My Personally, Most Viscerally Disdained Tropes of the Writing Life, Installment 23,117

Today’s trope hanging on my metaphorical kill chain is “Tee-hee, I’m a writer, I do research on weird stuff, don’t hold my web browser history against me Mr. FBI Man/Ms. Polite Society!” Miss me with that weaksauce. I don’t read messed-up stuff because I’m a writer. I’m a writer because I like reading messed-up stuff. Whether anyone else approves is irrelevant. 

Alas, I forget the source for this image.

Pornography repulses me, but the socially unacceptable attitudes I enjoy reading on the outlaw chan boards would get me in as much trouble with the today’s secular, but no less religiously fanatical New Church. I generally “hide my power level,” which is the chan board expression for “don’t let people know what you really think about things,” but it’s been my observation that, if someone wants you in trouble badly enough, they’ll get you in trouble, so it doesn’t bear worrying too much about. 

That said, the usual commonsense rules apply: be judicious, be discerning, choose your battles. Never apologize for how you feel or what you believe. As for how much anyone needs to know how you feel or believe...go back to those first three on the list.

A Visit from the Ghost of Churchgoing Sundays Past

Alas, if only Sunday School was ever remotely this fun, let alone educational and uplifting. The grim reality was finding yourself squirreled away in a room with a couple of aggressively unattractive, never-married women who had nothing better to do than to volunteer watching the kids so the normal, well-adjusted grownups could be good and bored to death somewhere else.

The maddening boredom was a feature, not a bug of the overall church-going experience. Along with your collection plate money, it was part of the penance you paid for whatever moments you may have enjoyed in the previous week. Maybe for even actual sins. The ennui certainly felt powerful enough to redeem any one or more of the Seven Deadlies.

Look, I’m not knocking church. All I’m saying is there are reasons people quit going, and treating Sunday School for the young ones as an afterthought is one. 

Eew on the Spew Crew

Remember when George Carlin would question popular expressions in his comedy act and make people laugh as he demonstrated the stupid, poorly thought-out assumptions behind them all? Of course not. I was thinking of him when I wrote this, though, and how almost no one knows who Richard Pryor is anymore. Two of the greatest outlaw comedians of all time, down the memory hole. Anyway....

As someone who never outgrew his childish delight in onomatopoeia and comic book sound effects, I cherish the word “spew.” The very “eew” sound at the end suggests something awful. As a noun and a verb, the word describes something viscerally disgusting sprayed with propulsive force, also satisfying my delight in form and utility.

Therefore it is especially offensive to me to hear how hate is spewed. Like vomit, I get that hate (but never hatred, oddly) is something distasteful, but “spewing hate” was a threadbare expression over a quarter-century ago around the time of the riots in Los Angeles after the verdict in the Rodney King trial, when both law enforcement and ghetto blacks were accused, again and again, of barfing up ill intent upon each other.

How does one spew hate, anyway? It’s not the sort of thing that sticks to walls and pools on floors and makes everything smell so sour others are gagging and fit to puke, too.

Hate is made to sound as if there’s a virus in all that spew that one might catch involuntarily, which is why this is used as an excuse to censor and de-platform people with unfashionable views. This is, of course, as disingenuous as it is silly. 

On the opposite side of the coin, consider how love is propagated. Love is generally spread, like a sweet jam. Or a virus, too, though no one thinks of it like that.

Honestly, though, can you think of anyone who has spread love? Spewed so much love it spread like a virus steaming from hot vomit, so much so that entire nations fell ill with...love?

As always, flip the script and it’s immediately obvious how ludicrously obtuse any given popular delusion is. As always, the True Believers shut down like toddlers overdue for their naps when confronted with the truth. 

We note the idiocy, we smirk at the idiocy, we move on. Here’s a photo of Gal, the big shaggy cat who rules the Blue Porch Wild Kitty Committee. 

What, you were expecting a photo of...spew? When the dark and disgusting is de riguer, happy and wholesome becomes edgy. I’ve always been of a contrarian mindset.

Early Adopter Technology and the Living Dead

Does your zombie novel have flying cars? Mine will. 

First off, fear not, this won’t hold my latest book up any longer than it’s been held up. It’s just that I have a couple of e-subscriptions to cutting-edge aviation mags (long story) and believe me, there are some serious people paying serious attention to the problem of our shameful lack of flying cars in this 21st century. Don’t get too excited, though, unless you’ve the got the kind of jack and juice a CEO or a hedge-fund manager would have, the kind that “needs” to go directly from the company rooftop to the company jet at the airport without dealing with the common traffic below.

Anyway, I saw this photo and realized, “Hey, Derek and his peeps will be in one of the Redoubts where all the billionaires and almost-billionaires retreated to when the dead arose to eat the flesh of the not so well connected. The elite of these elite will have flying cars, because why not?” [grinning most Grinchily] “Now, what kind of action set-piece can I write involving flying cars and vast hordes of flesh-eating re-animated dead?” 

I’m already employing other science-fictiony elements that are actual devices that have yet to come into wide use, but would already be perfected and enjoyed among the kind of people for whom the apocalypse is an inconvenience at worst. I just got another toy for my trippy little toybox. THE WRONG KIND OF DEAD is going to be so sick, in both conventional and colloquial uses of the word.

“Always Winter, Never Christmas”

The expression from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe come to mind during this most Monday of months. It’s pretty enough in pictures, but I’m not alone in wishing all this dirty, slippery, weeks-old snow would melt away already. For my part, I don’t think I’ve seen snowpack on roads stick around this long since I lived in Anchorage.

This is what 1°F/-17C looks like. At least the freezing fog has already cleared out, allowing for a better warm-up than yesterday.

This is my son’s third winter with us. He says this will be remembered as the one with lots of freezing fog. It’s no joke for guys like him who spend a lot of their day on the road.

It’s like the aspen is photo-bombing the poplars. The trees were pretty this morning. Of course, everything looks prettier against a blue sky. Today was the first day in a while for that.

Yes, I’m fascinated by these icicles. You could kill a man with some of these things.

Someone from the city was kind enough to drop random piles of dirt along the southbound lane of my street, so we’ve got that.

On the way back to Monte from Alamosa, grooving to Led Zeppelin IV. I actually heard “Stairway to Heaven” for the first time in a long time driving with this view and I absolutely loved it. The entire album was nice to hear again. I was so afraid I’d fallen out of love with my old music. It turns out all I’d needed was a break.

Chillin’ Like Villains

Random observational trail mix on a cold trek through the Long Monday of the year.

Today’s edition of Operation Deep Freeze saw us topping yesterday’s high of 18°F at 21°F by 10 a.m., and as a bonus, we got full water pressure back in our kitchen sink for the first time since just after New Year’s Day when the temperature went down to minus 12 and froze the entire length of the pipe under the house. No leaks so far, knock on wood. We needed this win.

Any day with blue skies is a good one. Sadly, our more typical days are congested with solid sheets of the high clouds seen here. keeping things nice and bitter. Oh, but those clouds clear off in time for nightfall, to allow what heat there is to escape into space. I keep telling myself this annoying winter pattern is what will keep this place from overpopulating. I hope I’m right.

A few days ago I learned that Sunday, 13 January is celebrated as Twentieth Day in parts of Scandinavia. As in “On the 20th day of Christmas, we ate all the candy on the tree — then finally threw that fire hazard out!”

Again, I have trouble letting go of Christmas, and I concur entirely with George Orwell’s observation that the celebration is primarily a relief from what is generally the worst weather of the year, but TWENTY days of Christmas? Three days of this period in Norway were once mandated by law for special Jul (Yule) ale drinking, by the way. At least three farmers must be in attendance for this. If not possible, the lone farmer must set out mugs as if entertaining the others, and drink accordingly.

Did I mention this was once the law?

Me, I’m looking at 16 days post-alcohol. I miss it sometimes, but I can’t afford sacrificing those days after to recovery anymore.

As for the writing and everything else, what can I tell you but it’s one day at a time. One gray, cold, yet passing-way-too-quickly day at a time.

This Is Not the Day

I started out this day with guns blazing, with so many ideas, getting so many things started. Naturally, nothing was finished.

Is this the day I finally miss a posting? 

Nah. 

Here’s a photo of me demonstrating proper leftover candy cane disposal in a 20-ounce cup of black coffee.

We’ll try missing again tomorrow.

It’s Like This Sometimes a Lot

I don’t know where I found this screenshot—somewhere drinking and Internettin’ in the last couple of years, no doubt—but all credit and glory to its creator. It’s apropos to what I’m doing, or, more to the point, sometimes not doing.

Apropos of nothing, as of today I’ve been tobacco and alcohol free for two weeks. My son told me when he got home from work tonight that I look like I’ve got five years of my life back, that I no longer look so pale and drawn. I figured I probably look flush for all the coughing. My lungs feel like they’re taking most sadistic vengeance upon me for their abuse I inflicted upon them last year, but I’ll savor the irony knowing I’ll never have to go through this again. And that I’m at least looking better.

Also, I’m dreaming again. I hadn’t realized I hadn’t been dreaming all this time until just recently when I started having those vivid, ultra-realistic dreams before waking up like I used to have when I was much younger. I attribute that to alcohol withdrawal. It’s not a bad side effect. I had honestly forgotten what it was like to awaken from a weird dream, rising into consciousness as if breaking the surface of deepest, darkest waters, gasping at reality. All this time I’ve been missing out.

Nothing to do but finish this hot anti-flu powder mix drink and we’ll try this again in the morning. Here’s hoping for a suitably compelling dream to inspire me.

A Gray and Dark Sunday the 13th

I don’t think my son has left his room all day. He’s either real quiet with his techno-track building, or more likely been asleep the whole time. My wife was roused at half-past midnight by a vicious intestinal flu. She’s much better as of this evening but she’s spent the entire day in bed, grateful just to hold down fluids.

It was almost as if no one was here. This means I should get make some headway on The Wrong Kind of Dead before I call it an evening. Meanwhile, here’s some shots of this gray day with occasional flurries. At least it hasn’t been too cold here in the San Luis Valley. Just messy.

Two views of some really wicked ice-fangs.

Not quite Currier and Ives, but good enough for me.

Spooky, so named because he spooks very easily, and I always wanted a cat I could call Spooky. Not only has this kitten grown to full size since the summer, but grown fat.

All the ferals could probably stand to lose a few pounds. We’ll worry about that come warmer weather.

Naming the Dead

Chocolate 
Starlight
Caramel 
Midnight

Honey
(oh, &)
Rain 

(she told 
me later 
when she’d 
remembered)

I’m relieved
she could at least
remember their names 

returning from last night’s
sleepover she’d 
never missed those 
once-beloved toy
horses I took to the
thrift store today

Upon my return my wife asked
what was wrong and I said 
Don’t mind me, I just got 
back from burying 
our little girl

& she reminded 
me that those 
horses & so 
many other things
had been locked 
in that old toy chest
for a year already

& if I thought
what I did today was 
sad, consider that coffin 
of her childhood 
just taking up
space

among the eye-
liner & posters of spiky-
haired singers & semi-literate 
notes to girlfriends seasoned 
with shorthand like “OMFG!” 
(swearing of course 
that the “F” doesn’t mean 
what I know it effing means)...

My wife was
very understanding &
right to tell
me that things aren’t
standing still & they
shouldn’t & I really
need to keep up

so I nodded, later
laughing alone that 
night when I
realized this came 
at a time when
I don’t drink like
I used to

not that I
need booze
to waste time
wondering if
those horses will get 
new names
should they find

new mistresses to
love them forever
or six months to a
year before 
moving 
on

so I lift my
two and only
beers to the 
little plastic 
horses

which have at
least a chance 
of a 
future 

as opposed to

that clever &
affectionate 
little child
whose lifeless
pieces

I dropped into 
the donations 
bin

long may you 
run

From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2006, 2019 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like...January 11th

It’s nice to have a normal winter for a change. I’m also looking forward to taking showers and making sun tea this summer. It’s all connected.

This is the first time since I lived in Alaska that I’ve seen new snow fall on top of old snow that didn’t melt away because it was too crazy cold.

Yet for an early January snow, this came at a rare, warmer time, and the snow fell heavy and wet, as in spring. This works out, as we need all the wet stuff we can get. This won’t break the drought, but we’ll take it. 

Angel Puff navigates the socked-in driveway by hopping into my footprints.

Yeah, I know. I wore myself out shoveling the sidewalk, though. I’ll have to get the driveway tomorrow.

It looks as if she’s playfully batting at the snow but she’s springing into a hop across some unbroken spots.

Ten into Nineteen

It’s time for a humblebrag status report. Don’t worry, this will quick.

The days have slowed their furious pace. Night still comes too soon, the sun dipping behind the tall peaks of the San Juans before 5 p.m., but the amount of daylight increases by a full minute and some. 

Our crisis with the below-zero hard freeze, our malfunctioning furnace, our freezing pipes made the tail-end of the Twelve Days of Christmas drag like a small eternity. This is funny, given how hard it is for me to let the season go. But between this misadventure and the strange fact that the town I live in still has its trees, lighting and decor still up and lighted, I can say I’m fully up to putting away Christmas and getting 2019 started in earnest.

No, seriously. We’re ten days into the New Year already. It’s not even a New Year anymore by the second day. Let’s do this.

Granted, Christmas will linger here until the last fake fir needle is vacuumed from the floor. I’ve been finding a few every day so far, thanks to our youngest cat Toonie, who insisted on rubbing her jowls against the boughs of our artificial tree and leaving their remnants throughout every room on both floors.

Except for a couple of very important categories, so far we’re off to a great start at Rockin’ Roy’s Rage ‘n’ Romance HQ. First and foremost is the strange miracle of me getting a post up on this blog daily since New Year’s Eve. The streak is bound to break soon, but I’m hoping I won’t be so blasé about it that I let it go for months at a time, leaving readers stranded. In the meantime, it’s a great feeling of accomplishment, right up there with keeping alcohol and tobacco free. 

My separation and divorce from tobacco and alcohol would seem more impressive to me if it wasn’t such a long time coming. I’ve felt hints of temptation from time to time but so far I’m liking how I feel when I wake up in the morning too much to quit. 

Meanwhile, I was disappointed in the progress with The Wrong Kind of Dead until today, before I set off to run errands, come back and do chores, when I started filling in entire scenes in my future chapters. Important reveals and decisions are more than merely outlined, they’re completely written out.

I can’t say when, only that I’m doing this a lot faster than I was. I’m seeing the ending so much more clearly now. 

Somewhere between earth and sky.

Words Like Kickdrums

Super-edgy, counter-intuitive writing advice from some guy you never heard of.

I came across this meme last week. It’s a most exemplary example of why one shouldn’t object to wordiness for the sake of objecting to wordiness. Sometimes you need repetition and rhythm to bring the drama: 

From Cheerful Nihilism’s Facebook page.

It helps to read this style as a genre unto itself and just go with it. Same deal with Shakespeare. Spend enough time in his neighborhood and you’ll pick up the language.

Bottom line takeaway, tl;dr: William Strunk’s dictum was to omit needless words. The trick is to find the sweet spot between euphony and economy.

Random Thoughts Occasioned by My Daughter’s 25th Birthday

I had occasion to think about a lot of things last year.

The age marking childhood’s end has been pushed back over the last 50 years, even more so if you’re familiar with stories of life as it was lived in the mid to late 19th century. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when it was expected of girls to behave as women at age 16, and stand by for marriage and child-bearing. Men, by age 18, were expected to be able to support that child-bearing woman. 

Not boys. Eighteen year-old men. By that age, to paraphrase a line from the New Testament, you had put away all childish things. You wouldn’t be caught dead with a comic book because, come on, son! Comic books? And what’s with all these toy spaceships and dolls all over your place?

I’m 57 years old and my grandfather’s generation and their predecessors would be repulsed at the sight of my bookcase. Good thing they’re dead. I don’t think it’s so bad to have artifacts of one’s childhood about in one’s personal office/study/HQ. It’s your place of peace, reflection, and creation, after all, and if you like having reminders of where you came from about, that’s your business.

Today’s milestone ages have been in place since (so far as I remember) the 1980s. You turn 18, you’re old enough to vote and join the military, to kill and/or be killed. You turn 21, now you’re a real adult because you’re finally of legal drinking age. (Yeah, we know, we know.) 

Then comes 25. I’m surprised there isn’t much more made of this, as it’s a critical landmark all its own. By this point, you’re either out of college, out of an early career in the military, something. All your Great Landmark Years are decade markers from there on out. Thirty. Forty. (It’s the new 30!) Fifty. (The new 40!) Sixty. (You’re still just middle-aged!)

I took these photos in June upon returning to Colorado Springs to have my catheter removed two weeks after my radical prostatectomy. (My daughter was kind enough to have her mother and I over for the night so we didn’t have to drive up and back in one day.) I wonder if the fact that my daughter owns a couple of bookcases makes her a generational anomaly. That she hangs on to old books she read even as a tween is a pathology she’s inherited from the old man. Some of these books, notably the Little House books and A Wrinkle in Time, were ones I’d read aloud to her and her brother when they were small.

Sixty-five used to mean something, as that was the year you could begin collecting Social Security, but that age got raised a while back. It’s been generally understood for a decade or so now that, unless you’re independently wealthy or crippled, you’ll work until you die.

That beigey-colored book in the middle of the horizontal stack is familiar.

I digress. I’m thinking of my long-grown and gone daughter. I read about “entitled Milliennials” and so on, and I don’t doubt there are lazy, stupid, entitled (etc., etc.) things galore out there, but that’s not what I’ve witnessed from my perch. In my daughter’s case, as soon as she got a handle on the concept of working for a paycheck and buying her own stuff, she got her own place so she could do her own thing. Like most of her friends, she has a main job, a side job, and an Internet art hustle.

I’m not sure she or anyone she knows is crying over his “wasted life” as one character I knew back in the 1980s did, the decade my contemporaries and I burned through our 20s. Based on the law of averages, I don’t doubt that a few have had the next best thing to a personal crisis with it. As for my daughter, as for most, though, I imagine they’re simply too busy to be that fussed about it. They’ll have some drinks to it, sure. But not so many that they can’t get up to go to work the next morning.

What do you see? A sunrise, or a sunset? (I’m sure most readers of this blog have already guessed it, but I needed a photo here, and the philosophical exercise sounded like harmless, if hackneyed fun.)

My children are not sheltered, gated-community kids. They’ve seen their share of human trainwrecks. Before my daughter was out of high school she knew at least one boy who had died from an overdose of black tar heroin. After high school, another hung himself from an old railroad trestle. She has plenty of other stories to tell, maybe not so dramatic, but just as sad for those lives that were truly wasted.

In the end, there were those people went one way, and my daughter and many more people, who took the longer road.

The weather won’t always be with you. Drive defensively, but remember, fortune favors the bold. Find that balance!

I laugh to think how my wife and I came from situations in which, “I’m the first in my family to go to college!” was a big deal. I was of the second generation of those, and that winning streak ended with me. Neither of my children have burned or plan to burn precious time and money sitting in classrooms. High school was hell enough for both of them, and as colleges and universities are in the process of rendering themselves irrelevant (for reasons better explicated on other blogs devoted to this peculiar bit of institutional decay), I’m proud they simply went on to take jobs, excel at those jobs, and move up enough to survive on their own. It’s more than dear old Dad ever did. I didn’t start doing anything I was proud of outside of raising children until my 50s.

I’ve seen my children’s friends. Some are smarter than others. A couple you worry about. All are hustling to one degree or another. To my mind, the trope of the Lazy Entitled Easily Offended Snowflake Millennial is just another thing the media promotes to make us all hate ourselves and one another. 

Sure, there are a lot of suboptimal people out there. They’ve always predominated. To my mind, that which is good is treasured because it requires effort to make happen. Good is not a by-product of laziness.

Good is still working out there. It never quit. It doesn’t seek, nor does it often get, publicity. If you’re hating on Kids Today, I’m telling you you’re hating the wrong kids. Go find a better crowd. Mine did.

Keep pushing through those mountains until you find your sunny day.