Arguing with G.K. Chesterton on a Sunday Morning

It’s not the smartest thing to do at any time, but I’m not the smartest man. Still, consider the following:

G.K. Chesterton isn’t as well known a Christian apologist as C.S. Lewis, yet he was every bit the approachable and easygoing — yet uncompromising, and supremely knowledgeable — writer and philosopher we wish we all knew and hung out with. I always chuckle to think of these proud, obese slobs from one of my old schools with one or two divorces behind them who want to talk to this old apostate about Jesus like they would know anything about the subject. These blustering fools couldn’t spell Aquinas, let alone tell me who he was. It’s impressive enough if they can name all the books in the Protestant Bible.

With respect to the venerable Mr. Chesterton, the crux of my counter-argument is that no hero is ordinary to begin with. Our protagonist likely isn’t anyone’s idea of a hero at the beginning of the story, but a good writer makes it clear the potential is there. Sometimes our hero-in-waiting will have what German author Hermann Hesse once referred to as the Mark of Cain. That is to say, ordinary people will despise him on sight and treat him badly. If not that, he’s behind the metaphorical 8-ball one way or another.

Your ordinary person is a coward who folds in the face of conflict then goes around finding ways to justify his failure. It’s not uncharacteristic to imagine an ordinary person telling everyone afterward how he put that monster in his place. We live among these people. “Most people are garbage” is a cliche for a reason, because most people are. Of course, Nietzsche would have told you as much, and long since has.

Heroes engage and defeat (most of the time, and certainly not at first) the monster against the pressures of their own terror and feelings of inadequacy, and sometimes even the carping of the “good” ordinary people who wonder aloud why he’s picking on the poor, misunderstood monster. The hero only appears ordinary on the outside. But he’s an outsider from the git-go, and the good ordinary people often never let him forget it. It just takes that One Big Event on top of some smaller ones to tease out the heroism that truly defines him.

Ordinary people serve only two purposes to me. To antagonize my protagonist, and to die horribly when their beat comes ‘round.

Oh, but Chesterton is talking about “the modern psychological novel” versus the classic fairy story here. Do such things as psychological novels still exist? Frankly, I don’t need to know that badly.

But even Jack of “Jack and the Beanstalk” fame was cursed for a fool for trading for the magic seeds that set him on his hero’s journey. Hansel and Gretel were special enough to be despised by their step-mother and proved resourceful in their circumstances even before they were captured by the old witch in the woods. I could go on. 

Heroes are outliers, always. Given that a lot of us feel like outsiders where we are (especially if we’re weirdos who actually read and stuff like that), these stories serve to inspire what heroics we may be called upon to do one day. Provided, of course, we’re not merely ordinary. 

There’s only one way to find out.

Random Thoughts on the Second Hottest Day of the Year

Friday was the worst. Let’s see how far I can get today before I have to shut down my computer because the room is too hot and the cooling fans are screaming.

For those scratching their heads at the header, I live in a part of the country where it gets uncomfortably hot for maybe two weeks out of the year. If I had the disposable income, I might install a swamp cooler (which, at our altitude, would work better than a standard air conditioner), but as when I lived in California, and 1,000 feet lower in Colorado Springs, it makes as much sense to open windows, run fans, and then close the windows and draw the curtains by 9 a.m.

Looking at the forecast, and going by my memory of how the seasons work after three years here in the central San Luis Valley, the worst is close to over. Saturday looked as if it were going to be second hottest day, but then a cold front tore through and rendered the day cool and unsettled until clearing by sundown. We won’t get such a break today, but we’re due for a couple of more classic July scorchers before the month is up and the temperatures begin slowly ratcheting down. As uncomfortable as it gets sometimes, I remind myself we’re three, maybe four weeks out from the leaves changing.

The year is slipping away.

Fade to bright yellow, then orange, then red, then black.

On the bright side, I’m getting a lot of writing done because the browser strains the processor in the heat. Word 2010 uses very little resources, even with a 259-page document open. So, no trawling for silly memes in my downtime. Heck, what downtime? I’ve got nothing else to do but write. It’s a beautiful thing.

An Encouragement of Surprises

Notes on stuff, thangs, since the last time it occurred to me to post something.

The days have blurred into weeks since I last posted. No one’s died this time around (thank God, and I’m not being funny), but I did get a surprising e-mail from Severed Press on 20 June. And by surprising, I mean I had to print it out and read it three times with my glasses to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating a notice for a three-digit royalty payment.

In keeping with my tradition of breaking up text with unrelated images, here’s an antique manure spreader on display amid flowers. Okay, so maybe not entirely unrelated....

It was a low three digits, hardly anyone’s idea of a weekly paycheck, let alone a quarterly royalty. Still, it’s the first of such size I’ve gotten in six years of having books for sale. That I’m getting royalties at all from Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead after six years is phenomenal in and of itself. When Severed Press published Bleeding Kansas in July 2013, I read somewhere the average e-book author sold 600 books and was good for maybe six months on the charts. I’ve tried to get stats since then, but, honestly, no one seems to really know.

The main thing is I’m still here. Also, I’ve sold a lot more than 600 books. The money has added up over the years, and if it still seems too little, too late for the countless hours of effort putting into creating both novels over the course of a year each, that’s not my problem. I’m happy to be alive and still in the game. Heck, I’d gone for 50 whole years wondering if I’d ever figure out how to write a novel. And here I am.

Still trying to get that perfect shot of these buttes and mountains. I like the details that reveal themselves when the light is muted just so.

A lot of people suffer from the delusion that the money just rolls in when you publish a book. If you’re of the top dozen or so name-brand authors selling off the racks at the airport, sure. Otherwise, you’d better learn to be happy with a couple of night’s beer money every three months. The big money doesn’t come until someone decides your book would make a fine movie or streaming television series. 

Naturally, this is all the more incentive to finish The Wrong Kind of Dead, the third and final book of my zombie post-apocalypse action-adventure series. For my part, I just want to finish it. I think of Samuel Johnson’s famous decree that “None but a blockhead wrote but for the money,” which I’ve always misinterpreted for the better. Realistically speaking, if you’re writing just for the money, you’re going to be disappointed. You’d better be doing this for the love of putting something together, whether it’s an imaginary world of heroes and villains or monsters or an ordinary political argument. You need to be in love with the craft.

A very blockheaded and cornball thing to say, I know. I also know a guy who got placed with a Big Name House, whose book got optioned for film. Life solved, problems over, right? I forget the precise details, but Big Name House screwed him over regarding publishing the rest of the books in his series. He’s back to shopping novels to indies, and though he’s still doing better than the thousands who throw in with the Great American Writer Sweepstakes every year, he’s not happy.

“My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.” —Bluto Blutarsky, Animal House.

I should also note this guy is also one of the thousands who is absolutely nothing without an editor. You can read any one of his several novels out there and you can tell which ones had someone coming in behind him to clean up his prose and force him to make sense. His general philosophy, like that of too many others, is that if the words are spelled correctly and the grammar more or less works, you’ve got a prose style.

He was in it to make money and get famous. Of course, if making money and getting famous is all you’re about, fine. I’m in no position to make moral judgments here. (That PayPal button is there for reasons.) What I’m saying is, if fame and fortune are your primary reasons for making up stories and selling them, you’ll be lucky to end up like this guy. Not everyone sells to the movies. Not everyone makes as much money as he did.

He did light-years better than most. Make no mistake. But he didn’t get filthy rich. He didn’t get famous. 

After decades of slogging away, he only grew older, and more and more embittered. 

So ends another morality play in...the Twilight Zone. And now the lesson is yours.

One should really take time to stop and smell the...what are those pale purply things, anway? They look like something from another world.

Meanwhile, yes, I’m running late—way, way late—on that third book. I’ve been wondering how to describe the difficulties I’ve encountered in the last five years. After wondering for a minute, I’m back to working through whatever those difficulties are in the novel itself.

Many thanks to everyone who purchased my books. I’m throwing everything I’ve got at the keyboard to make this last book worth the wait.

The Blue Porch Kitty Committee waits also. For kibble.

Social Media Isn’t Evil; People Are Careless, Cruel, and Stupid

...and shortsighted. But who saw this coming?

This story is as old as kindergarten, when that one hateful little brat would shadow other children for the purposes of observing minor infractions they could report to the authorities, in this case, the teacher. Most commonly, it was for saying Bad Words, followed by Expressions of Unacceptable Attitude.

While most teachers would say, “No one likes a tattletale,” in the late 1960s when I was coming up, no one today questions the character of the adult who pores through years of social media to find that one phrase, that one expression, even that one association—liking a Tweet by a Designated Evil Person, for instance—in order to ruin someone’s life. 

To extend my metaphor, the targeted child doesn’t just miss recess. Any infraction is enough to get him expelled from school entirely. Which, when you think about it (and you shouldn’t have to), is putting deplatforming, unemployment, and loss of income mildly.

As the saying goes, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. So it is with social media when things get mean. It’s people going after people. What part of the “social” in the “social media” did you miss?

Where every turn is a wrong turn.

As I write this, YouTube is in the news because one “journalist” working for a dying clickbait site managed to get several content creators shut down. Given the rapidly turning political tides, this does not bode well for the dying clickbait site, which already doesn’t enjoy much goodwill, given its trollish notoriety. Meanwhile, YouTube and all the other social media sites have all but grabbed the sign that says “Duck Season” and screamed, “It’s duck season! Shoot me now!” There has been such a sloppy arbitrariness to many of the deplatformings, several law offices no doubt have another pot of coffee on as they prepare for the harvest of monetary settlements to come. And then there’s the possibility of the U.S. government getting involved.

This is small comfort to those fighting to get their livelihoods back while the “journalist,” like the creature who promoted the University of Virginia rape hoax for Rolling Stone, will likely move on quietly to another job. (These people are assiduous at taking care of one another and keeping each other employed, which contributes greatly to their resilience.) So what’s the lesson for the rest of us?

We’ll just have to do the best we can. Like the classroom tattletales of days gone by, these creatures can turn the most innocuous thing you’ve said into a Grand Manifesto of Most Abhorrent Evil Intent, so don’t sweat too much of what you say. The terrorists win that way, after all. Most importantly, as a matter of policy, never apologize, especially if you suspect you may have said something to offend someone. It sounds counter-intuitive, but apologies are always taken as admission of guilt. The hostilities are thus escalated, never mitigated. 

Part of what makes these monsters so evil is how they use the best qualities of good people against them. And these monsters are monsters, by the way. They’re not here to right injustice or make the world a better place. They’re here to hurt people. Ruin people. Because they can.

That said, I recommend keeping all anger in check. As the saying goes when dealing with obstreperous children, “Remember, you’re the grownup.” Most everything you see in the media, including our beloved Internet, is designed to get a rise out of you. When enough of us meet these outrages with a stone face and say quietly, but firmly, “Enough,” is when this madness stops.

As I read the chan boards and Facebook pages dedicated to slagging on the current culture, it occurs to me that many, many more people are lurking for the entertainment as I am. What could they possibly be thinking of all this? How will they make decisions on what to buy, whom to buy it from, whom to hire, whom to vote for, etc., based on what they’ve seen?

For my part, I can’t wait to find out.

There’s always a sunny day, if you’re up early enough for it. The clouds still close in by 11 a.m. around here.

Psychic Bath Bombs

...because “Stinky Potpourri” didn’t smell right. [Ba-dum-TSSSSH!] Seriously, what am I, twelve? Thus, under new branding, I present the latest in disconnected thoughts interrupted by semi-relevant to entirely irrelevant photos:

WEATHER REPORT
After our drought-busting winter (finally) in Colorado’s scenic central San Luis Valley, we had the usual spring windstorms. Unfortunately, the windstorms have continued into a daily feature of our summer. 

If you want to see a pretty day, you need to get up with the birds. Everything is gorgeous, the sky cloudless, the air warm and promising. By 11 a.m., though, fat stacks of cumulonimbus clouds are piling in from the south and west, and it’s dark in time for lunch. The wind picks up, the air cools. Quick, five- to ten-minute long squalls of high-intensity winds over the last couple of days have done a number on the shingles of the neighbor’s roof, and I’m sweating bullets for ours. 

It’s the joy-murdering gloom that predominates throughout the day that really wears on the soul, though. The heavy wall-to-wall cloud cover breaks up just in time for sunset. On a good day, you’ll see the sun through the breaks, maybe get some color.

On the other hand, we’re out of the drought, and that’s no small thing. Given the hellish heat I’m reading about from my home state of South Carolina, I don’t mind running the heat a little bit in the pre-dawn versus running the air conditioner 24/7.

I was going to make a joke about being under attack by gay aliens or cartoon frogs in clown wigs but I have to remember not everyone goes to the same weird places on the Web I do.

WARNING: THINGS NOTICED OUT LOUD ON THE INTERNET
I’ve seen many a complaint about the proliferation of gay-friendly ads released by corporations for Pride Week/Month. Oddly, the only gay-friendly ads I’m seeing are posted by the very Facebook meme pages complaining about the “flood” of ads. You’d think these people would know a thing or two about how to block and filter online content—and you’d be right. It’s just something to complain about to get the great masses of people who neither know nor care to learn filtering and blocking to feel validated.

This is where most writers would say, “I can’t wait for this month to be over so I won’t have to read about people celebrating _________ (and where’s OUR month?)” but I’m happy to see every month there is, even January and February, and especially June, which marks the anniversary of my cancerous prostate removal. If stuff bothers me, I bl0ck it. Ironically, for as sheltered as I deliberately engineer my social media life, I seek out these complainers. Sometimes I even join in their various Two Minute Hates against whomever, whatever, if only to hate myself for it later. Crazy, right? Yes. It is.

Because....

From the Aborted Dreams Facebook page.

I came across this halfway through my first cup of coffee at 4:30 in the morning. I was in a funk the entire day, thinking of the characters I miss. I thought of how it was when I learned a friend from school days had died, how he’d spent the last ten years of his life struggling through Huntington’s chorea while I was losing my mind acquiring an MCSA (remember those?) in time for the bottom to fall out of the economy, and I thought I had problems. The two times I was back in South Carolina in the last seven years I could have looked him up. 

You know the rest. Watching the sunset through the picture window I realized it had been one year since what I thought might be my last night on Earth, because I was facing a five-hour prostatectomy the next morning. As of today, it’s been one year since I’ve been prostate-free. As for cancer-free, I’m overdue for a checkup.

This was taken on 19 May before the current pattern set in. The high clouds colored the dawn light in such a way it made the trees and the mountain behind it look like peak fall. (The ruddy evergreens give it away, though.)

STATE OF THE POST-APOCALYPSE
Meanwhile, in the wonderful world of writing The Wrong Kind of Dead, I’m pleased to report that it’s filling out at the end as I write the scenes I need to write up to along my outline. Meanwhile, I’ve been rewriting the two longest chapters at the beginning to better reflect the characters involved. It’s not just Derek Grace’s story anymore. Agnes Grace, Elyssa Godwin, “Brother” Christopher Grier have their own sagas within the larger saga of what happens to the human race when the elites press the reset button by way of releasing the Final Flu.

We’re not against petty warlords here. We’re against the very people who started it from behind the safety of their walls—and those survivors in the dead-infested Wilderness outside who know they got shafted. And the living dead, some of whom have developed primitive self-awareness and the ability to command entire hordes via pheromones released by the flesh-eating bacteria animating their bodies. Oh, and I forgot to mention that misanthropic colonel gone rogue with a virtual doomsday arsenal of conventional weapons at his disposal. 

So far it stands at 227 finished pages. I always knew it was going to be a monster. What’s important that it’s a well-built monster that can pass among the humans. Until it doesn’t.

And so, with thoughts of language and mortality and character development among the living dead, I leave with a photo of poppies and lilacs blooming in colorful defiance beneath the gloomy June skies. It’s a metaphor for something. You fill in the blanks.

Faith, an Elegy

I miss God sometimes
Rather, I miss when I could believe
He might be the father to stand in
for the father I never had.

Like so many others, though,
in the fullness of time
I fell upon that belief 
with claws and teeth

It wasn’t enough 
to cast off allegiance
I wanted to hurt 
that imaginary being

I wonder if this 
reaction has a relation 
to the urge some young girls have
upon the onset of puberty 

to mutilate, burn, or otherwise 
ritualistically torture their dolls

mindless, gleeful violence gloating
over the remains of 
childish affection

for some it appears a necessary development
the artifacts of a once sweet and loving child 
not merely destroyed
but desecrated

memories of happier, more loving times 
slaughtered, the more cruelly the better
so that the more practical 
sensible adult may take the place
of a child who somehow
vanished in a single night’s sleep
went out to play that one last time
came back
ate dinner, went to bed
and that was that. 

Of course, God was nothing like a sweet child
making up stories and enjoying tea with her toys
but a cranky old man who created us flawed
and hated us for it

therefore He had to permit His only Son
His avatar on Earth to be mutilated, tortured and
killed oh-so-slowly (those glorious Romans
being such expert practical, sensible adults)
that we might be washed clean in the blood
wrung from agonized flesh

ah, and that final detail—

the son of heaven
crying out for his father
but the father has withdrawn 
and so the son dies
humiliated, in pain
alone

salvation born in plain hateful meanness
for some reason this was necessary
the practical, sensible, and 
most God-like thing to do

The story should have lost me at the
sticky, stinking, so gratuitously spilled 
gore washing us clean

we’d been treated like rotten little children
promised something better if we only behaved
while the Favored Ones were as rotten as could be
and rewarded before our faces
right here on Earth
right where and when it counted

so we acted out like rotten little children
at once rebelling against our father
while most faithfully imitating Him.

This is far from 
the Greatest Story Ever Told
but it’s certainly among
the oldest.

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

The Passion of Sgt. Pepper

A landmark popular music album reconsidered over one half-century later. When what’s taken as your best is really the beginning of the end.

On 1 June (2 June in the U.S.) 1967, The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As this album with the colorfully striking and instantly iconic cover appeared after a relatively long, quiet stretch after calling it quits on years of touring, Sgt. Pepper was considered a comeback album. Strange as it may seem to us in the distant galaxy of the early 21st century, but it had been over three years since the band had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and in the hurried-up world of the emergent global popular culture of the mid- to late 1960s, The Beatles were already considered old hat and on the way out.

As the album was called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and as Paul McCartney was hyping it as The Beatles pretending to be another band entirely, the album is also considered the first “reinvention,” or rebranding of a popular music act—and, given the circumstances, just in the nick of time. As always, to fully appreciate this requires an understanding of the way things were when world superstars like The Beatles were a brand new phenomenon.  Consider the world of February 1964, when “the loveable moptops” in matching suits played on Ed Sullivan, versus the world of June 1967. Google the images. 

Hint: They looked nothing like this three years ago, not even the year before.

Now realize that, with what most critics consider The Beatles’ peak as a band, they had all of two years, two months, and 22 days to go until they were over. The last time the four men would be all together in one place was for the final promotional photo shoot at John Lennon’s Tittenhurst mansion on 22 August 1969. They had just exhausted their last bit of tolerance for one another on their last album, Abbey Road, finished just days before. Look at those photos and flash back two years before, then three years before that. It’s curiously apropos seeing that black-and-white world turn into fuzzy color. (Coincidentally, The Beatles’ previous album, Revolver, had a black-and-white art motif versus Sgt. Pepper’s blasts of blues, pinks, reds, greens, etc.)

I disagree with the generally accepted notion that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was The Beatles’ peak. All the hype stripped away, Sgt. Pepper was a better-than-average Paul McCartney album with very special guests and the most painfully mediocre songs of his Beatles career. 

But it was so well-produced! Ahead of its time! Revolutionary! 

Please. “Fixing a Hole”? “Lovely Rita”? 

“When I’m Sixty-Four,” while cute, is yet another one of Paul’s “rooty-toot songs” as described by producer George Martin, and more scornfully as “granny music” by George Harrison. When John Lennon was asked what his contribution to the song was in his final interview for Playboy magazine, he sniffed that such a thing would never occur to him. (The song was indeed all Paul’s, as he’d composed “When I’m Sixty-Four” when he was 16 and still living at home.) The best I can say for it is it’s a relief following the tedium of George Harrison’s twangy-dangy, boop-bop-bop of “Within You Without You.” Finally, something with a melody!

A somewhat deceiving image. George was famously bored throughout these sessions. Ringo had so little to do he learned to play chess to pass the time. They were no longer four guys learning songs to play for a show. It was more like two, sometimes three guys seeing how much studio jiggery-pokery they could load up their own songs with. They still had many classics to record, but it would only get worse from here.

Imagine if the quasi-metal stomp of “It’s All Too Much,” recorded during the Pepper sessions, but discarded for 1968’s Yellow Submarine soundtrack, had opened side two instead. I imagine a much better album. Even John Lennon’s contributions, aside from “Lucy in the Sky,”  “Good Morning, Good Morning” and the much ballyhooed (because much produced) “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” seemed forced to me. (The White Album, in which they practically all made solo tracks, is where Lennon would really shine in this declining phase of the band.)

Yes, Sgt. Pepper had “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and the greatest John Lennon and Paul McCartney collaboration to end them all, “A Day in the Life,” but this album was the beginning of the end. The Beatles’ last album as a cohesive band was Revolver. At the beginning of June 1967 the band was no longer touring, founder John was psychologically checked out as leader, and Paul was much too eager to take over. With the band soon to lose the guidance of manager Brian Epstein, as of June first, The Beatles had all of two years, two months, and 22 days left as a working entity.

I know I’ve mentioned that fact already.  My contrarian take on one of their most iconic albums aside, I simply can’t get over how much quality work did get produced, and over such a short, febrile period of changes in fashion and attitude. We’ll never see such times again, let alone such a band.