Psychic Bath Bombs

...because “Stinky Potpourri” didn’t smell right. [Ba-dum-TSSSSH!] Seriously, what am I, twelve? Thus, under new branding, I present the latest in disconnected thoughts interrupted by semi-relevant to entirely irrelevant photos:

WEATHER REPORT
After our drought-busting winter (finally) in Colorado’s scenic central San Luis Valley, we had the usual spring windstorms. Unfortunately, the windstorms have continued into a daily feature of our summer. 

If you want to see a pretty day, you need to get up with the birds. Everything is gorgeous, the sky cloudless, the air warm and promising. By 11 a.m., though, fat stacks of cumulonimbus clouds are piling in from the south and west, and it’s dark in time for lunch. The wind picks up, the air cools. Quick, five- to ten-minute long squalls of high-intensity winds over the last couple of days have done a number on the shingles of the neighbor’s roof, and I’m sweating bullets for ours. 

It’s the joy-murdering gloom that predominates throughout the day that really wears on the soul, though. The heavy wall-to-wall cloud cover breaks up just in time for sunset. On a good day, you’ll see the sun through the breaks, maybe get some color.

On the other hand, we’re out of the drought, and that’s no small thing. Given the hellish heat I’m reading about from my home state of South Carolina, I don’t mind running the heat a little bit in the pre-dawn versus running the air conditioner 24/7.

I was going to make a joke about being under attack by gay aliens or cartoon frogs in clown wigs but I have to remember not everyone goes to the same weird places on the Web I do.

WARNING: THINGS NOTICED OUT LOUD ON THE INTERNET
I’ve seen many a complaint about the proliferation of gay-friendly ads released by corporations for Pride Week/Month. Oddly, the only gay-friendly ads I’m seeing are posted by the very Facebook meme pages complaining about the “flood” of ads. You’d think these people would know a thing or two about how to block and filter online content—and you’d be right. It’s just something to complain about to get the great masses of people who neither know nor care to learn filtering and blocking to feel validated.

This is where most writers would say, “I can’t wait for this month to be over so I won’t have to read about people celebrating _________ (and where’s OUR month?)” but I’m happy to see every month there is, even January and February, and especially June, which marks the anniversary of my cancerous prostate removal. If stuff bothers me, I bl0ck it. Ironically, for as sheltered as I deliberately engineer my social media life, I seek out these complainers. Sometimes I even join in their various Two Minute Hates against whomever, whatever, if only to hate myself for it later. Crazy, right? Yes. It is.

Because....

From the Aborted Dreams Facebook page.

I came across this halfway through my first cup of coffee at 4:30 in the morning. I was in a funk the entire day, thinking of the characters I miss. I thought of how it was when I learned a friend from school days had died, how he’d spent the last ten years of his life struggling through Huntington’s chorea while I was losing my mind acquiring an MCSA (remember those?) in time for the bottom to fall out of the economy, and I thought I had problems. The two times I was back in South Carolina in the last seven years I could have looked him up. 

You know the rest. Watching the sunset through the picture window I realized it had been one year since what I thought might be my last night on Earth, because I was facing a five-hour prostatectomy the next morning. As of today, it’s been one year since I’ve been prostate-free. As for cancer-free, I’m overdue for a checkup.

This was taken on 19 May before the current pattern set in. The high clouds colored the dawn light in such a way it made the trees and the mountain behind it look like peak fall. (The ruddy evergreens give it away, though.)

STATE OF THE POST-APOCALYPSE
Meanwhile, in the wonderful world of writing The Wrong Kind of Dead, I’m pleased to report that it’s filling out at the end as I write the scenes I need to write up to along my outline. Meanwhile, I’ve been rewriting the two longest chapters at the beginning to better reflect the characters involved. It’s not just Derek Grace’s story anymore. Agnes Grace, Elyssa Godwin, “Brother” Christopher Grier have their own sagas within the larger saga of what happens to the human race when the elites press the reset button by way of releasing the Final Flu.

We’re not against petty warlords here. We’re against the very people who started it from behind the safety of their walls—and those survivors in the dead-infested Wilderness outside who know they got shafted. And the living dead, some of whom have developed primitive self-awareness and the ability to command entire hordes via pheromones released by the flesh-eating bacteria animating their bodies. Oh, and I forgot to mention that misanthropic colonel gone rogue with a virtual doomsday arsenal of conventional weapons at his disposal. 

So far it stands at 227 finished pages. I always knew it was going to be a monster. What’s important that it’s a well-built monster that can pass among the humans. Until it doesn’t.

And so, with thoughts of language and mortality and character development among the living dead, I leave with a photo of poppies and lilacs blooming in colorful defiance beneath the gloomy June skies. It’s a metaphor for something. You fill in the blanks.