Alas, Aladdin Sane: David Bowie, 1947-2016

“...[W]e lost so many people in one person, and a close family friend, at that.” 

Nothing like lying in bed in the pre-dawn dark, and the first thing you hear is your wife crying out that David Bowie is dead. Ah, well....

I liked Bowie’s stuff all right growing up. It was a little more gay than I was comfortable with as a teenager in the 1970s, but I Iiked what I heard on the radio. I never got far past the Ziggy Stardust album (an essential staple of the musical diet of all the cool kids I knew in college from 1978-1984) until, of all things, I was married with children. 

Then Bowie became something like a family friend. When we bought our first minivan with a CD player in it upon returning from Japan in 1997, we played the Hunky Dory disc until we’d memorized the words to nearly every song. Hearing then-four-year-old Emily singing along with “Oh You Pretty Things” as we drove around Beaufort, SC, that first time is the memory that makes me stop to rub my eyes thinking about it.

Eventually I got his entire catalog through Let’s Dance, plus his 1995 collaboration with Brian Eno, Outside. James and Emily got their introduction to classical music via Bowie’s narration of Peter and the Wolf. Labyrinth was a favorite movie here for a while. The photo I’ve attached is from Halloween 2008, when then 14-year-old Emily made herself up a Aladdin Sane Just last summer my son and I were learning all the parts from “Space Oddity” on guitar, because, well, we were sitting around playing guitar, and that’s a really good song. Good ol’ Uncle David. He had a million of ‘em.

I was surprised at my own reaction last year when Leonard Nimoy died, and we all knew that was coming. Nimoy’s iconic Mr. Spock was, of course, a close childhood friend. I thought that was the last time I’d ever be affected by a celebrity death. But Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, the Man Who Fell to Earth, the Goblin King...we lost so many people in one person, and a close family friend, at that. Right out of the blue, too. Good on ya, Mr. Jones, for keeping your cancer a secret for so long. It made for a theatrical surprise finish worthy of rock’s most theatrical performer.

We owe this guy for Iggy Pop and Mott the Hoople alone. The sun has yet to pale the eastern horizon here in Colorado, and I’m done with this cursed day. Time to queue up some music, and try to remind myself that this is the natural order of things. Although I can’t get past Bukowski’s line about the giants of literature who once walked the earth: “Where are the replacements?” A rhetorical question we all know the answer to.

Requiescat in Pace, Mr. Bowie. As Tennyson noted in his diary the day he got the news Lord Byron died, “The world was darkened for me somehow.” No kidding, Al. Ya think?

An Off-Day Does Not an Off-Season Make

You git back up on that horse, you!

Oh my God, I might as well give it up already. I missed making a blogpost yesterday. My New Year’s Resolutions are broken [sob]. Screw it, I’ll just get on with my life like I don’t care....

All right, enough. This isn’t Saturday Night Live. We know when we’ve made our punchline.

Why did I miss making that blogpost yesterday? I couldn’t think of anything to write about. I almost missed making this one. I figured I could write about missing blogposts and burps in New Year’s Resolutions at any time, really. Why not let this day go?

Because one has to draw the line somewhere, and the sooner, the better.

Hell, I’m forgoing the 100 push-ups per day I’ve been going great guns at for the last week—because I need a day of recovery for these sore, swole pecs I’m building. Sometimes there are even better reasons for the adjustments.

I got a lot written in The Wrong Kind of Dead, smoking and crackling with characterization and drama like you’ll never see in anyone else’s zombie apocalypse adventures. This book is going to shake the walls and blast people’s doors in. I expect I’ll get haters because this thing will read too much like a real book like real authors used to write. I’ve taken my original premise of “what if Robert A. Heinlein and Harlan Ellison walked into a bar and brainstormed a zombie apocalypse novel” and taken it into dark territory.

Best of all, I’m not writing like either Heinlein or Ellison. God love ‘em both, but I need L. Roy Aiken for this mission. I have full confidence in the man’s abilities to take this where it has to go.

It’s easy to dwell on the one lapse. So easy. I’ve done it. I’m not doing it anymore.

Today is, after all, another day.

A Twelfth Night’s Day Status Report on the Resolutions

As I mentioned in a previous post, I didn’t hit the ground running on New Year’s Day. Everything was working according to plan, though. I had been running with pre-resolutions of a sort since October, tweaking this habit and that, working at losing weight and increasing productivity. The holidays were understood to be “cheat days,” and setbacks from these periods would be accepted, acknowledged—and overcome. 

New Year’s Eve and Day were such a setback.

They have since been overcome.

So, although, I missed doing my 100-push-ups per day on New Year’s Day, I haven’t missed since. The idea is five sets of 20 pushups throughout the day. I’ve found this works best when the afternoon/evening news comes on. If I do the sets as closely together as possible, I get nice and “swole” as the weightlifters say. That is to say, I can feel my chest, arms, and shoulders swell and expand, establishing a tight, firm space where flabby, jiggly fat used to be. 

It doesn’t always happen that way. Yesterday, I did scattered sets throughout the day. Although my reps totaled out at 100, the effect wasn’t the same. I should be doing these sets in tight groups earlier in the day for maximum effect. 

I’ll start that today. 

The main idea here is to make this elementary exercise a habit. Running a continuous daily caloric deficit—the ONLY way to lose weight, and let no one tell you otherwise—runs the risk of burning muscle tissue along with the fat. As I have no desire to be “skinny-fat,” that is, slender, but weak, I need to do these to maintain tone.

Unlike many, I’ll be saving money on a gym membership. If you have Earth-normal gravity where you live, and a floor big enough to accommodate your body, you can get into shape. No special equipment needed at all. Your workout need be no more elaborate than push-ups, sit-ups, and walking.

There’s still plenty of 2016 ahead. As of this writing I’m still 23 lbs overweight at 187. I hope to be showing six-pack abs by Twelfth Night 2017. I expect they’ll look laughably out of place on my 50-something body, but they will be a refreshing change from the usual pale mini-moon overshadowing my waistband. If one must be different—and I must—it should be a positive, good different.

One last thing, and the lesson is yours—it was sometime late summer, early autumn, I forget which, that I decided I was sick and tired of existing as a generic middle-aged fat guy with a beard. I don’t remember the date I shaved and resolved to quit the in-between-meal snacks. It’s not important. The point is that I started. I didn’t wait until the New Year.

Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, or Twelfth Night. You could start now. Or on the Ides of January on the 15th. Or the day after Super Bowl Sunday. That is, if you need an arbitrary date to get going on improving the rest of your life.

Or you could start now.

In other news, the RCA Android tablet I got for Christmas is helping. I did a lot of trash reading on the Internet at my workstation. Not so much, anymore. Taking my trash reading out of my office and upstairs in front of the TV to do during commercials of my favorite shows has doubled my productivity. 

Oh, I’ve had this one for a while.
I’m pinning stars on it now.

If all this comes off as self-righteously self-serving to you, that’s because it is. Also, I’m not pretending to be perfect. We miss some things, we overcompensate in others. Everyone should know the old Buddhist drill by now: the trick is to keep get up more times than we fall down. I’m not wasting time hating on myself for missing something when I can be making it right.

I don’t know about you, but I’d really like to have everything together and looking good before I die. It might take me until the end of this year, or even the next, but I will have this. 

Merry Christmas, one last time. 

First Monday Motivation

Embrace the suck!

December has always been a bad month for book sales, so I couldn’t help laughing at how copies of Bleeding Kansas were getting snapped up on the first of January, as if people finally had permission to buy them. My effusive thanks to fans of the carnivorous undead in the United Kingdom and Canada and the United States for kicking off the New Year in international style.

Just so you know, I’ve got a follow-up book to Bleeding Kansas. You can read the first chapter of Grace Among the Dead here. If this doesn’t have enough zombie-killing action for you, then I don’t know what to tell you—except that I have a third book in the works, and you can read the first chapter of that here. It starts with zombies versus bears, and gets progressively weirder and uglier from there.

As a writer, I never really have a day off (why would I want one?), but my heart goes out to those who have enjoyed a long weekend of New Year’s revels, maybe even a full week off, only to return to the drudgery of whatever Monday-Friday gig they’re “lucky” to have. No more Happy New Anything; it’s Day Four of 2016 and we’re back to the same drab, joyless shit our lives were before the Harvest Festival (or whatever they called it) decorations went up in September.

Even here in the cozy warmth of my basement office, declaring this the 11th Day of Christmas, Twelfth Night Eve, etc., seems like forcing the issue. Most people who left their Christmas stuff up after Christmas Day took them down over this New Year’s weekend. To riff off a meme one sometimes sees around this time of year, it’s time to stop wishing for a great 2016, and actually engage that son of a bitch.

To that end, it would help tremendously to have an anthem. It’s a crack, you’re back, from the rooftops shout it out. You’ve got this.



Hang in there, brothers and sisters. We’ve made it this far. Why not further?

2016 By The Numbers

I’m not a big numbers guy, but there are a few stats I like to keep in mind as we start this last half of the second decade of the 21st century. 

1966 is now a half-century ago. Aside from being the twangy-happy advent of the Summer of Love, given the release of The Beatles’ Revolver, it was at the start of the 1966-67 television season that all TV shows were filmed in color. Think about that as you watch your flatscreen. Color has been a staple of broadcast for only half a century. (Well, it doesn’t seem so long if you’re over the half-century mark in age, yourself.)

Half a century old, and still fresher
than anything out there right now.

We can expect to be continually beat about the face with the 50th anniversaries of the first airings of Batman and Star Trek. As I’ve been on course to minimize my media exposure, I’m not too worried about it. One of the best things about 2015 was how I finally numbed myself to the hype. I genuinely, and oh-so-blessedly, no longer care about so many things. I’ll celebrate what I want to celebrate when I want to celebrate it. Now get the fuck off my lawn.

1976, the Bicentennial Year, is 40 years ago. A year of disco and hype. I doubt we’ll hear much about it. I was there. It was embarrassing.

We’ll observe the 30th anniversary of the Challenger shuttle exploding at the end of this month. The Chernobyl disaster turns 30 this year, too. The last tolerable original cast Star Trek movie, the one in which Kirk and Spock take a Klingon ship back in time to save the whales, was released in time for Christmas. Cake and ice cream all around for 1986.

The Summer of the Macarena will be 20 years ago soon enough. Now you feel old, don’t you? Heh.

Reaching back, I can’t think of anything happening 100 years ago in 1916 other that most of Europe’s young men dying by the container-ship load for absolutely no reason except some rich assholes wanted to throw a war, so never mind.

There is a literary bicentennial coming up, however. The “summer of 1816-and-froze-to-death,” which drove Lord Byron, John Pollidori, Percy Shelley, and Shelley’s plus-one Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley indoors to amuse themselves with a writing contest, produced Frankenstein, or A Modern Prometheus, 200 years ago.

That’s all I’ve got for pop culture. I had a long section already written talking about my personal milestones, but the more I looked it over, the more I realize I’m less interested in my past than I am the future. This year will mark three years since I became a published author. I need to finish writing the book that will conclude this series and move on. 

2016 will be the year I break big. That is all. 

###

Of Time, and the Magic Christmas Football

A morality tale for the first days of this New Year

I took my walk earlier today. As I looked across the wide field of Frontier Park where I begin my circuit, I was reminded of a thought I had the day before, on New Year’s Day, as I watched a man throwing the Frisbee with his grandchildren and dog. It wouldn’t have fit thematically with last night’s post, but luckily for us, this is another post, another day.

Frontier Park in north Colorado Springs is a well-loved piece of land, hosting girl’s soccer and community baseball, and sometimes Pee-Wee football. I wonder how many fathers and sons have thrown footballs here. For added poignancy, there is an elementary school behind me where my now-adult son attended fourth and fifth grades. Yeah, all of sudden in becomes very clear to me why it’s so hard for me to leave—and why it’s all the more imperative that I do.

I remembered that it was this time last year my then-18-year-old son and I were making the most of his 2014 Christmas gift, a Wilson NFL-regulation football. We called it the Magic Christmas Football, because it seemed to fly so easily from our hands, and was so effortless to catch.

I was always flattered that my son would ask me to throw the ball with him, whether it was a baseball or football. I was flattered even more that he still wanted to do it even as his career as a high school football player was over. Bless his warrior’s heart, he’s remained slim and fit since leaving those four years of almost non-stop physical training. That he tolerated my corpulence huffing and puffing along should be grounds for canonization. 

It was difficult for me, especially as I was 20 lbs heavier than I am now, but I had a firm rule I broke maybe twice over the years, and that’s when the son wants to throw ball, I put down what I’m doing and throw the ball. It’s a privilege not many men are afforded. I’m proud to say we spent more than a few evenings, as the sun set behind the Front Range, throwing either a baseball or a football. We did this all the way through his senior year of high school. Of course, we could have done more, but we did what we did, and in the end, that was all.

This was once a football. There are many
footballs like it, but this one was ours

I’m trying to remember the last time I threw the football with my son. I’m thinking it was right after he graduated high school in May. It was warm, the bugs were biting. I think one of his friends showed up at the park to take over for me, and that was the last time I threw the football with my son.

My son still takes the Magic Christmas Football to his Civil Air Patrol physical training nights. It’s spent some time bouncing off the asphalt in the street outside my son’s friend’s house, which is probably why it no longer holds air. My son carries an air pump with him to keep the football going for one more session of throwing spirals and catching on the run. 

If I’d known in time, I’d have gotten him a new one for this Christmas, because this particular Magic Christmas Football has been loved to death. To think I entertained the vain and stupid notion that this might be passed down to my grandson. They don’t make stuff to last anymore.

Run it all the way into the end zone.
A metaphor for life, or something. 

The point is, we started 2015 throwing a football, but my son graduated high school, and, in short order, got his driver’s license, got a job, got a girlfriend, got a life. Life as it should be, in a tight, existential nutshell. The year ended with him driving my Jeep to work, then stopping off to visit at his girlfriend’s for a New Year’s Eve party.

Maybe it’s time I moved on, too.

I added another page to my novel today. I have another two I’d like to finish before bed tonight. I’ve done my 100 push-ups for the day. I didn’t get as many jumping jacks in, but I did take my walk.

As always, I’ll pick up where I left off tomorrow. I still have no idea where I will be at the end of this year. Only that I can’t stay here.

The Challenge of the Second Day

...and the third, the fourth, and everything else that doesn’t have the shiny gleam of being “the first.”

Like most people, I overindulged on New Year’s Eve. It was glorious. The clouds cleared in time for the fireworks to be launched from Pikes Peak at midnight. There was much illegal booming and crackling throughout my neighborhood until 12:15. In between noodling on my latest manuscript, I was up drinking and singing along to my music clear until 5 a.m.

Crawling out of bed at half-past noon on New Year’s Day, I felt quite forcibly reminded of why one of my resolutions is to back away from the alcohol this year. (I’m giving myself this weekend to blow it out, and then going dry until the 31st. Among other things, beer is inimical to weight loss programs.) My planned regimen of push-ups and jumping jacks wasn’t happening. I did manage to get out and take a walk, though. 

I took some photos, too, as always. Here’s a happy snap of a tumbleweed in the snow in the late New Year’s Day 2016 light. It’s a sweet, existential little tableau as one only sees out West.

The ice in the drainage canal is thawing after a solid week of high temperatures never rising out of the 20s Fahrenheit. We’re looking forward to a break from the sub-freezing cold this first week. It’s warm and raining and flooded in the Carolinas where we’re supposed to be moving this year. Oh, if we could just move a little further north up the road from where we are now, and bring in enough money for long visits back East! My next book needs to be really good, and really, really popular...meanwhile....

I took many others, but two photos in particular stand out as a lesson in perspective regarding this most difficult season, this long, “dead” month of nothing following four months of steadily building excitement, from the charge of Things Beginning that comes with the first weeks of the new school year, then Labor Day weekend, then football, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

We have four months, a full third of the year in which we hear a steady drumbeat in the socio-cultural background. Something is always coming. You’ve gotta get ready, you’ve always “gotta get” something. Gotta get your Halloween costume and candy, gotta get your Thanksgiving turkey, gotta get your Christmas shopping done. 

And the parties! So many parties, so many celebrations, big plates of food and glasses clinking all around. It all goes up in fifteen minutes of fireworks after midnight on New Year’s Eve. At least we have the weekend this year until everything gets back to “normal”

“Normal,” of course, is a long, cold, gray month with nothing to mark it. No Labor Day, no Halloween, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas. There are a few college bowl games no one will remember, and while the NFL teams in the USA are bashing it out for Super Bowl berths, the sad fact of the matter is that the shine is off the sport as of the Thanksgiving week college rivalries. January is just...wait a minute...what’s this?


I have often remarked that there is no light like October light. As seen above, however, January light enjoys a beauty all its own, if you know to look for it. The explosion of light and color I caught below was an especial revelation.


Does knowing this photo was taken in the late afternoon on New Year’s Day add to its beauty? 

For four months we’ve been dependent on outside factors to enjoy a full third of the year. There’s nothing wrong with that; September through December is my favorite time, too. The special days associated with each month from October through December are sacrosanct to me. But we’ve got to finesse this transition into this period where nothing is really celebrated in US culture until Memorial Day. Even Easter and Spring Break are just a break on the way to summer. We feel “left alone,” and we go along with the joke that our resolutions are all “broken” by the middle of the January. Which is another socio-cultural outside factor, and one that should be rightfully ignored.

Is it so gray and dead up there in that photo? Do I need a special holiday to make that sky a little more blue, to gild those leaves a little more golden, to add drama to the bare branches of these trees?

Likewise, do I need a special day to make those things happen for me that I need to happen? I need to lose weight and become more fit, I need to develop better time management skills, I need to be making recordings, readings, podcasts. I need to sell more books. This is not a matter of “would be nice.” This is, “Make it happen, or suffer the poverty and other attendant miseries resulting from your inaction.”

On 2 January, I’ll go at it again. What I miss will be added on 3 January. And so on, until I get this right. I’ll do those 100 push-ups a day, I will be at optimum weight by the end of February, I will have posts up on YouTube, reading classic poetry and my own books. I won’t let my blog go to cobwebs like I did in 2015. 

We lose our enthusiasm for our New Year’s resolutions because we lose enthusiasm for living in the dead of January, when nothing seems to be happening. As evidenced in my photos, the dead of January is in our minds. Get out and look around. Know that you’ve got all this time to get it together without the distractions of “gotta get.” 

Anything you gotta get isn’t because of a special day. You gotta get it for you. How is that so bad, so bland, so dead, so nothing?

This is your month. Your time. You beat the drum. You set the beat.

One down, 356 to go in leap-year 2016.

2016 will mark my last walks through this neighborhood I have to leave, somehow, some way, sometime before the next Season of Celebration. I’m going to make this as close to a daily happening until it can’t go happen anymore. If I do this right, the days will be packed, and there will be plenty to celebrate along the way.

Once more, with feeling: Happy New Year. It’s yours if you want it. Me, I’ve got a need.