The Day After the Lottery

...everyone gets the piece of paper with the black dot on it.

June 27 is the day upon which Shirley Jackson’s infamous “The Lottery” occurs. “Lottery in June, corn heavy soon.” One unfortunate person takes it for the village while the rest of us ponder the wisdom of our traditions and maybe “this is the way we’ve always done things” isn’t an excuse for barbarity.

Swiped from the Warhammer 40K Techno-Barbarianposter Facebook page.

In real life, the day after is even more interesting. It was on this day in 1914 that a 19-year-old anarchist changed the world for the worse with multiple gunshots into the car of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. It was the excuse used to start World War I, known then as the Great War, because no one had seen anything like it. The royal families of Europe had especially lethal toys to play with this time around. 

There would be no more watching the battles from a picnic blanket on a nearby hill for civilians as troops shot and stabbed at one another. (Seriously, this used to be a thing.) Now there was death from above as machine guns in flying machines strafed positions from the air. Clouds of mustard gas blinded and sometimes killed. The death toll at either the Somme or Verdun was an obscenity justifying putting every last member of these royal families against a wall. The bloodlines of countless families were ended because of Kaiser “Little Willie’s” (as his relatives called him) need to make a royal spectacle of himself.

So much pain, ruin, and death came of that one 19-year-old kid with a pistol on 28 June 1914. I haven’t even gotten into the sequel to this war, which came about as a direct result of how the original finished. Let’s just say this calendar page is redder than most.

Two of my favorite people from back in the day when science fiction (or speculative fiction, as Mr. Ellison more aptly insisted) meant something died on this day, namely, Rod Serling, creator, writer, and host of The Twilight Zone, in 1975; and Harlan Ellison, in 2018.

I know a couple of people who have birthdays on this day as well, so it obviously isn’t all tragedy and loss on 28 June. Just a little more tragic and lossy than most. It is what it is.

Halftime in the Year of the Plague

I’m down to recycling Facebook posts, and why not? It’s not the worst thing I’m doing here. I’m noticing stuff. You know the drill.

It’s the last day of June 2020, the halfway point of a spectacularly emotion-driven year. From “just wear the masks like the TV man told us to, you’re such a Kaaaaren, I’m telling on you! [whine, fuss, splutter, shriek, nag]” to “everything is racist, let’s mob up and tear down all the statues, set stuff on fire!” in one weekend. 

And for that extra comedic, ironic touch, the worst participants will pause spluttering just long enough to tell you their irrationality is based on SCIENCE! and “studies.” (Spoiler alert: they couldn’t name you one. “But the consensus is there, so there!”) 

On one hand, A.D 2020 feels like one of those fourth season hour-long Twilight Zone episodes that didn’t work because of the length. On the other, it’s a great study in mass hysteria, and how some of the smartest people you know can start talking about “numbers” from the same media that told us Hillary Clinton was going to win by 90% four years ago and Saddam Hussein would nuke everyone if we didn’t drop everything and invade in 2003. 

Those are just two examples, but people still believe whatever gets broadcast at them from a Big Name, however ridiculous, and despite a proven track record of mendacity in the service of someone’s agenda. If I could bring back two people to help me make sense of this, it would be Ambrose Bierce and George Carlin. Both were very tuned into how mobs are raised and manipulated and I pray to avoid their bitterness at the same. 

So, what’s next? I wind up this seething wall of text and get to work, that’s what. And good morning! Among other things, I’m loving this too-short summer while it lasts.

Painting the Darkness

In this season of transitions

as unhappy as they are necessary

with the cat of our children’s childhood 

put down for old age and then

our last child leaving home to seek 

his fortune

In this nightmare year of convulsive changes

my wife and I settle into our irrelevance

another too-short summer dissolving before our eyes

only so many more Christmases to go

My wife set to remodeling when we gave up our cat

and when our son left, she overhauled his entire

room, painting the worn hardwood floor

moving the bed from its corner

to beneath the window

adding a futon sofa

The sadness of my son’s absence

still drifts in the sunbeams 

about the ghosts of his melancholy

(he was quite properly bored and anxious 

here) but they’re dignified 

by the attention

and, honestly, it’s better than what it would

have become had we left it alone:

a museum of dust and inattention

borne of equal parts sadness and

fear

These changes being what they are

this wasn’t enough. Soon our broken

and dusty stairs were redeemed

as my wife’s mahogany brown floor paint

slid smoothly across the filled cracks 

A cool green to match the stair risers

overtook the stained yellowy plaster of the walls

the white trim glowing like redemption

a halo to surround and crown the darker colors

Our stories haven’t changed

laughter and tears alike

lie fixed beneath this now-new paint

and I wonder how many more 

families’ stories will play out

in this century-old pile

when my wife and I are gone

Someone will one day

paint over us
my silent prayer is they at least 

coordinate the colors 

and keep that trim 

gleaming.

Poem and photo Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

The Happiest Sad Week of a Sad Year

A new week, a new month, a new season. So what else is new?

As of the first of this month, this also became the year our son moved out. I keep telling myself it’s a happy day because it is. Still, my wife and I will miss him. He’s in his early 20s, but we would have been content to follow the Italian model and keep him at home until he got married. 

That said, he wasn’t going to find his wife here in the sparsely populated San Luis Valley, let alone the kind of job that would have him certified as a journeyman in two states. In the middle of a pandemic panic-induced lockdown, he had three companies looking to bring him in to work. He could easily have gotten work here in the Valley, but it would have been a lateral move at best, and more likely a step back. It would not be a noble sacrifice on his part to stay here for his parents’ sake. It would be a foolishly squandered opportunity.

What most impresses me is how my son, in the six weeks since he left his last job, never bothered filing for unemployment. He had too much pride and no patience for the paperwork and jumping-through-hoops. He had enough in savings to pay his bills and still help his parents on the side. When all was said and done, he had plenty left to get him started again in Colorado Springs. 

When he moved back in with us three years ago, I told him to take the opportunity to “stack paper,” i.e., put something back from every paycheck. Well, bless him if he didn’t do just that.

He’s long been too big for these toys but we can’t give them up. These, as least we can hang onto.

 

As with the passing of our longtime family cat Otis in March, this was something that had to happen sooner or later, and if we mourn, it’s for us. I scolded myself as I watched him drive away, “If it’s this damned hard on you, make a bunch of money and move yourself closer!”

Maybe that’s just what I’ll do. It’s an incentive to finish writing this last book.

Road Kills

“Well, at least it was quick.”

Swiped from Steve the Vagabond and Silly Linguist's Facebook page.

On the Road is Jack Kerouac’s most famous book for whatever reason but I found The Dharma Bums more coherent and a better representation of what Kerouac was about. (As Truman Capote famously said of On the Road, which was written continuously on a long scroll of paper, “That’s not writing; that’s typing!”) 

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road works because the author’s odd, is-that-really-a-word? vocabulary enhances the Uncanny Valley unease of his post-apocalypse world. (Recall how this worked for the then-celebrated/now-forgotten 1980s post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker.) The ending was aw-gedouttahere unbelievable but after so many pages of relentless misery, you’ll take it. 

Still, for all that goes down, The Road wasn’t nearly as brutal as McCarthy’s 1984 masterpiece Blood Meridian. Those who have read that one recognize it as the most horrific horror novel ever. That it isn’t in the Horror section of the book store makes sense when you read it. McCarthy’s monsters-in-human-form are far, far removed from the turbo-charged Halloween beasties of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, et al.