid....before checking balance...then checked balance...and had to change cards so as not to overdraft. Got in touch with union HQ and was able to change payment source (favor).

Met another person rocking the fivevingers. These is the summer jawn for '11 fuh sho (favoring the feet).

Realized that person I thought looked a lot like person was, in fact, that person: reconnection (personal favor).

Found out that, in fact I had enough cash in account to cover original transaction, thus, no need to have changed payment sources (financial favor) AND that the lower payment that I made instead was still enough to allow me to work for the project (professional favor).

Had long conversation about paleo-diet (sp?), dialect, "race", identity, culture (oral favor!)

Heard from re-connection about their personal nutrition discovery affected them in a positive enough way to give the strength to stand what was, more or less divorce (resurective favor).

Surprise chance to see Sacha Baron Cohen in action up-close and Anna Faris do her (changed presumption favor).

And I got paid overtime for most of the above... (see "financial favor")

Sudden boost of energy, boosted moreso by FORTILIVE (musical favor)

Coming home, sitting on bed, looking down and finding lost 8GB micro SD card!

(highly unlikely favor)

AND it was nice and cool and breezy and overcast.

Today was Monday?

My new favorite.

 :-p

Evolution of Philosophy of $

While thinking about co-worker I find nutty,

(as in clinically)

I worked my way onto my position on money.

I think I hate money. I also think it's impossible to love money - people might love making money, but they don't love money.

They can't, because there's nothing there. There's no force, there's no energy. The only value (greater sense, not market) is that ascribed to it by (us).

A (at least roughly) spherical placed at the top of a decline has potential energy and, given a certain weight and relatively stable laws of physics, that potential is measurable. Launched down said incline, said rock has kinetic energy - again measurable.

One cannot take away the energy of that object - one can only displace it to other objects (impediments, air friction). Now, the method of measuring may change  or the units of measure may change, but that's just changing numbers around. Depending on the scale, the energy of that moving rock can be anywhere from seemingly infinite to negatively-near-non-existence, but it doesn't take away from the actual energy, force displayed. It merely is.

Money is merely changing numbers.


Dig?


The importance of money hinges simply on our collective insistence on it. To me personally, it is unimportant. One might suggest that I give them all my money in this case. At this point I might respond that I would be happy to if it weren't so important to all the people who want it from me.

If humankind wanted to, we could have already been to Jupiter by now, free of charge.

But as long as there's one person who has to get paid, or even an expense covered,

("oh, I just need the money to cover the cost of me....")

we'll just sit here occasionally glancing at bootprints on the moon.

This week, I think I am of the impression that I can't do anything I truly love for money.

MIT c. 1918

ahead of most curves, including diversity.

Al-Lo-Davar

Yesterday I decided to force myself out of the house and walk around with the K10D with just the strap and the F 50 2.0. (more on that bit of adventure later).

While in the Manhattan side lower deck, I noticed a Hasidic* family - what I assumed to be a mother and her two boys, father standing near. Without them noticing, I snapped a few shots of them looking out into the bay and taking pictures.

Now, I'm usually pretty weird about taking candids of people in public. I don't want to be in any pictures without being asked first - and just taking picture of people - especially those with kids, does make me feel slightly creepy.

and then there' all my personal image rights issues.

At first I was just going to leave it alone. Thinking that orthodox Jewish people seem fairly stand-offish anyway, so why bother.

Then I thought about Leiby Kletzky.

And I thought about this family with two small boys.

I may have even thought about the quote I read of someone not being able to believe the killer was Jewish.

(what, Jewish are that much better then everyone else?)

Then I decided, as the boat was pulling into the dock, that I was going to show it to the father ( I assumed ) and maybe offer a sense that maybe there were some non-crazy people in the world.

So, I did - and there was a slight awkard moment, and another when I offered to e-mail it to him.

(which I realize now was probably just him trying to understand why this strange man was taking pics trying to get a card - everybody in the city is wary of a sales pitch).

Then I showed it to the young woman, and the other adult male with them - smiles both times.

(which I was surprised about since I wasn't sure if orthodox women were ALLOWED to speak to non-Jewish men)...

Today I loaded them up onto photobucket and sent him a message with the link.

I did not expect to get an almost immediate response:

"wow thanks a million"

My pleasure, sir. Be safe.

Contenta

I don't know if I like being miserable, but I don't seem to care for being happy.
..

or being around people who are too happy...

Yet, I seem skilled at making people less un-happy.

Job security?

Or, maybe I'm just not happy now...

did I mention I've agreed to a job in "marketing" for the next 5 months in a full-time capacity?

managing...

yeah.

I don't know what I was thinking either.

One hopes finally being out of credit card debt will be worth it.

And, yes, no acting will be done in the near future; not in the theatrical context, anyway.

Well, I don't think it will.

(shrug)

(wave)

tired.

I could comment on the day's, week's b-s, but I think I'll mention the meteor that I think I saw streak and then explode over SI instead.

Mammals

Just stalked, wrangled and released the first Jerry of the season.

Hopefully, being 1 for 1 will suffice for the duration.

Lively lil'.....

brother

Yesterday, while trying to confirm a hg leak in the parking lot of PathMark on Forest, there was a middle age-ish gentleman of color in a Rodeo (maybe passport) talking on his phone parked next to me. As he finished his call and got rady to leave, I went to close my door which was in his way. I did so expecting nothing more than passing acknowledgement. However, he asked me, his speech tinge with the Caribbean that's nig omnipresent hereabouts, if I was from ''around here''.

I can't remember if I told him my geographic origin, but I did tell him that I lived on the island. 

Then he seemed to think for a moment and said that, as he watched my working on the car - and I thougt he was going to say ''kindred spirits'', and maybe that occurred to him as well, because there was the slightest moment before he said he felt like we were brothers. I expected some continuation about him being reminded of his brother growing up, but there was none... 

He asked me my name, I told him; he told me his:

''Semetrius''.

Then he simply stated that he hoped our paths would cross again and pulled away.

Hm.

MIT

Warm Day

In the case one wasn't able to make it out to Summerjam last month...

Currently:

vacillating.

fix car or not.

take job or not.

get bike or not.

run away w/space circus or not.

a truly inciteful & breathtaking post, no?

:-/

While out shopping for car parts today:

saw a Boss Hoss Trike,

then saw a completely self-fabricated, fully DIY as in culled together from random backyard leavings trike.

I think I preferred the latter.

Was told by Debra at Strauss auto while being checked out, "your a nice looking guy."

I didn't have a response, and think her daughter had run out of looks for us to trade at her mom's awkwardness.

such was Funday.

fb post

C. Walker Jr.

has love for the junior-highschool-age girl rocking the translucen
tblue scientific calculator trying to finish her homework getting exasperated with indecisive customers at the family's eatery.#sacrificefortheteam

 

fishscale

on the way back out to the car to attempt to deal with the horrid skweel coming from one of the belts in the bucket, the doorman cracked a joke that he was drinking sangria, but it turned out to be guava juice which he referred to as "healthy".


Being on a mission, I didn't get into my great and expansive idea that health is about balance and the the juice with the flesh of the fruit may act together in the system that stabilize each other; too much of one or the other throws off the balance => too much of anything is too much.

So, as I made way to the car, I must have started thinking about eat well and long life, because, by the time I got to the car, I'd surmised that

perhaps

one can have too much longevity

and that there must be a balance between long life and a full life.

What is a long life if one never lives?

What is excitement/passion/intensity if one has no time to consider/enjoy it?

So...yeah.

Time/experience.

Balance.

Yep.


(hm.)

jungluv

The Monster snoring is funny.

I got up at 5:30a to be 2 hours away by 11:00a after not sleeping until past 3...only to be told 15 minutes ago that the ''meeting'' has been ''pushed back to 1p''.

And now it's raining. It must be my Monday.

more co-incidence

I just learned of this cat while searching "savannah cat" last night.

I just turned on the tv today and show called "Speed of Life" was on Discovery. The title intrigued me. All that was on the screen was two people wearing head lights and I wondered what that had to do with the title.

So, guess what the segment I turned to just happened to be on.

My life is weird in strange little ways.

motodreams

had a dream about having a moto-bike with cut handlebars this morning...

suspicious I've been having dreams about them and not remembering.

I thought my bike itch had been scratched by having a shifty car now,

perchance I was wrong.

perchance it is merely Spring beckoning?

Gerald A. Lawson

Gerald A. Lawson, a Pioneer in Video Games, Dies at 70

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: April 13, 2011

Gerald A. Lawson, a largely self-taught engineer who became a pioneer in electronic video entertainment, creating the first home video game system with interchangeable game cartridges, died on Saturday in Mountain View, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Santa Clara, Calif.

The cause was complications of diabetes, said his wife, Catherine.

Before disc-based systems like PlayStation, Xbox and Wii transformed the video game industry, before techno-diversions like Grand Theft Auto and Madden NFL and even before Pac-Man and Donkey Kong became the obsession of millions of electronic gamers, it was Mr. Lawson who first made it possible to play a variety of video games at home.

In the mid-1970s, he was director of engineering and marketing for the newly formed video game division ofFairchild Semiconductor, and it was under his direction that the division brought to market in 1976 the Fairchild Channel F, a home console that allowed users to play different games contained on removable cartridges. Until then, home video game systems could play only games that were built into the machines themselves. Mr. Lawson’s ideas anticipated — if they did not entirely enable — a colossal international business.

In March, Mr. Lawson was honored for his innovative work by the International Game Developers Association, an overdue acknowledgment for an unfamiliar contributor to the technological transformation that has changed how people live.

“He’s absolutely a pioneer,” Allan Alcorn, a creator of the granddaddy of video games, Pong, said in an interview with The San Jose Mercury News in March. “When you do something for the first time, there is nothing to copy.”

Mr. Alcorn was the first design engineer at Atari, whose own cartridge console eventually dominated the home video game market.

At 6 feet 6 inches and well over 250 pounds, Mr. Lawson cut an imposing figure. A modest man but a straight talker who was known to one and all as Jerry, he was among only a handful of black engineers in the world of electronics in general and electronic gaming in particular.

Gerald Anderson Lawson was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 1, 1940, and grew up mostly in Queens. His parents encouraged his intellectual pursuits. His father, Blanton, was a longshoreman by profession and a voracious reader of science books by inclination; his mother, Mannings, was a city employee who was also president of the PTA at the nearly all-white school Jerry attended. There he had a first-grade teacher who changed his life.

“I had a picture of George Washington Carver on the wall next to my desk,” he said in a2009 interview with the publication Vintage Computing and Gaming. “And she said, ‘This could be you.’ ” He went on: “This kind of influence led me to feel, ‘I want to be a scientist. I want to be something.’ ”

As a boy he pursued a number of scientific interests, ham radio and chemistry among them. As a teenager he earned money repairing television sets. He attended both Queens College and the City College of New York, but never received a degree. In the early 1970s, he started at Fairchild in Silicon Valley as a roving design consultant. While he was there he invented an early coin-operated arcade game, Demolition Derby. Along with other Silicon Valley innovators, he belonged to a hobbyists’ group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. Two of its other members were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, later the founders of Apple.

“I was not impressed with them — either one of them, actually,” Mr. Lawson said in the 2009 interview, and though he didn’t say why, he declined to hire Mr. Wozniak for a job at Fairchild.

After inventing Demolition Derby, Mr. Lawson was put in charge of the company’s video game division. He and his team came up with cartridges that could be loaded with different game programs and then inserted into the console one at a time. This allowed the company to sell individual games separately from the console itself, a business model that remains the cornerstone of the video game industry.

A crucial element of the invention was the use of a new processor, the Fairchild 8; another was a mechanism that allowed for repeated insertion and removal of cartridges without damaging the machine’s semiconductors. Video hockey and tennis were programmed into the F Channel console; additional games available on cartridge included Shooting Gallery, Video Blackjack and Alien Invasion.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1965, Mr. Lawson is survived by a brother, Michael, of Queens, and two children, Karen and Marc, both of Smyrna, Ga.

After he left Fairchild in 1980, Mr. Lawson founded a company, Videosoft, that created games, and worked as a consultant.

“I don’t play video games that often; I really don’t,” he said in the 2009 interview. “First of all, most of the games that are out now — I’m appalled by them.” Most are concerned with “shooting somebody and killing somebody,” he said.

“To me, a game should be something like a skill you should develop — if you play this game, you walk away with something of value.
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