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.

Cold Snaps and Cool Beans

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

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

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

It’s a very chill town.

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

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

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

Always a pretty drive to Del Norte from Monte.

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

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

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

Keeping the glowing heart of the season alight.

The Nuisance House Across the Street

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

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

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

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

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


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

Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Season’s End Blues, 2019 Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year, anyway. 

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