The Season

Leave a comment

I learned about the Horror Writers Association years ago, shortly after I started publishing horror stories in 2009.  I couldn’t join because you had to have earned at least $30 from a publication.  I took this to mean a fictional one and I never made it beyond that benchmark until this year.  (It’s possible I misunderstood and could’ve joined for Holy Horror and beyond.  I think the point is they want to know you’re serious.)  In any case, these folks may be my tribe.  During the month of October the website has a set of free blog posts available to the public.  Mine—located here—dropped yesterday.  It deals with nonfiction, of course, since I’m still not finding much traction in getting novels published.  One of the weird things about book publishing is that you don’t know, unless you’re already successful, how well your sales are going until after about six months or so.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth may be flopping for all I know. 

I’ve tried to promote this one as much as I can.  I contacted bookstores and libraries in Sleepy Hollow itself.  I had bookmarks printed and put them in local libraries and bookstores.  I arranged a discussion at the upcoming Easton Book Festival.  I told my local writers’ group about it.  Posted on a Halloween Facebook group.  All of this is tricky rather than treaty when a book is priced near $40.  That’s quite a trick, I know.  As Halloween approaches I keep seeing memes and posts about the Headless Horseman.  But I’m not sure if anyone’s finding my book or not.  It’s an anxious period when you write.

Working in publishing for nearly two decades now, I’m starting to realize that there are two ways to relevancy.  One is to be hired by an institution with name recognition—that automatically makes you an expert and everyone want to know what you think.  They’ll even pay you for it.  The second way is to write a book that sells well.  That one’s a bit of a catch-22, however.  To get published these days you need to already have a following.  I suppose that’s what the internet is for.  The best forums at the moment seem to be YouTube and TikTok, but there’s more much traffic there than on a Los Angeles freeway during rush hour.  I’m not sure if many people read the Horror Writers Association Halloween Haunts blog posts.  These folks, however, seem to look at this from a similar perspective.  Maybe a few of them will buy Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  ’Tis the season.

Alien History

Leave a comment

If aliens sat down to read earth history, they’d get the impression that we’re a very warlike species.  While, no doubt, this is true for a large part of history, I’d suggest that at least since 1900 it hasn’t been so much that the species is warlike, but that its leaders are.  As long as we have “shallow bastards” (to use Frank Turner’s phrase from “1933”) leading us, is it any wonder?  Even with current world leadership given a pass, looking back over the big ones of the last century, it was mentally unstable leaders with fragile egos that led to wars.  I’m sure some national resentment across borders certainly exists, but would people just go and kill those in the next town over, in the “modern” world, if their leaders didn’t tell them to?  Think of World War II, brought on by a madman.  Yes, Germany had grievances, but war wasn’t the only way to solve them.  And killing Jews did nothing to help anybody.

Or World War One.  The assassination of an Archduke need not have led to nations clashing with excessively deadly force.  Men with inflated egos and personal ambitions seem to have played a large role.  To any aliens reading this, some of us would like to take exception to this warlike generalization.  Human society is complex, and the jury is still out on whether democracy can really work when the electorate doesn’t bother to educate itself.  Or allow itself to be educated.  Still, my sense of my species is that we’ve managed to civilize ourselves out of being warlike, but we do have strong emotions that we need to learn to control.  Watching Washington flirt with war every day because of incompetence, well, dear aliens, we’re not all like that.

Image credit: NASA (public domain)

The world into which I was born seemed to be okay as far as national boundaries went.  Younger generations are raised to realize that colonialism was an evil, exploitive outlook.  There are those alive, unfortunately many of them in public office, who want to go back to acquiring more land.  And countries, sometimes artificially created (generally by Europeans), continue to break apart.  South Sudan became a country only in 2011, but Sudan appears to have been artificially held together by pressure from other nations.  I still don’t see why globalism and lack of war can’t coexist.  If nations had thinking persons in charge rather than macho men eager to show how big they are (aliens, this is a human fascination, I’ll grant you), we might well be able to live in peace.  If you want to take them back to your planet, you are most welcome to do so.

Keeping House

Leave a comment

I really wanted to like The Innkeepers.  I’ve appreciated the Ti West horror that I’ve watched and Sara Paxton has a compelling screen presence.  The setting of a hotel that’s about to be shut down is a good set-up, and although the ghost story is somewhat conventional, it’s workable.  Part of the problem was clearly lighting.  Maybe I’m just too old, but when something important takes place in a scene that’s just too dark, well, it loses something.  So here’s how it goes: Claire and Luke are at the front desk for the final weekend of The Yankee Pedlar.  The guests are a woman and her young son, a psychic who used to be a television star, and an old man who wants to stay in the room where he had his honeymoon.  Claire and Luke are also ghost hunting at the hotel and a suicide-bride ghost is said to haunt the property.  When Claire finally does see the ghost, after the old man dies by suicide in the same room as the bride, Claire ends up in the basement where they get her.

The chase through the basement is dark.  I didn’t realize, until reading a summary later, that Claire, who uses an inhaler throughout the movie, died of an asthma attack.  That gives the story a nice ambiguity.  I, for one, couldn’t see that because things just weren’t lit well enough.  The final sequence, before the credits, shows the room in which the psychic was staying (she had a tendency to gaze out the window) and then the door slams on the camera.  The summary said a very light image of Claire is visible, and that she turns toward the camera before the door slams.  I watched the ending twice and couldn’t see her anywhere.  That scene was too brightly lit.  Without those two bits, the ending really doesn’t make much sense.

Movies generally involve many, many people (thus the very long credits).  Although the director is the “conductor” of the piece, sometimes I wonder about the lighting decisions, and whether this was a lighting department decision or West’s.  Whoever it was, I’m sorry to say that it made my experience of seeing the movie a confusing one.  The movie did reasonably well against budget so I suspect plenty of people saw what I could not.  I would be willing to try it again, maybe in a darker room or on a bigger screen.  A ghost story where you can actually see the ghost seems like a winning combination for an October weekend.

Famous Cemeteries

Leave a comment

I have to confess that I really didn’t know about Père-Lachaise Cemetery before this book.  I knew that Jim Morrison was buried in Paris, but I’d never really paid attention to where.  My wife picked up Benoît Gallot’s The Secret Life of a Cemetery: The Wild Nature and Enchanting Lore of Père-Lachaise and we decided to read it together.  It seems likely that Père-Lachaise is the world’s most famous cemetery.  This little memoir by the current curator of the cemetery is a delightful read.  It is reflective and sensitive (and spawned by the attention the author’s social media was getting, so hey, help me recruit some fans!).  Gallot began posting pictures of wild animals that he snapped in the course of his work and Parisians, and others, were fascinated to learn about wild animals at home in the capital of France.  This book reflects on the animals, plants, and people of the graveyard.

I enjoyed this book, but one aspect gave me pause.  Gallot notes that the cemetery doesn’t permit jogging.  Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but cemeteries have been some of my favorite jogging spots.  I mean no disrespect by it.  Cemeteries are peaceful and have very little traffic (one of a jogger’s concerns).  I’ve never found people walking their dogs (another jogger issue) in cemeteries.  I can see how mourners might not want to see someone taking their exercise near the grave of a departed family member, but a jog is simply a fast walk.  And we are, as a species, part of nature.

Many famous people are buried in Père-Lachaise.  I visit cemeteries to find famous people’s burial places.  Indeed, that’s what I tended to post on my Instagram site, but I found no followers.  We had visited Highgate Cemetery in London—another famous burial ground—and discovered many familiar names there.  Perhaps to Anglophones, Highgate is more famous than Père-Lachaise.  But even Highgate would’ve been off my radar had it not been for the Highgate Vampire incident that I’ve written about before.  Gallot, who lives in the cemetery, is skeptical of ghosts in Père-Lachaise, although he’s well aware that the stories are told.  This brief book is contemplative autumnal reading.  There are several black-and-white photos of animals among the graves.  They are the living among the dead, and an appropriate symbol that life goes on.  If you’re looking for a place to reflect on mortality and you want to learn about cemetery life, this may be the book for you.

Dark Pliny

Leave a comment

My current dark academia kick has me looking at the Classics again.  I taught Greek Mythology for three semesters as an adjunct at Montclair State University.  In the course of my New Testament studies I’m sure I encountered some of the classical Greco-Roman writers, but being focused on the Bible at the time, I never really followed through.  Then my doctorate got me interested in even earlier classics.  In any case, I’ve been trying to self-educate myself about Pliny the Younger.  To be honest, this is because he wrote one of the most famous Roman ghost stories.  Pliny wasn’t some guy into woo-woo subjects.  He was a magistrate and a lawyer and a noted orator.  His most famous work is the collection of his letters.  One of those letters tells his ghost stories.  Others describe Mount Vesuvius’ eruptions.  So, Pliny.

Image credit: Daderot, Angelica Kauffmann’s Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D. (detail), public domain via Wikimedia Commons

My fully-loaded bookshelves don’t have any Pliny.  I’m sure he’s mentioned in many of the books on these shelves, but I don’t have a copy of his letters.  I used BookFinder.com to search for used copies only to discover that the Loeb Classical Library divides his letters into three volumes, which feels like too much for casual reading.  Then I realized that most editions are edited, leaving out some of the, I suspect, less interesting missives.  Even as an editor, I don’t trust editors.  What if they left out the ghost stories because, well, serious scholars pay no attention to such things?  I discovered that Penguin Classics has an edition and from what I can tell, it seems to be complete.  I mark books that I want to remember on Amazon because they have pages even for the obscure stuff.  I try to buy the actual books from Bookshop.org.

What makes all of this noteworthy is that as I was on the Amazon page I noticed that you can “follow the author”—Pliny the Younger himself!  He must be a ghost by now.  So what the heck?  I clicked “Follow.”  I’m not in the habit of following authors on Amazon; I find my books in many different ways and most authors I know don’t like to talk about their writing, so why add another social media commitment?  I’m hoping that Pliny will be more willing to chat about writing.  He may be dead, but I’m not a prejudicial sort of individual.  I won’t hold it against him.  Who knows, maybe in addition to ghosts, I’ll learn something about Vesuvius?  And if he ghosts me, well, at least he’s a professional.

Nostalgic Shadows

Leave a comment

Nostalgia is a funny thing.  Although it can strike at any age, somehow after the half-century mark it’s particularly easy to get swept into it.  As I written about many, many times, I was drawn into the Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows novels as a tween.  In my mid-to-late forties, when the internet made it possible, I started to collect all the volumes from 1 through 32.  It took several years.  I had to find them via BookFinder.com and our level of income didn’t support buying more than one every few months.  Then in 2022, having difficulty locating the last of the original series, I found a seller on eBay offering up the whole set.  The price for that set was less than the least expensive final volume I could find.  I did what any nostalgic guy would do.

We don’t really buy antiques, but I’d been looking for an office desk (this was before the scam).  I’d been using a craft table for a desk for years and it seemed that I really needed something with a better organizational range.  This led me to stop into a local antique shop.  They ended up not having much furniture, but they did have aisles of nostalgia.  A few weeks later when it was too hot and humid to be outdoors, I revisited the shop.  This time, relieved of the burden of seeking a desk, I was able to browse at leisure.  It’s like going to a museum but not having to pay admission.  I turned a corner and I saw something I’d never seen before.  A collection of Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows books.

It wasn’t a full set, but I had, prior to finishing my own collection, never seen more than one or two together in any single place.  As a child I’d buy them at Goodwill.  As an adult, on BookFinder.  All those years in-between, I always looked for them when visiting used bookstores.  I visit said shops whenever possible.  In decades of looking I’d only found one in the wild once or twice, and always by its lonesome.  This was a completely new experience for me.  It was also quite odd to be seeing them and not having any need to buy them.  I have a full set.  The nostalgia was almost overpowering.  I couldn’t help but think of how even a few years ago I’d been pawing through to see if there were any I hadn’t yet found.  All for reliving a bit of my childhood.

A Presence

Leave a comment

Presence is a fairly new movie, for me anyway.  I was able to stream it at the price of commercials, so I gave it a chance.  It was provocative and to discuss it I’ll probably need to reveal the ending.  For now, however, I’ll just say it’s a ghost story from the point of view of the ghost.  It reminded me of A Ghost Story, which I also saw shortly after it was released.  Both are melancholy and explore the dilemma of a ghost having to watch as time passes.  In the case of Presence, however, it is a future ghost.  As I say, more will be given away, so be advised.  The movie is about a family of four buying a very nice house in Cranford, New Jersey.  Well, it doesn’t say Cranford, but that’s where it was filmed.  The parents, who have a bit of a troubled relationship, have a teenage son and daughter.  The daughter’s close friend has recently died and they’ve moved, in part, to try to shake her out of it.

We watch from the ghost’s point of view as the realtor shows them the house, the painters get it ready, and they move in.  The daughter, Chloe, is having trouble adjusting and the presence lingers about her room.  It’s obviously concerned about her.  Chloe sometimes senses it.  When Tyler, her brother, brings a friend over the friend starts to show an interest in Chloe.  The presence tries to intervene to prevent him from taking advantage of her.  When the friend drugs her, intending to kill her (as he did her friend earlier, which, of course, she doesn’t know), the ghost rouses her brother who saves her by tackling his friend out the window, killing them both.  As the family is about to move again, the mother sees in a mirror that the presence is Tyler, their son.  He was protecting Chloe, as a future ghost.

I found it an engaging film.  Sibling rivalry—the parents play favorites with the opposite gender children—and Tyler’s often harsh dismissal of his sister’s grief, dominates their family life.  The fact that Tyler is the presence protecting his sister even when, in real time, they don’t get along, is a form of redemption.  That brief reveal at the end is what makes the movie.  Is it horror?  It has a ghost and there are moments of considerable tension.  As I’ve argued from time to time, horror isn’t a precise genre at all.  I found this listed as horror in a streaming service and although jump startles and visible monsters aren’t evident, the affective aspect is clearly there.  Yes, in my opinion, it’s horror. And it’s well done.

Secrets

Leave a comment

It’s a mystery.  All parents do it and even when you’re a parent yourself you’re surprised to find your parents doing it to you.  Keeping secrets, that is.  Parents have their secret lives that they don’t tell their children, and when we’re given a glimpse into that life sometimes we’re shocked.  My mother kept a diary.  Not religiously, and not for much of her life.  I inherited one volume, and I’m afraid to read it.  I tend to be an honest guy.  I try to answer my daughter’s questions with complete openness.  There are, however, some things I won’t talk about.  My secrets.  And despite the fact that I reveal something of myself daily on this blog, I do have many parts of my life that remain unrevealed.  Those of us who write sometimes don’t want everything we put down to be read.  Or maybe we do.

I used to keep a diary.  It was partially to remind me but also, in part, to explain myself.  It’s quite personal and I lost maybe two or three volumes of it years ago.  I stopped keeping it after I got married.  I guess I figured a Ph.D. and publication record would do the job for me.  Probably those missing volumes were with stuff left at home that Mom unwittingly threw away, like our old baseball cards from the early seventies.  Some of my stuff got damaged by water, foreshadowing what’d happen when we moved.  Perhaps they were thrown away then.  They had secrets, I’m sure.  Our private lives are a mystery to others.  That’s one reason that I try to be kind whenever possible.  We don’t know the burdens that others carry.  Why add to them by a sharp reply?  Even typing this, I’m not sure it will end up on the blog or not.  Other pieces haven’t.  Secrets.

Photo by Yogesh Pedamkar on Unsplash

Some intelligent animals try to hide things.  Corvids, for example, look around to see who else is there before hiding food.  I once saw a doe giving birth.  She was in a secluded glen in the early morning and I just happened to be jogging quietly by.  I’ve started multiple autobiographies.  I’m not sure anyone has an interest in reading them, but I have hope.  Despite my secrets, most of which I keep out of the autobiographical musings, I know I have a story to tell.  That’s why I keep at this blog, day after day, year after year.  It brings no money and has only a few followers, but it’s a chance to tell my story.  Even if I keep the secrets closely guarded.

Fragments Etc.

Leave a comment

I’ve never counted, but there’s well over a hundred of them.  And a notebook with at least a thousand more.  What have I got in such abundance?  Ideas for stories that remain unfinished.  I’m not exaggerating or inflating numbers, I assure you.  I’ve been writing short stories for a half-century now, many, no, most unfinished.  Thirty-three have been published.  I was reminded of this recently while reading a nonfiction book that suddenly gave me the ending for a story I’d started many months before.  Perhaps even a couple of years.  I started searching through my electronic files for it and couldn’t find it.  Why?  There were too many stories started with frustratingly short titles (my bad).  To find the culprit, I would need to open each one and remind myself what was inside.

A few months ago, I printed out copies of all eight of my unpublished novels.  I also printed out copies of all my published stories as well.  I never got around to the unfinished majority.  I have a feeling that if I printed them I’d find what I was looking for more easily.  This, even with the ease of electronic life, will be quite an undertaking.  I think it may be a necessary one.  Although I’m hardly well known—I’m an obscure, private intellectual, after all—I do have many fiction ideas.  The stories generally come to me with an impression.  The start of an intriguing tale, for instance, or the end of one.  I then begin writing and either write myself into a corner or I scribble until I realize that I don’t know what happens next.  The story sits, unfinished.  Now and again, however, the missing piece is found.  I try to find the story so I can complete it to send out for several rejections.  Such is the writing life.

Now, if I could do this for more than the paltry time allotted to personal pursuits, courtesy of capitalism, I’m confident that I’d have far more than thirty-something stories published.  At current count I have seventeen stories ready to send out to literary magazines, several of them already rejected a time or two.  Another twenty finished and nearly ready to send out.  And forty just finished, but requiring a bit of spit and polish.  And these aren’t the fragments.  Don’t get me started on the nearing 6,000 posts on this blog.  Is it any wonder I can’t find anything?  I grabbed my notebook of a thousand fragments and jotted a physical note of how that particular story ends, in case I ever find it again.

More Curtis

Leave a comment

Dan Curtis was the mind behind Dark Shadows, an important part of my childhood.  Reading about his work in film and television, I learned that he produced a lot more than Barnabas Collins, and was an influence in horror in his own right.  A friend recommended that I find The Norliss Tapes, which I did.  This made for television movie was cut from the same cloth as The Night Stalker, which Curtis also produced.  The ending of the movie makes clear that The Norliss Tapes was a pilot for an intended series that never materialized and is a good representation of religion and horror, which is likely why it was recommended to me.  Here’s the story.   David Norliss was given a large advance by a publisher to write a book debunking the supernatural.  Before he can, he goes missing, leaving behind a set of tapes explaining what happened.  The first tape is the pilot episode.

Norliss is contacted by Ellen Sterns Cort, a widow who claims to have had a supernatural episode.  Upon following her dog to her late husband’s studio one night, she encounters her undead husband.  She shoots him, but the police can find no evidence of any body.  It’s revealed that he purchased an occult scarab ring that permits him to return to life to raise a demon who will, in turn, bring him back to real life.  To get the raw materials he needs (such as blood) he has to kill a few people and this again alerts the authorities but they insist on covering it all up.  Removing the ring from his finger will stop him, but that’s easier said than done.  At the end the demon is stopped but this is just the end of the first tape.  His publisher starts to play the second tape.

Dan Curtis productions have a certain feel to them.  I’m not sure how directors and producers do that—I’m not sure of all the tools they have in their box.  What is obvious is that watching The Norliss Tapes brings back echoes of Dark Shadows.  That’s not surprising since Dark Shadows wound down just two years before the Norliss Tapes came out.  The Night Stalker was sandwiched between them, but Kolchak: The Night Stalker was not a Curtis production and doesn’t have a Curtis feel to it.  Even though I’d never seen Norliss before, it was nostalgic watching the movie for the first time.  There’s a trick to it, I just don’t know what it is.

Disney Dark

Leave a comment

I write a fair bit about dark academia, but one of the strangest higher education events in my life was when the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature held their annual meeting in Orlando.  At Disney World.  Seeing the world’s top academics in the field against a backdrop of Snow White, or whatever, was surreal, expensive, and just a bit off.  I guess others felt that way too, because the conference never returned.  I have never had a desire to visit any Disney theme parks.  It is something that simply has no appeal to me.  As much as I appreciate fantasy in my reading and movie watching, in real life I prefer to visit places with home-grown authenticity.  At the same time, I realize many people adore Disney attractions.  (I just can’t get over why you’d want to visit a manufactured Main Street when there’s a real one not terribly far away.)

The Dark Side of Disney by Leonard Kinsey is one of those books that grew out of a blog.  Believe me, I’ve been tempted more than a time or two to pirate my own work here to try to make something that people would pay to buy.  In any case, Kinsey is a Disney fan.  Growing up poor, I was never accustomed to summer vacations.  One year we made a memorable trip to Washington, DC.  I didn’t realize it then, but that was where my grandmother, who lived with us, had been born.  I remember aspects of that trip and realize that it was my model of what a vacation was meant to be.  Kinsey grew up not far from Disney World and with a mother with a bit more free cash than mine.  This book is his exposé of the less-expected aspects of Disney.  Not only an exposé, but a “how to.”

I do understand the desire to be a “bad boy”—I suspect most of us do (chose your gender-appropriate nouns, of course).  The thing is, I’m not a rule-breaker.  Realizing that the guardrails in life are generally set up to help people, as much as I’m curious about what goes on behind the scenes, I prefer legal means of finding information.  I’m no fan of large corporations, but if they set the rules (you have to pay to get in, and once you’re here agree to uphold the illusion) then that’s the right thing to do.  In my opinion.  Then again, when you’re with a bunch of academics of religious studies there’s a limited amount of trouble to be had.  Unless you read about dark academia.

That’s Odd

Leave a comment

Some vaccines just wipe me out.  The shingles vaccine did it, and so did the pneumonia one.  It was bad enough that I had to take the next day off work.  One benefit of such things is being able to watch movies during the day, when you can stay awake.  The downside, as always, is affording them.  A bit fuzzy-headed, I selected one not on my list (which seems only to consist of expensive movies—I wonder why?) and found a very good one streaming on a subscription service I use.  From Ireland, Oddity is Euro-horror.  And it is distinctly creepy and, perhaps because of my state, made me literally jump once or twice.  (My usual, critical headspace scans for jump-startles on a regular basis, but this one caught me.)  A doctor in an asylum for the criminally insane is on the phone with his wife.  She’s alone at their secluded country house when one of his patients shows up and tells her someone crept into the house while she was at the car.  You don’t know whether to believe him or if someone is locked in with her.  She doesn’t survive the night.

Her identical twin sister, who is blind, runs an antique shop called Oddities.  The doctor has found a new girlfriend and she suspects that his wife’s (her sister’s) death wasn’t accidental.  She sends an oddity in the form of a wooden man, essentially a goy golem, to the house before showing up herself.  Much of the creepiness comes from that life-size figure sitting at the dining table in a shadowy room.  As the plot unfurls, it becomes clear that the husband had met his new girlfriend prior to his wife’s death.  His patient wasn’t her killer, but his orderly was.  Justice only comes when the golem comes to life.  Even so, the doctor gets away with it.  The sister, who is also murdered, sent the doctor another oddity from her shop before expiring.

Much of the movie takes its energy from the utter skepticism of the doctor—he presents himself as completely rational, not believing in anything supernatural—and the clearly paranormal events taking place around the oddities.  Also, the rational doctor is very immoral, preferring murder to telling the truth.  The sister, however, is concerned for justice and the supernatural is on her side.  This makes for a very creepy, compelling film.  I’ve been impressed by much of the Euro-horror that I’ve seen over the last several years.  This one is going into my personal cabinet of curiosities.

Knock-on

Leave a comment

When you’re the victim of a scam, the loss of all your money is only the beginning of your problems.  Scammers take away the simple pleasures you’ve afforded yourself.  Your mental security.  Your very sense of balance.  If you have to close your bank account, you’ll need to telephone (sometimes repeatedly) any company with which you have autopay.  You’ll receive threatening notices in the mail that make the rise in your blood pressure audible.   It should come as no surprise to my readers that I’m a Neo-Luddite.  I’m not sure the internet is a good thing and technology has made much of life more difficult.  At the same time, I’m conflicted because I know we have it easier than the vast majority of humans who’ve ever lived.  But still.  

The scammers took control of my laptop, which is not a spring chicken.  I had to have this old rooster scrubbed, which meant all the little fixes that allowed my device to use a very old printer and scanner were also scrubbed.  Now, visiting the websites of the printer and scanner makers, they no longer provide drivers for such ancient devices, so not only do these scamming parasites leave you with muzak earworms but with now useless electronics that have to be replaced.  And no money to do it.  We’ve managed to live for nearing two decades without having to buy a new printer or scanner.  Both work fine.  Now they’re useless because their makers no longer supply drivers and I’m once-burnt-thrice-shy about shady websites that tell you to download such things.  Meanwhile some undeserving soul is using my money to fund an operation to scam even more people out of their legitimately earned money. 

Please pardon my vitriol. Perhaps it’s my fault for thinking the best of people.  I try not to classify anyone as evil, but it’s getting more difficult not to.  After an identity theft there’s a ton of paperwork; things need to be scanned and printed.  Only, oh, yeah, I can’t do that anymore.   I’m very well aware that others have bad circumstances too.  Even worse.  I’m trying to recall Viktor Frankl’s maxim of finding meaning in suffering.  I’m attempting, very hard, to apply it now.  Thank you, dear readers, for being my therapists for this short while.  I do hope that I provide enough provocative content, not focused on my woes, that will reward your reading.  Okay, I’m done venting now.  Back to the usual kind of horror that occupies this blog.  Tomorrow’s post will be about an actual horror film.  I wouldn’t scam you.

Being a Fan

Leave a comment

Fandom is a weird thing with me.  Having wide-ranging interests, coupled with an at times obsessive personality, my likes are intense but fall short of the kind of fan who purchases everything associated with their fascination.  A friend kindly sent me the Dark Shadows Almanac, edited by Kathryn Leigh Scott and Jim Pierson.  I try my best to read books friends  send me, and working my way through the Almanac, I realized just how far short of real fandom I fall.  Dark Shadows was likely my gateway to horror.  Watching it after school is one of my early memories.  But I was quite young at the time and beyond Barnabas, Quentin, the wonderfully gothic house, and the opening music and waves crashing into the rocks, specifics didn’t last.  Dark Shadows was one of the earliest fan-congregating shows.  Before Comic-Con, there were Dark Shadows conferences.  Kids eagerly bought all things Barnabas related.

I was about seven when the show hit its zenith.  I do remember watching it, and the wonderful, creepy feeling it gave me.  As a child I couldn’t have named any of the actors.  A lot was happening in my life at the time.  My mother was divorcing my alcoholic father.  My grandmother, who lived with us, lay bed-ridden and dying in what had been our dining room.  We lived in a run-down old apartment with very little money.  Heavy stuff for a kid.  And television also offered funny shows in the evening.  And Saturday morning cartoons (which included, yes, Scooby-Doo). I’ve always been amazed at just how much stuff there is in the world and I yearn to understand it deeply.  It was probably pretty much fore-ordained that I would try to be a professor.

Reading the Almanac not only reinforced how influential the series was, it also made me aware of just how complicated producing a television show is.  Many, many people are involved, specialists in artistic and technical fields.  Most of them make modest livings with, if they’re lucky, mentions in the credits.  The stars we know.  I think, for me, Barnabas Collins was a father stand-in.  What I noticed, even as a child, was that he was sad.  A certain type of person is drawn to sad individuals.  I always want to cheer them up because I know how it feels.  This is the part of me that wanted to be a minister.  I tried that a number of times but it never worked out either.  Reading an almanac like this isn’t really a deep intellectual exercise, but it is a learning experience.  And one of the things we might learn about is ourselves, whether a true fanatic or not.

One of Those Days

Leave a comment

I recently lived a day directed by David Lynch.  Or at least it felt like it.  While I’m not at liberty to discuss the details, I can say it was a surreal experience that left me questioning everything.  Ever have one of those days?  It happened smack in the middle of work, forcing me to take an emergency personal day, if there is such a thing.  I’ve self-identified as an existentialist for many, many years—that may be changing in the light of Frankl—and the part I most identified with was the absurd.  It became clear to me, starting at least in seminary, how absurd my life was.  Strange things happen to me.  Always have.  I had a weird childhood and it hasn’t become any more normal since then.  Even so, some days are brought to you by David Lynch.

When I proposed to my wife, I told her that I couldn’t promise her much (I was functionally unemployed at the time, but applying for Ph.D. Programs) but that our life together would be interesting.  I doubt she would argue the point now, some 36 years later.  Even in a life defined by the odd—let’s use the existentialist word—absurd, some days stand out.  Days when, as Bruce Springsteen might say, you’re toppled over by “things you don’t even see coming.”  This particular day it was the direct consequence of the internet, our electronic metaverse, to borrow a term from Neal Stephenson.  The older I get the more I wonder if the blessing of constant connectedness is more a curse in disguise.  For thousands of years society got along without it.  Yet, as with most devils, there are definite advantages to dancing.

The next morning I saw a great horned owl while out jogging.  I know owls are difficult to spot and I’ve read enough about screen memories to make me wonder if something truly cosmic was going down.  I’d only seen one great horned owl before, and that was while jogging at Nashotah House.  I have been pondering my David Lynch day.  It actually grew into several days in which I felt completely out of control of my own life.  And the pneumonia vaccine didn’t help, donating a restless night and fuzzy head.  Some people, it seems, are magnets for the odd.  We don’t ask for it—it simply happens to us and we have to figure out how to respond.  Recognizing the absurdity may be a good start, right, Mr. Lynch?

Image credit: Alan Light, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons