High Summer, Comin’ Down

More Notes on the Current Crisis and State of the Post-Apocalypse.

As of today, the 30th of July, the quack doctor in charge of maintaining the pandemic panic is encouraging the mandatory use of goggles over the eyes. Although we still see no evidence whatsoever of corona virus even being a pandemic — our homeless and vagrant issues would be halfway solved by now if it was — the Powers That Be are doubling down on a “second wave” of phantom flu cases. In the middle of summer, mind you.

Oh, I could go on. I’ll simply sign off on this with the final stanza from the most necessary poem ever written:

Let boys want pleasure, and men
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes
     to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

 

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn there is a COVID-20 around the corner, and it’s the gosh-by-golly worst of the worst, and that’s why we need to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas. And all the bright-eyed fools — and there’s so many of them, God help us — will eagerly go along.

Whaddya gonna do? For my part, I’ve got to finish this book, pray it gets optioned for film, and look for a place even more remote than where I am now. The fewer people around, the better.

This is the hottest its been since we moved here. Keep in mind I'm at 7,600 feet in elevation.

If nothing else, this has been a breakthrough summer for the last book in my zombie post-apocalypse action-adventure series. I’m now at page 330 and Chapter 29, which is the Fun-and-Games run-up to the Darkest Hour. Once I finish these two critical chapters I’m onto the Vengeance Trail.

I may very well be finished with “Well, this year was a real stinker, but at least I finished writing that darn book.” I have sometimes wondered if there is some deep-seated fear of life without this project in my life that is holding me up. Maybe so. I can see the ending so much more clearly now, though, and I cannot wait to get there.

A final note: I have spent way too much time trying to make this post than I should have. Posting should be as simple as write/format/add images/publish, but nothing works that way with Google Blogger anymore. Imagine formatting for a large font and getting extra-large every time. And then you have to go into HTML mode to fix it, as you must do with all formatting repairs, because Compose mode simply will not do what you ask of it. It was bad enough before with the old interface. The new Blogger is nigh-impossible to work with.

You can’t upload photos direct from your machine anymore, though they still pretend you can by keeping the button there. Every photo has to be uploaded into the Google Photos app and transferred from there. Several times in the course of typing, formatting, re-formatting, and saving this post, I’ve lost entire lines of text. This happened especially with my trying to link to the Robinson Jeffers’ most necessary poem above. Creating a link now nukes the entire line. 

How does one screw something like this up? Don’t they hire the best and brightest there? I have spent a full extra hour writing and re-writing and repairing something that should have taken all of 15 minutes to do.

I see nothing getting better and no way out. I’m going to have to learn WordPress. The next post you see here will likely be the announcement of my quitting this platform. I’ll figure out what I’m going to do when my blood pressure goes down. Stay tuned.

4th of July After-Action Report and Year in Review

From the Year of the Flu and Race Riots, Too, so you know it’s got to be special. Like Special Education students are special.

First off, I’m sounding off on a peeve of mine, namely, the expression “I hate to say this, but—” Stop lying, dirtbag. You relish this. You can’t wait to see the hurt on people’s faces when you say what you supposedly hate to say.

Such gross dishonesty really grinds my gears. And, now, the news....

One month after moving out for his new job, our son came down to visit us for the 4th of July weekend. The first night we stayed up and drank and listened and talked about music and stuff. We hit the bar around the corner on the Fourth itself, then walked to the convenience store a mile down the road like a couple of bored teenage dudes on a summer evening’s adventure, then walked home. 

We didn’t shoot off any fireworks. There are at least three houses on my side of town good to shoot off an arsenal each on these occasions. On Sunday, my son changed his oil in our garage before driving to the southeastern Colorado town where he’d be working the next week.

Angel came back to visit for the first time since just after Spooky died. He looked much better than he did the last time I saw him. Angel even came by my upstairs office window to cadge treats, something he hadn’t done since autumn. This whole weekend was one big sunbeam break from the clouds.

Thus ended the best weekend we’d enjoyed since Labor Day weekend, which marked the last weekend Otis T. Cat could control his bladder and bowels. If 2020 has been nothing but darkness since March — and it most certainly has — the twilight began that first day Otis missed the litter box in September. What might likely have been the Last Normal Autumn of the United States was just the usual stuff in between cleaning up after an aging cat who was not getting any better. There was nothing special about my birthday or Halloween. Thanksgiving went well. Christmas wasn’t quite a disaster, but it would have helped if I’d waited a while before getting into my cups on Christmas Eve. 

Thinking back on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, it occurs to me there was no excitement about that last third of 2019 from Labor Day until then. We were simply marking time. A particularly bitter and ugly irony occurs to me when I realize I should have had Otis put down in October, to spare him the loneliness of not sleeping with us upstairs that was his fate for the last six months of his life. Putting Otis down in October would have definitely “enlivened” (the best word I’ve got) those perfunctory final months of the year.

Instead, we did what we did, and January and February went slow, gray and ghastly, as they are most anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. At the last of February we realized we could wait no longer. So Otis was put down on 3 March, and when the Great Pandemic Panic and lockdown got going two weeks later, it was just another sad and awful thing in a sad and awful year following a long prologue. 

Ginger Tom took sick and died in late April; I found Spooky dead by the side of the road in early May. I buried three kittens born of two different litters among the ferals. Then my son, who had quit his job sometime back, I forget, decided he was ready to go back to work. As of the first of June, my wife and I were empty-nesters again.

But my son came down to visit last weekend. We’re not alone and forsaken. That’s something. A very huge something, for which I am grateful.

My forward progress with The Wrong Kind of Dead has exploded entire finished pages at a time since then, in glorious contrast to the depression-enforced writer’s block that crushed my fingers when we left our grown children behind in Colorado Springs four years ago. More on that later. Meanwhile, I’m counting up the blessings and keeping my brave face properly starched and ironed. So far, so good, and here’s hoping you’re the same.

All photographs Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

Random Thoughts on the First Day of the Second Half

My last post was my 666th. Not that I’m superstitious, just uncomfortable. And I really do have stuff on my mind.

NOTES ON THE CURRENT CRISIS: It’s interesting how much the events of this year have made so many of us appreciate the changing of the months. It’s as if we’re all hoping that this will be the month everything gets back to normal. Naturally, they don’t. Things seem to loosen up on one side, then things get stupid-weird on the other.

As far as this Panicky-Demic Lockdown mania goes, the people making these stupid and arbitrary rules aren’t giving up their power. Fourth of July is canceled and so is the rest of the summer. If you think the snickering-smug authoritarians are going to let you have your Christmas shopping and parties this year, I advise you to think smarter, not harder. Thanksgiving family dinners will be discouraged, if not outright prohibited before that. Whatever happens in the November U.S. federal elections will only serve as further excuse for tightening the screws “for public safety.”

For those sniffing about for Socially Unacceptable Political Thought on my part, I remind you that the will to power uses ideology as fig-leaf, a beard to distract from its primary purpose, i.e., acquiring and exercising more power. It was the Big Lesson of George Orwell’s 1984, that the power to be able to spout any kind of nonsense unchallenged — say, “2 + 2 = 5” — is the ultimate goal. 

Everyone seems to have missed that point, but I’ll say it anyway, if only to be able to say “I told you so,” and if only from beyond the grave. Despite repeated proofs of inflated infection and death statistics, despite empirical, see-for-yourself proof that the big scary virus has turned out to be a nothingburger used as a boogeyman to frighten and intimidate and control, people are still playing along with this second wave thing. 

As I say, I don’t make human nature. It is what it is. Whaddya gonna do?

That no one on the Internet believes the official 9/11 narrative, that most even suspect an inside job, says much for lost public trust over the years. That said, the Internet is not the world. The fact that so many people are going along with this is discouraging.

“CAN WE PLEASE COMPLAIN ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE?” DEPT.: I’ve managed to find workarounds for the increasingly unworkable Google Blogger. So far I can still switch easily between “Legacy Blogger” and “that mess they’re forcing on us now” so I can make the smart quotes work. 

However, I am unable to load my photos directly from my computer onto a blogpost in either version. The workaround for this is to upload the photos to the Google Photos app — yes, it took ‘em from my PC folder just fine — and “Insert” the photos from there. I suspect this was something done on purpose by way of forcing people to use that app, but that’s just me, and so what? Nothing’s changing until it does.

There is one bright note to all of this. It used to be that I had to go into HTML to fix how any word I italicized became twice as large as the text around it. This bug endured for years. Someone finally thought to step on it.

That said, New Blogger still doesn’t get its own font sizing commands. Large text becomes medium-sized text and captions are illegibly small, however many times you highlight and hit the “Normal” button. As always, it’s fixed in HTML or not at all, and you still can’t count on what you saved to stick. You’ll come back to an already published post and see all kinds of haywire formatting. Why? How? I don’t know, I don’t care. I just wish it would stop. 

It won’t, of course. This is on me for not following through with my Wordpress account. Moving along, then....

Like I don’t have enough on my desk already.

TEN YEARS GONE: This morning as I fed the cats I was impressed by the autumnal quality of the air, and on the first of July, at that. Then I remembered walking out from my house in Colorado Springs on the first of July ten years ago. It was sunny and hot, the clear blue sky of another world because this was the first day in 20 years we were not getting paid and taken care of by the Department of the Navy.

My wife had officially retired the day before, just in time for the Great Recession to hollow out the IT industry I was hoping to break into with my MCSA and CompTIA certs. We had both hoped to land GS jobs on the Air Force Academy but abused wage-slave NAF was the best we could do. 

All that, and I was Class II obese. I was still two years from figuring out how to write a novel, and three years from being published. It would be five years before I finally gave up on temporary work, as the gigs were only getting worse on top of so few and far between that I might as well not bother.

So I wrote and published two novels, lost 50 pounds, then another 30, moved 200 miles from where I’d been living for nearly ten years, got cancer, got over it, and here we are now, 308 pages deep into the last novel of my series.

What a ride, is all I have to say. Hands down, my 50s have been the most inspirational and productive decade of my life. I thought I should say something about it.

It really is like this, For me, it describes mid-2012 until now, so, whoa. Eight years.

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.

My Writing Was Already Lit

...and less noisy. Unlike before, however, the sound is steady, even on the most pop-up video-crazy sites. Also, pretty blue light.

I’ve noted before how nothing strains a machine like a typically useless Microsoft 10 “update,” sometimes causing the rig to shut down in self-preservation. My son could hear the fans screaming from across the hall, so, by way of belated Christmas present, he purchased and installed two more fans into my CPU tower. 

Thanks to LED enhancement, the fans glow a nice neon blue and I can see into the inside of my case. It looks like the chill room at a Borg rave.

The 1970s singer-songwriter Cat Stevens released an album called Buddha and the Chocolate Box in 1974. In 2020, it’s Buddha and the Three Terabyte Portable Hard Drive atop the custom computing rig that facilitates my digital output.

The Borg’s actual color scheme is a depressing mix of neon green lines with silver accents and lots of black shadowing. I much prefer this aesthetic.

The March update is already out. I’m putting off the ultimate test until the weekend. I’m interested in what happens, but not so much to hear four fans driven to their limits, as opposed to two. 

It’s lit. Not pictured: the blinking blue lights at the base of my wi-fi antenna. I’m reminded of the predominantly blue color scheme of my basement office in Colorado Springs where I wrote my first novels. We even called it “the Blue Room.” Now I’m upstairs, and in neon-ish LED.

Stay tuned. If I write nothing further about it, all went well.

“I Just Know I’ll Be Happy Anywhere But Here”

A brief, random memoir from last year’s notes. I thought I had more of these than I did.

Growing up in a suboptimal family situation in northeast Columbia, South Carolina, I longed to get away. On sleepy, nothin’-doin’ Sundays afternoons I would walk three-quarters of a mile from what passed for home to climb the berm between Edgewater Drive and Interstate 20.

To go one way would take you to Augusta and then, after a long stretch of pine-woods nothing, Atlanta. Also, all the way out to just east of El Paso, Texas, but Atlanta was the western frontier of my knowledge, and I didn’t care for the west then. I wanted to go in the other direction, to Interstate 95, the junction of which is the sole reason Florence, South Carolina, exists. I wanted to turn north, and go to Washington, Baltimore, and New York City. Maybe I’d feel more at home in Boston. At least some place where it snowed in the winter.

Anywhere but here...it’s one of humanity’s oldest stories, and thank God mine had a happy ending. Uncle Jim was right. The West is the best.

Westbound US 160 through the San Luis Valley, on my way to the county seat to drop off my local elections ballot. One thousand, eight hundred miles and even further away in time from where I was and, again, thank God.

Notes on the End of the Second Decade

“The Meme Decade” doesn’t ring from the mountainsides but it’s better than “the one when the terrorists knocked down those buildings in New York and we went to permanent war in two countries.” Also, emo. And screamo. American Idol. What a waste of ten years. We did much better this time around.

Check me out, coming in without a warning that I’m going to be talking about recent history, current events, and other volatile subjects in the course of this series of micro-essays. So let’s change the subject to a recent trend on Twitter that I find as silly as it is annoying, namely, “Leave a .GIF describing your [current mood, writing project, highest aspiration, etc.]”

Will it ever end? Maybe I should give up and start collecting these things so I can play along and promote my stuff. These writers’ lifts have helped my traffic, at least more than I’ve been doing to encourage it.

Nah. One thing I learned from my flirtation with doing podcasts is if I’m not 100% into it, it’s not happening. And if it does happen, it will be embarrassingly and insufferably lame. I’ll stick with my non-animated comment response memes. 

I confess. I watched and enjoyed American Idol.  The auditions at the beginning of the season were at times hilarious, pathetic, and heroic all in one-half hour. I rarely stuck around until the end of the season, though. It got boring once the initial contenders were shaken out and they did embarrassing theme weeks. Worse of all was when it became obvious whom the showrunners favored as the winner. It got stupid crazy obvious around the turn of the decade, and the celebrity judges, with the big exception of Steven Tyler—who had the class to be visibly uncomfortable as he watched his fellow judges undermine perfectly good contenders for the pre-selected winner—were worthless.

 

Speaking of collecting things...you can’t call it a “fad” if it’s been going on for nearly 20 years already, but what on earth is up with Funko Pop! big-head vinyl dolls? They took up appalling amounts of retail space in Barnes and Noble and Borders Books in the first decade of this century. Borders was gone in 2011, bless its memory, but those silly little things that look nothing like the characters they presumably depict save for the clothes under their giant, generic heads are still going strong. Why? How? Cabbage Patch Kids and Beanie Babies were better known across the culture and good for maybe a couple of years each before fading away, but these black-eyed, big-headed dolls have been around for over ten years already and show no signs of going away.

It is a persistent weirdness I’m not sure I want to understand. Let’s get out of here; this place gives me the creeps.

I recognized Buddy the Elf because of the costume, but how on earth does that thing on the right resemble Mariah Carey? Carey’s real-life bust and backside are at least as big, if not bigger, than her head, which renders this utterly nonsensical.

I’ve been reading blogs since the turn of the century. I remember having a good smirk at “journalists” for the Big Media outlets putting them down, because bloggers often did what journalists are supposed to do, but often don’t, hence the scare quotes. “Bloggers aren’t journalists,” sniffed the “journalists,” and me and most everyone else said, “Yes, and that’s why we read blogs.”

This stopped towards the end of the first decade when the poor dears finally got a grip on making blogs of their own. Of course, they would have you know they went to a top tier school and they’ve worked for all the name outlets and that’s why their blog is better than yours.

For me, and a lot of people these days, the smart writing is buried among posts on the chan/image boards, in alternating green and black text with a “>” to indicate the beginning of a paragraph. (Spaces in between grafs are profanely mocked and dismissed as “Reddit spacing.” Despite the apparent indifference to capitalization and punctuation, there are rules.) These boards are the descendants of old UNIX and other online “bulletin boards” from pre-Windows 95 times, but that’s not what’s of interest here. The old boards were strictly text-based. These are image boards now, begetting that very thing which defines the 2010s for those of us who spend way too much time online.

This informational graphic uses some of the earliest macros, some of which have managed to remain evergreen.

They’re generally known as “memes,” more technically (and therefore rarely) referred to as “image macros. We’ll stick with memes. From rage comics to the I Can Has Cheezburger kittehs (with their own peculiar spelling rules), to twisted motivational posters to familiar scenes from popular media, the twenty-teens has been the Decade of the Meme.

I always liked the jokes on Overly Attached Girlfriend and Philosoraptor memes. Unlike those two, however, the Condescending Willy Wonka meme in back never died.

As seen in the image just before the one above, they are an evolution of the infographic, with a touch of the one panel comic. Unlike the one-panel comic, though, text and image are inseparable. The image is generally that of commonly recognized scene from a television show or a movie, or, in the case of Bad Luck Brian, an infamously unfortunate photograph. The familiar image supports the text by way of immediately setting us up for the joke. Bad Luck Brian can’t get a break. Chuck Norris is the most absurdly strong human who ever lived. Conspiracy Keanu is going to ask a funny “What if __, and then ____, because _____” type of question.

You can knock these things back like tiny milk chocolate candies all day. I know, I’ve done it.

I regret not having stayed in the workforce long enough to turn in a notice that looks just like this.

The anons (anonymous posters) on the chan boards like to joke how they “memed” the U.S. president into office in 2016 because they had a better grasp of memetic (in the truest form of the word used) humor than their opponents. What makes the joke funny is they’re not entirely wrong. Most people don’t know who Pepe the Frog is, but he did his part. The fact that the humor-impaired “woke” opposition still loses all pretense of composure at the very sight of the cartoon and its spinoffs, Apu, Groyper, and Honkler, says much about the barely managed moral and political hysterics of this age. 

To recap, the 1950s had rock ‘n’ roll and (then new) suburban culture. The 1960s had the civil rights movement, psychedelia and long hair. The 1970s had prog, disco, punk, and New Wave. The 1980s were Reagan, synth-pop, and hair-metal, and computers in the workplace and at home. The 1990s were grunge, hip-hop, and boy bands and Internet shopping. The decade following...well, 9/11 and emo and blogs. 

The 2010s came up with a new way to communicate information, agitprop, and jokes. It’s not much, but it’s no small thing, either.

I’m not drawn to manga or anime, but its a big and fertile field for memes. The sentiment expressed here is close to my heart, so here we go.

As for the next decade, I believe we’re going to see the denouement of the decline of mediums, e.g., print, and worn-out intellectual properties, e.g., Star Wars, etc. It’s a column for another day, and I pick the craziest times to go on beer fasts.

A Couple More Random Objects from My Psychic Junk Drawer

More varieties of half-rotted rubber bands and novelty bottle openers than you can shake a snack bag clip at. 

Recently I posted about how I had to be careful celebrating my 600th post milestone because I might have to delete pages with disabled video embeds and fall below the big round number. Shortly after I published I was looking down my list of most viewed posts and realized to my horror that one was my Patreon pitch, and the other was for my podcast, neither of which I worked too hard at to make happen, and neither of which occupied any real estate in my conscious mind until just then. Those posts would have to be deleted, too.

Twenty-eighteen was my cancer year, but as I didn’t get the news on that until April, I honestly can’t use that misadventure for an excuse. The post-holiday season depression, haunted by the death of one of the few close friends I had the previous November, makes more sense. I fought for literal weeks to work up the nerve to make that Patreon pitch, and then I did it, and then I didn’t want to do it anymore. 

Truth be told, my heart was never into the Patreon or a podcast. Both require implied obligations and I detest being obligated. The posts had to go. I’m down to 611 published posts now. So it goes. 

I cracked 10K on my Jeep on Columbus Day. It’s been a source of amusement to both my adult children, who were small children when I bought the vehicle in 2001, that I am such a stay-at-home stick-in-the-mud that the Jeep has enjoyed such low mileage.

It took 18 years and 27 days but the last digit to the left is populated at last. With new tires installed last month and all our vital fluids good to go, we look forward to another winter crunching through the snow.

Pictured in the high flat valley country she lost her 10K virginity in. ‘Til death do us part.

I’ve been struggling throughout the day to come up with something else. I leave with another photo from that day’s shoot and a note to myself that we’re due for another photo essay. Cheers.

Straight on to Alamosa.