Identity Crises of the Living Dead

Yes, “crises,” as in plural.

It’s occurred to me more than once that this blog, with its numerous photos of cats and mountains and trees and flowers and stuff, would appear to the casual observer to be someone’s grandma’s on-again, off-again hobby. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’d be flattered by the comparison. I often wonder how many of those old-school grandmas who love flowers and cats and pretty sunsets are still out there in this day and age. I raise a cup of hot chamomile to them, wherever they are.

And I’ll drink it out of a pink mug, in my Big Pink house, just to make you mad. We love you, Grandma, wherever you are.

After my days’s adventures among the living dead with an angry protagonist I like to come home to a little wholesomeness, that’s all. Unlike a lot of people who write in the genre I don’t like living in Horror World 24/7. I don’t denigrate those who dress their houses in black lace and skulls; it just ain’t me, babe. 

Will photos of local squalor make this blog seem more sophisticated? Well, then, let’s squalor ‘til you holler! Gotcher pot o’ gold right here, ha-ha, get it? I’m feeling smarter already!

Although I’m not scrapping any categories, I’ll make a point of presenting most of my turbo-wholesome Nice People Stuff on my Facebook page. Most of the nice, normal-type people I know are on my Friends list there. 

I’ll still run the occasional photo essay from time to time but I need to punch things up here. People would never know what a wonderfully ghastly zombie horror writer I am at first glance of the page. Nor would they know at the 22nd glance. So I’ll dial back the cats and mountains and trees and flowers and stuff to the every-once-in-a-while.

If you lived here, you’d be home by now.

I realize some are wondering why I don’t write more about writing. I am writing, aren’t I? Why don’t I write about that?

Put simply, and more abruptly than I’d like, I’ve noticed I’m less inclined to write about writing when I’m writing. I add quickly that there is a rather comical point behind this, namely, that my best successes are when I’m at my most chaotic. There are methods to the various madnesses, but stuff like Comma Massacre Day (one day last month I went through all 240 pages of The Wrong Kind of Dead and, well, massacred masses of commas), and abandoning a chapter in the middle to go back and read the entire novel from the beginning, cutting sentences, axing paragraphs, dropping entire pages in the manuscript in the process...these aren’t things I feel I could responsibly recommend to anyone. 

Worse, I’m not even sure I could sell this as entertainment. (Woo-hoo, look at me, I’m so random!) That said, I suppose I’d better give it a shot. I’ve got a few ideas for posts.

Not original, but apropos.

Of course, I can always run excerpts from my latest work in progress, whether it’s the last novel in my zombie post-apocalypse series or from the book of poems I want to follow that with. There’s other stuff I’ve been working on, too.

The main thing I’ve been working on is the nerve for online confrontation. If I am to ever get going with these podcasts I’ve been talking about for the last three years, I need to come up with a final decision on the metaphorical hills I’m willing to metaphorically die on. 

Soon. (No, really!)

That’s precisely what’s been holding me back on everything. I’m not that fussed about anything to argue with people about it. After years of stewing over this, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way I’m not going to get mixed up in something, no matter how hard I try.

So maybe I shouldn’t try so hard. Maybe I should take a stand on things. There was a time I used to enjoy wandering into comments sections and kicking rhetorical backsides. Perhaps that I don’t enjoy it anymore should give me a more mature perspective.

It should be fun to find out.

Clichés Exist for Reasons

“Only the strong survive,” 
cackled the good ol’ boys
I grew up among
in South Carolina

damn them all
they weren’t wrong.

What I had trouble with
was said strength was
to be directed only
towards survival

One displayed one’s
Superiority and fitness for
mating by superior endurance 
to the Big Miserable Thing
with no thought towards
liberation
if only in one’s mind

God help you 
if they caught you
trying an escape like
reading, or God forbid, writin’
when you better be workin’, boy
There ain’t no other way
and the sooner you figure that out
the better off you’re gonna be.

I spent my formative years
being told I was weak and
without common sense (now you got
Book smarts, so that’s something)
but—stop me if you’ve heard this—
with trumpets and fanfare 
announcing King Irony riding in 
with the cavalry to my vindication...

(wait for it)

...here I am 
a happily married old writer
there they are
(the ones not
long since dead)
bitter, disappointed old
beasts of burden

nyah-nyah
how do ya like them 
apples you braying
old jackasses?
etc.

It’s an old story, and that
I feel no particular vindication
only sad for the waste of lives
prosecuting an old trope
is itself an old trope

Besides, it took me long enough
to come around. I could have made
far better choices, myself.

Every writer learns 
to his horror or otherwise
that there are a finite 
number of stories 
to be told only so many ways.

You do the best you can.
It’s all a matter of style.

From the Midlands of South Carolina to the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado is more than a matter of miles for this retired old nomad of time and space. Kinda corny, I know, but there it is.

From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

Mid-December Sunday Greetings

...from a very neglectful blogger and author on the Redemption Trail.

“And Jesus rebuked Satan, saying unto him, ‘PUT SOME PANTS ON, YOU DEGENERATE!’”

I love Sunday mornings now. I rolled out of bed at 3:30 a.m., made the coffee, filled the hopper on the wood pellet stove, and set to typing out the thoughts that held me awake and forced me up in the first place. This is a very, very recent thing I’ve begun here that’s worked wonders for my productivity, and, best of all, peace of mind.

Before 5 a.m. I had started another poem, turned some metaphorical wrenches on the story bible for my zombie series, and, after so long a time, had ideas for blogposts. Still two hours out from dawn, and I’m considering a shower and proper pants, at least some fresh, non-stinky pajamas.

So this is what “happiness” feels like. Huh. So alien and strange, it’s easy to see how so many people end up sabotaging it for themselves. I’ve been that sinner. It’s the kind of sin that doesn’t wait until you’re dead to send you to Hell. It makes its own Hell for you right there and then.

Like all earthly Hells, it can be escaped. It’s a matter of watching for the Sartrean door to open while everyone else is screaming at one another over what they consider to be important issues. To take that old French existentialist’s metaphor one more step out of metaphor and into life as it is lived among us non-hypotheticals, most people never see that “No Exit” door. They may have heard rumors of a way out, but they don’t believe they’ll ever find it. That’s only for the lucky and the clever, and good for them.

I’ve got the lucky part down. As always, “clever” is going to require some work. It’s a good thing I’m up.

What Thanksgiving Is As I Grow Older

I’m not presuming to speak for anyone else.

Thanksgiving Day in the central San Luis Valley unfolded into a classic late November afternoon. Bands of gray clouds striped the high, thin film of haze over the sun, and I thought of how October, for all of its morbid associations, is full of color and life compared to the quiet, gray-brown death that is November. The leaves are long gone from the trees. As for those leaves left on the ground, what were once vibrant yellows and reds are dull, crumbling sepia memories, to the dust soon returned.

My wife and I had eaten our dinner. Our son, never one for eating with people, was still sleeping off his intense work week as a trade apprentice. Our daughter would arrive well after dark, having worked that day in Manitou Springs three hours away. Standing alone in the front yard, I recognized the colors and shapes in the sky, the pallor of the sun as the same from 1,800 miles and four decades away. I said “Annelle and Uncle Charley” three times, as if saying so would make them appear. Some of my best childhood memories were from going to their farm in Hartsville, South Carolina, for Thanksgiving in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

As the sun disappeared behind the thicker clouds on the horizon I raised a glass for my late cousin and one-time best friend Ben, who would have been 58 years old that day. Ben’s younger brother Leslie died last year, and the last of one of the finest families to ever walk the Earth was no more. Uncle Joe passed in 2007, Aunt Margie in 2013. Geniuses of mind and spirit, they took an entire way of thinking and doing things with them as they died. I’d need a book to properly eulogize them. 

This month also marks one year since my brother-of-another-mother and one-time best friend Steven Mock passed. I still can’t believe he’s gone. I really wish he was here to read what there is of my third novel. There wouldn’t be a first novel if he hadn’t had given it to me with both critical barrels after reading my prototype first chapter of Bleeding Kansas in 2012.

I’ve got a lot of people I’m missing hard this year. If I’ve had blue moments thinking of the people I miss—and I’ve had, and still do—this is a feature, not a bug of my holiday season. As Dickens observed in his essay, “What Christmas Is As We Grow Older,” we exclude nothing and no one. That means we accept the sadness with the joy. We allow ourselves to mourn our dead even as we cherish those still among us. 

The trick, as always, is in the balance. For instance, I’ve found it’s far easier to mourn silent, invisible dead than it is to cherish living beings with their own things to do and say. The living require so much more of us than a review of fading memories and that overwhelming sadness that comes when you know you’ll never see or speak with them again.

Therefore, you acknowledge those absent loved ones and move on already. There are people downstairs who came a long way to see you. Go see them. While you still can.

I’m sorry to say it’s only been in the last 20 years or so that I’ve come to fully appreciate the stated meaning of Thanksgiving and take it to heart. It was in this year in particular that I finally came to understand on the most essential, sub-molecular level that I might only have so many of these annual observations left. I’ve belabored that point often enough in my Christmas essays, but it’s hitting home all over the calendar for me now.

I could say more. I might say more. I started a memoir of my times going to see Annelle and Uncle Charley, but I realized it was going on too long for online posting purposes, and, as of this writing, I still have a novel to finish.

So, moving right along, then....

I’ve always found this a most haunting image. Is this the night before Thanksgiving? Or are these the survivors gathered the night after, wondering when their turn might yet come?

Thanksgiving Thoughts 2018

Season’s Greetings from the Colorado High Country.

I may have complained about this last year, but this year I’m calling an official end to an old tradition in my household, namely The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. If it were as easy as clicking an app and getting live streaming (we’re longtime cord-cutters living in a high, semi-remote valley with no broadcast TV) we’d get all the joyful, over-commercialized noise that comes with the event.

No, first the NBC app needed updating. Second, I had to enter an activation code on my computer upstairs. I did so, signing in via Facebook, giving NBC my e-mail address, etc. You’d think they’d be happy with beaming in the commercials to one more household but, no, let’s collect some information!

And for the information they took from me, I got absolutely nothing. Well, another activation code, anyway. Restarting the app got me another activation code to enter.

For all I know there was an easy fix to this I was overlooking. Maybe I needed to restart the FireTV stick, but it’s already irritating enough that I have to take it out and re-insert it into the side of the television every time I want to watch something. That apps for streaming live television require updating, that I have to enter in codes from my computer, that I can’t simply turn on the television and watch something without jumping through hoops—forget it, then. Just forget it.

I try not to be angry about it, but I do miss all that stupid noise, however stupid. We were even getting into the dog show that followed the parade when we lived in Colorado Springs. It was something we had on in the background while waiting for the turkey to cook.

Now it’s just quiet. Maybe I’ll put on some music later.

I love how this display outside of the real estate office combines symbols of the adjacent seasons.

I’ve often reflected as I pace the living area downstairs that, in a way, we’ve brought this 109-year-old house full circle. Radio wasn’t even a thing when this house was built. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there were some broadcast television stations in the San Luis Valley when television came to rule our cultural schedules in the 1950s through the 1980s. But with enough people willing to pay a fortune for cable and satellite service, why bother paying to maintain a broadcast affiliate station for a vast area (between the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts) with only 40,000 people in it? 

So instead of the sonic and visual wallpaper of television in the background, we have the curtains open to the sunlight. I wonder how many sunsets were missed in this house because the families living here had the curtains drawn and the TV on. It wasn’t that long ago that the days of the week were defined by what show was broadcast that day. 

I have to keep reminding myself that this is a good thing because I honestly do miss the noise sometimes. There is a feeling of connectedness, too, that’s gone missing. Poor me, I’ll have to depend on my usual websites to find out what Hot New Gotta Have Thing people are going to fight over in the stores this year. 

I’ll get over it. Like so many things I’ve been denied in my life, the denial becomes a blessing for which I am eventually profusely thankful. 

That’s a wrap. Thank you, Thanksgiving 2018.

Questions Asked and Answered

By way of stretching and working the metaphorical speed bag before going into the day’s writing, I’m going to work some TMI Tuesday into one of these Answer These Random Questions and Talk Your Friends into Doing the Same copy-pastas you find on Facebook. Also, yes, it’s been too long since posts, so here:

How old are you: Dirt. Okay, 57. Over a month since my birthday and I still laugh to think of it. I honestly can’t get over having lived this long.

Surgeries: For 18 years I had all the scars of Christ, with a carpal tunnel release scar on either hand from 1999 and 2000 and one on my right side for the appendectomy in 1984. Then the robot carved up my lower abdomen digging out my cancerous prostate this summer and wrecked the effect. I’m still a little put out by this.

Tattoos: Absolutely not. I didn’t understand people who drew on themselves in elementary school, either, so maybe it’s just me.

Shot a gun: Yes. I regret not getting more into it, but my observation is that, done right, it is an expensive and time-consuming hobby, and I prefer to allocate my resources elsewhere.

Quit a job: Who hasn’t?

Ever been on TV: Yes. Mainly guy-on-the-street stuff, which is funny, because I couldn’t do normal if I tried. I know, because I have tried. Leopards, spots, and so on.

What do you drive: A “solar yellow” 2000 Jeep Wrangler Sport, the last of the Jeeps that look like real Jeeps, not the ugly bastard spawn of a miscegenation between a Hummer and a Jeep. We’ve been together 17 years as of September. It’s a love affair. Like most of my life, it’s difficult to explain to normies.

Hit a deer? Regrettably, yes.

Fell in love: See above. But, sometimes, as with my wife and Jeep, it’s worked out.

Rode in an ambulance: No occasion to, thank God.

Sang karaoke: To the dismay of everyone in earshot, I did. They were at least as drunk as I was and probably deserved it, though.

Ice skated: A couple of times, actually. It was okay, but not something I would go out of my way to do.

Rode a motorcycle: Never drove one, but rode on the back with my hands gripping the seat bar behind me like a proper heterosexual male.

Stayed in hospital: “Surgeries” covered this.

Favorite fruit: Never considered this. They’re all good to me.

Favorite smell: A mix of fresh brewed coffee and bacon over fresh-polished hardwood floors as a fire snaps away at some well-seasoned logs in the fireplace. Or the sandalwood incense old head shops smelled of in the 1970s (there’s some Old Spice body wash my son got a hold of, the scent of which bears an uncannily precise resemblance to this). Or blooming wisteria, or tea roses. So many to choose from. So I won’t.

The view through my bathroom window just before sunrise. At first I was irritated because I had to get up, but then....

Morning or night: There’s a song by The Who — really, just Pete Townshend on a ukulele with a beautifully understated horn line by John Entwistle in the background — called “Blue, Red, and Grey” which speaks for my attitude towards this question. That is to say, “I love every minute of the day.” Whether drinkin’ and writin’ during the Hour of the Wolf at 3 a.m. or watching the sun burnish the clouds of dawn before lighting up the land, eating lunch in the sun at noon, walking in the afternoon, etc., etc., I can’t imagine why I’d pick just one when I can have ‘em all.

The bright morning light glancing off the evidence of one season transitioning into another. Sometimes you get a neat mix like this.

Skipped school: Yes. I actually had to be talked into it.

Last phone call: My son, calling to tell me not to panic, he’s coming home super-late from a job that went into sudden-death overtime in Salida.

Last text from: My wife, to let me know she got the text I sent her informing her of my safe return over 15 miles of snowpacked road from Del Norte.

Watch someone die: Not the precise moment of death, but close enough. I heard my mom go into death-rattle breathing the night before she died. It was loud and weirdly steady, like one of those old, loud aquarium filter pumps.

Coke or Pepsi: Neither. I do a Diet Dr. Pepper if I absolutely must, which is only after I get up from a midday siesta, which I also avoid when I can.

Favorite pie: Cutie. Seriously, I have to pick one? Get outta here.

Favorite pizza: ideally, a supreme, with everything but the bait fish. Gotta have my onions and black olives with my ground sausage and beef and pepperoni, et al. A Hawaiian with the pineapple is okay, but only in the summer. What, pick one? No.

Favorite season: Happy to be here for all four. I made a point of moving to a part of the country where I could enjoy all four, though winter does seem to predominate here.

Hold your finger down and select copy. Or scratch an armpit with it. Preferably your own.

Then go into your own status, paste. Or eat paste. It makes as much sense.

Change with your answers. Or not. It’s a free country.

Have a day!

Setting your keyboard on fire and walking away like you don’t care that the rest of the house is burning down after you’ve Made Your Point is the new “dropping the mic.” Although that was stupid, too.

Summer’s Survivors of the Frosts

I’m walking past these guys in mid-October and thinking, “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, you’re lovely and all, but—what are you still doing here?”

The alpine aster is also known as a September glory because that’s the month you generally see the most of ‘em. This little guy must have been left to stand guard while his brothers and sisters went to sleep. He wasn’t the only one, either. There are still a few outliers to be found if you look.

Hollyhocks are among the toughest botanical beauties you’ll ever meet, given how they can grow tall and study from a seam in a sidewalk while blooming to shame the angels. Here, along US 160 on the west side of town, we behold the toughest of them all. They’re normally long gone by the end of September, but don’t tell this one. I’ve got a feeling it will punch you.

This one’s having a hard time letting go. It’s okay; I don’t take change very well, either.

There are tractor-trailer loads of crabapples still in the trees. I can only imagine what the sidewalks will look like next spring. We can all only hope there’s enough precipitation to help wash all the mess away.

All photographs Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

More October in Monte, 2018 Edition

I’d meant to fill this space with reflections on where I am regarding my various writing projects. Those are indeed forthcoming, but meanwhile these photo essays are just too easy to do when you’ve,  a) got a lot of great photos, and, b) got a lot of great photos.

It’s not the same pattern as 2017 or 2016, but it is a pattern to itself, with distinguishing glitches.

The dawn was already colored by the heavy cloud cover as it broke with the slow passing of the front, but the cold-burned leaves certainly added their hue here.

In A.D. 2018, the autumn pattern in our patch of the San Luis Valley is broken cloud cover, with wind in the afternoon. It’s yet to get bitterly cold (below 20°F/-6.6°C), although it has gotten cold enough to turn the gold leaves on our aspen to deep red and black, while also rusting the leaves of the tall Lombardy poplars. 

After a while, the gold does come through to catch virtual fire with the rising sun.

From one of the more spectacular sunsets this month. You usually don’t catch this kind of bronze-to-orange light anytime other than August. 

Although the cold nights have the luster of the changed leaves, it could be worse. Last year, we had a heavy, wet snow of the kind that we’re already overdue for in the Colorado high country. The snow melted, then refroze on the leaves and branches, effectively bringing an end to leaf-viewing season before Halloween.

To add insult to injury, that was the only snow we had all season long. With luck, the end of the current La Niña cycle should help break this drought.

Every season of every year has its own personality. Some are more agreeable than others. I got some nice pictures from this one, and some trees have yet to fully change. 

Snow would be good, though. Any day now....

Ice crystals in the upper troposphere create this prisming effect commonly know as a “sun dog.” The moisture is up there. We just need to get it down here.

All photographs Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved. Virtual coffee and doughnuts gratefully accepted via PayPal.