Fire Sermon; #1 of...

"No power on Earth can harm me tonight. I have walked with the King."

---the late and truly missed Hunter Thompson


"Eh! Eh! Bomba, ye!"

---Satchmo (if you were really listening)


Sorry the tone of the latest few blogs has been so dark, my dear little brothers and sisters in the Logos. The next one is about eighty times darker.

WARNING: This contains some hot Gnostic preachin', brothers and sisters. Don't nobody go callin' the men with the van. I am of sounder mind than I have been in ten years.

Big Pulp and Farrago's Wainscot (links when they're up, no intros needed for these heavy-caliber magazines) are both running some truly horrifying stories I wrote this year, "To Soothe The Savage Beast" and "Lotophagi." In re- reading both of them, I am struck time and again by many things, most of which I'll shut up about at the risk of turning this into a tech lecture, which no one wants to sit through when it's so nice out, at least here.

But suffice it to say that they're dark, even for me. Crawl-around-in-your-guts dark. I was proud of both of them.

"Savage Beast" was inspired pretty much the way it sounds, just changed names and locations, and did not and will not name the security company. The ghost is real. It has been verified by at least two sober officers. And the piano player is real. The implication, the link... That came from various sources. According to the Gospel of Satchmo, if you have to ask, you'll never know.

"Lotophagi" was originally two stories. The former Sue Zoon published the original, "Where Lost Things Dwell" (a similar ditty about a squat-house and a Manson wannabe) in '02. The other story that became that one, "Half-Sick Of Shadows" was about a fictional hippie tree-sit in Alpine, OR, that never sold anywhere, and rightly so. It was self-referential crap.

But sometimes, when you fuse two sick animals, the resultant Jenny Hanniver gets up and barks like a chimera pup. "Lotophagi" was apparently one of those times, if it could get Darin Bradley's ear. (Bradley's in Diet Soap #3, very good piece from Doug Lain, M.K. Hobson and crew, as usual. )

Darin Bradley and FW specialize in finding a home for bastard critters like "Lotophagi." To this day, that story scares the old-time shit out of me.

But the most horrifying story is the one I can never tell.

I had kind of an epiphany yesterday, brothers and sisters. Out of respect for its catalysts, I will only say that sometimes, we spend so long pushing the Pull door (Jeff VanderMeer's words, not mine... and don't even get me started about the squid tentacle that pulled the door open last week...)...

That we build up habits around that, habits that become actions, that become pathologies.

We become the mile-long railroad waste dump we played in when we were kids, so our bones never grew together right and our brains never grew right at all. We become the scratch on the frontal lobe, the dog that howls too loud, the two-headed calf.

Nietzsche said something about that, some warning to do with bringing slingshots to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass building; or that when you swallow your pride enough to stop being afraid of the Dark, sometimes the Dark stops being afraid of you. And sometimes not all of you makes it off that battlefield. Sometimes, you're missing limbs.

And sometimes, you wish it was a limb that you missed, every passing day you can never get back of a life you could have been a part of.


Everyone who really knows me, and can scrape together enough character to say that they follow this blog (rather than hiding and skulking in the dark) knows what I'm really like, and the kind of weird shit I've been through even making it back this far.

Constant Reader #1 recently informed me, "You know, I'm not completely in the dark about what you've been up to over the years."

Up to... my neck in debt, assumed and compounded. Up to my neck in awful things I still have to write about to get over.

Those things were fine with you,Constant Reader #1. You needed me sick, just like your parents needed you sick. The problem was, you started to believe I was all of the coward you made me out to be.

I lived. I fought my way out. And now I'm starting to heal.

And you can run to Antarctica, you sorry piece of trailer trash. There'll be a Mississippi hard-ass lawyer waiting for you on the ice. Might be five years, might be ten. Might be tomorrow. You don't get to know.

You can think you got away, and that I'll never be able to repay the mess you left me with. Enjoy the time you have. The papers'll be in the mail. Watch ye then, for ye know not when the Master of the House doth approach.


Everyone with half a lick of sense who truly knows me knows that not all of the Past was my fault. It's never all anyone's fault. No one is ever truly static. But as I once wrote of another sexual compulsive, those whose dreams are stomped in infancy will spend the rest of their lives throwing a boot party for others. ("Eva"Neometropolis#1)

"If you can't figure it out," Constant Reader #1 adds, "I have nothing further to say to you."

Brothers and sisters, they that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs on mine head. The only reason I haven't been able to heal any more than I have, more than the imagined prison that one or two closet readers of this blog think they keep me in... is because I can't ever truly repay my sins, not to my own satisfaction. I can't ever repay the parts I'm truly sorry for.

And those parts have nothing to do with Closet Reader #1, brothers and sisters. Not at all.

There is a child polymath out there, brothers and sisters, born of an angel and a demon (and I still couldn't tell you which was which.)I owe her my life, and I handed her straight to the boogeyman in the closet. And that's the one debt I can never, every repay no matter whose name is on the bill.

Brothers and sisters, what I left Lydia is the one sin against God and Goddess I've ever knowingly committed. I had no choice. That doesn't make it any easier to sleep past 8 AM, or lead a normal life. The only thing that ever started making me sick is that I saw it coming and I couldn't stop it. And I still wonder if I will ever be able to beg my daughter's forgiveness.

It's the parts I can't repay that would have killed me so fast... if I could ever let them.

No, every bill comes due, brothers and sisters, with a lovely Yiddish word I learned from the Grand Iconoclast, Harlan Ellison: Vigerish. Another Red Sea Pedestrian and damn good writer, Aaron Larkin (Bastard High Command) summed up the English translation of that word when he wrote,

"Revenge is a dish best left in the back of the fridge until it takes on a life of its own and jumps out at you."

So it is. Amen. I just needed to get that out. As another prophet, Bill Hicks, once told us, don't worry, there are dick jokes on the way...;)