Cold Snaps and Cool Beans

I had to laugh. I couldn’t go to bed last night unless I’d posted something. So I dug through my poetry folder and found a cranky rant from 2006. Boom, up it went. Now I have a post-per-day record of four in a row.

This wasn’t anywhere on my list of resolutions for the new year. I have to see how far I can take this. One way to do it is to treat this as an actual web log, which is where we get the word “blog” in the first place.

In other words, oh, let me tell you about my week.....

It’s a very chill town.

New Year’s Day is a strange holiday, as there’s nothing really going on but people recuperating from the party the night before, and perhaps the Christmas season as a whole. Still, like Christmas itself, it doesn’t occupy a calendar day of the week. It’s outside space-time, at least as far as my foggy reckoning goes, so it feels weird to mention the snowstorm on Monday, which was New Year’s Eve, which brought the severe cold snap on New Year’s Day, and here it is, Friday in another year, and we’re just getting through it.

We learned the hard way that a separate pipe from the city line feeds the kitchen sink, so we were washing our dishes in the bathtub until our son went into the subzero-Fahrenheit crawl space with a heat gun to thaw out the hot water line. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, given that our gas furnace isn’t working (it turns out it never really has the entire time we’ve been here), but kerosene for the portable heaters is expensive. The wood pellet stove runs nonstop except for the hour and a half during the warmest part of the day (e.g., 22°F/ -5°C today, and quite balmy considering it only got up to 11°F/ -11°C yesterday). 

We’d taken some pride in not running up the credit cards during Christmas. There goes all those savings and more. I’m grateful we had a jump on it, however small.

Always a pretty drive to Del Norte from Monte.

Somehow I’ve managed to get some writing in. The notes I’d written to myself throughout my last bender on New Year’s Eve have been incorporated into the appropriate chapters of The Wrong Kind of Dead. These are future chapters, by the way. This isn’t retrofitting. I’m filling in the end of this book.

I note with some amusement that the Christmas season technically isn’t over until tomorrow. At least we found a way to prolong it. Once all this mess is fixed, I’ll be more than ready to tuck into the year. Which, in a way, I already am.

No alcohol, no tobacco, and a blogpost per day. The first week of 2019 hasn’t been a total wash.

Keeping the glowing heart of the season alight.

The Nuisance House Across the Street

There’s a Jack for every Jenny but holy
smokes! a lot of beer & desperation must
have gone into making those three 
boys of hers & now Grandpa is
stuck with supporting these indolent 
spawn of his leathery, snaggle-toothed 
daughter who can’t work because of 
“the accident,” though whatever that was
doesn’t stop her from riding in the 
bitch seat behind her generic walrus-
moustached loser of a boyfriend to 
Bike Week in Sturgis, among 
other things.

Somehow the house is kept up & for 
all I know ol’ Snaggle Tooth helps, doing
the occasional load of laundry & so
forth, which is the least she can do because 
cigarettes are expensive & she’s not the one 
paying for them. Her sons are another
matter, the oldest bringing his 
friends in from his job as “head cook” at 
some greasy spoon to talk loudly & 
run their engines across the street 
outside my bedroom window at one 
in the bleepin’ a.m.

Ah, but she’s really proud of that one, him
being “head cook” and all, though for all
that he’s still sponging off Granddad & 
making a hulking nuisance of himself. She’ll 
try talking to him, though, sorry about all 
that, but he’s almost 20 & you cain’t tell ‘em 
anything when they’re that age. Besides, 
he’s doin’ really good for himself & I don’ t 
mean to piss you off or anything but it 
ain’t like you’re workin’, so why’re you
so concerned? Me, I cain’t  hear ‘em at 
all, I sleep like a log, so, you know, I’ll 
talk to him, though…

And to think that for this her old man served
two tours in ‘Nam, and damned if he didn’t
get that look in his eyes when he told me
about it as if he would break down right
there. Yep, he saw the Elephant, the blood
shells & screaming & all for this, this? hell, 
I dunno, maybe this drama keeps him going 
being more than he could hope for 
with him being too old to work (except in 
the yard, where he looks as if he’ll keel 
over any second while his worthless 
grandsons skateboard or play 
videogames indoors), his wife long
since dead. He’s got two retirement 
checks coming in plus Social Security 
& with the mortgage long since paid 
off he might as well spend it on 
something. 

It could be worse, I tell myself, in a futile
prophylactic gesture against you
telling me the same as we 
compete for the prize.


From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2006, 2019 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past

1999 was 20 years ago. That’s enough for most people.

Sometime during these first few days of January 2019 will be the 50th anniversary of the end of Star Trek. I don’t know why I remember such things, but it does tie in with the holidays in a coincidental way. The first frames of anything Star Trek were shot immediately after Thanksgiving weekend 1964, namely, “The Cage” pilot. On the 9th of this month, it will be one-half century since the last frames of the episode “Turnabout Intruder” were shot, just after the 1968 holiday season. 

Nineteen sixty-nine marked a lot of passages. Star Trek‘s last episode, and then The Beatles. Many consider the last day of the group sometime in 1970, but the first and greatest worldwide supergroup were finished before the fall of that year. On 22 August 1969, six days after wrapping up recording on Abbey Road, they gathered for one last photo shoot on the grounds of John Lennon’s mansion. Everyone looked tired and a little cranky, just going through the motions. You can tell that George, especially, didn’t want to be there.

It seems hard to believe they wouldn’t have gotten together at least once in the next eleven years until John Lennon’s death, but all four were never in the same room again after 22 August 1969. Abbey Road was released on 26 September, and no one knew their favorite band was finished for all time one month ago already.

The Woodstock music festival had happened earlier in August 1969, and while many consider it the high water mark of music festivals in the seriously musically radicalized 1960s, there’s a funny thing about high water marks: you don’t get any higher. I half-wonder if anyone is going to attempt an anniversary festival like the one in 1999 that became known as “Rapestock” and featured such deep acts as Limp Bizkit. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of something like that going on already.

I think back on much of the music and entertainment I like from the 1960s, and it fascinates me how everything went from black-and-white and short hair at the start of the decade to lurid color and respectable normie guys wearing their hair over their ears. (I’m old enough to remember when this was a big deal. Also, wearing denim jeans in school.) The last year of that decade is turning 50. Well, well.

Fifty years ago when I was growing up was the 1910s and 1920s. And with that thought, I’ve got nothing left but the Fitzgerald quote I titled this post with: “So we beat on, boats against the current....”

Season’s End Blues, 2019 Edition

The party’s over. Time to get to work.

After a long night’s revels watching the snow fall as my Christmas mix played one last time, I awoke at around 9:30 a.m. to find that my wife had already completed the mammoth task of taking down the decorations and was two-thirds of the way down with dismantling our artificial tree. As always, I felt melancholy seeing everything gone. I’d said my drunken goodbyes to it all last night as I loaded the wood pellet stove that one last time before bed, so there’s that.

This would take me all week for mooning over the ornaments and when we got them, etc. My wife dismantles and packs away everything in a morning.

For that matter, I said my drunken goodbye to drunken goodbyes. My weekly ragers are now something I used to do but don’t anymore, because don’t get me started. I’ll still have my ale with my dinner when my wife and I go out to eat, but even that will be only twice a month in 2019. This is the year those life-sucking credit card bills go away.

Last year’s entanglement with tobacco use must end once and for all. I have to start taking care of myself. 

I’ve actually made serious resolutions for the year that I’ve written down and posted on my wall. One of them, a refutation of my tendency to wallow in sadness, got its first workout today. I looked at the ornaments through the plastic box where they were stacked and wondered How many more? How many more years will we be here to put these up? And there’s Otis, our eldest cat, on the pillow we put out for him in front of the wood pellet stove. He’s 17 years old. Was this already his last Christmas? 

All this, and the usual difficulty adjusting to the hard shock of transitioning from the three-month long festive season of football and candy and parties and gifts to the dull and unremarked days of January and February. I have plenty to keep me occupied, though. I have a book to finish, weight to lose, and I need to get out of the office and spend more quality time with my family. It sounds basic enough, but the basics are exactly what I need to get back in touch with.

Meanwhile, there’s tonight, New Year’s night, and it’s nothing special. Tomorrow will be nothing special. It’s not even a New Year anymore. Just January.

Happy New Year, anyway. 

Just let me have a few more of these, Lord, it’s all I ask.

Identity Crises of the Living Dead

Yes, “crises,” as in plural.

It’s occurred to me more than once that this blog, with its numerous photos of cats and mountains and trees and flowers and stuff, would appear to the casual observer to be someone’s grandma’s on-again, off-again hobby. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’d be flattered by the comparison. I often wonder how many of those old-school grandmas who love flowers and cats and pretty sunsets are still out there in this day and age. I raise a cup of hot chamomile to them, wherever they are.

And I’ll drink it out of a pink mug, in my Big Pink house, just to make you mad. We love you, Grandma, wherever you are.

After my days’s adventures among the living dead with an angry protagonist I like to come home to a little wholesomeness, that’s all. Unlike a lot of people who write in the genre I don’t like living in Horror World 24/7. I don’t denigrate those who dress their houses in black lace and skulls; it just ain’t me, babe. 

Will photos of local squalor make this blog seem more sophisticated? Well, then, let’s squalor ‘til you holler! Gotcher pot o’ gold right here, ha-ha, get it? I’m feeling smarter already!

Although I’m not scrapping any categories, I’ll make a point of presenting most of my turbo-wholesome Nice People Stuff on my Facebook page. Most of the nice, normal-type people I know are on my Friends list there. 

I’ll still run the occasional photo essay from time to time but I need to punch things up here. People would never know what a wonderfully ghastly zombie horror writer I am at first glance of the page. Nor would they know at the 22nd glance. So I’ll dial back the cats and mountains and trees and flowers and stuff to the every-once-in-a-while.

If you lived here, you’d be home by now.

I realize some are wondering why I don’t write more about writing. I am writing, aren’t I? Why don’t I write about that?

Put simply, and more abruptly than I’d like, I’ve noticed I’m less inclined to write about writing when I’m writing. I add quickly that there is a rather comical point behind this, namely, that my best successes are when I’m at my most chaotic. There are methods to the various madnesses, but stuff like Comma Massacre Day (one day last month I went through all 240 pages of The Wrong Kind of Dead and, well, massacred masses of commas), and abandoning a chapter in the middle to go back and read the entire novel from the beginning, cutting sentences, axing paragraphs, dropping entire pages in the manuscript in the process...these aren’t things I feel I could responsibly recommend to anyone. 

Worse, I’m not even sure I could sell this as entertainment. (Woo-hoo, look at me, I’m so random!) That said, I suppose I’d better give it a shot. I’ve got a few ideas for posts.

Not original, but apropos.

Of course, I can always run excerpts from my latest work in progress, whether it’s the last novel in my zombie post-apocalypse series or from the book of poems I want to follow that with. There’s other stuff I’ve been working on, too.

The main thing I’ve been working on is the nerve for online confrontation. If I am to ever get going with these podcasts I’ve been talking about for the last three years, I need to come up with a final decision on the metaphorical hills I’m willing to metaphorically die on. 

Soon. (No, really!)

That’s precisely what’s been holding me back on everything. I’m not that fussed about anything to argue with people about it. After years of stewing over this, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way I’m not going to get mixed up in something, no matter how hard I try.

So maybe I shouldn’t try so hard. Maybe I should take a stand on things. There was a time I used to enjoy wandering into comments sections and kicking rhetorical backsides. Perhaps that I don’t enjoy it anymore should give me a more mature perspective.

It should be fun to find out.

Clichés Exist for Reasons

“Only the strong survive,” 
cackled the good ol’ boys
I grew up among
in South Carolina

damn them all
they weren’t wrong.

What I had trouble with
was said strength was
to be directed only
towards survival

One displayed one’s
Superiority and fitness for
mating by superior endurance 
to the Big Miserable Thing
with no thought towards
liberation
if only in one’s mind

God help you 
if they caught you
trying an escape like
reading, or God forbid, writin’
when you better be workin’, boy
There ain’t no other way
and the sooner you figure that out
the better off you’re gonna be.

I spent my formative years
being told I was weak and
without common sense (now you got
Book smarts, so that’s something)
but—stop me if you’ve heard this—
with trumpets and fanfare 
announcing King Irony riding in 
with the cavalry to my vindication...

(wait for it)

...here I am 
a happily married old writer
there they are
(the ones not
long since dead)
bitter, disappointed old
beasts of burden

nyah-nyah
how do ya like them 
apples you braying
old jackasses?
etc.

It’s an old story, and that
I feel no particular vindication
only sad for the waste of lives
prosecuting an old trope
is itself an old trope

Besides, it took me long enough
to come around. I could have made
far better choices, myself.

Every writer learns 
to his horror or otherwise
that there are a finite 
number of stories 
to be told only so many ways.

You do the best you can.
It’s all a matter of style.

From the Midlands of South Carolina to the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado is more than a matter of miles for this retired old nomad of time and space. Kinda corny, I know, but there it is.

From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

Mid-December Sunday Greetings

...from a very neglectful blogger and author on the Redemption Trail.

“And Jesus rebuked Satan, saying unto him, ‘PUT SOME PANTS ON, YOU DEGENERATE!’”

I love Sunday mornings now. I rolled out of bed at 3:30 a.m., made the coffee, filled the hopper on the wood pellet stove, and set to typing out the thoughts that held me awake and forced me up in the first place. This is a very, very recent thing I’ve begun here that’s worked wonders for my productivity, and, best of all, peace of mind.

Before 5 a.m. I had started another poem, turned some metaphorical wrenches on the story bible for my zombie series, and, after so long a time, had ideas for blogposts. Still two hours out from dawn, and I’m considering a shower and proper pants, at least some fresh, non-stinky pajamas.

So this is what “happiness” feels like. Huh. So alien and strange, it’s easy to see how so many people end up sabotaging it for themselves. I’ve been that sinner. It’s the kind of sin that doesn’t wait until you’re dead to send you to Hell. It makes its own Hell for you right there and then.

Like all earthly Hells, it can be escaped. It’s a matter of watching for the Sartrean door to open while everyone else is screaming at one another over what they consider to be important issues. To take that old French existentialist’s metaphor one more step out of metaphor and into life as it is lived among us non-hypotheticals, most people never see that “No Exit” door. They may have heard rumors of a way out, but they don’t believe they’ll ever find it. That’s only for the lucky and the clever, and good for them.

I’ve got the lucky part down. As always, “clever” is going to require some work. It’s a good thing I’m up.