Back to Beauty

...amidst one of the darker passages of our lives.

I felt bad leaving “Holler at the Squalor” up for so long without some sort of follow-up or reply. I don’t mean to be down on my town. I don’t mean to be down, period, but it’s been impossible to avoid these last few weeks.

Riding the county road towards the main highway.

The atmospheric magnification of the San Juan Mountains is impressive today.

I joked with my wife that I missed those days when I was depressed for no good reason at all. She didn’t take that well. Inappropriate humor aside, I think fondly upon those sleepy late summer days of 2016 shortly after we moved to the San Luis Valley. For all my gloom at having to move (it was not much of a choice) and adjust to new surroundings it was truly another world in which we didn’t have anything to seriously worry about. 

All that changed in November 2017 when my friend Steven died unexpectedly, and then I was diagnosed with cancer the following April. Any time I see something online with a byline of 2018 I think, “My Cancer Year.”

I was able to get more or less past that transitional phase, though. More than I’d thought I would, given what’s going on now. 

The view from the road behind the supermarket on the far west side of town.

The thing about living around mountains is they look different every day, at any given time of day, due to clouds and the position of the sun.

I liked how the snowfield shone with reflected sunlight.

The bills are coming due, though, so to speak. I’d written last month about our elderkitty Otis and how he’s entered his last days. As expected, he’s gotten worse. 

It was Thursday morning, 20 February, when my wife and I watch as Otis voided his bladder on the floor. That was bad enough, but it was seeing his once magnificent, fluffy tail dragging in the puddle that did it. We’d sworn to each other that when it got to the point that Otis was lying around in his own filth, we’d have him put down. We wouldn’t want to live this way. This is no way to spend one’s final days.

Or so we keep telling ourselves. I put off driving to a recommended local veterinarian for consultation on Friday because the idea of setting our 18-year-old cat’s last day on Earth was too much. 

I might have stitched these two photos together but we’d lose out on the beauty of these peaks. Pretend you’re looking from left to right, and note the strange, almost perfectly conical peaks you only see west of Monte Vista towards Del Norte.

It was bad enough thinking this would be his last weekend with us. After all, we had to set the date for sooner than later. We have to clean his waste from the floor every day. He doesn’t always hit the pad we put down for him.

I’ve had to come to terms with the ugly fact that my grief is more for me than it is for Otis. He’s a familiar sight of nearly two decades that’s going away. In his elderly decrepitude, he reminds my wife and I of what’s shortly ahead for us.

Meanwhile, we can’t be cleaning these messes up three times or more a day. Otis may well wear us down before he finally wears out.... 

Oh, enough of that. Of course he won’t. We’ll call the vet. The vet will carve out time from his or her schedule to drive the mile and a half to our house sometime over the course of the week. I rather like that I won’t know the exact day.

Also, the bill for having our first family pet professionally murdered at home won’t be too large. I also have a specific credit card for such emergencies, new tires, oil changes and so on.

I’m grateful we can do this much. One might as well approach this from a position of gratitude, because no amount of tears and grieving will reverse the natural aging process few (if any) cats in the wild are afforded. This was a bill due, a corner to be turned. We knew these days were coming. We’ll do the best we can.

These are the same peaks and ridge we see behind the supermarket, but two miles west down the highway out of town. I think this mountain is called Pintada, with Windy Mountain to the left and behind it, but that’s as best I can do from the maps, and I probably stink at this.

This, I’m sure, is Green Ridge.  It blocks a lot, but by no means all of the weather coming up from New Mexico.

We can wallow in the misery and squalor, or we can lift our eyes and hearts up to the beauty and love and life that also endures in the world. Otis won’t be here to enjoy the coming spring and summer with us. But the spring and summer are coming, whether any of us are here for it or not. There’s a comfort in that I can’t articulate, so I won’t.

I’ll just take in as much joy and life and beauty and love as I find available and do the best I can.

By the way, my work-in-progress is going well. There’s that. More on that later.

Sunrises and sunsets photograph the same, in case that means anything.

All photographs Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

The Series Finales of Seem

“Let be be the finale of seem/The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream.” It’s okay if you don’t get it. Its an elder English major thing.

Ever notice that series finales of all these once-celebrated TV shows rarely satisfy?

Granted, my first example was by no means celebrated, but it was almost funny—almost—when Star Trek: Enterprise, after its one decent season, got canceled and went out with a Clip Show from the Future episode in which people of the future, namely Riker and Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation, see what happened to the brave pre-Kirk-and-Spock explorers. 

In the course of this dull affair I barely remember 15 years later, one of the more beloved characters was killed, and for no apparent reason than to import gravitas into this clip-show finale. The death was cheap, everything about this episode looked cheap, and you could tell the cast couldn’t wait until this humiliation was over. At least Scott Bakula still found work after this sad ending to the series of spinoffs from Star Trek: Next Generation (itself a spinoff) beginning with Deep Space Nine in 1993. Glasses are raised for the less fortunate.

Then there was that show Lost, the one that made executive producer stars out of J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. For a while in the late ‘00s it had a dedicated cult following. That following did not survive the sloppily written finale. I wonder how many young people under age 18 remember it. I never saw it, so I’m grateful to have been spared the disappointment.

The most famous and recent disaster of a series finale was the one for the once mighty Game of Thrones. Given the opportunity for cosplay (costume + play), the fan base will survive, if only as a niche among sci-fi/fantasy media fandom, which is better than most get. Especially when the Great Big Supernatural Bad and his army is dispatched with one poke of a dagger by some little elfin thing and the much-beloved Mother of Dragons turns evil at the last minute because, as one bystander helpfully offers after all these seasons, it’s what her bloodline tends to do.

When the tweenage girl in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep cried out, “I feel like I’m Daenerys Targaryen!” during a particularly non-heroic heroic escape from the Bad People she never seemed to be in any real danger from, I knew I was reading my last Stephen King novel. Knowing this Great Platinum Blonde Hope ended up murdering an entire village with one of her pet dragons at least makes it a little funny to think back on. Only a little, though.

Like most television shows I prefer to spend my time reading about them online than watching them. I’ll view the occasional clip, but that’s all. It’s not so much the overt pseudo-moralizing and mean-minded ideological agendas that stink up these things these days, though those are certainly a factor. It’s a matter of committing the time to a structure that involves so much talky/ broody/ gratuitous sexy-time sandwiched between moments of gross and visceral shock. 

The Walking Dead was a great example of this. I’m impressed it’s still around, years after the women on Twitter abandoned the “follow me back pls Norman Reedus” line in their handles. I can imagine the reaction when the series finale to that is announced. I can imagine no one being happy as it finally winds up.

Every now and then I learn of some great, “binge-worthy” series that I’ve never heard of before that is concluding after seven or eight seasons. I’ve heard a credible case for this last decade being something of a Golden Age of Television for all the stuff you can watch. And so much is so cleverly written, too! 

Thrill to the high school teacher’s descent into evil as he manufactures and sells methamphetamine to pay his medical bills! (After all these years Breaking Bad is still considered the gold standard for binge-watching a series. General consensus holds that it was consistently good from its bitter beginning to its bitter end.) Nod sadly and knowingly at the cartoon character with the horse’s head on a human body as we examine the effects of alcohol abuse on the people around him. That last one, Bojack Horseman, recently concluded on a blue note, but at least its fanbase seemed satisfied with the conclusion—although some thought it would have been better with the character dying as he did in the penultimate episode. (It turned out to be a dream, or something like that).

Supernatural, the only TV series I’ve been following consistently since Stargate Atlantis wrapped up years back, is concluding after 15 years on the air. I’m heartened to see the writers are doing their best to send Sam and Dean out with good stories; I had feared everything was going to fizzle as with Stargate S.G. 1, which was the longest running genre show at 10 seasons when it went out. The boys are up against God Himself this season. Talk about a Final Boss.

I can only hope the writers, cast, and crew manage to pull it off. When Supernatural is done, that’s it. That will be my series finale of contemporary series. That corner having been turned, like a lot of older people, I’ll go to YouTube and catch episodes of the old classic stuff from the 1960s, most of which were lucky to have lasted three or four seasons back in the day. 

I’m already doing that with the black-and-white first season of The Wild Wild West. It’s nice to have something to sit down and watch with my wife. In the meantime, I raise a most fittingly cooled cup of coffee to the turning of this corner. When there were only so many channels and only so much content, we all had that much more in common. But it’s been 40 years since an entire nation wanted to find out who shot J.R., and over half a century since electric guitar sales spiked because some band from England played them on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show.

It is what it was, and the beat goes on.

Holler at the Squalor

When the snow and ice has been around so long, it doesn’t just melt. It rots. That’s a thing you know now.

It was a long, drawn-out week at Big Pink as another phase was entered in the writing of my latest novel, The Wrong Kind of Dead. Progress made on other fronts as well, namely, weight loss. With time, I hope to accumulate enough accomplishments to talk about either one in a separate post. 

On Sunday, I got enough photographs of the melt-off from the last couple of balmy days to complete a post I’d meant to do sometime last summer after a rain. Save for the slight washing out in the middle of some photos due to burn-in on my 10-year-old pocket camera’s lens, these shots turned out to be more representative of what I was going for.

What I was going for was maximum ugh. As in, “For Pete’s sake, Monte Vista, would it kill ya to put some drainage in?”

When even a small potato farming town like ours rocks that Big City aesthetic.

I like how the wheel rut makes a straight canal between the two bodies of water.

With the exception of the eye-bleach at the end, all of these photos are of alleyways in town. If I drove around I could get shots of the vast ponds swamping parking lots along U.S. 160. Parts of this high desert valley town look like the Louisiana bayou after a long summer rain or a winter melt-off. 

Mosquitoes obviously aren’t an issue in February where we are, but the water itself is. The nearby Rio Grande needs as much if not more than is taken out of it by the county. As part of the water rights agreement we’re bound to in our part of the wild, dry west, we have to put so many gallons of treated wastewater into the river each season for the benefit of farmers downstream.

Storm drainage systems don’t come cheap but water is far more dear. All this water left to make mud and slowly dry away into the atmosphere is money left on the table. It says much that after so many decades of agricultural expansion in a land given to drought, no one has bothered making better use of what little comes from the sky. Someone in Denver did make sure a law was passed prohibiting individual property owners from collecting runoff from their roofs, though, so there’s that.

Ah, well, as the ancient saying goes, whaddya gonna do?

Gotta love these lakefront view dumpsters.

We’ll gradually dry things up here, then apply the eye-bleach.

This is one of the worst alleys for water retention. Fortunately, the breeze was aimed this way today. The heck of this is the alley does have a storm drain behind where I’m standing. It’s just that the alley isn’t graded in that direction. It might look that way from this angle, but it’s not.

Remember movie drops? Pepperidge Farms is struggling.

I like the arrows here. Nothing a general sandblasting and a coat of paint won’t fix. Yeah, I wouldn’t want that bill, either.

Another perspective.

May the blessings of unobstructed sunlight shine upon your alley....

Honestly taken on this very same walk. Oh, you bet it stood out.

...and a well-accessorized cheeseburger await you at the end of your travels.

For all you cats out there.

All photographs Copyright 2020 © Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.

Twitter Once Again Interviews the Author, Regrets It Immediately

Happy New Month, by the way. This is the first year I’ve seen so many memes complaining about how long January felt. There was definitely something in the air. Now it’s February. Now what?

One of the questions I saw on writers’ Twitter today was to the effect of “Did you feel the same way, too?” about January and I have to say, yeah, it sure did.  January 5 felt light years distant from January 15, and January 15 was a distant memory on January 25. From there it was a long march until the end.

It wasn’t an entirely depressive experience, but certainly a low-energy affair throughout. I didn’t get nearly as much done on The Wrong Kind of Dead as I would have liked. I didn’t entirely stall out, either. Also, I managed to read a big fat 800-page novel while I was at it. I’ve had months go by in which all my reading is done on the Internet, so that’s something.

As in January 2019, I managed to squeeze out 21 posts. Looking through those posts, it turns out I got some stuff done. I’ve just got to light a fire under myself.

Meanwhile, I’ll indulge my cranky side with more Please Please Please Engage Me questions from Twitter:

I’m a ridiculous coffee snob, generally adhering to somewhat exotic African specialty beans and pour-overs. What are you snobby about?

I look down my nose at people who signal their Betty Boosh-wah class status to other Betty Boosh-wahs with exotic stuff they just lurrrrrrrve. 

Your fourth most recent GIF is how readers will react to the next book you publish. What is it?

 Once again, I don’t collect .gifs, so I guess no reaction at all. Heh.

Waffles or pancakes?

 The most sensible question so far. And the answer is…both, soaking luxuriously in hot butter and warm maple syrup, among steaming pucks of ground smoked sausage and chewy, air-fried bacon, on a firm platform of crispy-topped hash browns. Try and stop me. You just gained 25 lbs reading this.

What word do you always misspell? Every single time?

Another good one. For reasons known but to God and (maybe) neuroscience, my fingers cannot type “September” without tripping over themselves. I always get the middle letter “e” and “m” transposed before auto-correct does its magic.

Everyone’s been really great with the “shameless self-promo Saturdays” and writer’s lift calls, so please disregard my suboptimal attitude and, until we meet again, enjoy a view of the best fed feral cats anywhere, the Blue Porch Kitty Committee. And, again, Happy New Month. We’re already halfway to Spring:

If you’ve seen the South Park adult animated series, you may have noted all the patches of snow in the backgrounds. This is what it looks like in Colorado in real life, especially from January through February.