Author Archives: scrivnomancer

There’s a Spectral Tree Growing out of the Back of My Head

06 Friday Oct 2006

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Steve and I will be getting together come Sunday to get my website put together.  Steve is talented in the realms of flash animation and web affects, so I’m excited at what we’ll end up with.  The basic concept is a sort of spectral tree full of ravens and each raven is a different story or different link to another part of the website.  Below are some concept notes I jotted down very quickly…

THE RAVEN TREE

-There is a tree at the edge of dreams and every branch has a raven and every raven tells a tale.

-A tree grows at the edge of dreams and it bares a thousand and one branches and in every branch roosts a raven and every raven tells a tale.

-There grows a spectral tree at the edge of dreams.  It lost all its leaves in the long ago – its branches now leaved with ravens.

-The ravens feast on the dead feed on meat and memories in the enterprise of plundering corpses and now ghosts swim in their feathers and in every feather there is a story for anyone with the courage to pluck the quill.

-There grows a black tree on the edge of dreams and all its leaves fell in the ever-Fall – it’s branches all bare, but it will not die.

-There grows a black tree on the edge of dreams.  It’s branches blow bare on oneiromantic winds, but it will not die – its black roots feed on those below.

-There grows a black tree on the edge of dreams, its leaves all ash, its branches all bare, but it will not die – it grows in the grave soil past Ever-After, black-fang roots feeding on the heroes buried below, toiling in a congress of bones, feeding meals of marrow up and up – and black bark encapsulates all the rhymes and prose trapped in the memory of a millennia of rings, and the black spiral swirls up and up – and stretches into a thousand-and-one black branches that hiss a cacophony-chorus of forgotten mythos in oneiromantic winds – and every black branch bares a raven – and every roosting raven tells a tale.


And lastly, here’s a poem I wrote the other day:

AMERICAN IDOL

 

The faithful cried because the evil prophecy had come to pass

and the sound of their generation was a self-indulgent keen,

the bellowing of bad karaoke singers who became demigods

in the flickering, pixilated eye of the babbling Cyclops.

And the faithful cried at the sound

of the demidgods’ voice-box-masturbation.

And the faithful prayed for the return of soul

and the second coming of Buddy Holly.

And the faithful prayed to all the saints.

To Saint Hendrix.

To Saint Morrison.

To Saint Lennon.

To the Holy Order of Zeppelin.

To the Knights of the Stones.

To the monks of the Brothers Blue.

To all of the angels

who now stood on the stairway,

holding their hands to their ears,

leaving their harp strings

unplugged

and

unplayed.

My First Review

04 Wednesday Oct 2006

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Good extended weekend.

 

Why good?

 

For starters, October is happening around me and I can feel it in the space between my molecules.  It tickles.  Also, I’ve gotten to be a kick-ass, award-winnning epic poet/swordfighter/reverend.

 

Please explain Josh?

 

Well, this weekend, I got to see a large quantity of the people whom I have very acutely missed lately (in fact, I’ve had the opportunity in the last few weekends counting trips to Springfield and seeing Torrie, Wil, my writing class fellows, and others).

 

Friday, I got to see Dave and Adrienne and drink with them and start discussion on how they want their impending marriage ceremony to go.  That’s right.  It’s Rev. Joshua…at least for legal purposes, and I’m going to marry a couple in a few weeks.  Things get strange in October.  It’s my favorite month.

 

Saturday I got to see Val’s husband’s band play…and I got to see some of my favorite mammals from Eureka (I love you guys).  I thought they did an excellent rendition of “Ballroom Blitz.”

 

Sunday saw me with Jeramie, Amy, and adorable-goddaughter-Reese, for a brief visit.  Then on to Genenda’s place in Southern Illinois.  The purpose?  She’s directing a high school play involving pirates and I promised her I’d help teach her students how to drink rum……just kidding – teach them some basic stage combat.  Come Monday, it went well, considering I just had a few hours with them, and I’m a bit rusty.  Though I think I did alright, I’m sure I’d be much better at teaching the kids how to drink rum.

 

Come Tuesday and a long train ride and I’m back.  But that ain’t it.  I received an email from my teacher/advisor/mentor, Nancy Perkins.  She had nominated my thesis/novel for Outstanding Thesis of the year (first in the English department…and then the school, should it advance).  She said not to be too, too disappointed if nothing further came of it as fiction is often overlooked, even in the English program, let alone the rest of the school, but that she thought mine had merit.

 

Well, today I got this email…

 


Hi Josh,

 

Happy day!  I found out on Sat that your thesis did win the vote in the English Program to represent the English Program in the competition for UIS Outstanding Thesis for last year.  I wrote my/the Program’s nomination on Sun. and Faxed it in yesterday.

 

I’ve attached it for your files–it is your first “review”!

 

Because I believe in your novel’s merit, I was honored to write the nomination.

 

Always my best wishes,

nancy

 

 
And here is the official nomination, my first review.  It’s the stuff blushes are made of.

Memorandum

 

To:      Provost Harry Berman and Members of the University of Illinois at Springfield’s          Outstanding Thesis Selection Committee

 

From: Nancy Genevieve Perkins, Associate Professor of English, Representing the English    Program

 

Date:   1 October 2006

 

Re:      English Program Nominates Joshua Alan Doetsch’s Master’s Creative Writing Closure           Project Souls Unsure: A Dark Epic in Prose and Poetry for UIS’ Outstanding Thesis

 

Joshua Alan Doetsch’s Creative Writing Closure Project combines epic poetry with brief interludes of stand-alone fiction. The poetry intertwines classical literary allusions with Native American, Caribbean, Latin American, African, and Creole-American literatures as well as contemporary street slang, music, movies, and other pop culture.  The plot traces the universal theme of good verses evil through the sinewy streets of New Orleans to the shadowy regions of Sheol, and the temporal setting pre-dates time itself interwoven with the moment of now. 

 

The epic poem began in Dr. Marcellus Leonard’s Long Poem course with a twenty-page tale spun from the wondering conscience of what happened back then: back in the dawn of time in the Judeo–Christian history of the War in Heaven, which resulted in good and evil, good angels and bad angels.  Were all angels such?  Or did some get caught between such warring forces, and if so, what happened to them?  Where are they now?  Dante wrote in The Inferno, III 30-37, “This is the sorrowful state of souls unsure./ Whose lives earned neither honor nor bad fame” (Book II, Coda 91). 

 

One of the three primary characters/voices of this epic tale, which is written in the form of a drama script, is one of these not fallen, not soaring, angels.  Josh named him Syth.  Syth is allusional, of course, to Seth, the third child of Adam, of Eve, of promise, of curse.  The Biblical Seth neither soared nor plummeted; he was neither the Promise of Abel nor the Curse of Cain; he simply was, and is, the between of all that is and of all that could be.  He is the best and worst of the modern Everyone.  Josh’s Syth is true to the prototype of Seth; he is neither good nor evil; neither black nor white but ashen and usually seen in shadow forms; he has a broken crystal voice which he uses only in whispers and sparingly because his voice reminds him of the best of what could have been, a voice in The Celestial Choir; he has broken wings, which allow him to move from world to world but without grace.  And Josh gives him a broken spirit—bound to his broken body with barbed wire, it longs to rest, to be quiet, to join the unfeeling of uninvolvement.  The opening Interlude, however, tells of the screams of a pure child, and those screams transverse this modern world to the nether world, beyond knowledge of time and space, and touch this broken spirit, and Syth intervenes in her misery, stopping the unnatural predatoring by her own father.  This action, this pure action, evokes the tortured souls in the nether regions of nightmares and Danté’s Hell to blister the readers’ minds and to taunt these minds with memory’s silent screams, and punish Syth for daring to feel.

 

Syth’s odyssey to find the child follows “the trail of broken doll parts”; he is chasing “the silent scream,” seeking Hope, “a youngling shade” (186) who may have had her spirit crushed by a life where prayers were not answered and evil allowed to continue for too long.  This hero/antihero gives all that he can, all that he has left, to save the spirit of the child whose body he saved. 

 

Syth’s journeys, his quests, are chronicled by Crow, the winged Trickster, to the voodoo Street Priestess, Mama Nancy.  Crow admits he is not to be trusted, and all readers of Native American literature know that his words can slide and twist the truth.  The voodoo priestess cannot travel to the nether worlds; she is bound to time and place, but she can, and does, evoke the spirits of power in the other worlds, Papa Ghede, Saint Gerard, Saint Patrick, the Virgin Mother, among many others.  But to know of Syth, to learn of his identity and of his journey, she must barter with Crow to be her eyes in places and in times she cannot go.  The irony of her bartering is that all Crow will accept to do her bidding are her eyes; he responds to her question of “why would wily Crow want the eyes/ of this poor, poor woman?” (24) with “Isn’t it obvious/Miss Too-Clever-For-Her-Own-Good?/ I don’t know/ what it is to have life in my belly,/ to pay bills,/ to grow old,/ one day at a time./ And you are loved and you are feared,/ and I want to see from your side of the divide” (25).

 

This unlikely trilogy of darkness, what Josh calls “Three archetype tarot cards of the soul” (xvi) illuminates the modern world while diving into the realm of the unspeakable.  These are like all of the dark corners that modern people avoid and constrain in the unspeakable; the tale’s words, images, and deeds focus the readers’ attentions, tap into emotions, and shine the light of language in the darkest of corners.  The Interludes paint this modern world in vignettes, emotions carried by all lost souls, and in the daily lives of those no one brags about doing activities best left unspoken.  Yet, the readers recognize shards of the self in these characters, and so laugh and so cry. 

 

One of these Interludes, “Teddy Bear Rex” (332), tells of Oedipus, the Teddy-Bear most beloved of Hope’s childhood in her Kingdom of Dolls.  All of the subjects had been turned to face the wall, so they could not see a “very bad thing” (333) when she was a very young child.  Then, as a grown-up with knowledge, Hope “came upon Oedipus . . . eyes leaking poison” (333).  “ ‘You shouldn’t have peeked,’ she sobbed, ‘Your eyes are too clever’.  She took the king of dolls off his throne and ripped out those beautiful brass button eyes. . . . [he] was exiled . . . banished to the dark closet. Blackness and silence and memories of what was lost—they were so good, his button eyes.  Perhaps it was all for the best.  Blanketed in darkness, the king of dolls never saw what became of his kingdom, what befell his subjects.  Without the evidence of sight, Oedipus went on dreaming he was real, in that grey place” (333).   This tiny vignette speaks the truth so clearly, so painfully, that when Josh submitted it as a short story for publication, it was accepted, and it has already been nominated for an Il Council Award and for a Pushcart Award.

 

The blending of story with journey is a powerful conveyance to the readers’ collective understanding.  Just as Josh’s blending of poetry, drama, and fiction scaffolds powerful truths, his epic tale for a modern audience paints the Paradise Lost by Milton in modern hues of Innocence Lost.  So which force will win in the timeless chasm between good and evil, love and hate?  Can both be understood?  Is a victory for one force ever the final victory?    Or is it, as the street priestess says that voodoo “is not about magic, but healing—healing through relationships. 

. .  Sometimes, we can raise ourselves up, to rescue another, when we don’t have the strength to save ourselves” (359-360). 

 

Joshua Alan Doetsch’s Master’s Creative Writing Closure Project Souls Unsure is nominated by the English Program for this Award because Josh set out to write an epic for the modern world, using a cauldron of literary allusions to enlighten and to entertain, and he succeeded.

Reading this made me a happy panda.  Reading it made me more excited than any potential award.  If I grin any wider, I’ll become a very handsome PEZ dispenser.

 

And on a final note: I think the film The Long Kiss Goodnight is highly underrated.  If you really want to see a woman be strong and overcome adversity and the odds, put down your masterbate-with-a-Halmark-card-LIFETIME-channel-bullshit and watch Geena Davis regain lost memories as a government trained hit-woman and slay several dozen assassins to save her daughter.

 

“Mommy, am I gonna die?”

“Oh, no, baby, no.  You’re not going to die.  They are.”

 

OK.  That’s all.

 

Goodnight.

 

mwah

Snow, Blood, Angels

28 Thursday Sep 2006

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Last night I wrote something new.  It’s very rough draft, and mostly unedited, but here’s a little junk from the beginning.  It’ll likely end up as one of the interlude chapters in the epic.  Don’t have a real title right now, but let’s just call it:

Snow, Blood, Angels

 

Oh where oh where can my baby be
The Lord took her away from me
She’s gone to heaven so I got to be good
So I can see my baby when I leave this world
—J. Frank Wilson, “Last Kiss”

 

 

            Desdemona used to trace the stars with her finger, connecting the dots, naming her own constellations.

            I call upon her name.

            Desdemona.

            I call her name when I want to remember

            Desdemona – who gave me thirty-one birthdays when I had none.  Desdemona – who laughed and made snow angels on rooftops because the snow there was cleanest, the closest to Heaven.  Desdemona – who made an angel of snow and blood in the dirty street on the day I lost her.

            I remember this, now, as Zeek struggles in my arms, anger and fear leaving his body in crimson spurts, and my smile dislocates my jaw.  Zeek with the shroud-eye, one eye glaucoma clouded, said it was his evil eye, said he could hex a body with a stare, cast a pestilence.  But, see, I knew better.  I knew it was Zeek’s dirty needles that killed the kids.  And the night collapses with primate shrieks as Zeek tries to lift his bloody gun and . . .

            Freeze.

            Too far.

            Backtrack.

            Once upon a time, Desdemona Mercer giggled in frustration and joy and chucked her astronomy text book off the roof we made love on.  She connected the dots and named the stars and when the winter wind came we folded in on one another, seeing how close we could get in my sleeping bag.  We spent hours seeing how close we could get.

            Now, I stare in the cracked mirror and I connect the track marks on my body, form constellations with them.  I name each one.  But then the memories cut too deep and I give up on the angry stars burning in a pale Milky Way of collapsed veins and I plunge the needle behind my eye and inject.  I count the bullets: one, two, three . . . and wonder how many good deeds it’ll take.

            I love you Dez.

            I slam the clip home.

            I miss you Dez.

            The little, vicious, mechanical conspiracy of a switchblade lurks in my pocket.

            I’m coming home Dez.

            I drop the syringe, close my eyes in prayer, and wait for the drug to take hold.  December wind slithers in through the cracks of boarded-up windows and thrills the pale, track-stared galaxy to goose bumps.  December wind has ghosts in it.  In the winds of December it’s easy to remember.

            Today is my birthday.

            Yesterday was my birthday.

            Tomorrow will be my birthday.

            When I feel the golden flash-fire burn from synapse to synapse, I smile.  Any fuckwit can shoot up heroin or PCP.  But creation . . . see, that’s art.  Desdemona said that if I applied myself more, I’d make a great artist, or chemist.  Desdemona once told me that medieval alchemists tried to turn led into gold and I know that the dealers dancing the alley shadows would kill to know how I transmogrify the chemicals and narcotics, spin caustic shit into gold, liquid fire.  But it’s my recipe, my cocktail, my alchemy.  My own.  I’ll never tell though the dealers would murder their mothers to know.

            I never knew my birth mother.  I was born in a heroin apartment, spat from a heroin womb, in my birth month of December.  Weeks went by before my mother’s mind cleared enough to take me to the hospital.  She couldn’t remember what day I was born.  The other orphans teased me, the boy with no birthday, told me I had no soul.

            And I lived under that assumption, strong and hollow, a predator in the jungle.  I swam through an ocean of chemicals, blood, and screams before I found Desdemona.  “Happy birthday, Gabriel,” she would say.  Everyone had always called me Gabe, but she called me Gabriel.  She said I was named after an archangel.

            “You have a soul, Gabriel,” she would say.

            “How do you know?” I’d say, tracing her tattoos with a forefinger.  Here her smile spelled mischief as she placed her eye on my bellybutton.

            “I can see it through here!”

            The memories cut too deep and I kick the mirror and millions of tiny me’s rain down onto the filthy floor.  I raise my gun, aim it at the luminous, broken angel, above.  I yell at him, tell him his boss is a bastard for what he did.  But I don’t pull the trigger.  The broken angel, busted and incomplete, is the last beautiful thing in here, the only remaining stained-glass window left, my only company, squatting in this burnt out church.  Desdemona wouldn’t break it.

            Desdemona celebrated my birthday every day during December.  She called it my birth month.  She ignored the fake date that social services had given me as a consolation prize for being shat into the world.  She gave me thirty-one birthdays when I had none.  That was her alchemy.  She could turn blackness into gold.

            With my cocktail burning in my brainpan, I leave the church.  With gift of my alchemy burning in my brainpan, I begin to time travel.  Suddenly, I’m blocks away from the old church.

            My vision bends in dream alchemy as lines fade away and colors bleed into one another, chromatic orgies of a melting wax world.  Desdemona liked to take me to museums.  Once she showed me a row of expressionist paintings.  My cocktail turns the street into an expressionist painting and it takes me a minute to recognize the street.  This is where I pushed my first dope.  The other kids played football and I was earning.  I don’t remember my first customers; they were younger than me.  I remember the cicadas screaming.  I felt sorry for them.  They spent decades getting ready, underground, earning their wings, whispering to each other, speculating what wonders they’d see above.  But, see, when the time came and they ascended, it was just to fuck and die.  They’d earned their wings just to fuck and die and they were screaming in chainsaw decibels at the unfairness of it all.

 

Drum Beats and the Second Coming of Buddy Holly

26 Tuesday Sep 2006

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I read, last night, at the Twilight Tales annual drum event.  Things went well.

 

The drummers (Richard Engling and Eric Cartier) did a really great job.  There were fewer people at this year’s event, I was told, than previous years and so we readers ended up reading several times.  I had only brought one poem, but managed to pull out some other works from my bag.  I did not have much poetry with me (and indeed I don’t write that much poetry) but luckily I have a lot of very short prose pieces and luckily much of my prose, delivered correctly, sounds like poetry.

 

READING WITH DRUMMERS IN THE BACKGROUND IS COOL!  See how excited I was just to mention it?  I spoke in all caps.

 

Everyone seemed to really like my stuff.  I read:

 

“Poe Goes to the Singles Bar” [my lewd use of “The Conqueror Worm” got a nice reaction]

“In Embryo”

“The Cook Book”

the Prologue to Souls Unsure

“Thorns”

 

I never would have thought to stick the Souls Unsure prologue with drums . . . but it really worked.  The drummers really got into it and I really got into it and that reading showed me that the pace of the piece really worked as I got really emotional reactions.  The drummer was still banging away when I finished saying, “Alright!  Man!  Man!  You are the man!  That was a gas.”  And then he made barking noises (which I’ll take as an omen of success).  When I sat down, I heard one of the people in the audience whisper, “Who’s going to want to have to follow that?”

 

Saying it felt good would be an understatement.

 

Nick and I talked with the drummers, who also run a theatre company, after the readings.  Nick got to find out various details on plays and auditions and I got told that my work has some great “cadence” and that I’m a very good reader.  One of the drummers, Rich, said that the sound of the piece (the prologue) was so good that he got lost with the actual narrative meaning because he got so into the rhythm of it.

 

T’was a good night.

 

A few nights ago I saw an independent short film called Six-String Samurai.  Awesome flick.  It was on my cousin’s On Demand (he had a list of various short films from some festival to watch).  The premise is wonderfully absurd (early in the cold war, Russia nuked the US turning it into a post apocalyptic nightmare and most of the country is ruled by the red army, but there is a free kingdom in Lost Vegas where Elvis was crowned king, and not, fourty years later the King is dead and every sword wielding, guitar playing samurai is headed for Vegaus to have a shot at getting crowned kin] but they just go with it and it works.  Basically, in this wasteland nightmare, musicians are also sword wielding warriors, both go hand in hand (which isn’t a concept that’s too-too crazy as it jives with the old notion of the Troubadour knights).  The ridiculous concept is great because it allows for some great images – the hero of the story (though it’s never explicitly said) is Buddy Holly . . . but Buddy Holly with a worn samurai sword, cracked glasses, tattered suit, and guitar strapped to his back, traveling the wastes to go to his “gig in Vegas” so he can compete to be king.  Any movie that allows a samurai Buddy Holly to fight hords of enemies (savages, a cannibal spoof of the “nuclear family”, killer bowlers, and Russians).  Buddy even fights Death himself, in the climax (which really becomes a struggle between dying classic rock and heavy metal).

 

I recommend this movie (if you can find it).

 

I went to a very dismal Sox game last week, but I did get to wear my new sports jersey.  I’ve never owned one before, but it seemed to suit me and, if you glance really fast, it could be mistaken for a Sox jersey.  Here are some pics, compliments of Torrie:

She Didn’t Like the Way I Said “Bitch”

22 Friday Sep 2006

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So I haven’t updated in a while.  I’ve been on the go.  Want some random memory snapshots?  Come along . . .

 

I’M GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!

Recently took a ten day Florida trip with the family.  All the siblings are now graduated, so we took this family outing before we all split off, and took advantage of this cheap Disney off-season deal (while all the other children are at school . . . mwahahahaaha!).

 

It was fun.

 

It was tiring.

 

I formed a nasty, exploding blister on both heels from using an untested pair of sandals.  I’m still healing/limping.

 

I heard Steve Irwin died while I was in the shower at my aunt and uncles place.  Later that day I snorkeled at a simulated reef at Disney’s Typhoon Lagoon where, years prior, I had almost stepped on a sting ray.

 

Nick complained about everyone thinking he looked like Johny Depp/Jack Sparrow.  My sympathies were lacking.  Guys that are told they look like Kevin Smith have little sympathy for guys who are told they look like Johny Depp.  Kevin Smith’s who go to Disney night clubs and stand next to Johny Depp’s receive little attention.

 

NOVEL CONTEST

No news yet.  Sorry.  Hopefully I’ll hear soon.  I’ve completely eaten my own finger nails and have started chewing on the nails of anyone that comes within reach (which gets me weird looks on the train and bus).  News as it develops . . . slowly.

 

AWARDS!

So I’ve visited Springfield the last two weeks for a writing class I’m taking with my old teacher (kind of a non-degree thing to keep me writing and to see some of my favorite writing group people).  I got to drop off coppies of my thesis (long overdue) to the rest of my committee members).

 

I also got to pick up my acting award from my director from last years Oedipus (incidentally, you can read a complaint about my “tasteless use of the word bitch” in a less than favorable review HERE – just scroll down to the bottom story).  I won the “Outstanding Theatre Student 2005-2006” award.  I thought it would be a standard plaque . . . but it’s pretty cool looking – a big chunk of glass – the kind of award you can commit a brutal murder with.

 

Speaking of awards, I got this forwarded to me:

 

Hi Jim,

 

I am nominating Josh Doetsch’s thesis, Souls Unsure, for the English Outstanding Thesis.  A published chapter of his thesis, “Teddy Bear Rex”, has already been nominated for an IL Council Award and for a Pushcart Award.

 

A copy of it is available in the English Office for all to enjoy!

 

Joys,

nanc

 

Nancy later talked to me (she’s teaching the class I’m in) and told me not to hold my breath, as fiction usually gets looked over by the more “important” topics.  But . . . she think maybe mine could go somewhere, break through.  If I win out in the English department, it goes on to the school, and in the unlikely event that I won out completely, I’d have to give an big, stuffy speech (I think maybe I’d just read the entire thing and yell at anyone who tried to sneak out after the 8th hour of reading).  I like nominations, they give some of the good feeling of getting an award, with none of the pressures.

 

Speaking of “Teddy Bear Rex.”  It was just published, again, in THE WRITERS BLOCK.

 

NO SLEEP FOR THE WICKED

Recent travel has cost me sleep.  I was up for 40 hours or so before I crashed at Torrie’s place on Wednesday night.  Thursday, awoke me from what I can deduce a very deep level of REM sleep as my motor skills were impaired and it took me awhile to arise from the couch and gather my things.

 

“Uh . . . it’s like my brain has a dial-up connection with my body . . . and I want DSL.”

 

GRANDMA ON LOVE LIFE

I heard that my Grandmother turned to my little sister and up and asked, “So, how’s your love life?”  This is only funny if you know my Grandmother.  These are not the kinds of words that leap out of her mouth, especially to the baby sibling of my family.

 

It made me think of my love life . . . or the rather, the empty space that now has a banner that reads “YOUR AD HERE” where a love life used to be.  I’ve been single for roughly . . . a hundred years now.  Mayhaps it’s time to seek dates.  I’m not sure I remember how or how much my social skills have atrophied – as lately, when I try and ask a girl for her number, it just comes out as me slapping the side of their head, waving my arms in the air and yelling “Junga!  Ju-junga!”

 

READING!!!  YOU’RE INVITED

Lately, I’ve visited a live reading/story group called TWILIGHT TALES, in Chicago (at the very cool, British style pub, THE RED LION).  This Monday, the 25th is an open mic reading, and a special one.  They have a drummer coming in to play improvised drums to go along with the open mic poetry.  I’m going to go read something of mine.  Anyone interested in attending?

 

[YOUR AD HERE]

That’s all for now.  I’m sleepy.  But you should know I’ve typed this entire entry while wearing a pair of green skeletal gloves I bought when I went to the all night Walgreens to get special bandages for my feet . . . but instead wandered down the Halloween isle.  It makes typing difficult, but entertains me greatly.

 

PAX

I heard the pinwheels laugh today

23 Wednesday Aug 2006

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Today I was at a funeral.  My cousin, Matt and his wife Sara-Anne’s baby died.  He was born premature, tiny, perfectly formed and developed, except for his lungs.  He lived for ten minutes, long enough to meet his family and for his father to baptize him.

 

The funeral was a little surreal.  There’s more to type and say on the matter, but I’ll save it for another time – right now it’s a jumble of images and sounds:  the tiny coffin, family members being there for each other and still able to spare a few smiles and laughs, the energetic chattering sound of all the pinwheels in the children’s section of the cemetery…

 

Breathe in.

 

And breathe in.

 

And the living go on living and I’ll change to a happier track and a boisterous example of living.  Here are more of the pics from the Slip ‘N Slide party – picking up where we left off LAST TIME.

Brave slip n’ sliders gather in the dim . . .

Ken and Nick battle down the slide with Steve speeding from behind.

Byar!  Thar be a pirate wench!

Imbibe enough rum and a slip n’ slide party becomes a surrealist painting…



This sport was ment to be by torchlight.

SAFE!!!

Uh . . . are my eyes glowing there?

This was taken just after I crashed into the brush and literally ate dirt.

Same picture as above . . . but in ZOMBIE-VISION.


“Second star to the right and straight on till . . . OW!  I’ve got a twig up my ass!  Fuck!!!”




Slip n’ Slide parties are a tribal affair.

Sliders face the hazzard of sliding past the slide and into mud and brush and pain.


Nick jams on a guitar, apparently on another plane of existence.

Dori looks on, rather majestically.

No stairway.  Denied.



AND NOW . . . the morning after . . .








Happiness is not knowing where you’ll be the next day

17 Thursday Aug 2006

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Lot’s to tell . . .

 

SLIP ‘N SLIDE PARTY

 

The slip n’ slide party went swimmingly.  Fun was had by all.  We all had cuts and bruises and cuts on our bruises and bruises in fourth dimensional places that cannot be seen by mere man (though Rod Serling may have been able to).


“Submitted for your consideration . . . a couple of brothers dressed as pirates.  Bedeviled by a brown-locked beauty, they allow themselves to be subjected to copious applications of eyeliner and fall, head first . . . . into The Androgynous Pirate Zone . . .

“I’m Rod Serling . . . and if I could, I would make physical love to my own voice.  I mean it.  I would fornicate madly with my voice box.  Hearing myself talk, just a syllable, causes an instant and irrevocable erection.  In fact, the entire run of The Twilight Zone is just one long orgy between me and my voice, nestled between gremlins and ghosts and time warps . . . and occasionally William Shatner was there.”


By the bye, pictures of the party are posted at the end of this transmission.  The party went late (as they do).  We all drank a lot (nobody got sick) and we did a lot of late night sliding.  My Dad provided some impossible feats of card manipulation . . . and we had at least four kinds of rum flowing.  One thing I did learn in the experience . . . I liked having eyeliner on, maybe a little too much.

TWILIGHT ZONE TO TWILIGHT TALES

 

The Monday before last, I went to an open mic reading of the TWILIGHT TALES group (a writing/publishing group of strange and macabre tales that does readings and events, every Monday, at the RED LION PUB).  I read “Teddy Bear Rex.”  Everyone seemed to like it – some very enthusiastically so.  I think it’s a good crowd for my stuff and plan on making that an every Monday kind of a thing (the beer garden has a nice atmosphere).  Chicagoland folk should come on down too.

 

“Teddy Bear Rex,” by the bye, will see its second printing (my babies grow up so fast) in Springfield’s The Writers Block (which the lovely SUZY introduced me to).

THE GODFATHER, THE GEEKS, AND THE GROSS DEMENTIA

 

“What is going on with the WHITE WOLF CONTEST?” I keep getting asked.  Let me tell you of my weekend . . .

 

Last week, I visited GENENDA, (who is now about to begin her career as a full time teacher, give her a wish of luck) down in Southern IL – brining various odds and ends and furnishings, taking up space in our garage, to help fill out her new apartment.

 

Thursday, I get an email from my editor/contest coordinator at White Wolf telling me that the contest is taking longer than expected (I can understand that . . . with five full novels to judge) and that it will hopefully be decided on soon.  He also invited us finalists to stop on by the White Wolf booth at GEN-CON (a gaming convention in Indianapolis) and say hi, if we happened to be there.  He said he’d even score us some tickets to the White Wolf party on Saturday night.

 

Happen to be there?  I hadn’t planned on it.  I’d driven from Northern IL to Southern IL with plans to be in Central IL come the weekend for my soon-to-be Goddaughter’s baptism.  But here was an opportunity to go over the flesh-press-face-to-face rituals and put faces to tames with heads of a company of possible employment . . . and publishing.

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, one aspect of happiness, for me, is NOT KNOWING WHERE I’LL BE TOMORROW.

 

So . . . I made a bee-line to Indianapolis on Friday night.  In the AM hours of Staturday, I tracked down some fellow game-geek friends (you can count of a few people you know being at this thing) and snagged a space to sleep on the floor of the room of the most hospitable, most loyal, KEN.

 

I slept a couple of hours.  I rose.  I caffeinated.  I entered Gen-Con.  There was much of the strange, much of the bizarre, something of the wonderful . . . and not a little of that which might cause others to proclaim, “Geeky.”  Mustering a lucid moment of consciousness, I met with my would-be editor (fingers crossed) at the White Wolf booth.  We talked a bit.  He gave me the ticket to the party.

 

I spent the rest of the day, in various stages of consciousness – seeing the sights and collecting as many company business cards as I could (I figure I might as well start submitting writing samples and look for work).

 

Night fell.  My brother drove all the way down to bring me newly printed business cards, writing samples, and magic tricks (you never know . . . and they make the ultimate ice breakers).  So we entered the club.

 

The club, if I remember was called Club Industry or the Industry Club.  It looked like something a vampire would walk into . . . or the last fight of the Highlander would happen in – all bent, black steel and giant, industrial fans and girls dancing in cages.  You know that scene in the beginning of Blade, right before the blood rains down from the sprinklers?  Yeah . . . In fact, the DJ played the techno music from that scene . . .

 

Different party, different time . . . but here’s a couple of pics from one of White Wolf’s parties in the same place.  You get the idea.


Nick and I talked again, with my gracious White Wolf contact, Stewart Wieck.  We got to talk about some of what has just been released by the company, including my one purchase at the Con:  PROMETHEAN.

Afterward, we met up with some friends at the Con and ran into a friend I’ve known since grade school, but haven’t seen or heard from in five years.

 

Right.  Back to my place on the floor.  I slept another two hours.  Woke up to a horrid battery acid burn that started in my stomach and ran up my throat (I think all the ingested caffeine had destroyed my stomach and caused some kind of acid reflux nastiness).

 

I drove to Central IL.  I really shouldn’t have been behind the wheel.  Normal thoughts were hard.  I haulucinated a couple of times.  But I did make it, just in time.  I changed into a suit in the bathroom of a Catholic church, went into mass, and, after that, participated in the baptism of my adorable Goddaughter, Reese Nicole Glass.


So, by weekend’s end, I was a Godfather.  I’m very excited – even more so than I expected to be (and I expected to be).  After all, it’s not just an important, milestone obligation and responsibility . . . it’s also a fantastic excuse to go trick or treating in the not too distant future.  After the ceremony, I talked with Jearmie’s Dad a bit, as well as the rest of the family . . . then I passed out on their couch for . . . I have no idea how long/short.  Then I drove back home.

 

Sunday night, I slept for 13 straight hours.

 

AND NOW, without further preamble, here are the promised pics from the Slip N’ Slide Party.

To start out with  . . . I think this should be a Captain Morgan Ad.

Everyone’s got it wrong – Blonds + Brunettes are more fun.

And here we have my prized rum tray/display.  Complete with copious varieties of rum, other libations, a pirate hook and my very own skull/spinal beer bong (we call him Byron).

And a quick rum check before th eparty starts . . .

We tried to recruit Skippy into the pirate crew . . . but he was reluctant.

Nick, the pirate.

And Joshua the pirate (er . . . me).

Genenda plays with my snake (it should be dually noted that I, an English Master, have yet to find a way to converse about Lenore, the snake, without it sounding dirty . . . so why struggle).


Pirate sandwich anyone???

A little tribal idol overlooks the proceedings.

Oh beware the artificial parrot in the light-up palm tree, for he has shifty eyes.

A Still Life of Steve and Beer

“Josh, do you ever go in front of a camera with a normal face?”
“Does Superman ever go into battle with a necklace of Kryptonite around his neck?”

At last, night falls, and the gathering revelers, fueled by fiery libations of rum and the mysterious concoction that Nick calls Pirate Punch . . . are ready for the sliding to commence!

Nick inspects the slide.

The slide, in all of its torch-lit glory (our largest one to date).

“Calling all Slip-n-Sliders!”

The scene of the crime.

And they’re off!!!

Nick and Steve decide, for science, to suit up and try taking a raft, with oars, down the slide (alcohol convinces them that this is a good idea).

And where did the night go from here?  Tune in next post, for the second half of the party pics.  See what horrible fate befell me.  See what everyone looks like waking up the next day.  See where Nick woke up . . .