Great Stories Well-Told Are Like Arrowheads

That is to say, they’re out there to be found, but you have to know where to look. At least in this metaphorical case the arrowheads are still being manufactured. 

The following is a case in point from a Facebook page called Green Text, which refers to the Reddit and chan board custom of posting in green text to indicate the text is either a story/anecdote, a quote, or a summation of another post. Normally colored text can and often does follow, sometimes to provide the punchline.

It’s a visual language unto itself, but easily acquired. My point is, you won’t find anything published by the Big Five publishing houses to match the chills in this story. Long ago, in a world far, far away, writers like Saki, O. Henry, and Guy de Maupassant specialized in tales like this. You could read them in regular little magazines devoted to such things; can you imagine that? 

Anyway, I can hear these once popular, now nearly forgotten masters cackling from beyond the grave as I get towards the end:

Probably the darkest Be Careful What You Wish For tale I’ve ever read. If there’s a darker one, I’m glad I forgot it.

I pray to God this is fiction. The hell of it is, it’s a hell of a world and we might not even be hearing the worst of it.

To end on a happy note, though, I trust those who have followed the links embedded in the author’s names have realized you can read their best works for free on the Internet. (These people are long dead; they don’t mind.) Of course, green text stories such as the above can be found browsing boards on Reddit, 4chan, or 8chan. They can be as crude as they are crudely formatted, punctuated, etc., but there is more life to many of these anonymously posted tales that you will find in any celebrity author-edited Best Short Stories of 20__ collections of stylized tedium.

For readers and writers alike, these are great days to be alive. Even as illiteracy and coarseness seem to be metastasizing across our culture, these may very well be the best of times. The Good Stuff is out there. You only have to look, read, and enjoy.

Jack’s Weekend Out

Once again I find myself confronted with change and looming mortality, albeit on a smaller scale. Also, is this the best life we’re living? One cat seeks to answer this most important question.

I’d done it before, but they all came back in. These were the same cats, too, Jack and Luna, who slipped out the primitive screen door on the side of the mud room facing the backyard, because I’d neglected to put the big concrete chunks in front to keep it secured.

The first time this happened, they came back inside quickly on their own volition. This time, Luna had to be dragged out from beneath my son’s car. 

Jack ran away.

Jack, from our last years in Colorado Springs. Although we’ve had Jack since my daughter brought him home as a kitten in August 2011, it’s only in recent years that he increased in mass (not fat, mind you) to become our largest cat. Also, several of his whiskers are bright white now.

I hadn’t realized he was out until I came back from my evening constitutional and saw his large, black-furred frame standing to one side of the porch in the front yard. I called his name. In cat-like fashion, he looked blankly back at me. I went inside, and was promptly asked, “Have you seen Jack?” 

Well....

Jack, doing his flat-cat thing on my old futon in my Colorado Springs basement office. For many years Jack could lie down on something and his uncanny ability to conform to the surface made me wonder what he did with his internal organs. 

I went back outside and walked the perimeter of our yard. The regular outdoor ferals were out and about as always, but no sign of Jack. 

“Well, it’s not the first time he’s spent the night outdoors,” I said, coming back in. “He’ll show up when he’s hungry.”

“A reasonable assumption, human. However....”

I found myself looking through every window I passed as I drew the curtains and closed up the house for the evening. I was in the master bedroom upstairs peering through the windows that overlooked the front yard when I saw a familiar shape sprawled comfortably across the front walk. I unlocked the window, but by the time I had pulled it back to call his name, Jack was gone.

After a few minutes I went back downstairs. Jack was back on the front walk. The porch cats were in the yard hunting grasshoppers and moths, and, so far, coexisting quite well with the large black gelded tom reclining across the concrete like he owned it. I opened the front door and stepped out to the porch.

“You think you know me, human, after all these years. Bah!”

Jack saw me. He knows my voice. He knows the inside of the house, which he could certainly see through the open door behind me.

When I called him to come in, Jack ran away into the darkness.

“I suppose he’s where he wants to be,” I told my wife.

“He has no claws.”

I said I figured he’d do the best he can. “Remember that cat in Anchorage with no front claws that managed to kill every last rabbit in the bog near our house?”

I looked out the windows every now and then, but I finally had to give up and go to bed.

I expected Jack to appear as I fed the porch cats in the morning. I saw no sign of him. Jack is something of a “chow hound,” if you’ll pardon the expression, and it wasn’t like him to miss a meal.

I walked out into the yard and looked around. I looked toward the big empty lot across the street from our house, then up and down the street.

I turned around and went back inside. I could only hope he was close by, and unharmed.

My wife, as always, articulated what was already pointing a bony, accusatory finger at me from the back of my mind. “I kinda feel guilty for not feeling worse about this. I really don’t miss him that much.”

Indeed, Jack’s defection to the great outdoors presented an opportunity we thought we’d only have upon the death of our eldest cat, namely, to bring the big, shaggy white rag doll mix we call Gal into the house.

Gal is a tale unto herself, being one of the first cats I noticed that “came with the house” we moved into two years ago. I used to call her the Yeti, because she was so huge and shaggy and white. She would scowl down on me from the top rail of the old chicken coop in the backyard, when the stray cats used to all congregate there. (That they don’t anymore is a mystery. They all stay near the front porch when they’re not inside the abandoned house across the street.)

For the longest time, we never saw her. I couldn’t tell you when she showed up again, only that it was sometime over last winter. Over the past year we noticed how she got closer and closer to us as we went outside to feed the outdoor cats. She would run between our legs to get at the bowls we were filling.

One day this summer, she let my wife pet her. The next day, my wife held Gal in her arms. I was still recovering from surgery at the time, but it wasn’t long before Gal was in my lap, nuzzling my chin. There is no doubt in our minds that Gal was abandoned, perhaps by the same people who left this house empty for two years before we came along to buy it.

Note Gal at the door. She comes inside to visit us from time to time, but isn’t comfortable with the indoor cats. Everything is a work in progress.

It didn’t sit right with me, though. I watched Saturday afternoon as Jack tried playing with Angel, the big white tom, only to narrowly miss getting his face taken off. Again, Jack has no claws. He can’t even run up at tree when the occasional stray dog comes around, and it wasn’t looking good for his acceptance by the born-and-bred ferals under our porch.

Saturday evening I tried cornering Jack so I could bring him indoors. Everywhere he saw me, he ran.

Maybe this was it, after all. This was the life he wanted to live and he’d find a way. And if he didn’t, he’d die giving it his best shot. It’s what any sensible, self-respecting creature wants, so why I am trying to cage him in this house?

Spooks (full name Spooky McSpookerton) is of the third generation of kittens to be born since we moved here, and for as well as he gets on in the great outdoors, would not enjoy being domesticated at all. 

Regardless of these thoughts, I went out on Sunday morning, this time leaving the front door wide open. He regarded the open door before him. I took a step towards him and he shot up the steps to the porch, across the porch and into the house.

The family was complete again, our weekend-long crisis over in three minutes. Jack had to make the decision, I keep telling myself. He wanted to do this.

The other cats in the house had a grand time sniffing him over for all those exotic outdoor scents, and Jack didn’t mind the attention. That was all there was to it. Jack hasn’t tried escaping since. He’s even a little more affectionate with me, even demanding of it from his perch on the chair by the picture window looking out over the front yard.

He’d made his decision. Was it the best one? I don’t know, but I’m glad it turned out this way. The incident gave me much to think about in terms of freedom versus comfort.

If nothing else, they do furnish a room.But is that all we’re here for? To furnish a wet rock spinning through space? Yeah, we’ll stop here. I’m obviously tired.

The Software-as-a-Subscription (SAAS) Model Was Only the Injury

Here comes the insult.

I’ll never forget that first day playing with Word in Office 2010 on its debut ten years ago, just in time for Windows 7 to improve on the buggy traninwreck that was Vista. (I once heard Win 7 referred to as “Fixta.” Amusing, because apt.). It was love at first scroll with that ribbon bar. 2010 certainly looked like the future from there, and a fine one, at that. 

Years later, with 2010 well in the past, they offer me a subscription service by way of an upgrade. Ha-ha, funny. No, thanks, I’m good. 

One full decade later in 2019, they’ve not only bottomed out, they’re drilling the abyss. The grammar function on Word has always been about as useful as tits on a boar hog. Now....

I got this image from someone’s Facebook page. I looked up the article, and, ironically, this is the one article of many on the subject that does not gush over the “gender inclusive” silliness beyond the logline. Of course, it might have something to do with the audience of this particular online paper. See for yourself. Asinine Western pop-cultural fashions aside, the latest Word is an intrusive piece of software. This may be all well and good for brainless business drones who must be kept in corporate cultural lockstep. For writers who value their artistic integrity, it’s cancer.

I’ll handle my own editorial, thank you. Office 2010 ‘til I die, then.

If All the Stories Have Been Told, Why Do We Still Need to Hear Them?

My entire philosophy of art in two handy quotes.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
— G. K. Chesterton

Art’s highest purpose is to comfort and encourage the weary and the frightened, to uplift the downhearted. We follow the story of the hero as everything that matters is taken from him. Maybe all he really loses is hope (and that’s bad enough). When he’s on the resurgence in Act III, we know we can come back from whomever or whatever puts us down, too.

There are many sculptures of Heracles versus the Hydra. This one is in Denmark. Imagine all those snake heads as hungry zombies and we’ve updated the story of one man versus all manner of bad craziness.

That is, if it’s well and convincingly written. Maybe you could sculpt a statue of someone performing a mighty deed, Heracles and the Hydra-style. Or paint something so serenely beautiful as to soothe our last surviving nerves from work. I want to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, goes a line to a popular song from a few decades back. Show us it’s possible to at least manage that pain, too, if you don’t mind. Or at least give us a dank, sticky three-chord riff to make us forget it for two and a half minutes.

Most of all, we want to know we can all make it if we just hang in there and take that final stand. Sometimes all the hero has to do is show up before the bad guy, thinking he’s got nothing left to lose but his life, and what do you know? He sees this thing here, that thing there, he hears an inflection in his antagonist’s voice. A memory surfaces, something someone said. He sees his shot. He takes it.

And if this guy could do it....

“I shall rebuild...somewhere else. The Zorgons hit this place pretty hard, by the looks of it.”

We have art so that we may not perish from truth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The Neetch was snarking here, but there’s another level to this besides “we have art because we can’t handle the truth.” At least according to how I choose to interpret it, and it’s debatable whether Nietzsche would appreciate my interpretation. I’m aware I’m turning his line inside out, but I stand by my variation, which is We have art so that we know we are not alone.

Every hero in every story you ever see has a Darkest Hour. By this point it’s been one disappointment, one failed plan after another. We’ve lost people, we’ve been betrayed, every move we make is on someone else’s metaphorical chessboard and we’re eternally in check.

There’s some downtime involved here as the hero sulks in silence, wondering whether to proceed at all. Either new information comes to light, or he decides to go out swinging despite the overwhelming odds. Either way, we’re encouraging those in their own private darknesses not to make any rash decisions. Wait either for the new information, or the resolve not to give your enemies the satisfaction. A lot of times that new information—a revealed weakness, or weapon, the cavalry, etc.—comes up in the course of our hero taking those final swings. 

However it plays out, evil falls. The hero overcomes.

As per Chesterton’s quote about the dragons, we know the dragons can be slain. Here, we know we require these stories that we may not perish from refusing to disregard the odds. The numbers never lie, but a good heart can sometimes change the equation. What Chesterton understood as the power of a valiant spirit, Nietzsche would recognize as self-interested will unfettered by the slave moralities of timorousness and terror. 

Whatever you want to call it. These are my stories, and I’m sticking to them.

The Old Man Speaks of Funnybooks Beneath Gray Tuesday Skies

Yeah, I know, I know....

I think it’s interesting that the most lucrative fantasy films such as this year’s Avengers: Endgame are based upon a medium that’s already good as dead. We’re all familiar with “comic book movies” but comic books themselves are no longer sold in supermarket spinner racks. They’re sold in specialty stores that sell more Funko Pop! bobblehead dolls than actual books. In a nation of 325 million people the bestselling comics title can’t even come within shouting distance of one million units in sales. 

It’s been noted the bestselling titles now sell at levels that would have gotten them canceled in the 1980s heyday of direct sales comics. I laugh thinking of that infamous “Milkshake Crew” photo taken of the all-female Marvel Comics bullpen at behest of the female editor. The girls had taken over the boy’s old treehouse and were now mocking them for being irritated by the petty desecrations the girls were gleefully inflicting upon the place.

In memory of the House of Ideas, as built by Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko, Marv Wolfman, Berni Wrightson, et al. The big boys have moved on into legend. The little girls laugh as they color on the walls of a long-abandoned structure. 

It was supposed to be an insult. All it served to show is that comic books are nearing extinction as a medium. As a smarter blogger than me noted—albeit speaking in more general terms—once the girls start moving in and taking over, the smart money has already left the building. The clever boys have moved on to other treehouses while the boys sticking around to complain look foolish because, honestly, you see girls are all up in this stuff now, right? There’s nothing here for you. Walk on.

Yet the characters owned by Marvel Comics do well at the box office. Other movies based on other companies’ characters do well enough to keep getting made. All based on what amounts to cultural memories of characters from a medium that’s basically an intellectual property placeholder and tax write-off for the mega-corporations that own Marvel and DC Comics.

I suppose they’ll be calling them comic book movies long after comic books cease to exist entirely. It will be interesting to see if the superhero genre as motion picture fodder doesn’t end up fading away itself by the middle of the century. It would be worth living thirty more years to find out. I’m mostly curious to see what’s replacing all these relics of the 20th century that are slowly falling away from the culture like old, dead skin.

Blue skies on the horizon.

Stinky Potpourri

Observations in passing and in brief.

Summer fades ever so gently into fall, and fall chills one freeze at a time into winter, but winter does not go easily. The land convulses into spring.

This was 23 April or thereabouts. (I need to fix the timestamp on my camera.) Afterwards we got a lot of rain. A lot. Of course, the afternoon windstorms happen with or without the precipitation.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” is a line I turn over in my mind when I find myself thinking about things in my long ago past. A personal variation I keep coming back to is, “The past is a foreign country. We had good reasons for moving.”

I always feel honored to witness a sunrise. They’re pretty no matter the season.

I’ve always found the expression “going forward” annoying. Who thinks this is a good substitute for “henceforth” or simply “from now on”? Pretentious gasbags aiming to sound “professional,” of course. Like “ongoing” in place of simply “continuing” from the 1970s, though, this will likely stick with us.

The Sangre de Cristos, like a big foamy wave poised to crash over the valley floor.

I never thought I would live so long to see Christianity become a barely tolerated minority religion. The arson of Notre Dame was one corner turned. What happens to the structure during its repair will be another. If Islamic minarets aren’t put up in place of the destroyed Arrow of God, it won’t be for lack of enthusiastic and insistent effort. The desecration has already been suggested.

As one who suffered a most bitter break with the faith in his teens, this open disrespect for Christianity still puts me off, especially for how cowardly it is. The comeback, “Real edgy, bro. Now do Islam” after someone mocks Christians and Christianity is already a meme.

The asters resurgent.

Having lived in Alaska, where the birches bud in early June and the leaves begin changing in mid-August, and now in Colorado, where trees budding in April is early, and you can see shocks of yellow in the green boughs by late July, I consider how strange it is that these trees live so long only to have leaves for less than half of the year, if even an entire season. Something about the tenacity of life, half a loaf being better than none, etc. Something.

Anyway, it’s good to have the warmer weather back.

Notes on the Last Few Weeks, May Day 2019

This will be very random.

Ironically, I’ve spent most of these past few weeks wondering how I’d write about self-censorship. The inspirations for this project were the sudden death of a cousin and the arson of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Writing my remembrance of the cousin might get the attention of extended family with whom I would rather avoid conflict. The business with Notre Dame has already disappeared from the media, and will therefore soon vanish from relevant discourse. Also, this involves sensitive matters of religion, culture, and the death of one major belief system at the hands of another. Here, complete strangers will be calling me bad names and wishing ill upon me. 

And those are the opening acts.

Another problem is in deciding how to illustrate these posts. Here, I’m just giving up and showing some photos I took in western Alamosa County ten days ago.

I’ve been throwing down notes on the murder of a couple of classmates over 40 years ago and contemplating how I’d get the whole mess pass the surviving classmates I’m connected with on Facebook. Although I do like a couple of them, I was the outsider at school and, as I’ve since learned to my dismay, that seems to have carried over 40 years down the line. If I can avoid these people altogether, let alone on an issue they would be very sensitive to, that would be ideal.

Also, class antagonism! Not something a lot of audiences are comfortable acknowledging, let alone reading about. It’s something I need to get out of my system, though. So I’ll write it and figure out what to do with it later. Leaving it in a folder until someone discovers it after I die is an option. There’s a growing chorus of voices in my head, however, that says pull the pin and throw that grenade. I don’t owe these people anything. 

What’s sad and cowardly about all this is I’m avoiding conflict for the sake of avoiding conflict, not because I actually care what these people think. (Ironically, the people at my old school remember me as being precisely the opposite in temperament. Of course, what creeps me out about some of them is how they still sound the same at age 50-something as they did at 15.) I’ll own my cowardice and write and print around the people I don’t want to deal with. If I get discovered, I’ll simply dodge, block, whatever.

Besides, these are great stories. It would be a shame to waste them. So I won’t.

Why anyone would brand their gardening supply stuff “Black Ops” is beyond me, but here we are. In the background is Blanca Massif, one of the four mountains holy to the Navajo.