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.

State of the Apocalypse: New Year's Eve 2015

A partial report, thank God.

In the interests of physical and psychic self-preservation, I have resolved to never again put off my grocery and liquor shopping until New Year’s Eve. The mellow vibe I’ve enjoyed since Christmas took a hard hit today.

Thanks to other resolutions adopted and prosecuted throughout this last quarter of 2015, however, I’ve rebounded. I’m going into 2016, not as from a starting gun, but roaring past the line at speed.

It looks idiotically, condescendingly simple as I type it out, but I learned this lesson the hard way: don’t put off until some arbitrary date to start doing something. Just get on that shit the minute you decide it’s something you need to do. If it’s something you needed to do yesterday, it needs to start now.

The view driving to the library today to dump off some books I’ve been dragging around forever, some since the 1970s and 1980s. I’m throwing out a lot of stuff in anticipation of a move back East I’m not so sure I want to do anymore, given all the unnatural warmth and rain they’ve had there, and all the wintry beauty we’ve had here this season. I’m done with this neighborhood, but Colorado itself will be hard to leave.

I end 2015 at page 230 of The Wrong Kind of Dead, Chapter 27. I might get a little further before I pop the cap from the sparkling wine in time for midnight and salute the fireworks blazing from the summit of Pikes Peak, but I’ll leave these numbers for posterity. I was so happy to finish Chapter 26, “In-Flight Horror Movies,” last night. It was a major crawl forward, as this 34-page monstrosity not only takes us through the Fun and Games part of the narrative, but introduces a sinister twist to the undead, while setting up all the pieces to be knocked down. That chapter had a lot riding on it. Now for the mean part. Then comes the Terrible Vengeance. Oh Lord, that’s gonna be a lollapalooza....

This Captain America mug I got for
Christmas holds a full pint of coffee.
There are no more excuses now.

It’s good to have something to look forward to. I’m especially looking forward to getting a solid zombie apocalypse adventure narrative put to bed. The DEAD SILENCER has been rolling on years past the normal sell-by dates for books. Still, it has yet to find a mass audience. 

Actions will be taken to remedy this.

There’s much more to talk about but the hour grows late. I will enjoy tonight’s revels while I can, because a more ascetic approach to living will be key to accomplishing my objectives to 2016.

So let me close the blog for this year with a hearty thanks to all who have stopped by to read my ramblings, my zombie fiction, and maybe bought one of my zombie books. I’ve got more to come, so here’s a heartfelt wish towards your peace and prosperity in 2016, so you can buy more. I won’t pretend I don’t have some self-interest in this.

Seriously, may 2016 be the year you made things change for the better. Many warm regards from my basement office to wherever you’re reading.

Chapter 1 of The WRONG KIND of DEAD: “Unbearable”

From the ALL-NEW, Yet-To-Be Proofed and Published FINAL BOOK of the SAGA of the DEAD SILENCER

Most people know to make quiet and back away upon discovering a mama bear with her cubs. I’m sure even the dead obeyed this essential instinct a few months ago, before the winter’s hard freezes immobilized them.

Like the bears, though, the bacteria animating the dead went into hibernation. When the thaw came, it awoke ravenous. The urgency to devour raw, living flesh shuts down all sense of self-preservation in the host cadavers’ brains. Roaring furiously, mama bear rears up on two legs and swats these humanoid beasts into spinning pieces. Still, they come, hooting jubilantly for their meat.

Round-the-clock exposure to the elements has weathered the corpse-flesh of every race, color, and creed into the same pale, jaundiced leather. Their clothing hangs in ribbons of blood-rotted cloth, the backs of their trousers and skirts eaten away by the toxic scat they pass after consuming living flesh. It looks like mama bear climbed with her two cubs to this rocky shelf to get away from these ghouls. Unfortunately, the walls around this shelf are 25 to 30 feet of vertical rock. They’re trapped. I’d need a rappel to get down to them from where I am.

But to get up to where the bears are from the base of this ridge, one would have to climb nearly 75 feet of steep, naked rock. The dead wouldn’t have attempted anything like this when they were last active. Judging by the slimy brown wetness on their hands, the successful climbers still had flesh left to wear off in getting here. The dry-boned ones can’t keep a grip. Much angry wailing follows as they flip and tumble down the slope, taking out many of their fellows on their way.

Mama bear rears up again, in a halting, staggering motion, and for a moment I fear she might fall over. The outline of her ribs shows through her fur. I’d ease over to the wooded ledge on my level of the ridge to see how many ghouls are still coming after this starved and cornered bear, but I don’t dare move. The first thing these monsters do when they find their feet is twist their heads to either side, sniffing the air. They smell us; I’m sure of it.

I’m fairly certain (I think) they can’t get up the walls around the shelf, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try. As berserker reckless as they are, there is also an eerie sense of purpose about these post-freeze dead. It’s not something I want to test.

Mama bear swats one gore-swollen tick of a man so hard his head flies from his body. Claws out, she slashes one former cubicle drone stem to stern. He falls in halves, one side, then another, about the growing pile-carpet of corpses.

The numbers are against her, though. At first it’s one, then two that manage to avoid mama bear’s swinging paws. Soon, half a dozen of them are staggering about the bodies and body parts in the clearing. While mama fights four deaders, two others are going after the cubs. Mama bear’s preoccupation allows one more to surmount the lip of the shelf, then three more after him.

Squealing piteously, the cubs charge up a narrow slope of scree to a rocky outcrop eight feet up from the floor of the shelf. For a moment both seem to be running in place as the scree rolls and slides beneath their paws. Only one finds the traction to get there before the other.

The second cub cries out as a woman in the rags of a floral print dress grabs it by its rear legs, adjusting her grip to bring its soft belly to her mouth. She falls backwards, a shock of fur poking from her mouth as a young man in a metal band shirt pulls the cub away. He grapples with the man whose shirt front and tie are rotted away from the multiple bibs of gore he’s slobbered there. The remaining knot of his tie resembles a dog collar. He grabs one leg and rips it away towards himself, making barking, laughing noises at the man in the remains of the T-shirt. 

I hear the bone snap in the cub’s leg, the cub shrieking, mama bear’s anguished roar as she sees and hears but can’t get away. A teenage girl in a dirty bra, the shreds of flannel pajama bottoms flapping about her legs like filthy pennants, clings to mama bear’s back, pulling her fur away with her teeth as the burly young thing in a muscle shirt circles behind, and the shirtless middle-aged man in soiled Bermuda shorts goes straight for her belly. 

Mama bear falls forward, crushing the man in the Bermuda shorts. The remaining ghouls pile upon her back. She attempts to roll over on top of these newcomers, but her strength is gone.

As is my tolerance for the sound of that little cub’s cries. I pull the crossbow from my shoulder harness and nock an arrow. I spend more time than I’d like getting my breathing under control. 

I want to take the cub out of its misery but its head thrashes in agony. I have a better shot at Barking Laughing Man. I’m nocking another arrow as he falls. Metal Band T-shirt is next. Now the cub, but a large woman in a soiled pink shift lumbers into my line of sight. The shaft thumps into her back. 

It might as well be the kiss of a gentle breeze for the way she sets upon the twitching and mewling cub. I aim for her head. It takes two more precious shafts to drop her sprawling atop the little bear, smothering its cries. Her generous mass requires the efforts of three large ghouls to wrestle her from the remains.

They’ll have her off in a minute. Mama bear is down, her face in the dirt. These hijacked remains of humans, people who once had names, jobs, and debt, even siblings, parents, children, and pets, they sprawl across her body, rising and falling with her dying breaths. They cling with their rock-sharpened finger-bones exposed through their bloodied hands, burying their faces deep into her fur as they gnaw through to the pale flesh beneath.

At last, one of my arrows finds mama bear’s head. I drop three more ghouls, but that still leaves six to feast on her carcass. I don’t have many arrows left, and we’ve got to get home. At least no more are climbing over the edge of the shelf. Even better, the ones already there, tucked into their respective meals, have taken no notice of their downed fellows. An empty cage of ribs lies where a baby bear was once. A lanky young man tugs at the head. He nips at the face, then figures what the hell and curls up with the cub’s head between his knees, greedily gnawing the flesh from its skull. 

I feel her small hand slipping into mine. “Daddy?”

I look down at nine-year-old A.J. She took to calling me Daddy around Christmas. She tugs my arm and nods towards the cub on the outcrop. I’m about to open my mouth in a doomed attempt to convince her I can’t afford the arrows when I see something that makes me pull her to me, my hand over her mouth to stifle the scream I know must come. 

The dead not snorting and gulping down every bloody gobbet of flesh from mama bear and the dead cub are closing in on the surviving cub. Three groups of two each carry the remains of their fallen between them. The first couple throws the body at the foot of the wall beneath the ledge. The other two couples follow suit. 

They’re building a ladder of corpses to their terrified prey on the ledge. The three men and two women stand aside as the alpha of their group, a tall man in the rags of a suit, puts his foot upon the bodies and lifts himself up, his long, yellow fingers stretching towards his meal.

The cub leaps off the ledge, its hind paws tearing into the face of the alpha. The cub manages to land without hurting itself, but the dead are turning to catch it. The cub bounds over the corpse-littered floor of the shelf, straight for the ledge. A.J. cries out into my hand as it leaps over the edge into space.
Forgetting my previous avoidance of the ledge alongside our terrace, A.J. and I grab hold of the trees along the edge in time to see the cub hit the slope one-quarter of the way down. It bounces and splays in midair before landing in the writhing pile of corpses and corpse-parts at the foot of the ridge.

The stench is eye-watering. The widening streaks of thick, brown corpse gravy oozing down the rock have joined to make one vast, slippery sheet of old, dead blood. What was merely difficult to climb is now impossible, and the latecomers slide downwards to join the masses groaning at the foot of the ridge. 

I squeeze A.J.’s shoulders and we begin creeping away. With the bears dead and no more ghouls coming over the ledge, the only noises from the rock shelf below us are slurping, smacking, and moans of pleasure as the new lords of the food chain take their meat. Baby bear is thoroughly skeletonized. Things will get nasty once mama bear’s carcass is stripped. 

It’s a long walk into the trees before we escape the foul sounds. There’s got to be some place where the people aren’t. Where the dead would have to roam far to find us. So what if the gasoline is going bad and I have no idea where to lead our tribe, now with six newborns and another mother ready to pop? It’s hero time. 

“When are we leaving?” says A.J, jogging alongside of me. 

“I need to talk to your mother first,” I say. 

“We have to go,” she says. 

“Tell your mother what you saw, then.” Agnes will raise hell at me for having A.J. anywhere near the stinkers, but it should help emphasize the urgency of our situation. 

“Brother Christopher would have saved those bears,” says A.J.

“If he’d had everyone in his squad coordinated around the rim, maybe. Even then, there’s no way those bears were getting down from that shelf. They were dying there one way or another. They should have run along with the first two waves.”

I’m talking about the stampedes across the mountain a couple of weeks back. Rabbits, squirrels, deer, mountain lions, and bears—even dogs and cats, swarms of rats and mice, foxes and coyotes—charged through our yards and kept us inside for two days at a time. Christopher and his men tried culling what they thought would be easy meat from the charging herds. Not a chance. You were as liable to be trampled as anything. Or attacked, as happened to Justin with that one big dog of the pack that nearly took his arm off. Everything, everyone is hungry and scared.

The tears brim in A.J.’s eyes. “You still coulda—”

We freeze at the sound of engines. Multiple vehicles, and not the kind we own. A.J. follows me up the rise overlooking the road below. Where I left the golf cart out in plain sight.

“All right, warrior princess, time to put on your cloak of invisibility.” I look around. Smart kid, she didn’t wait for me to tell her. If they stop here by the golf cart…well, A.J. should be able to find her way home. 

Whether she still has a home by the time she gets there is another matter.

NEXT EPISODE: Chapter 2, “Uphill Both Ways”

For the price of a happy hour drink, you can enjoy many delirious hours among the delightful hellscapes of my first two SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER books, available in Kindle and paperback from Severed Press. We commence the crash of civilization in Bleeding Kansas, wherein our intrepid hero Derek Grace must survive a plane crash, combat with the undead at the local Wal-Mart, an exploding fire truck, a female hardbody assassin, and lots of hungry walking dead people-things.

Book 1 has ONE exploding head
on its cover.

I’m told it reads even better in German. This edition from Luzifer Verlag also sports a hellacious one-of-a-kind cover courtesy of ace artist Michael Schubert:

You can buy this German version stateside here.
You know you wanna.

Book 2, Grace Among the Dead, steps up the game with a tale of love and redemption, the living dead, and a flame-throwing monster truck. We’ve got an arc going from decadence to...respectability?...for our hero. As close as it gets, anyway. You should savor this big book o’ hell while it lasts, because things are about to go completely to shit.

Book 2 has TWO exploding heads.
See the pattern here?

They’re also available in Canada and the UK.

###

Christmas 2015 After-Action Report

Notes on a foreshortened season.

The singing angle summons the decorations
from their perches. My wife is in a hurry to
de-Christmas the house so she can get back
to the business of prepping it for sale.

I’m not at all religious but I know a miracle when I’m feeling it. The miracle is all the things I finally got straightened out in my head this Christmas. I’ve even made—and am so far keeping—resolutions. They’re beautifully elegant in their simplicity and how each one supports the other.

First, I have resolved to use the tablet I got for Christmas for my Internet trash reading, and do that trash reading outside of my office. The principle behind this is the same as in modifying one’s behavior to combat insomnia, by using the bed exclusively for sleeping or sex. One should not read or watch TV in bed if one ever hopes to establish a proper sleep schedule. Likewise, I shouldn’t be using this chair in front of this desk in my office if I’m not writing. 

It’s not the delayed writing I’m concerned about, either. It gets to where I’m simply existing in this chair, and life is short. There are people who are forced to live in their chairs who wish they could get up. I need to indulge this luxury while my bones still support me.

Second, I am de-cluttering everything. On Christmas Eve, I began reviewing and deleting links on my Chrome bar. I not only found and tossed some ghost sites, I said goodbye to a few that I would actually look at from time to time. Most were sites indulging in the Great Issues Complaints of the Day. I am no longer interested in such things. The negativity doesn’t help my writing, nor does it improve my health. Knowledge of the latest skulduggery by bad actors conveys no benefit to me whatsoever. 

I already know to avoid bad actors. Out, out it all goes.

These are good actors, staging for their final boxing in Colorado.

The result of this change was immediate. I’m not tempted to go to those old websites because I don’t want to upset the calmness of spirit I enjoy. 

The de-cluttering continues in terms of my losing weight (this has been going on since October), shedding and shredding old papers, and discarding items I’ve held onto for no reason beyond neurotic hoarder’s instinct. It’s much like throwing weight overboard an aircraft in order to gain altitude. 

You guys stay.

Chapters were closed this year. New ones were opened. 2015 marked our first Christmas with our adult children, and it was very good. We all understood next year would be different. We don’t know when or how, but we may miss a couple of Christmases together from here on out, for whatever reason. Which is as it should be. They’re getting their own things going on. We should be moving on, too.

I really don’t want to leave Colorado but we can’t stay here. All our friends are back east. Still, to leave our children...our grown children, but still...I have that much more to sort out in my heart and head. I’ll work it out along the way. Like everything else.

A curiously symbolic thing happened just last night. My son had returned from his girlfriend’s house. He was in the mood to sit up and talk about things, so I offered him a beer. He reached for the bottle opener I’ve had for ten years or so, and it broke in his hand.

I’d forgotten how long I’d had this old novelty bottle opener. My son told me with how amused his sister and he were as they heard me use this to pry off a cap, then fume for a minute while tinny noises of Homer Simpson enjoying a beer played out. They were small children then. They laughed even harder as the battery began dying and Homer Simpson’s voice slowed into a prolonged growling before ceasing altogether.

We’d had this novelty bottle opener for over ten years. It had opened thousands and thousands of beers for me. It broke opening my son’s beer. He felt bad about it. I thought it apropos. I took a photo for posterity. Then I tossed it. RIP, Homer Simpson novelty bottle opener.

RIP, so many people and things this year. “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

For those who have read this far, I hope you have had a Merry Christmas. Here’s a wish for an energized and productive New Year to all of good heart.

       I wish you a hopeful Christmas,
       I wish you a brave New Year,
       All anguish, pain and sadness
       Leave your heart and let your road be clear.

                                                           —Greg Lake
                            “I Believe in Father Christmas”

###

My Final White Christmas?

Growing up in the humid jungle of South Carolina (bless my heart), I ached to experience a Christmas like I saw on TV and in the movies, where it always—always—snowed. Well, I’ve done that, three times in Anchorage, and maybe seven times here in Colorado Springs. Looks like I’m doing it again this year, this time with feeling. 

The forecasts for Christmas Week 2015, where I’m living now, and in the Greenville, SC, area where my wife and I are planning to move. Let’s hope this is just a really bad year for the South, as they actually do entertain temperatures approximating winter sometimes. Ideal Christmas weather conditions as I recall them growing up were 40 degrees F and raining. (Images Copyright © 2015 their respective ABC TV affiliate stations.)

As it well may be for the last time ever, I’m delighted to see a prolonged White Christmas this year. However, I’m also looking forward to spending Christmas 2016 (among other days) with my people back east—and most certainly not looking forward to the freeze-and-thaw cycles Colorado will endure until Memorial Day. If, while growing up in South Carolina, you’d told me the day would come that I would leave a gorgeous, magical land of White Christmases and legal marijuana to return to that unhappy place I would have turned my back and walked away, refusing to answer that insult with a proper punch to the face. Oh, the times, they’ve been a-changin’. 

###

George Clayton Johnson, RIP

You don’t know this guy. But you saw what he did.

UPDATE, 26 DEC 2015: I learned yesterday evening that I was proceeding from one of several erroneous reports of George Clayton Johnson’s death. Johnson’s son announced his father’s passing on Christmas Day. Lesson learned: check the sources. If the death notice isn’t from the family, it’s likely a hoax, or, as I suppose in this case, a matter of writing the obituary and carelessly printing it before the subject in question has passed away. 

Remember that episode of The Twilight Zone in which Jack Klugman played a game of pool with a deadly serious Jonathan Winters? George Clayton Johnson wrote that, and seven other episodes, including that one in which a very young Robert Redford played Death masquerading as a wounded police officer. Johnson is primarily remembered for his Twilight Zone work, but his story about a shape-shifting, last-of-its-kind salt vampire, “The Man Trap,” was the first episode of Star Trek ever televised, which I expect we’ll hear more about as that air date nears its 50th anniversary on 8 September 2016.

As Monsters of the Week go, the Salt Vampire
was pretty terrifying. Especially if you’re
nine years old and seeing it for the first time.

With respect to Johnson, most of Star Trek’s production people, including actor Leonard Nimoy, were against airing “The Man Trap” first, because they considered it a standard-issue Monster of the Week story. NBC, however, wanted something just like that to draw in viewers. I get the impression Johnson himself wasn’t terribly proud of the script himself, as he never talked about it much. I believe, as Nimoy did (it was in an interview with him in which I learned this story), that Star Trek’s success as a series would have been far more immediate if they had aired the shows by their shooting schedule and presented “The Corbomite Maneuver” first. It would have made for a much more spectacular series premiere.

Trust me, I’ve not quite scratched the surface
of GCJ’s career. Check out the somewhat
breathless, albeit more comprehensive obituary
where this photo comes from. 

All that said, any writer worth his salt, myself included, wishes he had one-tenth of one percent of George Clayton Johnson’s résumé, which included far more than Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. (His first sale that became the basis for the original Rat Pack Ocean’s 11 film, for one. Co-writing the novel that became the movie Logan’s Run, for two. There’s more.) George Clayton Johnson was one of those unsung heroes of TV and film who wrote a bunch of stories you remember seeing, but unless you’re a writer, or into classic 1960s TV fandom, you never caught his name. He lived a full, long life, did lots of neat stuff, and, as of 25 December 2015, he’s gone. As the Great Bukowski asked, not so rhetorically, “Where are the replacements?” 

Sunday Meditation: Father Bukowski Speaks of Hells Left Behind

For the longest time, like a good, well-trained citizen of these United States, I used to consider myself a failure for not having a career. In my half-century-plus of existence, I’ve never worked anywhere longer than three years, if that long.

But then I think back on those places where I worked, and it saddens me that people could be so soul-dead as to not mind coming into those same places every day, dealing with those same awful people every day, watching the seasons change through the same plate-glass window year after year. 

Watching each other grow old, talking about days until retirement like you’re all waiting to get out of prison—a prison you campaigned to get into, and worked like a fool draft horse stay in, because you’re no one if you’re not wearing someone’s brand of striped pajamas. If you do not belong—as in, you are not owned by someone who commands your time for 30 or more hours a week, why, that’s just the worst.

All love and respect to those out there making the wheels go round in the cubicle farms and whatnot, but the idea of still working at any one of the places where I used to work back in the day fills this basement-dwelling horror writer with cold, nauseous dread. Father Bukowski wasn’t cut out for that madness, and neither am I.