Ten into Nineteen

It’s time for a humblebrag status report. Don’t worry, this will quick.

The days have slowed their furious pace. Night still comes too soon, the sun dipping behind the tall peaks of the San Juans before 5 p.m., but the amount of daylight increases by a full minute and some. 

Our crisis with the below-zero hard freeze, our malfunctioning furnace, our freezing pipes made the tail-end of the Twelve Days of Christmas drag like a small eternity. This is funny, given how hard it is for me to let the season go. But between this misadventure and the strange fact that the town I live in still has its trees, lighting and decor still up and lighted, I can say I’m fully up to putting away Christmas and getting 2019 started in earnest.

No, seriously. We’re ten days into the New Year already. It’s not even a New Year anymore by the second day. Let’s do this.

Granted, Christmas will linger here until the last fake fir needle is vacuumed from the floor. I’ve been finding a few every day so far, thanks to our youngest cat Toonie, who insisted on rubbing her jowls against the boughs of our artificial tree and leaving their remnants throughout every room on both floors.

Except for a couple of very important categories, so far we’re off to a great start at Rockin’ Roy’s Rage ‘n’ Romance HQ. First and foremost is the strange miracle of me getting a post up on this blog daily since New Year’s Eve. The streak is bound to break soon, but I’m hoping I won’t be so blasé about it that I let it go for months at a time, leaving readers stranded. In the meantime, it’s a great feeling of accomplishment, right up there with keeping alcohol and tobacco free. 

My separation and divorce from tobacco and alcohol would seem more impressive to me if it wasn’t such a long time coming. I’ve felt hints of temptation from time to time but so far I’m liking how I feel when I wake up in the morning too much to quit. 

Meanwhile, I was disappointed in the progress with The Wrong Kind of Dead until today, before I set off to run errands, come back and do chores, when I started filling in entire scenes in my future chapters. Important reveals and decisions are more than merely outlined, they’re completely written out.

I can’t say when, only that I’m doing this a lot faster than I was. I’m seeing the ending so much more clearly now. 

Somewhere between earth and sky.

Words Like Kickdrums

Super-edgy, counter-intuitive writing advice from some guy you never heard of.

I came across this meme last week. It’s a most exemplary example of why one shouldn’t object to wordiness for the sake of objecting to wordiness. Sometimes you need repetition and rhythm to bring the drama: 

From Cheerful Nihilism’s Facebook page.

It helps to read this style as a genre unto itself and just go with it. Same deal with Shakespeare. Spend enough time in his neighborhood and you’ll pick up the language.

Bottom line takeaway, tl;dr: William Strunk’s dictum was to omit needless words. The trick is to find the sweet spot between euphony and economy.

Random Thoughts Occasioned by My Daughter’s 25th Birthday

I had occasion to think about a lot of things last year.

The age marking childhood’s end has been pushed back over the last 50 years, even more so if you’re familiar with stories of life as it was lived in the mid to late 19th century. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when it was expected of girls to behave as women at age 16, and stand by for marriage and child-bearing. Men, by age 18, were expected to be able to support that child-bearing woman. 

Not boys. Eighteen year-old men. By that age, to paraphrase a line from the New Testament, you had put away all childish things. You wouldn’t be caught dead with a comic book because, come on, son! Comic books? And what’s with all these toy spaceships and dolls all over your place?

I’m 57 years old and my grandfather’s generation and their predecessors would be repulsed at the sight of my bookcase. Good thing they’re dead. I don’t think it’s so bad to have artifacts of one’s childhood about in one’s personal office/study/HQ. It’s your place of peace, reflection, and creation, after all, and if you like having reminders of where you came from about, that’s your business.

Today’s milestone ages have been in place since (so far as I remember) the 1980s. You turn 18, you’re old enough to vote and join the military, to kill and/or be killed. You turn 21, now you’re a real adult because you’re finally of legal drinking age. (Yeah, we know, we know.) 

Then comes 25. I’m surprised there isn’t much more made of this, as it’s a critical landmark all its own. By this point, you’re either out of college, out of an early career in the military, something. All your Great Landmark Years are decade markers from there on out. Thirty. Forty. (It’s the new 30!) Fifty. (The new 40!) Sixty. (You’re still just middle-aged!)

I took these photos in June upon returning to Colorado Springs to have my catheter removed two weeks after my radical prostatectomy. (My daughter was kind enough to have her mother and I over for the night so we didn’t have to drive up and back in one day.) I wonder if the fact that my daughter owns a couple of bookcases makes her a generational anomaly. That she hangs on to old books she read even as a tween is a pathology she’s inherited from the old man. Some of these books, notably the Little House books and A Wrinkle in Time, were ones I’d read aloud to her and her brother when they were small.

Sixty-five used to mean something, as that was the year you could begin collecting Social Security, but that age got raised a while back. It’s been generally understood for a decade or so now that, unless you’re independently wealthy or crippled, you’ll work until you die.

That beigey-colored book in the middle of the horizontal stack is familiar.

I digress. I’m thinking of my long-grown and gone daughter. I read about “entitled Milliennials” and so on, and I don’t doubt there are lazy, stupid, entitled (etc., etc.) things galore out there, but that’s not what I’ve witnessed from my perch. In my daughter’s case, as soon as she got a handle on the concept of working for a paycheck and buying her own stuff, she got her own place so she could do her own thing. Like most of her friends, she has a main job, a side job, and an Internet art hustle.

I’m not sure she or anyone she knows is crying over his “wasted life” as one character I knew back in the 1980s did, the decade my contemporaries and I burned through our 20s. Based on the law of averages, I don’t doubt that a few have had the next best thing to a personal crisis with it. As for my daughter, as for most, though, I imagine they’re simply too busy to be that fussed about it. They’ll have some drinks to it, sure. But not so many that they can’t get up to go to work the next morning.

What do you see? A sunrise, or a sunset? (I’m sure most readers of this blog have already guessed it, but I needed a photo here, and the philosophical exercise sounded like harmless, if hackneyed fun.)

My children are not sheltered, gated-community kids. They’ve seen their share of human trainwrecks. Before my daughter was out of high school she knew at least one boy who had died from an overdose of black tar heroin. After high school, another hung himself from an old railroad trestle. She has plenty of other stories to tell, maybe not so dramatic, but just as sad for those lives that were truly wasted.

In the end, there were those people went one way, and my daughter and many more people, who took the longer road.

The weather won’t always be with you. Drive defensively, but remember, fortune favors the bold. Find that balance!

I laugh to think how my wife and I came from situations in which, “I’m the first in my family to go to college!” was a big deal. I was of the second generation of those, and that winning streak ended with me. Neither of my children have burned or plan to burn precious time and money sitting in classrooms. High school was hell enough for both of them, and as colleges and universities are in the process of rendering themselves irrelevant (for reasons better explicated on other blogs devoted to this peculiar bit of institutional decay), I’m proud they simply went on to take jobs, excel at those jobs, and move up enough to survive on their own. It’s more than dear old Dad ever did. I didn’t start doing anything I was proud of outside of raising children until my 50s.

I’ve seen my children’s friends. Some are smarter than others. A couple you worry about. All are hustling to one degree or another. To my mind, the trope of the Lazy Entitled Easily Offended Snowflake Millennial is just another thing the media promotes to make us all hate ourselves and one another. 

Sure, there are a lot of suboptimal people out there. They’ve always predominated. To my mind, that which is good is treasured because it requires effort to make happen. Good is not a by-product of laziness.

Good is still working out there. It never quit. It doesn’t seek, nor does it often get, publicity. If you’re hating on Kids Today, I’m telling you you’re hating the wrong kids. Go find a better crowd. Mine did.

Keep pushing through those mountains until you find your sunny day.

Cultural Anhedonia

It’s either that or another surprise late-in-life mental shift coming over me.

From the Google search page results for “anhedonia,” in case you needed the definition but were too embarrassed to ask.

Standing before the music library in my office I nearly had a panic attack trying to decide on a compact disc to listen to while driving to pick my son up from work. It was taking too much time to decide, and not in the sense that I have so much good stuff. I wasn’t in the mood for any of it.

I wasn’t in the mood to spend any time with Aerosmith. The Beatles? I’d had a crisis the month before when I realized I was skipping their tracks when they came up on shuffle. I’ve heard all of their songs a million times over. I didn’t want to hear them anymore. 

So how about anything from my complete Cocteau Twins catalog? David Bowie? Bob Dylan? That’s just the first of three racks of compact disc racks I own. 

I ended up making the 20 minute drive to Alamosa listening to the rusty distributor bearing chirping irritably under the hood of my Jeep. Unless you’re into pop country, modern basic girly-pop, or Mexican music, Colorado’s semi-remote San Luis Valley isn’t known for the quality of its radio stations. (I’d tried, though. Again.)

“Alas, has my heart grown so cold in my old age?” Oh, hush. This is me leaning out of my upstairs bathroom window at dawn last Friday taking art shots of the icicles and hoarfrosted trees. It’s -3°F/ -19°C out here. Is that youthful-edgy enough for ya, or just old man crazy?

This would astonish anyone who knew me growing up, when I couldn’t get enough of the same two or three bands, especially The Beatles, Stones, and Who. I know some who would say, “About time. You’ve been listening to this same old stuff for half a century already. You should listen to—”

Stop right there. I’m not only uninterested in the music I used to listen to, I have absolutely no interest in any new music you’re trying to sell me. I’ve heard some stuff in the last couple of years that I like (see my Jukebox category in the black taskbar above), but I have no pressing need to seek out the Next Coolest Thing by way of feeling au courant and totally with it, man. 

I’ve got all the cool I need right here. As for being au courant, well, this is now, isn’t it?

I knew I’d suffer some changes in attitudes towards things with the removal of my cancerous prostate in June, but my growing disdain for the music I’ve been listening to for years and years and years and years was something that was simmering before I came to Monte Vista in 2016. 

Working in relative silence can be more distracting than anything, because you get all kinds of random noises from the house and whatever’s going on outside. As Stephen King noted in his book On Writing, one plays music and plays it loud to make a sonic shell to keep those distractions out. My obvious solution is to fill a track list with instrumentals and deep cuts from some of my lesser-played discs.

This is what I mean when I say I play discs. At left is a 1GB MiniDisc, a miniature primitive hard drive that goes into Sony’s failed, one-season-only 2003 Walkman model at right. I’ve always liked the sound the proprietary software coaxed from its proprietary digital files, so I’ve held on to it. The discs, like my January one pictured, are starting to break down after ten or more years of use. I’ve yet to find an MP3 player that comes close to the fullness of sound I get from this, so I expect I’ll soon be playing these files from a dedicated all-in-one computer.

Who knows, maybe this is the year I’ll discover classical music. At least I won’t be bragging about listening to “Miles” or Ornette Coleman, ad tedium, in the future in this or any given parallel universe. People who claim to like jazz are the most insufferably pretentious smuggos on the planet, so I won’t be joining that fraternity. No worries there.

I’m 57 years old and I need some new anthems to keep me marching forward, that’s all.

Until I reach that faraway range.

I smile to consider the irony that in this whiz-bang, blockbuster-of-the-week pseudo-culture, my life is about as quiet as anyone’s from 100 years ago. It’s not just music that fails to capture my passion anymore. The only reason I can be fussed to watch the one and only television show I watch anymore is to spend time with my wife. The blatant social agenda I see on too many shows, even the one I enjoy with my wife, turns me away.

I may yet do a post on how the film 2016 Arrival insulted my intelligence to such a degree I hate modern movies and the hateful people who make them. Or not. I’m actually at peace with not being excited in any way whatsoever for the latest remake, re-imagining, franchise installment, comic book maladaptation, or, in the case of Arrival, a trite Mary Sue story masquerading as thoughtful speculative fiction.

Honestly, I’m not even angry about it. I luxuriate in my apathy towards modern pop culture. I celebrate being too old to have to pretend to care about the Latest Greatest Whammo-Blammo CGI cartoon. It frees me up for so many things.

If you’re into this, fine. No one’s judging. I’m just happy looking outside my picture windows at the cats on my porch. Yeah, I’m old. What was your first clue, Buttercup? I don’t expect anyone to believe this but it really is quite a relief in so many ways. Pray you make this level. You’ll know what I mean.

I do need to find some new music, though.

The Blue Porch Wild Kitty Committee. My favorite reality show.

St. John's Wort

I’m two capsules removed
from those toxic sunbeams 
shoving 
down
on my 
shoulders

choking my heart 
with poisonous gray dust

these New Agey herbal supplements
keep me as hard & as ignorant 
as any expensively groomed putz
making six-figures worth
of contributions
to the great multinational
people-eating machine.

a good thing because 
when I pass my son’s room
I see the friendly faces
of the trains, his talking
teddy-bear
& suffer that 

terrible knowledge 
everyone else ignores 
(what can you 
do?) that the

six-year-old 
boy with the 
big gap in his teeth
is dying one day 
at a time
& the smiling 

faces of the trains
his talking teddy bear
will soon entertain rats 
in a rain-soaked landfill
unless they

manage to find 
another home
where

other children are
decaying into dull-witted
teenagers

at best too hassled
to realize they’ve been
dead for as many years
as they’ve been interested 
in grinding hips with
other corpses
like themselves

I have no problem
with growing older as
I’m long since resigned that
the sweet young
things I so adored are
old brittle miseries showing
their true faces at last

I don’t have to look at them 
if I don’t want to
& I don’t but

I have to watch my
son

I have to watch all 
interest & curiosity 
& pure joy flake 
away into a series 
of surly poses

which may or may not
amuse the people to whom 
he sells himself
into slavery as a 
(we hope) 
Responsible Adult.

I took my children’s passage into tweenhood hard. It tore me apart seeing that innocence and joy of play go. Fortunately, they grew up to be great adults, so there was a happy ending to this. Still, you miss those children. You only have them for such a short while.

From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2003, 2019 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

What Schedule?

Beginning a column of counter-intuitive writing advice that likely only works for me. Here is the one time I will quite unironically recommend people do NOT do as I do.

I’ve come across a couple of writers who have written of their super-tight work schedules. The successful ones always perform specific tasks within a generally set time frame, so there honestly is no knocking this. You do want to be successful, right? 

Some might point out that this isn’t so much “intuitive” advice as it is obvious common sense. Well, you’d think, but it’s a big world full of people out there. For those, I invite them to bookmark this page, lest they pay others for this commonsense advice when I’m giving it away free:

Make a schedule and stick to it. Get up at a set time, sit down to do your emails and social media at a set time, schedule your edits and rewrites for a set time, and set aside a special stretch of time, at a precise time, to do your new composition. 

It doesn’t necessarily have to be in that order. For instance, I’ve recently learned the best thing for me to do is ignore social media and emails for at least the first hour. Spontaneous writing first thing in the morning awakens the beast.

That’s a post for another time. The point is there must be order.

Of all the counter-intuitive advice I give—don’t join writers’ groups, don’t force yourself to write every day, etc.—this is the one time in which I say, “Don’t do what I do.” 

Lovely antiques, but I’m grateful for text I can correct onscreen before printing and a digital camera that doesn’t require me to wait/pay to have film developed.

I don’t have a schedule. I don’t even do deadlines. I find them oppressively irritating and self-sabotaging. 

My approach is leisurely, and would horrify most for its perceived waste of time. 

They’re entitled to their emotional distress and I’m entitled not to care.

Ooooohhh, 2 EDGY 4U!

Here’s what most people cannot be made to understand under threat of torture, but I’ll mention it anyway. I am not in this to make a whole lot of money right away. 

Oh, I intend to make money, all right. (By this point, most people are already confused.) However, my business model is to maximize income by selling a product that is as durable as it is readable. This means I need to take my time with it.

As the great dramatist Orson Welles would intone at the sad end of a great career, shilling for a mid-shelf adult beverage on a network television commercial no one remembers anymore, “We will sell no wine before its time.”

Pictured above is one of the greatest creative talents who ever lived. At age 22 he famously pranked radio listeners across the USA with an adaptation of War of the Worlds for radio that made it sound like the alien invasion was really happening. (The CBS reporter dying on air “live” as the Martian black smoke crossed the East River was the most memorably horrific scene for me.) At age 25 he would direct and star in what is widely considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest films of all time, Citizen Kane. Orson Welles did lots of other stuff, too, any one of which we’d be happy to dine out on, but this is what most people remember him for, if they think of him at all: the fat guy selling supermarket wine on TV. Whenever I start hating on myself for being such an underachiever, I think of Orson Welles—and potentially destructive self-loathing becomes tolerably generic depression. You do what you gotta do.

I learned this lesson the hard way with the release of my second novel, Grace Among the Dead, in 2014. I’d hoped to finish that book mere months after the release of Bleeding Kansas, as I thought I could easily rewrite the proto-novel from which most of Grace’s story came.

That was a nigh-catastrophic error in judgment on my part. I’ll never forget that night I leaned back blearily in my chair and realized I had to drop what I was doing, and start going backwards in pages until I found the point where my narrative left the rails. Trying to edit a clumsily written text (this was my proto-novel, after all — Hemingway smartly threw his over the side of a boat) was a mistake.

For all the time it took, I might as well have started cold. In hindsight, I should have scrapped the whole thing and done just that. Instead, I spent an entire year slogging through for the sake of a few good scenes, with the battle with Bo Hemoth during the tornado being the centerpiece. Because I wanted so badly to turn my manuscript in at the same time I’d turned in Bleeding Kansas the year before, I submitted what I had of Grace Among the Dead at the time, figuring I had a good month to go through the manuscript while it was being processed.

The process I’d gone through with Bleeding Kansas the year before was accelerated, to say the least. I can’t blame the publisher. They’d waited a year already for this thing.

It was quite a tangle.

My misadventures in writing the third book would take several posts, but for our purposes here, I will state that my caution in regards to how everything looks and reads has played a large part in the years-long delay. If you’re on the indie scene, it’s a stone-cold reality you need to adjust to—Maxwell Perkins is dead. That is to say, the great and wise editor who will advise almost line by line how to go is long gone. You’re lucky to get properly proofread.

All of that is on us, the creators. And when you put it like that—creators—your responsibilities make a lot more sense.

However you choose to feel about it, it is what it is. It’s why I’m taking my time. It’s why I’ve revised Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead twice, because I want the tone and style running consistent throughout all three books.

These may be the only novels this old guy writes. They have to be right.

Meanwhile, you make a schedule and stick to it. Me, I’m doing this the only way I learned how.

Until I run out of road. 2018 was my Cancer Year. I need a new theme.