Blurbage

"I enjoyed it quite a bit... Touched and honored."

---Trent Zelazny, on 'My Country 'Tis of Thee'  in Oddlands

Story behind Trent: He is a bad-ass writer of horror and science fiction. (And, oh, yeah, by the way, his Dad wrote some books about some city called Amber or something a while back.) Story behind 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee':

I was googling something entirely unrelated, and I ran across Trent's short story "The Day The Leash Gave Way." I cannot say enough good things about this story, except that it was enormously inspirational to think that someone could do the idea so deftly and quickly, and sell it to a big market... and that a Zelazny did it, to boot. 

So of course I had to pastiche it, same way I do to Waldrop and Di Filippo and (most recently) Sargent and Scholes and all those other underappreciated geniuses I know. MCTOT is a story I made up based on a long conversation I overheard from a rather unique neighbor.

Don't get me wrong. The neighbor is not at all a victim of any kind of abuse. S/he is perfectly happy the way s/he is, and s/he is a grown... whatever... able to make all h/ir own decisions for hi/rself. However hi/r fiance (male and theoretical until Oregon legalizes marriage for all humans) struck me second-hand as more than a little creepy. Arc #1.

Arc#2 came from my utterly religious viewing of Jerry Springer at the Grove Hotel. For five months, I waited to be able to watch an episode of Jerry without that prick slumlord shutting off the TV behind the front desk. (Hi, Morris. Are you in jail yet? You should be.) 

Anyway, don't get me started about Springer and his brilliant documentary filmmaking, or the mirror he holds up to America. I found out about his political history, and Arc#2 wove the strange America around my neighbor like myelin around a nerve. 

Until I read Trent's story, though, I had no fucking clue how to start this one. Then the real-life Merlin of Amber took me straight to school on paper.  Mutual Admiration Society meeting called to order, yeah yeah, but...

Stuff like that just happens to me. Like finishing up at work today and getting interviewed by the Oregonian at random, then walking home past ZZ Top's tour bus and a cloud of weed smoke that got my grandchildren high. It's Portland. Random things fall out of the sky and recite Ovid's Metamorphoses at you in Farsi. The gutters may rain confetti or polonium. Nothing is ever static here...

Roadway Not Improved

Even though I don't, and can't by all physical laws, raise hell the way I used to, I still find ways to keep my pulse above 200, gray out entire streaks of hair and make my hands twitch. Sometimes, I remember that this is a good thing. 

Like tonight. On the way back from the grocery store on Max*, I inadvertently took an unimproved section of Carlton Street between 45th/Woodstock and my house. 

Don't get me wrong. That little electric is a tank (I was run off the road on it once, flipped the thing 360 and all that happened was both mirrors got broken.) For reasons such as these, I babied it around every pothole.

But there are a lot of big yard-pony sized bull mastiffs that like to slip their leashes, back in those weird little unincorporated pinball games of Lovecraftian rental housing and meth-motels gone bust with the sudafed ban, where ROADWAY NOT IMPROVED is the name of every street. Those are the parts that are still Felony Flats, and those are the parts that muddin' through on a too-fast-for-its-own-good electric Darwinator can make delightfully interesting.

Like I said, I have to remember that once upon a time, I looked for these things. They make you value what you have. Next time, I'm waiting and taking a left on Duke.

Or maybe not. Maybe next time I'll bring a camera, and drive slower still. Things jump out, back that way. But I don't know that any of them can run at thirty miles an hour... 

(*Blossom's E-Go L6 electric velocipede thingamambob neighborhood vehicle. It's got about the oomph of a moped, more because of the weight and zero accelleration time. My Mabel, aka the I-Zip HG1000, is still in the shop.) 

Personal Mush, Please Avert Eyes

   It's night out on 72nd Avenue, after an afternoon of Johnny Mathis at arena volume. The Transylvanian is putting in new flowerbeds. Mathis I'll enjoy, since he's the poor man's Dean-O, but I draw the line at Pat Boone, who came next on the playlist. (Sorry, Dmitru.)

   While that was going on, I was out checking on the orb-weaver population in my backyard. Our garden spiders come back every year, and to a Pennsylvanian are truly awesome to watch. There is a little fox-colored kitten, one of our mama yard-cat's babies, who has been trying to get into the house for some time but voluntarily starts shit with Katmandu (who gives him these priceless Harrison Ford looks, like , "You are beneath even my contempt.") 

    Long story short, people, I'm kinda startin to feel like the Texified William S. Burroughs, and it's kinda cool. 

    I was talking to my Dad and my sister about how much the Pacific NW is green and weird and antique in the same way that PA was. Holly and I came to the conclusion that Great-Grandpa (short form: Grumpy) Morris got the wrong damn coast. Can't blame him, though, I'd be tired and having lapses in judgement with as hard as the man worked and as much as he moved around. 

   "Grumpy, you missed your exit. You want I-5. To Portland." "Shut yer gob, yeh..."  Heh. 

   Hearing Brian Lumley read at Lovecraftfest also made me think about that side of the family; Lumley also hails from County Durham, Grumpy's long stepping-stone on the way over to PA. The author's accent was frighteningly similar to my late Grandfather Morris', and bits and pieces of the vocabulary on that whole gigantic side of the family.

    There is family out here, too, and not just blood (though the sisters are one state north and one state south.) It is awe-inspiring to think that, despite my own best efforts, I have put down roots out here, and grown a little older and wiser. I forgot I was allowed such things. I forgot that the Family (Bastards on the Right, Blackshirts on the left, Blood in the middle) always finds me. 

    But the synchronicities just blow my mind, in life. The little kit-home that found Blossom and I looks like the farmhouse my family lived in when I was a kid, scaled-down and with slightly fewer crawlspaces. The neighborhood we live in, in this teeming-to-me city of two million, looks like any post-War Polish neighborhood in any part of Cambria or Blair County, PA you could name. 

    Life and our destinies find us, kiddies, when we take the punch in the face, stand back up and finish out the night shift checking ID's with blood pouring into our eyes. The way that life looks when you come to a full stop and gain time to reflect is passing strange, many times, but kind of looks the same everywhere.

   All the more reason to, as Method Man instructs, create a ruckus where you AT. 

    I dream about my ancestors often. The last time I ever got to talk to my Grandma Morris on the phone, she asked how I was and I told her the truth. (Blossom and I were living in the Hancock house then; I was killing rats in the kitchen with a steak knife and barely making any money, she was drowning in school.) Anyway, Grandma tells me, "No. Just listen. You're making it. That's all that really matters."

  This from the woman who made sure that NINE KIDS (read that again) never went hungry. That carried some weight. 

    I dream about blank pages in Buddy's Underwood typewriter he gave me, blank pages that become the white of the same walls in the same room I slept in where once my father woke after realizing his own mortality, realizing the crippling death-anxiety that drove his son to become a writer in the first place. White like the nightshirt Grandma Ruth was wearing when she told my Dad to pray on it, and rocked him to sleep.

   A white blank page like the pond by the farm, where we used to ice-skate, the pond maybe three other people knew was there. My sister Amy, now with two babies of her own, was still small enough that Holly and I hossed her around in the sled with a rope on it as a matter of course. 

   I took that blank page to Governor's School and did the photograph over in charcoal. Those are the kinds of memories we keep, all the way to busting my hump on a snowboard on Mt. Hood years later and remembering the way I learned to ice-skate when I taught myself to toe-rail on one of the bigger boards. 

   A white blank page like this one, that I can never stay away from when I have words to go monkey with. Thank you for listening to Procrastination FM. We now return you to local programming already in progress...

HP Lovecraft Film Festival 2008

The footage and stills are trickling in all over the Web, and I've blogged about the HP Lovecraft Film Festival at the old Hollywood Theatre in Portland many other places. 

I didn't bring a camera. It wasn't that kind of party. The truest parts of the weekend couldn't be photographed, or maybe shouldn't be. I took thousands of rolls with what Peter Murphy wisely called the miniature secret camera.

Like Richard Lupoff taking the bullet at the first Authors' Read, delivering the Arizona-fried "Petroglyphs" with such panache that I could see Dick's soul twinkling out, the soul of a witchy-eyed boy holding up a flashlight to his Kafkaesque face and telling tall tales around the campfire. Lupoff's read alone was worth the wait. 

It was a blowout. Everywhere. There was the usual amount of 'convention head' and bad drama behind the scenes. But no one stayed focused on that. Hell, even I couldn't keep my claws out for long. If I live to be a hundred and eighty six, I will never forget rehearsing 'Jihad Over Innsmouth' in the green room on Sunday, then going up and blowing the room away.

I don't make statements like that unless I can back them up. Two heads I didn't know came up and asked me to repeat my name a few times after I read. Laird Barron, Michael Shea and the inimitable Stan Sargent came up and thanked me profusely afterward. Barron called the 'Jihad' excerpt, "Wonderful writing." 

That round of applause, and the comments from the pros, were the best thirty-third birthday present I could ever get, bar none. 

Laird Barron's short story 'The Imago Sequence' is tied for first in my personal experience with Jeff VanderMeer's 'The Cage' as the scariest thing I've ever read in my life. Michael Shea is a warm-hearted poet who got Lovecraft's iamb right, which made me pay attention immediately (difficult to do in both cases.) And Stan... Everybody (with one exception who wasn't a guest,) was very personable and approachable, but Stan and I are brothers from another mother.  For a full list of attendees, see the earlier link. As stated, everyone was way cool and a joy to be around. 

I got to sit on three panels, too; "Lovecraft in Pop Culture" with Jovanka Vukovic from Rue Morgue , "Authors vs. Filmmakers" (a technical rant 'n reel session about translating Mythos stuff to film and paper), and a panel introducing "The Blair Witch Project" with director Aaron Vanek, and screenwriter Julia Fair, one head of the team that wrote 'Blair Witch' and 'Curse of the Blair Witch' on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Heady stuff. I spent most of the weekend charging around on this natural adrenalin kick. After many years as an ex-pat in the City of Roses, I finally made it to one of those. Ken Scholes saw to it that I got invited, one more reason why he gets a shrine.

Still a bit knackered from all that, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I'll be at ScratchPdx next, then Orycon. I feel like I'm on some kind of weird reading tour. BRING IT...