mbranesf | Entries tagged with personal writing

May 2017

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Annoying Dream:
For some reason, I've lately been having dreams in which I somehow end up in a wooded park and find myself getting lost and running into dead ends as I try to navigate its trails and roads. This park is a real place from my boyhood, a fairly large and heavily wooded park in the town in which I was born and lived until I was thirteen. It had (and I presume still has) hidden trails, a couple of weird bodies of water, an old stadium, a police shooting range, some assorted attractions like a public swimming pool and a dirt-and-gravel road that cuts through its back regions, but which doesn't really go anywhere--it just loops back around to where you started. But in some iterations of this dream, I am either walking or driving that road and somehow just can't quite find my way back out of the park. The road forks in strange ways, generates long sidepaths that dead-end in the woods or run into a large lake (there was in real life swampy flooded lake-like algae-choked area of water there that one could get to by following a dead-end path from the main road--and where it was believed that teenagers would go to fuck in their cars--but nothing nearly so large as the dream lake). In last night's version of the dream, instead of following the endless ever-changing road, I got similarly disoriented on a trail that cut through the woods and followed a narrow shallow stream. This trail and that stream were real things back in those days, too. During the summer when I was twelve, I frequently ventured down this trail by myself and masturbated. I enjoyed doing this outside so much that it became a nearly daily habit that summer even on rainy days, always standing in the same hidden spot and squirting on a clump of milkweed. It's amazing that I was never caught doing this because, while the path itself and my favorite spot on it were quite hidden from view, it was still traveled pretty frequently by other kids who liked to use it to cut aross the deep foresty middle of the park and feel some kind of sense of adventure from doing so. But I always got away with it. In fact, the only thing I was ever seen doing with my fly open was pissing in the stream that ran next to the trail, but that was totally non-controversial as it was absolutely standard for every boy who ever went to that part of the park to piss in that stream as if it were a long public trough-style urinal. In this dream from last night, I was on that same path, and I remember so many vivid details of it that makes me feel like my old impressions of it had risen whole and unchanged from some deep geological layer of memory. In the dream, I didnt jerk off and wasn't in the least bit horny enough to want to do so anyway, because I was intensely frustrated at how long circuitous the trail had become, and how it seemed that no matter which direction I went, I was just getting farther and farther away from the park's exit. At one point, I decided it would somehow be faster to simply go back the way I came and quit trying to find the end of the trail, but then the way back had changed, as if the path had been reworking itself behind me as I trod the woods' depths. Eventually, I made myself wake up. I can't always do this, but occasionally I have the ability to realize while in dream-space that I am probably dreaming and can just put an end to whatever dumb situation is going on by waking myself up.

New book project:

I am well into the editing and revision phase of a long project that I will probably release through (the long dormant) M-Brane Press hopefully later this year as both a series of ebooks and a single big print volume. It's a gay pornographic science fiction thing with elements of planetary romance and cosmic horror, set in a fantasy version of the Solar System several centuries from now, centered around a cast of specially-endowed characters that work almost like a Doc Savage-type secret organization to save the world again and again from various insidious threats (while continually getting their rocks off). I started it last summer, and added over fifty thousand words to it as my NaNoWriMo project last November, and it's been kind of growing gradually since then. I may release it pseudonymously, not because of its content but more because its built on the conceit that it's an assembly of several dudes' diary entries put together by an editor many years after the events described. So I think I will credit the book to its imaginary editor. It's become a lot more complicated, elaborate, nuanced, weird and just plain longer than what I had intended at the outset (which was just to knock out some quickie Kindle porn really fast and see if anyone would actually buy it), so I am months behind my own deadlines on it. The original idea was to release it as a bunch of ebooks, each "book" really just being a chapter in a serial. Typically these erotic Kindle books on Amazon tend to really just be four or five thousand-word short stories, and sometimes even shorter than that. My project is currently mapped out to have twenty-seven of these "books", each with a number and a lurid subtitle (I was kind of inspired to that number by Mark Danielwski's The Familiar, which he intends to tell in twenty-seven massive volumes). These individual book segments tend to be clocking in at around ten to twelve thousand words (and they get longer as I lard them up with "scholarly" footnotes) so a bit longer than is typical for the Kinde erotica format, but that's for the best, I think. I find a lot of that stuff to be too brief and not sufficiently fleshed out (and just plain awful) anyway. The final number of chapters may change by the time I am done, because a few of the unfinished ones seem to not need to exist anymore, while a couple of new ones that weren't even in the original outline have grown up and become important to the story arc. Also, I a few months ago, I had more or less decided to kill off one of the characters and excise him from the whole storyline because he didn't seem to be doing much of anything important, and I thought I maybe had too many major characters anyway (nine of them). But more recently, I kind of fell in love with the lad when he suddenly needed to be at the center of a couple new plot threads due to his special ability (he paints and draws stuff derived from prophetic visions). So he stays.

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Here is the final piece of my Justin Bieber fan fiction trilogy (which I have just now this moment declared a trilogy because I have a third item). The first was "Your Justin Bieber" (2011) in which a second-person narrator has an unexpected romance with the pop star, but it's indicated that maybe the whole thing might be more about the archetypal figure that JB might suggest than about JB himself. The second item is "The Exorcist Playset" (2012) in which JB appears JBmug2

only as a literal prop in a secondary role in what is otherwise a piece of Exorcist fan fiction. In this story, he is literally an action figure, a sort of animatronic doll that stars in a kid's weird play-time fantasy and who perhaps helps this kid work his way out of what may or may not be a real demonic possession. In the writing of the following story, I have brought the subject matter closer to home and let myself be embarrassed. And for this occasion, the story seems like it should have a long and ponderous title like…

You Will Find That Heart/Smiley-Thing Deep in Here, XOXO JB
by Christopher Fletcher

Woven into the texts of Nemesis—where the unknown author famously makes an extraordinary observation about a universe where “dark planets rolls without aim, where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or luster or name”—is a concept with which I utterly disagree. I can say now, as the world unwinds around us, that there really is an aim after all. It’s just one with which humans will have nothing to do.
            —Justin Bieber, PhD, from The Diary of Fthaggua

When he presented you, at the Xmas Eve party a couple years ago, with the next year’s Justin Bieber calendar, you were both amused and acutely embarrassed. Because it was a light-hearted gesture, honoring with well-intended humor the fact that you had unabashedly declared yourself a JB fan some time ago and were willing to admit it to anyone and stand up for its legitimacy against any opponent. And because you know that it’s likely an ongoing source of derision that you are too old, too serious, too old, too smart, too old, too professionally accomplished, too old, too cerebral and brainy, and mostly just plain too goddamned fucking old to be a belieber. It was like being handed a piece of pornography, by someone who knows exactly what kind of porn you’re into, in front of a whole bunch of other people who don’t now and won’t ever get your weird kink.
            Your favorite months are June and September, especially September where he wears Wayfarer sunglasses like yours.
            Because you are very busy with work and life—and because you are not a consumer of the kind of media where the foibles and failures of celebs are celebrated—you miss for a few days the news of JB’s arrest in Florida for drunken driving and resisting arrest. People close to you are amused that it falls to them to fill you, of all people, in on the latest of a series of ridiculous calamities surrounding this young man. You have to tell them that despite what they’d assumed was a deep and abiding fandom on your part, you just plain hadn’t heard about it yet. But when you get a few free moments away from anyone else’s gaze, you google the fuck out of the situation and find his mugshots. Though you’d not admit it to anyone else, you are relieved and delighted that he looks—even under the duress of drunken incarceration—not like a bleary-eyed loser like most people do under those conditions, but kind of pretty and sweet and crowned with mostly intact hair. He smiled for the cop cam.

This was about the last you’d hear of JB for a while. The incident supposedly motivated him to change his life, and part of that change was receding from pop celebrity. He cancelled his remaining performing and recording schedule. He declined media appearances and interviews. You remember hearing that he had decided to devote himself to matters of “faith and philosophy,” which you’d naturally assumed was some kind of meaningless fake-ass nonsense well in line with his previous professions of a sort of cheesy pop star Christianity.
            You remember liking a lot that full-page pic of him in his book Just Getting Started where he is on stage and he looks wet, sweat-slicked, very earnest, and yet behind him is a big lit-up sign that says PRAY. In its caption, he tells you that he is living proof that dreams come true. You cringe at this naïve cliché and you are embarrassed both for him (for saying it) and for yourself (for reading it and owning a copy of the book). He tells you to believe and to pray, and you cringe, believe and pray and pray and all your childish dreams will come true, but he’s so fucking beautiful anyway, so you ignore this patent moronic nonsense and you decide, once again, once again, one more time, one final time, to like him anyway because he has, at least, a gorgeous voice even if he’s dumb as a bag of hammers. You occasionally still enjoy “As Long as You Love Me” and “Boyfriend” when they recur on your playlist, but you assume that the next time you’ll see any sight of JB is when he is eventually dredged up as an F-list celeb alongside a hundred-year-old Joan Collins, a cyborg Kirstie Alley, a fat and drunk Marilyn Manson and one or another stupid Kardashian for a season of Celebrity Cook-Off hosted by an ever-more-raspy Guy Fieri.
            And of course some hot new kid quickly emerges to fill the Bieber niche, that pop-cultural hole that must always have a lithe young male occupant, and after a year or so of no new news of him at all, everyone quits caring about or even looking for the whereabouts of Justin Bieber, former pop star.

You come home from work late on Friday night—after cooking an Ancient Roman wine dinner or some such pretentious nonsense—and J says: “Can’t wait to tell you this shit: Your Boy has moved in behind us, in the house across the alley!” You honestly don’t know to which one of “Your” “Boys” he may be referring since that is the language he uses for any dude that he thinks that you might possibly think is cute. It could mean any of several thousands of dudes. It could be anyone. But seeing your exhausted confusion, he clarifies: “The Biebs. Fuckin’ JB. Here in Argos-Bellona, here in our back yard! Just moved in today.” And you again feel way behind on current events because this was supposedly widely reported on Channel 5. Stunned, you look out the back door, across the alley. Through a window in the house across the way you see a silhouette in motion that you can imagine matches JB’s.

You locate online and start reading daily the copious blog posts of the new Justin Bieber, the former pop celeb who now lives across the alley from you, whose backyard is in full view of your second-floor balcony. One day he writes,
            “The Outer God Nokkthathuas, typically represented as a blood-tinged cyclone or a shroud of blowing red dust possibly concealing some sort of unseen, unconscious creature, is perhaps a more appropriate entity for consideration nowadays—as the Dust once again threatens to enshroud the planet—than great Cthulhu itself, but the fanatics of the Cult Cthulhu will not give up their adolescent fantasy that they are finally getting noticed by the gods. They bear a mutant baby and they think it means love from the Void.”
            And, yeah, nearly all of it is just as impenetrable as that passage.
            One afternoon you sit on your balcony and gaze across the way. Behind his own house, JB sits at a table in his backyard. He wears nothing but board shorts and sunglasses, as if he might be ready for a swim, but you suspect (to your despair) that he is never going to get wet in that in-ground swimming next to his table. Because when he sits at that table he does nothing but type and click on a laptop computer. Sometimes he does this long into the evening. Sometimes, after he has stopped for the day, you check his blog and see that he has just added another long and abstruse post about Cthulhist theology. On Twitter he might say something like, “Some people still want some kind of heart or smile from me. It’s fuckin’ comin’.”

You go to a local bookshop where you have an appointment to read aloud passages from your novel The Days of the Dust and the Diane Rehm Show and hopefully sign copies of the book, purchased by readers from the merchant who invited you there. Hardly anyone to date has bought it yet so you hope for a small breakthrough here.
            The bookstore manager has arranged several rows of chairs in front of a table that you sit upon cross-legged and read to the guests. The passage you choose involves a dangerous, revelatory encounter between two young men aboard an airship cast in the form of a dream about alternate-history ancient Greeks who are uncovering an ancient horror on an asteroid that rolls in the dark between the Earth and the Moon.
            In the front row sits JB. He is somewhat disguised, a Cardinals baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, Wayfarer sunglasses, but it’s plainly him. You attempt to avoid glancing at him too many times, deciding to observe his obvious desire for anonymity since no one else seems to have realized who he is. He listens to you read, occasionally taps on an iPad resting on his lap. During the question/answer period, he doesn’t ask any questions. Afterward, he buys a copy of the book but he does not get in line to have you sign it.
            After he leaves, the bookstore manager says, “That dude who was sitting in the front, the one with the Cards cap, looked exactly like Justin Bieber.”
            “I guess it could have been him,” you say, and the guy just laughs. Maybe he doesn't know that JB actually lives in the city now. Or maybe he just can’t picture JB coming into his store for any reason.

Later that night, you take a look at the blog and read this headline:
            “Nokkthathuas and the Zeppelin: A-R Kanayda Shrouds a Deep Truth Inside a Family Drama.”
            His first paragraph: “This evening I listened to the author read from the book at a local bookstore. Even though I’d already read it, I kind of wanted to see the person who wrote it in person, speaking aloud some of its weird words, hearing his actual human voice saying these things.”
            Below this paragraph, inset within the post, is a picture of you from that night’s reading copied from a fresh post on your own website. You feel, for just a moment, quite nearly almost as embarrassed as you felt about the calendar because you understand that you are actually thrilled and flattered to appear on JB’s blog. On the new JB’s fuckin’ blog, which makes not a lick of sense. You’re a fucking fanboy so you do not care that what follows—his nine thousand word review/analysis of just one short segment of your novel—is nearly incomprehensible. And you love the fuck out of it when he cross-posts his new entry—about your story—to Twitter with the comment: “There’s a weird smiley/heart thing deep in here.” You could just die. Die.

One night you have a lengthy dream in which JB intermittently appears in various roles and guises: college friend, co-worker, boss, lover, brother, son. At one point, shortly before you awaken, he is leaning into you as if to hug you, and you permit this hug and you also permit him to kiss you in an awkward hesitant manner until you both eventually agree to this intimacy fully and kiss wetly with fully open mouths. The streaming spit between you becomes somehow thick and sticky and stringy like strands of rubber cement or semen. It thickens until your faces are bound together in a gluey mass from which you try half-heartedly to escape.

About a week later, you daydream that maybe you could really someday quit your day-job and take up the novelist life because JB’s endorsement has somehow caused Days of the Dust to rise into Amazon’s Top 100 in both Literature and Science Fiction and it looks like you might actually get a decent royalty payment for the first time ever in your life. But then a week or so later, it falls down into the top 30,000 and then down into the top 100,000 and then continues to plummet from there into the millions. But you have another one ready to publish and you can just go ahead and use JB’s endorsement of the first one as a cover blurb on the second one, and so it goes.

You go to the grocery store after work, very late and in a hurry for a shortcut for the pasta dish that H wants tonight. You peer at jars of various pestos and pickles and olives and other cured and marinated things at the Italian kiosk where a store chef has prepared samples of porcini mushroom/chicken risotto for the customers. You wonder if there is a container of something flavorful and piquant and oily that you can just dump into a pan with whole-wheat rotini and parm and be done with it.
            JB says, “This looks really good, but I have no idea how to make it.”
            You look up, turn around, and see him. He looks exactly like he did at the bookstore reading, sunglasses, Cards cap, t-shirt, board shorts. And he is looking at you. And his comment about not knowing how to make something was, in fact, actually spoken to you. Then you realize that you did not change clothes before you left work and that you are wearing a dirty green chef coat and black pants with pictures of fish printed on them. Of course, upon interacting with JB in person for the first time, Fucking Of Course! you’d look like this. And, Of course: he certainly thinks that you are the store chef who is handing out the risotto samples because that dude is not at his station at that moment.
            “It’s not that hard,” you say, checking quickly to make sure that you even know for sure what “it” is. The display surrounding the risotto samples has all the stuff that the store wants you to buy to make porcini/chicken risotto. But you disapprove of how it’s really just a bag of some kind of fake-ass risotto product to which you add chicken and the store-brand cheese. You disapprove of the lack of fresh mushrooms, white wine, freshly grated cheese, fresh parsley. “It’s not that hard,” you say again. “But this isn't the way to do it.”
            Though you resist the act of literally taking his hand in yours, the effect is similar as you lead him around the store and drop items into his hand basket: Arborio rice, shallots, garlic, assorted earthy shrooms, flat-leaf parsley, a box of chicken stock, a bottle of pinot grigio, a tub of grated parmesan. “It’s easy,” you adhere, “as long as you remember that you need about three times as much stock or other liquid as rice. What kind of kitchen equipment do you have?”
            “I have everything,” he says. “I’m just not good at using it.”
            “Just remember,” you say, “to not skimp on the heat when you start the initial sauté. Heat is your friend. And don’t lose patience with the rice. It will be correct at about twenty-two minutes. Google some directions or a YouTube vid if you don't remember exactly what I have told you.”
            Fuck no, he says, you need to come to my place and show me.
            Stopped, as they say, “dead in your tracks,” you say this next thing, feeling like a totally stupid tool: “Um. I don’t know about that. But maybe. Do you live in the neighborhood?”
            You, he says, know goddamned well where I live.

When you finally return home that evening, H has already eaten dinner. You are amazed that his mood is good and that not a word is spoken about how late you are. He does not ask what kept you, does not disparage the fact that the groceries that you brought home are too late for tonight’s obsolete plan. He does not inquire as to where you were, and so you do not have to tell him right now the truth that you followed JB to his home behind yours and that you were at once excited and creeped out when JB changed clothes in front of you (which consisted only of removing his shirt and swapping one pair of shorts for another) and that you were delighted to guide his hands, your long monkey arms wrapped around him from behind, as you taught him how to properly chop an onion and smash a garlic head, and how proud you were that you actually did not get a hard-on and knock it against the small of his back while you were doing this. Because no one would have believed you about that.
            And how, when you said goodnight just before you drove your car around the corner to your own house, you did not, emphatically not, accept his offer of a kiss goodnight, your kiss-spit remaining just a gluey rubber cement dream.

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I did resolve a few days ago to move along the long-in-progress work-in-progress to a this-year completion. This afternoon I roughed out this scene that seems to solve a problem that I was having the last time I tried to get past a certain point. These are the new words of the new chapter, fresh and unedited...

The Starfish

Below lay the tomb world, the immutable cause-and-effect world of the demonic. At the median extended the layer of the human, but at any instant a man could plunge—descend as if sinking—into the hell-layer beneath. Or: he could ascend to the ethereal world above…
--From The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

So there’s two “yous” in these notes, Chris, you my traveling companion, my step-dad, and then there’s the you of this journal. That second you I don’t always use, because it’s dumb, like “Dear Diary”-dumb, like I am a girl on a twentieth-century TV show addressing in the second-person a cheap blank book with flowers on the cover and a chintzy lock that any mean brother or sister could easily break. But sometimes I speak nonetheless to this journal directly even though it’s dumb. Chris: you are taking me on a trip today for a reason that I can’t guess at and which I haven’t bothered to ask about because I really want to go no matter what your own motive is. Diary: you will suck up my thoughts when I have them and then recede like something dimly perceived in binoculars, moving away, when I don’t have them.
We’re in the base of the Ankh, that giant metal thing from the 1960s that towers over the downtown of Argos-Bellona, because it is the only local structure suitable to be retrofitted as a dock for airships. You texted me a few days ago that the airship Atreides was arriving in town, stopping for a couple hours to take on new passengers for a journey northward to Transcanada and then later to Gotham. You implied by the very act of letting me know about this opportunity that I would be excited about it because I would hope that an old friend of mine would still be among the crew of that ship and that I would reunite joyously with him. But you were kind enough to not actually say a single word about this possibility—that he would be there—because you are worried that it will break my heart—and then eventually yours—when we board the ship and discover that he is not there anymore. It will break my heart, but I am ready for it, and I am ready to let it not break yours. I will wear a tough guise, a face of great confidence, a mask that proves that I am still excited about this airship journey because I am doing it with you, and certainly not because I expect to see someone else. You will believe this because it’s what will make the first few hours aboard so much easier on us both. This is always how I’ve done it, Chris, even when Dad was still with us. It needs to be even more this way now that we are alone together. Believe me. I am wiser than your years.( Read more... )

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It is Christmas morning at almost 9:00 am as I start to write this post, J and I have been up and about since 6:00, and he keeps discouraging me from starting on today's food preparations until a little later. I guess I am not used to being around the house in the morning, and I am having trouble settling on something to do until it's time to start cooking. I realize that this is partly because all of 2013 was conducted at a full-on run, mostly because of my job, and it's weird to sit still. We did actually take two little vacations this year, to Curacao for four days in August followed by a couple days at home, and then to see our friends in OKC for three days at Halloween. But those, and two days back in January, were literally the only days this year until today that I did not appear at work for at least a short time. Working 350 or so days of the year, as I did in 2013, isn't going to be sustainable in 2014.

Work
But I am making some changes in the workplace in 2014 which are going to be good for me. I'll be reorganizing the team a bit and filling a couple of vacant positions so that I can delegate away some of my more time-consuming chores and start to withdraw a bit from the minutiae of day-to-day operations. I need to to do this so that I can get some more big-picture stuff accomplished next year and also so that I don't just completely wear myself out. Also, I think my crew is getting tired of my stress-level (did a really bad job of keeping it bottled up inside this year!), and I would like to stave off mutiny for a while. But I kind of needed this year the way it was in order to figure some things out. My department expanded in size in 2013, and is about to expand again, and the experience of 2013 told me a lot about how to run a much larger operation.

Other Stuff
Changes at work need to help me create more time for other non-work stuff because I need to set some priorities and accomplish some things in my little writing/publishing world as well. M-Brane Press was considerably shrunken this year with only one new book title released and the promised revival of M-Brane SF magazine unrealized, and the long-promised final edition of Fantastique Unfettered altogether cancelled. A shame, because it was gorgeous, but I can't say I was too sad when its editor, Brandon, told me we were canceling. I was just too tired to finish my end of it properly anyway.

My own personal writing projects have been more or less in stasis for months. I haven't finished anything new and haven't published anywhere in a fairly long time. I am still plagued by what's now really a pair of novels involving a set of characters that have wanted their story finished to the exclusion of all else for a couple of years now. It's almost there, but it still needs some sustained attention.

This universe originally emerged in my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel (the only year so far that I actually made it to the finish line). Then, in the winter of 2011, I revived its characters in what was intended to have been a short story for one anthology or another. But it ended as a 30K-word novella, but still didn't feel done. Then I noticed that the two main characters from the '09 story, were separated from each other throughout the '11 story and only one of them was actually "on-camera" very much. So, sometime in 2012, I suddenly went to work on another big long thing focused on the other main character and what he was up to during the same time-frame as the '11 story. It could have stopped there. There's something I liked about the symmetry of the two parts. But it still wasn't done because Some More Stuff still needed to happen.

So '13's segment is intended to bring this to a conclusion at last. But now I have another problem: this three-part thing was originally imagined as a sequel to the '09 book. But I have somehow gradually changed enough stuff about these people and their past that the two stories don't make a lot of sense back-to-back now, or maybe that they make just enough sense together that the discontinuities are annoying to me. The timeline is messed up. I wonder if I don't really care about this or if I should somehow retcon the original story to make it match the newer one. It probably doesn't matter except for the fact that they might both end up in print at some point (just because I might put a revision of the '09 thing in a collection that I am considering). I have written some other junk here and there, but it's all been more or less unfinished or un-revised because this one project still wants all the attention. So that's the one that's getting it in early 2014 during this free time that I imagine I am creating for myself through reforms in my work life. We'll see how that goes.

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Feeling need to talk to my journal about random topics, no particular logic to it:

VACATION
Jeffy and I are going to Curacao next Thursday. This is the first actual vacation we have taken since 2002 when we went to Mexico. Curacao was a somewhat last-minute choice. We'd been planning a trip to France, but it got all off the rails for reasons too tedious to recount. Basically, we procrastinated our planning too long, weren't going to meet J's requirements for that particular trip, decided not to spend the money if it wasn't going to be right. But I was still determined to go somewhere completely away from home. We'd heard of this former Dutch colony just a few miles off the shore of Venezuela but we knew nothing about it. Now we are very excited about it. We have a suite in the capital Willemstad, which town evidently looks like this:

curacao

WORK IN PROGRESS
I certainly didn't need a new one of these to start up just now, but that's the way it goes. This is the opening segment of what turns into a haunted house tale of sorts later on:

Mud, made of red clay and the inches of rain that had deluged the land for the previous two days, finally stopped the driver of the old truck that was to have conveyed me the last few klicks to the Sanitorium Melancthon. It was not that his tires were yet mired, but rather that he wished to avoid that hassle, which he saw coming too soon down a road the pavement of which was probably two centuries decayed and which had been getting gradually more so as we drove. You’ll need to finish on foot, sir, he said. I’m sorry, but I’ll go no further in this mess. I paid him the full fare, pulled on my rucksack and trudged forward between ruts full of black water. The rain didn’t fall hard, but it was insistent and a bit too cold for that hot season.( Read more... )

DREAMS
carsinwater

The water dreams are back. In these dreams, I am usually driving somewhere that I don't want to go and I find that as I proceed the road that I am on is too close to edges of bodies of water or that there are vast expanses of water to either side, and eventually the road starts to get washed out and I am trapped in some hopelessly cut-off swampy or oceanic area with no possibility of going forward nor any chance of retreating the way I came. I have been bothered by these dreams for most of my adult life. I went for a while without remembering one, but they recur a lot lately. I don't like it at all. I hope that when I am in Curacao by the ocean and on the floating bridge and in the floating market and driving a rental car within view of the ocean that some switch will flip back off and get rid of these dreams for a while.

EJAC STATS
Another ongoing work-in-progress caused me to do some quick Googling to determine if I could easily get an answer as to whether, in the real world, something could somehow change with the genetic information transmitted in a human male's sperm as to make it somehow not really his genetic info anymore but rather that of an exomorphic entity.( Read more only for TMI... )

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A passage from the work-in-progress. A few people might recognize the situation of it from when I posted a whole bunch of the story's "Part One" on this journal some time back. But this is from Part Two. Part Three is close. And that's the last part. So hopefully it will be out of my system yet this year.

A-R passed much of the day fiddling about with his Dune site, Bene Tleilax. A large number of new (and mostly ridiculous) fiction postings had accumulated and they needed cataloguing. He sorted them slowly into their scores of categories—hurt/comfort, Chapterhouse Era, Jihad Era, many dozens of permutations of slash-fic, Duncan this-and-that, Harkonnens, et cetera—and added the appropriate tags, rejected a few that were not complete enough entries. He answered a few emails and social media posts, mostly related to the suicide panic of a few weeks previously. He explained again that the infamous “The End?” pic was not a suicide note, that he would not himself commit suicide, that he discouraged people generally from committing suicide. Enough now with suicide, said he to all.
( Read more... )

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A couple of years ago I visited my homeland and was inspired by its weirdness and my own weird feelings about home and family and things of that nature to write a weird story about it. It was initially a stand-alone short thing about a dude who visits his family home in Wisconsin during a period of bizarre climate change and runs into some Lovecraftian supernatural business. Then, last fall, I churned that concept into my annual attempt at National Novel Writing Month and developed a sequel to that original story, a Part Two, which focused on the son of the protag from the original story and what that kid was up to while his dad was away in Wisconsin. I didn't make word count for NaNoWriMo with this, but I did figure out that the story actually wouldn't end properly without a Part Three bringing together the threads from the earlier attempts.

So now I think I have the start of Part Three, and I am considering telling the whole third part in epistolary form, letters back and forth between the characters, maybe some journal entries, kinda like Dracula. The original story (Part One) was in first-person from one of the main characters. The second part was told in a more or less conventional third-person narrative aligned with the other main character. I am not sure about going epistolary with Part Three yet, just trying it out. I don't usually like the concept. It worked for Dracula over a century ago but it's failed so many times in the internet age when a novelist thinks that stringing together a bunch of emails and social media postings works easily as a narrative. It gets dated fast, and often just ends up being dumb. I pretty much always rejected this when I was editing M-Brane SF. I recently read Dennis Cooper's gay-sex horror/porn thing from a few years back, The Sluts, which is relayed in message board posts, and it's not a very good read. I like his work generally because of its transgressiveness, but that one really needed a different format. But when I started on Part Three of my thing, I found myself writing letters. I think if I continue in this fashion, I will try to assiduously avoid a lot of references to how things like computers and smart phones operate currently. These characters aren't putting quill to parchment. It's set "now." They are using their tablets and phones, but I don't want the tech to be too up-front. So maybe the concept of letters without a lot of talk about how they are transmitted might work? Anyway, this is the way Part Three starts...

It would be better than here. Just in the like that, if you can’t remember anymore if. I want to know but I can’t see are you up there. I don’t have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name.

            —From the last and first sentences of Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, with italic emphases added by A-R Kanayda for his “response/thought text” Bellona City of Vapor, Denny Kid of Fire

Dear Chris, (my #2 Dad, Alternate Father Who’s Sometimes More Like an Older Brother, Destroyer of Illusion, Captain My Captain, the Falconer who Cannot Hear the Falcon):
            I do not know what happened to you when you were in Wisconsin, what things you did, what things you saw. You have not talked to me about it, except in the most vague of terms, circling around the subject, outward and outward, evading my questions until I am so frustrated that I get sick of talking to you and decide to just leave you alone with whatever it is you do and think all day. You also do not want to know what happened to me while you were gone, what things I did, what things I saw. You make that fact clear by not asking me even when I pointedly tee up the question for you.
            I told you of the arrival here in our house of the Cult Cthulhu and how one of their boys sold me some kudzu fruit at Circus of Foods and how I was enlisted to impregnate one of their women. I know that you had some kind of similarly weird misadventure when you were away, maybe even an experience somehow parallel to mine. Though you have shared little about it with me, you did let slip the fact that Circus of Foods is a store up there, too, and that you bought kudzu fruit there. You admitted, though without saying it bluntly, that you fucked a Cult Cthulhu boy there, that one that I saw with you in the phone image that night.
            Is that why you do not want to tell me much about your visit to Wisconsin? Do you think that I would judge you negatively because you had a relationship with that dude? Do you think that I would frown on the fact that you had your first such liaison post-Brace? Do you worry that I’d somehow be jealous? And do you really think that Brace—if he could somehow know about it from beyond the veil of death—would object? Because if you do, then you don’t know me very well and you have already forgotten something about Brace. Listen: you did pretty much the same thing he would have done had your positions in life versus death been reversed.
            And I think that you did the same thing that I did a few weeks ago.
            Maybe you’re just not yet used to being back home in “real” time. Maybe you are still suffering an effect of the time dilation that was going on under the heat bubble, a kind of temporal jet lag. Maybe you will catch back up to me in time and be able to talk about things like we used to.
            A few days ago, start of last week, I began a part-time job at Circus of Foods. I told you about this and have posted my schedule to the calendar on your phone so that you can know easily when and when not to expect me to be home. You didn’t have much to say about it, other than that I don’t need to work right now and that I need to be thinking more about getting back to school. I told you that I know that I can easily just live indefinitely off of you and the trust that Brace left for me. But I also told you that I might feel better about myself if I can earn some of my own money. And I told you that I am not going back to school until the fall anyway. The fall at earliest. I even told you that I might not go back at all because I thought that would catch your attention, get you stressed, maybe make you angry, maybe make you yell at me and give me the Brace-lecture about how I sure as fuck will go back to school! But you didn’t do that. If you don’t give a fuck about it anymore, then maybe you won’t care that I don’t give a fuck about it anymore.
            Do you wonder if I just said that in another attempt to get a rise out of you? You won't know one way or another until you have a serious talk with me.
            My job at Circus of Foods is in the Deli-Café. That’s a department of the store where we prepare ready-to-go food, mostly for people who don’t know how to cook or who think themselves too busy or important to cook for themselves. My assignment is to make salads and hot foods for the self-serve bar that they have adjacent to the produce department. The manager of the Deli-Café is very impressed with me because he found out that I am Brace Kanayda’s son. I did not present this fact in my application, but it came out in the interview. I admitted during my first meeting with him that I know how to cook and had been taught at home. He said, “I guess it makes sense since your last name is Kanayda!” and he laughed goofily. It turns out that he is a fan of celeb chef-type people, but that he did not necessarily assume that I was actually blood-related to Brace. It was assumed to be a coincidence of name. He would not have guessed that I was actually associated directly because someone like him would presume that no one who’d ever had a brush with “celebrity” would show up for an entry-level job in his store. But I sat there like an idiot and said, “Brace Kanayda was my dad. He taught me how to cook.” If I’d not done that, it would have been a secret. I may have been subjected to gentle ribbing based on the coincidence of my name—much as I might be if my name were Flay or Batali or Morimoto—such things as a co-worker saying, “Hey, don’t mess with the master over there, Chef Kanayda knows what he’s doing” and the like. The dumb shit people might say. Like if I were working as a house painter and my name were Michelangelo. That kind of level of workplace-dumb.
            The manager’s name is Mike DeLouvier and he conforms to the stereotype of grocery store managers. There are pictures of all of them on the wall behind the customer service desk: the general manager, the meat manager, the produce manager, the night shift manager and Mike DeLouvier are all dudes ranging in age from about thirty to about sixty, and they all have mustaches and not very good hair. The other managers, also pictured at customer service (such as the customer service manager), are women in the same age range. They’re also afflicted with bad hair but blessedly lack the mustaches.
            Mike thinks I’m really cool. He says that I am better at chopping stuff than anyone else who works there, and that I work faster, and that the end result of my work looks better. This is all true. But sometimes it’s weird because he seems to pay too much attention to me, even to the detriment of my co-workers, who all need and deserve attention. I suspect that they will eventually come to resent me, and that it will be due mostly to how he spends too much time talking to me and praising my work. I have only worked there a week, and he tells me that he could help me out if I want the assistant manager position that is allegedly opening up soon in the Deli-Café. He has thrice invited me to have an after-work beer with him and some of the others. On each occasion I have been ready with a polite excuse with which to deflect this unpleasant engagement. I’d almost suspect that he was starting to chickenhawk me. Maybe he thinks I’m cute, right? It’s happened before, yo. Would certainly not be the first time, son! But then when I overhear him talking with the other older dudes who work around there, I hear him engage in dumb jokes. I somehow mentioned that you were recently in Wisconsin. One of the other dudes said, “Only thing in Wisconsin is steers and queers!” And they all laughed, including Mike. It’s really stupid.
            Some of the foods I prepare there: macaroni salad, macaroni and cheese, tortellini salad, baked beans, three-bean salad, green bean casserole, potato salad, scalloped potatoes, mashed potatoes, meatloaf, Salisbury steak, country fried steak, carrot salad, broccoli salad, tuna salad, chicken salad and ham salad. A new gelatinous fruit/whipped cream salad based on the kudzu fruit, and a salsa made from it for the weekly taco bar. The meat for the taco bar, its shredded lettuce, shredded cheese, sour cream and regular non-kudzu salsa. I volunteered yesterday to make the biscuit dough for the breakfast shift because I find that I run out of things to do during my own shift because I work so fast. And you have to stay until the shift ends; you don’t get to just go home when your work is done. There are two breaks during each shift, but I never go on break with the others because they say things like steers and queers and I don’t think I will work there for very long.
            So that’s what’s up with me today.
            Love,
            Falcon

Dear Arthur,
            This is very odd that I am writing a letter to you, in response to your very odd letter to me. But I think you are correct that I have been slow to catch up in time. I know that your letter was received several days ago, but I somehow feel like I am answering a letter that I just received a moment ago. But I think I am catching up. Each day feels a little more normal.
            But didn’t we see each other each day since you sent your letter? Didn’t we sit at the table and eat dinner together just last night? We did. I know it. We ate fajitas that you made. There are leftovers of it in the refrigerator right now. I just looked to make sure. There was even some kudzu-fruit salsa that you made but which was almost exactly like one that I made in Wisconsin, and we even talked about this for a moment. Why do you have to write a letter to me when we sit together for dinner every night? It makes no sense. Really, why do I need to write a letter to you now when I just had dinner with you last night and expect to do so again tonight? Do we really not ever talk? It feels to me like we do, but maybe it’s just so slow from my perspective, delayed, and you are somehow still ahead of me in time.
            I’ll be ready to talk to you more directly very soon about the important and valid points that you raised in your letter. But we may need a change of scene for it. It might help us both. I am attaching an image that I suspect will interest you.
            [Attached image: Airship Atreides, Moored at the Obelisk, Capital]
            That ship is coming to Argos-Bellona next week. Do we want to get tickets?
            Love you,
            #2

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Lately I have been having a lot of media-related dreams. My last entry here was about an imaginary Rod Serling-produced TV show based on Faulkner's books. The other night I had another one about a TV show based on Frank Herbert's Dune--which of course never happened. But I decided to try to integrate this into the current work-in-progress. It fits in this way: there is a plot point that makes a lot more sense if the protag has for some reason a large and geeky social network. It needed some reason why a lot of people on the story's equivalents of Facebook and Twitter were available to observe it and react when he posts a pic of himself online with the words "THE END?" written on his chest with a marker upon the occasion of his twenty-first birthday. So, the long and exceedingly geeky paragraph below is the condensation of the dream cast into the world of the work-in-progress:

"I am A-R, a Boy Who Loves Dune"
That Arthur-Rimbaud even had such a large—and rather nerdy—social network extant to respond to his perceived suicide-distress-call was due mostly to his role as the curator of Bene Tleilax, a web-haven devoted to the fandom of the old TV series Dune. Derived loosely from the novel by Frank Herbert, the show ran from 1966 to 1986 on broadcast and then later on cable, inspiring a small but persistent following of people given to doing things like making costumes, attending conventions and writing fan fiction. Like its major TV sf-genre rival, the British show Doctor Who, the Dune series was composed of a long string of complex story arcs and it was marked by changes in its cast and characters as time passed, sometimes informed by Herbert’s occasional new entries into the novel series. Its “golden age” was generally considered to be its first three seasons, in part because of its remarkable cast ensemble: James Dean as the Duke Leto Atreides and Dean’s real-life young son Luke-Henry as his fictional son, the hero Paul Atreides; Tallulah Bankhead as the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam and Joan Collins as the Lady Jessica; the surrealist artist Salvador Dali as the Emperor Shaddam IV; John Colicos as the corrupt and sadistic Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, and Luke Halpin (also of Flipper fame) as his troubled heir Feyd-Rautha. Because of the vast scope and depth of its storyline and the constant need for new characters that might only appear once or twice, Dune became a routine stop for nearly every actor in Hollywood during the period as well as for every up-and-coming director. Anyone who’d ever touched Yoknapatawpha County or The Twilight Zone or Star Trek or Night Gallery ended up involved with Dune as well. By 1990, there was literally no one under consideration for an Emmy or an Oscar that hadn't had at least some contact with Dune. A-R’s father had been a huge fan of the show, and he’d indoctrinated his boy into it from an early age. Several years ago, looking for something to do as web-based media project for a class in high school, A-R started Bene Tleilax as a sort of personal blog combined with Dune content. Dune-enthusiasm had waned a bit over the years, in part as a result of a number of botched feature film attempts and a string of widely panned novels by Herbert’s son, but A-R still loved it all, even the weak early-1980s seasons and the bad movies and the sketchy novels, and he was delighted when his site readily gained a large following. Eventually, despite his efforts to keep the site focused on his “front-page” content, it gradually turned into a huge library of fan-written fiction, most of it “slash” in character. Accepting this natural inevitability, A-R’d spent much of his time with the site over the previous few years carefully organizing all of this slash fiction into easily searchable archives, and occasionally posting an editorial on his main page about the state of it all. This satisfied in him an urge to organize data. Occasionally he’d bust out fifty cents per word—on his dad’s dime—for original sf/fantasy fiction with a “Dune-ethos” (but without using Dune’s copyrighted property), which got him some notice as a “professional” publisher of sf/fantasy, and a lot of the stories that he’d published on Bene Tleilax later re-appeared in the various annual “Best Of” books. Despite this success, he never invested fully and personally into its cachet, instead sticking with the sensibility of his site’s original subtitle: “I’m A-R, a Boy Who Loves Dune,” and never trying to make it anything more grand than what he’d originally envisioned.

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Early this morning I had a dream that I discovered on Netlfix a 1950s-era TV series produced by Rod Serling and based on William Faulkner's work. This was so cool that I had to write it down, but instead of just recounting the dream, I decided to splice it into the work-in-progress (my still-ongoing NaNoWriMo project). A new excerpt from it:

...but after this release, A-R did not return to the book. Instead he turned on the TV, selected his Netflix queue. He’d become rather interested in an old TV series called Yoknapatawpha County. It was a creepy Southern Gothic soap opera of sorts, with a lot of horror elements. Rod Serling had produced it (same guy who also made The Twilight Zone) with teleplays penned mostly by William Faulkner, and it had run on TV in the late 1950s. It had been quite popular despite its opaque plotlines and densely written scripts and its often-macabre subject matter. But evidently it also had been heavily censored during its original run, many of its episodes bowdlerized in the cutting room or never aired at all in order to protect the sensitivities of 1950s TV viewers from moral offense. But the show’s current studio owner had recently undertaken to restore it to the TV show that Serling and Faulkner had intended it to be. Never-aired episodes were unearthed. Scenes were restored to other episodes. The whole thing was meticulously re-mastered, its black-and-white imagery newly crisp and mesmerizing on a hi-def screen, its shades of grey rendered into a glistening plasma of strangeness from another era, its soundtrack music once again like a transfixing Circe-call.

The show was built around a series of story arcs centered upon the rivalry between two decayed families of the series’ eponymous fictional county, the Snopes and the Compsons, the former being relatively low-brow newcomers to the county and the latter being the remnants of an antebellum aristocracy. Interspersed among these ongoing storylines were many stand-alone episodes about various incidents of mystery, horror and evil chicanery. One of the “lost” episodes that had run afoul of 1950s censors focused on one of the Compson boys—a “mental defective” named Benjy—who tried to sexually assault a girl and was then castrated for it. The story was unspooled almost languidly by way of Faulkner’s ornate language, and filtered through camerawork that made the whole thing look like something seen through shifting black-and-white stained glass. But the result was a thing both stunningly frank and surprisingly graphic. A-R wondered if it would meet broadcast standards even now, and he was not at all surprised that it’d been suppressed back in 1959. Another episode uncovered a group of social outliers—some frightful white trash, relatives of the county’s Klan-involved sheriff—who were processing dead humans, some murdered and some grave-robbed, into smoked sausage and decorating their unspeakably filthy pine woods hovel with desiccated and tanned human remains. Some of the series’ horror even ventured fully into the supernatural, with acknowledgements of vampires, specters and voodoo zombies afoot in the county, these made even creepier by the way the characters never seemed to regard any of these goings-on as things outside their ordinary experience.

A-R had thought about that a lot lately: weird goings-on that weren’t regarded as anything outside the humdrum of day-to-day life on Earth. He’d observed that the “heat bubble” phenomenon that had been blanketing Wisconsin—where Chris persisted in staying for far too long—was generally commented upon as being rather unexpected, but also that no one was particularly concerned with explaining it. Indeed, the only media attention he’d seen devoted to its basic weirdness was on a single broadcast of NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show when Rehm and a climate scientist discussed the topic, the scientist wearily dismissing the whole thing as just another symptom of the world winding down and suggesting that humanity ought to just lie back and accept its obvious impotence over the natural affairs of the universe.

One multi-episode arc of Yoknapatawpha County’s second season featured in its background a steady rainstorm that had persisted for months without a break. The eeriness of the phenomenon laid not so much with the bare fact of it but rather the characters’ complete nonchalance about it. It was a detail that impinged only incidentally on the events of the main storyline. A truck tire might be mired in mud because of it, or a woman’s hair might be soaked when otherwise it might not have been. But that was all. This reminded A-R of Wisconsin, the heat bubble, and now the temporal disconnect between Wisconsin and the rest of the planet. No one seemed to care about it. It was in front of no one’s attention.

A-R had had reached season three of the show. The sixth item on the episode guide caught his eye, an episode titled “The Cabinet of Cthulhu.” Its summary stated: “A visiting researcher (Robert Culp) befriends Benjy (Billy Gray) and presses Quentin (James Dean) for the secrets of an ancient seaman’s chest and a hidden cult.”

“WTF?” said A-R aloud, sitting upright, fully articulating it as double-you-tee-eff. Just as the blunt depictions of unvarnished racism, social decay, cannibalism and incest from other episodes seemed out of synch with the utopian cultural mindset of the era in which this show had been made, so, too, did a reference to the Cult Cthulhu, a thing you heard about and encountered routinely nowadays but which did not seem like a thing that could even have existed in the made-up halcyon myth age of 1950s America. Like Mormons, he thought. They were certainly around back then, but you didn’t see boys on bicycles wearing ties every single day like you do now. Nor boys with tentacle chains around their necks stocking weird-looking fruit in the grocery store.

He clicked WATCH.

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This is some real first-draft unedited business here, just a segment from my NaNoWriMo project that I came up with to tie into Thanksgiving. I submit it here in honor of the holiday, not because I think it was worth writing for any other reason. It is from the middle section of a trio of interconnected novellas, and so will make little to no sense to anyone in this stand-alone way. But it's got to do with dinner.

"Spatchcock"
from The Curve and the Cairn

Lastain claimed never to have had in her entire life an actual Thanksgiving dinner. Her expression soured after she said this. She pursed her lips over the rim of her glass and sipped her drink. A-R told her that this was an absurd assertion: “Everybody in this country has at one time or another had a Thanksgiving dinner—even if it was a really shitty one. It’s embedded in our cultural DNA.”

But Lastain persisted that her family had never honored the holiday properly, instead doing things like going to movies and eating popcorn, or running through fast food drive-thrus and eating in the car. A-R wondered if, during these times, she had been thankful for anything. Because, if so, then this too could have been a form of Thanksgiving dinner, albeit a shabby one. She said nothing at first, but peered at him darkly, sipping her drink. Then: “You have always been so snobbish about stuff like this, Arthur. Not everybody’s dad was a celebrity chef, you know. Hardly anyone has a kitchen this nice in their house!”

“I’m not talking about the food.” A-R reddened, felt his ears get hot, and he looked inside the refrigerator. “I am talking about an unavoidable, deeply encoded cultural norm in America.”

As if to defuse further clashes between A-R and Lastain, Haider interrupted with his assessment of the holiday and its fare: “Turkey, mashed potatoes, Stove Top Stuffing, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole and sweet potatoes with marshmallows on them.”

“Barbarism,” muttered A-R, still examining the contents of the refrigerator. Lastain sighed loudly behind him.

“And you watch football on TV.” Haider leaned back, ass on the countertop, satisfied. Case closed, he seemed to say.

“Whatever.” A-R sighed and reached for a bottle of white wine. “You two are missing the point. Tomorrow night we will have Thanksgiving dinner together and I will show you how it’s properly done.” He looked at Lastain. “No snobbery, I promise!”

“Arthur. It’s January.” Lastain pushed her glass forward, hopeful of a refill.

“It doesn’t matter. Thanksgiving can happen any day of the year.”

A-R wrote the menu with a chisel-tipped Sharpie on a sheet-pan sized piece of parchment:

TURKEY IN TWO STYLES w/natural pan gray

CELERIAC SMASHED POTATOES
CREAMED CHARD AND KALE, gratineed yo!

ROASTED WINTER SQUASHES AND RADISHES

OYSTER STUFFING w/pancetta FTW!

MAMA STAMBERG’s CRANBERRY RELISH!! fuck yeah!

PUMPKIN PIE w/whipped sour cream

Beneath this list, with a fine-point Sharpie, and in much smaller letters, he wrote his grocery list, checking the pantry as he went for items he might already have. When the list was finished, Hurricane jumped atop the steel island and examined it. “Coeurl,” he said. And, “Mew.”

“Did I remember everything, kiddo?” A-R bent low to accept a nose-kiss from the cat. Hurricane emitted a loud purr, gazed at his human for a moment, and then leapt away, back about his day’s business. A-R added one more item to the list: cat food. Then he took a picture of the list with his iPhone, grabbed keys and left for the store.

He decided to try the new supermarket that had recently opened on the former site of a desolated strip mall. It was called Circus of Foods, and rainbow flags flew gaudily, gleefully from its concrete ramparts. Having been raised by two dads, A-R could not see a rainbow-anything without thinking GAAAAYYY. But he doubted that this was likely the store’s proprietor’s intent.

He passed through the broad entrance, grabbed a cart and turned left into the large produce section. Assessing it’s vastness and variety, he made a mental note to send Chris here—if Chris ever returned from Wisconsin. Celery, carrots, celeriac, garlic, parsley, chives, A-R said to himself, trying to tick off as much of the vegetal section of his list as possible before resorting to looking at his phone image of it.

A big bin caught his eye. It was heaped with a large red-purple fruit with bright green and yellow fibers growing wildly from its skin. He had never seen anything like it. He picked one up. It was heavy for its size, fist-sized and cool. “It’s fantastic, isn’t it?” said someone. He looked to his right. A boy in the store’s uniform stood there, moving more of the fruits from a big box into the bin. The kid’s blue shirt collar splayed open to expose a necklace: steel charms in the shape of curvy tentacles hung from a knotted leather strap. Cult Cthulhu, A-R thought. But said, “What are they?”

“They’re called kudzu fruit,” said the kid. He grinned. “They’re delicious!”

Not on the menu: A-R took two anyway.

Chopping an onion:

Arthur-Rimbaud did it first, shedding its skin, halving it from root to stem, sweeping its ends to the side. He laid one half on its flat cut surface and quickly sliced through it in many close cuts perpendicular to where the root had been. Then he turned the thing slightly widdershins and sliced again, rendering the half to tiny dice. “Like this,” he said to Haider.

Haider had just asked how properly to dice an onion, professing that he’d attempted it and occasionally seen it on a TV show, but had fallen short in accomplishing the task himself. “I’ll teach you,” A-R said, “by making you do it yourself.”

Lastain sighed. “Oh Jesus Christ,” she muttered.

A-R glanced at her, said, “We need a ton of onions anyway.” He pulled from the basket another onion “Here,” he said, setting it upon the board, handing Haider from across the steel prep island the ceramic knife, handle-first. “I will talk you through it.”

“You did that so fast,” said Haider.

A-R wondered, “Are you left-handed or right-handed?”

Haider pursed his lips, nodded slowly. “It kind of depends. I’m kind of bi.”

Lastain snorted behind A-R.

“OK,” A-R said, “let’s say you were hacking to death a zombie during combat in Ruhrapenthe, in which hand would you be holding your war ax or machete?”

“The right,” said Haider, no hesitation. He grabbed the onion.

“Hold it against the board,” A-R said, “on its side. Yes, like that.” He watched Haider position the knife for the first cut. “Now, cut. One slice. Take off that end.”

“And again. The other end. As close as you can to that root.”

Haider did as he was told. Next, A-R showed him how to make a shallow cut through the skin from end to end and then peel away the papery layer.

“I know how to do that, dude,” Haider said, gazing at his peeled onion. “But what I don’t get is how you get it diced without chopping it all to fuck.”

“You’re making a big mistake,” Lastain said, rather dryly. “Letting Arthur think that he knows something that you don’t.”

“Ignore her. Listen to me.” A-R grinned at Haider and was surprised that he smiled back. “Now do what I am doing.” A-R grabbed the remaining intact half from his onion and pretended that he had a knife in his hand. He positioned the end of its imaginary blade against the onion’s white flesh. “You put the tip roughly here, just short of the end of the onion, and make one straight slice downward. And then again, as close as you can to the first cut. And so on, et cetera.”

Haider paused for a second, considered what he had seen, and then botched it entirely by making his first cut in exactly the wrong direction, making half-rings fall from his onion half.

“OK. Stop.” A-R stepped around the end of the island to Haider’s side. “Don’t freak out. Because I am going to touch you, bro. Don’t go all PTSD cyborg killer on my ass.”

Haider gazed down at A-R for a moment, as if deciding how to answer that. He laughed. “It’s cool, dude.”

“It’s like trying to tie someone else’s tie,” A-R explained. “You pretty much have to be standing behind him.”

Haider frowned.

“But,” A-R said, “you are enormous, like a furless Chewbacca. So I can’t reach around you from behind and still see what I’m doing. But I can kind of get beside you.” A-R sidled close to Haider, extended an arm in front on him and grasped his knife hand. He took Haider’s other hand with his own left and moved it into place, fingertips against the onion. “Here is where you make the first cut,” he said, carefully positioning Haider’s right hand with his own. “And now. Slice.” Slowly, they did it together.

Lastain leaned forward, opposite them. “You boys are so fuckin’ sexy right now,” she said. “If you accidentally start making out, I may just wet myself.”

“Silence, Satan!” A-R hissed. He and Haider made four more cuts together and then A-R released his grip. “Continue, just like that. Try to make each cut as close as you can to the last.”

Once the final slice was complete, A-R told him to turn the onion half so that he could slice it again, this time perpendicular to the previous set of cuts. “As if you had sliced a zombie from head to toe and then needed to do it again from shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, just to make sure it was good and really dead.”

Suddenly confident, Haider did as directed and laid the onion out in fine dice.

The turkey:

“Doesn’t that turkey,” said Lastain, “take like a thousand hours to bake?”

“Don't you just stick it in the oven and wait forever?” said Haider.

“No,” said A-R to Lastain. “Because we’re going to spatchcock it. And no,” he said to Haider, “because we're going to spatchcock it.”

That’s a preparation, A-R explained, where you cut the bird from throat to ass along its backbone and then pull out the backbone completely, and then flatten the beast for roasting. “But I take it a step further,” he said, tearing through that backbone with a great crunching, once and then again. He cast the long chunk of bony carcass into a steel bowl next to his cutting board. “Because I am also going to completely detach the leg quarters from the breast section.”

Haider gazed at the bird. Lastain refilled her wine glass.

“That’s the dark meat,” A-R clarified. “The part that Americans have been conditioned to despise but which is actually the best part, as soon you will learn.” He flipped the breast chunk over, cavity up. “I am also going to knock off these wing tips—” more crunching—“and very carefully take out the rib cage and the entire keel bone.” Haider leaned in closer, more interested.

“It's like busting down a zombie, isn’t it?”

“Actually,” Haider said, “it kind of is!” He looked more closely, watching A-R carefully pare the breast meat loose from its bony superstructure. “Except I’d just take that knife and whack the fucker straight through the middle of that sternum or whatever it is.”

“Perhaps, but in this case I am trying to keep the whole breast-slash-wing section in one piece, just minus most if its skeleton.”

Lastain wondered why.

“So that we can still have a brief Norman Rockwell moment,” said A-R, “with something that vaguely looks like a classic intact Thanksgiving turkey out of a vintage Good Housekeeping mag. Before we eat the fuck out of it.”

This explanation struck everyone as very funny for some reason, and they paused in the food prep for a bout of laughing, followed by a cigarette break. After a few minutes, after Lastain had stubbed out her smoke, she grasped A-R’s shoulder and said, “Though I have been giving you a hard time ever since you suggested this, I think I actually get what you are doing. What you really mean with your cornball spirit of Thanksgiving nonsense.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. “So, really, thank you for doing this with us today. It is actually, somehow, fun.”

Gently stunned, Arthur-Rimbaud stepped back. “But we have barely started cooking. And we have not eaten yet.”

“But that’s not really the point, is it?” she said.

A-R gazed at Lastain, not sure how to answer.

Behind him, Haider examined the dissected turkey. “So what’s next?” he said.

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Though November 12 is a hopelessly late date to start this year's participation in National Novel Writing Month, I've decided to do it anyway. I am going to give myself a whopping 22,000-word head start by incorporating an already-written novella into the plan...but I won't count that toward my 50K to "win." So what's the point of this massive cheat, then, you may wonder? It's to motivate me to finish a much larger story, which I will take to 75K before declaring NaNo victory, assuming I make it to that threshold by end of the month. But if I do not log 50K in new words before the end of the month, then I will not claim my winner badge (but I still did the obligatory fake cover!).

This is the plan: I will put together a triptych of inter-related novellas involving the same characters. The first part of it will be the already-written "Love Me, He Said, and Turned Away Forever," most of which I posted on this journal in 2011. The second section will be titled "Taste the Blood of Lastain" and will focus on the character Arthur-Rimbaud who was only seen in Skype calls during the first section, and it will cover what he was up to while his counterpart in the other section was having bizarre misadventures. And then the third segment, titled "The Cairn and the Curve", will involve the reunion of the protags from parts one and two and their confrontation with GREAT DRAMA! And HORROR!

This mostly-new work involves a group of characters that I have been tormenting since my 2009 (winner!) NaNo project The Days of the Dust and the Diane Rehm Show, and which I revisited in an alternate universe kind of way in the short story "The Cairn" (published in Library of the Living Dead's 2010 anthology Zombiality: A Queer Bent on the Undead). But in this new tale of their lives, they struggle in yet another vaguely Lovecraftian alternate universe where Cthulhu cultists are as ordinary as Mormon missionaries and climate change isn't any longer a subject of politics because it's become the giant freaky-deaky regular fact of everyday life.

And there will be zeppelins again, because airplanes can't navigate the Dust.

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A little Halloween fun for all my readers and writer-pals. Happy holidays, y'all...

The Exorcist Playset

Last October, the whole world seemed like a slow-mo image that I perceived through a layer of stained glass, a place to which I was anchored, yet oddly detached. And a weird confluence of public and personal events happened last October, that all had something to do with Hell on Earth. One: a next-door neighbor, Detective Lance Kinderman of the Saint Louis Metropolitan Police, who’d been probing into the matter of the local “Gemini Killer” serial murders, turned out to be the Gemini Killer himself, the monster who’d stuffed his victims’ mouths full of rosaries. Two: I got an acting job in the tenth remake of an old horror film, my first such job in a few years and one I didn’t much like after all. Three: my recently-deceased brother’s son—Regan, age fourteen—became my legal ward and moved into my home; and, four: the Kenner toy company revivified an old thing called The Exorcist Playset, a toy based on a novel from the 1970s.

The original Exorcist Playset was a box of plastic and cardboard open on two sides, resembling a bedroom, with a plastic four-poster bed in it upon which rested the action figure of a demon-possessed girl. Levers in the cross-festooned base of the toy would raise and lower the bed—SUPERNATURAL HORROR!—and move dressers and other objects up and down on posts—LIFE-LIKE DEMONIC MOTION! The girl figure was articulated to the extent that you could make her sit up in bed and make her head spin all the way around, though her limbs were mostly immobile. Instead of being equipped with swinging joints, they were instead formed on a skeleton of flexible wire that you could bend a few times before they eventually broke. The press of a button on the playset’s base elicited the scratchy, metallic playback of a recorded voice saying at random such things as “The sow is mine!” and “I am the Devil!” and “The piglet will die!” HEAR THE SHOCKING VOICE OF EVIL!

Action figures of two priests—one old and one young—could be placed here and there in the room, left feet inserted into pegs in the floor, but they always stood frozen in a sort of holy rigor mortis, one forever clutching a rosary and the other forever wielding an oversized Lucite bottle of holy water. A weirdly agnostic toy, the original Exorcist Playset never promised to resolve the tension of the underlying story, instead leaving its outcome to the imagination of the kid playing with this nearly static scene. In that sense, it was a great toy.

( Read more headspinning horror... )

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I've been off from work for a week, and that's the first time that's happened in years. Everyone seemed surprised/disappointed that Jeff and I didn't have any kind of trip somewhere planned and that I just stayed home all week. But let me tell ya: it is really nice just getting to stay home and not have to do much in particular. On the other hand, I am fairly twitchy by nature and seem to always harbor a feeling that I need to be getting something constructive done all the time (which has been a useful trait in my job). For my days off this week, I'd imagined that I was going to complete a lot of writing. I didn't do anywhere near as much as I'd have liked, but I still did get a lot of it done, and I know where I am going with a couple unfinished projects. Some random features of the week off:

--I took the Cube in for an oil change. It wasn't as painful as I thought it would be, and I while I waited in the car place's rather comfy waiting room, I re-read a story called "Tattooed Love Boys," which I think is my favorite entry in Alex Jeffers' collection You Will Meet a Stranger Far From Home. That book also contains two stories of which I was the original publisher in issues of M-Brane SF.

--We received from Ikea two new couches. They arrived in eight boxes and took much of the afternoon for us to assemble them (and get rid of our old furniture--thanks, Craigslist hoarders!). This was a tough project, but we are very happy with the result. We have never had comfortable living room furniture, and the new couches--two identical items by the name "Karlstad"--are way comfie. We love them.

--J and I went shopping for throw pillows for the new couches. On the same trip, I bought a case of cheap but very palatable wine at Trader Joe's and have been imbibing liberally of it since.

--Earlier in the week, J and I stocked up some staples at Viviano's, the Italian grocery in the adjacent neighborhood. There I found a new San Pellegrino drink, Pompelmo (grapefruit). It is wonderful! I have drunk three of them so far just as they are, but I suspect it would be a fine mixer with vodka or tequila.

--At our regular grocery store, I saw in the same visit two attractive lads who have worked there for a while, but never seem to be there at the same time. One is a bagger and the other a stocker in the produce department. Seeing them at once made me wish that they were well-known characters about whom I could write some "slash" fiction. I could still do it, but no one would know who they are. Such a shame. Maybe I can imbue them with supernatural powers, turn them into characters, and then cause them to have their ways with one another.

--Last night I spent a few minutes on Twitter attacking Congressman Todd Akin (Assbag-MO) who is now our state's rightwing candidate for the US Senate. There are douchebags, and political pieces of shit, and rightwing toads...and then there is Todd Akin. This guy is a card-carrying disaster. He believes that student loans shouldn't exist. He wants the minimum wage abolished. Ditto Social Security and Medicare. No more Federal investments in energy or education. Resignation from the United Nations. The kind of troll that wouldn't have been taken seriously in Senate-level politics even 15 years ago, he is also one of the most homophobic members of Congress, in the same league as Bachmann and King. So unhappy was he with the repeal of DADT, he came up with a new bill to make it legal for service members who don't like fags to bully and abuse their gay comrades. That's how stupid and mean this creep is. Akin's Twitter handle is @ToddAkin, and I encourage tweeps to use it to attack him savagely, with great scorn and bile, from now until Election Day.

--I remembered once again that spending random time, with no particular point or purpose, with Jeffy is more satisfying than anything "constructive" I could have been doing during my days off, and I am glad that I found a lot of that time this week.

I go back to work tomorrow, but only for a half-day at most. Most everyone else will be off, so I can get some work done in the early hours and be gone by noon. It's all pretty nice lately.

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I found some evidence of my teenage activities (which pre-dated a bit my use of the internet) on a wiki site called Fanlore, a neat repository of info that I'd never seen before.

461px-Alternativewarp13

For a couple of years when I was in high school, I published a monthly Star Trek fanzine called The Alternative Warp, (which has entry here at Fanlore.) In some ways, it's a bit of an embarrassment because there wasn't much to recommend it as far as the quality of its content, but for me and my co-editor and our handful of other contributors (all of us being 14 and 15 years old at the time), it was still a pretty solid effort: monthly publication schedule for almost two years, full-size pages, typical issue-length of 32 or more pages, serious effort at making it look decent (in the pre-computer age, yo), cover artwork of no worse quality than the writing inside. It was a mix of fiction, non-fiction, letters, news items, opinion pieces and other random stuff. It fit well with my general interest in writing and my student journalism activities, and it was good fun for those last couple years of teen-hood right before having a driver license and a car opened up a world of other stuff to do at night.

Much of the article about it on the Fanlore site is text copied from a post that I made on the M-Brane SF site on the occasion of Trek's 44th anniversary when I was feeling old and remembering The Alternative Warp #4, our big 20th anniversary extravaganza (kudos to whomever found that post, it being nearly as obscure as its ancient subject matter!). It's kind of exciting in a dorky way to see it referenced anywhere at all. None of its content ever existed in an electronic form, and whatever extant print copies of it may remain on Earth are surely brittle and warped with age, pages probably stuck one to the other by toner decay, so it's kind of cool to know that something I did way back then is noted in the big online record of Stuff That Happened even if the work itself doesn't survive.

But evidently a couple issues are still to be found in "Box 120" of something called the Ming Wathne Fanzine Archives Collection at the University of Iowa. Evidently Ms. Wathne amassed a vast collection of fanzines in numerous media properties and bequeathed the entire collection to the University. According to the catalog, in Box 120 are issues #13 and #14 of my zine and according to the image credit on the Fanlore page, it is from those copies that the images of those covers were grabbed. #13's cover is copied here. Until today, I had not seen it in over 20 years! I can still interpret the headlines: "New Trek cast" refers to the announcement of the actors cast for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which would start its first season a couple months later; "Awards progress" has to do with a (largely fraudulent) poll that we were running to designate best-ofs in fiction etc. from the zine's first year; "Stamp drive" refers to a rather extensive piece that I researched on an effort by some über-fans (but we didn't say über back than) to get the post office to issue a Star Trek commemorative stamp (which effort also scored me the awesome prize of a handwritten note from Isaac Asimov stating that he didn't know anything about the stamp campaign); and "Brazil review" is there because I'd recently seen the Gilliam film, was obsessed with it, was obsessed with making other people see it, and I wrote a little article about it.

This cover art itself was source of mild controversy at the time, but I assume it won't cramp anyone's style all these years later. It was drawn by an artist named C. Kyle (am about 99% sure that C. stands for Christine). We ran this Kirk cover, and also a Spock cover and a McCoy cover, all drawn by Kyle, in three consecutive months (the McCoy image can be seen on the Fanlore page). After we had done so, we received a gently scolding letter from the late Bill Hupe, who was a huge publisher and re-publisher of fanzines. Hupe was a big deal. We called him a "fanzine mogul" and we dreamed that he would for some reason "buy us out." But he was a subscriber to my zine, and even purchased from us random, stupid merch that we sold to raise extra money (homemade tribbles, for example--which got us another cease-and-desist, by the way, from David Gerrold's assistant). Evidently these Kyle covers had previously appeared in some of Hupe's publications and we ran them without proper attribution. Which was really more the artist's fault than ours for not mentioning that they were not previously unpublished. We just published pretty much anything anybody sent us. But I didn't want Hupe angry with me, so I replied with an apology and ran a statement in a subsequent issue properly crediting the items. And here it is again!

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I haven't been maintaining my pointless journal lately, and it's been driving me crazy. My work life the past few months has been so intense that I have had no time for much of anything. But that's settling a bit--we're entering a mid-season mitigation of insanity--and I am done with regular M-Brane tasks for a while, and I have been carving out a bit of normalcy. Which should really include babbling in this journal and then advertising that I have done so. Just like in the old days. For tonight's post, I have no particular topic other than recapping what's been on my mind outside of work lately.

Reading Books!: Anyone who knows me very well might be stunned to learn that in the year 2012, which is nearly half-over-with, I have read exactly ONE book plus 206 pages of second one (whilst in 2009, for example, I think I tore through about 100 titles). But what a wonderful, huge, weird and totally crazy long-ass book that one was: Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. Clocking in at nearly a thousand pages, this giant hardback city of weirdness, given to me by Jeff for X-mas, engrossed me for months. In usually very short installments. I actually read most of its bulk on laundry mornings at the laundromat. And then I'd struggle to return to it at night on the couch after work. But inevitably doze off from exhaustion, sometimes after having read as little as a single new sentence. At this pace of reading such a long book, in sessions of as little as 30 seconds at a time, it's not too hard to figure out why it took me so long to get done with it. Weird fact: just a few days after I finally finished it, it developed that Jeff's mom had heard about the book from one of her friends (who had listened to an audio book of it, which must have taken about six months to listen to) and so she wanted to read it herself. Wouldn't think it would be her thing. But she borrowed my copy. Haven't heard back yet on how it's going.

Now I am 206 pages into another thick read, Samuel Delany's long-awaited Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and I have somehow managed that number of pages in just a few days. Yesterday I glanced over at Jo Walton's review of it on Tor.com and I felt that I share some of the reviewer's sentiments: it's really hard to enjoy it at first (Christopher is not at all into the lead character's obsession with nose-picking and snot-eating!), but then it sets its hooks in. I think I am going to love it, even though I occasionally have to avert my eyes a bit at an especially squicky passage. Before I glance back it at it and really read it anyway. Delany's a favorite author for me and I love having this thick new volume. For someone who hasn't read Delany before, however, and wants a sense of his whole body of work, this may not be the book to start with. It revisits a lot of the sex aesthetic of a much earlier work, Hogg, and like that earlier work, fuses "Literature" with some of the dirtiest (literally) hardcore pornography that I can recall ever having read. But this new book is not the gruesome and nearly altogether hopeless horror story that Hogg is. It seems like it's coming from a much brighter place. And it's got a character that I am falling in bookworld-love with, its young protagonist Eric who gets more awesome chapter-by-chapter, even when he is making boneheaded decisions (please finish high school, honey!). But then I consider his rationale, and I wonder who I am to say he's not making a good choice. He's going to be another Delany character that lingers with me for a long time after I have finished reading the book. As the story opens, he seems to be in a role somewhat analogous to that of silent Cocksucker in Hogg but with much more free will, and not nearly so much the receptacle and void of corruption that Hogg's lead was. But as the story has gone on, Eric has turned into something else entirely. He is going to stay with me like the fractured Kid and the sweet Denny from Dhalgren, and the other very scary Denny from Hogg, and Rat Korga from Stars in My Pocket Like Grain of Sand, and Comet Jo from Empire Star. I'll report back on this book later.

Other Junk!:

1) I was greatly victorious at the June installment of the monthly wine dinner that I chef at the Botanical Garden. It was themed to go along with the Chinese Lanterns Festival in progress there now (San Francisco-accented Chinese food with Napa wines). Everything about it--the specific venue within the Garden, my menu, the makeshift kitchen, etc.--conspired against success, but we totally dominated. It was hard as hell, but when it's that difficult and it all goes perfectly, then that's what constitutes triumph.

2) I am looking ahead with some dread at Jeff's impending vacation to New Mexico to visit a friend. I can't go with him due to work this summer, and I just realized that I have never once spent more than a couple hours at a time alone in our current home and have a hard time imagining its emptiness when he is not here for days. It's gonna freak the cats.

3) Of late, I find it difficult to get out of my head Justin Bieber's "Boyfriend" song. Once any portion of it is heard, it replays in the background of my mind for a long time. What's annoying about this is that I probably would never have been aware of this tune were it not for the fact that the staff in my production kitchen at work constantly listens to a top-hits pop station on radio (later in the morning after they rebel against my selection of the local NPR affiliate) that only has eight or ten songs in its rotation, and one of them lately is this insidious Justin Bieber song. But what's really kind of fucked-up about the whole situation is that I don't really mind! I actually totally love this song! I think I am going to spread the contagion even further now:

4) An upside to having come down with the above-described affliction: I recently had a dream that Bieber was cast as Feyd-Rautha in a new Dune film, and in the dream context this seemed like a totally awesome idea. It still kinda does. Maybe I am still dreaming.

5) Got some new writing done yesterday, about 2000 words of it. This is best one-day achievement in many months.

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My current work-in-progress—that novella that I have posting section of on Facebook and on my LJ—involves a Lovecraftian cult in the background of the story, and I decided to talk about the sexual practices and mores of this cult. I thought some kind of “magic” involving sex would be fun to add into the mix. So yesterday, I was looking into the matter of “sex magic” and “auto-erotic” spiritual practices, including those promulgated by the occult groups with which Aleister Crowley was involved in the early years of the 20th century. Somehow my research got a bit sidetracked, and I stumbled upon a gay porn site, one of the really funny ones that evidently originate in a non-English-speaking country, but where all the text on the site has been translated—very poorly—into English. The site contained several rather wordy paragraphs of text, supposedly describing various videos that one could see a preview of or download. Oddly, all of the pics accompanying the text blocks were on a single theme: medical examinations, randy doctors and their lovely patients. But the accompanying text described a much wider range of activities, or at least seemed to from what I could glean.

As I read through these bizarre paragraphs of near-nonsense, weirdly computer-translated, I found them strangely interesting in their syntax and word choice. There were broken sentences of 12 or 15 words of sheer gibberish, but then this might be followed by a phrase or clause that seemed almost lovely. I started to imagine that this text could work for live performance if one wanted to present a ridiculous parody of a pretentious Beat poetry or slam poetry reading. I imagined William S. Burroughs sitting in a smoke-hazed café somewhere in 1960, stoned on heroin, listening to a young poet reciting this text, someone in the background tapping on a bongo drum.

So I copy/pasted several paragraphs of text from the porn site, and spent about ten minutes editing them into the following gay erotic “poem,” overbearingly titled “Learning My Opener-Word: Nut-Fogged Impressions of the Orgy Years in the Twink Gay Fora…A Found Poem.” I did not add any language to what I snagged from the porn site. All I did was delete words and add punctuation, emphasis and capitalization occasionally. I didn’t even rearrange the order in which I found it, or mix sentences from different paragraphs. What follows is exactly as I found it, in the order I found it, just with my minor edits. Now, I would like for someone to perform a live café reading of it and capture it on video and post that video online. Then it will be Art, man!

The piece itself contains some sexually explicit language, so reader discretion is advised. Oddly, however, considering its source, it ended up not being as crazily pornographic as it might have been.

And now, without further delay, my newest work, “Learning My Opener-Word: Nut-Fogged Impressions of the Orgy Years in the Twink Gay Fora…A Found Poem.”

( Read more [adult content]... )

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Another installment of current work-in-progress, a probably novella-length fiction (it stands at 11K words so far and has a while to go yet) set in a altered version of my homeland. This item also appears as parts 9 and 10 on my Facebook wall. This experiment of writing something fictional more or less online and posting the draft without revision as soon as its done has been useful. It creates some artificial schedule pressure on it and shuts off the internal editor for a while.

A sort of turning point is reached in this segment, with the narrator's relationships with other characters. The reliability of this narrator remains somewhat in question. A few segments ago, I was contemplating having him get really unreliable, but I am so closely aligned with his POV that it's hard for me to not believe what he's saying. But we'll see. Previous segments are found by way of the "personal writing" tag.

"Love Me," He Said, and Turned Away Forever (Part 5)

Deliberately I avoided talking about myself, and instead steered the dinner conversation toward Ledger as much as possible. He said that he had been graduated from the local high school the year before but had not settled on any further educational or vocational plan. He said that he liked physics, but that he wasn’t smart enough to get into a good college to study it. He said that he understood “temporal mechanics” but that he couldn’t perform well enough on standardized tests to prove it to anyone. He said that his mother was dead and that he was semi-estranged from his father. “He used to hit me a lot,” Ledger said of his father. When I reacted, he added with a raised hand, “But that was before I got too big for him to get away with it. He hasn’t done that in a long time.” He said that he liked the TV show Doctor Who, and that he liked to go fishing in the river that cut the town in half. “But you probably think that’s dumb,” he said.

( Read more... )

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personal writing

This next (rather delayed) segment is short. I was going try to get the remainder of the story posted in one or two big chunks and be done with it, but the section that immediately follows this one is giving me trouble. Here the dinner is served and something is learned about Ledger's background. (Anyone who was following along but forgot what was happening since last post was like 10 days ago can find the earlier installments by way of the "personal writing" tag).

"Love Me," He Said, and Turned Away Forever (Part 4)

Dinner came together easily, in several pieces between cocktails. Beans simmered, forming a silky broth, and tamales steamed. I pulverized roasted chiles and tomatillos into a blistering, piquant sauce, and shredded a small, perfectly pale green cabbage. I quartered more limes, planning on many more drinks. And eventually, when enough time had passed, Ledger came back inside. He surprised me by standing close to me at the stove, peering into my pots and inhaling their aromas. “I’m really hungry,” he said. I still had neither invited him properly to dinner nor done anything to ameliorate my earlier rudeness. But we seemed to have moved past all of that by unspoken agreement. “I hope you are,” I said. “We’re going to have a lot of food.” I opened the refrigerator and handed him a beer. Peace in our time.

He seemed to want to say something but couldn’t get it out for a minute. Finally he asked if it was OK if he took a shower there, and then he looked very embarrassed over having asked. “But I’m really sweaty and dirty,” he admitted. “I probably shouldn’t come to dinner like this.” I was charmed that he viewed this situation as a dinner that ones comes to, as opposed to simply eating, especially in this wholly shabby kitchen. “I have other clothes in my backpack.” I had not noticed that he even traveled with a backpack, but then there it was, a green camo thing lying in a corner of the room next to the trash can. This reminded me of my son: he was always digging stuff out of a backpack. He carried so much stuff in it that I had imagined it to be some sort of civilian-model TARDIS, way bigger on the inside than the outside.

The shower ran for a long time and I continued to cook. I gently pulled open the banana leaf wrappers of the tamales and laid sauce over them, and a snow of crumbled cheese. I slid them under the broiler. I fried all the cabbage I had shredded earlier and much of it went into the yellow rice, while some of it was soaked in a dressing of lime juice, olive oil, crushed garlic and minced jalapeno. I had little decent to work with as far as serving dishes, but I managed it. Soon everything was sprawled over the kitchen island, a buffet large enough to feed at least a dozen.

Ledger reappeared, refreshed. He was dressed identically to the way he had been—white t-shirt, camo cargo shorts—but the clothes were clean now. His hair looked as if it had been slicked with pomade and he now wore glasses—or had he all along? I couldn’t remember. I vaguely remembered that he had been wearing sunglasses outside. Perhaps they were prescription, like mine.

“I have never seen this,” he said.

“Seen what?” I handed him a drink.

“Food that looks like this in somebody’s house. It looks like it’s in a restaurant.”

I told him, briefly, about my culinary background, and added, “Brace, the guy who hired you for this job, and I used to own a restaurant.”

“What is this?” Ledger bent down, his nose close to a bowl full of a bright orange sauce, studded with black pips and rounds of scallion green and bits of cilantro leaf, and shiny with a drizzle of olive oil. “It smells really good.”

“I’m not quite sure what to call it,” I said. “It’s an experiment. I made it from that weird 'kudzu fruit.' A kudzu fruit salsa, I guess? Taste it.”

With the corner of a tortilla chip, Ledger lifted a big blob of the salsa to his mouth and ate it hungrily. His eyes widened, as if surprised.

“Is it too hot?”

“It’s good!” he said. “Only thing anyone around here ever does with those things is make pies out of them.” He ate a couple more bites of the salsa and then sat down on a stool at one end of the island evidently ready to dine in earnest. I served him, filling his plate with some of everything.

He tasted the rice and then the beans. Then he looked at me and said, “You don’t say a prayer or anything before you eat, do you?”

“No,” I said.

He nodded, and went back to eating. But I had to know: “Do you?”

He shook his head. “I don’t. Not since I moved away from home. But my dad always did. I could never pronounce all of it, but he usually just said the short version: Cthulhu fhtagn!”

He returned to eating, but I stared at him, surprised. A Cthulhu cultist! This kid seemed so ordinary in most regards that I hadn't expected him to be of any kind of non-mainstream religious practice. But, as if anticipating my next question, he said, through a mouthful of tamale, “But I don’t believe in that. That’s my dad’s thing.”

“Of course,” I said, suddenly finding my employee and dinner companion a bit more interesting.

[to be continued]

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personal writing

I happened upon a site this morning which was comprised of Justin Bieber-based fan fiction. At first I assumed it was a slash site, but was surprised to discover that it was actually not. But what was it? A cursory glance through its contents proved that it was a fan fiction site that seems to be by and for teenage girls, and its fiction consists primarily of thinly-disguised versions of the authors having romantic liaisons with Justin Bieber. So, of course, I decided to try my own hand at the conventions of what seemed to be a ridiculous genre. Over the course of the day, a few minutes here and a few minutes there, I banged out the following item, a piece of Justin Bieber fan fiction that I have decided is of MUCH too high a literary quality to post on the Justin Bieber Fanfiction Archive ;) Instead, I shall bide my time until a pro market emerges for such material or until someone solicits a novel-length treatment! LOL

While this story is probably a totally ridiculous waste of time, it made me think about something seriously. Why exactly is it that I and apparently most people in my peer group find the adulation of Justin Bieber to be so ridiculous? A lot of very legitimate answers come to mind, but could there also be a streak of plain old meanness underlying it? He's just a kid who makes some music that isn't really to my taste, but that does that make him and all his fans a bunch of idiots? Probably not. So while I was at first planning to write a really snarky parody/pastiche of some of the material I found on the fan fic site, I almost immediately dropped that idea. What I came up with instead is still pretty preposterous and will hopefully cause some laughter and derision, but it's a lot nicer to its subject matter than what I had expected.

"Your Justin Bieber"

You did not know, during those days of the beach house, that for everyone there is a Justin Bieber. Not necessarily Justin Bieber himself, but the concept of him, an ineffable want that cannot be set aside until one knows him. When you consider it now, in these soft terms, you wonder if he ever was anything but a concept, and never a real young man at all. You wonder this, as you stand again in that beach house's airy rooms, each one almost unchanged by time, even all these years later: Was he real? Was there ever really a Justin Bieber, or just that aching want that was, at last, effaced from the heart by age and time’s erosion?

That this house still exists on this beach assures you that at least some of it was real. Yes, you regain confidence in your own history, and you know that while, for most people, Justin Bieber is an archetype with many names, a necessary totem in the passage through age and disappointment, for you he was more literal. For it was here in these rooms and on that beach that you loved—or at least imagined that you could have loved—the living man, the real Justin Bieber. As you linger, you will consider clutching the pillows of the bed to your face, inhaling deeply. Really, you wonder, do you really believe that the smell of his hair and sweat would still adhere to pillowcases and sheets, as if they had never been changed in all these years? Eventually you will lie down in that bed again, but not yet, not before a long time spent outside gazing at the sea…

The way it always happens:

You wonder exactly why you have been sent on this particular mission, a glorified babysitting assignment, watching over a kid with perhaps too much fame perhaps too early. You don't know him, even by reputation, but the Agency has filled these gaps in your knowledge, because you spent a dozen hours on a plane filling your head with trivia about one Justin Bieber. He is "highly unstable" you have been told. His mother is crazy, they have said. But you see no objective evidence of any of this in his file. "He is completely unable to tend to even his most basic needs on his own," the file says. "He requires continuous maintenance." But the information in the dossier belies this: you find a video of the boy roasting a hog, buried in a pit of coals. His face is stained with soot, and he looks like he has stumbled right out of Lord of the Flies. He mouths a silent "Fuck you," and grins at a camera that he aims at himself. You start to like him a bit more already, even though you know he will prove to be yet another entitled piece of pop-cultural debris, a complete tool of the industrial/douche media complex. And your own son is already older than this kid, and you did not enjoy even his upbringing. You wonder why they could not have not sent you anywhere else, perhaps to interrogate death row inmates, or salve the egos of Middle Eastern despots, or force the last few aging Nazis to confess their crimes. But no, to babysit a teenage millionaire boy-monster, that's the work they give you. But as your tiny plane lands on a steaming tarmac on some isolated island, you watch his video again and you admit that you look forward to meeting this Justin Bieber.

It takes no time for you know that you may be in the presence of your personal Justin Bieber, the Justin Bieber as concept, the Justin Bieber as premise. That he is literally the human incarnation of Justin Bieber seems almost beside the point. You are having dinner with him, a massive spread of take-out food that you picked up at a local taqueria. He eats it with great enthusiasm, so hungrily, as if he has been starved for days. He thanks you for the food, lavishing compliments, even as he chews and swallows. It's as if he thinks you cooked it yourself. He sips wine that you have decided to allow him to share with you. In no objective respect is he any different than any other hungry teenage boy, yet you cannot throw off the sensation that he is that undeniable thing that you did not know you were missing. This train of though leads in circles to ruin, so you engage him in what you assume is conversation of interest to a young man his age, and you drink a lot more wine. He laughs a lot, and he does not seem like he needs any help at all from a woman more than twice his age.

You slip gently from bed, not looking behind you, pretending that you did not notice that sometime during the night Justin Bieber had slipped into bed next to you, lying on top of the sheet. You decide that the amount of wine you consumed the night before will be your ironclad excuse: you simply did not notice, you did not wake up. Dressing quietly, the sleeping entity still lying next to the dent you left in the mattress, you decide to set aside the fact that he was there, that you noticed when he had laid down, that you could feel a trembling from him as if he were stifling great heaves of sobbing for a long time until he at last fell still. But you do look back at the bed and are surprised that he looks nothing like the child/angel/mannequin-thing generated by his public persona machine. Lying there in his underwear, dead asleep, he looks like a very human young man. His mouth hangs open slightly, he snores gently, his hair is a tangled corona about his head. You ignore this and head out of the house.

At the market, you buy eggs and chorizo. You carefully select perfectly ripe avocados and mangos. Bunches of green onions and cilantro fill your basket, and you ask for two dozen freshly griddled tortillas. You shop as if you are preparing for a very important meal, and this briefly makes you feel stupid. But, in fact, you are gathering supplies for a breakfast that you will cook for Justin Bieber. Though you still have not comprehended Justin Bieber as a concept, as the scratch for the itch that you did know you had, you cannot deny that you cannot wait to return to the beach house and see if he is awake and if he wants to eat with you again. This shames you and delights you at the same time. You squeeze a chunk of queso fresco and you wonder about its slight yield under your fingertips. Your fingers think it feels likes digging into Justin Bieber’s shoulders.

Do not say it, you tell him, as he tries to say it. Do not say this thing, you tell him, silencing him with your own lips pressed to his, because you know it’s not true. But you also know that he does not know it: boys his age lie all the time, even when they mean to be as sincere as a bleeding heart. They cannot comprehend their own emotions, not even one such as Justin Bieber. You have been with many men, yet you know that he has never been with a woman. This in itself seems preposterous: yes, he is young, but he is powerful and in his prime and can have whatever he wants anytime he asks. But he says it is his first time, and you somehow know that he is telling you the truth. Do not say that you love me, you think as hard as you can, yet you do not say the whole sentence aloud. Some shambling old crag of a mother in you wants to tell him to wait until it is right, until he is with someone he loves. Experience tells you that this is nonsense: wait for what? For unfulfilled expectations and disappointment? And, when it is done, you must admit that it is you who wanted it even more than he did. You wanted your Justin Bieber.

He eats his breakfast enthusiastically, sitting in his underwear at the patio table. That bangsy hair that is the only thing that one ever notices in images of him does not exist this morning. It is tousled, strands heap in tangles and lay plastered by dried sweat to his forehead. “I know it didn’t really mean anything,” he says through a mouthful of scrambled eggs and avocado. “I know I was dumb to say I love you. But I still hope you at least like me a little bit.” You tell him that you do.

And again, now, as always:

You are in an airport in Europe. “Hello,” says a voice somewhere behind you. You turn around and see him for the first time in twenty years. Twenty years of age have not effaced his essential youth, though he seems to carry the weight of those years behind his eyes. “You look well,” he says. “You look good.”

“So do you,” you say. A man in outré carnival garb stands behind Justin Bieber and snaps a pic of the two of you together. You do not know if he is a random fan or perhaps a lone paparazzo—Justin is no longer attended by the swarms of cameras that pursued him in his youth. They have moved on to new Justin Biebers. But as you look at him again, now, you’re not sure that you ever did.

Tags:

A short segment tonight, also posted as "Part 7" in my Facebook notes. This forms a sort of connection between what's happened so far and an imminent event that may be pivotal. It might be reasonable at this point to start to wonder about the reliability of the narrator and what he is telling us, but I haven't decided yet if that's the way it's headed. [If LJ-ers happen to see this and care, the previous installments are accessible by way of the "personal writing" tag].

All the doors and windows still stood wide open when I returned to the house, and I was glad to see it as I brought the car behind the house next to the weed-choked garage. Glad, too, was I to see Ledger in the garden. He had braved the so-called kudzu and removed a wide swath of it. No longer did it encroach close to the back porch, though it still swamped the garage and much of the fence in thick thatch and tendrils. Somehow it looked less verdant in the daylight than it did in twilight and at night, but it had begun to sprout fuzzy pinkish blossoms. A tangle of its severed tentacles sat in a huge heap next to piles of trash that Ledger had hauled from the house, and buried in that trash was the whole rejected contents of my old bedroom. I saw the edge of that old photo collage peaking out from under the wreckage of the bed frame.

He said, as I got out of the car, “This shit’s got to go. It’s out of control.” His t-shirt clung as a wet second skin, and his face was sun-kissed, or maybe just plain burnt. Killing kudzu was hot work, no doubt. A garden hoe hung in his left hand, and he smiled, obviously pleased with his progress if perhaps worried about his vegetal enemy’s resiliency. “If you want to sell the house, I bet you want people to be able to use the garage.” With the hoe, he pointed at the vine-festooned ruin. The pink flowers seemed much larger now than they did at first glance. I thought about the weird fruit I had bought at Circus of Foods and wondered if these giant flowers were its gaudy precursor.

“If the climate around here ever returns to normal,” I said, “this stuff will die off on its own. But you’re probably right that it needs to be beaten back now.” I opened the car’s back hatch, grabbed a couple of bags of groceries and handed them to Ledger. “Mind helping me bring this stuff inside?”

He peered into one of the bags. “You got some of that fruit.”

“I sort of felt pressured into it.”

It took us a couple of trips from the car to the kitchen to get it all inside. I'd bought a lot of stuff, not only at Circus of Foods, but also at a liquor store with the odd name “The Beer Deeple.” Ledger assisted me with four cases of beer, two cases of wine, some bottles of gin and tequila and other liquors, and a raft of mixers. Seeing all of it on the kitchen countertops made me wonder if I could, in fact, afford to buy so much stuff at once. I hadn’t had the motivation to really understand how Brace had organized my finances before he died, and I hadn’t looked at the bank account balance in weeks. Two expensive blue bottles of Mumbai Sapphire glowed in a sunbeam, inviting me to commence an afternoon cocktail hour. I was surprised how low the sun hung already. Evidently I had been out wandering around and shopping for hours.

Ledger examined a tall, green bent-necked bottle. It was shaped like a Saurian brandy bottle from Dr. McCoy’s sickbay liquor cabinet. “What’s this?” He squinted at its French labeling.

“Absinthe,” I said. I dumped a bag of limes into a basket that I had purchased specifically to hold them.

“I never heard of that,” Ledger said.

“Never mind. You’re too young for it!” I’m not sure why I said that, and it came out harshly.

“I didn’t ask for any. I just asked you what it is!”

I ignored him and continued stowing groceries and bottles in the newly-emptied cabinets and the refrigerator. After another minute or two during which I felt he was glaring at me, he said, “I'm going back out to chop down more kudzu.”

Briefly I considered following him outside and apologizing for my sudden surliness. I set aside that idea. Why did I care anyway? He was welcome to leave any time he wished if he wasn’t happy with my attitude. I considered the menu I had planned at Circus of Foods: tamales stuffed with braised pork and chorizo, glazed in a sauce of tomatillos and roasted chiles; pinto beans simmered with onion and epazote and later smashed in sizzling lard and garlic, and covered over in a melted sheet of queso enchilada; rice tinted with saffron and studded with frizzled strands and chunks of fried cabbage. And then I considered, for the very first time that day, exactly for whom I thought I was planning this dinner. Somehow it had never occurred to me that I had invited no guests. Was I planning all this food for myself, to eat alone? Of course not. And, of course, I had been assuming without really thinking about it that it was Ledger who would dine with me. Why did I make this assumption, after having neither invited him nor having any good reason to guess that he’d be interested? At once, the entire prospect was suddenly and unaccountably, yet very deeply, embarrassing.

I let him work in the yard, and I set about cooking beans and mixing corn dough. But after a few minutes of this work, after a pair of onions lay first in dice on a board and then disappeared into a murky pot, and after hot water released the sweet and earthy aroma of the masa harina, I realized that I had forgotten about my need for a cocktail. Relieved to remember it, I quartered a lime and crushed all of it into a glass of ice. I added a lot of gin and a little bit of tonic. I spoke to dead Brace as I recreated what had been his favorite cocktail. I asked him how he found Ledger on Craigslist, and why. “Why,” I said aloud, “can I not be left alone now? Why did you send this kid to me?”

“How do you know,” he said, aloud, his voice real and right behind me as if he were in the room, “that I did not send you to him?”

Frozen, I stood there. I will not turn around, I told myself shivering in the kitchen’s heat. He cannot be there. A minute or two later, after I had gulped down most of the drink and had heard no more voices, I returned to my cooking. Outside beyond the kitchen window, in the declining orange sunblaze, Ledger hacked at vines.

[to be continued]

Tags:

personal writing

Page Summary

Dream Journal: Lost in the Park; also, Progress on New Book
You Will Find That Heart/Smiley-Thing Deep in Here, XOXO JB
Finally some new words added into the WIP
Year-end considerations and the outlook on 2014
Vacation plan, new WIP segment, effed up dreams, ejac stats questioned
something from the work-in-progress
Part 3 of the Kudzu/Cthulhu story suggests its format
Dream Journal: The 1960s-era DUNE TV series that never was
Dream Journal: The Serling/Faulkner TV show that should have been
Thanksgiving NaNoWriMo excerpt
Better to NaNo late than not at all
The Exorcist Playset
Vacation: Good, I guess? Yes! Random notes.
Box 120: Evidence of my pre-internet existence found
Random housekeeping and effluvia; books
My Great New Poem
New W-I-P, Part 5
New W-I-P, Part 4
Yes, Justin Bieber fan fiction.
New W-I-P, Part 3

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May 2017

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Dream Journal: Lost in the Park; also, Progress on New Book

You Will Find That Heart/Smiley-Thing Deep in Here, XOXO JB

Finally some new words added into the WIP

Year-end considerations and the outlook on 2014

Vacation plan, new WIP segment, effed up dreams, ejac stats questioned

something from the work-in-progress

Part 3 of the Kudzu/Cthulhu story suggests its format

Dream Journal: The 1960s-era DUNE TV series that never was

Dream Journal: The Serling/Faulkner TV show that should have been

Thanksgiving NaNoWriMo excerpt

Better to NaNo late than not at all

The Exorcist Playset

Vacation: Good, I guess? Yes! Random notes.

Box 120: Evidence of my pre-internet existence found

Random housekeeping and effluvia; books

My Great New Poem

New W-I-P, Part 5

New W-I-P, Part 4

Yes, Justin Bieber fan fiction.

New W-I-P, Part 3

Page Summary

Syndicate

Expand Cut Tags

Style Credit