Creepy Cryptids

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J. W. Ocker and I have a few things in common.  We’re both Edgar Allan Poe fans.  We both have an interest in the odd.  And we like to visit places where something strange is commemorated.  It gives me hope that there are likely more such people out there.  I read Ocker’s Poe-Land a few months back and knew I’d be coming back for more.  The United States of Cryptids caught my eye.  This book is for fun, but with a serious subtext—our world is a weird place.  Dividing the country into four regions: Northeast, South, Midwest, and West, Ocker traveled across the country looking for stories, or better yet, memorial statues and/or plaques, of cryptids.  Defined broadly.  These cryptids can be sightings of something unusual, folklore, or, in some cases, confessed hoaxes.  He makes the point repeatedly that cryptids make for great tourism opportunities.  There are people like me that will seek out such places, given half the opportunity.

Quirk Books, which has been unfortunately experiencing some difficulties of late, functions as a sort of home to oddities.  And cryptids fall into that category.  Ocker does point out, on a serious note, that any animal reported to have been encountered prior to scientific description was a cryptid.  Perhaps the most famous case is the gorilla, which many non-Africans believed to be mythic until one was actually found.  Or the coelacanth.  In any case, discussing cryptozoology is a dicey thing to do.  If you take it too seriously you’ll be ousted from polite society and if you handle it with too much humor, true believers will shun you.  Ocker manages to find the middle ground here with a book that is fun to read and yet gives you ideas of places to visit or concepts to explore.

Reading Ocker’s books makes me think that maybe I take things a bit too seriously from time to time.  That’s one reason that it’s important for me to read authors like him.  I’m plagued with a need to know.  Not everybody is, of course.  I do tend to take things with an amount of earnestness that others sometimes find too intense.  It’s probably my childhood that’s to blame.  That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a lighthearted treatment of unknown animals.  And I do try to keep a somewhat open, if critical mind.  There’s a line, sometimes fine, between having fun with and making fun of.  Ocker enjoys the odd enough to know which side of that line to walk.  Or drive.  Now, where did I leave my car keys?

Googling Books

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I admit to Googling my own books from time to time.  (I know, I know!  You’ll go blind if you don’t stop doing that!)  Since I haven’t yet seen any royalties (or reviews) yet for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I searched for it.  Google now has a page topper, generated by AI, I suspect, that goes across specific searches such as for a person who’s got some internet presence, or a book.  Not all books get such a banner, however; yes, I’ve looked.  My Sleepy Hollow book, however, pulled up a page topper.  It was still a work in progress, however.  By the way, I did this search with results not personalized; Google knows people like to see themselves topping a page.  So here’s what I saw:

Okay, so they got a number of things right.  This is the correct book and the description seems correct.  The publication date is right and I did indeed write Weathering the Psalms (still my best selling book).  But what’s going on with Wal-Mart?  They have the title correct but that picture?  Although I watch a lot of movies, I’m pretty sure this one has nothing to do with Sleepy Hollow.  What I tried to do in that book was find every extant movie on the story and watch them.  It is possible I missed some (the internet isn’t built to give that kind of comprehensive information, which is why human authors are still necessary).  Besides, AI has hallucinations, and this seems to be one of them right here.  It couldn’t find a copy of the cover of my book (which appears on the left-hand side, but apparently the right…) so it filled something else in instead.

None of my other books get their own banner/topper on Google, except A Reassessment of Asherah.  That isn’t my best selling book, but it is my most consulted.  That banner, however, also has mistaken information.  It says it was originally published in 2007.  The original date as actually 1993.  Web-scraping may not help with that.  The book, as originally published, didn’t have an ebook, and the information about it largely comes from the second edition, published by Gorgias Press.  But then, only humans are concerned with such things.  There are no sultry women staring out of one of the topper windows, so the images appear to be correct.  That’s one of the funny things about being a human author—you want the information about your books to be right.  Of course, I should probably cut down on the Googling of my own books.  It’s unseemly.

Demon Pop

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To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of KPop Demon Hunters.  The places I look for media advice generally don’t cover such fare.  I’m not into K-pop, Manga, or boy/girl bands.  Most of my media tends a bit towards the weightier side.  Now that I’ve sufficiently justified myself, my wife asked if I’d like to see it, pointing out that there were demons in it.  The concept seemed intriguing; Huntrix, a girl-band K-pop trio, hunt demons while building a protective barrier with their songs.  Then Gwi-Ma, the king of the demons agrees to a plan for a demonic boy band, the Saja Boys, to draw attention away from Huntrix, lessening their power and the protective shield they’ve built.  When demons get through they feast on the souls of humans.  Huntrix is hampered by the fact that Rumi, one of the singers, had a demon for a father and her bandmates, Mira and Zoey, do not know this.  When they find out, internal strife leads them to losing the battle of the bands.  Until they accept Rumi for who she is.

The story is well told, even for those of us who wouldn’t normally willingly listen to K-pop.  I appreciate stories of female empowerment.  And there are, after all, demons.  The concept of demons in eastern Asia is quite different from how they’re conceived in Abrahamic religions.  Gwi-Ma is not “the Devil,” although he shares some of those characteristics in this movie.  The demons are portrayed in monstrous form, and they are very numerous.  Since this is an animated film for audiences that include younger ages, they don’t reach horror-movie levels.  All in all, this wasn’t a bad diversion for an evening’s winding down.  It did make me think about the way demons differ not only across time, but across cultures.

As I discuss in Nightmares with the Bible, the concept of demons evolved over time in the western world.  Not all demons were bad in Greek thought, but monotheism made them evil.  Meanwhile further east in Asia, the concept—which may have developed independently—was more ambivalent.  Many years ago, while visiting my brother-in-law on the west coast, we watched an Anime movie about demons, but I’ve unfortunately forgotten the title.  Since this was about two decades ago, hope of recovering that data is minimal.  Still, I remember being affected by seeing it.  Of course, it wasn’t a musical.  Boy bands and girl bands seem not to have enough world-weariness to sing songs that resonate with me.  I guess I have my own demons with which to struggle.

The Black Monk

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Back at Nashotah House the local ghost was called “the Black Monk.”  A plausible origin story circulated with the name; a student broke through the ice on the lake one winter night and met his demise.  Some even claimed to know which was his gravestone in the cemetery on campus.  I really didn’t give much thought to any of this until I learned that Anton Chekhov wrote a short story titled “The Black Monk.”  Now, I don’t know if some literate Nashotah student was referencing Chekhov or if the color was just fitting for a cassocked community of quasi-monks.  In either case, I decided to read the story.  The Russian tale involves a man named Kovrin.  He holds a Master of Arts degree, in the way that degrees in Russian stories bring the holder a great deal of respect.  He was raised by a wealthy farmer who owns extensive orchards, and, needing some time to relax from his city schedule, goes to stay with his former guardian and his daughter.  While there he relates the tale of the Black Monk, who was seen all around the world, and maybe even in space, from where he walked in Arabia or Syria, a thousand years ago.  It was rumored that he would return a millennium later, and, as it turns out, Kovrin sees him.

G.K. Savitsky’s illustration “The Black Monk,” public domain via Wikimedia

Kovrin is a successful, bright, and cheerful scholar.  He begins to see the phantom and have conversations with him.  The monk assures him that he (Kovrin) is extraordinary, a genius even.  That other people, satisfied with mediocrity, melt into the herd.  True genius, however, is often perceived by others as madness.  They have long conversations.  Kovrin marries the farmer’s daughter but their relationship is troubled.  One night she awakes to find him speaking to an empty chair—nobody else sees the Black Monk.  Convinced that he is mentally ill, she and her father put him in a doctor’s care and his new regime of lifestyle changes prevents further visits of the Monk.  Kovrin, however, grows sullen and dull.  He realizes that his genius is gone and that he has become ordinary.  His marriage falls apart and when he goes on a vacation to the Crimea, he once again sees the Black Monk.  His feelings of being extraordinary begin to return, but he dies that night.  His corpse wears a smile.

This tale had me thinking.  It’s not clear that Kovrin was really mad but no doubt he’d been quite intelligent.  He was given a university chair and received the praise of others.  It was the cure that destroyed him.  It robbed him of his enjoyment of life and also led to the downfall of the farm since his father-in-law died and his daughter, now separated from Kovrin, writes to curse him for his insanity.  The farmer and his daughter aren’t always sympathetic characters, but until his dying day (literally) Kovrin had lost all that made his life meaningful.  The Black Monk admits he’s an apparition, but Kovrin was clearly brilliant while he met and conversed with him.  I’m not sure of any parallels with Nashotah House, but it has a character in common with Chekhov’s story.

Finding October

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This post is both about and not about a movie.  On a recent weekend I tried to watch The Houses October Built.  I found it on a free streaming service (with commercials) and settled in.  I’ve been looking for good movies to watch in October for many years, and this one seemed to have promise.  Then a couple of things happened.  But first, the idea: a group of friends want to find the most extreme haunted house attraction in the country.  Fine and good.  Their banter is appropriate, and engaging.  But thing one: the backdrop is again in part of the country where the leaves don’t change dramatically.  Like Halloween, it has the Southern California feel.  Not the truly spooky mid-Atlantic, upper Midwest, or New England autumn.  This is, for me, an integral part of the Halloween, or October experience.  It’s one of the reasons I could never move to the south.

Thing two: as a found footage movie, the camera motion made me physically sick.  Now, I don’t want to give up on “found footage” films.  I really liked The Blair Witch Project.  Perhaps because one of the missing campers was a film student, the camera motion wasn’t extreme.  I do remember newspaper reviews when it came out saying that some people left the theater ill because of it.  Since then, however, found footage has become a standard horror trope.  Some of it is quite good.  The Houses October Built joins VHS Viral, Amish Witches, and even Avatar 3D,  as films I could not finish watching because of too much camera motion.  Other movies have come close.  I’m sure the condition I have has a name.  Since it mostly affects me these days when watching movies, I see no reason to go under the knife to fix it.  But the fact is, the nausea after it sets in lasts for more than a day.  The insidious part is that I notice I’ve entered that realm suddenly, usually because a movie, like The Houses October Built, are engrossing.

If enough people read this blog I’d call this a plea to movie makers—the camera does not have to move constantly to make your film scary.  You are, in fact, limiting your viewership by at least one fan by making it utterly unwatchable.  No movie is worth being physically ill into the next day.  I have a friend whose favorite type of horror movie is found footage.  I often can’t discuss this with him because I’m often afraid to watch them.  And really, does anybody else appreciate that the trees are part of what makes the fall spooky?

Lap Dog

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Recently my laptop had to be in the shop a couple of days when a component went bad.  This became a period of discovery for me.  My laptop is my constant companion.  I’m not a big phone user and I have no other devices.  Suddenly I had to live without something I’d come to rely upon.  It was, in a way, a grieving process.  I’ve grown accustomed to being able to check in on the internet when a thought occurs to me.  Flip open the laptop and look.  Or, if I want to watch a movie, streaming it.  Even if it’s a matter of my wife and I wanting to see a “television” series for an evening’s entertainment after work, it has to be done through my laptop.  (No other devices will connect to our television, which is, unfortunately, beginning to show signs of requiring replacement.)  Just ten years ago this wouldn’t have been such an issue.

Getting the time to take the laptop in required advance planning.  This blog, for instance, is dependent on my laptop.  I can’t tap things out with my thumbs on my phone—I don’t text—and my phone isn’t that new either.  I had to pre-load several blog posts before the laptop went away and figure out how to launch (or “drop,” as the terminology goes) them from my phone.  I’m not sure of my neurological diagnosis, but I am a creature of strong habit.  That’s how I get books written while working a 9-2-5 job.  I’m used to waking up, firing up the laptop, and writing for the first hour or so of each day.  I had to figure some other way to do this, without wearing my thumbs down to nubs.  This blog is a daily obsession.

And then there was the emotional part.  The day I dropped the laptop off—it had to be a weekend because, well, work—I was despondent both before and afterward.  Listless, I couldn’t start a new project or even continue work on any because I’d already backed up my hard drive and would risk losing any changes made.  (I don’t trust the cloud.)  Then I thought, how did I ever survive in the before time?  I only became a laptop junkie this millennium, and the majority of my life was in the last one.  I recognize the warning signs of addiction.  During this period I decided to unplug as much as possible and read more print books.  Perhaps that’s the most sane thing I’ve done in quite a long time.

Tapped Out

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I grew up with rock-n-roll.  Those born in the previous decade to mine can say the same thing, but collectively we are the earliest now adults who never knew life without it.  Extrapolating from that, the longest surviving early rockers are also aging and many of them are still playing.  In a nutshell this was the inspiration for Spinal Tap II, a mockumentary where Tap is legally obligated to perform one more concert.  The band members have been estranged for years, each having taken up a different career.  As with This Is Spinal Tap, their final concert is being documented by an interested director.  The band tries to negotiate all the changes that have taken place since the eighties which, God help me, were forty years ago.  The premise is both funny and sad.  Tensions still exist between Nigel and David, with Derek being the glue that holds them together.

The movie is entertaining and well done but does lack the energy of the 1984 film.  It made me reflective since the nature of fame is no protection against having to work into old age to survive.  Rock stars, like athletes, tend to peak at a young age.  With the improvements in health care and lifestyle, they can live many years beyond the height of their influence and it’s not unusual, if the money wasn’t managed well, for work to continue.  That fact hangs like a pall over the humor.  I still listen to the bands and performers from my youth who’ve continued to rock into their seventies, or in the case of the movie, Paul McCartney in his eighties, and ponder the passage of time and what it means.  As someone aging myself, I know what it’s like to think like a young person but awake with a body shy on the spryness factor.

Although critics mostly liked Spinal Tap II it did poorly at the box office.  I suspect many people my age feel this dilemma keenly.  Those of us who are seniors sometimes aren’t willing to let go and let others eclipse us.  We see this in the world of politics all the time.  Capitalism sets us up so that generally those who are old control the resources, and, rewarding greed, this system doesn’t encourage letting go.  Power, I imagine, creates quite a rush.  Being on stage with thousands of people adoring you must be something almost impossible to let go.  I also listen to some younger artists.  Rock is uniquely fitting for the young.  To me it seems that all is right as long as the music continues and inspired people, often young, continue to make it.

Life’s Work

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Here’s the thing: religion (or philosophy) is my life’s work.  By that I mean that I can’t just casually encounter an important idea that impacts larger life and just let it go without wrestling with it first.  As a professor that was expected.  As a paid seeker of the truth, you dare not ignore new information.  When I found myself unemployed with a doctorate in religious studies, the only jobs I could find were in publishing.  Now, publishing is a business.  And since I was a religion editor (still am), that meant that I had (have) to encounter new and potentially life-changing ideas and simply let them lie.  I assess whether they might make a good book, but I’m not supposed to ponder them deeply and incorporate them into my outlook on life.  Problem is, I can’t not do that.  It’s an occupational hazard.

Some presses, I understand, won’t hire an editor with a doctorate in the area s/he covers.  I think I can see why.  It’s maybe a little too easy to get overly engaged.  I work with other editors with doctorates in their areas.  I don’t know if they have the same troubles I do or not.  The fact is, other than religion/philosophy there aren’t many other fields that qualify as dealing with ultimate questions.  History, for example, may be fascinating, but it’s not generally going to change your outlook on life, the universe, and everything.  And so I find ideas that I need to keep track of since they might have the actual truth.  But that’s not what I’m paid to do.  I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened had I been successful in becoming clergy.  They too are paid to wrestle, but they are expected to always end up on the side of the organization.

There are people cut out for a very specific job.  No matter what else I do, I think about ideas I encounter.  Especially the big ones.  In the academy this was applauded.  Elsewhere, not so much.  The possibility of ending up in the job you’re made for isn’t a sure thing.  It seems we value economics more than dreams.  Or than systems that help people fit in with their natural inclinations.  Then again, should I really be thinking about things like this when work is about to start?  I should be getting my head in the game, shouldn’t I?  But here’s the thing: religion (or philosophy) is my life’s work.

On the Run

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I come down on the side of book.  Usually.  In the book or movie first debate.  I have to confess, however, that I learned about Logan’s Run because of the movie.  It was quite impressionable on a teenage me, thinking that in such a world I’d have less than ten years left.  I bought the movie tie-in book and read it.  It was very different from the film.  I only remembered one scene from the book and so, nostalgia smothering me, I had to read it again.  The book was actually published in 1967, when I was quite young.  The movie came out in 1976, as did the tie-in novel.  The story has been replicated since then but the basic idea is that in the future overpopulation leads to the radical decision that everyone dies after turning twenty-one.  This is a world of the young.  Politics are handled by computer, and Sandmen, like Logan, hunt down and kill runners—those who try to escape their mandatory death.

There are a number of things to say about this.  One is that the two authors, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, had distinguished writing credits.  Another is that this is good sixties sci-fi, but belles lettres less so.  I still enjoyed reading it again.  It had been literally fifty years.  When this was written a population of six billion was considered unsustainable.  We’re now at over eight billion and it does seem as if we’ve tipped some kind of balance.  Another thing that stood out, one of the dangers of future-projecting sci-fi, is that newspapers are still a thing in the future.  They’re hardly a thing now.  They do make predictions for 2000, so maybe they should’ve pushed things out a bit further before committing.

In real life, the “developed” world actually has a problem of too many of us seniors and falling birth rates.  Nobody to take care of us when we no longer can.  This seems to be true in the United States, Japan, and China, at least.  Hopefully we won’t go to Logan’s solution.  So, as the book title suggests, Logan decides to run.  There’s a fair bit of religion in here.  He runs to find Sanctuary but, until very close to the end, intends to kill Ballard, the guy who helps runners escape.  There’s lots of adventure, several changing scenes, and a fair bit of testosterone.  Still, the story isn’t a bad one.  It’s old enough (ironically) to be a classic.  And yes, it’s still in print.  Part of my childhood has been restored.

Unexpected Thoughts

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The unexpected changes things.  We in the western world live under the false assumption of permanence.  We build something and it remains.  Well, any homeowner knows that constant maintenance is required, but still.  Then something unexpected happens and everything changes.  And it can be in the middle of a work week.  A death can lead to quick decisions and changes of a usual course of actions.  I wrote some funereal thoughts earlier, but a hastily planned drive all the way across Pennsylvania was organized just as a bomb cyclone hit our area.  We were thankfully spared feet of snow, but I had to deal with shoveling before driving early the next day.  After the funeral, a kind family member had invited us to her home, which we’d never visited before.  My wife and I drove there the night of the funeral.  The next day we had to cross the state of Pennsylvania again.  And then back to work on Thursday.

Something has fundamentally changed in my life, but still work expects the same Steve who was somewhat unexpectedly out of the office on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Thursday nothing has fundamentally changed at work, but in my life.  Even my usual morning routine feels off as thoughts constantly wander back to the intense previous two days.  And Monday’s stressful weather.  How the weekend before all plans had to be cancelled to, as the song goes, “let it snow.”  My mind, which operates largely on a routine schedule, has been shaken.  Jarred.  And yet, work persists.  Readjusting on a Thursday is difficult.  It’s as if I’d forgotten how things were usually done.  How did I use to sleep?  How did I use to drink so much water?  How did I jog before sunrise?  It was all routine last Friday.

Last Friday.  It was a work day, but I could jog.  The snow had melted.  We knew the drive was coming, but the weather painted a huge question mark over it.  It seems, this year, just when that illusory normalcy has once again been established, winter rudely intrudes.  Some Good Samaritan plowed all the sidewalks on our block on Monday, relieving a bit of the pressure.  But not the anxiety.  February in Pennsylvania is anything but predictable.  It is the poster child of change.  Back home on Thursday I was remembering how to jog on the streets—my usual trail still hasn’t melted—wishing this winter would finally end.  I reached our house where I noticed something where the snow had melted while we were gone.  The daffodils I transplanted last year were beginning to push through the soil.

Gothic Dreams

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I love this book.  Roger Luckhurst understands that the gateway to horror is the gothic.  In Gothic: An Illustrated History he offers a world-wide, luxuriantly illustrated tour of both classic and contemporary gothic.  As a category, it’s difficult to diagram precisely.  Luckhurst does it through a series of themes: architecture and also form, various landscape settings, how the four cardinal directions appear in the gothic imagination, and, of course, monsters.  Each of these themes is divided into four or five chapters.  Not wanting to rush, I limited myself to a chapter a day, but I’m sure I’ll be dipping back in again.  This is the kind of book that both gives you ideas of new books to read and movies to watch, and affirms the choices that you’ve already made in those regards.  In other words, this is a place horror fans would naturally feel at home.

The gothic entered my life at a young age, partially because I was living it (unwittingly) but mostly because it appealed to me.  It made me feel good watching monster movies and Dark Shadows with my brothers, and later, reading gothic novels.  There’s definitely a nostalgia to it.  I loved gothic architecture from the moment I first saw it.  Not that Franklin had soaring cathedrals, but there were some very nice Victorian houses in town.  And when I saw cathedrals I felt a strange stab of joy.  Although I sublimated my love of gothic while working on my academic credentials, I couldn’t stay away from ruined castles and abbeys  in Scotland.  Although I was trying to be a scholar, I knew what secretly inspired me was made of coal-blackened stone.  Even if I didn’t say it aloud, the monsters of my imagination lurked there.

The narrative accompanying the wealth of images in this book probes what makes gothic tick.  It would be impossible to cover it all in one tome, of course.  My current fascination is with dark academia (an aspect perhaps too new to be in Luckhurst).  Dark academia’s draw is that it revels in the gothic, placing it in educational settings.  But it can occur anywhere, as Luckhurst clearly shows.  Anywhere that there might be shadows or reflections.  Anywhere that experiences nightfall and autumn.  Anywhere people must face their fears.  While my usual avocations always please me, when I see the gothic addressed directly it takes my breath away.  No doubt, mine has been a strange life.  One in which, even before I reached my first decade, I found the gothic vital and necessary to an odd kind of happiness. This book brings it clearly into focus.

Funerals

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Attending the funeral of a teen is a somber experience.  I can’t even begin to imagine what tempests the parents are facing.  After having given my condolences last night, I became reflective.  My thoughts went back to my teenage years.  First of all, there was that disturbing song, “Seasons in the Sun.”  The Terry Jacks rendition was popular during my teen years and it haunted me even then.  Perhaps more influential in my own life was Alice Cooper’s album Welcome to My Nightmare.  And the context.  I was a somewhat sickly child.  Raised in the Fundamentalist camp, I thought about dying quite a lot.  I became comfortable with the idea.  In seventh grade I missed a lot of school, having come down with the flu, then chicken pox, then a flu relapse.  And yet another bout.  Lying at home, feeling sick, having had pneumonia as a kid, I’d listen to Cooper repeatedly and read the Bible.

One of the lines from that concept album that stood out to me was one of the spoken interludes.  “I don’t want to see you die, but if that’s the way that God has planned you…”  God has planned you.  There was a fatalism there that in the context gave me a strange sort of hope.  I listened to it over and over again.  Our teenage years are when we’re just starting to get a sense of what our lives might be.  Most of the time our expectations don’t match reality, and sometimes reality is simply outside of our hands, such as a with an incurable disease.  Back to “Seasons in the Sun.”  I found myself without the words I felt I needed to console the parents.  I realize my view is the odd one out.

Early in my own life, I found myself of a philosophical bent.  I wanted to know what the meaning of life was.  I guess I was looking for instructions.  Probably my senior year in high school I discovered existentialism.  I identified with that school, especially after learning that Søren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist.  That seemed to mean it was okay.  Existentialists believe “existence precedes essence”—we make our own meaning.  Life has been a lesson in that as I studied and worked in religion, which should be some consolation, for over half a century.  The skies are silent regarding the meaning we attribute to our lives.  The song on Welcome to My Nightmare continues, “You’ve only lived a minute of your life.”  And those words come back to me now.

The Power of Yes

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In going back over my fiction writing, I had a realization.  Both the first novel I tried seriously to get published (still not) and the first short story I submitted to a journal were accepted the first place I submitted.  That perhaps seemingly insignificant fact is quite important.  Like most, or at least many, writers, I’m a great self-doubter.  This probably comes from not knowing many other people personally and having a Calvinistic-level assessment of my own work.  Affirmation is rare in my experience.  Having a publisher say, “Yes, we like this” early on in my attempts to publish fiction was a tremendous boost and gave me the courage to try again.  It didn’t take long for the rejections to start rolling in, but I knew that someone believed in me.  Belief is far more important than most people think.  Worlds can be built on it.

The publisher of my debut novel decided to back out of the contract when the acquiring editor left.  I know, different editor, different game.  But this was under contract.  Thirteen years later it remains unpublished, not for lack of trying.  I began re-revising it in recent times since I’ve found a potential publisher and reading it I could see what might’ve frightened off others.  Still, I stand by it.  The book was written in a style very different from most of my subsequent fiction.  Characters speak their minds instead of being beat down by the system.  Readers of my academic work would be shocked.  That’s one reason that I use a pseudonym.  I sometimes wonder what I’ll do if the novel ever does get published.  It’s difficult to promote and keep your identity secret.

The point is that we never know what good we might do when we encourage someone who underestimates themself.  This may seem an odd thing to say when so many arrogant individuals command the world stage these days.  There are many people, however, who might accomplish great things if someone only gives them a little encouragement.  I think of this constantly in my work as well as my private life.  Is all this person needs simply some uplift?  Publishing can be a harsh world.  You put yourself out there and people like to start taking pot shots at you.  I’ve received much criticism over the years, and this has been primarily for nonfiction publishing.  The reviews some fiction writers receive, whether on Amazon, Goodreads, or even in print, can be unkind.  Some of the critique may be deserved, but why not offer it up with a word of motivation rather than Schadenfreude?  It can make a huge difference.

Swing Low

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The 1970s were a rare era.  On the cusp of the electronic revolution, we grew up with many old fashioned notions about how things were done and what was possible.  It was a period dominated by both interest in the paranormal and by Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great, Planet Earth, looking for the end of the world.  I was sent scampering to the strange documentary Chariots of the Gods by Gary Rhodes’ Weirdumentary.  I honestly can’t recall whether I saw it growing up.  I know I read Erich van Däniken’s book on which it’s based.  As a kid with little exposure to a truly educated community, I was swayed by the book and that makes me think I may have begged to have been taken to the Drake Theater in Oil City to see the film.  Watching it as an adult, however, is truly an odd experience.

First of all, it’s freely available on multiple streaming services.  All you have to put up with is commercials and, since it’s not a high-demand movie, there aren’t that many of them.  The film, done by a German director and voiced over in English, begins by suggesting religious writings worldwide tell of wisdom from above.  People have always, I expect, felt that there is something divine about the sky.  We still get that impression from our experience of the weather.  The documentary makes the suggestion that Elijah’s fiery chariot was more technologically advanced than supposed.  Same with Ezekiel.  But then it sets out on a worldwide tour of ancient monumental building, stressing how such simple folk could never have built these things all on their own.  Although this doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, there’s nevertheless something compelling about it.

Among the more interesting items are some of the ancient rock carvings.  Without the written context, however, jumping to the conclusion that these were astronauts is foolhardy.  There are legitimate mysteries of history.  We don’t know who built certain structures, or why.  Our own modern fragile skyscrapers raise the same question.  People seem to be compelled to do such things simply because we can.  We don’t need aliens to help us with them.  Placing all of these mysteries together and suggesting a single solution is so 1970s.  Breaking things down and study of them by experts yields quite different results.  No less fascinating, but perhaps with feet more solidly on the ground.  This documentary is a strange period piece of a time I remember well.  And one from which, it seems, an even stranger culture has grown.

Individualisms

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As an individual that stands out in the herd, metaphorically (standing out  is always dangerous, I know), I don’t tend to follow trends.  Blending in isn’t my strong suit.  A current, or recent trend, was to be seen carrying a disposable coffee cup when in public.  At least for a while there, everybody was doing it.  Walking down the street, going grocery shopping, at the mall.  It was almost like a fashion statement.  Anybody who was somebody had a cup of warm liquid in their hand.  Perhaps in my case economics and personal choice made the decision not to do this.  Economically, a five-dollar cup of coffee is out of my range; I’m not a hedge-fund manager.  I haven’t gone out for coffee in some years because of the personal choice aspect of it: I gave up caffeine.  This was several years ago.  I didn’t like being addicted to daily coffee, so I stopped, cold turkey.  But I still like the taste of coffee—that was hard earned.

These days the personal water bottle industry must be a good one to be into.  I recently visited friends and I noticed everyone had their personal water bottle.  I tend to leave mine at home.  Yes, I have one for the basic reason that running downstairs to refill a glass with water multiple times a day would mean that I’d miss an awful lot of work.  I drink quite a bit of water in a day.  About a gallon when I’m not traveling.  In my regimented life, I have a water bottle that I fill four times a day.  I know its capacity and, trying to stay healthy, I drink it down whether I feel like it or not.  I tend to leave it at home, however, as I mentioned.  At this gathering of friends (which was at somebody’s house) everyone who didn’t live there had their personal water bottle.  I was just using a glass from the kitchen.

There seems to be a trend of being seen with your water bottle.  I recently had to buy a new one because I’d been using an old stainless steel bottle well over a decade old.  It’d been put in the freezer with water in it before a hike and the bottom had, naturally enough, convexed to the pressure.  Being the thrifty sort, I pulled out a hammer and rendered it unlikely to tip over again.  It worked for years, but had become unstable again. Since it sits next to a computer all day, I couldn’t risk it.  The first thing I discovered is that water bottles meeting my exact specs were very expensive.  It’s a trend.  So at our friends’ house one of them offered to buy me a cup of coffee.  We live in a day when you can get a decaf latte with oat milk, so I indulged in an old habit.  As we walked down the chilly street, coffee cups in hand, I realized that I’m just like everybody else.