Zoom Out, Zoom In

Everything’s a matter of perspective.

Somewhere in the fog of November I’d slipped these photos into a folder for use in a post that month and promptly forgot them. A mere four photos for two exercises in perspective, but a post is a post. We’ll start from a location in western Alamosa County, looking due west at Blanca Massif, home to not one, not two, but three peaks over 14,000 ft./4,267.2 m.

It’s already a little pre-zoomed out and fish-eyed with this old Canon Powershot, but that’s part of its wacky charm and I’ll cope until I can get funding for a proper DSLR. Meanwhile, I’m doing well enough. Now, zooming in:

As that ancient ‘80s pop radio hymn goes, now face north. It’s still the Sangre de Cristos and I have no idea what the individual peaks are. Even up close I don’t see how anyone can tell. It’s just one jagged line of sharp snow-covered rock.

I’ll never get over how flat this high valley is. Fun fact: no one, neither Spanish nor Anglo, took anything from the local Indian tribes when they settled here. It was simply too crazy cold for the Utes and Navajo to endure in the pits of winter. They hunted when they could and beat feet out when the weather started turning. It’s fierce enough everywhere else around here that’s not in the San Luis Valley.

I’m looking at that and I can imagine what someone coming in from the Taos Plateau to the south would think, “There’s no way through that, is there?” You’ll need to head farther south to find a proper pass.

To Live Among the Clever Folk

oh, to live where nothing is too loud
where nothing smells bad
everything is clean
everything works.

amid the clangorous traffic 
the boom-thudding-boom of
vulgar peasant subwoofers
I would move calm and upright
in an exquisitely armored bubble 

authoritative and resolutely
cheerful cellos and violas 
entwining among the warm 
and welcoming woodwork 
of my mind

Everyone I know and work with
(never for) is guileless and pleasant
even the attractive, fresh-faced
help behind the counter
are happy to help
because they know
sure as sunrise
this isn’t where it ends

this is something they’re 
doing now as a favor 
for a family member
for mad money
and they’re proud to do it well
from across that deep gulf 
of difference between 
serving one’s own
and serving one’s betters

so very few people I know
can begin to comprehend 
what that means
but I’ve seen these places 
I’ve met these people
and tough break 
it was not my fate 
of birth to dwell 
among them

I can’t hate myself 
too much for trying 
to emulate them
listening to public radio, etc.
reading all the right books
checking out all the things 
these people liked and 
trying to like them myself

an author I admired once cautioned
“be careful whom you pretend to be
one day you will wake up and
that’s who you really are”
and God help me
I counted on it

I wasn’t wrong to want to get away
from what I wanted to get away from
but I understand why I was shut out

I also understand I could still earn 
my way within the gates 
were I to create 
a smart boutique business 
or a bestselling book
to afford a space among them

it’s all right
everything worked out

my wife, my grown children
the quiet in the country farm town
where I live now
suffice enough
to crowd out 
any hard feelings

We’ll keep our distance as
we always have, thank you,
and all the best to you 
and yours (seriously, we’re 
not talking about this the science 
was long ago settled)

Cheers.

From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2020 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

Twelfth Night 2020 Notes

Alliterative, ain’t it? Clearing my psychic desk in time for the first normal week of the New Year.

I’m sure this is not the first year in memory since Christmas and New Year’s Day fell on a Wednesday, but this is the first such time I’ve ever seen so many people complaining about it. Yes, it does result in two weeks chopped in short halves. It also results in Twelfth Night/Epiphany falling on a Sunday. I realize mileage varies for all, but I see nothing but win here.

From yesterday, 4 January. Five hundred miles since 12 October. I liked how the 100 and 500 looked together.

The monthly Windows 10 update continues to be a test of one’s anger management. My 35-day postponement was up on New Year’s Day, and as I’d hoped to write for a little while past midnight, I elected to suffer the multiple downloads, in interminable installations, and the inevitable shut-downs of my machine from processor overheating. 

Although I cursed losing two hours of playtime on my rig for these stupid, useless updates, the miserable process went by as quickly as could be hoped, with my computer only shutting off once during the download process. (Why simple downloads should tax a processor so remains a mystery to me.) Remarkably, the entire download-and-install process left very little to clean up. Normally there would be multiple gigabytes to be swept from the system, and I wonder if someone at Redmond finally figured out that most people aren’t as assiduous as running Disk Cleanup as some, thereby filling and congesting their hard drives.

That the process is now self-cleaning is an improvement. As if to offset this rare “benefit” to an onerous process best done without, however, I noticed that this update wiped out every setting on everything on my machine, from my music player to my printer. Even the thumbnails of image files have been omitted for uploads, requiring one to find the icon in the upper right corner change them back. This doesn’t seem to have relieved any stress from my video card and monitor, though. Instead, my video card update seems to have crippled where my thumbnails do appear. I have to hit F5/Refresh to make the blurred and out-of-shape thumbnails come into focus. This has never happened before.

“Winter Sunset Through a Filthy Windshield.” It’s not as crazy cold as it can get here in the San Luis Valley but it’s enough.

This will be the first time in so-long-I’ve-forgotten that I’ve had to roll back drivers for a program. I know I’ve done it, it’s been ages, but here we are. As for the rest, I ‘m going to have to reacquaint myself with my machine and do some search-and-destroy. Until I can secure the funding for a Windows 7 license and I can lock down the machine, it’s all I can do. That, and stay on top of my backups. 

One of the biggest things to go down this season was my sudden, obsessive compulsion to straighten out this side of my office. Towards left is the original chimney to the house. For as long as we’ve been here, the wooden corner plaster guard was off. I went crazy with some glue and nails and got that thing back on. The place feels so much more whole now.

It’s as if, knowing I’m so close to finishing this crucial bridge chapter in my third novel, The Wrong Kind of Dead, I’m slowing down. I’m mere pages away, though, and it should be done by the end of this week. Note what I have so far in the lower left-hand corner, 121,629 words across 348 pages and growing:

This will be a very big, very solid, most action-packed adventure. Something that encouraged me this very day was seeing the trailer for a sequel to a popular science fiction/horror movie of the last few years. The movie was about a post-apocalypse Earth in which giant, spidery aliens have killed most of the human population. The aliens are blind, but very good at homing in on sound. No one could make any noise or the giant spiders would crash through the wall like Kool-Aid Man and eat them.

What was encouraging was the sequel dials the clock back to the most interesting part of any post-apocalypse, when the ordinary world begins unraveling, slowly at first, then all at once. It’s what I’ve invested several months and over 100 pages into, by way of telling the story of how Agnes met Elyssa, then came to Sister’s Keep to eventually meet the Dead Silencer. Even when you know what’s going to happen, it’s still a thrill to see how your favorite people learn to adapt to their rapidly worsening situations.

It’s also good to know you’re not the only one who’s figured something out.

For my latest published novel in the series. I’ve got to make a lot more like these.

“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.

The Shifting Decor of Our Seasons

It means something; I’m just not sure what yet.

There was a second part of a post I wanted to publish featuring images from last autumn. I may yet assemble and post it out of sheer perversity between now and the end of February. For now, as we begin the long slog through the two most loathed months in the northern hemisphere, I would have us reflect upon this image captured on Veterans Day. Behold the U.S. national ensign planted in the sidewalk in front of a thrift store in the midst of putting Christmas up in one display window while Halloween still squints against the sunlight in the other.

Something-something, the duality of man and nature, blah-blah-blah, who cares? I thought it was a neat shot.

Random Thoughts on the Changing of the Decade

First off, Poindexter, we all know how to count. Yes, technically, all decades end on the year ending in “0.” Culturally, that’s not how most people look at things. For instance, no one considers 1970 to be part of the legendary ‘60s because 70. Don’t just shut up, go away. A Mister Know-It-All who doesn’t know when to shut up doesn’t know squat worth hearing about. We’ve other matters to discuss.

People who argue when decades “really” begin are lucky to get a kiss from their dog when the clock strikes midnight. Of course, it’s all society’s fault and the result of a “systemic” something or other.

I read something somewhere that noted that, for the first time since the ‘90s, we’re living in a decade with a name, namely, the ‘20s. The writer pointed out that the first two decades of the 20th century weren’t named, either. A good  point, but I like to think of the last decade, at least, as the twenty-teens. What, you say it leaves out 2010 through 2012? Call them the twenty-tens and twenty-teens. It’s not nearly as clunky as what people have been calling individual years since Y2K.

A pet peeve of mine is how people still say “two-thousand something” when “twenty-something” scans so much better. I’m hoping people will get in the habit of saying the one-syllable shorter “twenty” over the cumbersome “two-thousand” as we get into the twenty-twenties, but I suspect it will take a while yet. People seem really attached to saying “two-thousand.” Saying “Y2K” (why-two-kay), as in, “Y2K-19,” spits out faster, and has some savoir faire to it, but savoir faire left us long before the original Y2K, so whaddya gonna do?

When does the New Year become the Same Old Year? Today? Not for me. I’ll hang onto the feeling until Epiphany. It still seems a bit soon but we’ll cope.

I wish history had been taught the way we’re expected to remember history in the media, namely, by decades and their fashions. It could be noted how fashions were slow to change in the absence of global electronic connectivity, but they shifted enough to account for the differences of the centuries. You could list the centuries and the top ten things they were famous for in terms of improved technology and who was whuppin’ whom, with some fine print towards the bottom for the remaining hundred. Students who could memorize these details would have a far, far better grasp of how things came to be in their world than they would listening to some nattering narcissist going on and on and on for the longest 60-90 minutes of their lives.

By this logic, Miss New Year above will be a wizened crone in a granny gown come next December. Here’s hoping she keeps her hair.

Comparisons with the Roaring Twenties of the 20th century are inevitable, but let’s hope it’s not taken too far. The next decade is the ‘30s and the 20th century ‘30s were not famous for being a time of prosperity and happiness. Let’s make these years our own.

Happy New Year from the Blog

No best-of/worst-of lists. Not yet, anyway. Only gratitude for now.

Twenty-nineteen was a better than average year, even as I failed to finish the so-long-awaited-it’s-forgotten conclusion to my zombie post-apocalypse trilogy. Many changes occurred in my life, largely for the better and putting me on track to be more productive. 

I began going through my 2019 journal today and realized I had a lot of material for blog posts if I put my back into it. I’ll give it my best shot. I have a lot of best-of categories to sort and file, and among them are a few choice single paragraphs on a variety of subjects which can work with minimal adornment. I need to train myself to be more pithy. A short post every day beats a brilliant long-form post every two weeks or more.

I’ve made resolutions, most of them regarding bad habits that need to be left behind in the old year. I’m generally good about honoring my New Year’s promises to myself but I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say I’ve got a really good feeling about this year and here’s hoping you’re the same.