Rev. Edward Morris' Old-Time Gnostic Gospel Hour

Willamette Valley Sorcerers Writing Group has gone viral :D

2011-05-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

WILLAMETTE VALLEY SORCERERS ONLINE MEETING: FRIDAY APRIL 22: SOUND OFF LIKE YOU GOT A PAIR!!

2011-04-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

Anyone local I've tried to snag, for the writing workshops we have here at Secret Hideout Studio every other Friday, is welcome to help us get a YahooGroup going for online discussion.

We'd talked about moving the workshop, mainly my own overzealous nature trying to accomodate a loved one. But this is more practical, and doesn't cut into Saturdays in the spring.

Not everyone is on Facebook, so it's gotta be Yahoo or a similar discussion group for a while. I am open to ideas.

By way of introduction, for the new folks, my name's Edward Morris. I've been writing speculative fiction professionally since 2002, making about as much money at it as I do co-running Secret Hideout Studio in the Hawthorne district. My Serena and I do what we do for different reasons.

Like how you only get one chance, and the good you do lives after you. Like how you find yourself convulsing on a stretcher with a lung full of blood... and what you do saves you. Then and there. When I collapsed a lung last November, I swore that when I got out I'd quit screwing around and start the workshop I'd wanted to steward my whole young life. Here we are.

I'll let others introduce themselves. To the core group: I've blurbed most of you monkeys already. You don't get off that light. You too. Again, this is just a placeholder, and the message board will be settled on soon enough.

Namaste, and welcome to the Island. :)

WILLAMETTE VALLEY SORCERERS WRITING GROUP: FIRST ONLINE "MEETING"

2011-04-21T18:12:00.000-07:00

We have a meat meeting (meating?) at Secret Hideout Studio on Friday, April 22, 7 PM until. I want to set something up for several friends with odd work schedules or geographic impairments.

All discussion can be through the comment feature until J.D. Busch and I can get a Yahoo discussion group going. This shouldn't be too hard.

In any case, everyone who's been emailed, and everyone who follows this... Welcome to the humble beginnings of the online roundtable version of a writing group that I dub for convenience the Willamette Valley Sorcerers.

You may mock. The California Sorcerers group, which met at Charles Beaumont's house, birthed "The Twilight Zone" and so many other projects. The spirit there was the same as it is here. Everyone brought something to the table, and no one left hungry. If I had a nickel for every time one of you, or even an irregular regular, has talked to me privately about the ways their writing has gotten off the ground since this started... Well, it would be a pretty full nickel bag.

William F. Nolan came here twice, and sat in my writing chair, just as he came to Chuck's. And when he heard the way I wrote their workshop leader, his eyes lit up and he smiled. I got it, and Bill told me that. Because of the spirit that we have here. A man I am also pleased to call friend, Spider Robinson, nailed what this group has become (and it is growing; 11 deep so far):

"We raise hopes here, until they are old enough to fend for themselves."

The more of us the merrier. Hence, the online version. FNGs (folks new to the group... heh... yeah, that's what it means), please introduce yourselves and talk about what you want to show us, why you write, what you think of doing it, how long you've done it... All ears.

FREE (or in some cases at least "still available")SHORT STORIES BY EDWARD MORRIS

2011-03-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

‎People often ask me, "Where can I find your stuff?" Here are just about all the links to my short stories online. Cheers. ---ed.

"Padam, Padam, Padam" (originally appeared in THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, BOOK ZERO, http://www.mercuryretrogradepress.com/Worlds/TWACM/DeathInc/DeathInc8.asp

"The Bum's Rush"http://www.mercuryretrogradepress.com/Worlds/TWACM/Bums_Rush.asp

“Mixtape” orginally appeared in Arkham Tales #7 Nathan Shumate, ed.
http://arkhamtales.leucrotapress.com/?p=335

"Game Over" originally appeared in All Possible Worlds #2 Jason Champion, ed.

"Sweetheart of Segundus" originally appeared in Circlet Press
Cecelia Tan, ed. http://www.circlet.com/?p=1321

"I'll Take New York" is presently the joint intellectual property of Edward Morris and Houses Amber/Chaos.

"If Company Should Come"/"House of the Rising Sun" appearing at http://aklopress.org/?p=8

"Gregor" originally appeared in The Red Penny Papers
http://redpennypapers.com/fiction/quarterly/vol-i-issue-2-winter-2010-11/gregor-edward-morris/

"Dioscuri" originally appeared as a podcast on Nil Desperandum
http://ndstories.com/?p=95

Jihad Over Innsmouth originally appeared: http://www.3lobedmag.com/issue16/3lbe16_story3.html and http://pseudopod.org/2008/09/05/pseudopod-106-jihad-over-innsmouth/

"Eva" with Lou Antonelli, originally appeared in NeoMetropolis #0x11

“If I Went Crazy Now, Would You Still Call Me Superman?”
(Originally appeared in Bewildering Stories #215 Don Webb, ed.
http://www.bewilderingstories.com

“The Sick Breath At My Hind”
(Originally appeared in The Opinion Guy #6 Seth Crossman, ed.
http://www.ogsf.com/ )

“Scientifiction”
Originally appeared in Heliotrope #1 (Original title:”On The Air”) Jay Tomio, ed. (Italy) www.heliotropemag.com

“Tobacco Railroad”
Originally appeared in Southern Gothic, summer 2005
Jeff Crook, ed. www.southern-gothic.org

“Mysterious Ways”
Originally appeared in The Harrow, Jan. 2006
Dru Pagliasotti & Michael Colangelo, eds. www.theharrow.org

Infamy: Preamble
“Infamy”
(Originally appeared in Oceans of the Mind, Summer 2006 Richard Freeborn, ed.
& in The Worlds Of Philip José Farmer
Michael Croteau, ed. Meteor House: 2009
http://www.pjfarmer.com/

“Deep Down Trauma Hounds”
Originally appeared on www.amazon.com/shorts

“Eva” (with Lou Antonelli)
Originally appeared in Neometropolis #0x01 John Jacobs, ed.
www.neometropolis.com

“Imagine”
Originally appeared in Interzone #200 Andy Cox, Jetse deVries, et.al,eds. (UK) www.ttapress.com
#Finalist for the 2005 British Science Fiction Association Award, Best Short Story

“Hair of the Dog”
As “Wilki Miedzy Owce” ('Wolves Among Sheep') in Polish
originally appeared in Nowa Fantastyka #6
Pawel Ziemkiewicz et. al, eds. Translated by Rafat Maczynski.(Warsaw)
http://www.fantastyka.pl/

As “Hair of the Dog” in English, in Murky Depths #2; Terry Martin, ed. (UK)
http://www.murkydepths.com/

“The Cat Inside”
Originally appeared in Coyote Wild, Dec. 2006 MacAllister Stone, ed.
www.coyotewildmag.com

“Blue Monday”
Originally appeared in Bewildering Stories #208 Don Webb, ed. (Canada)
www.bewilderingstories.com

“True Believer”
Originally appeared in Sci-Fantastic Oct.2005 Sarah Dobbs, ed. (UK)

“Bad Blood”
Originally appeared in Simulacrum #13 Lynne Jamneck, ed. (New Zealand)

“Lucky Cat”
originally appeared in Withersin #1 Misty Gersley, ed.
www.withersin.com

“Sound & Furie”
Originally appeared in Trabuco Road #1 B.K. Dunn, ed.

“Rejection Letter” &
“One Night In Manhattan” originally appeared in Big Pulp
http://www.bigpulp.com/
...
“The Weapons Shop” originally appeared in SpecFicWorld
Doyle E Wilmoth, ed.
http://www.specficworld.com/

“Home of the Brave” is presently the joint intellectual property of
Edward Morris and the estate of the late Robert Sheckley,
Project TBD.

“The Devil Was Hot” originally appeared in Black Whole
Down in the Country Press, Autumn 2008

“By The Rivers of Babylon” originally appeared in Polluto#6
Adam Lowe, ed.
http://www.polluto.com/

“As I Walked Out One Evening” originally appeared in Coyote Wild, issue #2
MacAllister Stone, ed.

“Nine-Tenths of the Law” and “First Aid” originally appeared in Murky Depths
Terry Martin, ed.
http://www.murkydepths.com/

“My Country, 'Tis Of Thee” originally appeared in Oddlands #2

“To Soothe The Savage Beast” originally appeared in Arkham Tales #3
Nathan Shumate, ed.
http://www.arkhamtales.leucrotapress.com/

“Gossip Folks” originally appeared in Stimulus: The Portland Literary Offensive 2008 Stimulus Package
Distributed at Portland Wordstock Festival, 2008. Mykle Hansen, ed.
http://www.mykle.com/stimulus.pdf

“Go East, Young Man, Go East!” originally appeared online at Everyday Weirdness
Aug.27, 2009
http://everydayweirdness.com/e/20090827/

“News On The March” originally appeared in War Of The Worlds: Frontlines
J.W.Schnarr, ed.
http://northernfrightspublishing.com/

“Courtesy Call” originally appeared in Tiny Terrors #2 (UK)
Paula Wilson-Buckle, ed.
www.hadesgate.com

“Fridocha” and “I Drove All Night” originally appeared in Pulp Spirit
Shelby Vick, ed.
http://www.planetarystories.com/

"TEKELI-LI!" accepted in OVER THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

2011-02-19T07:22:00.000-08:00

"Tekeli-Li!" (my adaptation of Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS into a 1963 Twilight Zone screenplay by the late, great Charles Beaumont) will be appearing in OVER THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, an anthology Robert M. Price has put together to coincide with the release of Guillermo del Toro & James Cameron's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS movie.

Just got cleared to shout about this from the rooftops. The anthology is now closed. It's on.

A few words:

The great horror writer Joseph M. Pulver was skyping with me from Berlin a few weeks ago. We were talking about an anthology he and the British artist/editor/writer/decent oul'skin Ivan McCann have put together,AKLONOMICON, also Lovecraftian and closed.(Some big squishy hippie named Alan Moore or something is reading that one over their shoulders, I hear.)

AKLONOMICON took two of mine, which I am also clear to blog about now: "House of the Rising Sun"
a Universal Horror Pictures parody about two bouncers named Larry Talbot and Frank Steiner who drive a stake through their boss' heart. That one was my just revenge for every minute I ever had to spend anywhere near Gus Pollizos or his Marathon Taverna. Only difference between Gus and Stoker's Dracula is that Dracula had more class.

The second story, "If Company Should Come", was inspired by three great Lovecraftians: Caitlin R. Kiernan, Stanley Sargent and Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire. Without any spoilers, I will say that Stan's story "The Black Brat of Dunwich", Caitlin Kiernan's font of knowledge and understanding concerning the central premise of the story, and Wilum Pugmire's galvanizing live reads, were all responsible.I put Lovecraft into an alternate-history timeline I had used other places, and caused him to attack the one horrid thing he never could on paper: His own life, without frills or embellishments. A great psychiatrist named Max Rinkel at Boston Psychopathic Hospital is responsible for this... but not directly. Howie does it on his own. "Whatever this is to be, it must not be a Letter to the Editor written by a boy. This must be written like a *man...*"

So Joe Pulver asked me if I had an 'At the Mountains of Madness' riff to run past Bob Price. I did. It was an old poem called "Beringya" I always wanted to turn into a story. It came from a nightmare about a boat trip to much colder climes, and an island full of people who were no longer human. Kind of proto-"Lost", in a lot of ways.

I had to make that click more with Lovecraft's story, to fit in the anthology. I thought. It was so much like AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (which I have read many,many times since I was a kid) that I thought a splice could work. It did.

I needed a gimmick. Joe told me Bob was looking for adaptations. I had been watching my way through every Charles Beaumont episode of "The Twilight Zone" that I could track down, following last year's H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

At that Fest, I had my heart torn out of my chest by a couple of documentary filmmakers named Jason and Sunni Brock. Charles Beaumont built a great deal of a world I take for granted too much, and posted and blazed the trail for so many other people it makes my head hurt just pondering the list. He also died of a very complicated form of dementia brought about by meningitis and aluminum poisoning. He was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in front of that Torpedo typewriter, and while I obviously never met him, that documentary made me miss him more than I can put into words.

But I could. I decided I could. They said no one could mimic Beaumont's style. I didn't try. I mimicked the whole man, as I have mimicked voices with scary accuracy since I was old enough to read sheet music. I took the screenplay up off the page and out of the form, and I wrote about Chuck, too. And his son Christopher, whose eidetic reminiscences of life at "The Tudor Manse" made "TEKELI-LI!" no stretch at all to tell.

I wrote about Beaumont adapting AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS into a Twilight Zone episode. Then I wrote the fake episode itself. It's not such a stretch; I saw in the documentary that Beaumont adapted 'The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward', which I hadn't noticed the three other times I watched the docu. But there it is, about a third of the way through if you watch the background, a screenplay with "BASED ON THE STORY BY H.P. LOVECRAFT" in 12-point Torpedo bold, covered with Chuck's scribbled notes in pencil. It gave me a chill when I saw.

The story took several weeks to write. While recovering from a collapsed lung, I decided I wanted to have writing workshops here at our space, and that has taken off well. I have a good group, and the electricity of what we do is dizzying. Much like Beaumont's group.

One of the cornerstones of Beaumont's writing workshops (which everyone who was there remembers,), came to my workshop last week. This man's name used to leap out at me just about every time I brought an SF/H short story anthology home. He and Beaumont always exhorted young writers to crank out lots of material and "know how to shift gears."

William F. Nolan heard the first two pages of "Tekeli-Li!"... and started nodding his head immediately. "Yeah, yeah, you *got* him," he told me when I took a breath. "The way you talked about him rubbing his forehead in the very first sentence. Chuck used to do that all the time." I didn't know that. For some reason, the whole night left me kind of speechless.

But now the story is in, and the movie will be out when it's out. So I get paid when everyone else gets paid... but I didn't do this for the damn paycheck. It was the toughest piece of Mythos fiction, the toughest piece of metafiction, that I have undertaken since Dr. Munk down at Scripps took me to research boot camp for JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH.

I had to do it that way. For Howie. And for Chuck.

Here's a snippet of Tekeli-Li. They've just gotten to McMurdo Station, Anarctica. For this scene, for some reason,in my head I had made an impossible cast. Paul Petersen from "The Donna Reed Show" as Howie, Darren McGavin as Dr.Derleth... and, before I knew I was doing it, Michael Emerson from "Lost" as 'Bill'...

BILL glances at CLARK, who is busy removing layers. BILL glances back at HOWIE with flat, dead squid-eyes.

BILL

Your Pop gonna take you to see the South Pole?

CLARK answers for his son before HOWIE can get the words out.

CLARK

If he toughs it out down here long enough. We're dug in for a whole trimester
of research, bought sold and paid for. If we work through Midsummer, we can
be done by March and be out of your hair before the midnight sun. Not like you
have too many extra hands down here anyway.

BILL

No, Doctor. We do not. A lot of old faces are... gone. We … we miss the Russians, too.

BILL incongruously, unaccountably giggles, then hides it like a belch. CREW of various denominations are milling all around them, stomping off boots, unloading various equipment, proceeding in to the inner sanctum. LOCAL CREW act strangely stiff, wooden, emotionless. LOCAL CREW look sick, their skins off-human hue.

DR. DERLETH

Who are the new people?

BILL

Like I said, we rotated out just after the nuke plant's one-year
anniversary.After it had been running for a year, things...changed. People...
took notice.

DR. DERLETH

What people?

BILL's dead eyes fall on HOWIE again.

BILL

You'll..all... be briefed... soon enough.

FATHERS & SONS, Book 1 in the BLACKGUARD series, out NOW

2011-01-25T20:45:00.000-08:00

BLACKGUARD, BOOK 1: OUT here

More when I can blink. Too many to thank at once. Too tough a day to do anything but go face first in the keyboard, and bask in the black, black light.

And in my sleep, the battlefield of mind rises behind my eyes in swirls of rainbow strobes and chemical fog. In the Club Inside, several elder sets of eyes switch on at the sight of Burke's head in full riot-gear, in full black-and-white, on the cover of the paperback.

Small press or no, advance or no, I have written this thing in the basements of Hell, under the aegis of the finest men and women who ever worked a door downtown. Seeing the cover is its own reward.The filling is even more startling.

New story: SWEETHEART OF SEGUNDUS

2011-01-05T19:55:00.000-08:00

SWEETHEART OF SEGUNDUS, at Circlet Press, an SFnal piece about a soldier and an alien hooker. Good fun. Flash fiction. Enjoy...

New novella DIOSCURI (and possible sequel, PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN) podcast on NIL DESPERANDUM

2011-01-04T16:17:00.000-08:00

Free podcast of DIOSCURI, part 1, HERE. Enjoy...

Happy 2011

2011-01-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

"All day the snow fell on that Eastern town
With its soft, pelting, little, endless sigh
Of infinite flakes that brought the tall sky down
Till I could put my hands in the white sky

And taste cold scraps of heaven on my tongue
And walk in such a changed and luminous light
As gods inhabit when the gods are young.
All day it fell. And when the gathered night

Was a blue shadow cast by a pale glow
I saw you then, snow-image, bird of the snow..."

---Stephen Vincent Benet, JOHN BROWN'S BODY

"You may even kill me if you like. But the machine that is me will continue."

--Neal Asher, THE SKINNER

"You walk everywhere.Who the hell do you think you are, Ed Morris?"

---Wade Finch

When I was a very little boy, my Mom would take me a long when we went to pick up my sister at her piano lessons over in Roaring Spring. There was a candystore called Stumps that always sold little plastic paratroopers. I collected them. I repaired their chutes, both the ones I bought and the ones that other kids junked out of impatience. Every time I find one of them now, I fix it and keep it. Just to remind me. Two mornings before New Years' Eve, I found one so new it wasn't even out of the rubber band. I have no idea where they sell them around here. But it just came.

In 2010, many people fixed my chute, and blew air into it, and set me back upon the wind to keep doing whatever the hell it is I do. I jumped because I knew they would catch me. And I am bowled over by the sense of history, community, nostalgia and dare I say SELF that comes from not dying, last November. I can't find the words fast enough. Not today.

It happens right on schedule: I'll be thinking about fixing the paratroopers, or every cool thing like that Mom and I ever did, which leads to every cool thing that ever happened to me growing up. Everything I was still able to hold onto, no matter how much Sickness howled at the door and took those around me. Everything I still was, that got me through, and let me help, no matter what it looked like or what it meant.

I'll be thinking of the year I turned twelve, the first year I heard Skinny Puppy, and Nine Inch Nails, and read Ray Bradbury's "Christus Apollo" and John Gardner's GRENDEL. All the trips to Georgia, where the light of that side of the family burns and runs as hot as a newborn star.I remember it all. I remember it all.

I'll be thinking about being fourteen, every dance I ever went to at St.Mary's or St. Rose of Lima to try to get outside of the Enraged Villager Dating Pool and ending up making out with a gorgeous S.H.A.R.P. girl from Philly in the Bell Avenue graveyard,still walking with a cane...

Or any age:Nineteen and dropping everything to hit the subway and go read "Howl" at the University of the Arts the day Allen Ginsberg died, the cool Philly day still stocked with talking trees and sunbeams that were better than any drug in the book, almost as beautiful as the one who was running the boards...

Or thinking about anything, really. And I find my eyes filling up with boiling water that scourges them like tea, like bleach.Feeling like my complete humanity grew back for the first time since 1999, no matter what sickness was in me or anyone else or the world. And that I am *there to experience this.* For this I thank God and Goddess, the One, the All, the Most High, and give praise every day of my life.

I never thought about holding on to any of those things. That love of self-as-part-of-something, to be able to be worthy to remember not what I did to prevent a crisis, but how I behaved and who I was when there *was* no crisis. How fearless I was, and am... except now I know what I was thumbing my nose at in the abyss.

But I'm still thumbing it. And now I see a middle finger going up on the free hand.Yep... there it goes.

And I can't stop playing "Waltzing Matilda." Or claiming post-surgery and eating a whole box of donuts. Or going for a walk in a hailstorm because I feel like it.

Because I can. Because no human threat, no ticking time-bomb I knew I was carrying, no sickness from self or others, can ever hood the light I learned how to reflect a long time ago.

There is still so much work to be done. Memory itself may smear across the map,but I never stopped walking. I never stopped waltzing Matilda.

When I walk nowadays, it feels as though I could walk state-to-state, between physical boundaries or liminal states of being, all the way to the nearly nameless nightmare countries at the top of the world where we must write the maps ourselves, sink the shafts of shelter and build a roaring fire. Because we are the first ones there. And we got there with our own two feet.

I *will* get there with you. Split a piece of wood and ye shall find the Promised Land. Lift up a stone, and it was waiting the whole time. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. For everyone.

Take it.

MUSIC FOR FOUR HANDS accepted for publication: A Few Words About Improbable Mashups

2010-12-15T15:52:00.000-08:00

"MUSIC FOR FOUR HANDS", four short stories written by Lou Antonelli and Edward Morris, has been accepted for publication by Yard Dog Press This marks the third collection Lou has sold, and me (SHOCK THEATRE and BEYOND THE WESTERN SKY have been 'bought' by Wildside Press, publishers of my BLACKGUARD series.)
I first met Lou Antonelli in a 2006 ASIMOV'S, (brought to me in a stack of same by Big Jim Willig, my idea generator since college,hetero life mate and hired thug.We get to Jimbo in a minute.)
Lou's short story "A Rocket For the Republic", which had to do with a feller inventing liquid oxygen fuel in Sam Houston's time, made me laugh and cry and hoot and stomp.It was so good...especially the ending...that I thought it was Joe R. Lansdale writing under a pseudonym. Lou was tickled pink by this, and asked me immediately if I wanted to collaborate.
For more about Lou, who came late to the table and covered the SFnal country in his own guns anyway, go HERE.
We have corresponded ever since that day in '06, and I feel that both of us are the better for it. We are from as opposite sides of Life as you can get, and yet... The stories we produce in any capacity are something much more than either parent.In one title, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart nailed the concept. MUSIC FOR FOUR HANDS. Here are the concerti that made it in:

"SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES":(originally appeared in THE FIFTH DIMENSION)
I miss Ernie Kovacs.I was never even around when the show was on, and I miss him SO much. Even Chevy Chase agrees that Ernie is a big part of the glue holding modern Comedy together. Lenny Bruce, Cheech and Chong, Rodney Dangerfield, and so many other great comedians have given props to Ernie over the years for the shoestring innovations that made his show so beloved to so many.
Dr. Allan Barber, one of the tougher...and better...Film profs I ever had, turned me on to Ernie's show, which was a huge hit in Philly when it was on. I was absolutely entranced by someone taking that many risks with live video while "drinking and smoking tea... er, uhh, drinking tea and smoking."
Kovacs used to sit in the sauna wasted out of his skull on liquor and verbally compose material. And it worked. He did things no one had ever done before, and he redefined Funny. I believe it was Dave Chappelle who said that greatness means that everything that came before you is obsolete and everything that came after you bears your mark. So it was with the Madcap Magyar.
This one was Lou's idea. Blame him. I was able to drop a lot of standup knowledge into the work, while Lou kept me mindful of the history of television comedy, and several key players that gave the work a much more harmonious tone.
And yeah, damn it, every time we get to the Yul Brynner moment, I cry like a little kid with a skinned knee. I was able to tone that part up, too, thanks to the ghoulishly spot-on oeuvre of another great comedian who left too soon, Bill Hicks.

"OFF THE HOOK" (originally appeared in DARK RECESSES PRESS #16; Bailley Hunter, ed.)

The first two stories in MUSIC FOR FOUR HANDS have to do with comedians. Comedy is one bond that Lou and I definitely share (especially his great suggestion to use The Three Stooges in marathon form as an anti-depressant.)
"Off The Hook" came from the idea mill that is BIG JIM Jim Willig and I met at Temple University, part of a phenomenon there in the late Nineties that can best be described as a kind of anti-fraternity designed by Ken Kesey, the Bastards of the Universe.
Jim is always claiming that he can't write fiction, because he's dyslexic and he's better at composing Comedy, you're the writer, I'm the comic, blah blah, heard it. While I think Jim is selling himself entirely short, I'll take every idea he throws me.We are the authors of each other's careers,in many senses.
But one day Jim goes, "I don't know if you can use this or not..." ( a staple line from idea mills, which he remembers me parroting at him from my old friend, the late Blair County Coroner Charlie Burkey.) His IDKIYCUTON moment for the day was a riff about a comedian making a deal with Death.
I tried it. It didn't sell anywhere. Lou and I were trying all sorts of collaborations then
("Eva", which he coughed up the idea for but didn't have time to work on, was one such piece, and does not appear here, but will be in my own collection SHOCK THEATRE from Wildside Press in the very near future.)
So Lou asks me if I had one that was fully formed but blocked anyway. Like one that wasn't selling and I didn't know why. I sent him [insert original title here, I have forgotten]. Lou realized exactly what was wrong with it, almost immediately...
And forthwith coughed up the slipperiest little bit of comedic secret/almost-alternate history I ever did see. Especially at the end. SPOILER ALERT: In talking of the synergistic nature of collaboration, and moments in these works that make my eyes leak, the idea of Rodney Dangerfield making his roommate Lenny Bruce clean up...Yeah. Not a dry eye around here any time I read that one. Lou Antonelli Is Not Afraid. :)

"ACROSCAPHE" (originally appeared in PULP SPIRIT; Shelby Vick, ed.)
Again, this one started out as Lou's idea, and he did most of the fleshing and composition. I dug into the crates of influence, from sources from Robert Ludlum to Cody Goodfellow, to figure out what flavor I could add to the story. Soon enough, we had something that wasn't quite a Fifties big-bug story but moved like one, though with a certain global sensibility I found I liked. I can't say too much about this one without killing the goose, except to say that I still call it "The Jumbo Shrimp Story."

"STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN" (originally appeared in ENCOUNTERS #1)
Lou sent me a Christmas card this year with a clipping in it about the "McKenzie House" becoming an historical landmark.I believe he has reposted this article on his blog.
This one truly became more than both of us... but started reminding me of my friend Trent Zelazny, and his father who understood the Sixties much better than I ever could. I gave his father a brief cameo in this story to illustrate that, rephrasing Lowell Cunningham, "Roger is NOT dead, he just went home."
I show this story to people I don't know who want to see my work, or Lou's. It's that good, and it was that much fun to write. The time-traveler is unapologetically based on my dear Serena, who endorses this message.:D

From the Introduction:
The moon is high, full, nearly ready to drop, to hatch…
You wake in your bed, knowing you can’t stay inside one minute more. There’s already a big flashlight under your pillow, young Diogenes. ut in the moonlight, canvas flaps and rustles and Klezmer music like nothing you have ever heard in your life whomps and wallops from boxcars boxcars boxcars, their sides mostly open to the breeze.
The snare drums speak Hebrew, Romani and mediaeval Italian as interchangeably as the sinuous sibilant hiss of the conjoined fire-dancers doing the kind of high-temperature contact juggling that people who share organs shouldn’t be able to do…
Louder than the howl of the Strongman, the accordion is trashed beyond all hope of coherent speech. A wild Gypsy fiddle pierces the still air as the Calliope starts up its mad bone carousel of song. For the second time in your life, the Sideshow has come to town.
To every light in every cage here, a darkness. The darkness outside of Town along the hidden carny circuits behind America, between her, tiny back- alley strings that reach to paralell Whens, and Whys, and Whats …
The Sideshow is here, the Shakedown Street that landed the last time downtown, when you were five, so late at night that you’d never have been allowed to see. The Indian-pins of the jugglers disappear and reappear, substituted with noses and hands and … other things, someone’s watch, an old lady’s wig, a wand of spun cotton candy that makes a child yawp right by the curb, all objects replaced quicker than the eye…
“Quicker than the eye, or your money back…” the Ringmaster solemnly guarantees, laying a finger upside his nose, upside his fabulous mustache and those deceptively sleepy eyes that never miss one juggler’s pass in any freak-tent. “STEP RIGHT UP!!” he roars, “INTO THE TENT, LADIES AND GENTS, FOR A MAGIC SHOW THE LIKES OF WHICH YOU WILL NEVER AGAIN OBSERRRRUV…”
The Ringmaster makes his rounds. Follow at the heels of his high boots for a glimpse behind the canvas, when opposite poles of the freak-tent tread the boards of the main stage for an unholy duet upon concertina and Appalachian saw.
The Ringmaster is taking off his coat, tossing it to a flippered stage-hand who grabs it and tumbles away like an acrobat beneath the cobbled-together stage.
The stage is empty, but for a folding card-table and two chairs. On the table is a blank hornbook, an inkwell, two Palmer pens and a Ouija-board. Meanwhile, in the front row Ethyl and Methyl the Siamese Burlesque Queens are keeping the groundlings more than entertained …
The Ringmaster takes the chair opposite the Crooked Man from the freak-tent. Both of them have removed their top-hats, and bow.
What happens next is hard to describe…

New story "Gregor" out now!

2010-12-01T09:44:00.001-08:00

In THE RED PENNY PAPERS, issue #2. Click the title to enjoy...

Reports Of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

2010-11-20T12:49:00.000-08:00

Remember, remember, the tenth of November. That day, I burst a few cysts in my lung that I'd been born with, and the nasty post-flu cough was replaced by two liters of blood. I went into shock in the ER, and came very close to Death. Spent 5 days in the hospital, am FULL of painkillers then and now,and am working hard on PT, etc.
The people I need to thank are too numerous to mention. Dr. Chuck Deuville, the best chest cutter I ever met. David Bee, my upstairs neighbor, for getting me to the hospital. My dear, dear Serena Blossom, who never lets go of my hand. Justin Montgomery, J.D. Busch, Andrew Fuller, Wendy Wagner, Jim Willig, Maleah Johnson, Aaron Larkin, and my whole family and the staff at Providence.
And today, I heard that the Red Penny Papers are going live, featuring my short story "Gregor".
I lived. I'm back. So much to say, but need time to filter it. This blog is a bad place to gush. But I am keeping it open for a lot of new reasons. There are a lot of new folks wandering through and saying Hi. So... this brief station identification has been brought to you by Radio Free Hawthorne, 98.6 on your FM dial. We are funded with generous support from the Dread Lord, the Merciful Mother and viewers like you, and couldn't have done any of it without the rowdy lot of yez. Please give yourselves a standing ovation, and accept the deepest thanks of one weird, broken kid who can't stop dreaming. And is around for Act 2. I love you all.

HARLAN ELLISON(tm)

2010-09-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

AT MADCON, AN AILING HARLAN ELLISON WILL SAY GOODBYE

When I was a sophomore in high school, my Dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor close to the optic nerve, probably produced or speeded up by Agent Orange during his military service in the Vietnam War. My mother was diagnosed with MS *and* got pregnant with the new little brother I begged her for ten years prior, in the same year. My older sister was off at Army language school in Monterey by that point.

As you might imagine, I didn't sleep much in high school. Ephedra was still legal, and with undiagnosed ADHD, coffee and ephedra were almost the best friends I had to keep up with the sinking ship at home; on top of AP coursework, vicious persecution at school and no idea what to do with the rest of my life.

At a time when most kids were getting "help" from their families (that is, learning how to drive, learning how to get and keep a job/apartment/relationship, etc.), I was the one manning the bilge pumps with my little sister Amy (the acme of old time toughness herself, as I learned to see in those years while that came to flower within her.)

"When you looked into the abyss, Angry Candy would have sustained you. Here is the bittersweet: You are not alone."

The house where I read those words doesn't exist any more. The back stairs where I rediscovered an old friend from OMNI during the worst time in my family's life, are now so much fire-hardened rubble at the bottom of a landfill someplace.

I didn't know my Dad for a long time before his diagnosis. He got really strange, as the tumor began to grew. You could almost plot it on a graph, and my whole life there were things about him that were sick.

But before all that, when I was younger, there were times when he was the nicest human being on Earth, the one my Mom married. The one with the OMNI subscription, who poked fun at Harlan Ellison in a number of different ways, right around the year ANGRY CANDY was released in paperback.

I didn't read AC that year... but I found it three years later, in 1991, when all this was happening. ANGRY CANDY and THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON and THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD and SPIDER KISS and and and...

That's the thing about Harlan, and his work. There will always be an "And..." My "and" from that library run was STALKING THE NIGHTMARE, with his Surrealist exordium 'Quiet Lies The Locust Tells' that I still can't read without Kleenex.

That essay, and 'Eidolons', got me through that awful year at school, and helped me learn tools to make it magnificent. I began studying martial arts, and taking time away from being scared shitless of my coursework to use that old manual typewriter I hauled outside late at night, to work on other things.

I'd taken LSD for the first time that year, and had a marvelous experience in that I never, ever wanted to stop writing fiction after I came down. (Nothing like watching one of one's own stories played out on a blank wall to kick-start the Muse.)

But it was in sobriety that I was told by my Mother, "If you approached everything in life the way you approach writing, you'd have it made." So that's what I did. And through his work, Harlan showed me how. Not by all the legends about him, but what he actually wrote, and said. He was my Virgil, and I owe him. Big-time.

People besides me have written reams and recorded hours about *the rest*. Yes, I know he is the angriest sandy little butthole in the world, shot J.F.K., threw a drink in your Mom's face, etc. He was a friend to me, when I needed a friend like that so much. I will never forget him for that.

That... and one other thing.

I was working the Dealer's Room at the 2006 WorldCon, in Anaheim, not long after my first short story sale to Interzone magazine. I sold them a novella called 'Journey To The Center of the Earth' that they were wild about at the time. Editor Jetse de Vries invited me down to the Con and comped my ticket for helping him in the Dealer's Room.

I was delighted. I met David Gerrold and Gardner Dozois, Pat Cadigan and Ellen Datlow, Harrys Harrison through Turtledove and a dozen more great writers and editors besides. I got to drink a beer with Geoffrey A. Landis and thank him for answering all my noob-writer tech support questions. I got to sit poolside with a writer from Dr. Who and listen to him enlarge Reality.

But the story I always take with me had to do with my novella. L.A. artist Pamelina H. did the cover for 'Journey', and was so much fun to hang out with that Jetse and I were nearly late to the Hugo Awards.

We got there with five minutes to squeak in, and a closed bar. The doorman was less than thrilled, but got us in.

We immediately began hunting around for programs. Jetse found four on top of a tall amplifier on the way in.

He reached for them, and his hand was immediately slapped away by this slithery, reptilian little demon, with basilisk eyes of a hue and piercing intensity that reminded me of two of the hardest-working people I ever met: my Grandmother Morris and my great friend Finn Robins. Harlan was floating in a guess-which-one-of-the-Away-Team's-gonna-die-red hoodie and the coolest pair of Adidas sneakers I have ever coveted. "MY BOOK!" Harlan Ellison snarled. "GO GET YOUR OWN---"

Then he looked up. Jetse's a big dude, a Dutch hair farmer who looks like he could fill in on guitar for Slayer and no one would notice.

My inner bouncer went off then and there, and I got between them as the fumfuh started and Harlan immediately backpedaled, "No problem, no problem, here, have some food..." And he thrusts his small plate of taquitos at Jetse.

Jetse is not a fighter at all. Quite the reverse. So, beet-red, he takes the plate of taquitos and sits down. Harlan looked at me, "Who the fuck was that?" "The editor of Interzone," I replied. Harlan threw up his hands.

"Ohhh, INTERZONE, the guys who said you can't put a price on one of my stories..." He went on in that vein for a little while. It was plain to see that, under the five coats of snark, he liked the magazine very much, and wanted to work with them.

"Let me check on that for you, sir," I told him, made a few more manners and let him get back to what he wanted to do, which was walk around and bitch to warm up for all the speeches he was about to make.

But long story short, a few weeks later, I was told that "through the good offices of Edward Morris" (Harlan's words), he sent a beautiful essay called 'Mistral in the Bijou' to IZ, and they ran it. That essay had to do with another mouthy workaholic writer from Oregon, Ted Sturgeon, and the several weeks Ted stayed at Harlan's house.

I read in the above article that Harlan is ending the only way Harlan can: By riding his giant, clanking brass balls gracefully into the sunset. I had to stop everything I was doing today and get some of this down, out of respect to the Harlan underneath... as well as the Magnificent Bastard I wish I could be, when I have to go around and flex on clients and editors who won't pay up.

"Do you do that at the gas station?" I ask, "At McDonald's?" When I say that, I can hear the buzzing song of The Locust in my voice, the blast and the burning shame and the bitter frost and the fright of all those long nights knocking my brains out on a manual typewriter for whatever purpose.

There's not just one Locust, Harlan. There are plagues of us now, and we are *hungry*. We are *pissed off*. And thanks to your own good offices, we do *not* suffer fools gladly. Joke 'em if they can't take a fuck, and thank you for never, ever, ever going gently into that good night.

"So some night there'll be a flash
you'll barely notice
you'll think it's distant lightning
perhaps
and I suppose, in a way, it is
It is heat lighning
from his grave,
a freeze frame of your virulent hypocrisy

which exposed
loses all immunity
in its systems
its censoring bureaucracy"

---Jim Carroll, 'To The National Endowment On The Arts'

New Zombie Erotica Story

2010-08-19T22:17:00.000-07:00

RIGOR AMORTIS, anthology; "I Fall To Pieces"

...Just stoked as hell to be sharing a Table of Contents with Armand Rosamilia and Wendy Wagner. Check it out...

BLACKGUARD 1: Fathers And Sons accepted for publication by Wildside Press.

2010-08-19T13:04:00.001-07:00

Not much time to blog, though more than usual. Josh Lay is coming over, and we are having a "safety meeting" about the upcoming Rilly Big Shew #2 at the Blue Monk Sept. 27th, doors@8, shew@9, $5 cover, 21 w/i.d. The bill so far reads: ARLO STONE. KRISTINE LEVINE. JUSTIN HANES. JOSH LAY. THE DAN COSSETTE(tm). DON FROST. And yours truly.

But more immediately on my mind are Wildside Press, who just accepted the first novel in my BLACKGUARD series for publication.

They publish Robert Silverberg, and Damien Broderick, among many other SF Titans. Damien was the bloke who made this happen.

I must, of necessity, for my number-one fan, point out that Wildside are a niche market for writers. I do my own promotions, there is no advance, and the royalties are modest. They run "print-on-demand."

However, the reason I am doing cartwheels is that, contrary to Stephen Brust's famous line, exposure is not always something you die of in the Arctic. I see Wildside books flying around at every convention I go to, and many of these people, Damien and others, have shown me great kindness and support. (R.I.P. George Scithers)

I am so very glad that BLACKGUARD has found a home. The story, simply put, is larger than myself. It is a kind of shared vision among every bouncer who ever wore a black "ugly-shirt" at Club Panorama in Portland. The location and nature of the club made many of us think in Science Fiction out on the door/floor. And nowhere was that better exemplified than in the several bouncers who made me their chronicler. Their eyes. While I was making myself into my own.

I can hear the Old Man now:"Quit humping my leg, heathen." I will, just a minute.
Despite being untreated for some very terrible things, and shirttail-poor, my time at Panorama was one of the best times in my life. I got to learn what a real man looked like, and how to act like one. (Saw a couple of real women out on the floor, too, running out drunks that were three times their size.)

This is a regurgitation of many speeches from Shawn and Finn, but people who come to that trade have a lot to give back, and they're good at it because they can think like criminals/Fuckquanauts*. "It's like putting wings and a halo on a demon and getting them to play for the other team..."

This story belongs to Shawn, Finn, Jim, Les, Drew, just as much as me. Beyond that, it belongs to Kisha, Cowboy, Bill, Loki, Kio, Rick, Lisa, K.C., Heather, Old Bob,Big & Tasty, Shance Smith, Jereme Ruhl, Erika Hoffmeister our android cigarette-girl :), and all the staff, especially the R.I.P. for Uncle Nick on the dedication page.

So much more to say, but so much more to do first. There are a lot of other good things happening, but I can't blog about them yet. Much. Stay tuned for further bulletins from this station, after these messages...

*Fuckquanaut= The kind of person who is so intoxicated that no matter what you ask them to do, they reply:"Fuck!Why not?"

"Rejection Letter"

2010-08-11T06:21:00.001-07:00

Big Pulp just ran a rejection letter I got quite a while back. It's a good story. You might like it...

SOAK 2010 Camp Zombie Unicorn pictures (for Serena, but y'all can look)

2010-07-01T06:44:00.001-07:00

2010-07-01T06:42:00.000-07:00

"Carnivale" fanfic: 'NEWS FROM THE ROAD'

2010-06-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

NEWS FROM THE ROAD

(All characters and indicia are owned by Daniel Knauf and HBO. This is Fan Fiction, and as such falls under all statutes regarding parody and fair use. Blah blah blah. It was cool.)

In the battered green trailer with the sign over the door reading only MANAGEMENT,the old soldier is seeing red.Out across the midway, the Ferris wheel suddenly blares into light and life, spinning up and powering on all unbidden, howling like a lost soul in want. (Somewhere else, where the sun refuses to shine, his unconquerable enemy wakes in a cold sweat from nightmares of a knock that will soon come at the door.)

The bulbs on the Ferris wheel now glow as white-hot as headlights near an unshielded radio antenna. Everywhere, dirty-faced fanboys in the cheap seats lean forward and scream BELIEVE. Across the Depression-ravaged landscape, John and Jane Q. Public remember what it was like to not worry for the length of one whole dream. The die is cast. It begins.

The Baggage Trailer has now materialized in the back lot, spilling out Chick Endor and the Leonard Joy Orchestra's "Love Me Or Leave Me" from an old Victrola no one is physically winding. Its shutters bang like cemetery gates.

The tornado is inside it now, radiating outward. The Kingdom of Oz is at hand. The light is not black, but red, red, red as the core of the earth. You can make out the shadow behind the curtain when it stops. But it doesn't stop. It's been waiting too long...

In the slow hours before dawn, every roustie on the crew dreams of armed angels and sycophantic demons. In his sleep, Clayton Jones is at bat, rounding down on the mobster who broke his leg. Out in the truck, under an Army blanket, Samson remembers his days as the circus strongman at Coney Island.

For a moment, all of them remember their one shining chance, and get it back again. Belyakov's power is his agony, yet it feeds their dreams everywhere they go. And now, for just an improbable moment, it is feeding his own.

The veins in Belyakov's head beat blue-black with effort. His mouth that cannot form plosive sounds twists, baring gray teeth still all his own. His single red eye glows, the ravaged socket on the right resembling a smoking coal. He is looking ahead. The possible future he sees will take the patience of Ashoka. He sits, and waits, and spins his web. And dreams.

He dragged himself upright and Translated himself out of that field hospital at Aix to the stunned surprise of two nurses( and one intern who'd been up for hours, and thought he'd hallucinated the whole thing. )Sometimes the bear eats you... and sometimes you eat the bear.

He summoned Bruno to the boxcar, out on a siding behind the hospital ... See Morethat hadn't been shelled into metal. The bear knew it had been bad, to give in to the Dark, when that awful Texan barbarian who was supposed to be his Adversary sprayed the beast like a skunk with his own bloody hundred-proof geek breath and it turned in his direction. And both their Enfield rifles jammed simultaneously. And the whole circus train of stupidity began...

The bear knew it had been bad, to give in to the Dark. It knew what it had done. It lowered its head, and accepted its place in the hunt. Lucius removed that ridiculous circus fez from its head, laid his palm atop it, and kissed the bear between the eyes with the ravaged remains of his lips.

"Just a sucker in a rigged game," he whispered in Russian. "Just like the rest of us. I am sorry, my friend."

Bruno's death was quick, and merciful. In the boxcar, Gen. Belyakov fed for a long time, and slept. When he woke, things began to change in a hurry

#

"Come to me..." So many people across Europe heard that choked whisper in their dreams as he got his plan on rails in every sense of the word. Not like his poor, broken wife, who took his Alexei and Irina and ran off to America to get out of the way of what her fanatic Orthodox beliefs lead her to call the "celestial massacre" that would happen if her husband were felled in battle. "Then where would we be?" were almost her last words. He wouldn't repeat the last ones. He couldn't. He couldn't say them correctly without effort.

He had barely any lips. It was hard to speak Russian, any more.

When he caught up to the Hyde and Teller Carnival, of Coney Island, New York, it was a bitterly cold night in Vienna. In his boxcar, he stoked the little coal stove and drew the heat brighter around himself with his single remaining hand.

When he closed his eyes, he looked for other places where the Light was, no matter how bright. It was a small matter to couple his own car to the end of their train, as he did so. Most of the rousties were in town drinking powerful Austrian beer and chasing whores. But the biggest whoremonger of the bunch wasn't tall enough to ride most of the rides, and he was in the crew car, sleeping off a bad case of Drinkin' Won't Help.

Lucius cast his mind out, out and up, through the Prussian snow, listening to the sounds of kids singing in church, old men sitting down to watch the snow, older women curled up in front of the radio and the faint, crackling orange light behind the glass...

In the crew car, he heard the tortured soul of the midget strongman, and opened his mind to him like the grate on his own stove, exposing the roaring furnace behind it, the strange stars of the Middle World...

"Samson..." That voice could have given a marble statue a convulsion. "Mighty Samson, shorn of your locks. Let me make you an offer..."

#

Dawn brought a knock at the door of the reconverted boxcar. "Boss, open up," Samson's reedy treble was almost louder than the pounding of his small, callused fist. A wind sprang up. The oil-lamps flamed forward greedily. "What news?"

But as he spoke, Management's eye widened, agog, at the bale of paper under the ex-strongman's arm. "Got your work cut out for you, Boss, and I don't envy you one little bit..."

“No one believed Cassandra, either,” Management lamented, staring gloomily at the list of names in Hack Scudder's loopy first-grade handwriting that he, Management, had to read through, one by one, and could not simply divine. (The Gentleman Geek clouded everything from Management, including his own penmanship. That was settled long ago, and could not be undone.)

"No one believes the Prophet, when he foretells wars, and rumors of wars. Knowing something does not cause it to happen, but what we are faced with is bigger than either side. It is an affront to God Themselves."

Samson took out a toothpick, and looked at it. He was used to this. The Boss always got all wound up every time they got close to finding that no-account Scudder and settling up some carnival justice for whatever was between them, from back in the war.

But there was something else behind it. Something that smelled even worse. Something like what that crazy Kraut was starting up again, over in the Old Country. But worse than that.

Something that could snuff out a whole world.

"I don't know about any of that," the diminutive carny-boss allowed,"But I know you're pushing yourself too hard. You don't take it easy, you're gonna throw a rod before we even get there."

Behind the curtain, he saw the red eye flare bright.
#
Management wept.
#
Lucius Belyakov first fully grew into his powers when the bear mauled him. His Adversary stayed whole, and just as strong, but the product of their stalemate twisted his mind out of all countenance. Even now, young Robert Oppenheimer sowed the seeds of the Blasted Tree. Light and Dark were both getting so tired. But some things just have to run their course.

It got to him. Samson knew that. He never expressed those kinds of things. That quack head-shrinker he once heard give his pitch in Vienna would have said that his ego didn't require conventional reinforcement, or some such load of horseapples. He just went somewhere else.

When he did, Samson knew he was feeling the earthbound pull of regret, that dragged him back into that ravaged shell from ...wherever'n'hell he went...He said he wasn't ready to die. That there were people to teach. Things to learn. More importantly, Armageddon to avert.

Samson got everything but the Armageddon part. That was for wiser heads than his, and anyway, didn't St. Paul say that it wasn't going to be the end of the world, just the End of Days? Like, the end of numbered days, and folks would have to start building back up again?

Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, the carny-boss reckoned. Drag those warlords in their swell suits down to the same as everybody else, and share the wealth around. That would suit him just fine.

But he never let himself believe that. Not when he was up all night listening to the old Cossack ramble on about William Blake and the Gnostics and how everything all fit together.

Not when he heard him talk about his daughter Irina dying in that train wreck, and Alexei moving his own mother's fading life to save hers, then dying himself...

(Or at least his good son faded forever from Lucius' mind, in that derailment, he would have volunteered, if asked. He probably died in the attempt to move the life. Poor boy.)

Sometimes, on nights like that, Samson wanted to find Hack Scudder himself, and do what should have been done a long time ago. But no matter how closely his heart resembled Texas in acreage, he was just one man...
#

"A true Russian never gives up," his Boss often joked. But when he saw the strange blue color of the blood on that acre of handkerchiefs in the hamper half the time, Samson wasn't so sure if maybe a true Russian would die in the traces before he even thought about giving up. And maybe he was a true fool...

When he looked back into the puppet-stage Lucius used for a bed and writing-desk, he saw that the wriggling old mass of scar tissue and clear light was on his side, conked out in his long-johns again. Samson smiled. He could almost hear him dream...

#

"Why can't you forgive my Paw?"the roustie Ben Hawkins harped,where they sat at the foot of the great Tree in the Middle World.Belyakov sighed."Irrelevant.He will make a Hell of Earth,drag it to a lower world. He must be stopped." Ben glared. "I won't be your hired gun. You know so much, do it on your own."Both of them woke up simultaneously.

Like his father, Ben almost invariably went away mad.
#

Ben never remembered much about the dreams he had, where the Baggage Trailer those yeggs told him to go clean out was real, standing there just as sure as he was, full of old receipts and coins, invoices and bills of lading from a carny tour-route full of towns like Stratford-on-Avon, Brussels, Hamburg...

And that poor little dead baby in the jug of formalin. The one that didn't quite look like the old man, but almost. Around the eyes. The jet-black eyes that sometimes looked like they were open. Eyes the color he thought he saw Sofie's turn sometimes, and hadn't he dreamt that the piece of sticky-tape on the jug, too, said [LAST NAME UNKNOWN, BOYFRIEND NAME SCUDDER?, RUTHIE; INFANT UNNAMED... ]

Ben sighed, head and guts throbbing from everything his near-Biblical dreams gave him to digest.
#

Belyakov trembles in his trailer, the lights turned down low. Scudder's upstart son Ben was right, though he'd never understand why. Management never wanted revenge on Henry Scudder for the bear attack. But in running away from their duel in France that never happened, Scudder perverted History itself.

Management wants revenge for what the Gentleman Geek has done to the human race.

Higher,higher,the Ferris wheel turns into the firmament,each corresponding dip into Below making every car into a mine-car for five seconds,swooping through summer night chaos magic that is the immediate joy of Hell,to be ripped out upside down on that Dantesque wheel and back towards the stars. It's not wired to anything, either.

Not tonight.
#

THE WORLDS OF PHILIP JOSE FARMER: LIMITED EDITION ANTHOLOGY

2010-05-16T13:54:00.001-07:00

GET EM WHILE THEY'RE HOT

May be crashing the Locus Awards in Seattle that weekend (June 26, 2010) for Farmercon, to help promote the work... and sign books.

Phil couldn't make it. He's out on the River right now with Bill Burroughs, reading the story I sold to this anthology and snickering. The preface placed on my story was put there at Phil's own behest.

More when I'm done with this box of Kleenex. For real-real.

"You do not go to heaven unless you are already in it. The magic must be wrought by you and you alone. God has no fairy wand to tap the pig and turn it into a swan."

--- PJF, R.I.P.
01/26/1918--02/25/09

"The Dunwich Horror", Southern-Fried

2010-05-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

(C)2009 By Edward R. Morris Jr.

FAMILY TRADITION

By Edward Morris

Yeah, let me tell you about Cthulhu, buddy. There. I'll say its name again:
Cloolahoolahoo. Kahoolawassee. Lulu. Kahlua. Hula-Hoop. Goobersmooch.
See, I know how to say it.
Ahaw! Don’t no person know how to say the name of no Elder God, no Deep One, no nothin’. You tell me they can, that’s already your bare ass out in the wind, ‘cause I heard him say it, and can’t nobody…
Nobody. Says right there in that one old book, the John Dee book about the worms that Daddy had---
Naw, it was Olaus Wormius, not De Vermiis Mysteriis, don't you listen to me. Tell you what ol' Olaus said, he said that can't nobody say Cthulhu's name with human gift of tongues, just kinda get the sense of what was said. Just like that old boy Thucydides mentioned when he was tryin' to write about the Peloponessian War, when they didn't have no CNN or Fox News or what have you.
You ever read Thucydides? Haw. You thought I was just some dumb old hillbilly, just like lots of folks do. Meantime, folks like me's layin' back in the weeds, laughin' at you. Daddy had Thucydides, and Herodotus, and all them sort of old Greeks and maybe sometimes Roman historians. He had all them books, but he kept them down in front.
The good books, now, the real histories, Daddy kept upstairs. He'd take his tool-belt off'n his overalls, and done take the tools out of it, too, if he caught you messin' with that door, there, in the back hall. "Told you once, ," he'd say, "You stupid."
After that, he called me everything but 'white', and 'a boy', just to scare me into payin’ attention to him. Daddy said he wanted to whale the tar out of me, when I tried to jimmy that door when I was six, but, "Can't be gittin' your blood up around some of them books, Denny. Things happen that ain't... natural."
I tried to work for him from the day I turned fourteen. He said I was big enough, then, and we'd been doing stuff around the property for long enough, and deep down enough, I thought I could go work with my Daddy and make it stick, since I knew what I was about.
I should have known better, now, than to have tried him so young, what with all the other folks around here I've done impressed into service just like they was in the military, by breaking them down and building them back up.
That's how you make a good contractor. Good sacrifice, too, or a dedicant. I know. I learned. He thought I didn’t, but… well, he done learned, in the end, didn’t he?
“You stupid,” Daddy'd say, out of that little old banty-lizard mouth and them banty-lizard eyes, looked like Strother Martin in an old movie only with glasses, and what that really meant was Prove me wrong. Whip me, or I'll stand here an' whip ye till ye do...
Daddy was hard to follow, sometimes. Perfect example what I mean about how it ain't just book-talk makes a man smart. I remember more times than there was examples, of him yellin' at me to go get him the wood-gilb when he was tryin' to chisel out a new hole to re-hang a door, and I always just knew he was talkin' about.
My cousin Bobby went on home after he helped us do some sheet-rocking (I gave him a few bucks, he's all right for a Yankee and he'll drink a beer with you if you get him talkin'.)Anyway, Bobby come on back the next day, and tells me that a "gilb" was the Scots Gaelic word for chisel.
Why, I could have told him that. We're about half-Scottish, on the Beane side, Mama's. Says in our family Bible that Daddy’s great-granddaddy’s great-great-grandaddy come over from somewhere else than Scotland, though, and had him a big old castle on a cliff, Delapore, was the name, but they’s up in Virginia now, and we don’t know none of them.
I remember that sheet rock me and Bobby hung. Daddy and me and Bobby built that upstairs part on our old barn, the one that's almost like an apartment, but... ain't.
That's where we kept Junior.
Junior, well, he kind of got home-schooled, we told the census takers when they come round, and the lady from the Board of Education. Home-schooled on account of he's got that real violent Asperger's Syndrome on top of autism, I think they said, and I got to damn near wrestle him to the ground and pin his arms back when he has him one of his spells.
Never know when Junior's liable to have a spell, I tell them, and they always nod like they do know.
They don't. But we home-schooled Junior all right, when Daddy died, just lately.
Daddy had Junior growing, down in the dark of the cellar-hole, for some time. We all knew. It was nothing to me. Way I took it, Junior weren't made entirely from no real stuff, anyway, not the stuff like you and me's made out of, my truck, my chair, my beer.
No, he's some other kind of thing, though when he gets loose he likes to rip and blow and cuss up in the hills, and make windstorms and tentacles and suck the dead right up out of their pauper's graves into his own essence.
Now, some of them dead was neighbors' dogs I shot when they come on my property. I don’t feel bad about none of it. They was vicious. I just hate having to waste too many shotgun shells on the same damn animal.
So I tried to keep top eye on Junior, and maybe some perimeter security I ordered from some fellers I know. Had me a couple of Claymore mines on electrified razor wire at ever' corner just under the window, and a photoelectric cell I rigged up from a coupla old supermarket doors, you know the kind I mean? Except the motor don't make the door come down, no.
No, sir, Mr. Whateley; Winder, Georgia cadet branch of the Dunwich Whateleys, it do not.
It goes to a home assembled flame-track I ain't got time to tell you about.
But I ain't mad at Junior at all, no more'n I'd be if we had us a velociraptor, or a damn hippopotamus swimmin' around out back. I’m still sore at Daddy, is who.
Daddy said Junior was, "My votary, Denny, my vessel, just like your Great-Cubed Grandpa Johnny Dee said could be done with Paracelsus' brick-oven altar formation he talked about usin' to grow a embryo... Paracelsus done scratched out half his notes 'fore Mother Church come in with her long, sharp nose, but I know what that old Swiss were tryin' to do..."
I guess maybe Junior had his own rules to live by, and since Daddy called him up with powders and books and whatnot, he's his problem, now just like then.
I was scairt to go out back there. See, Daddy died last night.
No, I hear what you're thinking. No, sir. Tell you what. No, I did not.
Daddy's body died in the hospital. Mercury poisoning. Paracelsus didn’t know everything. All that alchemical shit, that’ll get you. I don’t want to waste too many words on that.
But I home-schooled Junior tonight, all right. Me and Cousin Walter and the boys, we home-schooled him back to before the Stone Age, back to the primordial stew and the panspermatic dust.
With what we did, we done opened up a big old hole full of light in that swamp, right when Daddy come through into Junior's body. Then Junior/Daddy busted out of his apartment.
That shoggoth Daddy made of his own essence punched through the barn wall, spraying soup bones and sheet rock dust every which way but back together...
We stood our ground, me and Walter and them. We had us them little soapstone squid-headed idol things, the ones I got down’t’lanta from that voodoo woman, and we put ‘em in the water, and they…
They just went on and made that hole that caught Daddy/Junior, and started to pull him down.
Pullin' him on down, into that eldritch light. Daddy, a-wrigglin’ and a-floppin’ with Junior’s mismatched ol’ yard-sale body layin’ that black tar slime all across the grass that was witherin’ white where that ol’ black goo fondue laid smack across it…
I looked down into that hole, all the while a-yellin’ the good spell that’s supposed to make you fit to stand in any sight, the one Daddy showed me, that there Yellow Sign of Hastur Degryon? Sorta worked. We all looked all the way down in the hole, while we was a-chantin’ and whoopin’ and carryin’ on.
Down through the half-hollow Earth, and out the other side, to sunken Rl’yeh in the Bermuda Triangle, and the place where Great Ktulu-ili-mo'ku's done waited this whole time, laying under the waves and laughing at us all.
I looked that ol' Elder God square in the face, buddy, and I didn’t turn my head once.
And I heard him say his name once, just before Daddy in the form of Junior just plain wasn’t there any more, and neither were some of the boys and most of the swamp.
#
I heard him say his name, once, and beat on his big ol’ chest, that high off the ground, that high up from those weird rocks....
Cthulhu. Cthulhu ftaghn…
Then the light went out, and I was left to count up all them bodies, wait for the smoke to clear and clean up Daddy’s mess, with that damn name still ringing in my head…
#
Well, don’t ask me.
How'n the hell would you say it?
#

CoyoteCon2010: Hey, Look, Ma, I Got A Guest Page...:)

2010-04-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

This kind of made all the blood leave my head...

Holocaust Story, redux

2010-04-29T07:33:00.000-07:00

"Deep Down Trauma Hounds"

Please ignore the years-old, 'O My God Someone Please Take Me Seriously' bio, kiddies, and enjoy.

SECRET HIDEOUT STUDIOS: FIRST FRIDAY, APRIL 7: FEATURED ARTIST: SHARON COOLEY

2010-04-29T07:20:00.001-07:00

Join us at the Secret Hideout Studio for First Friday in May, and view artwork by Sharon Cooley.

Sharon's doodles are each hand drawn, one line at a time using gel ink pens and colored pencils. Each one is as unique as a snowflake, no two ever being perfectly alike. Her art is inspired by the fractals which can be found in nature and by the driving beat of psychedelic trance music.

Come and relax in our newly renovated space, and enjoy light refreshments while mingling with your fellow Portlanders and chatting with the artist.

As always, Studio staff will be on hand to give more information about the Studio's year round activities, such as creative coaching, Tarot, Reiki healing, groups and more-- and maybe even offer a demonstration :)

Secret Hideout Studio
1315 SE 37th, Basement Unit
Portland, OR 97214
503-839-6224 or 503-875-6326

Look for the "Open Studio" sign.

We are located close to SE Hawthorne & 39th, accessible by buses 14, 15 & 75. On-street parking is typically available within one or two blocks.

Hope to see you this May!

-Serena Blossom Appel
serenabappel@gmail.com
http://secrethideoutstudio.wordpress.com

Ground Productions presents "PLAY AGAIN" May 15 Preview, Bagdad Theatre

2010-04-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

PLAY AGAIN

About PLAY AGAIN

What are the consequences of a childhood removed from nature?

At a time when children play more behind screens than outdoors, PLAY AGAIN explores the changing balance between the virtual and natural worlds in childhood today. Is our connection to nature disappearing down the digital rabbit hole?

What are we missing when we are behind screens? And how does this impact our children's well being, our society, and the very future of our planet?

Through the voices of children and leading experts like Richard Louv, Juliet Schor, Bill McKibben, Susan Linn, Diane Levin, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Gary Small, and David Suzuki, PLAY AGAIN introduces new perspectives and encourages action for a sustainable future.

PLAY AGAIN features music by Sigur Rós and Kimya Dawson. Original music by Andreas Hessen Schei. Cinematography by James Klatt. Edited by David Bee. Executive Producer Lowan Stewart. PLAY AGAIN is produced by Meg Merrill and directed by Tonje Hessen Schei.

For more information, please visit www.playagainfilm.com.

Dear Friends,

What an exciting time this is! PLAY AGAIN has been selected by FICMA, the International Environmental Film Festival in Barcelona, and we will have our World Premier in Spain the first week of June!

Here in Portland, we are getting ready for our pre-release screening May 15th at the Bagdad Theater. For Earth Day we will be at the City Repair Project event. We will be selling raffle tickets and our intern team will be launching our interactive web project, where you can share your thoughts and stories on the issues that PLAY AGAIN addresses.

We are so impressed with the community of support PLAY AGAIN has generated. We are relying on the power of the grassroots to get the word out about this film. So please pass the word!

For more information visit www.playagainfilm.com.

Thank you for making this important film a reality.

Sincerely,

Tonje, Meg, David and Lowan
_______________________________________________________________
Help us cross the finish line!

Visit kickstarter.com to help us finish PLAY AGAIN and bring it to the widest audience possible! Win prizes like DVD's, screening tickets, and karma points!
_______________________________________________________________

PRE-RELEASE SCREENING
Portland, OR
Bagdad Theater
May 15th, 7pm

WORLD PREMIER
Barcelona, SPAIN
FICMA International Environmental
Film Festival
June 1st - 6th

What they do not value, they will not protect. What they do not protect, they will lose.

Charles Jordan,
The Conservation Fund

PLAY AGAIN will be an important film that will help reconnect children to nature and slow our cycle of hyper-consumerism.

Juliet Schor,
sociologist

________________________________________________________________________________

Due out: WAR OF THE WORLDS: FRONTLINES

2010-04-24T14:06:00.000-07:00

War Of The Worlds: Frontlinesbought a piece of Wells-inspired flash from me called "News On The March." This antho is due out very shortly. More about this one when it goes live...

Starseeded

2010-04-24T01:28:00.000-07:00

This is going up temporarily for a friend. If it's accepted for publication, it comes down.

©2010 By Edward R. Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved
                                                              STARSEEDED

                                                           by Edward Morris

10/08/1871

   On Sunday night, behind the orange-lit front window of Piotrowski’s Drug on DeKoven Street, Louie Cavendish was the only soul left at nine-thirty. Mister Piotrowski was long gone down t’the saloon for a pitcher of beer, and he gave Louie the key to close up, just like Louie was a grown man and everything, and not a bit soft, either!
      The city wrestled and sweltered through Indian Summer. Mister Piotrowski said there was a drought on even now, in October. “Whole city of Chicago’s done to a turn, Lou,” he groused that day. “Everyone’s losin’ their natural minds. Boychik, you may not believe this, but there are times when I truly envy you your unique condition of not havin’ the same kind of mind to lose…”
    The big afternoon rush that Sunday, with every Papa in the whole durned Ward taking his littl’uns out for an ice-cream soda, it seemed like, thinned down around four or so. Louie stayed until ten each and every night to sweep and up clean out the deep-freeze.
     Mister Piotrowski said funny things, sometimes. Often, he said Lou, I’d Trust You In the Same Room with A Hundred Dollar Bill, and Louie shook his hand the first time he heard that because Mister Piotrowski taught him more about being a man than his Papa ever did, so hearing him say that was like a kind of present.
   Louie was mostly done now for the night, resting in the front window with his busted brown brogans up on the scrolled cast-iron radiator, having a chaw of tobacco and watching the stars. It was pleasant to merely sit there and spit, letting the day wash and while away. Louie was at total peace just then…
    Until the stars outside and overhead ruptured, exploded and his whole world went sliding sideways out the front window with the rest of him.
    A white glare that wasn’t exactly light crashed into the sky, trailing lazy blue flames. Something went HOOM out in the alley a block away. It sounded like the roof on Pat O’Leary’s barn. Just where he could see when he blinked, the aerolite fell forever, dividing Before from After. This was no star, he thought, no comet! The Moon Men were here on Earth, like in that funnybook he could read a little of, behind the counter.
    Then big Louie, who’d never hurt anyone, ever, who’d been sterilized by a country doctor before he even knew what that was, who only wanted everyone to like him and not make fun, Louie made the worst mistake of his short young life: He ran outside to see what all the hubbub was about.
   Realization of the enormity of the affair grew in Louie’s strange mind by leaps and bounds when he got there. Half a block of railroad-style frame houses and sheds were already merrily flaming away.
    At the other end of the alley, trapped cows screamed from the smashed wreckage of the O’Learys' barn, parboiling in their stalls where the new, smoking black hill threw off its dull red heat, blocking their escape. People ran hither and yon, barely noticing him, their mad eyes tetched with the flames. DeKoven Street was a white-hot wooden tinderbox with the wind going the wrong way, bowling superheated gusts towards Louie like a Kentucky Derby in Hell. But he heard no sirens.
     There was a huge blaze in a slum tenement on the South Side the night before, he remembered overhearing some men talking about in the store. Maybe the Fire Brigade was still sleeping it off. He ran back to the store as fast as his short legs would carry him, and pulled the firebell anyway. Mum said that was what you were supposed to do.
    He’d never heard a firebell before, not up close. It was so loud he ran back outside while he still had any eardrums left. What a bell that was! It---
     Louie turned back, slowly, a question on his big, simple, honest face (a face that made young women want to pinch his cheeks, and sometimes give him smooches, which made both cheeks turn as red as the pump-engines that hadn’t arrived yet…) Something was calling to him, from the other end of the alley outside.
     Calling in the flames.
     Me?
     WORSHIP ME.
       It was God, calling out to his humble servant from the burning barn where the fatted calves were even now roasting in sacrificial offering to the Most High. The smoke made Louie’s belly rumble.
      WORSHIP ME.
      The flames parted around the barn door in a clear, bright cylinder. Louie shielded his eyes.
     “Wait. I can see you, sorta, but I don’t understand what you are-- “
        WORSHIP ME.
      Like Shadrach in the Bible, Louie Cavendish walked into that furnace, and was not consumed.
      Not exactly.
#
2.)
    10/29/1930
     The window of the young psychiatrist’s back office was stuck open and he couldn’t find the pole. In the street, he heard the rough alcoholic talk of the men on the bread-line that stretched around the block to the kitchen of Chicago State Hospital, where they chucked the day-old crusts to willing mouths who would slather every roll with mustard and lard and thank whatever God they brought with them from across the sea.
     There were thousands worse off than him, but he’d clawed his way up from trash, so he’d been properly grateful, even before Black Friday. Grateful to be out of jail, mostly…(The doctor rolled up his sleeve, pulling the garter taut at his bicep.)
    This office was all they’d been able to afford him for his residence at the State Hospital, but he didn’t mind. His flagship case was going to mean all sorts of future publishing possibilities.
    He’d heard about the old mongoloid Louie Cavendish from operators on the famous Cook County Car#1 (the one the conductors called the Loony Wagon, since it stopped right out front. The doctor took it to work quite regularly. )
    The moron was amazing, a regular Delphic oracle. Why, a fellow could almost start his own religion around this one, if he was sharp. P.T. Barnum was right about a certain sixty-second birth cycle for the world’s most plentiful organism.
    As he drew the plunger up, pulled the colorless cocaine into the syringe from the spoon, and gently flipped away an air-bubble with one talcum-dry index finger, his mother’s voice echoed in the young resident’s head down the years, lo these many since he was a baby in short pants and they were rebuilding all the different Wards of Chicago after the fire, and she always told him…
    “Warren Schreiber! You finish your homework or you’ll grow up to be nothing but a … lamplighter!”
     On his desk, the spirit-lamp flared a bright blue alcohol flame like there was treasure here, or a ghost was about to speak. Fat chance. Fat chance for anyone. The whole country was shit-poor and just about ready to go to war or the whole economy would collapse. Starve the people on enough pork and beans and mustard-and-lard sandwiches and they’d believe anything you fed them.
    Turning away from the subject with a shudder, the young resident’s thoughts raced on out loud., “Why, no one could have said everything Louie says under narcoanalysis without being present, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. You are now on your own, my good old son. Truly, truly…"
     Dr. Warren Schreiber found a good vein and took his P.M. injection, sighing a little as the coke hit his system and sparked his heart and way down into his feet. Not too much in baby’s bottle in the PM, but the work demanded a little. This job was anything but lamplighting,
      Oh, no. Warren fancied himself a true American entrepreneur, who parlayed his MD into long years of teaching at Chicago University while passionately turning his hand to writing the new ‘Scientifiction’ in his spare time. One day, one of the novels would get published, and fly far above the two fraudulent patents and that one string of bad checks in Gary, Indiana. He was on top of things. And at any rate, Mother Dear was easy to shove aside.
   The patient now enjoying a post-session barbiturate nap on his big overstuffed couch in the front room, on the other hand, was being torn apart by his own head, and the scary thing was that the more Dr. Schreiber listened to Louie, the more sense he made.
    Mongoloids weren’t even supposed to live this long. This old baby Louie had witnessed the big fire firsthand , the records said, as a young lad in 1871, the same year he was committed.
     According to the carbons of his original “funny-papers,” Louie Cavendish was committed because he thought he was a Man from the Moon, with a gibberish name Dr. Schreiber couldn’t pronounce,. Louie’d been riding that merry-go-round for most of his life, with no brass ring in sight. Dr. Schreiber’s predecessor diagnosed rapidly deteriorating paranoid schizophrenia and massive non-specific delusions. Incurable.
    Sometimes, though, old Louie just acted like himself, and exhibited great despondence (coupled with a kind of Stoic resignation) when told where he was, what year it was, what was on the radio that night, or anything of the kind. That made Warren wonder...
    Wait. How much time had passed? And what…
    Don’t worry, he reassured himself. You got Lou for half a day before that Ward Mother wants him back with the rest of the brood to slop up supper. Your original thought was: What if … What if all those prophets in the Bible, all those wandering madmen, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Isaiah… what if they were all…
     “Like Louie,” the doctor muttered to himself, ridiculous little toothbrush mustache going up and down, “But if we frame the hypothesis in reverse, what if neither poor dear Lou, nor any of those wooly old stampeders, way back when were ever truly---“
      “Human?” Louie croaked from the doorway.
       Schreiber shrieked. The empty syringe shattered on the floor. The doctor smacked his forehead, chuckling at his own instant assessment of the situation.
    “Somnambulist.That old broody hen puts it in your chart all the time. Didn’t know you vocalized, too.” He puffed up, putting his thumbs in his braces. “Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing today?” he scoffed.
    The wizened, round-headed old apple-doll marionette broke its lips free of their rigid, rotten grin. When Louie’s eyes opened all the way this time, the new green light was suddenly all that Warren Schreiber could see. When Louie spoke, the voice sounded like the moan of backdraft in a burning house.
      “I AM THAT I AM. I AM LEGION. WORSHIP ME.”
     Dr. Warren Schreiber, lapsed Seventh-Day Adventist, non-practicing sadomasochist and burgeoning drug addict, wet his pants. Suddenly, the P.M. meds weren’t helping at all…
#
3.)
Kelly, Kitty Dr.Warren Schreiber: Reluctant Apostate
Excerpted in The National Inquirer, May 15, 1955
… that negative sentiments are implied at the usage of words like "cult" and "sect". From that first series of sessions, Dr. Schreiber chose to begin “transcribing” The Tome of Joyness, and organized his famous ‘Agora’ of pseudoscientific minds in the Chicago area to discuss the material collected from patient LC and others of similar diagnosis, the first “Lamplighters” or prophets in Joyness vernacular, from 1929-1939.
     The Agora group claims the book is used as a spiritual guide by many different religions with information on other beings’ purpose, history, and message. They believe that the Tome was authored by superhuman radio signal through “Receivers”, semi-epileptic and usually retarded ‘possession victims’ such as Patient LC, who took down the Word in dictation or dictated it to their primary practicioners. They claim much of this data “unpronounceable by human tongues,” just as their true forms are purportedly invisible by human eyes.
   The science fiction writer and professional skeptic Charles Fort interviewed Schreiber in early 1930, and called his writing, "...Incomprehensible pulp twaddle that puts suspenders on its too-big britches and dares to name itself Logos, Philosophy, even Universal Truth? One might only hope to one day naturally experience the worlds which such false prophets visit under the influences of the various pharmaceutical preparations. Back here on Earth, we are confined to the heuristic rigors of plain common sense."
(CONTINUED NEXT PAGE)
#
4.) 03/29/1971
    "Look, Nina! A shooting star!!! I just---"
    “Shut up! I’m watchin’ the news! Give my head a break for five minutes!”
   “This is CBS Evening News for March 29th, 1971. Walter Cronkite with you this evening. Tonight’s top story is, as you may already be aware, the long-awaited verdict in the gruesome Manson Family killings. We take you to film from Los Angeles County Superior Court...”
     In the other room, Nina pocketed her tinfoil marijuana pipe and sprayed the Lysol again. Outside the windows, visible both from the parlor and their parents’ bedroom, the skies over West Deptford, New Jersey could have come straight out of that great old “War of the Worlds” movie she’d just seen with Sal Portinari again down at the Odeon for the Friday Night Creature Feature last week.
     The shooting star she'd just seen was joined by a second, then a third, trailing lazy blue flames. Four, five fireflies falling into Town, and if one of those fires should happen to catch… Nina Sloan watched, and wondered much.
      She’d stayed in all that hot night, glued to their big old black-and-white Fifties Philco fisheye bubble TV that always smelled like burning film after they left it on a while. Bobby’d been down at the Y until well into the evening playing fooseball (and good little walking liability for staying the hell outta my hair…) before things got weird. Now he was back, and she was going out of her mind with worry, dope or no dope.
   Bobby picked up on that, of course. He always picked up on things she was thinking at the most inconvenient times. Bobby knew a lot of things without having to ask. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it got him in trouble.
   “What is it with boys and their fires?” Nina muttered, blasting the last little nugget in the pipe to sweet black ash, then pocketing it again. “If I saw something like that, I’d run the other direction…”
    “I write no commandment to you,” Prosecuting Attorney Vincent Bugliosi read chillingly on the TV, into a courtroom mic from a stained composition notebook, “I have not written through you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it more deeply concerning those Pigs in power who would try to deceive you. I have written these things to you because you believe that you may know Eternal Life…”
   The news cut to Cronkite again.
   “Despite repeated pleas of Manson’s innocence, and a very complicated story from the defense implicating Manson family member Linda Kasabian in a ‘crime of passion’, after Kasabian testified against the cult leader, Manson and three other ringleaders have received verdicts of Death. ..“
   Bobby was listening in the kitchen doorway.
    “I didn’t set the fire, Nina, I swear to God, it was lit when me and Dustin got there, right by Scuttlebutt Nine---“
   At that point, Nina lost it. “---Also known as a private mausoleum, some places, and you idiots use it for a fort. I’m sorry I’m not more with it right now, but this turned out to be a lot worse than you bein’ the little boy who cried wolf, to call attention away from whatever the hell it was you blew up this time---“
    “The body of Ronald Hughes, attorney for Leslie Van Houten, was recently found, badly decomposed, in Ventura County. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi states that he will not be intimidated by…”
    “You saw!” Bobby squeaked. “You saw! There was this great big smoking hole in the ground, and all the trees on that whole side of the graveyard are---“
   Nina clutched her forehead.   “I know, I know, I saw, just shut up and let me think…”
   “Now is the time for Helter Skelter…”
    “But, Nina, when me and Dustin looked in the hole, the rock that came out of the sky, the whatzit, the meteorite, it looked back up! It opened up some kinda tunnel that went all the way down, and it talked to us, it said we were supposta---“
    “ ‘Leave a sign,’ Manson told them, ‘Something witchy.’ “
   “Bobby, you’re talkin’ crazy. Snap out of it. Look, I’m sorry, all right? Mom’s gonna be back from work in an hour. She just phoned. She said they finally got ahold of Dustin’s Mom, down at the mill. Bobby, you gotta be real strong right now. Bobby…. Dustin’s dead. They said… burns over half his body, but he wasn’t burned right out, they said it was … Radiation, or something. Bobby, what did you just say about---“
    “… Conspiring to send threatening communications through the U.S. Mail, and transmitting death threats by way of interstate commerce. These threats were targeted specifically against elected officials and corporate executives, accusing them of environmental abuse, and other supposed---“
    “When the rock came out of the sky, Nina, we both looked at our watches and they both said 12:12. Dustin’s started going backwards. Mine stopped. It--- OhshitIgottagoIt'scallinme---
      “Bobby, what was that just---“
                                                                                    FLASH.
“Bobby, you get your ass back in this house right now! They said they might need you to identify your friend---“
                                                                                    FLASH.
“Bobby, I’m not playin’! What the hell did you just---“
                                                                                    FLASH.
   "Oh, hi, Mrs. Fuentes. No, I don’t know what just blew up. Did you see which way my brother went? I swear to Christ I’m gonna wallop him when I---"
                                                                                    FLASH.
    Okay, that one came out of the sky. Did you see where it landed? Over in the graveyard, just like the other---
                                                                                    FLASH.
    Bobby, come out, come out, wherever you…
                                                                              Oh.
                                                                                  My.
                                                                               God.
     “ I’m sorry, Officer. Yes, I’m his sister. Nina Anne Sloan, we live right up the road. Oh. My. God. Bobby, what happened here? What did you see? What really---“
      Bobby grinned at her with green teeth.
      “Wolf.”
#
5.)
If Found, Please Return to
Nina A. Sloan
1137 Grant St.
West Deptford, NJ
------------------------------------
08/11/1992
   Vodka. Better. Thank God for whoever invented this stuff.
   I only get 1971 in bits and pieces now, like music playing far away when it’s stormy out. I heard “Raw Power” by Iggy and the Stooges on the radio yesterday and cried and cried in the middle of work. I had to tell the boss why.
   She let me go home early, and said when I felt better she might stand me a beer. (She was a Stooges fan once, too.)
   I hope I get to there pretty soon. I don’t think I could feel much worse. Anyway, I was telling the Bobby story. The one I never told anyone all the way.
   They had Bobby committed a year after the meteor shower, to that state hospital way out in the Pine Barrens. He was ten. Wasn’t shit-all else we could do by then. No parent could take care of that.
   One reformatory shrink said Bobby was off- the-charts smart, and the other guy said he was a retard. I don’t care what’s true. None of those people talk to each other. No wonder they let him go in the Eighties, when Reagan got in.
     And even, even if Bobby really did get possessed by an alien, so what? That alien came to Earth just to be a pissant.
    “Bobby?” he asked me flat-out one time, across the glass. “Yes. He was one of the most intensely beautiful beings I've ever experienced. He died when he breathed in the exhaust from my landing. The heart was still beating..."
    You see what I have to carry around inside me? Last time I saw Bobby was on the street in Bensalem last year, right when there was some rave or another going on outside of town. He got old, tattooed his whole face and grew a beard and stuff. He looked desperate.
       I was pulling in just as he was coming out of the Wawa market with a bag of rolling tobacco and a tallboy of beer in his hand, wearing a yellow cotton blanket made into a kind of cloak with buckles sewn onto it, and leather pants. Bobby looked right into my eyes and didn’t recognize me. I never told Mom. I wish I had.
    Mom’s about had it, anyway. The doctors say each day’s a blessing now. Father Tony’s been in more and more. All I can do is be with Mom right now, and offer the rest up to God.
    But, God, is it wrong for me to be upset that I didn’t kill whatever took Bobby over, when he came back in the house that night? Or that I didn’t run him over with the car that day outside the Wawa? God? Why do I think these things? I'll go to Confession. Father Tony's heard it all before, but he's so good at getting me to find something else to look at. Thank You for him, too.
I'm thinking about a lot of things he's told me, over the years. Like how we have to not just forgive, but keep forgiving. And then keep forgiving again.
    Maybe I'll have a whole new attitude tomorrow.
#
---------------------
Anne Andersen
1620 SE Belmont,
Portland, Oregon
(971)***-****

15 MAR 2007
SYNAESTHETIKON
dj: PHIL
FULL MOON PARTY
SOMEWHERE IN THE MOJAVE DESERT
       What a night. Drive 6.2 miles down Cow Taint Lane. Turn right on the dirt road and reset your odometer. Drive 3.8 miles, bearing left at the wobbly bridge, & turn Up, onto the fire road marked GO BACK. It's kind of hard to see. Drive uphill until you hear the party. Take a left at the mushroom patch, then let me tell you and then you tell me…
     Just earlier, tended my very first ever ritual fire, woot! The fear helped make me into asbestos. It was one of those giant hot banked fires that Nomad likes to build just behind what he calls the “sweet spot” of the dancing ground. We marked the perimeter with
                                                          [here a line is smudged out]
and it was getting cold, then the central axis lined up directly with the Pleaides, where Nomad says he’s from, then made triangles on the edges. The dancing was okay, they added to the energy. Nomad said that helped.
     There is a Native Atlantis under Mt. Shasta, and it rang with what we did when we called Down, then Up…As I get more practice it’ll be easier to herd the douchebags away and keep the serious channellers. More people will start to understand what we’re doing.
      Nomad was very pleased with my work. Pixie hucked most of the heavy logs for me and dug most of the pit! She says she has ‘helpers’, who live at a higher magnetic phreq than we can see. Nomad lit the fire with his eyes. I had the energy to stay with it for twenty-five hours, Phil’s whole set. Still a little punchy now.
     Last night tonight. Things may get a bit
                                                           [three pages torn out]
       brain-whomped when the channel opened to Nomad’s
                                                                           [line struck out]
   yet others in most glorious ways. We were all Starseeded. Nomad Starfucker did that for us. He opened our skulls.
       Someone or something was pushing everyone’s buttons intentionally that night. But Nomad made it all better, cast out all the human interference from they who tried to steal me from Nomad and Pixie and go back home with him instead of
                                                           [several blank pages]
     Will have to core out my ex-human Scott Freeh too, now that we’re all back in Babylon-Portland again. Scott is asking too many questions.Don't know why he still comes around here any more, except to buy weed. But Nomad says he’ll handle it, so it won’t take long. Pixie says she will dose Scott afterward to help cushion the memory-wipe, so he just thinks he tripped really hard. Hopefully that holds. I used to date him, and every time we drink around each other he gets all weird
                                                                          [last page is blank]
#
5.)
03/27/2007
   I remember. Real Life. “Send Me An Angel,”.up too loud on my stereo, rattling the screen door. I remember that day, sitting on the front porch of my bitter little bungalow in Felony Flats, stripped to the waist, smoking a cigarette, enjoying the seventy-degree post-sundown and listening to cheesy 80’s Top 40 on the radio.
     I missed Anne the most on days like that.. “Scott, our love couldn’t be domesticated at the time, and so must run wild, somewhere, still,” she’d written in a poem I only recently saw online by accident. That afternoon, for some reason I was stuck on ruminating about the day we met. The cherry blossoms were out all through Schrunk Plaza downtown.The sunlight was faded film stock from the early Sixties. It was that kind of day.
      She wore rectangular bronze glasses, and was tiny and freckled and blonde, green eyes giant and glowing, shoulderblades in that skintight black tanktop that I wanted to reach out and touch...There’s only so much I can’t condense, about that week when my girlfriend was in New York, when Anne came and hung out at our arteriosclerotic little one-bedroom walkup every night for a week and smoked cigarettes and drank iced tea with me and coaxed the greatest poetry I ever wrote from me just so I’d have something to read back.
    That continued, all the way out of that apartment, across town to a shared room over a loud, rowdy pub where the drunks howled ceili until three.She hauled me back to that fold-out cot, pulled me to her and began kissing the corner of my mouth and didn’t stop there. I stopped wondering too late.
    “You don’t make noise,” she breathed in my ear at one point, “I want to hear you…”   I’ll never forget the light in the room that night, the feel and sounds and smell of her, that themselves formed their own slippery, suck-marked continuum of several months, skipping like a stone from Milwaukie to an SRO hotel downtown where residents had to sign in guests and why, why, how did I either forget or misfile all this?
       The horrid thing is that it stops hurting. The heart still beats, just nowhere near as hard. Anne and I broke up two years ago. There’s still no one like her.
     A week ago, I was finally renting this place, after a deposit that had me back on the Emergency Food train for several weeks, and a move that required calling in every favor I’d ever done since moving out here.
    I had the rosebushes out front trimmed and ready to bloom, the landlords on good speaking terms, the grass mowed, the bills paid, the chance to sit around in the evenings and read my own columns while I nursed an RC Cola and silently mourned the days when it would have been an ethyl blend.
    Then the wind blew and the shit flew and down Seventieth Avenue crept that little white Nissan I thought she sold.
    This never happened outside of the movies. Maybe…
    Maybe nothing. The memory skips a beat. The soul outweighs the mind. What came back from Mojave wasn’t all the way Anne.
Her honey-gold skin was shiny with white alkali dust from the playa, from the black hair-wrap holding in her dreadlocks, down to the rings on her toes. She smelled like kerosene and beer that day, and she looked so damned good I wanted to go in the bathroom and castrate myself with the nearest available sharp surface after her left arm left my shoulders on the porch and she dropped the dime, “Not a chance, Scott. Not a chance.”
      I wondered even then how much of her made it back, my newest ex, who I let slip through my fingers, the alien in my house, the tiny elephant in my room. “Oh, lighten up, ” Anne smirked eventually, leaning in and kissing me on the cheek. “Take the stick out of your ass, we could use the wood. You weren’t in the right place to live with anyone anyway. All you could offer was fancy footwork and empty promises, you know that. You were too hung up on trying to fix the past. Can’t be done.
    My brain and cock and heart were still shouting at each other like the Three Stooges just shared a few twenty-dollar rocks of crack cocaine. I waited for the sting to go away.Anne’s teeth were very bright, her eyes full sore. “Don’t take everything so personally,” she went on fast, “If I looked at life the way you do all the time, I’d …go insane…”
     (Then what, I ask her now, after such knowledge. What am I supposed to do? Go live in the woods, tattoo my face? But the right words never come in time. That ship has sailed, and left me here on the ground.)
   “Anyway,” I sighed ruefully, back then. ”Tell me more about this gig.”
   “You’ve heard psytrance before,” Anne elaborated, reaching in the Army satchel she used for a purse and producing a pouch of Native rolling tobacco   I seesawed my hand.
“Acid-house with a rrrreal industrial sense of humor, they use every kinda noise overlay they can to…"
      “It’s a language,” Anne overlaid herself, like I hadn’t spoken. I just sat there in my recliner like a douche and watched her pack her ornate glass bowl full of weed, hand it to me, then hand me one earphone of her iPod. The file was down at the bottom of her oldest playlist, simply titled: PHIL. SPIN 12. THE SHIFT. I leaned in to listen closer…
    This Phil creature was good. The trance was heavy, commanding, a deep meaty 98-beat-per-minute stew full of a lot of classical music, big Jamaican Nyabinghi drums, 1930’s German jazz, Seventies funk, nutbags on talk radio … Phil took it all up and spun it in his hands, and wove a sonic tapestry landscape of meaning that shivered the cities of the West down to the last tin shack…
      And if I had to listen to this stuff for twenty-five hours straight or whatever she was talking about, I’d go crazier than Syd Barrett and never come back...Or maybe not.Anne was still talking,
   “…drugs I’ve never heard of, and Phil gets up in that chair and spins for twenty-five hours straight when the moon gets full, and…”
     I held up one hand. “You said something about…” Part of me had been paying attention to everything she said the whole time, “Er, that is… Who’s the lucky new…”
I didn’t know what flavor her new partner would be. The question surprised her. She flushed.
     “One of, uh, one of each, actually. The … male half, used to be a guy from Jersey named Bobby Sloan.”That statement was very not Anne. I reached for a cigarette of my own and fumbled on the coffee table for a lighter, trying to pretend like I could give a shit. But I was all kinds of confused. “Used to be?” I scoffed. “So he’s a transsexual? I always wondered if they were capable of orgasm, can he… she… ze… How do you…"
     But Anne was shaking her head, laughing for a moment and then quickly thinking better of it. She handed me the bowl, and my cigarette took a back seat. I hit it hard, very interested in what she was going to say next.
    “Scott… I… you're a journalist, can I just…”    I made impatient gestures, feeling slightly sick and knowing that no matter what it was, I hated it. “Tell me the story. Whatever it is. It’s your story.”
     Anne nodded, not really listening. Then her eyes started shining in a way I didn’t like. There was something complicated growing in back there behind them, like algae, or… Ewwe…I squinted, trying to puzzle out a single detail. The air in my bungalow was a nice healthy blue. Roaches were falling off the kitchen counter, fucked-up.
     “Take this,” I handed Anne back her huge, handblown pipe. And the earbead. The music was getting straight irrational. I had to look away, and talk myself down.“I’m good. More things than Heaven and Earth were meant to hold. One of… each? Anne.”
    Sentences were getting hard to form. The end of the bowl was near. Anne nodded, telling me the rest in whispers. “I’m letting both other thirds of our new thing, our Trinity, Pixie Stormbringer and Nomad Starfucker, I’m letting them… kinda lay low at my place. They called up a lot of powerful energy at the last event, and a lot of people are still convinced that they didn’t know what to do with it, that they weren’t really… Are you listening?”
      I was. I just couldn’t speak. I nodded my assent. She went on again as if I hadn’t spoken at all. It was like hearing a Grant Morrison comic book come to life, I reflected, except there were no panels, no splash pages. This was serious shit.
      “I’m still trying to get clarity about the Timeshift that happened down in the desert that night, the transference. Everyone had a bad trip, but it wasn’t just a bad trip. They screwed up what Nomad was trying to bind. They let it out. It drove Justin… the guy who I met after you, sorry, Scott…” I made a noise.
       “Justin went temporarily, and pretty violently, insane. The rest is a long story. If you would have been there---“
      I grimaced. “Bite that off. You wrote the rules. Remember? “
     Anne lowered her voice, “But, see, this is the best part… Pixie and Nomad... are aliens. Both of them are real aliens. Self-admitted. They’re… fire performers, kinda. They build these big geomantic fires that they use to talk to their home, and they use Phil’s events to focus the signal…”
      After that, I'm afraid it got a little weird.
#
    Over the next few hours I will mercifully not reproduce here, I gathered that “Pixie” was the last of many women around the country who supported Nomad Starfucker/Bobby Sloan and let him hide out at their homes when whatever festival was in town.
     I wondered how many child support payments the original human owner of Bobby Sloan’s body owed in how many different states, while the alien ran him around like a tweaker with someone else’s brand-new Mastercard, him with his stable of fire-dancer groupies trailing after him like he was a one-man Grateful Dead.
     Part of the reason why we broke up was that Anne claimed I sometimes got so stressed I just Went Away, and wasn’t there while she was talking to me. I meditated on the weird essence of this new ‘They’, who were now sleeping on the futon where I used to sleep, doing the things I used to do in ways I never could imagine.
   Any way you sliced the whole setup, it rained loony all night. I sat and listened and waited for a thread of clarity to show up. None did. Anne was still spouting Nomad bullshit,
    “Pixie was different, see. She dumped her job, her boyfriend and her identity at Mojave when the alien walked into her head….”
     After a while, just hearing any of it made me want to tune out harder
#
    Nomad could talk a transvestite hooker out of her g-string, I was soon to find. He lived on sleight of wits and favors, fancy footwork and empty promises, for the simple reason that even he believed himself, or did such a damn good impersonation that he might as well have done.
As near as I was able to determine from his own diatribes and the trail he left in his immediate wake, he grifted every rave or music festival he could seven different ways from Sunday morning coming down. He got part of the gate, part of the dealers’ cuts, part of the swag from wallets and whatnot left over after cleanup, everything.
    For it, Nomad did work a hell of a lot of hours on festival strikes and load-ins, in exchange for “anything that isn’t money”, in his slurred words, living in the warped mirror of the carny world where every month is rainy April and every city is dark.“All of you Lamplighters are frustrated and want First Contact to happen right now,” I once read on one of this creature’s many incoherent blogs, or maybe firsthand preached from on/while high, “There’s always been a time frame, just not yours. This is not Burger King. You cannot have cosmic enlightenment Your Way, Right Away... “
     I remember the way Nomad came on to Anne from the word Go, with arguments against the machine world and the horrors of nuclear experimentation. In Nomad’s America, Geomantic ritualists waited to consign Bourgeois-Crime Offenders to “creative problem-solving tasks connected with the houses of the senses.” … I read Nomad’s blogs, all right. Every scrap. I Googled the ‘alien’ words he used… and found a heretical offshoot of Seventh-Day Adventism that flourished in Chicago in the Thirties, and exploited a lot of truly sick people. And I read their scriptures, too.
#
     I remember sitting on Anne’s couch, reading the testimonials at the beginning of this year’s edition of Dr. Warren Schreiber Inc.’s tissue of horse shit, every fan going, ninety-two degrees outside, dreaming of spilling my heaving guts into the synapses of the Free Press about this asshole, in the bright perspectiverse of Just Off The Clock…
    “Regardless of the question of who wrote this book, or recorded it, or any of its origins, I was deeply moved. Not much moves me. The Joyness Book did. “
     I think I was going to tell Nomad off tonight. I have set out alone to see Anne. Switching to work recording gear. Soon.
     After I see her sweet face, and burn one with her, and pretend like this may not be my last night on Earth---
[last page is missing]
#
[undated earlier entry]
   Nomad stroked his black Don Quixote beard, clearing his throat. His weird, ringing voice always put me to sleep after he ran that mouth of his for too long. One webbed hand sinuously stole the mic again. I looked at the hand.
    “Don’t sweat the petty stuff, you know the rest. And when you wake up one day and just can’t bring yourself to go out into the crazy worland a mundane, trivial job just to pay said bills, well, then, don’t go in to work either. They're just an illusion anyway, you know? The so-called education system on Planet America…”
    “…And you can talk like that, with your trust-fund or whatever it is,” Anne snarked from over on the couch. “You could sit fat off the cow for the rest of your life. I saw your bankbook. And yet you make Pixie strip to pay your rent?”
     She was sore at him that day for some reason. It had something to do with things I never wanted to know about, ever. “How Thou art fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, Who Didst Rise in the Morning!
     Nomad’s grin was like nothing I have seen before or since. “The original owner of this body told me that, back when he was in Sunday school---“
    I snorted from the couch. “Did they have Christianity then, or did you –“
    “Negativity,” Nomad was unfazed, merely clucking and wagging one finger as he handed me the big spliff whose fumes he still half-held in. “Funny, though. You’re Scott, didja say?”
     He was sucking down psilocybin tea like it was Pepsi, humming and sewing on a pair of pants he was making for someone or other at the next festival.
     “Of course he’s Scott,” tiny Pixie buzzed from the floor, sorting different grades of black buckskin with a grease pencil in her mouth. “Scott Freeh. Remember how I said that was like one of your stupid jokes, Commander?”
    She was right at my feet. The microskirt she wore had rucked up in the back to an alarming degree. Her own purple-and-black dreadlocks were tied back close to the base of her skull, and wiggled like tentacles when she looked at Anne, grinning that missing-incisor grin. “Anne, dear, I hacked Social Security this morning. Your benefits went through. I haven’t done that in a while.”
    For some reason, she was rubbing a black burn mark at her right temple when she mentioned that. Or… I squinted, and it was only a shadow.   “…mmmbut due to some unfortunate events,” Pixie buzzed back up to normal speed. I rubbed my eyes.
     “Not like we need to talk about them any more, but … lotta bad trips at Mojave, and the fire called up a deity far greater than the space, a whole buncha vast bad-past stuff from people who didn’t know how to fight it, just kids, couldn’t handle the heat…”
      There was a lot of cabin fever between all three of the new triad that day, bickering that seemed to put itself on ice when I got in the door, out like the light in a refrigerator until that door shut behind me again. Nomad and Pixie rarely left the place, and Anne rarely could when her pain got bad.
      “… but they tasted like chicken,” Nomad leered, licking his lips and looking at Anne. She gave him the finger and resumed wrapping up one of her twenty-bags of a fantastic new strain of weed that always seemed to be in massive supply, of a strength and potency unknown to me. The buds were sticky, and almost literally glowed in the dark.
      Initially, Nomad and Pixie seemed much calmer than the kind of douchebags Anne normally brought home. While I thought both of them were clinically insane, they were nice.
    I had more to deal with, then. Even after I swore off booze most of the time, late at night when a drink started looking pretty good I often wondered if something else lived in my own head, some hostile alien parasite that magnetized a cloud of Fail all around me, and laughed, and laughed…
      . At first, in the smoky sunlight of Anne’s new Section 8 apartment, it seemed almost verboten to openly discuss the shadow side of self-proclaimed Lamplighters. Any time we did so, Nomad would storm in and slam us with a smile,
    “You’re taking other people’s illusions personally,” he’d simper through his beard, “There’s a great work that must soon begin, you guys, so why live in the past and pass judgement?”
     The only reason I still came around there was to buy weed , and sit and talk to Anne for as long as I could get away with before I felt like an idiot. If that was what it took to keep her in my life as a friend, so be it.
#
   The next time I came over to Anne’s apartment, I was walking by her open back window, just about to call for her to let me in, when:
     I heard Nomad’s token nasal boom, in tones I didn’t associate with him,   “Hogwash! What you see in me are just your uncleared issues, human-symp! This is a very self-centered human genetic flaw, rampant everywhere. You don’t even know you’re not free!”
    Or some such nonsense. Anne’s voice cut back clear and sharp as glass, like the Anne I used to know, “All I said was, ‘you have two weeks to pack your shit.’ This is Public Housing. You can’t have guests, anyway …”
     I stood where I was. At the sound of what I heard next, I could taste the shot of whisky already, taste it, feel its blessed napalm nepenthe washing away the brain cells that held this moment I was seeing now, hearing now, and none could stem the…
    …Tide, tide of tentacles in soft honey quartz Portland twilight falling, falling across the dear sweet face of Anne who went willingly into the embrace of that icthyic Djinn with eyes as green as burning copper, murmuring in a weird, cackly voice I didn’t like…
       “Cloudcuckooland, province of cuckoos and fairies,” I heard Pixie chime in from somewhere else in the room. “Lay back into me, dear youngling. Let us upgrade you.” That murmur was raising a red flag in the class struggle in my pants, about as useful at the time as a rubber crutch.
          “See it, know it, touch it? I want to hear it.” Anne was saying back to someone.     Something unzipped. Something else schlupped. I tried to roll a cigarette and dropped the makings everywhere, looking up as…
      “Oh. It Knows Where I Am. It Wants Out. Oh.MM.”
     The smell was unlike anything ever. So was the light. … I slept on that futon. We could sleep a whole night in each other’s arms without waking up. What are you, motherfuckers, what are you really---
     “Oh. Mmmm. Aaah. I am… it. It exists. I am ….me. Shall always be. It is I…”
      “Mmm. Aaaah.”
      “It wants out.”
#
8.)

USER:SCOTT FREEH 07/04/2007
(voice recording) NOTES TOWARD:
OUTDOOR PSYTRANCE PARTY COLUMN

     This is Scott Freeh reporting live at the Synaesthetikon Full Moon Ignition on the Feast of Dionysios, 2007, if you can hear me at all, for the Portland Rocket, where we say Keep Live Music Alive and Earth-based, bidding loyal fans and worst enemies to listen close. You wouldn’t believe how many of these go on, weather permitting. Most of them don’t make any
money, but even the promoters are preservationists reaching for the lasers. As always, there’s a seamy underbelly, and that’s where I feel kind of funny talking into this Bluetooth recorder in my ear right now.
    This column, if I ever make it through tonight to write it, was all supposed to be a fluff piece, fifty thousand words on outdoor trance parties in the sticks in this area.The performers at these events live in yurts and work Pagan holiday retreats and Ren-faires, SCA and AFTRA events, year-round at one guild craft or another. Like the carnies of yore, they know what towns to stay out of. Their venues often carry more equipment than most sound and light companies.
    Nomad is like them, at least a little, not afraid to be written of in the newspaper or labeled a walking contradiction .
     Oh, who am I even kidding with this Edward R. Murrow act? Yeah, they’ll transcribe this. Heh-heh. At the Evidence Lab of the Portland Police Bureau. Hi, Officers.
      You’re now hearing what was supposed to be a music column, brought to you by the piece of leaky meat currently cooling on a Slab Nearest You. In life, my name was Scott Freeh, and I was an idiot. I am in Hell now for a worse crime, though: Following one.
     I sit wrapped in blankets to protect me from the monster at the other end of the fire, under this sycamore tree like an Alex Grey Buddha, willing the hallucinations out past my flesh to arm’s length, down a long corridor lit by eyes of every human and inhuman hue, where I can observe but not get hurt…
    I can’t leave this endless branching hallway inside myself looking out, stuck in the mediation, lost in the Om, caught in the mosh, crossways in this wood between the worlds full of white eyeballs and deep meat chasms. I can’t move again until I find Anne, you see, hiding in whatever mushroom she’s hiding, dancing wherever she’s dancing to the thunderous , infinite beat that is everywhere, all around.
     Synaesthetikon. Phil’s gig. Don’t know the date any more, or even know where the hell I am in the Altered State Of Oregon, somewhere between John Day and the Kingdom of Prester John. The clocks have melted down. The gods have all gone home.
    I think this was supposed to be a column. I’m at… I guess you’d call it a kind of outdoor rave, but that doesn’t begin to cover the happening that is a psytrance party in Sticksville, Oregon.
    I sit and hide, wait and watch, behind the … whatever this is, behind whatever I took, whatever got slipped in my drink, whatever...
Whatever. Nothing matters but the rising of the moon, and the pounding of the drums in the deep forest, the way the strings of lights make a faery city between the branches, like they did way back when we arrived. There was more. Nothing matters now. Nothing more.
      Even out here, something is riding on my phreq. Listening in.I’ve been drugged against my will, readers, and I’m pretty sure I’ve sustained injuries consistent with something that is not now nor was ever human. I think. All of this is mere conjecture, to be edited in sobriety. But I’m fairly certain that some of it might be real, and might not go away in the morning. If the morning ever comes, and I live to see it.
    I think the non-human entity I think I mentioned… may be responsible for the death or irreparable transmogrification of one of my oldest friends in Portland. Yet I have to slow down. Tell this so it makes sense. Unenviable. I…
    Wait. Focusing on the breath. Staying with it. Riding the terror down, down…
    Writing it down. Talking it down to the size of this microchip in my earphone, sending it into the light.
     You can bombard a patch of ground for a thousand years, but the dust you cleave is never your own, and the starter plants rarely resemble the pictures on the seed-packets. True, they develop quickly, but there will forever be adaptation, cross-pollination, variation…
    Sooner or later, the descendents end up looking nothing like the originals, and begin to question their will. Right or wrong, the gardener always reaps what they sow.
CLIICK-CLICK-CLACK-CLUCK-CLACK, goes the beat, CLICK-CLICK-CLACK-CLUCK-CLACK (whunk whunk. whunk whunk.)
     Reality’s peeling in strips. Wait. Where the hell is Molly? I left my weed with her. She’s… Anne’s neighbor. The drug counselor. The one who drove us here, she….
   Sigh. Hiding in someone else’s smelly, pestiferous sleeping bags, wondering why I keep forgetting to leave the scene and make a run through those big… dark… woods… I struggle to string the night back together into some kind of vague sense.I don’t remember how I got here, exactly. Some of it is me. All of it is. Hell, I don’t know. I wish someone would come along and tell me what to do.
   The moon is up. It’ll all be over soon. I try to orient myself, sit crosslegged and look into the flames. Overhead and all around, the weather witches into Fall and the cold stars shine in bright profusion everywhere, in endless forms most beautiful and wonderful, running riot like a wild garden full of plants left to cross-pollinate and evolve and graft and everything after its kind.
    Gotta remember what I took. If you name a thing, its hold diminishes. Gotta remember real life…
    Heh. Around me now in the flat field, the dancing grows more frenzied , the beats more savage. I’m not going anywhere near the fire again…
I don’t exactly remember how I got under this tree tonight, brothers ‘n sisters. My recent past has six or seven possible explanations, like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books in grade-school. Life doesn’t work that way. Except tonight
   Now doesn’t gibe with Then, the nightmare road-trip I can't believe I am sitting here remembering, gasping and half-alive, with that thing leering at me from the back seat. This dog don’t hunt. Do Not Want...
#
8.)
    I remember starting out on foot tonight from my house, locking the front door. The moon was just up. I was loaded for bear with the tools of desperate revenge shoved into my belt or deep down the inside pockets of my trench coat.
    I remember the dusty way the rain smells in that part of town, full of boiling cabbage, fried food and beer and methamphetamine twinkling into liquid in tinfoil pipes. I remember walking in the rain under all that verdant greenery, with Mods whizzing by on old Vespa scooters, crackpots on unicyles carrying newspapers under their arms, Jesus Freaks pushing Salvation to boiled-out alkies in Guapo’s drawing in cut-rate charcoal on the backs of foodstamp applications.
   I remember realizing that I was about to commit a felony. I remember that making me roar with laughter.
     BORG EVANGELICAL VENTURES, read the old plywood sign high atop the flat Art-Deco wreck, visible a block away on Woodstock by Silver Dollar III Pizza. The building was long vacant. But not really. Not if my hunch was right, between the lines of everything Anne said.
    I won’t go back and explain that part. Too much culpability everywhere. I knew what I knew. About where he'd go when she kicked them out.
     Let’s just say most of that part of Woodstock Avenue was empty, too, except for the biker bars. Above the windows, the banners were tired. The sun-faded jellybeans in their exploded bag on the windowsill looked like an astrological chart I couldn’t read.Let's just say I dipped into my jacket and removed a tiny steel pinch bar.
     By the time I was done, that door looked like a pit bull tried to chew its way out. So much for stealth. It started raining. One cop drove by. He didn’t stop.
#
     Up an old, osteoarthritic spiral staircase in the back, the first door on the right was pay dirt: A coruscating back room, once a live-work apartment in the Thirties, strewn with pestiferous slime-shimmery pillows and sleeping bags. My Maglite beam flicked through that splintery, fermented darkness, making shadows that animated into long, melty creatures come to peer over my shoulder and touch my Earth-meat flesh with spatulate digits, tasting me through their minds, making sibilant sounds in my ear.
    I remember all the smells coiled inside that building, all the ways the doors behind you seemed to whisper open, as if at the presence of…
    They’re supposed to be gone, my mind hissed in a desperate effort to shut itself up. Phil’s throwing a party at Silver Falls, way out on some farmer’s land. Anne said she got me a ticket, but …
     (Something else was in there. I felt it tracking me, heard the metal rattle of its hungry tongue. I bluffed ignorance, put my head down and kept on.)
     Across the walls, flaking Polaroids in my flashlight beam showed meteors with faces, Nomad’s face, others’, a face that could have been Nomad’s growing out of a mountain of a thing that resembled a rolling juggernaut of dead parts and ropy suckers and other nasty shit I can’t even talk about because there aren’t quite words.
    I saw more. Things done to and grown in people, things that some people looked like they liked doing with him, only when they were done they didn’t quite look like people---
I gagged on that now-familiar smell never of this Earth. There were a lot of very old scrapbooks here, and if my flashlight batteries held, then I might…
    (Scuttling on the tile, a tentacled blur across my badly-focused beam, then---)
    Bobby Sloan, Nomad Starfucker, King Cult-And-Paste Himself, grinning like a dirty fishtank. The smell was indescribable. “I come forth from the Eternal, and shall return to the Presence,” he crooned, fixing me with his gimlet gaze. “You want so much to see? To know?”
    WHAP. His strange, webbed hands never moved. But I saw, all right:
    In the dream, I was held bodiless, without lungs or a mouth, and he showed me…
    Multiverses, excessions, prepositions that superseded Existence itself... Further back, into…
    In two, and four and six, worlds that bleed up the scale beyond joy or grief…
#
9.)
     Then came the drive to Anne's, and the road trip that did not end.
     Back under the tree now. Totally forgot that all that happened. I feel really cold. My gorge rises. The pride within me falls into humility.
    Being kidnapped kind of puts a whole new spin on things now, doesn’t it? Especially when the fucker who chicken-winged my arm behind my back and doped me to the gills did it while standing still on the other side of the room…
     Now is pounding, spinning, blacklite tapestries tied to geodesic frames, to yurts, to tents, to trees, creating a fabric that ripples and sings and dances with the blind idiot piping of Kokopelli and his brothers in Chaos serenading the formless Void… All the moss-backed, web-footed flockies and flunkies and folkies, every dready-girl and triple-fat-goose-jacketed B-boy, every live-action artist and Psych counselor reliving the Nineties, bob to bass so deep you could feel the vibrations in Atlantis…
      He touched my eyes, in the car. He let me see what I see now: The fields of light emanating from the back of every neck, a single silver cord from every one feeding the fire, the fire, the endless fire at the other end of the field, the growling doorway that burbled WORSHIP ME when anyone drew near.
      I have to find some vitamins. 5HTP. Something. I don't know who to ask. I've lost my English, and the world is not my home.
     On the hastily-erected stage, Phil is a dark shape behind the turntables, up in the chair, God, Allah, Samuel R. Delany, bearded and beaming over the crowd, spinning the stars through his fingers and making the heavens talk back…
   I can move again. I just checked. But now I can tell Bobby's Angels are watching me to make sure I stay put. His hide-bound tribe have eyes different than the rank and file. Maybe if I don’t move, they’ll think I’ve just brain-fried.
    Maybe they’ll let me get up, light oh please light a god damn cigarette, please, and then stroll ever so nonchalant into the bushes to break into a dead run, back to the highway to flag down some Samaritan trucker and get the fuck out of Dodge.
     Moon is high. Guessing midnight ish. The drums are very loud. The tree gives shelter. My skin is still on. The other guests haven’t yet crashed the party… If they will.
      If any of this is real.
      Remember…
#
      When I tried to ask Anne about what happened at Mojave, she always fed me the same lines, “Some shit got stirred up. Bad. There was a lot more to it than that. Talk to Nomad. He’ll explain. There’s not a thing wrong with him, no matter what you think at first. He’s special. He… he is Love.”
   He makes his own leather armor. His dreadlocks are capped with metal. His entire face is scaly with tattoos. Since 1979, this douche, this tit, this freeloading …Nomad told me, he lived traveling from party to party, doing what he did.
   "The fire channels the earth's core. We’ll raise the flames high, and barbecue you all. Can’t eat you, though. Too many preservatives and trans fats. What was I just on about…”
   ”No, Scott…” I hear Anne in my head, so many times over, “Nomad is wisdom & compassion. There are so many things I want to say about this soul, but words just fuck it all up. You haven’t seen what I saw… Supernatural things… I saw him bring a bird back to life---"
#
    The memory’s gone again. The fire’s talking to me now. DON’T LET THEM SEE US. DON’T TELL THEM WHAT WE ARE DOING.WORSHIP ME.
     At that, the flames laugh louder, shaking the earth. I sit way back in the shadows. The hopping, gibbering throng draws no closer than the light’s golden helix. The turntables BGGGDDDT DDDDDT DDDT, and then, just then, on the DDDT----
   Phil’s bass shoots low into the earth. I feel the faultline shake. The crowd of bobbing heads in the trees is starting to look decidedly inhuman.
   A clear white column of different light parts the flames in a different shade and rises through the smoke. Beneath the light, a shadow writhes and pulsates, causing me to tremble at the thought of the ultimate cold of the darkness between the stars.
    Out here on the perimeter, drowning in a field in the grand vast wet forests of the Cascade Range so tall and old, the right way wholly lost and gone… Close down on the clumpy western horizon, the small blue POINK of light flares up in a bright column, lost from view somewhere past the ionosphere, soon joined.    POINK. POINK. POINK.
    Three more bursts of blue, low in the sky, one right after the other, a daisychain of long, fine flashes. A mass landing. They’re coming in. I can see the first ones now.
     Mass landing. Hahahah. They will land in empty places, and occupy small bodies that would have died anyway. No one cares, not even… not even…
     I am Scott Freeh, of 862 Southeast Quimby Street, Portland, Oregon, 97205. I am on this planet. I came out here of my own free will and took whatever I took of my own free will, must have, with what used to be my ex-girlfriend Anne, and then became something else, then something else again.
    Her new friends are six different kind of crazy, but I was crazy going into this. Ha. Haaaa. Nanoo Nanoo.
#
      Earlier, as the night deepened, I saw Nomad’s girl looking at me, and took her hand. We were somewhere else. Somewhere in between. Excruciatingly adorable Pixie stormbringerbringer squirted four drops of phosphorescent blue Heaven onto my open palm and massaged it in. I licked it clean. Then …
    Pixie stood for a few moments watching the lights, before dancing straight into the fire and disappearing, and then I awoke and found me here, still in way over my head, with no idea why I should be so afraid, or wanted to follow, through the wavering gap in the flames where she ran, where I could see ….
    A long, hazy river between the stars, lights shooting up and down that flume to parts unknown, projected at the speed of Thought… A vast, flowing door for anything that wanted to crawl on through.to the other side. Our side. But It was already here ..
#
      “Now is the time to abandon your You,” I hear Nomad singing as he tosses a log into perfect configuration on the giant pyre. “You have prepared for the next stage with full awareness. Now it is time to leave your home. Abandon your attachment. Turn to me…”
    Yeah, yeah. Heard it. Jesus, but Anne’s been gone a long time. She said she was just going to talk to Nomad and smooth things out. I forget what we were even smoothing out, but Pixie dragged her through the hole in the fire, and…
      Something came back. It’s her body, but I’m still waiting for Anne to get back, just as I always have been. She apparently swapped out with Something else. Again. It’s got her eyes. It’s got … It’s. Not.
    Here. It’s There and Not There, unjust and equally justified. I couldn’t look at it too long, but Swamp-mouth over there poking the fire with a big flaming pointy log ,hollering in a ululating, inhuman warble, apparently has no issue…

       What’d you do with her? I remember asking him. A thousand years ago by five minutes I railed, You put her back in her body, or I’ll wipe these rocks with your face! You’re nuts! Did anyone, I mean---
   In my hand, my Pall Mall was growing as heavy as an alchemist’s loaf of lead. Ever… just flat out tell you…that you were…
   Was it an alien in my head even making me think these things? Easy. Easy does it. The world is your template just
dont close
your
O JESUS MARY JOHN CARPENTER WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH MY EYES
    “What?” Nomad asked me, standing there with sick gold light blaring from his hands and eyes, baring gray teeth in that sharp, angular mass of tattoos that were starting to move around…
#
    (bobby my name’s bobby I’m seven and I went somewhere hot and smoky where I could fly and breathe different air, and trap it like a balloon, and soar, and dive… and now I’m…)
(long black veil of winging flight through horrible abysses of radiance)
hung down his tentacled head, and roared a terrible roar, and his tail drew a third part of the stars of Heaven and cast them down into darkness…
   The field bore little resemblance to the one we’d formerly occupied.    The stars didn’t map the way home any more.    The column of purple light was gone. A lot of the deserters were coming back to the fire, pointing all around them.
    “Unless is a world,” I muttered, feeling colder than anyone ever had a right to feel outside the Arctic Circle. “A world that’s Not Yet. Write the things which you have seen, and the things which are, and the things which will take place after this…”
    It was a full minute before I stopped screaming.
      The music died. It all made sense. Why else would they have been so stupid… unless they were just kids, back wherever Home was…
     And I beheld Satan fall as lightning from Heaven, beheld this version with the eyes of a god, saw his end all too soon... Those eyes flashed out for the last time over the world that had ceased to be.
    Then Nomad dropped the log he’d been leaning on, rearing forward to snap at me with transparent teeth…
     WHOOM.
      And everyone was surprised.
     "Do you hear the aliens? In the song?" His tongue was black, and it… No..three of them? And hollow?
    From the fire, a swirling column of sparks soared past the ceiling of the clouds, a bass thud down below making the Earth quiver. A a strange refraction in possible movement, a bang, a whimper, a bursting column of purply-white light like a Sterno flame of moonbeams, a jet of gas found nowhere on the Periodic Table, shot up from the fire, through it, of it, around it, a…
     Log fell, as long as the last straw that broke back and bank and house and barn and all and bled the purple column straight up, sublimating the stormclouds themselves into gas.
      Raver kids in horribly victimizing clothes began falling all over each other to get to the parking lot. All the other grungy supporting Nomad band-mates began to scatter from the circle with varying degrees of alacrity at the sight of the purple light, gone into the crowd to run for the road and hop in the backs of trucks or Vanagons, anything that would turn over…
    Phil put the turntable on ‘auto’, removed his headphones, and strode casually down from the chair, a bearded shape with a long gray queue. “Such a shame,” the DJ called back over his shoulder as he ducked and ran.
   But when I listened, I could hear the aliens, too, fed in between every third note by broken digital pulses, crying Join us… Join us…
   Only I am left to tell, to warn, no one will understand unless I tell it all, I will tell it all:
   I called and called in the night and cried in the daytime, but I have Fallen, and my Father hears me not. We urgently wish to be heard by… particular individuals. So many technologies have been suppressed by your world’s oldest families since the unfortunate accident between Atlantis and Rama, blot on the consciousness of Humankind for a hundred thousand years. My Father only will know the minute and hour for such things.
      We are very strong, yet fragile beings, who communicate mostly through spectra you cannot perceive. I was called back to Earth. I am the return of the wayward son…
Our opponents took control of Earth virtually overnight in return for a terrible price...
      I have called the Great Old Ones back to Earth with my own return, as they have been called many times since the golden age of Thera, or as you know her, Atlantis. My
Father will bring the New Jerusalem down from on high, a shining ship on a hill to base a new, enlightened government aligned with the galactic family of light…
      We are Legion. I am Him. He is Me.
      WORSHIP ME.
#

A Blurb From House Zelazny...

2010-04-23T20:59:00.000-07:00

"Edward Morris is an eviscerated politician using words as Miles Davis used notes. All I've read has been a great reading pleasure."

---Trent Zelazny, author of
The Day The Leash Gave Way, & Other Stories

"Make a point of sitting at your computer, or with a pen and paper, and don’t worry too much about what comes out. If you are willing to work through the tough times, you’ll get to the good ones."--TZ, interview with Gabrielle Faust, Austin Literary Examiner

COYOTECON 1 (click the text)

2010-04-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

Drollerie Press, of Cleveland, OH, is hosting what may be the world's first all-online writing 'Con. From May 1-31, there will be online panels in the evenings, featuring, among others, Nalo Hopkinson, Gary Braunbeck, Kealan Patrick Burke; and Yours Truly co-moderating one of the two Steampunk 'panels. Read more about it, check out the schedule, and please come have a look so we have more of these.

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE FOR EDWARD MORRIS

Sat. May 01
Mythic Fiction, 4PM PST
Deena Fisher, Edward Morris, Sarah Averyu, Meredith Holmes
8PM PST Ghosts Sarah Avery, Edward Morris

Fri May 7 Writing Paganism and Non-Christian Religions- With Meredith Holmes, JA Howe, Sarah Avery 10 PM PST

Sunday, May 16th at 8PM EST, 11 PST Rayguns! Steampunk Panel: General genre free-for-all discussion, with Sara Harvey

I Was A Teenage Zombie

2010-04-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

(c)2010 by Edward R. Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved

GRADUATION

by edward morris

1.)
JOHN RAYMOND, Gr.#10, LINCOLN HIGH
HOMEROOM 30
ID #6510229

People say some strange things.

I keep these notebooks of mine, here, mostly full of the strange things that people say, and only realize fully the second it’s come out of their mouths and everyone around them just kind of looks. Some of them eventually bust up laughing. Some eventually shudder.

But at first, there’s just that silence. Until one person blurts out, “Write that down.”

I’m writing this down now. But I swear to God, I never said a word when I found Bucky Haggerty.

I just wrenched open the door on the Men’s Room at the other end of the mess that used to be Biology Hall. I come in, and I just start getting talked at, like we’d just gotten out of class together.

Like it was class, and the stench was just those damn foetal sharks or foetal pigs or whatever foetuses we were supposed to do whatever with ...

I stumbled into that bathroom, and this dead thing on the floor starts yarking at me like we used to debate the whole way out the door to class and along to the next one. Bucky always wanted me to be on the Speech Team so we could do Ex Tempore Debate. Me and the bloated, half-alive toadstool on the floor, the stretched sausage skin one gluon thick, around…

Around… Oh, I couldn’t look. This was going to get debased. Real fast. “You bring me my pills?” Buck asked me crossly, there on the floor, just before he exploded. (I don’t know who he thought I was.) “I'm goalie tonight. I don’t get 'em before I go out, I'm gonna be barkin'…”

I still don’t know how to say what happened next. Bucky broke like an egg. Like he was all hollow inside, and whatever he became had grown there.

I never saw my neighbor from three doors down blow up before. Not Bucky, who once gave me seven stitches when he whacked me in the head with a cast on his arm when we were about ten. I sent his head through a bathroom door when I tripped him the next day. Glorious times. One week suspension. But now…

Oh, I was fucked-up about this. Until the black stuff got on my skin.

I told you, he split open like a pod. The black stuff burned. The first thing I reached for was the soap dispenser. Not even thinking, I stepped over some of Bucky, and slathered myself with soap and hot water so fast I didn’t realize I was ripping off my black button-down shirt, I was checking my ratty Levis’ and no black, no seed spore dust that stank like mold, none… None…

But that didn't stop me screaming. There was a bag of something that looked vaguely janitorial under the sink, something called VO BAN and I didn't understand what it was until I was dumping it all over me and I smelled the same smell that means someone puked their guts out in the hall.

I didn't. I was past that point. Nothing left to come up but a burp. I spit high and hard at the wall and scrubbed the chemically-treated sawdust off me as fast as I could still yell and cuss.

Oh, that water was scathingly hot, hotter than it ever got for me when I was washing my hands in this shithole for real, in between classes, gagging on the cigarette smoke and wishing it was a good home grown doob like at my cousins’.

I wondered if my cousins were still alive, after the weird thing happened. I hoped they were. Denny had a cool shotgun his Dad, my Uncle Walt, let him take hunting, and Dave owed me five bucks.

It was hard to keep a hold on my mind, in here, at first. These notebooks helped. They're not quote books any more. Now the blank pages, and all these pencil stubs I have from the library, are a kind of salvation.

(This is kind of censored, from the way I'm experiencing it. I write it down the following night. Just warning anyone who reads this, in case you think I had the notebook in my hand when any of this shit went down. Never thought about having to do it this way, but whatever. Makes my head hurt to ponder that. Mr. Piper the English teacher once called that 'artifice.' Just going to keep cranking mine out to keep sane.)

Anyway, I still had to think like this place was the whole world. Like this house of a thousand corpses was the whole world. I couldn't think about the cousins, or the fam, or anything else that was happening on planet Not Now.

I was going to find a way out, or at least a weapon that was worth a shit. It would have been easier at home. Mickey and I love to make clubs and concrete-filled baseball bats and all sorts of other fiendish things, down in that basement full of Dad's old tools that were all we had left of him after he got killed at the locomotive shops, and no one to carp at us about what not to use them for---

Couldn't think about that. I'd beat Mickey's ass later at cards. I would. Just after we'd smoke a doob on the back porch and Mom acted like she doesn't know.

A lot of people already died there. A lot more were on their way. A lot of them were my friends. And then there was Bucky. Was. Bucky. Over there, and there, and a bit there, and…

And I found myself standing there naked, taking the disaster version of what Mom would call a whore’s bath. Mom. Jesus. Mom. I’d been in there five days, hiding, and I’d lost it a long time before but Mom, Mom and Annie, and Mickey who calls me Double-O Chode and steals all the laces out of my shoes for his own use. Mickey with the pornopticon under his bed and the lousy right hook.

My Mom and big sister and little brother, who might or might not be waiting back home.... or might be waiting someplace else, with Dad. I was alive, inflamed, in that awful urinal-puck smell and foam and broiling heat that I had to roaringly slather voluntarily up and down my torso, along my neck, in my face, my eyes.

Some time ten years later, I found the taps and turned them off.

And nothing happened to me, after I backed up, and ran haltingly in search of some kind of a towel. When I found one, I yanked the rack that it hung on, and hefted the bare metal pipe in my hand. It felt right. First thing in a while that did.

I wondered if any other lockers had cigarettes in them. I wondered if I’d ever see the sun again, or what things had degenerated to outside. There was too much to wonder at one time, but I knew better than to try and sleep.

I could sleep forever in the Lincoln High basement, sleep forever curled up on one of the Port-a-Pit cushions the pole vaulters used in Track, pull a tarp around myself and hide from the light. But Sleep produced monsters. No, seriously.

That fact, that bare-wired fact, was true the week before, and true then, too. The other things, the rabid things, they hate the light, but they love the dark someone thinks they have a corner on when they go try to hide in it. Oh, how they do.

Oh, how they did. I’ve tried so many times to sleep. Sleep. What? I was thinking about sleep, and I almost…

Damn it. The best I can do is a kind of walking nap. I’ve run into several walls. Even then, I’ll flush one of those nasty-smelling things out from a locker or wherever… Wherever I’m near, they come a-chompin’, bony fingers scuttering around the door with the limp, dead sense of tentacles.

The first time I ran into two of them in the hall, I screamed so loudly into their faces that the whole world went up and up and up and the fire flared so bright I didn’t even realize I still had my lighter or Misty Evans’ can of what she always called Aqua Helmet hair spray from what I hadn’t even realized was her locker, Number 209 and the fire…fire…was … following the gas back into the can, I ---

Fuck. Makes my heart pound to even remember.

I ended up lobbing that can at the two partially-smoldering things that had come up from the basement to tell me how I tasted. They were covered in foam and vomit. One of them was my keyboarding teacher. The other was some dude in a leather jacket, a big biker I never met.

His beard went up first. My keyboarding teacher’s head kind of didn’t all make it when the hairspray can exploded like a frag grenade in an old war movie. The smell was beyond anything I could describe on the best day of Piper's class.

But I’m not bit. Bucky was rotting, when he found me. Some kind of jungle rot that maybe the crumblees get, after they get past a certain point of …well, dead, really. Can I even say it? Can I even allow myself to rise above this shit-town blindness and say what's right in front of my eyes?

There were four of us, when it happened. Four dudes Mr. Petrella sent down from Third Hour Phys Ed to get an empty cart that he used to store the volleyball equipment.

We never did get to play volleyball, or see how fast we could get the cart going with two of us riding it on the way back. Mikey Whitmire made it about as far as the cafeteria. He was the Doubting Thomas of the bunch ( even after what I believe was a school-wide, deliberate rout by way of the office, one that spread out in a kind of V-shape over the whole building and campus. Or at least that's my best guess now. With what I've seen.)

“Nothing’s wrong, just a bunch of sick people,” he chortled airily through his big nose as his little close-set eyes led his big yuck-yucking redneck ass on down the hall, and his white-boy fro was bristling like it was standing on end no matter what he said.

Then, just like that, there was just this arm, this arm, half-covered in skin, that reached out of the back room where the lunch ladies live, and yanked him inside.

Not even a scream. Just part of a yawp of surprise. Like, “WHUP---” The rest we heard sounded a little more a la carte. He didn't make any more noises. Well, parts of him did, but not controlled by the brain.

Mikey was in my keyboarding class, too. That's right about what I was thinking when us four became we three. When the lights started going out all over the school. When the sounds started, breaking glass and awful things that shouldn’t be happening in a school rang out everywhere. I could have sworn I heard a pistol outside, just one shot, then nothing at all.

Inside, we walked past Room 34 and Mr. Johnson looked up with the face of Mr. Hyde as he paddled, paddled, paddled away at a young, naked ass that was all I could see. I didn’t stop . I wasn’t qualified. Batman didn’t go to school here any more.

In the half-dark, Wobby Roomert’s eyes looked like blue LED’s. He was wearing a red t-shirt that told me to Dare To Keep My Kids Off Drugs. “I think it’s a plague from God,” he started up. I punched him in the arm. “Some God, who would do this. Some God.”

Wobby looked at me, lower lip quivering. “You’re not helping at all, Raymond. Communist.”

“Awp, do you even know what a Communist is---“

Then,

THWIPP. I ducked around the corner, as the pheromone trail and wash of rot parted my hair, danced across my neck like a dirty broken fingernail with someone else’s tissue under it.

It felt like there was a hole in the air, when Wobby got pinched. It happened so fast, I could still feel the place where he was.

Wobby was a big boy. Wobby squeaked when the two crawling things got him cold by his untied shoelace, and dragged him down into the gym by his ankles. I heard them eating him like Alpo, down in the sick and muck and abbatoir where part of my gym class still was. The ones who weren’t lurching and shambling after me in the dark.

I didn’t see where Steve Diehl ran off to, fourth in our party. Steve was smart. He was in track. I hope he made it. I do.

I heard his running footsteps fade to nothing on the tile, out over the halls and far away. They took a long, long time to fade. They didn't have much competition. Much.

#

I'm okay now. I'm really okay. Found a broom closet. Candles. The janitor used to smoke dope back here. I can smell it. There's... part of a sniped Marlboro King, say Hallelujah, maybe three inches down from the filter...

Better. But still the same. Still. S-o-c-k-s, as Seňora Eisler used to say in Spanish class. Eso si que es. It is what it is, and can't nobody do nothin'. They’re not dying, or infected, or irradiated, or whatever.

They’re walking dead. It’s Last Times now, like Dad used to talk about when he got on his Bible kicks, the End of Days. Not the end of the world, just the End of Days. I stopped remembering what day it was the last time I saw the sun. Anything goes.

Anything goes, now. Last Times. Somehow, I have to keep remembering that.

Somehow, I can get out. If I just find a big enough stick. For now, the pipe feels right in my hand. I sit and wait for the noises to stop, so I can move again, forage again, pretend like I’m doing something.

#

When I grunted and puffed back out into the hall, after that, I made it ten feet and then squinted. My glasses were the first and only part of me to go, but in the murky depths of the corridor the sign stood out like the Holy Grail, my two new favorite words,

SCHOOL NURSE

#
2.)

YETZIRAH FARRELL, Gr.10 LINCOLN HIGH
HOMEROOM SIXTEEN
ID#6520675

I was sharpening the scalpel when John came stumbling in. I had a knee on his nuts and one of his arms behind his back before he could bellow the Safe Word,

“JESUS FUCKIN CHRIST YETZI I’M ALIVE I’M NOT BIT IT’S ME IT’S COOL---“

“Oscar performance. I think we definitely need to go home today. Let me just write us a note.”

I kissed him full on the mouth. That shut him up enough to help me help him patch up the cuts all over his poor battered body, clean them and dress them, and hang him with hot packs and ice packs like a weird YMCA Resusci-Christmas tree.

We were just friends. This would not change. We would be just friends after this. As far as I was concerned, this was wartime, and John was nice. I was so glad he was alive I would have railed him right there if he didn’t look so tired.

But he did. So I didn’t. We didn’t. So say what you want. It was something better than all that stupid, sticky sweaty nonsense that, as I believe Billy Shakes tells us, will come when it come.

It was something better than that, Diary, those first few days we hid out there and lived on the food in his backpack, and the nurse’s fridge (mostly cookies and juice from the Blood Drive, but there were two bag lunches and a bottle of something that smelled suspiciously like what my old hippie dad calls “garbage-wine.” Probably juice that had gone over. I left that alone.)

I have been John’s nurse, just like Mom is, possibly was and till I know I can’t say. I was John’s nurse, and he was mine.

He never laid a finger on me, and we still healed each other by all the talking, talking, talking we did in those two little rooms.

Healed, oh, God, since Mr. Myelnikov the Art Teacher went fucko bazoo and started chewing on his own arm, can you even believe it, his own arm, and his eyes were all the way back in his head and his skin was starting to cyanose in places where it wasn’t translucent white, and …
And since I ran. Since I put my head down and ran and clocked two of them in the head with books. I don’t watch the track boys throw discus for my health, although it does help…

I felled two of the ones that aren’t really there any more, even when they’re about to bite.

And I got in here, and I’ve been holed up in here ever God damn since reading the God damn Physician’s Desk Reference and Highlights magazine and I needed…

Diary, I needed John’s big goofy carcass snoring on that cot. I needed his voice. He was the whole human race to me, since he beat on the door for ten minutes and I found what I did with the School Nurse’s scalpel after I took it out of the split in the ex-School Nurse’s gray roast chicken forehead and kicked the frail dead thing in the ribs and broke its sternum with the heel of my Doc Marten boot.

Every boy in this school wants to fuck me sideways, but that never made me a sissy la-la girl. No, I went looking for the spores after Johnny told me, after I picked off the little white bits where he said he washed the black stuff off. There was nothing there but dead skin. His lights were on, upstairs. He felt fine.

I needed my friend. I needed him very much, just then, sitting there with the blinds drawn and duct-taped on the little cots that always meant to me that I was going home early with some sort of awful flu.

Except now we were well, and everyone outside was sick.
I may be a while till we next talk, Diary. Got a lot on my mind. But do stick around. You're already helping.

#

JOHN

She lay naked beside me that night, small and warm and tan and naked, with her long straight black hair falling between her warm shoulder blades. The curves of her ribs felt deceptively thin.

Yetzi smelled like the first day of summer, bright and alive and electric, and sharp. Like the first real day when everyone out on the street after dark is half-lit and it’s warm and music drifts from open windows.

I could feel her sigh with pleasure and curl up closer when I held her. And I couldn’t have gotten it up then if my own life were at stake.

Because it was. At stake. Hell of a way to wilt a hardon. My arms and hands wouldn't stop trembling, even when I laid on them. I was fully clothed. I had the pipe at my right hand, and at my good left...

Well, see, High School administrators never want anything thrown away. They figured out a while back that these things were maybe not all that safe for kids to be around, but they're still too cheap to part with them. In the back storeroom we jimmied open with my towel-rack sword (after which Yetzi dubbed me King of Lincoln High with the bent, mangled thing) …

I found the old paper-cutter, and unscrewed the heavy-handled blade from the scored green chopping block. Swinging it from the handle like a bo-ken in Aikido class. I sunk it three inches deep into the side of the nearest table.

Yetzi screamed, a weird yodeling bark that stopped fast when it didn’t bounce off dead . She put a hand to her improbable bosom and swallowed something that sounded like her soul. “If. You. Ever. Do that to me again…”

I bowed, swinging the blade well away. “You have my sword, lady, and I fain would fall upon it…”

Yetzi sighed. “Rise, good sir knight, or I shall taunt you a second time. Come help me rummage. Is there anything flammable in here? “

#

So I’m lying on the cot now, with my art-room sword, my mangled pipe, and a girl I always thought was out of my league, naked as the day she was born. And she is still out cold.

I kiss her a second time. On the nose. “Goodnight,” I tell my battle-buddy, glancing at the six or eight Molotov Cocktails we made from isopropyl alcohol bottles and cotton balls. Two on the end are wicked with tampons, which I had to get Yetzi to do. She looked at me funny, like she wanted to laugh, but went right to it .

What? I've never used one. I don't know how they...

Oh, shut up. It’s funny now. It wasn’t then.

All right, I guess it was.
#
YETZI

Diary,

On the first morning of the rest of my life, the sun came clear and cold through the parts of the long window shades that duct tape wouldn't keep down. John had all his clothes on, and he was holding me like I was a little baby, wide awake himself and reading an old pulp magazine he found somewhere, something called NIGHT CRY. I wondered aloud if he'd slept.

John put the luridly-covered magazine down, ran a hand through his natural militant mutant pompadour, and rubbed his poor black-circled eyes. “ 'Bout... five, six hours,” he mumbled. His face was puffy. “Now, I can't claim any of 'em were in a row, but...”

I got up, padded to the nearest of two sinks, found the two hand towels that hadn't been used and began working toward something like a sponge bath. (Can you believe, Diary, that John picked up that magazine again, and turned away? If we ever got the hell out of here, I wanted to warn him, I was swinging around toward not wanting to leave him alone. )

We found some fresh clothes in the Lost and Found box that Mrs. Sutton the Nurse kept in the little wardrobe by her desk as you came in. Black hoodies and jeans. Yeah, the ones from the Reuters photo. We matched.

Well, sort of. In the picture, John is wild of hair and eye, his backpack loaded with bottles like a bandolier full of ammunition. He is still carrying that bent pipe thing he had, the one that looked like a towel rack. (I won't get rid of it. It's resting on two nails, same place it always was. Above the TV in the base-housing apartment the Army gave us, for this strange little while.)

I had my hair tied back half-heartedly, and my big goofy Liv Tyler ears sticking out. God damn it, they had that turkey all over the BBC and CNN when we got TV and wi-fi again. Every damn nosepicker in the blogosphere got to see what I looked like after all that time in the funhouse. I---

#
I never thought I could swing that big cutter-blade of John's, but he dropped it when he started lobbing flaming SoBe bottles full of isopropyl at Contestant #2, there, you see in the picture , the one who's already on fire? (I'm not sure what John's pre-mortem beef was with Mrs. Ohana. She taught Keyboarding, I think. He just kept screaming, “WHY WON'T YOU DIE?!?”)

He dropped the blade. I just saw it. I didn't even think about it. I just picked it up, closed my eyes, took a breath---

And I lunged, and spun, and bore my weight on the balls of my feet when I leapt. Twice.

I put everything I had into the swing. It was a risky move, a hot-dog move that my Ballet teacher would never have approved of, and there's simply no word for it in the dictionary.

But that blade swung the whole way around. At the end of its arc, it hit a locker hard enough to bend the blade into a boomerang shape.

I didn't keep that one. I am denied such male puffery. Every time I think of that shape it made, it hurts my right hand.

You see, in the picture, where I have my boot on the ex-Mr. Petrella's severed head, right as the Army guys are coming around the corner? See their Commanding Officer holding up his hand for them to halt? How they're all biting their lips, holding back the roar of laughter, trying not to look like they want to clap, and cheer?

John's working on getting me to take compliments, but I wish they would have put the thing a few less places, at least, or had some...

Oh, all right, it's a great picture.
#

Cyberpunk Story (always wanted to try this...)

2010-04-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

*A word about this one. Lowan Stewart and David Bee are two of the Voltron parts of Ground Productions, a local documentary film company who do a lot of cool things I love. Here is the opening date for their newest docu, which I've been honored to be present near through the birth throes, PLAY AGAIN.
David lives upstairs from here at the fabulous Secret Hideout Studio. We are on the bottom floor of a triplex full of filmmakers. A few months ago, Lowan was over at Dave's and so was I. I got to pick two great brains at the same time, and along the way Lowan advanced this idea. Dave ran with it. I ran for a pen.
And when I was sitting around talking smack about how good it was( on the Facebook time-sink one night to procrastinate actually finishing it,) the cyberpunk and truly Punk one-man army (who wrote the first "Crow" movie, and City Come A'Walkin', and all those seriously disturbing short stories down the years and so much more,) John Shirley, told me the idea sounded so good he wanted to gank it for himself. He was joking, of course, but I took his words in the spirit they were given. All three of them helped to make this story a lot of fun, no matter how it turned out. There will be sequels, but I think it stands alone. Hope it's as fun to read as it was to write.

+++++++++++++++++
©2010 by Edward R. Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved

ALL BUT BLIND
By Edward Morris
1.) DOC

I started going blind as soon as we got about twenty miles outside of Portland. It was kind of a relief to leave it all behind, really. There are times when it’s better to wipe one’s eyes dry, and not see at all.

You don’t really go blind when you get out of range. I know that. You just think you do. Your body thinks you do, when the goggles come off and your poor little headgear is twitching inside your brain like severed insect limbs, with nothing to connect to. More of a philosophical blindness, to go along with the physical blurring and general agnosia. Things take a while to look like things again. A long, long while.

But I didn’t know that when I got the boot.

That afternoon, I woke up just literally after noon. There was a wine stain on my gray carpet I didn’t remember, and my big Chinook Indian buddy Nick face-planted on the little sofa I’d scrounged from Adult & Family Services around the corner for the price of an afternoon spent moving a few other pieces of furniture, and a promise to call the receptionist at some point when she wasn’t working. (Her name was Karlie. She had red ringlets and big round breasts and a mouth that defied mythology. I made her come three times. She never called me back. They don’t.)

I remembered killing a jug of wine with Nick after he got done working the door down at Club Relapse for the night and tipped out. He could have walked home, but we lived so close he knew he always had a couch.

Nick was one of my best customers, and he was always encouraging me to get the fuck off Burnside and start hanging art again. I wondered why he didn’t, but I had different boundaries than he did. I was just the guy who sold him his two little balloon-ends of coke every week, one gram in half, eighty bones every time in cash. I was nobody’s motivational speaker. Just paying the bills.

Long after Nick woke up, mumbled “Cheers,” and stumbled back to the old Mallory Hotel Apartments,my entire world view changed. Going out of headgear range, as I experienced it that subsequent evening, is the worst itch in the world, worse than clap, worse than stitches, worse than street-rot in your feet or a plantar wart.

The worst. See, if you wear the goggles all the time, then get out of range and take them off, the atrophied parts of the poor little inboard sensory equipment take a long time to get back up to full op-capacity, i.e. range of regular human sight.

So I heard, anyway, before the bottom dropped out of my carefully-planned little world when I finally went out that afternoon to get a bagel.

It had ham on it. And cheese. And an egg that almost looked real. Scrambled. In a block.

I never got to eat that bagel. I wasn’t even trying to look at the noon news in the cafe, from a dozen different places that all contradicted each other. Anyone can write the news and call it The News. Nobody really looks into these things any more.

Everybody’s too busy getting more and more shit surgically stuck in their heads. Then they act all surprised, and sue, when they get infections or this that and the other. It’s the American Way. Used to be grille-teeth, and piercings and tattoos. I read that somewhere.

See, I read about history. I know. And I turned out to be no smarter.

You think I was afraid of dealing, dealing anything, whatever was going cheap? I’d already done all my time in Hell. This world just meant waiting around in some bus station somewhere.

I grew up in Hell. My Mom died giving birth to my brother, who was also her brother. Never knew Dad. (He went Away.) I had an eye put out when I was six.

I grew up in Xebico. If you know the West Bank, out on Barbur Road, past Lair Hill, you know Xebico. It used to be something called a ‘mobile home court’, but to me just looked like a bunch of cheap, shitty houses made out of old trucking-containers or whatever, built up with wooden pallets and stones.

Everything looked abandoned. The Iron Riders, Gypsy Jokers and Hell’s Angels up that way were the only law. And if you know Xebico, you know what I saw every day in the graveyard at the end of my block of houses.

That graveyard was abandoned, too, tumbledown and left for …heh… dead. Hexers used to squat in the crypts there, and sometimes use the bodies for scarecrows around their squats. Once in a while, some wiseass would put up a sign in a window, CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS. There were rapes in that graveyard, and murders. Sometimes the military buried people there with no markers. Sometimes the locals did, too. Sometimes the locals’ kills wore khaki, but for every one of those there were ten more of the former, and so it went.

That’s my people, my roots: Squabbling ghouls. Cannibals. The Xebico Geek-Show, right up close, where you cook the offal and you like it and God help you if you talk back to your Foster Father. What do you expect out of me, New U.S.Chancellor For Life? I’m lucky I can put two words together.

But I’ve always had a special relationship with all those nice men in suits with the earpieces, the ones the military defers to… most of the time. See, I sold my birth certificate to some Mexican weed-farmer in Bend when I was nineteen.

That right there was the first time the Feds took notice of me, since that was considered an act of terrorism. When you committed that particular crime, as so many kids my age were doing, you forfeit all citizenship and declared yourself something called an ‘enemy combatant’, whatever that means.

That was my own stupid fault, and it took some time to talk my way out of. This wasn’t.

But what could anyone do? I hadn’t taken the damn goggles off in two weeks. I was working! I know you’re supposed to, in your own home, where you can chill and not have to see that far ahead of you, but…

Who wants to? Really. Who wants to be in the dark?

I’d been working for two weeks, before that day. Straight. At Job #1, that is, not flipping powder to club kids and fucked-up mercenaries in Japantown. I mean working from home. In my studio. Chilling with Nick was the first break I allowed myself the whole damn time.

It was a big piece, a year’s worth of pops and crackles of broken static from some hacked old satellite channel or other, woven into an animation that looked like robots dancing “Swan Lake.”

While I worked, I wasn’t even getting high from my own supply. Much. I learned to drink those canned vitamin shakes they give to old people with feeding-tubes, so I could stay hydrated and wired around the clock. I was into Little Bob down the hall for about a key, but he fronted all the time and paid off the block cops himself, since the old bastard had warrants.

So I had no profile at all. Little Bob liked that. Little Bob liked having an artist for a runner and a mole. I had no tangible other demands on my time. Not to him.

But don’t get me wrong. I still remembered how to not answer my door.

Frozen Music, I was going to call the installation. It was going to have many parts, when I started rendering it the following week. I had my goggles on the whole time. The. Whole. Time.

Then I was rendered, and the images were lost. I got stupid and careless and they got me cold, and that was the end of even trying to think about that.

I had bigger problems. My lights were going out. My eyes had atrophied more than I ever imagined.

And who knew? I mean, for real. Who knew I’d ever leave Portland for anything any time soon? I hadn’t been out of town since I moved there. Nobody ever left Portland any more except richies. Nobody could.

As soon as the rezoned office-squat shantytowns gave way to the tiny historical ring of faux-oldtime highway restaurants and shopping malls, I could see the carpet of transmission-points and bubbles and blurbs and flashes (with as few words as possible) get thinner. Past about ten feet away, everything just looked like shadows and light.

I’d been wearing my goggles too long. I couldn’t escape that fact. It kept popping up over my shoulder and chewing on my ear. Reaching for my heart.

Taking them off, after the fifth day of work, even without the new interruption, would have required a stern lecture from an intern at the Old Town Clinic, probably in a language other than my own.

There were no clinic interns out here in this giant rolling-thunder beast of a military sport-limo with no knobs on the back doors. There were no towers anywhere, either; no Lamps with a wireless dish somewhere in their streetlight parabolic reflectors to bounce and beam the sweet life-giving bandwidth through the stud behind my useless, skin-covered left eye socket…

Nunnadat. No wireless transmission points of any kind, where we were going. This was my generation’s answer to the old cop routine of taking someone out in the sticks, beating the shit out of them and making them walk back into town sans shoes.

The two Feds knew me. They knew I’d be all but blind out here. Their terrible gifts that day were the absence of color, the gradual desensitization of the optic nerve in the presence of so much extra information, blowing out at the first stress point.

I saw the streams slow down and stop, the songs fart off and away like poked balloons, the disgusting ad-rolls finally out of my face, everything reset to Zero.

Zero. There was no more music whenever I wanted it. No more instant connection to the news.
I could gradually see every little road sign in the air wink out above every business, every cross street, reaching into the sky where the last thing to go was Time-&-Temperature,::::2:09:::: fading away from solid black smoke-numbers to insubstantial smog, then gone.

By then, there were military checkpoints on I-5. As soon as the soldier in the buff-colored flak gear was knocking on Thing One’s windshield, Thing One was flashing his cred.

Thing One’s cred had a shiny Fed holo shimmer on it that jumped right out when he seesawed the card forward and backward in its clear plastic case. Thing One’s fingers all looked like tiny, malformed cocks.

Thing One looked like he started shaving his head when he noticed the male pattern baldness, and grew the nasty little moustache to distract his own attention the way the Bic-job distracted people from the state of his head. He was big and tall, as his people called it, tall in the saddle and big in the ass, kind of shaped like a steer walking upright. Texan. No horns, but proclivities not positively established, as the old bromide didn’t go. The bored grunt snapped a salute at him, and waved us through.

Thing Two didn’t even look at the grunt. He was engaged in a muted conversation with his own headgear, which apparently contained some kind of Subvocal Speech damper, something I’d only ever seen in movies. Fascinating, and it went with the rest of the mop-headed little donut about as much as his own cred, and his piece.

I saw the regulation FBI Tubthumper pulse-pistol holstered under his right shoulder. Thing Two didn’t really care that I saw the cannon. He’d said as much when they nabbed me. “Bet you’d like to take this from me and beat me with the wrong end. You start cryin’ and whinin’ before we dump you, this goes right up your ass.” (I bet he was real fun to go clubbing with. Maybe I could club him sometime soon.)

I knew this was my last ride. I’d kind of given up on just about everything, anyway. At that point. The whole way there, both of these grafty, pasty psychos wanted me to remain aware of certain things. Like what happened when small-time dealers got greedy, and forgot that this wasn’t supposed to be their number-one gig.

We were headed out of town fast, maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. I was about to be erased, or at least come back in no shape to be anything but dragged out into the nearest street and shot.

They knew it, too. I fucked up bad. Neither of them got their checks for two months running. I’m not here to tell you what led up to all that. I’m not proud of it. Not at all.

But I looked around, around, around, for the glowing oasis of one Public-Works streetlight Lamp core, somewhere in a light pole on a traffic island. Just to tell me where I was near.

No. If I was going to make it home after Thing One and Thing Two got done beating the shit out of me, I was going to need to find a cane, or a guide. Or… something.

I closed my eyes in the backseat of my latest involuntary ride from the government, their troop-transport Fedmobile with its grotesque shiny wheel-rims on tires as tall as I was. I was trying to resign myself to everything I’d bought.

They were taking me somewhere with no lights, to watch me bash myself to death stumbling around in the dark. That was how it felt. My whole psyche had changed. I didn’t understand people without auggies any more. Most of that was just the coke, I was sure. Like I’d have a whole new attitude if I remembered where I left it.

I knew one day someday somebody would be driving me out into the middle of nowhere like this. I just never imagined that I’d deal so deep I could afford headgear in the interim, or what a crippling thing that would end up to be.

“Shoulda given us Joey, Doc,” Thing One (Special Agent Burke, to his friends and victims) rasped. “Or anybody. What are you, a fuckin’ guido? There’s no more code of silence. Your buddies would dime you out for two ounces of powder and a warm place to sleep. You been downtown too long, not playin’ ball with us or the MPD or anybody else. Like, ever. We…”

His partner, whose name I could never remember, nodded around his sweet-potato fries and that big cup of coffee that smelled a lot like bourbon, finishing the sentence. “We can’t let you do that,” he managed through a double mouthful of yam. “We would have let you keep movin’ them little balloon ends fulla cut blow outta the meat drawer in your fridge for at least another year or two. No harm done. Not until you got big enough to catch and release.”

I kept my face a dead mask. I’d laugh about this later, when I walked.

But now I could barely see. It was the price one paid, for living in the city and getting anywhere, really, doing anything. You pays the extra and gets the magic decoder-ring on your brain.

“How’s that little side business working out, since you transferred to the Portland Field Office?” I asked Thing Two, “I mean the Factory. What do you get, like a thousand dollars per kid you turn in? What do your scientist pals even use retarded kids for, anyway? Is it really to---”

SCREEEK. I smelled burning rubber, and pitched forward in my seat. The two Feds barked laughter, odd laughter that felt out of place at first, and then began to chill me more and more.

“Retarded, he says. His Grandma musta taught him that. What an ugly word.”

I shuddered to the core of my spinal column, behind my eyes, the gibbering pit of my stomach as my heart turned over harder, harder, harder at the words, “What do you think, Burke? Right here look about good?”

I saw Thing One’s head shake back and forth twice. The chuckle was nothing I ever wanted to hear again.

“Little farther.” When he spoke, the gas pedal screamed like something being skinned. Somehow, Thing Two, whose name I finally sorta-remembered was Guterson or Gustafson or something, managed to get my door open with me trying to bite as many pieces out of him as possible. But they’d cuffed me.

Oh, they’d cuffed me. This time they refused to take off the old-time metal double-lock bracelets until, until, until both of their hands made a palm-strike, flat and out and backward and I was airborne for an all-too-brief period and then the field of stars came up everywhere and my face met the THUD.

THUD. Airborne again, longer that time. Too long.

SHHHHHHHTHUD.

Then it was dark.
#
I came to someplace darker, hearing sounds I couldn’t understand, smelling a colony of mold. I could feel that my goggles were gone. My eyes---

Blink. Blink. Rub. Rub. Nothing. Dark. There was someone standing close. Smelled like a woman. A sick one. I heard her intake of breath that slowly spun into speech.

Her voice was raspy and broken, the voice of a jagged bottleneck slicing a throat, and the rush of winter wind it made from the esophagus. “You can hear me, yes?” Russian. Maybe Ukranian. Older than the wilderness. “Move a foot, a hand, something. Give Mama a sign.”

I heard her hands clap together twice, sharply. I choked back a few weird noises and tried to say something, feverishly flapping my left hand and right foot.

“I hear… I hear…”

“Good.” Then the worst pain I have ever experienced surpassed my ability to describe anything.

It leveled off a bit. White then, not dark. Burning bright bleach white.

For a moment I turned within the pain, beheld it like a sparkling snow globe from the inside. Then I fell from its eye into the whirling gas clouds of that gravity, that planet of pain that pulped my brain into vapor for a while longer...

I knew about Agent Gunaarson’s additional income from a crackhead named Birdman who washed windows at the Texaco. Bird’s niece disappeared, and he said the whole neighborhood was crawling with Feds that didn’t want to help, for at least a week afterward. Any orphan kid with a birth defect snatched anywhere from Burnside Skid Row into Nihonmachi was fair game.

All of it was just the way things were. No one could do anything about anything any more. Not since the Secession, since Washington D.C. took back the reins and busted the West Coast back to territories that had to be readmitted.

All of us had been held back a year in school, whatever the fuck school was that I heard about somewhere. The future was going backward. All I had was my high back attic squat, my notebooks, my Optix recorder, my easy ends and monstrous pride and the blind, blind eye I turned on everything.

But now, even that polarity was reversed. In the dark, I felt their hands, heard the breath from their warm mouths, their soft voices…

“Get the thing that Goat made… No, not the Geiger Counter, stupid, the other thing. The thing that plays games.” Silence that might have been a minute or a few days.

“Hey, mister, you look sick. You like chicken soup? That’s about all we got this afternoon, but Goat’s comin’ back down with hamburg for everybody, he said, and cheese and mustard and mayo and maybe even some tomatoes. We make the bread…”

My stomach screamed like a beggar dying in the cold. For some reason, this provoked a storm of childlike laughter.

Not childish, you understand. Childlike. Huge difference. Childlike, but with a depth of nuance and understanding that I could find no comprehension for, no index to understand.

“He will be fine,” the old woman croaked at them from a much greater height, from very far away in whatever wet cave of a room we were in. Some spore in the air smelled like the raw subterranean version of a familiar part of town, or street, or…

I waited for something to happen. All too soon, there came a horrible feeling like my entire head was bolted down below the skin, or magged to something about the size of a kitchen sink.

Okay, maybe smaller. I was weak, and beat to shit. Felt like I’d lost thirty pounds of meat and several gallons of blood.

But some things didn’t require wireless reception. Some things were inboard. From the street.

“How many of them are autistic? Or have Down’s Syndrome, or… whatever….?” I heard myself asking, “How many of them did you break out of the Factory?”

“All of them,” the old woman croaked. “You are clever. You…haxor? Computergeek?”

I tried to shake my head. “Not exactly. I just read the news, Mama Yelizaveta. They said… you were an urban legend.”

“Haah!” the voice croaked. “The news! Oh, look, here is Demetrios with your … new toy.”

The little presence sounded like it stood on its tiptoes, handing something up. Mumbling a Greek word.

“Stereoptikon.”

Before the light happened, the darkness felt very deep. Universes were born in it, for me, and died in bursting retinal dust motes as big as barn beams.

Galaxies flared up and fizzled out in my head. The little boy and the old woman were pulling something apart, putting something together. My jaw seemed to lock, unlock, change shape as a hot river in my head pulled down and out my bad eye.

Then the light came on, and I saw through a console. Not darkly, but smearily, in mostly shadows and the primary colors. Mostly in degrees of light, the first separations of Mind from Matter a child knows.

For a little while, it took me, and captivated me, and I blessedly forgot who I was for just long enough to remember my character.

There were so many of them. I saw the tall, pale old woman right away. Her long silver plait was wrapped around her head and pinned in a crown, the way the Ukrainian girls I knew up around Foster did it when someone was getting buried, or hitched.

All the lines in her face were laugh lines. In the odd light that was my whole world now, her faded blue eyes seemed to bleed into the air.

“He can see,” she told the rest of them, “He can see when we make his eyes light up. Now move aside. Let Mama come through. He has to see.”

See… The murmur drew back a wave of the smaller ones, the children.

The ones who were all different, never twice the same, never twice the number of eyes and fingers and hands and toes adding up congruently, every one beautiful and blessed in the light of the thing they’d done, the thing that had a few game icons in the bottom left quadrant, powered OFF. The thing that was allowing me to see.

See: The crone knelt beside me, where I lay propped up on what looked like a gigantic stack of pillows and sleeping bags, carpet remnants and towels and a hundred different kinds of rags and cloth laid out flat or rolled into a bed.

There were needle things sticking in my hand, things that pulled, things that made me not want to move too much. I smelled blood and shit and alcohol. Not the good kind, either. The kind for wounds. And shots.I looked right instead of left, wincing at a knot in my neck that felt like a pulled muscle, or a bruise. I was…

I was remembering, apart from life, remembering ways to put this together now that made no sense, had no part, and yet fit perfectly.

“How long…” I tried to ask. My eyes filled up with tears. “How long was I out?” I sat up on the pillows, holding the big metal bedpan thing on my eyes. It rattled.

For some reason, all those damn kids took it into their heads to spontaneously applaud.

“I am Yelizaveta Kashinaya,” she informed me. “This is my land. I have title. You have to go home, soon. Outsiders only make more show.”

My spinning, aching head tried to make sense of any of this. “Not now,” she waved her hand dismissively, “Not now. You sit up, you come and eat. With all of us. Yes?” Under the circumstances, I could only answer in the affirmative, in a voice little louder than her own.
I saw her smile. I saw her right eye flash several times, bright green. Like she had headgear. Then I got sick again, dizzy and spinny and sick, two of the bigger kids with bright eyes and big laughs had to drag me to the dinner table.

The kids’ table was longer, and they all apparently ate first. I needed no eyes to smell the chicken, the crumbled-up bread with sage and onions that became stuffing when you cooked it long enough in wired-together pie tins over an open flame, with some old chipotle juice and honey someone left outside in a can to age until it got a little bit of a snap.

All of these things I needed no one to tell me. They were merely apparent. As apparent as the little girl Shelley who fed me and talked my ear off, until all I could see was the world through her eyes for an instant.

I could see the old woman smile,too. After a while the girl came a little bit closer, and spoke for both of them…

2.) SHELLEY

We asked the skinny one-eyed man from the city if he wanted to make pictures with us. We do that after dinner. Mama says it’s okay, it teaches us to think, and say more of what we mean. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t rather draw than be doing something else?

The skinny man, the stick man, the skeleton man, I guess he thought so too. I could see his poor red eye, the one that was still there, fill up and cry and cry.

It was sad to see just the nothing where the other eye used to be, or maybe never was, but the one that was there looked like it wanted to work really, really bad.

He put the cup back on that good eye, that poor little eye that was trying so hard but looked just like my eyes that one time I had pinkeye and had to have the horrid Bad Stuff put on bandages for Too Too Long For Me, No Fair, Do Over!

Like that. So I felt sad for him, and I wanted to be sweet to him. Like if he needed somebody to help him walk around, me and Dimmy could do it if Dimmy wasn’t making things and he didn’t mind. I could do it by myself, though. I could. Because he couldn’t have been very heavy.

. From the game-box Oldmother put in the pocket of the man’s work shirt she gave the skeleton man to wear, I heard the sounds of the little opticrystal thingy getting cold, cold, cold, too cold to touch without the box around it. That was Dimmy’s old game-deck box (the one he tried to fix when he got it from that river-rat who came through on the last packet-barge from Boring.

“I’d like that more than anything in the whole world,” he told me in his weird voice that wasn’t like Oldmama’s at all, except it hurt like hers, maybe a little.

I never knew grownups could hurt so much and help so many of our friends get out of the Bad Place before the gray doctors made it be time for our number. Come to think of it, all the grownups I ever knew who got hurt the most were the ones who helped the most people. (The gray doctors don’t count. They weren’t grownups. Or people.)

So I handed him all the big boards I had, the big card-boards that Oldmother gives us to make pictures on. And the crayons we all made together, with hot wax and berries and barks and things.

He didn’t quite look like he knew what to make out of any of it, maybe, because he just kept crying and crying the whole time he was making us the most beautiful pictures I ever saw in my whole life.

Pictures of a city, like Mama talks about, buildings so tall they went up past the clouds, and shone in the sun, and went down into the river, or floated in the air on platforms. The whole time he was making the pictures, he cried out of his one eye. The whole time, the broken bracelets he had on when two of the big boys found him in our front garden clacked and clacked and clacked on his belt loop where Mama put them.

Mama said he’d be able to see in a little little while. She said he’d see the bracelets there, and understand what that meant, when he decided to stay.

I think she decided that when I handed Doc the crayons. I do. I do.

I saw it with my own two eyes.

#
For Lowan Stewart, David Bee and John Shirley

Inspired by the late Mad Magazine cartoonist Don Martin... just for a laugh...

2010-04-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

(C)2010 by Edward R. Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved

THE FOCUS GROUP

By Edward Morris

In the back row, the big dude with the gold tooth belched a kind of seismic event that echoed on the air with almost a physical slap. Half of the thirty-five people who made it in the door looked like they were trying not to crack up laughing, and the rest didn’t care. Junior high never ends. We just get bigger classrooms.

Up in the front of this particular classroom, Dan the Man was droning on about the mechanics of wireless hubs. “Now each little unit, there, you have in your hand, we’re gonna test it out, right now, there. See the thing that looks like a volume knob, on the right side of each of your remotes?”

I’d pieced it together on the way in. I had no idea what this group was even about. I just walked in off the street. They said it was for a radio station or a TV station or something.

That kind of crowd, where they ask you all the intake questions three times and everyone has perfect hair and every one of the women on staff looks at you like, “Nnnnofuckinway,” before you even open your mouth. Like that. I thought it was funny, myself. No one asked me. That seventy-five bucks, now, that wasn’t funny at all.

So I got in this room with a veritable induction center full of Misfit Toys like me, and we all had some cookies and lemonade and bullshitted for about five minutes before Dan The Man bobbled down from wherever they kept him on high and unlocked the doors of the conference room.

It felt like a hundred thousand jobs I’d ever lost, on Training Day when you get to get off the phone and go listen to some corporate rep bark that This Is Not Burger King, You CSR’s Cannot Have It Your Way, Right Away. I’m no fan of these rooms, or the ones with phones in them, either.

But in what the local papers rather memorably called “these economic times”, needs must, as they say, when the Devil’s spitting on your doorstep. I was coming back from the welfare office, or the DHL, or the LSD, or whatever the government calls the welfare office nowadays. I had a stack of paperwork as thick as my pinky finger, and wanted to take it home and finish it with the window open and some old rockabilly on the radio and the charcoal-sketch I had started.

But along the way, there was a door I’d never noticed, in the back side of the old Woolworth’s they’ve mostly converted to garish office space. “CAUTION,” it read, “DOOR OPENS.” When I thought about that, I laughed for longer than I thought I needed to, just then, but knew I needed to. The building number was the same on Craigslist. Whatever this was, I was in the right place.

I looked back at the roly-poly little bald guy in the front of the room. He kept going in and out of focus, the way anyone standing near an incandescent light did when I had my glasses off. I’d been doing a lot of close work, writing down years of employment history onto a form at the DHS, and left them off for it.

He looked like a plastic doll-baby at the carnival. His red polyester shirt bled into the stillness. He was doing something with the laptop in front of him. He looked upset.

“Okay, is… anybody getting a green light on their remote? No. ‘Kay…” Someone else cut a loud fart, and the whole room tried not to laugh.

Dan’s rubber doll head, with its monkish tonsure of neatly peppered black hair, swung toward the sound, but he said nothing, merely dismantled his laptop computer on the desk, zipped it into a case, hung it on the doorknob and removed a fresh one from a lower shelf of the desk before him. I rubbed my eyes. Listening.

“Now, when you hear a song you like, on the headphones that my lovely assistant Jim will pass around to you when we get these remotes working, I want you to turn up the volume as far as you would… if you heard that song on the radio.”

He grinned. His face looked like someone had drawn it on a balloon. I was starting to wonder if maybe that afternoon was too long to go without eating anything substantial after I sat around Gamma Plasma with a hose in my arm for an hour’s worth of saline drip and watched trash TV.

I was starting to wonder a lot. Dan’s eyes kept flicking back and forth to his laptop. I saw a few green lights flickering close to a few hands, in the room. Some of the remotes were catching the hub, some weren’t.

Dan was still swapping plugs, ports and multicolored cable that looked somewhere between Philip K. Dick and Fisher-Price. I was in awe at how long this was all probably going to take. Five hundred songs. More questions than the fucking MMPI the shrink receptionist made me take on another intake, ( one where I had to give them money.)

Dan was crunching code into the new little laptop, to no avail. He began unplugging everything again, looking absolutely unruffled at the near-riot he had on his hands. Something was wrong. The light was strange. I felt the cold saline in my arm, though it was no longer there. So tired…

Dan the Man dragged a duffel bag from under the desk, unzipped it, and draped something out like a deflated condom, something I couldn’t quite see. Then he hid the thing with the small of his back, arched up, reached around behind himself, and pulled something out that went PSSSSSH.

He folded into himself like a flan in a cupboard, sagging, becoming smaller. The red shirt was the last to go, pooling on the floor all at once. All I could hear was everyone still talking, no one really paying attention but me.

Dan the Man 2.0 sat up out of the duffel bag, and twisted off the rubber umblicus. When his feet swept out of the bag and trod the carpet again, they wore the same black Payless slip-on shoes as before.

“Okay, now if you’ll all open the manuals I gave you,” he said in the same voice, and turn to page fifty, I’m gonna run a self-check. Please press the number five one more time, folks, and set your dials to fifty…”

It was all happening. It kept happening. I took the headphones they passed over, but set them down and crept out the door, letting it close softly behind me. No one stopped me. My heart was pounding very hard.
#

Snowflakes

2010-04-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

I am trying to harness my dreams, whose character is changing rapidly as I do.

My dreams show me a grieving city where I live gladly as a dirty squatter if it means getting more folks the hell out of there. In those dreams, I have a few tiny advantages that make me practically look like a superhero by comparison. Maybe a Watchman, I guess. Been one my whole life, in one way or another. Once they even let me use non-lethal weapons (which gathered dust, as well they should, when any watchman is doing the job correctly.)

The people who are stuck there need help worse than I ever did. I have some support, from a few other good guys who wear black (you know who you are) but mostly I have to be a kind of one-man resistance. At the end of the dream-day, the holes in my hoodie, sprained joints and bruises are what I have to show for it. Outside.

On the inside, though... Norman Mailer called the process gathering snowflakes from the void. I will map every block of that crumbling god in ruin. I can't fix any of it... but I can record with my eyes, and disgorge it all. Four books, so far, in varying states of completion. Three new stories, and about ten others already out, set in the same universe.

Nalo Hopkinson and Cory Doctorow know that universe well. So do Samuel R. Delany and John Shirley. My city come walkin' is right here at home, and I will write it out of my head until I am the one who gets to leave the dream. No one else can get me out of there. When the rescue op is completed, the last and greatest rescue will be my own. Self-administered...

The Blog That Wouldn't Die

2010-04-13T09:51:00.000-07:00

I keep this up for professional reasons, and try to wipe off the breast-beating and tin-cup-on-the-bars-of-the-cell rattling whenever possible. Just read somewhere that blogging is becoming more the province of pros in any given field, due to the rise in popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and other more short-attention-span-geared social media.

Aside: Here's what my upstairs neighbor and his partner filmmakers have to say about the rise of short attention spans.

Don't get me wrong. I have a friend list on Facebook that is quite literally a repository of literary/artistic talent never before seen in history. Last night, I had John Shirley jokingly tell me that a story idea of mine was so good he wanted to steal it. In any given day, I have two of the greatest teachers I have ever known on the same comment thread. Stuff like that.

Today I am procrastinating through allergy-med-head and trying to figure out where I'm going with my backlog of short stories. There were about 140. Through condensation, rewriting, etc, I'm down to 19 partially-written or -outlined pieces, and maybe 20 one-line ideas; plus a few books I started that are waiting in the wings for various reasons.

All the rest of the stories are out on the market. Ralan Conley and Duotrope are the reasons why.

More to say, but errands and work call. Medicine head seems to have leveled off. Thanks for listening.

ADHD

2010-04-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

Going to Seattle with Serena this weekend, to celebrate our six year anniversary by getting out of Dodge for a weekend, going to see an old friend or five, doing some hiking and other things you're absolutely nuts if you think I'm writing about here. ($50.00 the first minute, $75.00 each additional.)

And on this auspicious week, my diagnosis finally came back. Organically caused inattentive ADHD. First year of symptoms: age five. As Jack Webb used to say, these are the facts.

The facts I never expected, after 29 years of being the little boy who cried wolf.

I wanted everyone else to be right, and me to be wrong. I wanted to find out it was all in my head. I wanted to hear that I was just goofing off and that I really didn't want to solve any of my problems. I wanted to hear that I brought all those problems on myself.

I wanted to hear that I was suffering because I'm a bad person who never takes responsibility for anything. I wanted to hear that my self-induced problems were all my fault, so I could go kick my own ass some more.

I wanted to hear all those things. I had prepared for that eventuality. I didn't hear any of those things.

What I heard, I knew all along. That I get to have a life, now. That I get to get well.

Harlan Ellison(tm)homage flash fiction:"One Life, Furnished In Early 1980's"

2010-03-30T16:33:00.000-07:00

Not up yet, but click here and check FRONT PAGE or ARCHIVE
This webzine is like an improv theatre company in design, except they all write SFFH flash. But in that similar Shakespearean spirit, the editors roll up their sleeves and pitch in a good yarn for the day if they don't have a sub to fill it. And they're no slouches either.

How this one came about: Paul Di Filippo asked on a recent Yahoo group post if anyone knew anything about 365 Tomorrows. I decided to beta-test them and submit an extensively-retooled piece of flash. They took it last night, and further perusal has turned over some pretty neat fictional rocks. I recommend a look.

The story itself came from a very simple source. I was cleaning out my desk, something I do about twice a year, and found a Polaroid picture of myself at age 13, on crutches, wearing a Bauhaus sweatshirt and a smirk. Looking like I knew everything.

And at the time, I thought: What if I did? What if Polaroid-me and Me-now could walk through the border of the photograph and switch places?

It was 1988. At the risk of ripping off "Hot Tub Time Machine", which I still haven't seen yet, I will not wax rhapsodic about the 80's. Any more. This story, another one called "Mixtape" that may be out soon, and "Birthplace Revisited", which will be up here soon, were kind of my 1980's horror trilogy, both lauding and lambasting all the classic movies and fiction from that time. Which was last week. Now get off my lawn.

The piece shares similar sentiments and morality with Harlan Ellison's immortal classic short"One Life, Furnished In Early Poverty", which was featured in The Essential Ellison and also adapted as a teleplay on The New Twilight Zone. Also in the Eighties. It's not a direct pastiche, but the touch of the Master's hand is visible. Many Ellison stories from those years were central to the formation of certain lobes in my brain, and "One Life" stands out among these in very tall steel-toed boots. In large part, Ellison inspired me to keep writing, during some years when few others' works had the fire or the personal revelations contained within his best stories. Love him or hate him, he has blazed a wall of fire up and down his field, and I have learned a lot from him on the page. (There needs to be more Ellison manga, IMHO.)

Anyway, the piece ended up being flash, which means 1000 words or less telling a complete story in which something happens with a beginning, middle and end. I have sat on panels about this form, and I can tell you that it is T-O-double-UFF-TOUGH. William F. Strunk and E.B. White's classic admonition to "eliminate all unnecessary words" is, in Flash, taken to Japanese extremes. Ki No Tsurayaki knew the principle well:

" crazy for me she
was. i found out
fifty years later " (may have screwed up the line breaks, sorry...)

TenFlash Magazine is another great example of a flash webzine. They run each issue as a theme and get writers to riff on it... kinda like improv theatre. I am sensing a theme here.

Must stop procrastinating. Miles to go before bed. Thanks for reading.

Glowing Review

2010-03-25T12:56:00.001-07:00

SFSignal: 5 stars for "Lotophagi" in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year 2

"Excellent... Dense, psychedelic, the kind of piece you'll want to read twice."

---Laird Barron, multiple-award-nominated author of The Imago Sequence

WAR OF THE WORLDS: FRONTLINES

2010-03-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

Just got the final proof today for "News On The March", a short-short story which will appear in:
WAR OF THE WORLDS: FRONTLINES.

Stay tuned for further messages from this station. It doesn't look good, folks. I am hearing something about a heat ray, whole blocks of buildings reduced to ash. This is a bad time to be in Jersey...

Testing...Testing...

2010-03-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

Testing facebook feed link thing... live in 3,2...

The Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

2010-03-15T17:24:00.000-07:00

TALES OF WORLD WAR Z
"DEAD AIR"

Polluto (UK) Issue #6
"By The Rivers Of Babylon"

TANGENT reviews Lou Antonelli & Edward Morris' "Stairway To Heaven."

2010-02-28T10:49:00.000-08:00

.

“Stairway to Heaven” by Lou Antonelli and Edward Morris

Our narrator Tom Di Salvo, a small town newspaper editor who lives in East Texas, has a problem: Laurie McKenzie, daughter of the deceased owner of his house, keeps popping up in odd places. Like on his doorstep. Or in his office, and she comes bearing a futuristic weapon, determined to take him somewhere in space where she’s been staying for the past fifty-some years, and never ageing a bit. Why? Because her drunken mother died in a car crash—after first killing Di Salvo’s wife.

Laurie and her buddies have been chosen from the hippie generation by the Telians, the “People” who are keeping an eye of Earth. But Laurie has something entirely different to prove to Di Salvo, that time travel works and that sometimes one is privileged enough, or lucky enough, to go back and make things right.

This SF/time-travel story begins with a bewildering question—why is she doing this, and why now?—and ends quite beautifully with a scene that pulls it all together. It’s an example of a story told with heart, and, along with its prose, qualities that make all the difference. The authors have dedicated it to Ted Sturgeon and Trent Zelazny, and fittingly so.

"Lotophagi" in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror Of The Year, vol.2, from Night Shade Books

2010-02-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

It's out. Here. (LGT cover, which was just released)

I am swooning. I've blogged way too much already about my childhood romance with OMNI magazine. It was thus the honor of my life to take a turn in the cybernetic editing dojo with Ellen Datlow, who is the best there is. Surprisingly, when we finished on the mats I was in one piece, and Sifu was pleased. As am I. Only minor corrections for continuity in the beginning of the piece, which Ellen caught. This ended up fomenting an additional, truly horrifying paragraph tossed offhandedly over my shoulder at me by Serena while I was working on "Lotophagi" out loud.

The story deals with a fictional collective farm at the western edge-tip of Felony Flats in Portland, right out where the tentacles of forest begin to snake from Ross Island to Milwaukie. Once you get out around Johnson's Creek, you start seeing horse barns.

I juggled the geography slightly so that the collective farm in question would not be mistaken for the one I was reading about in the weeklies, which I will not name. Those people sound like good folks, not at all like the broken douchebags in my story.

No, those came from a nasty squat-house where I used to live, presided over by an even nastier human being. I imagined what it would be like if this character was in charge of a collective farm, grafted two old ideas together (with massive blasts of inspiration from the works of fellow Lovecraftfest regular Laird Barron, whose story "Strappado" also graces the anthology) and the story wrote itself.

I imagine there's something in there to offend everyone. Yet it is works such as these that sell. Every time I pull out the stops and tell a story the way I want to tell it ("Write what you feel like writing," as another great editor, Jetse de Vries, continually exhorts)... it is those that actually get looked at. For some reason, most of them turn out to be horror or alternate-history. Don't ask me. I just work here.

I wanted to write that story because everyone at that squat was creepy and noble in their own ways, its Fagin the most of all. Problem is, absolute creepiness and absolute nobility do not make for a fun time to be around. He had the potential to be a holy goof, an accidental shaman. The problem was, he had no boundaries at all and he was what they used to call a sociopath, which I term him for convenience. Current psych vocabulary would probably be "borderline."

I don't think he ever killed anyone, and certainly wasn't in league with some prehuman race, but it was very hard to get to sleep in that house on a dark winter night. I forgive him, and I feel sorry for him, but I'd still cross the street to avoid him. I wrote about him so I could move on.

In the process, this wild Dantesque tale emerged about the rest of the people there. I realized that "Deuce" was nothing but a bit player the whole time. The horror inherent in that situation was inherent in each and every one of us. Apart from the countercultural fetish-commodity titillation factor, I think that's what got the story the notice it did, a quality that one collaborator identified as brutal honesty. Heavy on the 'brutal.'

Must get back to work now, just lagged too hard on putting the picture up. More news as things develop...

Kage Baker, carried off the battlefield

2010-01-16T10:49:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a little difficult and all over the map. Please bear with me.

KAGE BAKER has taught me more about multi-genre writing than anyone I can think of off the top of my head, (with the exception of her male counterpart she may, self-admittedly, never have yet gotten to read or meet, a fireball over in the UK named Neal Asher.)

I read Mendoza in Hollywood and Black Hearts, White Knights when I was living around the corner from the Central Branch of the Multnomah County Public Library. I haven't stopped reading her since, or learning from her as a writer and a person. We only ever emailed two or three times. That's not at all what I mean. I'm talking about example.

Kage's work lives on the fused, seamless border between hard SF, alternate history and, occasionally, Fantasy, in that many of her concepts are mythopoetic and, like her contemporary S.M. Stirling, seek to describe life not in terms of magical realism but real magic. Her extrapolations of the "Nanny State" mentality into Draconian law centuries from now are as powerful a political weapon as the megaphones of those English agitprop guys who preach nonviolent nonconsumerism in Trafalgar Square and strongarm the cops into giving them hugs on camera. Her work is a brilliant blazing blow for Punk Rock, or what punk rawk was supposed to mean when it was just having something to say and not giving a good hard fuck. It is as brave and beautiful and honorable as the woman who wrote it, and still as rich and warm and accessible to anyone.

Kage kept her condition to herself for some time. Maybe even while I was corresponding with her. Read the Locus article I linked above, and her dear caregiver's elaboration of it. I won't disrespect her with third-hand repetition. It's bad. Very, very bad. And the worst part of it all is that there won't be a Company story about it. God DAMN it.

I am trying very, very hard not to beat my breast now. Very hard. That will accomplish nothing, and I know that's not what she would want.

None of this makes any sense... but I am still locked into the same body I had when the Company found me and rebuilt me. I still exist, and may do nothing about it from this time, this Portland, this mission. All I may do is watch, and report back.

But I have no heart for my assignment now. Only rage.

Zombies and Martians and Collections, O My...

2010-01-14T09:35:00.000-08:00

Lefora Press is getting ready to run an antho called Through The Eyes Of The Undead One of the stories in there is my short-short 'I Am Stretched On Your Grave', a heart-ripping take on the fallout the zombie war leaves in one screwed-up relationship.

Editor Robert Essig said that IASTYG is a little shorter than what they were looking for, but that something about it was 'oddly compelling.' I agree. I wanted it to go longer, but it just kind of told me when it was done. And I couldn't turn it loose until I had it right.

I was thinking of the way Bram Stoker treated syphilis in his fiction, and how much it would suck to know that you were a zombie. And how little you would have to lose...

J.W. Schnarr at Northern Frights Publishing is also sending round contracts for those of us who made it into his anthology WAR OF THE WORLDS: FRONTLINES It was a real thrill to get to give H.G. Wells the mad props he deserves.

A word about that: I read 'War Of The Worlds' the same year that Howard Waldrop's short story "Night of the Cooters" ran in OMNI. Long story short: I loved them both. Because I was reading them both at the same time, I understood Waldrop's sophisticated Texan parody showing where the other Martian ships landed... and who was there to greet them.

I got that part, too. I'd seen 'Blazing Saddles' and maybe part of 'Dr. Strangelove.' Even on the first read of the Waldrop story, the genius of what he had done (sending Slim Pickens to fight the Martian dreadnaughts) rang in my ears for years, and still does.

'News On The March' is for Howard and Herb. The humor, psychology and pacing are mine, and it shows. But it was a real honor to get a turn.

In March, Lou Antonelli and I have a chapbook of collaborative short fiction, Music For Four Hands, coming up for review by a major indie publisher. As well, I have been in negotiations with another small press about my first short story collection, Shock Theatre. Just finished that one up last night and beat it into fighting shape at 75K words.

(A second collection, Beyond The Western Sky is also well ready to go, but I have to wait for the rights to some of these stories. It should be no more than four months before that even meatier volume of my all-over-the-map stories can leave home and go find work.)

Plowing the road with new material. Always more ideas. Harry Turtledove told me once that having a good idea is never, ever the problem for a writer. It's having the time to develop the good ones. I have a fighting chance at that, and I'm fighting like an army ant.

Current projects:

'Islands In The Sky': Intradimensional alien invasion in 1919, face-off between Kage Baker-ish timecops and the inimitable Charles Fort.

'Serpent's Tooth' (completed) The meaty, complete hard-SF short I have been trying to write since the first time I ever read A.E. van Vogt. Many nods to many heroes in that one. The story is the logical extension of the 'self-destructive heiress/actress' phenomenon as disturbingly common in our society as the amount of headline space said harpylings swallow up when they finally start bottoming out.

But I made my heiress thirteen, likeable...and dead. Dead and waiting on a regrown body, with plenty of time to confer about revenge. That one's being looked at right now.

Blackguard 3: As-yet-untitled return to the West Coast Secession universe (Blackguard 1-2 unpublished; "Game Over", All Possible Worlds#2, Jason Champion, ed. ; "Sound And Furie", Trabuco Road #1, B.K. Dunn, ed; et.al). A highly spiritually evolved alien species from the Pleiades has monitored the human race for millenia, waiting for us to learn to transcend physical bodies. Only then will the Makaliki consider humans enlightened enough to make Contact with.

One Makaliki operative has traced the first moment of human Transcendence to a mile-long dance club in Portland, New Oregon Republic.

There is a long and bloody turf war raging at that club, the Paisley Jones, between its para-paramilitary Security staff and the drug-slinging minions of the Yakuza crime boss who owns the club's mortgage.

BLACKGUARD 1: FATHERS AND SONS and ''2: THE ART OF WAR deal with the history of the polymath genius who accidentally wound up running Paisley's crew, 2nd Lt. Sean "Ghost" Mallory, an Airborne medic retired with a terrible wound that will never heal. Sean saves the life of a young Japanese soldier named Kano Takahara, the aforementioned Yakuza boss, who becomes so when he turns his back on his benefactor and willingly falls from grace. (Or is it willing? There are disturbing hints that there may be more than one Makaliki on Earth.)

Book 3 begins at a lull in the turf war. The military and the courts have gotten involved in many aspects of the Paisley Jones, and everyone is looking for a way for the club to keep operating. The owner wants to put it in orbit, and surprisingly, the military are playing along...

I will post links to new works, etc., as they become available. Must return to my Thursday and more of the same. Thanks for stopping by...

PUBLIC APOLOGY: HARRY MARKOV

2010-01-06T21:20:00.000-08:00

All right, if party in the second part won't post it, I will.

A short time ago, my publisher, without my knowledge, submitted my novel There Was A Crooked Man to Temple Library Reviews. Harry Markov responded with a snippet of commentary about the work, meant mostly for his circle of friends.

I responded by tearing his head off and acting in an unprofessional manner. I don't know him from a can of paint, nor he me. He just managed to inadvertently clip the last fingernail I had hanging onto a cliff in many forms.

But I realized, after a point, that I had been behaving like a certain Horrible Example I love to trot out from the SFnal past, and promptly deleted my comments and recanted my statements to the good Mr. Markov, who really was only doing his job, no matter what he said or how he said it.

Had I known the review was solicited, I would never have said word one. But that is no excuse for my behavior, and I recant it all here. I hope to one day meet the kid, buy him a pint and tell him Sorry to his face. End of discussion.

Edward Morris
dante3000@gmail.com

My Parents Just Lost Their House

2009-12-06T14:32:00.000-08:00

NEWS ARTICLE ABOUT IT HERE (click the link)

UPDATE:My parents lost their house in a bad fire. Cash donations can go thru Paypal, address: dante3000@gmail.com. (Everyone who donates gets a receipt for tax time, and there's no fee.)To donate clothes or goods, contact the Red Cross@ (814) 941-8385 or (814)944-6146. My Dad takes a 2XL shirt, waist 46, inseam 31, size 13 W shoe. Mom takes a size L shirt, size 14 waistband but pref. elasticized waists;size 10 shoe

The Electric Grandmother

2009-11-09T12:23:00.001-08:00

THE ELECTRIC GRANDMOTHER
By Edward Morris

Five A.M. The front door swings open with a click on the firework boom and strobe and flutter of lightning dancing in the skies above the scrub woods and kudzu-fields, over and under the sounds of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs exhorting me to go home, go home, and kneel by bedside and pray.

I will, but not right away. When they make the drop-off, when I'm finally sure I can go, I'm going to a hotel and sleep for seven and a half weeks....

Uncle Reb's back in Jamaica, sitting in his own lab on data-silence, brooding and twittering over his pages and pages of math, all the schema on all those holopanes, all those hours until he hears from me on the antique cell number he still rarely gives out.

Wait. I was nebbing there. I wasn't supposed to tell you about that. Never mind. Just...

I'm always the last to leave anything. You uncles charged me with this, each with your own reasons. Uncle Reb's biochemistry degree and your encyclopedic knowledge of positronics and AI's should have gotten together a long time ago. Who knows what could result, if your little hammer-stroke ever became public knowledge?

But like so many other things, this stays in the family.

Now it's almost time for me to 'take responsibility', like you and Papa keep throwing in my face, like you or anyone else ever really had the heart or the guts or the unclouded intellect to...

I bite my tongue, swallow my heart, and look down at the tiny steel earring-knob of the Pincam tacked to my right lapel.

You two uncles have a lot of nerve, not being here for this. I... Wait, I volunteered. Don't... Oh, don't start in on me, Walter, you remember every damn thing anyone ever said to you since you were in the womb, in...

Sorry. Poor choice of words. You were blessed to be the fruit of her womb, Grandma Claire Crowe nee Two Blades, the holiest woman I ever knew. She practically built that little church in the valley they go to, the one where, at the funeral, you said you hadn't been up to that pulpit since you were seventeen and in your sophomore year at MIT.

Hi, Uncle Walter, there on the other end of the Pincam. You're not at MIT any more, Toto, but racked and shackled into a well-paid scientist tenure at Georgia State. If there were room, you'd bang a tin cup on the bars of your cage... All right, look, now's not the time. Reb's trying just like you are, Walter, just like I am, just like the rest of us.

Oh. I just heard the van touch concrete, up the driveway a piece. See the headlights on the wall? Your research assistant's right on time. Bonnie, was it?

"Papa, you've got company coming," I observe. The headlights whicker down into the driveway. Papa stands in the doorway, eating laser holes in me with his Eastwood eyes. His iron-gray hair is wavy like mine, but cut short, slicked back. He wears a white Archie Bunker undershirt and boot-cut bluejeans, no socks.

"Who'n hail---" SMSGT Reginald Crowe, USAF (Ret.), was up making breakfast at 0430 sharp, avoiding me until I got the fuck out the door (he thought.)

( I couldn't sleep. I could still hear Grandma in this house, smell the hand lotion she always put on her deft, hard-working hands to make them so soft that anyone would feel them and think Mother. I heard her voice in every relative who spoke to me at the funeral. I felt my heart torn out of my chest when her continent-sized one finally gave out after ten years of congestive bouts. All I could think of was that maybe she'd finally get some sleep, and that I'd miss her so awfully that the whole world would look strung-out and empty years later. )

You told me she was a long time dying, Uncle Walter. Ten years. Papa barely told anyone how bad off she was, and she wouldn't. That wasn't how she was raised. She never even groaned, you said, unless she was semi-conscious. She never made a noise. The actual death only took three days, then out like a light, blissfully, in her sleep, under a calm tide of painkillers. Not enough to float her away, but as one of Papa's favorite dirty jokes ends, Just Enough To Win.

Except that my ship back from Mars took five days. No FTL travel for this gutter-punk. Like our ancestors, I went strictly steerage.

It all happened so quickly. None of us saw it coming, in that no man among our number, or woman either, could know the minute or the hour. I got there two days too late.

Remember when we talked to my Mom about this, your big and only sister leaning on her walker, with tears in her eyes? Papa wanted her to stay down here. She's nowhere near where Grandma was, at the last, but the MS is taking her slowly. I know all three of us would do anything she asks.

The dexamphetamine-and-coffee circles under my eyes speak as loudly now as the way your lower lip trembles, the stubble on your face; the sadness in Reb's hooded gaze, and the fatigue you all showed on the way out the door.

"Show him," my mother Darlene Kalashnikov, nee Crowe, exhorted us with tears in her eyes. "Show me. Show me that you can be there for him, no matter how he acts. The man just lost his wife. Show him some compassion. Show me some, too, for that matter. Show me some, too..."

Laurel, my sister, got us some of the parts, but she wasn't any too happy to compromise her commission in the United States Federated Military Corps (even if there was no way they could prove that the prototype her unit was to have disposed of was not, after the fact, merely a bunch of old electronic equipment and a department-store mannequin they threw in the flash-chamber.)

But Laurel did it. Because she saw the sense of your plan, the plan that Reb adapted slightly. I threw my own shoulder to that wheel so completely that I felt like I was about to die in the traces.

Though she never would have used such a word, Grandma Claire believed that blood is thicker than bullshit.

So may we all, Walter. So may we all.

#

I hear the battered Chevy-Grumman van lift off from the driveway. There comes the soft clack of sensible pumps up the flagstone walk outside, and a gentle whirr more delicate than the rain, more powerful than Georgia lightning.

The front door whispers in. The old soldier has some company. I hear that voice that still let everything roll from it like water, gearing up louder than the storm, "REDGE."

Involuntarily, at the mere sound of the voice, I hear the old soldier's heels click together, and the vertebrae in his neck give a twenty-one gun salute. I hear his over-prominent Adam's Apple, so like mine, go up and down in his throat, like he's swallowing his own skull.

Are you seeing this, Walter? Are you seeing the old man who once called the Sherriff on you over a nickel bag of weed, are you seeing him unmanned?

Are you seeing Freud's wolf-god stripped of his teeth, his bark, his bite, his cane and whip? Are you seeing everyone who ever hurt you, now put in their place with a toy you helped devise? Are you---

Seeing Papa come in and look at me, with the Walther PPK pointed right between my eyes; instantly, by his own lights, understanding what has come up to the house to see him.

"You did this. I ought to beat your ass shut. You---"

Clack-clack. The hammer falls back in the darkness. Somewhere, lightning strikes. Just then, DXE-1 shuts the door behind her.

The android crosses the room, in the red silk jacket that you snagged from her closet when you were removing the stuff Papa couldn't look at, the one with the little gold angel pin on the lapel. I remembered every time that smile ever turned on me. "REDGE," Grandma Claire's reproach falls unto Grand-Dad yet again, louder this time, with a sense of real urgency. I can't look.

They got her better than better than Sandro Botticelli or George Bernard Shaw, or even Philip K. Dick. And all because of--- "They all did it together. I know everything you gonna say, so you just sit. No. Redge, you just SIT."

As she speaks, her faded blue eyes turn white, and begin to crackle. Something else grows in smeary coronas around her pale, liver-spotted right hand. Papa finds that he's sitting in the big, overstuffed blue armchair where Grandma died. It is still her voice that pulls him up short, even more than the touch of her shimmering hand. He tries to do something about it, then can't. "Why, you---"

From his non-physical shackles in the big blue armchair, the Senior Master Sargeant begins calling me everything but 'white' and 'a boy.'

And I sit there, and take it. Because I'm on camera. Because I promised you I would, Uncle Walter, comrade in arms on the same front line as me.

I sit there and take it, the way we all sit there and take it from martinet martyrs by blood or circumstance. I'm not even paying that much attention to Redge.

I'm looking at both her hands.

Her hands. I can't even see through the tears. Her hands holding mine, clasped where they hugged me, wiping away my tears, in the yellow-white antique days when everything was Sunday school and swimming-holes and a whole world we didn't even have to think about, because it started and stopped with Grandma and Papa, with Mom and Dad, with order and routine...

. I remember the fraction I know, the fraction, everything they'd done, all the people who remember her, and packed the church for the funeral, and would probably either thank us or ride us out of town on a rail for what we'd done ourselves. "Other than Walter, and..." I swallow my gum, my pride and most of what's left of my soul, "Laurel, we're kind of spread out all over the world. We wanted to keep an eye on you. She sent us all a letter, before she died. She... she asked us to. Hard as this may be for you to believe, or fathom, or even get your mind around, Redge, we... we cared, not like you give us much of a reason to, but..."

I can't continue. I fall to my knees, in a weird way, like I'm holding a sword I plunge into the deep carpet like William Wallace's monastic uncle in that old, old, old movie, saying goodbye in his own way.

"My God," Papa observes, in a weird little Jerry Lee Lewis croak, "Don't think I ever saw you pray." I can't look up. More incredibly still, Redge Crowe picks up the slack. He won't look at me, or the droid. "Pastor said... I might get lonely, I might want... a companion..." His eyes narrow more. He's almost ready to talk. "So you... Walter was in on this?"

"Redge, it was very hard for him," the android affirms helpfully. "Your grandson, here, stepped in and did a lot of the heavy work. Walter was his eyes. He---"

Papa's head's about to explode. "Did what?!He never worked a damn day in his life, never did take responsibility for nothin', he---"

"REDGE." The droid's left hand contains a ranuncula of syringes full of the meds Redge won't take otherwise. Her right holds the gentle shepherd's crook of the repulsor. "He learned s'fast he was suggesting things to both of 'em. You would have been proud."

Papa sulks and scowls in the chair, looking like a surly little kid about to hold his breath until he turns purple. "He's a shiftless, shifty-eyed layabout, no better than his damn D---"

". He's an artist. It took an artist's eye to see how to get everything to fit, and still keep that power supply as small as it could be. If it weren't for him, I'd be luggin' it around on a little cart, but he showed them how, if you fold the mag-skin, it---"

Papa refuses to believe this. "He didn't do no such thing. Boy couldn't find his ass if someone loaded it up with plutonium and turned off the lights..."

The eyes go lightning-white again. "You watch your language around a lady, Senior Master Sargeant Crowe, what do you think you mean by it? I know your Mama raised you better, when you weren't out with your brother Junior on that moonshine whiskey..."

They begin arguing, but Papa already sounds like he knows he's licked. The best place for me now is arm's length, and for some time, while Papa lets the chariot of The Rest Of His Life pick him up at the station, lets her spirit rest, and one day finally finds the off-switch we planned into the design, after roughly three months of mourning, then stands the silent droid in the closet like a wedding dress for someone else to Oooh and Aahh about, while he starts up his truck in the morning and drives out into the sun, into the white light and timeless haze where he's never been alone at all.

My cab's waiting, Walter. Mission Accomplished.

Have a good life.

FREE DOWNLOAD: THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, BOOK 1: BY EDWARD MORRIS

2009-11-01T20:52:00.000-08:00

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, BOOK 1
BY EDWARD MORRIS

GET IT WHILE IT'S HOT
WHILE YOU STILL CAN

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN #1 READING/SIGNING

2009-10-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

When: Thursday October 15 7 PM-9 PM
Where: The Human Bean Coffeehouse
998 SE Oak St. Hillsboro, OR (503)747-6731

What:(clears throat, pops mic)

A weird little railroad town in Central PA that becomes the drain plug for Armageddon.

A girl the hero fell in love with when he was no older than Dante living 'La Vita Nuova', forged into a heroine worthy of the hardest hard SF by brute necessity, thrown back in Time too late, every time, to find her Taliesn again and get the hell home.

Twenty-two years of chasing the shadow with a camera, and realizing that only a lens separates you from it. Nietzsche covered that. (The monster's taking your picture, too...)

All this, and so much more, and more before... Come on down and sit on round. The Reverend has been a-building this here Fire Sermon since he was old enough to type.

News From The Front

2009-10-10T20:28:00.001-07:00

Blistering day of work today, punctuated by the odd power nap and even odder news articles to cleanse my mental palate, or maybe soil it so much my eyes for the work became fresh...

In any case, I finished The Big Reggae Story I've been trying to do for three years. Originally, it was an alternate history quasi-SF piece that switched lives with Bob Marley and Samuel R. Delany.

It didn't fly. I'll leave it right there. Chip Delany is a polymath and a prodigy. I'm not. I couldn't pull that one off.

But the core premise was sound, and an interesting riff in America in the Fifties about Sun Records down in Memphis, that was sound too. I needed a set of lives closer together to switch, to make the story truly sing. Then I discovered Jackie Opel, a Barbadan transplant whom many reviewers called 'The Jackie Wilson Of Jamaica.' And the premise for 'Higher And Higher' was solved.

5500 words and one power-nap later, I woke and fired up the Facebook demon, to hear that a story I truly, truly believe in that got roundly rejected has been tentatively accepted in an anthology. So maybe there's hope for "Higher And Higher" as well.

Back to work. More to come.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME: Made It To 34! W00T!

2009-10-08T14:20:00.000-07:00

A lot of writers on my favorite Yahoo group call me "kid". If Samuel R. Delany is right and slogging through a slough of personal nightmare really just means being a writer at my age, then I can't wait to shed the title.

This birthday has been... interesting, somewhat in the Chinese curse sense of the word. As Dick Lupoff just wrote to me, and I couldn't put any better myself, I just got a medical diagnosis I really don't want, but one that is not immediately life-threatening for the foreseeable future.

Despite that, though, I made it. I made it here, where every day is kind of like a birthday. I have the most wonderful woman in the whole world with me, one whose life can't even be nailed down to ...well, anything, really. Serena is the sun in my sky, as someone else put it, and also the best birthday present ever. First & Last & Always.

On this birthday, I am still mourning my grandmother. But Miss Dixie told us all, in one of the two or three great poems she left us at the very last, to let her spirit rest, and heal the wounds we could heal and grow where we could.

I can only say that I am the most blessed human on the planet to have ever had such a wise woman in my life... and that when I look at my sisters now, and my Mom, I can see Dixie shining out just as fine as paint.

I lost two good friends, this birthday. One of them turned out to be faithless, and one such a Lovecraftian monstrosity I can't even begin to explain it here pending litigation. But based on the death-blow one of them dealt me, and the slightly less fatal blow the other dealt to my faith in humanity as a whole...

Well, the writing is just INCENDIARY, nowadays. I have folded even the colors of my two new worst enemies into my own palette, and learned to forgive them because neither of them have any CLUE what the fuck they do. Much like Vanessa. Nothing changes but the year.

When I did that, when I learned to love them, I began to heap coals of fire down upon their heads in the most pagan sense possible. "Alphabet Of Lightning" is the nastiest, bloodiest, most savagely beautiful thing I have ever written.

And the most honest. Though it is over with too quickly for my liking, and glosses over some dead horses I would truly like to flog until there's nothing left but slurry and Jell-O... I have to be honest, and just, fair and complete, rather than attacking two or three folks who are sadly too dead to defend themselves.

However, that doesn't mean that I'll lie, or bullshit, or censor myself, for five seconds. Powersburg in the 1940's is a savage, desolate land, though the intellectual and spiritual beauty of folks like the librarian Anna Connelly go yards toward making it habitable.

And (see posts just below)... I have to start hustling on the Crooked Man launch. We have our first gig, and the second at Orycon by default. I want to engineer TEN. WFC and Radcon and the whole tour. And if that can't happen, I will know the reason why.

One of my literary heroes, Jeff VanderMeer, once used the mantra "Knives Out." For now, that's where I am too. Anybody who actually reads this thing, in the Portland area, please come down to the Human Bean on the fifteenth. If I could work my will, even if twelve people showed up, I would lock the doors, hand out beers to everyone (or whatever you're into) and just filibuster Book 1. We'll see...

Crooked Man Release Date

2009-10-07T10:40:00.001-07:00

PRE-LAUNCH AUTHOR READ
THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN: BOOK 1
OCTOBER 15
7-9 PM
The Human Bean Coffeehouse
Open 5AM - 9PM Daily!
998 SE Oak St.Hillsboro, OR 97123
503.747.6731

I will be reading from Crooked Man 1, saying a few brief words about the collection and construction of this singular, ground-breaking cross-genre experiment, and signing books. (If we run out, I'll pre-sell 'em. Don't worry, most of you know where I live.)

OCTOBER 27
THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, BOOK 1
OFFICIAL RELEASE

OTHER DATES TBA. I will try to make it to Radcon and World Fantasy Con.
In November, I will be a guest author again at Orycon 30, and will also be letting the Crooked Man out to cause havoc at the Marriott. Stay tuned.

Checking In

2009-10-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

I noted how long it had been since I've posted anything on here. Been recapping stuff on Facebook, but...

"By The Rivers Of Babylon" will be in Polluto#6

Ditto "I Drove All Night" in Graveyard Tales, very soon

And "Stairway To Heaven", co-written with Lou Antonelli, will be in an anthology I will comment on as soon as the mailman bears that antho's fruit.

Attended the H.P.Lovecraft Film Festival/Cthulhucon as a guest author, and thrilled to death to hear that they are doing a smaller one in Seattle in March. Met William F. Nolan and Cody Goodfellow and the great editors/filmmakers/see Rolodex Jason & Sunni Brock. The core Bizarro/PLO crowd were there rolling up their sleeves and busting their ass.

What else... Read with Laird Barron, whose live reads are always a smash. My first Cthulhu Mythos story I ever sold, 'Jihad Over Innsmouth' had the room spellbound and laughing (according to eyewitnesses.) Had a hell of a lot of fun on the Humor In Horror panel with Jemiah Jefferson and Marianne Snyder, and S.T. Joshi himself pulled my ass out of the fire during a scheduling hiccup for the other panel. Can't complain.

More to say, but must go round up breakfast. Starting to think about hunting a small animal in the backyard, but raccoon meat is no good and the store's only two blocks away...

Death In The Family

2009-09-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

My grandmother, Dixie Claire Brooks, (formerly Wallace, of Sir William's true line; as the Brooks line can be traced back to William The Conqueror, The Carter Family Singers, President Jimmy Carter and the outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd) was born four years before Black Friday on a farm whose original parcel was part of the Sooner Land Grab in Oklahoma.

Her mother Lucy Wallace was a schoolteacher, and her father James Wallace was a cowboy (who made his own skillets on the forge, and employed the most unique recycling program I've ever heard of when he fed their dead nag to the pigs, as it was always done out on the prairie.) His brother Marion was a U.S. Marshall in Texas who was reportedly shot in the back by an outlaw.

Dixie and her sisters Carrie and Blanche were cowgirls who wore pants and rolled their own cigarettes. She went on to Nursing school, where she met a young Airman from Georgia who had crawled his way up from Hell, where one pulls a plow barefoot. Dixie and Gene Brooks wed in the Postwar years, and contributed three visionary geniuses just like them, to the Baby Boom.

When I was no more than a small armload, Grandma Dixie used to wrap me in an afghan she knitted (which my little girl inherited), rock me in Papa's old rocking chair, and sing old gospel songs like "I Shall Not Be Moved", and "I'll Fly Away." Every year on my birthday, she sent me a card with twenty-five dollars in it. Every. Year. Last year included.

Just before her Oklahoma-sized heart got tired after eighty-four years and started yelling for a break, I had the honor of editing a novel she wrote called No Greater Love. We were always emailing, and there is a new afghan she knitted draped across our beloved old couch. Serena and I take that afghan on picnics, and camping, always with a very clear idea of the love that went into it, and who made it. It is reserved for the most special of occasions.

Grandma Dixie was so preternaturally thoughtful, she even sent us the table napkin I am now using to wipe my eyes and blow my snotty nose so I can even see. Somehow I doubt she'd mind.

Dixie was one of the four or five people I've ever known who I would call a true Christian. She was also one of the two wisest and truly holiest women I've ever known ( the other being my late Grandmother Ruth Morris, who preceded her by a good few years.)

I have been going through a lot of napkins today, and very little else. I would give my EYESIGHT to be in Georgia right now, but there is neither enough time nor enough money.

The doctors say they have done all they can. My Aunt Margaret, who is also a writer, put this better than I could right now. Sure, the world is a lot poorer, but they're already singing in Heaven.

GO EAST, YOUNG MAN, GO EAST*

2009-09-04T12:32:00.000-07:00

In EVERYDAY WEIRDNESS, a neat little flash-fiction website that throws you a new fictional curve ball every day of the year. I've noticed a lot of Absurdism, Horror and convoluted SF, all very fun to read just to see what nugget of back-handed wisdom that day has coughed out at you. These are good people, and this was a good idea.

The days have been flying by. I barely remembered it was the 27th of August when "Go East" came out. There have been a whirlwind of incredible things and incredible projects going through here. Many wolves to feed when some of those projects start becoming paying ones, starting with the biggest wolf that has been sitting on my chest for ten years. (Hell hath no fury nor Dante such sweet revenge as, 'Here's your check. You ruined my life. Now fuck off.')

But even that wolf was never that big. It all depends which one you feed. I learned how to feed the white one a long time ago, so the Churchillian-black one now looks kind of like the scavenging mutt it always was.

I can't talk about the big projects here yet, just a few more weeks. But I can say that Crooked Man 5 is half-done as a first draft, about four years ahead of schedule. On June 17th, I walked away from a wreck that should have ended my life. No power on Earth can keep The Rest Of This from happening. The Green Man has touched me this summer, and everything is coming up the same color. Now for Harvest Time, very soon...

BLURB FROM RICHARD LUPOFF

2009-08-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

"What a trip! What a ride! We used to write about the past, present, or future. Then we got into alternate time-lines and reality-tinkerers (of which Ed Morris is a major contender if not the champ). And then there was this book! Wow!

Reading There Was a Crooked Man is like listening to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, Charles Ives and Frank Zappa simultaneously, while indulging in a serious absinthe high and daydreaming about Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Morris is either a documented genius or a certifiable madman. I’ll put my money on the former."

---Richard A. Lupoff

Author of Visions, Dreams, and The Emerald Cat Killer

DED

2009-08-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

Wiping 'I Robot' from here and revamping it, per your suggestions.

Sorry my robot sounded too human.He was supposed to sound like an old man. Like the other desk guy who you didn't see...

This was not intended to be hard SF, strictly a journal entry about a place I am still way too close to. I still wake up at six every morning scared shitless that I'll be five minutes late to that awful haunted house (the Grove Hotel) and some fuckstick from "Last Resort" like "Sgt. Mason" will be calling me to give me an earful.

I need to either take some time to get over the physical symptoms of working at the Grove... or stab and end the creature, to the heft. Probably going to be B.)

You know, you're really starting to talk like a pro way too much. Now drop and give me twenty push-ups!

ESCAPE POD 193: Props From Mike Resnick

2009-07-31T21:14:00.000-07:00

Free ad for this blog, courtesy of a Hugo nominee

Resnick's story "Before The Beginning", written with Harry Turtledove, is one of my very favorites. I don't know if this here whole thing was a coincidence or not, but either way... :)

Also, in TEXT form at the late and very much lamented Jim Baen's Universe

THE MUSIC LESSON

2009-07-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

By Edward Morris

(C)2009 by Edward R. Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved
Anyone attempting to claim this work as their own can eat the grip of shit I did trying to sell this.

This is for Shelton Hank Williams III

#

In a little Alabama jerkwater halfway from Can to Cain’t, a boy named Hiriam hossed a Woolworth guitar in a thrashed case up Main Street, bobbing some when he limped to the left.

He was a good old boy already, no matter how old the skin around him was. At first glance, he looked like he might know enough to find his ass with both hands if someone walked him through it a few times first.

The guitar hung on a rawhide strap around skeletal shoulders that looked too frail to support his big old grownup head in its big old white Stetson. Those shoulders were wrapped in a yellowed Arrow dress shirt with no collar, also too big, tucked into faded, cuffed Levi-Strauss dungarees and a pair of Red Ball Jet sneakers that had been new come school time but now made the guitar look new.

Until you saw his eyes, so hungry and ancient and aware. Until you heard the screams of the caged Cherokee spirit nailed down inside him and in torment, a force that had nothing and remained proud.

Eleven years old, this waif, limping like an old drunkie. His kind, unhappy face was swallowed in the very innocence of Pinnochio waking up in the torture chamber of real-boyhood.

When there were no chores, Hiriam stayed in his little room. His only friend scrounged him a Motorola radio that hadn’t blown a tube in a year so far. The tube cost a nickel, worth the radio’s weight in nickels for teaching the boy the Kaballah of names: Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Fiddlin’ John Carson, a thousand million immortal old-time songs he taught himself to play by ear.

Hell, when he got going he’d even written one or two of his own, though he never shared them with anyone but his friend who bought him the radio, who laughed and slapped his knee at the tale of the wooden Indian over in the antique store across from the corner where they had their lessons…

The guitar was a recent concession, a Christmas and Birthday from Mama, who cried and told stories about him when he was little, and got a bit too into the corn liquor herself and said, “I don’t only wisht I could give ye that .22 you wanted, and the bike th’own in, son. I wisht I could give ye a father weren’t a no-count only gave you that empty bottle upside the head when you mouthed off when you was six…

“But, Mama,” he replied stubbornly, just not getting the tune at all, “Pastor Kenneth, he says I’m to forgive Pappy, on account of he took that wound over in France what made him lose his senses to begin with. What have I got to do with any of that? Pappy’s at the VA now.

He’ll do no breakin’ bottles no more, and if he does, why, Pastor says they got big men in white coats up there who can make Pa holler Uncle. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ ” When he intoned, his little face was wide and open and repentant, “You cannot wield it. Yours is to forgive.’ “

Now the tears truly began to roll. “Baby, come here and hug your Mama.”

He looked surprised. “Why, what did I---“

“Hush your mouth, Harm. The Lord gave you to me ‘cause He loves me so much anyway…”

But she kept picking the same kind of man, he couldn’t help but notice (with that part of his brain that spoke out of turn at home and at the schoolhouse, the part that got him socked in the mouth more than once.) After each no-count asshole was turned out of their dooryard, Mama just got harder and meaner.

Pondering this, the boy looked away from his reflection in the front window of the drugstore. Mama said a tall wind would blow him away. He hated how pale he was, the way he had to drag one leg all the time, and the permanent gray rings around his eyes, the scowl of concentration that drew down the right corner of his mouth, the left shoes that wore out first like the way his left sneaker spoke the name of every stone on the sidewalk through a millimeter of sole.

He knew what people thought, when they looked at him. But to him, the body was just something to haul around like that guitar, like those shoes. He talked to God in spirit, clothed in flesh incorruptible.
He talked to God in song, which was all he ever, ever wanted to do. Mama said when he was five, he drowned out the whole church choir once he ciphered out all the words to “How Great Thou Art.”

One day, he’d have him a real Western band, and call himself Luke the Drifter. All the girls would want to come listen to him play, and none of the boys would ever knock him down or make fun.

His heart was too big, and it was already about to get broken, though not in the way one usually sings of such things, down South. No, this was a different kind of magic, waiting just above the ramshackle skyline of Town like a wriggling gully-buster of a thunderhead, aching to spread its news, to make it rain…

All he knew was that he didn’t know much. All he was content to know was that he was starting to get hungry and he was pretty sure he was late, like it mattered. He had the pay for this lesson right-cheer, swinging in the wicker basket in his spindly right hand.

He had no friends to speak of at school. The bigger boys who played basketball beat him up once in a while when they needed some extra sport. They all called him nigger-lover for playing his guitar with that old colored fella Tee-Tot Payne who sang for his supper out by the Courthouse. A few of those boys were fellow attendees of the First Southern Baptist Church down in town.

None of them cared to know anything about Rufus Payne (who claimed he got the nickname Tee-Tot from the one whole week he ever quit drinking when he was on the road.) Even at his tender age, Hiriam never understood why it was that those boys claimed to be Christian at all, if they were going to act like that. He could have picked up his guitar and busted it over their heads any one of a hundred times.

But Tee-Tot told him that turning the other cheek meant a lot more than ignoring a bully. In the Biblical times, his friend imparted not long before, turning the other cheek meant that the bully would have to slap you with the left hand…

“…Which, back then, they used to hold the corncob with when they was in the outhouse, you know? So you slap a man with the left hand, back then, you bein’ unmanly. You turn the other cheek, you kill those boys with kindness. You get them to act unmanly, mkae ‘em look like sissies in front of your whole school, then it’s on them. Don’t give me no whys and wherefores, just bear that in mind and take it back to class wit’cha...”

Hiriam grinned, remembering. He could hear Tee-Tot two blocks over from the low front wall of the old County Court House, idly picking single-finger chords on the scratched-up, well-oiled Dopyera Triolian biscuit-cone resonator guitar he said he won in a poker game in the back of some juke joint in Mobile.

The boy coveted that guitar, Maybelline by name. She was Tee-Tot’s bread and butter, scratched up from the big silver vodou rings he wore on the second and third fingers of his right hand. One looked like a proud man with a full beard, not dissimilar to Tee-Tot himself. The other was a signet, bearing two crossed keys and the mystic letters E L E G B A. Once, he asked Tee-Tot what that meant, and he still remembered not to ask.

He often dreamt of the sounds those rings made knocking, knocking cross-body beneath the strings, giving Tee-Tot’s playing an otherworldly percussion that melted the eyes and loosened the tongues and stays of so many women in so many roadhouses, he said, so many years and so much living still left to do as the secret heart railed against it all and gave voice to its cry in a shot-glass slide run that shivered the shantytowns of the Mississippi Delta down to the last radio.

Hiriam saw that cute little gal Maizie from the Prothonotary’s Office shyly pass old Tee-Tot, in her cloche hat and too much sachet, and dropped a silver dollar in the old bluesman’s own black Stetson (upside down between his big bare feet.)

“I thankya, thankya,” Rufus Payne mumbled shyly, not looking her in the eyes as she wiggled on home for the day. Out on the street in McWilliams, Alabama, doing so could have gotten Tee-Tot lynched from a cottonwood tree with same-day service at no additional charge.

Tee-Tot was old, and the road was too hard for him now, but could he still play? You’d best believe it.
But the boy didn’t recognize the song Tee-Tot was playing now, a mournful little waltz, a twinkling one-two-three, one-two-three, over and under, making him feel so lonesome he could cry…

According to the thermometer down by the lumberyards half a mile back, it was a hundred and three degrees outside. He admired the roses that ranged along that side of the lawn behind the wall, under the window of the downstairs courtrooms #2 and #4. All the pansies, crocuses and supporting cast in that bed were a sad and wilted mess, but the roses were running riot.

“ ‘lo, son.” Tee-Tot glanced at the boy, his eyes like abandoned wells. “You ready to go walk with the King? Gitcha back fixed? Or you decide you rather not? It’s your call. You say no, we droppin’ it now.”

Well, there was anything short of Serious Talk gone. The boy tried to talk, but nothing would come out. There was a roaring in his ears, so much he wanted to say and so little breath, he…

“Sit down,” Tee-Tot invited, grinning through his beard. Hiriam did so, very slowly, grimacing his way to the curbstones. “Remember when you asked me what the word meant on my ring, and I tol’ you how Papa was a boko-man, went down to th’ crossroads to get Papa Legba to take the lame off my baby sister Cassie’s leg?”

There was more he wanted to say, but the bearded lips held back. The sun beat down hard overhead. The dust in its beams fell harshly upon the old man’s grayish face. Hiriam was suddenly struck by the fact that Tee-Tot looked even sicker than he was.

The boy frowned, attempting to tune his own guitar. Without blinking, Tee-Tot gave him a clear A-note to start from. “What’s a boko?” Hiriam asked.

“I told you once. A holy man, of the night way, one who serves with both hands. A witch-doctor.”

“I remember everything we talked about,” his serpentine mouth pursed. “But that ain’t Christian. Are you sayin’ you’re … the healer… an’ gonna conjur up some kinda whatnot, like you mentioned? I mean, Tee-Tot, you done taught me to play, but---“

Tee-Tot’s voice got low and chilling in that way Hiriam didn’t like, the way it did when the Sherriff tried to kick Tee-Tot off his favorite corner that one time. Like whoever heard it had to listen.

His scowl beat across the boy’s eyes like a mahogany club held sideways. “Do you want to sleep a whole night through? To walk ? To play basketball?” The tear that fell down Tee-Tot’s right cheek, into his beard, was something that scared Hiriam almost away. His lower lip trembled.

You know I do, he tried to say. Tee-Tot sighed. “Your bones never grew right. I can… I done things with bones before. I can teach ‘em to climb back up that trellis, the spinal cord, the way they supposed to. I did it with Cassie. Legba gave me the touch so Papa get what he asked.”

Hiriam’s heart lurched strangely in his chest. The sun was still high. The roses, and the whole street, looked saturated with light, suffused by a timeless white haze. He gestured at the basket. “I… brought dinner.”

Tee-Tot stopped playing, grinning half a mile of ivory keys. “Your mama bribin’ me again? I ‘spect another mess of ham biscuits.” But the boy was shaking his head.

“Cheese this time. An’ a Ball jar fulla sweet tea, and chocolate chip cookies, I think, if little sis didn’t get there firstest with the mostest---“

Tee-Tot held up a hand. The happy, muddled drunk he played for the townfolk returned over his features like an iron mask. “But th’show mus’ go on, my light-skinned apprentice blues man …”

The boy laughed, and said something Tee-Tot didn’t quite catch. He chuckled, rubbing at his eyes. The setting sun was calling him. His race was nearly won. The boy didn’t have to know about the cancer. No one else did.

That morphine was a mean bitch. He kept slipping away. The sun’s bright light kept coming closer, occluding the edges of his vision. It had a song to it, too, a long slow steel pulse. It was nice. It---

Hiriam clapped his spindly farmboy hands twice in front of Tee-Tot’s grizzled face. The old man blinked, looking around. “Don’t you faint on me! “ Hiriam roared. His concern was touching, if thinly veiled in bluff and bluster.” Rufus Payne, I’ll duck your fool head in the horse trough and you can kick my ass later---“

Tee-Tot chuckled, elbowing the boy off him as easily as he would a small dog. “You o-kay, too, little drifter. And so will I be, after a few of your mother’s fine biscuits. Jus’… got playin’ an’ forgot…”

The boy couldn’t hide his grin. “That’s our problem, I guess. We should eat.” His face looked so open and sincere that Tee-Tot cracked up laughing.

He never laughed as much around anyone as he did around this kid. His own Mama said that when you stop laughing, you start to die. Bon Dieu was calling him home tonight, but at least he could die with a smile. There were worse ways. Like Papa… Never even knew what hit him, got rode so hard it broke his poor heart, and he laid down his skull-head cane and died…

Moodily, the old bluesman shouldered Maybelline and bid the boy follow him to the pump on the far side of the Courthouse square, in a little dooryard where a few spavined lawyers’ horses were hitched and brooding, huddled round the water trough in a great cloud of flies and pheromones.

The old man and the little lame boy took turns between holding the other’s guitar and sticking their heads under the pump. Then the boy got dinner ready on a park bench, far from the horses. They sat and ate in silence for a while. Then Tee-Tot finally dropped the dime.

“Here’s how it works. This ain’t church. You ain’t got to do a damn thing but listen…”
He opened Maybelline’s case, removed the shiny metal-inlaid old girl and opened the deep false bottom.

Hiriam saw two bottles of Old Crow bourbon, a city of weird lumpy candles, a Mason jar of what looked like clear water, a pocketknife stained black, a bag of dried mushrooms, and a tiny drum with a horsehide head. “I… Well, all right. Where do we---“ He was flummoxed. This was a whole new school year, as it were, and…

But the thoughts kept breaking off when they left his head. Tee-Tot laughed out loud, and the laugh echoed down a long hall of mirrors, making the boy clap his hands to his ears as Tee-Tot touched the herniated vertebrae in his lower back with…

With his eyes, the space between his eyes. His hands were linked behind his back the whole time.

“Not getting any better, is it?” When the boy looked away, he commenced to washing down the mushrooms with corn liquor. The stars felt right. The frogs sang from the bottom-land outside town. The loa all around were happy, waiting for something, whispering to each other the way all spirits do, just beyond the reach of most folks’ ears.

This was a sight for them alone. When he closed his eyes, the boy heard drums, and felt wingbeats in his big jug ears. “You weren’t joking.” Hiriam looked lost. “Tee-Tot, you’re my friend, but… this ain’t ‘zactly … godly, like I said...”

The old man was three feet away. Many shapes moved in the courtyard. Not a flower, a tree or a blade of grass broke through into where they were. His heart pounded hard. The bones in his back wanted to dance the macumba.

But his pain was everyone’s, and everyone’s was his, he… it… they…But…

But even the worst parts of this life shone tonight like stars. In their shame, they were all the same.
He could call the tune, tell them, sing them, let them---

The boy rose, following Tee-Tot through the gloaming. Now the wingbeats were hurrying him on, and though none of this was the slightest bit godly, he listened with his heart and knew that the wings were what anyone with any sense would call angels.

They hit the highway out of town, into vast wet farmlands where every third house seemed abandoned, and improbable creturs screamed in the brush. The walk seemed to take little time when the boy looked back on it later, like they were floating, or being pulled along.

“Whur we goin’?” he asked at one point, unable to keep quiet. The old man turned around. He gasped.

Tee-Tot’s eyes were rolled the whole way back into his head. “Look yonder,” he rumbled in a voice like stormclouds over land. Ahead, the crossroads cut itself out of struggling beanfields in red clay and igneous rock.
He looked down. Every rock and root in the road looked like windswept bone. Ahead of him, the old man picked his barefoot way with alacrity, up into the middle of the rough intersection, off the shoulder.

No one walked in the flat fields. The roads were empty. Lightning licked the black glass of the sky, far out and away in another world, as far away as Nashville, France, Alpha Centauri, other lives than those…

Maybelline’s case dropped open in the road. One bottle clinked up into the old man’s hand like it was on a fishline. Tee-Tot held it out.

“Me?” Already, the boy wasn’t unfamiliar with the contents of said bottle. He and a few misfit kids from the neighborhood once split a bottle of it. He got so drunk he fell off Brian Perkins’ pappy’s barn roof while sitting there trying to serenade some girl who’d never look at him twice until she heard him sing. ..

When he took the bottle, he felt something roll into him from the old man, sinuous and multicolored, a spotted python of light …

“What… is … this…” Tee-Tot’s eyes rolled back down. “I wove this spell to… You s’pozed to be knocked out from the first sip! I put enough graveyard dust in that whiskey to drop a rodeo bull, boy. What kinda duppy you got stuck in you?!?”

Hiriam whimpered at him in terror, looking all of a sudden llike Tee-Tot had commenced to give birth through his forehead like Zeus did in the dawn times. “Oh, no.” He was shaking his head very rapidly. “No, no, no… “

The starlight bent around them in the crossroads. The undergrowth was alive with the cries of souls who bled their lives out into that land, plowed under, generations born with shovels in hand to dig their own graves...

Tee-Tot dropped to his knees. “Papa Elegba,” He crossed himself in a funny way, blowing on his hands and bowing, prostrating himself. “Gracieux Papa, je suis vo’Serviteur, en humilité.Je---“

Then his eyes rolled back into his head and he began to shudder. Hiriam instinctively put some distance between them. But his back was crippled up since he was little. Running was out of the question.

The other bottle rolled out of the case, landing in front of him half-full. Moving like he was in a dream, Tee-Tot unlimbered himself right where he stood and pissed in it. Hiriam thought that he’d never seen a pizzle of that size that wasn’t on a bull, then looked politely away.

Buttoning his fly back up, Tee-Tot capped the bottle and flung it into the night. When it broke, the air changed again, grew heavier again and pulsed with something the boy could almost remember from long ago…

The earth at Tee-Tot’s feet rose up all around him, whirling pebbles into weird grids of north-south and east-west, the dust of the change burning bright alkaline across the boy’s tongue, all heat-lightning and sour herbs and the natron tang of darkest Africa…An oily iron smell like a locksmith’s shop, a jingling rattle from somewhere out of mind…

“Why you bother me, boy?” Something rasped through Tee-Tot in a voice like brass on brick, dripping with a pithy accent.Hiriam took a deep drink from the bottle, pouring it out near the newcomer without echoing Tee-Tot’s other gesture.

Tee-Tot himself was off the air, no longer the potter but the potter’s clay, no longer rider… but horse.

“Pappa Legba,” Hiriam wonderingly addressed the lame old god, who leaned on a bright copper staff where none had been before. A giant ring of wrought-iron keys jingled at his belt, which appeared to be made of two snakes in an argument. With his free left hand, he was smoking a fabulous, gnarled briar pipe full of something that smelled like burning leaves in the fall.

The boy’s head hurt, and his back was white fire. It was too hard to think, period. Too hot. Too much pain. Too drunk, and… Yessir, that ‘graveyard dust’, whatever that was, was starting to work as well.

Hiriam just opened his mouth and kept talking. “P-p- p appa Legba of the crossroads, like he told me about. Can you… Oh, I don’t care nothin’ about my back, mister, the doctors can fix that when I get my growth, Mama says. Tee-Tot says you answer prayers.”

Something hard crept into his voice, darkening those obsidian eyes. “ ‘Spect you know mine. Could you… That is… I mean, I know I can be the top, but…”

Legba looked bored already, pensive, restless. “You don’t need my help for that. Piss off.” He sat Tee-Tot’s body down in the road, shading his dusky garnet eyes, shaking his head. “I’m not going to grant you no boon, blanc. You can get there on your own.”

The world spun in front of Hiriam. “I’ll sell you my soul!!” he screamed. Legba scowled with Tee-Tot’s teeth.

“I don’t want your soul. We don’t do that. “

“But…But… I ain’t got a pot to piss in, nor a winder to--- Mama, she“

“My heart bleeds,” the old god scoffed, “You never been to the islands, little boy. Or, clearly, to Selma. Go tell your mother she callin’ ya.”

Legba stood, arms branching out like traffic-signals, gnarled old body in its entirety doing fabulous things no body should do. Hiriam blanched.

“. I told you once, you weird-lookin’ fuck, I’m the best that’s ever been.”

The old god turned, momentarily unmanned, light making a white nimbus around his sad head. He swept a courtly, arthritic bow with that sextant-slide-rule-staff held out before him.

“JE PERMETTE.”

Hiriam took a huge, gulping breath and commenced a Carter-scratch of the riff actually born in Tee-Tot’s own hands that very morning.

He took that waltz from the light on the roses before this long dark dirt road under the stars, and turned it over in his hands, coaxed it through his guitar strings with the simple grace of love in a backseat under stars like that, the taste of good whisky, the first drag on a cigarette, the first kiss, the first fireworks...

The silences between his notes were static between stars, as big as the Big Bang, that breakup whose endless loneliness aches in every sinew of the universe. He made the song cry in the night …

Hiriam Williams strung his own heart, broken into sculpture by pain and poverty and sickness, and called upon the harps of the blessed to tune it true… If he couldn’t be good, he’d be careful. If he couldn’t walk the straight and narrow all the time, he’d pay it all back in broken-callus blood upon those strings.

The boy played a web of song out over those lonely fields of beans and peas and cotton, stretching far away under the night. Even the indignant cicadas were forced to pay attention, and still their own song and then, with the toads and crickets and peepers, begin to sing again, sing along…

“Enough.” Pappa Legba finally held up both ninety-degree-angular hands for silence. Hiriam’s throat suddenly didn’t work any more. “I told you, you don’t need my help. But a blessing, now…”

Hiriam’s knees buckled, and he fell down at the crossroads. Legba’s pipesmoke thickened in the air around him. The old god shook his head.

“I hope you know what kind of contract you just signed.”

Hiriam stood up carefully, brushing himself off, wobbly on coltish legs. “That’s my business,” he said, in lower tones now. “I thankye … …It’s…”

“You’re drunk,” Legba chuckled out groundfog. “Speak what you got to speak, boy. Night’s dragons cut the clouds full fast.”

Hiriam laughed. “ May we…that is…” He took a deep breath, trying manfully not to vomit. After a moment, his stomach settled the issue in his favor. “Are we done here? My Mama gone tan my hide. Better tell our ol’dog to move on over, ‘cause I’m fixin’ to move in with a red ass. Uh, pleasure doin’ business with ye.”

He stuck out his hand. Legba just looked at it and chuckled, already beginning to dissipate.

“Good night, Harm,” the old god jibed. No one had saddled him with that nickname since way back in Mt. Olive, when he was just a spud, barely old enough to remember… “Hey!“

Legba paused, holding barest material shape. “Quoi?”

“Call me Hank.”

Once more, that creaking bow. “Mais bien, Hank..Go in peace, drifter, and teach them to sing.”

Then it was dawn, just dawn. Tee-Tot fell to his own knees in the road. The dust-devil blew apart, away, separating back into sky and fields and the fog burning off before the day ahead. The boy’s eyes blazed. “Tee-Tot, it worked! He said I’m gonna be---“

Tee-Tot fell face-first into the road like a sack of meal, unresponsive.

Hank Williams’ jaw dropped with a click. Some part of him noticed that the neck of his guitar was melted beyond repair, and that the spindly fingers of both hands were mashed and blistered and bloody. At the time, this generated little concern.

Hank unslung the guitar from around his shoulders and raised it high over his head, giving voice to a wild and terrible rebel yell. Every bird within auditory range took flight in a startled burst of dust and wings.

In looping barbarian arcs, he smashed his axe to flinders in the road, not stopping until he was done and there was no more left to smash.

Doc Holton down in town diagnosed him with two newly herniated spinal vertebrae, wagged his finger at him over a tirade about boys who got too big for their britches and tried to play circus strongman, and gave him a bottle of morphine pills to take home to his mother with directions printed on the label.

Hank knew he’d stretched those bones in his spine the wrong way when he dragged Tee-Tot( that poor old drunk nigger everyone in town looked down on, who could play the guitar like he was a god, who was the only real friend Hank Williams ever had, at that age) off the road and into the Brooks’ peas, put pennies over his eyes, tossed a handful of dirt on him and tearfully recited a few verses he could recall from Ecclesiastes before flagging down a trucker.

The rest of the day passed without incident for him, the last one of its kind for many years.

Under the calm tide of morphine, Hank could swear he heard hymns of peace being played on a round-necked guitar, and the knocking of Vodou rings across its hide. He rested his back and wept for his friend, wondering if he’d ever sing again.

SUPERNAUT

2009-07-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

(c)2009 By Edward R.Morris Jr. All Rights Reserved
Anyone attempting to claim this work as their own is encouraged to send it to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Hoboken, NJ.

SUPERNAUT

By Edward Morris

"I would like to plead for my right to investigate natural phenomena without having guns pointed at me. I also ask for the right to be wrong without being hanged for it. "

---Dr. Wilhelm Reich

1947, before U.S. Supreme Court

People v. Harvard University Medical School,

(Dismissed. Dissenting vote cast by Justice Harry Hopkins.

Separate Brief by Justice Margret Chase Smith,

Cue Reel-Drive UPSTAIRS/WIRE RECORDS, PRE-CRYSTAL/

WASHINGTON Intelligencer

14 March 1947…)

#

SLATE:

FILMED AND PRODUCED BY ALEX GREY,

©ALEX GREY STUDIOS; NYC, NY 1980*

*THIS DOCUMENTARY IS A WORK OF PROTECTED SPEECH

FADE IN:

SLATE: PICKMAN’S RARE BOOKS

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

MARCH 04, 1980

CAMERA swings 180° around the PACKED HOUSE. Freaks of every type and description line the coffeehouse sitting-room-only and cheek by jowl with humbled investment bankers from the Financial District, and MIT madmen dusty with days in the lab. Coffee cups steam at every table. Outside the PLATE-GLASS WINDOW, a rainbow hangs over BOSTON COMMON.

An AMPLIFIER rings forever, marking the moment where nothing comes Before and everything comes After. CAMERAS begin to flash instant karma, instant benevolence, instant joy, whingeing and going tak, tak, tak almost silently in the still dark-roasted air.

A RICH RADIO VOICE rolls in from off-camera.

RADIO VOICE

Welcome to Pickman’s, the pulpiest pulp fest north, south, east aaaand westath’Combat Zone!

My name’s Paul. I’ll be your waiter for tonight. We are honored to have with us one of the finest minds Austria ever produced, one whom America is proud to call her own. Our guest reader is a true polymath, a real Renaissance an in the Da Vinci sense of the phrase.He is faculty chair of Harvard’s Psychopharmacology department, runs his own lab out in Port Lowell, born in 1897, and every damn day he still comes to work…

Sometimes, that work is writing and publishing. And sometimes it’s out here on the Mount, dumbing it down for schlubs like us. His new work of non-fiction, The Bion Experiments, is a memoir of his early hand-to-mouth days as a researcher, and well worth the read.

Herr Doktor says he… uhh, refuses to participate in such a crass example of bourgeois commercialism as a ‘book-signing’, possibly due to the advanced state of his arthritis. In either case, he will be staying afterward for coffee and donuts, as well as any questions you folks may have.

Ladies and gentleman, wide-eyed children of wonder in every age bracket, please rise. I give you our reader, Dr. Wilhelm Reich, author thus far of The Bion Experiments, The Food of the Gods, and the Mass Psychology of Psychotropia. Herr Doktor, Wilkommen, bitte.

CAMERA PULLS IN on LECTERN at front of room, to MEDIUM CLOSE UP of a FRAIL OLD MAN WITH A THICK MUSTACHE, gripping the sides of the lectern with both hands. OLD MAN stands in a tight pool of incandescent light, with his wheelchair close behind him, should he need to sit.

BEAT: AMP rings again. Someone makes feedback go away, OFF-CAMERA.

WILHELM REICH’s dark, hooded eyes dance with wonder. His stiff, mustached upper lip begins to twitch. His spindly old hands forget to clutch the podium, and take flight like the air above Port Canaveral, Florida, on the busiest day of the week.

REICH chuckles, clears his throat, and begins to speak extemporaneously:

#

REICH

Thank you, Paul. I am humbled and quite in awe at the number of my former students I see in the audience tonight. Yes, I remember all your names. Orgonon Center, like our beloved Yard we gather near today, loves all her sons and daughters who have gone on to such illustrious success in sciences from Agriculture to Zoology and back again.

Everything is a miracle. There are all these possibilities Love, work and knowledge are the wellsprings of life. They should also govern it.

The more our current regime shrieks its orgastic anxiety all over us, at us, the thinner their death-based morality reveals itself to be. Good people, we must outlast them all.

I used to believe that full sexual consciousness required disbelief in all mysticism. Then I met the German Max Rinkel; the Swiss, Albert Hoffmann; the American Joseph Campbell at Sarah Lawrence, and the Scot, the horror author… Crowley, that old …was be deutit in Englische…nut…

AUDIENCE laughs. CAMERA pans around them for a moment. Alston-Brighton hipsters
in striped tights wearing Chip Delany and the Wailers buttons on their backpacks sit
peaceably with Irish punk-rockers from Southie and the Channel. But they are the youngest who have come to listen, and not even a plurality of the total crowd.

REICH chuckles wistfully.

REICH

Old Max. Dr. Max Rinkel from Boston Psychopathic Hospital, for you
younger folks. He used to hold “acid-tests”, if you can believe
that, right at Harvard, at Quincy House, which the Psychology
Department rented per diem during summer term, he… Oh, yes, I see
some of you have heard. There was that Philip Wylie book, The
Electric Za-Rex…

And well remembered. The banks of the Charles might have been
Babylon on the Euphrates, in the late Forties and early Fifties!
They’d brought back “Ordinary” bicycles, the ones with the big
wheel in front, as a hobby, and unicycles that year, and stilts.
All over the radio were the folk tunes of Woody Guthrie and the
new rock and roll of Bill Haley, Ike Turner and Screaming Jay
Hawkins, the blues of Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday,
and all those who lived on the outside…

We knew we’d become the mainstream, and would insure that this
time the counterculture informed the culture, and the culture
actually cleaned out its ears long enough to listen, is it not
so? We thought we knew so much. Ha! Babies, all of us.

But what old babies, as the Chinese say, we had, in their
escape from Chancellor Drexler’s death-squads in Germany… We had
Rudolf Steiner on the faculty there, and Stanislaw Graff,Eugen
Sänger and a dozen more besides!

These noble German and Prussian ex-pats (Sigmund Freud the
greatest chemical advocate of them all!) facilitated the
resurrection of lost opportunities in medicine, anthropology
and any number of other disciplines just waiting to synthesize
around the things that these plants, or the chemicals, in them
if you like, had taught our brains to do down the years.

It was a glorious time. Dean Anderson at Harvard dubbed the
experiments, “Operation Salamander”, which is how the
Smithsonian remembers them. Rinkel and our TA, Richard
Alpert, organized the first mass research studies in 1955,
on-campus.

Mysticism has merely changed form, undergone an alchemic
sublimation into something newly relevant to our day. You
see, like the way the visionary documentary director, your
young Mr. Waldrop, explains it in his … Ach, ja, you saw it?
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” …

AUDIENCE applauds wildly.

REICH

As that marvelous film tells us, the aliens landed long ago, meinen
kinder. They are plants: vines, fungi, cacti, all over the world, with
the same message to teach us. They came in peace to visit, and with
goodwill, to liberate our natural capacity for creative love, and
master the sadistic destructiveness no more necessary to human nature
than typhus was necessary to political ideology.

CAMERA PANS RIGHT, to show TENSE AUDIENCE. STUDENTS in the crowd, and many PUNK ROCKERS, wear IMPEACH MCGOVERN buttons. WE HOLD, SWING RIGHT 90°, PAN BACK:

REICH

Honest scientific pioneering remains surrounded by hostility, which obligates we scientists themore. When I founded Orgonon as a research center on a shoestring budget, my primary goal as a psychologist had changed as well.

I left our Orgone Studies in the much more capable hands of the Serbian who jokingly called himself my ‘overseer’, our distinguished, though sadly late, Dr. Nikola Tesla, so much maligned in that day.

I took old Niko out of that filthy apartment in Manhattan; ach du liebe, nearly dragged him out of that Platonic cave he only really left to go feed the birds and mutter to himself. He’d gotten a bit sad to be around in his age.

But the transformation was remarkable. I gave him students, Harvard grants to hold out his electric hands to and reel in new tragedies and triumphs…

I gave Nikola Tesla a… a second act. No one else would touch him, after that debacle where he tried to sell the Peace Beam in its first version to President Lindbergh , but…

I failed in my studies of Orgone energy (or chi, as mainstream medical science now calls it.) But I did my best. Now Niko’s brain trust, and the firebrands who followed them, have solved enough of the rest to laugh all the way to the bank and share the wealth, they…

AUDIENCE is applauding wildly again. SOMEONE BARKS SOMETHING
INDECIPHERABLE OFF-CAMERA.

REICH

What? No, no! That is a gratuitous assertion, and it is gratuitously denied. I never
invented wireless power! No! Especially you in the front, with the… hair, you shoosh! Niko sold that wireless Duesenberg he concocted at the Niagara Falls power plant, to old Clement Studebaker and his positively ancient father-in-law, Mr. Milburn. Wireless power was born in Dearborn, Michigan, at the Milburn plants.

I’m a psycho-pharmacologist, you rowdy lot. The Tesla-Milburn plants broke their backs gripping the Earth hard enough to make it quiver. My rewards lay elsewhere, though I have brought along a film clip… Paul, are we …

ANOTHER INDECIPHERABLE ANSWER, OFF-CAMERA.

REICH

Sehr güt. Anyhow, Niko understood about Orgone energy for years. He called it the “aether”, and said it was in every one of us. His astounding scientific exploitation of orgone technology for wireless electricity looks, with the benefit of time, like taking coals to Newcastle.

In his spare time (I don’t know when the old coot ever slept !) Niko perfected the Home Orgone Box, which health nuts the world over sit in like sauna and gather energy they never knew they lost before. Niko sold that design to your Food and Drug Administration for mass production to the tune of fifty-six million dollars.

You should have seen old Tom Edison take on, from his hospital bed, wrecked as he was
from years of amphetamine abuse and cut-throat living that cut his own throat in the end.

To his dying day, Edison swore wireless power and Orgone theory were hoaxes. But they
still exist, and he… well, I’m afraid… doesn’t.

AUDIENCE laughs.

REICH

Edison’s power stations were just a mess. Niko’s run clean to this very day, all around us. Those wireless stations, both on the ground and orbiting the Earth, are a shining global example. Would that the myriad of environmental and sociopolitical problems scourging the human family could be solved so easily!

But Niko answered my original question quite nicely, back in the dim dead days when

I actually spent a few weeks beside him in the laboratory trying to keep up. “Earth is alive, Wilhelm,” he informed me, “All the world is a vast, living thing, and each of us merely coliform bacteria in her intestines. We can neither hope to damn nor save her, brüder.”

I remember asking him, “So … what can we, as individuals, hope to accomplish?”

The look in Niko’s eyes burned my skin even where I sat across the room. “Evolution,” he answered quite simply. “We are its angels. The rest of them will catch up. We ride the edge, Doctor. We catch the lightning precisely where it lives.”

I asked him what I might do, in that light. I remember putting the voltmeter down on the table, and looking up. Paul, may we… may we have the video projector, please?

We were filming several experiments, that night. My gracious host here at Pickman’s, Mr. Paul Di Filippo, was kind enough to transfer them, and several more besides, to the new laser-disk format for the benefit of all of you here this evening.

CAMERA pans to BACK OF ROOM. At a MIXING BOARD on a card-table, with a LASER-DISC PLAYER bare-wired into it, the tall, bespectacled young emcee in his black tuxedo grins a gamin grin. Behind his thick glasses, wise eyes as black as his hair twinkle merrily with the moment.

PAUL

Got it right here,Willi. Comin’ up….

DISK CUTS ON, projected on the SCREEN up front. PULL IN:

INT, LABORATORY, BRIGHT DAY

GRAINY BLACK-&-WHITE FILM STOCK, STATIONARY CAMERA ON TRIPOD

OVER-THE-SHOULDER SHOT of WILHELM REICH’S back as he stands, VOLTMETER forgotten, listening to a man as old as REICH is now. DR. NIKOLA TESLA has iron-gray hair, parted down the middle, slicked back. TESLA’S long nose holds a PINCE-NEZ, and he is dressed as immaculately as the best man at a wedding. TESLA’S upper lip curls around his mustache, similarly hued. His teeth are very white, seeming to glow blue.

TESLA

There is another half to your musings, Reich, both inside and out, the ones we have
discussed and those… you have not mentioned plainly. Myself, I have always believed
that Dr. Freud is only half-right in his vision of a future wherein every mental malady can be chemically cured.

YOUNG REICH relaxes a little, STROKING HIS CHIN, and INTONES:

YOUNG REICH

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

TESLA’s eyes shine. TESLA moves away from the table, one hand on a lightning-rod cane of copper and ebony and glass.

TESLA

Point for you. Then the Apothecary says, ‘Therein the patient must minister to himself.’ But what if… What If… the Apothecary himself held the key, with different medicine, and knew how to responsibly administer it, and to whom? Ah?
The psychoactive plants that the Surrealists rant about in the newspapers, and this new thing from Germany, Rinker’s ergot extract, how is it called…

YOUNG REICH rattles off without a breath:

REICH

D-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. Rinker abbreviates it LSD.

TESLA

Just so. The students call it ‘the million-eyed monster’, but I have read of one case where there were alcoholics on both sides of the poor child’s family. He had no idea what his heredity had in store for him, but after Rinker was done with him, he…

REICH

You’re talking about Harold Hart Crane. That… that Phantasist.

TESLA

I’ve spoken with Crane. I kept this to myself, but I have often wondered… What of a more advanced case of alcohol addiction, or any other kind, than his own? Rinker ‘nipped him in the bud’, as these Americans say. What if you were to test this new alkaloid, that has so much potential to heal, on other kinds of mental illnesses?

The moment stretches long in the LAB. YOUNG REICH is clearly ill at ease, reaching for a cigarette that is nowhere to be found.

REICH

The Dean, the new Dean, that is he’d…never, ever go for it, Niko. Though he does support visionary research in the newer arms of the Psych disciplines, they are still new disciplines. Poul Anderson doesn’t lightly sign off for pies in the sky.

TESLA smirks back broadly. The black coals of his birdlike eyes glow. As TESLA speaks, he paces, wing-tip heels clicking on the TILE FLOOR.

TESLA

O ye of little faith. Think a little on the matter, Willi. Alcoholics. Schizophrenics. Soldiers with shell-shock. Things like this. Put such people in a controlled environment, and guide them on a walk through their own minds.Teach them to slay their own dragons with love. Teachthem to rewire their heads…

ON SCREEN, FILM CUTS OFF. CAMERA pans back down to REICH, who is LOOKING INTENTLY at his NOTES. REICH looks back up sharply.

REICH

Paul, may we have the next one? This… this bit of film came from one
year later, at my own flat. Watch the younger man. He was… he was the
first patient I could think of besides Crane, the first one I thought
Rinker’s miracle could help. The other fellow, the tall one with the
interesting jacket, is Maurits Escher, you see where he brought his
little friend, the---

AUDIENCE is ripping up the benches. REICH cannot hide his grin.

REICH

Indeed. M.C. Escher, the first and true Lizard King. And with him, our most
successful case, by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose masters
and mistresses have archived this reel. I… ahem, I say ‘most successful’ advisedly,
dear friends. We cured him to a point, but what we let out with that five hundred
microgrammes of Sandoz Blue Sun acid, well… Have a look.

CAMERAMAN is audibly weeping. CAMERAMAN’s voice is low, ringing, full of wonder and a faint polyglot New York accent.

CAMERAMAN

I… Oh, I read about this… Oh, Wilhelm, I can’t believe the Met sat on this, it… Oh, great, great, great, here we go…

CAMERA SWINGS UP, PANS IN ON VIDEO PROJECTION SCREEN. CUT TO:

ON SCREEN.

INT, FRONT HALL OF BIG, BAUHAUS-FURNISHED FLAT,
UNSPECIFIED TIME.

FILM STOCK is BLACK AND WHITE, GRAINY, HAZY.

SOFT MUSIC plays in the background, COUNT BASIE’S “YOU CAN DEPEND ON ME”

In FRONT HALL, M.C. ESCHER paces behind SOMEONE ELSE. ESCHER glances at FRONT DOOR, which bears IMPOSING SERIES OF LOCKS, CHAINS, DEADBOLTS.

SOMEONE ELSE kneels slightly out of frame. We see a BALDING HEAD, OVERALLS, the figure kneeling in a horror of NEWSPAPER and LIQUID ALUMINUM ROOF-COATING and a thousand other unidentifiable forms of mess that the VISQUEEN PLASTIC visible under the newsprint might or might not even repel.

ESCHER is tall and cadaverous, with an improbable mustache and small round spectacles, tinted as silver as the roof-coating that spatters the newspapers around his gaiters. A tiny CHAMELEON crawls across the dry graphite jigsaw of his immaculate gray suit jacket.

BEAT: A drop of PAINT flies by the wide-open iris of the CAMERA, slow and lazy as an opal chip floating in glycerine. The CHAMELEON dodges it; DROPLET lands neatly in the JIGSAW PATTERN on ESCHER’S JACKET.

CAMERA SWINGS RIGHT, showing both men. ESCHER is critiquing the work he sees unfolding on the wall. OTHER MAN is a big, lanky farm boy with a tonsure of fine, graying dishwater-blond hair. He wears PAINT-SPATTERED OVERALLS, and is surrounded by a veritable bucket-drummer’s wheel of COFFEE CANS, BRUSHES, PALLETTE-KNIVES, POTS, TUBES and at least THREE VISIBLE PALETTES.

CAMERA swings back further on VIDEOPROJECTION. CAMERAMAN filming VIDEO PROJECTION GASPS OUT LOUD.

MURAL on REICH’s front wall defies description. MURAL bears some of ESCHER’s mathematical, elliptical technique, but with different magic than the then-young Dutchman brought to the canvas; a kind of fire and fury that makes the optical illusion Lovecraftian, intense... and familiar.

BEAT: WE PULL BACK. MURAL depicts a MILLION-EYED SPIDER at CENTER OF UNIVERSE, GIVING BIRTH TO ITSELF.

CAMERA focuses on PROCESS again, rather than PRODUCT; 2-shot of ESCHER and ARTIST#2 KNEELING AT HIS WORK IN THE HALL. ARTIST#2 has a hard, florid face, with frown lines and sad eyes. He has thrown himself gaspingly into the painting, like an eight-armed Gene Krupa drumming the wall. ARTIST #2’s pupils look as wide as stove lids, as wide as ESCHER’S. ARTIST #2 rages as he works.

ARTIST #2

The time of giving the vision is past, Escher! They won’t see it any more!
This is Kali’s time, time to smash and grab, smash and build, again, again,
take back the planet from the fucking alien warlords and make a society
that can even appreciate visions in the first damn place!! Ten thousand
years of social conditioning we gotta rebuild from the ground up? We
might as well become voluntarily extinct!

ESCHER strokes his mustache, cool as the deepest deep-freeze in the middle of July.

ESCHER

My dear boy, who owns the giant shadow looming behind your bombast? The world has ever been a live thing, Jack, with no arbiter to what it dreams, no rhyme, no
reason, no classification Class Insecta Class Dismissed. Where were you when they sent round the memorandum?

On ESCHER’s shoulder, the CHAMELEON bugs out its eyes at the ARTIST, appearing to scowl. ARTIST #2 does a double-take, but his attention is quickly drawn back to the wall. He frowns, reaching for a big sable brush and a tube of Gleem toothpaste. ESCHER kneels beside him, scootching CHAMELEON into his hand, takes off his JACKET and tosses it past the NEWSPAPERS and VISQUEEN.

ESCHER

May I play too?

#

CAMERA pulls back. CLIP ENDS. AUDIENCE stomps and claps and hoots.

REICH

I believe that, were it not for psychotropics, the great Jackson Pollock,
whose first ‘trip’ you just witnessed in part, would have drowned in the drink.
Jackson Pollock was by no means the only high-profile alcoholic, or the only Jack,
who agreed to the tests. A young French-Canadian writer from Lowell, Massachusetts
came to our clinical trials because he was hitch-hiking and needed some extra income.

After ensuring the young man had something to eat and laid off the booze for a day or
three, Jean-Louis Kerouac ingested 500 micrograms of LSD in a back room at Quincy
with a typewriter and a bottle of gin,

REICH’s Kerouac impersonation is scarily good. PAUL laughs into his open mic, then
realizes it is open and pushes it away audibly OFF-CAMERA. REICH frowns,
continuing,

REICH

‘In case more things than the eye of Man seen to behold, ovauti,’ he mumbles at me
when asked, ‘But not till morn, shall my reward mechanism do its level best not to
screw up your experiment, Docs, for you have paid me good.’

Kerouac became quite paranoid as the night wore on, which manifested by delusions
of grandiosity and persecution and ideas of reference. He demanded more gin after
several hours. This was not brought, but two tall cans of beer were procured from the faculty lounge.

You see, he… he never stopped typing. He was like a rat. Like a rat in a cage,
chewing and chewing and chewing. The acid changed him. It … changed his
schizophrenia, when he had to confront it.

That was the night Kerouac began writing what I knew as ‘Scientifiction’ in my day.
That was the night he finished Dr. Sax at one go, just as Robert Louis Stevenson did with the psychic amplifier of his day, cocaine.

But even coca, in its natural form, is not the same as that Aztec revenge on our
bloody swords known as cocaine. Man-made poisons produced Hyde, where God-given plants produced Sax.

Kerouac was a changed man, and became a Buddhist from that day forth. He wrote to
me until the end of his life up north, in Montreal. His children even thanked me. Ain’t that, as they used to say, a kick in the head!

However, he was also as schizophrenic as one of our later subjects, the Californian Phil Dick…

AUDIENCE applauds again.

REICH

Hmmp. I never was much for mainstream fiction, but he was nice enough. Any way round, Dean Anderson discouraged the treatment of any severe psychosis with the new drugs. On the record…

I wanted to see what John and Jane Q. Public did behind the new psychoto-
mimetics, in any case. So we culled most of our new subjects from the so-called ‘Big Ten’ Ivy League schools.

In those days, thirty dollars to be part of a research study bought a whole lot of
bologna sandwiches for a hungry college student. We recruited writers , working
artists, poets who could write big bold verse about knowing one was nothing and
everything on the cosmic mirror…

Our survey for entrants crossed all demographics, and looked something like Dr.
Kinsey’s ubiquitous No Postage Necessary survey-cards from the previous decade…

REICH closes his eyes studiously, intoning,

REICH

How did you come to participate? What do you do for a living?

What is the nature of any information you were presented with

about psychotropic drugs before you arrived?

SOME of the OLDER LOCALS in the crowd are bobbing their heads back and forth, reciting along in sour amusement.

REICH (continuing)

Do you want to know yourself better?

Do you want to learn about yourself?

Do you have an emergency contact?

Will you sign a release? Oh, and my

very favorites… Do you walk in

your sleep? Did you wet the bed as

child? Have you ever been hypno-

tized?

REICH snorts. OLDER LOCALS laugh in remembered exasperation, still waiting on the ghost of that thirty bucks.

REICH

Oh, the first days were the hardest days. Initially, the experiments were
like herding cats. We got no unity, no synthesis. Everyone was in their own
room, licking their own wall…I suppose that’s why there aren’t more jailbreaks at sanitariums.

AUDIENCE chuckles.

REICH

I learned very early that niacin will block the uptake of LSD in the brain,two thousand milligrammes per. I recall… you will no doubt find this amusing…One test subject raced up to me on the ward one evening when I was having a late breakfast at the Nurse’s Desk. ‘It’s the End of the World!’ she screams, ‘It’s the End of the WORLD!!!’

MOST AUDIENCE MEMBERS share knowing looks with each other.

REICH

‘Here,’ I told her, giving up my untouched cereal. ‘ Eat a bowl of Total.’

AUDIENCE chuckles.

REICH

Research has to be conducted safely, you see, but even interrupted lines of inquiry can generate important contributions to knowledge. I remember those two graduate students, Leary, and Zimbardo, who once stole an eyedropper each of Rinkel’s private stock for personal use. After injecting himself with a massive dose of a synthetic pre-mescaline derivative, young Zimbardo allegedly dove through a closed and shaded dormitory window in the middle of the night.

Their dorm proctor called the Boston Police, who arrived to find Leary sitting in the dorm he shared with Zimbardo, clearly intoxicated on an unknown substance. Leary only identified himself to the two patrolmen who arrived on scene as a graduate chemist. ‘I told him,’ the police quoted Leary’s reaction. ‘I told him. Did he listen? No.”

‘Told him what? What’d he take?’ one of the policemen asked. Leary’s reply was that
Zimbardo had overdosed on anti-depressants. ‘Yeah, right,’ the policeman reportedly
said. ‘Sir, can you put your wrists behind your back for me?’

Leary went on, of course, to his illustrious career as a performance poet.
Here REICH snorts derisively again.) Zimbardo was later apprehended on
some odd little side street in Southie, on a charge of Public Intoxication,

REICH peers at another page of his notes.

REICH

‘Naked and acting in a threatening or aggressive manner, possible public
drunkenness or unknown intoxicant,’ read the report of the bored parking-
attendant on his electric trike, ‘Suspect initially eluded capture, as his skin
was too sweaty to seize in regulation department cycling gloves. Used
Tubthumper pulse-tube device to subdue suspect in absence of alternate
means of non-lethal force. Suspect took three pulses, a medical anomaly, then became
immediately compliant and was booked for blood test.’

It never really made the papers. It was too soon. No one understood what had happened
to them. That came later.

It wasn’t just about the mescaline, or the 2CI, or any derivative drug that came after it.It wasn’t what we were looking for that made history, but all the discoveries that were found along the path.

Doors were opening that Man had been afraid to go through. We scaled back
research almost immediately, and made sure psychedelics were only legally
available to those who had no record of mental illness or violent behavior. To this
day, psychotropics remain Schedule 2 if anyone with such a medical history is
caught acting out under their influence, or found to have them in their possession.

The country’s first Drug Czar, former FDA head Linus Pauling, worked very closely with us in those days, and at least those laws haven’t changed much…

BEAT: REICH pauses, looking out over the audience for a good while, thinking of what he wants to say next.

REICH

We came not to destroy the old understanding of evolution, but to fulfill it, and show why the human brain doubled in size in the past three million years. If we broadened and altered our understanding of the ways in which former cultures employed psychotropics in their own arts, sciences and religions, I wrote then, it would change our current understanding of our present situation.

I knew, even then, that Nature has a lot to teach, when we’re not busy paving it over.The road past the sick geopolitical mess we’re in now is not far away at all.

In any case, many of you have lived through two world wars. Even our own research
was put four years behind when the Nazis captured Max Rinkel and attempted to use
LSD for mind control in their Project Pegasus. Max wouldn’t talk about those years
when he was alive, but I honor him now.

Max Rinkel escaped Buchenwald in 1945, you see, the night the prisoners liberated
the camp. Dr. Rinkel also escaped the American refugee camp, eventually, having no
wish to be psychoanalyzed by Americans, or worse, his own students!

Rinkel knew that ergotamide, Louis Pasteur’s forgotten discovery (shoved under
the rug of last century with ether frolics and absinthe,) was a direct link to the
psychotropic vines and fungi of other stages of evolution. The anti-depressants, the
triptylines and the inhibitors and the garbage, all the barely-patented nonsense,
they… they work for some people.

The problem is, every so often there is a ‘ringer’. Same with LSD, but in both
cases the true nature of the problems being treated is not congruent with the drug
being administered. Change the prescription to promote life, by whatever means, promote and perpetuate, and this ethos justifies ends and means.

Not all of them, though. I will not dignify the American Office Of Strategic
Services’ now-debunked Project MKULTRA, going on undercover and sometimes crossing over with my own early experiments. I may have even been in their employ a few times, who knows? All results were kept strictly confidential. We were paid in cash. Sometimes there were soldiers on campus.Sometimes they were armed.

Those were dangerous days, good people. Even now, you cannot imagine. The OSS
were scared to death that humankind might find the great mystery of their own
emergence, and sought to subvert it down to their grubby, blood-smeared level…

With Alice Sheldon heading the new Central Intelligence Agency, though, I feel
somewhat relieved. The old boys who came before her in the OSS were, to say the least,much less diplomatic. I can discuss these things with her, now. We are done in court.

Why not? Bigger fishes for us all to fry, of late.

Alice herself raves of the curative powers of the drug in a therapeutic setting. Everyone is on, it seems, the same page. How could I even begin to describe the relief, the joy of the times between, the chance at the second act of mine, then….

Those early years I talk about in my book triggered what has amounted a thirtty-one-
year study in human consciousness, Extra-Long Range. All of it came from creative
doors being opened to extensions of our minds, open access to worlds that are different,wider, out of place, twisting the senses so acutely, breaking with all known quantities, able to see…

The experiment outgrew Orgonon, New England, and even Earth.

It was hard. There is much in my book about how hard. In the first years, I turned
away Federal funding, so J.Edgar Hoover blackballed me as a Communist Jew. I exposed him in turn as a great big bottom-fish transvestite in The National Enquirer and that even more awfulHush-Hush. (I hear Howard Hughes was so glad to be off the front pages of both he nearly laughed until he choked!)

This is the even-handed dealing of the world. Oscar Janiger, our fair-haired boy in Research and Development, knows a lot of powerful people. It got me more funding from the far left. All the better.

It got Tesla funding, too, (in the last years of his research, may God rest his electric soul) from the military, to make those Cloudbusters, the things he called the Peace Beams. None of you remember what trouble we had with the power supplies, before. Oy. Even orgone has to come from somewhere.

None of you remember what this world was like, before. They make the orgone blankets in Beijing for a dime a dozen, a dollar a day. The first time Niko shot off that Cloudbuster cannon, oh, how fast the Osirians swooped down on Washington, D.C to start playing Twenty Questions with Our Leader!

Like children, they were, like tripping children, and all of us tripping the same light fantastic down here on Earth, designing new variants every day in the lab to penetrate the cosmic One and come back whole, without the knocks and pings of the chemical prototypes…

Our new friends tumbled down, down, down… not for us, at first. They just came to Earth sometimes, before, to visit their ancestors. The Peace Beam was a sweet surprise.

Any race capable of producing particle weapons, in their view, was capable of…

Well, I suppose I’m too late to say this, but I need not preach to the choir.

As every schoolchild knows, Osirians are vast bodies of spores. Fungal spores, with multi-differential protoplasmic capabilities we still don’t quite fathom. The length of time they spend in space determines the form of their vessel. And when they landed…

Oh, this is all still so funny to me. How many repentant Beatniks surrendered themselves into the Linkletter Clinics when they found out just what was in those Mexican mushrooms was, in fact, sentient? How many of these bitter old drunken clerks roared for a different sort of purge than the Ayahuasca they took in the Yucatán on their spring holidays?

Look around you, people. We are the aliens. Our friends from Osiris, though the dialogue swells and grows these thirty years hence, are but a reminder that we must make contact with ourselves, in inner space, before we rise to the challenge of sub-c travel which the Navy Space Command is nearly ready to roll out upon us all.

Let the doors of perception swing wide. Mars is ours, ladies and gentlemen, but the outer planets and the New Earths still wait. It was the plants, then and now, who show us the way.

We are here to go.

#

CUE THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE, so loud that PAUL eventually has to go outside and soothe the ruffled feathers of BOSTON P.D.

The responding OFFICER tells his partner to go on ahead, and sneaks inside the door.

OFFICER

Hey, Doc, can I… can I have your autograph?

CUE STANDING OVATION.

#

[END]

#

This story is dedicated to its cast.

Worry-Man

2009-07-14T09:44:00.001-07:00

Years ago, my dear one Serena gave me this little clay green-man on a rawhide strap. She told me it was a worry-man, and took away worries. I'd know he was done with me, she went on, when the strap broke.

Cue ahead hundreds, slowly becoming thousands, of days. Up, down, healed, sick, richer, poorer, hating life or shouting to the rooftops How Great We Art. Cue forgetting everything I ever knew and remembering I ever forgot before that.

This morning I found the worry-man had come off when I started doing wash. Like a patch of psoriasis, sometimes every kind of worry (even one calcified into a habit) can just clear up of its own accord, and be gone.

And suddenly, it didn't even matter that the neighbor girl was revving her Kawasaki outside my window at nine AM, or that the trash needed hauled out, or anything. Suddenly, that little clay bearded guy in my hand meant everything. Not for What it was... but for Where it was now.

Ah?

Last Night's Dream

2009-07-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

I went back into a town that doesn't exist any more, my town, my Hollidaysburg. To start with, anyway. In the Dream, my memory-city connects to others of its kind.

At the bottom of the long hill that used to be the backyard of 507 Pine St., I'd hidden a plastic pop bottle in the shed wall, at the spot where I used to sit when Dad and I were smashing down Fletcher's old shed. We shared a few beers there, Dad and I, but the contents of the bottle were some wondrous pineapple concoction that Donnie Pierce and I were swilling one night. He compared me to one of my heroes that night, without being prompted.

There were no heroes in that yard. My little brother, also a Donald, and some of his douchebag friends were getting a party together on the back deck, very subdued and talking in low tones.

After retrieving the bottle from where I'd left it all those years ago, I pocketed it and was cleaning up the space where I'd left it, hosing down the concrete and watering the dwarf apple and pear tree that Dad didn't have the patience to maintain and so ripped out, much as I know he wished he could with other things.

At that point, a former neighbor of mine (think Gabby Hayes if GH liked to read SF and shoot cocaine in his arm) was milling around between me and Donald's boys, playing the sidekick who comes round to tell everyone it's time to get up and go.

So I did. The dream changed.

The Exorcists were approaching that tallest, tallest tower of filth in my Dream-city, the one that used to be a hotel. I can remember when the elevator went all the way to the top floor, but last I saw the place it was just a crumbling squatter-plex with half-functional plumbing.

The Exorcists wore black. One was an Old Celtic warlock. One was an atheist. One was Catholic. One professed no religion at all. The weapons they wielded claimed no creed, terrible in their shiny incomprehensibility.

The crowd parted for them as though they were S.H.I.E.L.D. I was following them, dancing through the shadows in my old black hooded cloak like always. It was my dream. I wanted to stay half-visible, and watch all this.

But I walked in the crowd for a time, merely to pop up behind two boys who were in thrall at the sight of the four men in black breaching that sick old building. "I worked with those guys for three years," I told the boys. "They'll get it done."
In response, the eldest asked me for my autograph. I disappeared and kept following, so he wouldn't see me cry.

And in so remaining, invisible, the whole way up the back staircase to get a good vantage point (as one of the Exorcists had once instructed me, awake) ... I opened the door on the entire up-spiralling white toxic fog that was the spirit they were trying to banish.

It gathered in the stairwell atrium, pulsing like a tumor. I breathed some of it in... and then blew the whole thing up and out, through the roof. With my lungs and lips, just that. That was all. The last thing I heard was .5 seconds of the crowd outside cheering wildly.

Front Street Reviews "O Fortuna"

2009-07-05T08:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.frontstreetreviews.com/O%20Fortuna.html

Edward Morris

Reviewed By Ann Marie Chalmers

[Robyn Goodfellow, the former Larry Creswell, has just deposed the Goblin Queen of Faerie and freed his people from bondage. But he’s unable to face his true parentage or own up to the responsibilities of being a liberator. Robyn returns to Earth to Portland, Oregon, and begins living bohemian and trying to pass for human.

His first mistake is that Robyn’s rebound girlfriend is an Angel. Actually she is Lucifer’s big sister Alisander, first among the Heavenly Host. History knows her as Fortune, or more recently, Lady Luck. And she’s wanted in Arkadia, for all the right reasons… and some of the wrong ones.

This is the 2nd book in the The Arkadia and it is the sequel to Blood of Eden. In this book the reader can follow Robyn back for an even more savage return to Arkadia, in which the question of his own true origins is revealed after a front-lines tour of duty in the war between Heaven and Hell.]

So...you can reparse the original jacket copy I wrote and pass it off as your own work. Well done.

[This modern day fairy tale come futuristic paranormal]

What does this mean? 'Cum-' as in the Latin? Should read "modern cum-futuristic paranormal.' Dock five points for misuse of Latin.

[will look extremely tasty to some readers. However the book itself is a confusing read of babble that is hard to follow. ]

"While you judge the book, the book is also judging you." ---Stephen King

At least I can scrape together enough character to put my contact information on my website.

[The first book in the series was good and made the future books in the trilogy sound interesting but this series is turning out to be weird and not at all wonderful.]

There will be no third book in the trilogy, because you and the rest of the Samhain herd just want bodice-ripper porn so they quit running SF and fantasy. Why don't you go back to reviewing bodice-ripper porn and save the SF and fantasy for reviewers who can construct a sentence?

[Erratic and uninteresting this is not a piece of work that many will enjoy. ]

Germanic sentence structure, missing comma. Dock ten points.

[There are readers that will definitely like this style and story but it is not for the weak at heart or people who want to read a nice novel to relax. ]

"I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial predjudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible act of recreating the world in a new way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyeballs water."--- Harlan Ellison

[This author obviously has a new writing technique that is unique and a required taste that will either taste lovely or have you throwing it away after a few bites.]

The feeling is so very, very much mutual.

A required taste? I think you mean an 'acquired taste'. Dock fifty points for not checking your work. Hope those Website Design classes work out a little better for you than English class did, although it doesn't look too hopeful.

Edward Morris
(503)875-6326