Rev. Edward Morris' Old-Time Gnostic Gospel Hour

Upcoming Events

2012-03-07T10:00:00.004-08:00

"I think it's time for the Shadow to make a social call..." :)
Monday, March 26: Michael Gira from the Swans performs solo at Mississippi Studios.I am FRONT AND CENTER, thanks to the Martian Ghost Doctor, aka Durtro James, my friend, patron ...and greatest character model of all time.

Wednesday, March 28: Verse in Person Poetry Series.Northwest Library, NW 23rd and Thurman. 7-8 p.m. Features Toni Partington from Voice Catcher and Vancouver readings, and Lisa Wible, beloved of the Mojo Cafe readings. And eighteen minutes of fire sermons from here at the Drive-Thru Tabernacle of Living Glyph, starting with "Howl", a paradoxically-labeled homage to Bob Kaufman and a brother Willamette Valley Sorcerer in the belly of the Beast.

Friday, April 13: Stone Soup Reading Series. Marino Adriatic Cafe, SE 41st and Division, Portland. I am featured reader. My fellow readers will be Curtis White-Carroll,seasoned Portland poet who spearheads these reads; and my housemate and great friend Adam Cedar:Slam poet,rapper,mystic and absolute *trouper* of the open mic scene around here. Time TBA, watch this space.

May 27... Good grief...

2012-02-23T13:08:00.005-08:00

I just looked at when the last time was that I had posted. Roughly three months into the death knell of a relationship to which I will not render any more free publicity. Two stories, "The Unfinished" (magical realism, 'Jimbo Story'...from my idea mill and hetero life mate Jim Willig...) and "Send Me The Pillow That You Dream On" (slasher fic in the mode of Trent Zelazny) will deal with it.

But it made me realize how good it is to be back in the human race, with all its joys and terrors, all its nosedives and incredible aerobatic maneuvers and occasionally calm and cloudless skies. How much it beats what I just left. How amazing it all is.

There are a few things to catch up on. I was nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Prize In Literature, for this: I laughed. I cried. The Pushcart. For my Hart Crane alternate-history story, where I gave that poor creature Stephen King's Word Processor of the Gods. <3 <3 <3 <3 In small ways, those moments are what my hero Maurice Sendak calls "bringing the Lindbergh baby back alive."

My first collection of published short fiction,SHOCK THEATRE is out in the small press, from a big name... BLACKGUARD: FATHERS AND SONS also. That one is in the public libraries. As far as I know, I am the first of my noble and quite blue line to have a book in the library, and I salute every member of my family who lifted me there.

It was funny: Multnomah County Library called me for my biography, and I was like, "I sorted out that twenty bucks with you at Belmont Branch!" :)

Many other incidental bits of publication news and Portland literary peripateria to come. Just can't believe how long I let this thing lapse.

Stagnate THIS, Nurse Rachet.Ain't heard no bell yet...

2012-02-22T18:49:00.004-08:00

Would like to apologize to readers of this blog, and people I've recommended it to, for not posting in so long. You haven't really met me yet. Just walked away from a great personal tragedy, and am taking great pleasure in rejoining the human race. May the deity of your choice, or lack thereof, bless you for tuning into the still-meteoric ride I am taking with these words. I could not do any of it without the wonderful people who read them. CHEERS.

Willamette Valley Sorcerers Writing Group has gone viral :D

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

INTERVIEW WITH JESS GULBRANSON HERE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few words:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BILL

Your Pop gonna take you to see the South Pole?

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

CLARK

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

BILL

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

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

DR. DERLETH

Who are the new people?

BILL

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

DR. DERLETH

What people?

BILL's dead eyes fall on HOWIE again.

BILL

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

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

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

BLACKGUARD, BOOK 1: OUT here

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

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

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

New story: SWEETHEART OF SEGUNDUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New story "Gregor" out now!

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

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

Reports Of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

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

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

HARLAN ELLISON(tm)

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

AT MADCON, AN AILING HARLAN ELLISON WILL SAY GOODBYE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That... and one other thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Zombie Erotica Story

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

RIGOR AMORTIS, anthology; "I Fall To Pieces"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Rejection Letter"

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

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

THE WORLDS OF PHILIP JOSE FARMER: LIMITED EDITION ANTHOLOGY

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

GET EM WHILE THEY'RE HOT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holocaust Story, redux

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

"Deep Down Trauma Hounds"

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

Due out: WAR OF THE WORLDS: FRONTLINES

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

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

Starseeded

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

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

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

                                                           by Edward Morris

10/08/1871

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

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

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

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

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

A Blurb From House Zelazny...

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

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

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

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

COYOTECON 1 (click the text)

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

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

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE FOR EDWARD MORRIS

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

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

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

I Was A Teenage Zombie

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

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

GRADUATION

by edward morris

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

People say some strange things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck. Makes my heart pound to even remember.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then,

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

SCHOOL NURSE

#
2.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

JOHN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

All right, I guess it was.
#
YETZI

Diary,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glowing Review

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

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

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

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

WAR OF THE WORLDS: FRONTLINES

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

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

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

The Hits Just Keep On Comin'...

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

TALES OF WORLD WAR Z
"DEAD AIR"

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

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

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

.

“Stairway to Heaven” by Lou Antonelli and Edward Morris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zombies and Martians and Collections, O My...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current projects:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Parents Just Lost Their House

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

NEWS ARTICLE ABOUT IT HERE (click the link)

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

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

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

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN, BOOK 1
BY EDWARD MORRIS

GET IT WHILE IT'S HOT
WHILE YOU STILL CAN

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN #1 READING/SIGNING

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

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

What:(clears throat, pops mic)

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

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

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

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

News From The Front

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to work. More to come.

Death In The Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GO EAST, YOUNG MAN, GO EAST*

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

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

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

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

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

BLURB FROM RICHARD LUPOFF

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

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

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

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

---Richard A. Lupoff

Author of Visions, Dreams, and The Emerald Cat Killer

ESCAPE POD 193: Props From Mike Resnick

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

Free ad for this blog, courtesy of a Hugo nominee

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

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

'Lotophagi' in FARRAGO'S WAINSCOT #11

2009-07-01T12:30:00.001-07:00

http://www.farragoswainscot.com/
Issue #11 is up

Just returned from the woods outside Salem, OR, and SOAK, the Portland regional Burning Man festival. My face and back are so sunburned I am amazed to not be peeling.

SOAK's gonna be hard to write about. I want to keep most of it for now. It was a joyous peeling back of our neurotic civilization, of the kind I had not experienced in some time.

People _can_ live like that. People _can_ be decent and civil to each other and focus on the extraordinary instead of the bottom line. And anyone who tells me differently can, quite frankly, DIAF because I'm so tired of your shit after seeing behind it that I'd like to burn the whole facade.

I worked the gate for one shift, read people's cards, talked to them, listened to their stories and watched the Little Man burn down to ash that folks still tended the next morning... at which point people I had never met before in my life would come up to me with a word of thanks, a smile, or simply a look in their eyes that said they remembered what we talked about and weren't soon going to forget.

The best part about events like that is that they ARE temporary, like Buddhist sand-paintings that the monks blow away when it's time. The idea is to make every day a sand-painting.

The idea is to make more...

TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BEAST, Arkham Tales #3

2009-05-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

ARKHAM TALES # 3 NOW UP http://www.arkhamtales.com/download/5/

There Was A Crooked Man: Book I : In The Bag, No Thanks To...

2009-04-29T15:13:00.001-07:00

Why is it that the best and worst things always happen butted up back to back?

The Crooked Man series has just found a home at Mercury Retrograde Press,

Stoked as hell about this, don't get me wrong. Wanted to announce it immediately.

Now that the dust has settled on a whirlwind that my balky precognition saw coming Just Soon Enough to Not Know What Was Wrong, I can say that I just vetted and signed a nine-book deal on a series that I started when I was eleven.

Eleven. A year I had a very odd paranormal experience I've never really shared with anyone because I don't fully understand it. Pierre L'Enfant and Jane Lindskold might. Maybe a few more. It was in DC, in 1987. For precedent, the closest thing I can recommend is the birthday party scene in Dante Alighieri's 'La Vita Nuova'. Ya had to be there.

But that germ of a dream, and several that came after it, as we scribes and visionaries came up and came together in the wilderness, all of us mutant oracles with hitchhiker's thumbs and head wounds and alcohol-induced telepathy...

I got it all. I photographed it. As I just told an old friend from Altoona, this series needed to be written for three hundred years. I only did it in 22.

I've been through Hell and out the back upside down to tell this thing, and I can't tell you what a relief it is to craft the final versions of each cartridge in this little atomic-powered Giger babymachine.

Can't say enough about this series fast enough, not like I haven't tried before. I just lost what looked like a plum gig, writing a publisher's memoirs. I should be very sad right now.

However, now that the dust has settled, all I can feel is liberation and relief. My soul is not worth what that skinflint paid, whether I am wearing a guard uniform or an ugly black polyester bouncer shirt, or even working at home for a megalomaniac who fucked up his kids.

I don't know how they find me. Word to the wise, you writers: If you go free-lance as an editor, and some old fart shows up on your doorstep with a box of journals and a One Right Way to make them into The Great American Memoir...

Like I said, this has happened twice, so I can say with some authority:

As soon as he makes his pitch, look the old bastard in the eye. Pick up the claw hammer you have sitting on the coffee table. Whack yourself in the head with it several times. Then run screaming in the opposite direction.

While this may look like a circuitous route, and a painful one, it will be much less so in both cases than any continued negotiation with this species of Closet Human. (tm) Fooled me once, shame on you.

Fooled me twice... and I just hooked two new clients, sold my African-Atlantaean mermaid yarn 'By The Rivers Of Babylon', and found that the latter-day Medici Prince I was working for was the one thing I didn't need to keep going at this.

We let people get the better of us. You do it too. All the time. We let some bullying asshole figure out enough about how we work that they can use their animal cunning to whip your back bloody and push you into total breakdown just to get maximum output.

As Chaucer tells us, therefore behooveth him a very long spoon who shall eat with a fiend. Fire your boss, kiddies, no matter what kind of pleasing face they put on. It's a mask, and underneath the face is always the same.

My dear Serena Blossom ( whom this schmuck disrespected in my own house, in the most vulgar terms he could) told me that I was ranting in my sleep, once, about everyone doing what they wanted to do... and then society would have to change.

Doing what you Want... not what you think you want... sometimes includes abandoning what looks like the Easier Softer Way if you can keep a single shred of dignity, or at least enough to recognize what a carny hyp looks like when someone's blowing it up your ass.

Weird week last week. Maybe this one will be better. We have nothing to lose but our megalomaniacs. I am 144 pages into Crooked Man 2: Birth Of A Nation. The hits just keep on comin'...

2009 Rhysling Nomination, and Crooked Man series finds a home

2009-03-14T22:56:00.000-07:00

I am one of many nominees for the 2009 Rhysling Award.

This is the sound of the goofystick still orbiting the earth just after it clocked me.

Also, the Crooked Man series (which I babble about on here all the time, been developing it since age 11) has just found a tentative home at a fairly big-deal publisher of "Transgressionist literature." The editor's from Philly, and writes similar material her own bad self. She said, of this series so far,

"If Aleister Crowley ever got over himself and started writing horror, this is what it would sound like."

That cracked me up to no end. I had cast Crowley as a horror author in the alternate 1940's of "Supernaut" (an as-yet-unsold tale of Wilhelm Reich's contributions to the field of psychedelic research.) But being compared to him...

Aw, hell, I see where she gets it. There Was A Crooked Man, and all the books that come after it, look some very difficult things full in the face.Crowley said that when you go after a god, you have to go all the way... madness included.

I will posts links to the work as soon as they become available, knock on wood. My latest big contract has been devouring most of my time, but the news of the Rhysling, and the Crooked Man finding a home, dangle like shiny carrots at the end of the editorial whackin' stick. I will take my wounds from it gladly. I've been working up to this for a while.

"The Weapons Shop" in 'Featured Stories', SpecFicWorld.com

2009-01-21T08:08:00.000-08:00

http://specficworld.com/fiction/DVSHORT.aspx?Id=41

In my own reading, Spider Robinson was the first SF writer to point out the particle-beam weapons system that Nikola Tesla tried to sell to both FDR and British Prime Minister Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. One huge Spider fan I know is CBS radio's own Big Jim.

Jim advanced the idea you are about to see. I find it truly horrifying in a way... but in a way, I kind of wish it would happen.

I wrote a lot of cynical things during the Bush Administration. I was sure it was Game Over. Game On passes strange, many times, but the winds have begun to blow hard out here. Hopefully, I too can get a job picking up the downed branches from the storm of the previous regime. Or at least mucking biofuel someplace.

In any case, "The Weapons Shop" was inspired by a great painting by Kenn Brown (http://www.mondolithicstudios.com .) Kenn told me he titled the painting, in turn, from A.E. van Vogt's SF chestnut 'The Weapons Shops of Ishtar."

Completely off-topic, but I finally get to nod three hands away at that old Dutch master, whose story "The Enchanted Village" was the best damn piece of SF I was ever exposed to in elementary school, period, with the exception of "Night of the Cooters"...

Anyway, enjoy. More on the way. ---ed/

HP Lovecraft Film Festival 2008

2008-10-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

The footage and stills are trickling in all over the Web, and I've blogged about the HP Lovecraft Film Festival at the old Hollywood Theatre in Portland many other places.

I didn't bring a camera. It wasn't that kind of party. The truest parts of the weekend couldn't be photographed, or maybe shouldn't be. I took thousands of rolls with what Peter Murphy wisely called the miniature secret camera.

Like Richard Lupoff taking the bullet at the first Authors' Read, delivering the Arizona-fried "Petroglyphs" with such panache that I could see Dick's soul twinkling out, the soul of a witchy-eyed boy holding up a flashlight to his Kafkaesque face and telling tall tales around the campfire. Lupoff's read alone was worth the wait.

It was a blowout. Everywhere. There was the usual amount of 'convention head' and bad drama behind the scenes. But no one stayed focused on that. Hell, even I couldn't keep my claws out for long. If I live to be a hundred and eighty six, I will never forget rehearsing 'Jihad Over Innsmouth' in the green room on Sunday, then going up and blowing the room away.

I don't make statements like that unless I can back them up. Two heads I didn't know came up and asked me to repeat my name a few times after I read. Laird Barron, Michael Shea and the inimitable Stan Sargent came up and thanked me profusely afterward. Barron called the 'Jihad' excerpt, "Wonderful writing."

That round of applause, and the comments from the pros, were the best thirty-third birthday present I could ever get, bar none.

Laird Barron's short story 'The Imago Sequence' is tied for first in my personal experience with Jeff VanderMeer's 'The Cage' as the scariest thing I've ever read in my life. Michael Shea is a warm-hearted poet who got Lovecraft's iamb right, which made me pay attention immediately (difficult to do in both cases.) And Stan... Everybody (with one exception who wasn't a guest,) was very personable and approachable, but Stan and I are brothers from another mother. For a full list of attendees, see the earlier link. As stated, everyone was way cool and a joy to be around.

I got to sit on three panels, too; "Lovecraft in Pop Culture" with Jovanka Vukovic from Rue Morgue , "Authors vs. Filmmakers" (a technical rant 'n reel session about translating Mythos stuff to film and paper), and a panel introducing "The Blair Witch Project" with director Aaron Vanek, and screenwriter Julia Fair, one head of the team that wrote 'Blair Witch' and 'Curse of the Blair Witch' on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Heady stuff. I spent most of the weekend charging around on this natural adrenalin kick. After many years as an ex-pat in the City of Roses, I finally made it to one of those. Ken Scholes saw to it that I got invited, one more reason why he gets a shrine.

Still a bit knackered from all that, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I'll be at ScratchPdx next, then Orycon. I feel like I'm on some kind of weird reading tour. BRING IT...

Troll Repellent

2008-09-28T13:52:00.001-07:00

Urrgh. Urrgh. Never want to blog again. I've had one troll for several years without realizing it, and the other troll has just been given a cease-and-desist order. Troll #1 just found out what happens when you snoop around in the life of someone you've denied visitation of their child to for eight years. (My novel 'Blood of Eden' was sitting there waiting in the earth like a land mine for that precise day. ) FAIL.

Troll #2 likes to tape-record everything like Tricky Dick and then claim that the Constitution protects this as a right somewhere. Last I heard, Jefferson didn't write the Declaration by dictaphone. The necessary and proper clause of the Constitution guarantees to the states all powers not specifically addressed. In the state of Oregon, recording without consent is legal only if you are an officer of the court recording a conversation you are not involved in, where one of the parties consents.

This psycho does it with EVERYBODY, and has proven in that and so many other ways to be twice as crazy as the people he was 'writing' about in his little crime novel he's sat on for thirty years while he fires editors one after the other. (I say'writing' advisedly. He couldn't write a men's room wall. ) FAIL.

I always find the fun ones. Someone find me that baseball bat.

On the bright side, I will be rolling up my sleeves and pitching in at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. We've got some heavy hitters rolling in from the nearly nameless nightmare countries toward the top of the world, folks.

Mike Mignola (just saw 'Hellboy II' at the Bagdad last weekend and my head's still ringing.)

Laird Barron (whose story 'The Imago Sequence' is tied for first place in my own mind with Jeff VanderMeer's 'The Cage' as the finest horror story I've read in twenty years.)

Richard Lupoff (One of the most twisted alternate-history minds New England has ever produced, whose psychedelic interpretation of Lovecraft's works is rivaled only by the late Robert Anton Wilson.)

Brian Lumley (the man who invented the word 'Necroscope', a true class act who wrote me my first, and best ever, rejection letter when I was all of eight years old)

Stanley Sargent (Wait... who the fuck... How did he get in this blog? SECURITY!?!??!!)

All these folks, and many more, will be in attendance. On Saturday night, as it stands now, I am introducing 'The Blair Witch Project' with a very short thumbnail sketch of its connections to the Lovecraftian genre. (You'd be surprised... especially at the Karl Edward Wagner story "Sticks"...)

Sunday night, I get to read a Lovecraft-inspired short called 'The Cat Inside' that I wrote about some of my favorite Lovecraftian unknowns: alcoholism, the incomprehensible feline species, alienation and possession. I will keep this one short, but plan on blogging from the event as things unfold. Crack KUFO suicide squad Cort & Fatboy may be on hand for carnage control as well.

On October 18, I will be reading a story that only Mike "Gutterball" Gardner at Burnside Represent has had the balls to publish. "Leaning Toward This Machine" examines the curious lull in Charles Bukowski's life-cycle as a writer after he first moved to Los Angeles.

Genius is a funny, fluid thing. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Bukowski had his finger on something. I pointed that finger east instead of West, to New York instead of Los Angeles. Toward a group of hard-drinking, chain-smoking fiends where he would have fit right in: Gernsback's wriggling bastard brood of Post-WWII science fiction writers.

Sure, Buk would have balked at first, but stories like his "The Devil Was Hot" are entirely speculative in nature. Just get him drunk enough first, and...

And America looks passing strange. Scratch Pdx have invited me to read this one again, which I haven't since the old Diet Soap reads at the former Red & Black Cafe.

Must go get back to work. I thought being entirely freelance would be nothing but an endless sea of B-movies and bong hits. Very sadly mistaken there, but I still wouldn't trade it. Stay Tuned...

Pseudopod 106

2008-09-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

Pseudopod 106
"Jihad Over Innsmouth"

Woot!

Just went freelance as an editor two nights ago.

"Best part about it is... I DON'T HAVE A BOSS."

---Bill Hicks, 'Relentless'

Oddlands: You Filthy, Filthy People...

2008-09-01T20:15:00.000-07:00

...for publishing my Trent Zelazny tribute, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee", here

Trent's story "The Day The Leash Gave Way" is a ground-breaking exercise in splatterpunk, psychological fiction and just plain Lansdale-esque fun. It made me cringe. I had to write one like that, just to see if I could stand in the shadow of this warm-hearted human being and cold-blooded horrormeister who does his Dad proud.

The actual transsexual featured in this story is much more willing than his fictional counterpart. S/he does what s/he likes. S/he and the 'fiancee' are both happy with the arrangement, just...

Damn. Dayom. That's all I have to say about the things that go on in my neighborhood. It's like Patrick McCabe and H.P. Lovecraft wrote Felony Flats when they were bored one day and called Irvine Welsh in to put on a rubber gimp suit and fetch them nitrous and cocktails. I don't make the news, kids. I just report it.

The title, of course, came from Ani diFranco and her great line:"My country 'tis of thee to take swings at each other on national TV..." I used to live for watching 'Jerry Springer' when I was a Fire Guard at the Grove Hotel, simply because it was the most entertaining thing that happened all day if Dog Lady up on 3 didn't start throwing a wingding and there were no fights to break up.

When I read of Mr. Springer's political history, some truly nasty possibilities for alt-hist began to suggest themselves. Add in Ani, the tranny and Trent. Stir.

Anyway, yeah, this one came from a dark place, and there are plenty more on the way like it. Aeon#16 features another Grove tale, the shuddery little 'Rejection Letter', a tribute to an editor further back in the canon than either Zelazny, and his postulated take on the world around us now.

Must go grab a couple episodes of 'Dr. Who' for fuel. I have another long night of writing ahead of me, and a long day of weirder things ahead. Stay Tuned, True Believers. I have not yet begun to distribute filth like MCTOT en masse... (Fiendish cackle, fades out to John Waters organ music...)

Murky Depths #3 is out

2008-03-05T09:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.murkydepths.com

They have a MySpace slideshow in there of Wayne Blackhurst creating the splash page for my Philadelphia demon story "Nine-Tenths of the Law." Glad that one's up, that's another one that took a pound of flesh to get right.

Hung out with Ken Scholes yesterday at the Delta and talked shop into the evening. The man just got blurbed by Orson Scott Card, and Card's reaction was something like, "Give me more! Now! Yesterday! Why aren't all five of these books done?" Damn.

Anyway. Eleven stories went out last night, and new ones ready to ship pretty soon. I have about thirty first drafts, thirty ready to become first drafts, and fifty raw ideas that are just a para or two. Then another fifty that are just a line or two. I've got them lined up and ready to be assembled. Moo hoo haa haaaa.

"Heartbreak Hotel", Portland Tribune, 01/23/08

2008-01-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=120095288471721800

Ha.
Ha.
Ha.

He got a lot of things wrong, but he got the important details right. That person "walking the hall every hour" every half hour, actually... was myself or any one of a revolving cast of others. I did five months there voluntarily.

It only took the City of Portland twenty fucking years to get around to doing anything like what they mention that article, and if there weren't such a big flap with "urban renewal" (since that's what they're calling Gentrification these days) this City would have let those people drown in their own filth the way Hasson was letting them since 1970. Everyone up and down the chain in the whole debate that this article describes is so full of shit it made me sick to be wearing any kind of public safety uniform and taking orders from any of them.

"Dog Lady, to me, is a living node of City Politics, avatar of The Way Things Actually Work, though she'd never admit to that in a court of law. .. Atlas Escher's motto is, 'If they don't like it, they can move... If this hotel is a clock, Atlas and Dog Lady are the hands, circling each other with knives even as the mechanism grinds to a halt. ...If you live at the Last Chance, your family has restraining orders against you adn you've been evicted everywhere else..."

---from Firewatch, out soon...

GENTRIFICATION by Edward Morris (c)2008 All Rights Reserved

Don't follow us, this time.

From sea to shining sea, the country now a dream
Of hip squalor reborn as million-dollar condos, rings
on white, blighted trees, block after block, district,
city, state, Potemkin villages virally replicating as
the radiation from Walt Disney's frozen corpse
sterilizes the whole world to look like Anaheim.

Don't follow us, this time.

No one will miss these buildings when they're blown flat,
when the crazed jihadis your leaders hire to thin the herd
get a big one off again behind your gates. You've Starbuck'd
all the others. Keep your leaders' half-assed stabs at Space.

I ran up here from San Fran to escape your waste.
The Elders have me guarding our launch site now
With a gun bigger than any I've ever seen.

At my back, our wormdrive Kulkulcan points a middle finger at the dawn stars.

Turn
that goddamn Escalade around
before I power up
the big loop of wire and spare parts that will render
[every gadget you play with while driving ]
into a useless white-noise generator;
you'll gasp on the pavement, buck, convulse,
turn blue.

Don't follow us this time.

Look out on your pristine streets and inbreed,
Eloi. Remember when you tripled our rent and
kicked us out?

Remember?

Well, it's kind of like that.

Do what you want with the place.

Complaints will be answered in the order received.
In the meaningtime, this is our land you're on.
See the deed? Read. Weep. Turn back.
Have a nice day.

G'way.

Ulp...

2008-01-16T14:58:00.000-08:00

Just got my old job back. In between, I am holding in my hand Tiny Terrors 2, a Hadesgate anthology of horror that features my sf-horror Crooked Man Universe story 'Courtesy Call'. This is the second Crooked Man story to see print, the first being 'Game Over.' This is also the first time my work has ever been in an honest-to-goodness print anthology. Period. Party over here.

And... Details are sketchy at best, but it appears I have sold a poem to Helix SF. We're trying to get film crews on the ground for visual confirmation, will return after...

(Cut to commercial, William S. Burroughs in an apron with a bottle of Palmolive, about to say something...)

'Tiny Terrors #2' Anthology Release Date: The Hits Just Keep On Comin'

2007-07-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.hadesgate.co.uk

Tiny Terrors #2, HadesGate Publications' second horror anthology, will be out on November 24, featuring my telemarketing boiler-room horror story 'Courtesy Call.' This anthology has been officially endorsed by no less a giant in the horror field (love him or hate him ) than Dean R. Koontz!

'Courtesy Call' is also a Crooked Man story. For those of you other than the four or five out there who actually know what that means... 'There Was A Crooked Man' is a series I started when I was eleven and just finished the first arc of last year. One side project I attempted a while ago was to take all the principal characters and give them their own story apart from the main plot. The heroine of the Crooked Man books, Maura Mallory, gets 'Courtesy Call'; an alternate future for her, where she and her boyfriend are expecting twins and she has to take one of those interim jobs we all know and hate.

But the boiler room telemarketing firm she chooses is much more than meets the eye. Callers who do exceedingly well are taken to a special room in the basement, and...

But, as Lovecraft says, I dare not speak of that yet. Tiny Terrors #2 is full of such auguries, oddities and just plain old Whiskey Tango Foxtrot... I will re-post this in November, but just wanted to add it on top of the Atlantis release and the fact that Blood of Eden has gone into final edits today as well. I swear, if I had a job right now I'd be pissed. As it is, I'm just trying to plow the road... ;-)

Atlantis: 1999 released.

2007-07-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/PublisherDetails.asp?PublisherID=3011

"Imagine Steinbeck possessed by the spirits of T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner living in San Francisco in 1999.

Now give him a pen.

Morris has written The Grapes of Wrath for a new generation. This slipstream beat poem in prose chronicles the lives of a young couple starting out in the wrong place, at the wrong time, without enough money.

Reading it is like riding Atlantis back into the sea."

Me and the 12 handlers for my swelled head are now off to go pick up paychecks, run errands and bug the hell out of local bookstores. Cheers.

MySpace blog archive

2007-07-15T11:03:00.001-07:00

(*Note: Just transferred all my old Myspace blogs, such as they are. These are mildly amusing and slightly edited. Here's Jim with the weather...)

Sunday, July 08, 2007

The Wind Blew, and the Shit Flew, And Up From the Trenches Came the Whole Damn Crew...

Current mood: creative

I'm a little emotional right now, y'all. I just worked graveyard for the first time since I was a bouncer, which was three years ago. The hours in and of themselves didn't do this. Despite the sleep-dep hallucinations, I ate like a king and took very good care of myself the whole shift.
However... When I'm not pissing off reviewers, extrapolating about alien cult leaders or playing with my garden, I am a medical caregiver at a local Alzheimer's facility. This is the third day I've had working with this population (frail elders with Alzheimer's, rather than non-verbal profound MR/DD folks in wheelchairs like the last job.)

Last night, I spent much longer than I expected to sitting up with an octogenarian ex-Marine Aviation Corps cargo pilot. As soon as I found out his rank, I theretofore addressed him as 'Sarge.'

'Sarge' responded to my questions by offering to tell me about "the _real_ Iwo Jima." He flew supplies into Iwo Jima, and also flew missions to Guadalcanal, Midway and, during another tour, something he called 'The Big One', which I eventually gleaned to be D-Day at Normandy. 'Sarge' received the Distinguished Service Cross, as did all the pilots in his unit.

'Sarge' is also the second-oldest PTSD victim I have ever met. He was shaking and crying when he told me about Iwo Jima. "It looked like Hell down there," he told me. "It was Hell. I saw lines of Marines getting torn in half by machine-gun fire and they just kept coming. No matter how long it's been, it's still Hell to me." His best friend was in the Navy, apparently, and died at Iwo Jima that same year.

My stuporvisor cut short this rocket-ride through a time machine that would make Harry Turtledove stand at attention and salute. And my heart broke into a thousand pieces on the way out the door. I think 'Sarge' and I are going to get along just fine. Next time, my microcassette recorder comes along, and if anyone has a problem with that they can put it on their Tough Shit slip and send it to the Chaplain.

Throughout my life, every back-breaking, low-paying, Why-the-hell-am-I-still-doing-this job has come with an incredible story underneath.

This facility is a beautiful former monastery at the foot of Mt. Tabor with frescoes in the chapel to rival Giotto himself (okay, if Giotto were second-generation Italian living in 1890's Portland with better art supplies.) There's a lot of laziness and tweakers, no leadership and very little
active listening.

But as the old saying goes, the people make the place. I mentioned that 'Sarge' was the second-oldest PTSD case I've ever met. The oldest one is on my favorite floor. This year, 'Bela' turned 101.

'Bela' has more lights on upstairs than anyone in the whole facility with the exception of 'Sarge' and one other delightful lady with mild dementia. 'Bela' is Hungarian, totally blind, and speaks four languages fluently.( I had to ask him to 'spriche Englische mit mihr, bitte' at one point. He obliged.)

'Bela' was on the other side of Big Two. Though not a member of any minority they were really going after as far as I know (at the time he was Christian, heterosexual, non-disabled, etc.) the Nazis held Bela captive for many years when he was living in Yugoslavia. Occasionally, he thinks someone is trying to poison him.

At one point, well before I arrived, 'Bela' re-experienced that period in his life with results that even taught me a lot in the second-hand retelling of it:

At age 100, while having a PTSD flashback to his time being held by the Gestapo, 'Bela' yanked the stander-bar out of his bathroom wall by main force and kept those who he thought were Nazis at bay. The staff let him wind down, and he went to bed early that morning with the bar still clutched in the crook of his arm. Those bars are bolted into the walls with electric drills. Behind the drywall, those walls are solid fitted stone. Do the math.

So, as I said, I'm a little emotional right now, returning home to my own ghosts. I have one ghost holding up each arm right now:

Bob Heinlein, in whose good graces I remain from a while back (according to his living intermediary Spider Robinson, bless both their weird hearts;)
And Ted Sturgeon (whose full eulogy 'Mistral In the Bijou' by his dear friend Harlan Ellison just graced the pages of Interzone #210(Interzone) thanks to an accidental bit of legwork between myself and Mr. Ellison at the 2006 Hugos.)

I need ghosts of that caliber holding me up, at the moment. The edits for Atlantis:1999 came back from Drollerie Press yesterday, and the last mile is very definitely the hardest mile.
I've got my work cut out for me today. Wish me luck, kiddies. I think with Ted and Bob smoking up the room with their weird grape pipe tobacco and Pall Malls (respectively) , I should do OK. As always, the shoulders of Titans bear each of us home. All of you reading this are Titans too. 'Membah dat.

COMMENT BY GENERAL AARON LARKIN, 7 BASTARDS OF THE UNIVERSE:
Y'know, for years, my old man has been telling me to get a video camera and interview the Grandfolks about the times when they were younger. Each of them has a story. Grandma Faye is easily the oldest out of the three, and she'll be 90 this year, I think. She'd have vivid memories of the Depression, all the wars from the 1930s on, growing up and living in mob-controlled New York... nan and pop were born and grew up in Depression-era St. Louis, with Nan growing up above her father's drugstore. Grandpa Robert and Grandma Clara were Russian Immigrants. I don't know much about pop's family, but I know about POp.Pop was a pilot during WWII and korea, and he has TWO Distinguished Flying Crosses. I don't know for what. He was also part of the Presidential Air Fleet and the unit that flew JFK's body back from Dallas after he was shot. he actually has a couple pictures of him with JFK and Jackie. After that, he was the team pilot for the Celtics during the dynasty years in the 60s. He was good friends with Red Auerbach.The older generation, the one that fought in Europe and before that, were hardier, stronger, smarter, and tougher than any of us. The lessons we could learn from them could make the world better to live in, but nobody's willing to listen anymore. Sad really. Not every senior citizen is a rambling Abe Simpson. You learn from the mistakes and lessons of the past. All you have to do is listen.You are I are good for listening, and watching. All we have to do is convince others to do the same. Maybe if it was a reality show on TV somebody would pay attention.

MY REPLY: If I live to be as old as 'Bela', I will never forget my history teacher in high school bursting into tears at the sight of the photographs from my Great-Uncle Bob's funeral. Bob was Special Forces. He was at Normandy, too, and ran afoul of a machine-gun nest at the top of a cliff he and his unit were trying to scale.

Anyway, KR (my history teacher, short for Kathie Richardson) saw the pictures of Bob's funeral, the largest in my Dad's family's hometown, and sang softly:"Over there... Over there...Send the word, send the word to beware..." In that moment, she breathed life into the waxwork of the past for me. 'Sarge' did that again last night. That's where I come in. I see it as a sacred duty to be a conduit for such things.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

It's been a Surreal weekend.

On Friday night, I was hip-deep in this monster alternate-history novella "We Now Have Power", featuring Nikola Tesla and Pete Seeger. If a bunker-buster nuke had gone off in the basement, I would have thought the cat just 'left one go' and kept writing. I was in the zone, man. More on that later.

Anyway, some fucker came into the side yard and jacked up Blossom's electric motorcycle, which was plugged into the wall and charging. I kick myself for not putting the tarp on it. That thing has sat out there for months with a tarp on it when we weren't riding it. Never an issue.
Of course, we were both livid, furious, depressed and many other adjectives as well. Last night, however, was one of the best times I've ever had with her. We went to my best friend's house and spent a great deal of time getting silly and watching 'The Three Amigos', which I hadn't seen since I was fourteen and doing bad stuff at the time, many fond memories... The whole event made me really get fiery and up on a stump about the things I still do have, especially one thirty-seven-year-old Finnish-American artist chick who brings me Willie Nelson reggae records and listens to me bitch all the time.

This morning, I went out flyering as soon as I was conscious. I made myself do it. I didn't think it would do any good, but in times like this I always fall back on my spirituality... and Mother and Father were both telling me to move my ass or lose it.

I listened all the way to the Woodstock Drive-Thru Mini Mart. The clerk told me he didn't have time to put up a flyer, but I was welcome to do it myself on the window outside. I had the strapping tape ready.

I get outside and put the flyer up. A guy and his girlfriend, out walking their dogs, look at each other and look at me as we're all lighting up cigarettes simultaneously. "Oh, that bike," they both say.

Long story short (too late): A few doors down from the girlfriend's house, a silver and red E-Go electric motorbike (we call him Max) was dumped off in the bushes of this IT Tech guy, who called the law because "Someone was gonna be pissed." Nate and his girlfriend have a half rack of beer coming. Shaughn, the IT guy, like me, does not drink, but will probably get a thank you card.

Someone tried to jimmy the key-switch on the EGo, found they couldn't, and dumped it off. The key still turns, and the motor still spins up. That's enough for me. The new headlight post and stuff are coming next week sometime.

Portland PD was very quick and thorough about closing the case, and the officers both told me I was lucky. Cops have been telling me that a lot this year.

Must return to my Tesla story. Just wanted to get this down. Whoever took the E-Go, if by some miracle you can read & ever see this, know this... Karma already got you. You're a fucking idiot. Now get the hell off my lawn.

I told Blossom a while ago that I wanted to kill a dragon for her. Twice now this year, by dumb luck, I have held the steaming heads of her incidental dragons in my fist close enough to taste the smoke from their black teeth. At the moment, I feel something like George McFly after he punched out Biff Tannen in the last reel of 'Back to the Future.'

So may we all slay our incidental Biff Tannens, and twist off their heads. There's Hope. Good Night and Good Luck...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

To all my blog subscribers (especially you two in the back with the conjoined head,)
I haven't posted on this thing in so long. Like I have time. I devote a total of 11 hours a day to my job (which pays, after child support, $7.29 an hour, yay me.)

Just need to kvetch. I totally blew my Worker's Comp "Independent Medical Evaluation" today. It was in Tigard, and I got lost on the way there. Luckily, they rescheduled. At least now I know where the place is. And I got a three-hour paid break. Woo hoo!

State agencies in Oregon have burned me so hard that this Worker's Comp thing sent me off the deep end this morning.OHSU was not reputable enough for the state, I suppose. They have to have a third party tell me:"YOU BAD, BAD N-----!!! HOW DARE YOU CLAIM TO BE INJURED, EVEN WITH AN $899 MEDICAL BILL AND A FELDENE PRESCRIPTION? GET OUT OF MY OFFICE!"

My doctor was right. My job is sucking my soul dry. I work as an unskilled, entry-level caregiver for medically fragile humans. We do so much lifting there I was diagnosed with repetitive stress syndrome (and self-diagnosed with Caregiver Burnout) after about four months. Like everything else about that job, Workers' Comp is proving to be nothing but a big old bullshit hassle.

We are paid $8.75 an hour (a whole $9 after 6 months) to do the kind of work Vincente Fox won't even do (obscure news-junkie joke, never mind) for people who will make you re-think your whole conception of Just About Everything. I love the clients, but our company is run around by an alcoholic who drinks on the job and hires snarky eye candy who couldn't find their own behinds, to quote Mr. King, "if someone rammed them full of radium and then gave them a Geiger counter." I've been published in three languages on three continents, and I'm not allowed to put up a sign that says DON'T PARK IN OUR BUS SPACE. That sort of Administration.

This was the year I got in Interzone twice, 'sold' damn near a story a month for a little while, rekindled a lot of old friendships and settled into a real house (as opposed to one of those virtual ones.) Chris Huff got me over the transom at Random House, which is more than I can say for my own efforts. I got to hear my boy Big Jim interview Will Vinton. Larkin and Lu are finalizing wedding plans. Blossom is a centimeter away from being done with school. I have a new brother in law and two nephews in law. (And some dogs in law, too.)Things go up and down.
I've just painted myself into a hell of a corner and hold onto too many things.My life has gotten too stable for its own good. Now the issues of brutal poverty, genetic wounds (thank you Terrence Dicks) and the sorry state of the economy around here are free to be corralled like the rabid pit bulls they are. Anybody know anything about pit bulls? I suddenly find myself without the slightest knowledge...

Thanks for listening. Off to hang out with the plants out back and give thanks for everything that all of us DO have. Chaos and Joy unto you all. ---ed.

REPLY FROM LUCIA AND AARON LARKIN: Don't worry about your comp eval, lol no matter what, they are paid by the insurance co to say nothing is wrong with you. It a joke. I spent 22 months in the hospital, have a knee so swollen its the size of a basketball...cry almost 24 hrs a day from pain....use crutches or a wheelchair to get around, and they still said nothing was wrong with me. Its their game, wait it out...cause in the end, you will prevail...
Pitbulls are misunderstood...people think they are crazy and rabid, yet it isnt the breed but rather the owners which make them that way...kind of like people in our lives making us crazy....and we get blamed for it...you know what I say? Fuck the man....and eat gerbils
much love my brother...174 days....

REPLY FROM ELIZABETH HUFF (local poet, old friend, fellow veteran of the Cafe Lena Reads and Alice Anonymous:)

She's right, brother. Praise be to what you have and all that is to come. Don't look behind, you might get lost to what is coming around the bend...I sound like fortune cookies...

REPLY FROM JOSH "LESTER" LAY, PORTLAND STANDUP COMEDIAN

Hey, that's fucked up about the cojoined heads thing, man. It's not my fault my parents fucked near powerlines.

REPLY FROM JESS GULBRANSON, PORTLAND AUTHOR, http://www.nwdrizzle.com

Heh, think I have some 6 year old feldene in the fridge myself- "heavy ibuprofen, sinks down to your feet," as my doc said. "That's just made up," said I. And why rip on Vicente Fox? I don't get it.

So no more kvetching, no matter how well-written. Be a shtarke. And I only say that because I'm hoping I'll take my own hint and be strong through the shit that's going down, which I won't describe. This is your soapbox, after all, disintigrated though it may be.

Do you remember when we climbed that black spire, Ed? To read the tablets they all said didn't exist? The ones we found, tablets of elemental zinc GROWN from the side of the caldera there? Do you remember? The secrets we read in letters of bright corruption on dull surface of the metal, until the gods had to stop us by releasing the stampede of burning wolves from beneath the ground? How we fell, laughing, scorched and smoking, with bits of scoriated lava in our beards, laughing because we knew the gods did not exist? Do you remember? How we fell into an alkaline pool there at the base of the spire, and swore blood brothership with an obsidian dagger? Ed, do you remember how you flew east on black wings? I watched until night fell on the wasteland, then strode east on my Seven League Boots.

You probably don't remember because that was a dream! Hah! Thanks for being a target/example for wanna-bes like myself. You can hold that lotus up high despite the level of the shit. Peace out!

(Actually I do remember that, Jess. Surprised? Oh yeah, the Vincente Fox joke. Pres. Fox said that his people were all emigrating north "to do jobs that not even black people would do."
I hear you on the no more kvetching thing, Jess... Blossom told me something last night that pretty much covers it. If one tries to approach things in life from the completely practical side all the time, or from the completely mystical side all the time, it doesn't work. Here's to the Middle Way. )

REPLY FROM SERENA BLOSSOM APPEL:

Or, more succinctly: Magick comes from recognizing where the sources of power are and tapping in to them in the correct manner. There are some in this world and some in non-ordinary reality. I'm a practical pagan--use whatever tool works and if more than one works, use 'em all. Ed, I'm your eyes that's in back of you. Nosehouse.

2/25/07 QUOTE BIBLES, REDUX

(*I don't think Rupert Moloch would want to go after any of this for ownership. As a less-than-tactful mentor once told me:"You needn't copyright the stuff, no one will steal it." ---ed.)

Most of you subscribers already know about this, but... in brief:

In about 1989, I had the inestimable pleasure of getting to know Lord Vassar Cooper, of Hollidaysburg, PA. Vassar is one of those forces of Nature who sweeps you along for the ride, "one of God's own prototypes," to quote the late HST, "Too weird to live, too real to die." We were in junior high together, then high school. Vassar is a true Bastard of the Universe like the Seven, and he taught me a great deal about life.

One of the first things I got to know about Lord Vassar was a little black-and-white Roaring Spring composition notebook he showed me in confidence. The front cover was labelled 'Lonny's Auto Repair.'

(This was a hoot to me by itself. Lonny was one of our esteemed classmates, who looked sort of like Mr. Yuk on the poison-control stickers with a white-boy fro and about 300 pounds of cheese-and-crankcase-oil-smelling meat attached. Lonny was Lord of the Autoshop, and proud member of Hollidaysburg's graduating class of 1990, 1991 and 1992. )

"What is this?" I asked. And Vassar explained to me the principle of the Quote Bible.

In any social group, drunk, stoned or sober, working or playing, on the moon or in Peoria, when you get a group of friends together doing ANYTHING, one of them is bound to say something so funny, so off, so original that someone will wish they wrote it down. Vassar always did, and he got me into the habit.

I have over five hundred pages of my own Quote Bibles. The ones up until high school graduation are, I believe, hiding in Vassar's Dad's attic someplace. However, I have 1996-now.
I don't know about publishing them all on here. I think MySpace would burst into flames. But here is a sample, from yesterday, when myself and a certain Bastard of my ten years' acquaintance were sitting around and doing nothing whatsoever illegal, not at all, no sir, we were smoking I mean drinking tea and playing Yahtzee. There were no Back To The Future movies and giggling involved. The goats made it home. They were confused, but they made it home. Enjoy.

(*Most of this was speed-transcribed on post-its by a pair of arthritic hands that are not so good
at longhand. I've been sitting here for the past several hours, mumbling, 'Jim, what the fuck does this say?!?' Sarah and Blossom, our respective Muses, said a lot more funny stuff but I can't read my own shorthand...)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JIM:"DON'T DRINK AND TIME-TRAVEL."//"I'm as hard as an Alabama tard."//"Dude is a meat face. With a gooey middle. And a delicious flaky crust that makes you want him more."// "New Dr. Leuss book: Get Out Of My Mom."// "Back To The Premise." //"The No Broke. Get more No."//"Herve Deep Roy Chaize. Why do they call you Deep? (midget voice)''CuzzzzIgowayinDEEP.' "/"Ah'm eye-humpin' you right now."//"What, like there's roaming bands of babies with guns out there right now?"//"Why is the door always locked in your hat when I come by? ''Cuz I'm doin' stuff, to mah body...'"//"Reverse Prolapse= Brolapsed."//"Wild Hogs Can't Be Tasted."//"Damn Tito Puente comin round here like he owns the place. We got Titos poppin up in the flour. Gonna get me some Tito Repellent..."//"Well, if you're so stupid you hit a BOAT with your CAR, that should be your first clue..."//"Yellow shit? What you been eatin', twinkies and crayons?"//"I feel like I've been teabagged by Satan."//"The FOur Hosemen of Late Afternoon TV."//"My uterus plays DVD's and I've got TiVo on my nay-nay."//"I oughtta cack you in the White Face..."//"Shake the Wrong Tree and see what runs down..."//"Cowboys in love with two Asian women, running from dragons and fighting with my fence... My nipple won't peel off. Go git me m' pliers, boy...' You'll have to excuse Grandpa. His cold medicine has a lot of side effects. "//"I made my house out of Ass Wood."//"My halo brings the Hebes to the yard."//"The Home 'Crying Game'. Batteries Inserted."//(to the tune of 'Marching Through Georgia'):"Here ..comes the white man... steeealing all your stuuuuff...' "//"I got a Penis Pouch. On a cincher. With chains. I like chains because they don't rub."//"Tannen, quit eatin' that shit an' git to prison."//"I. Want. her. Tits. I wanna put my face in her titties and go b-b-b-b-b-b. I want to bottle the smell ... of ....shampoobs. Lather. Rinse. Repeat."//"It runs on a series of air bladders."//"Willie D-Fo. lookin for some no-no."//"I plosed for Playboy."//"Prehensile labia"//"The New Nike Honky! In white, opal and mother-of-pearl!"//"They will call you Pump Goblin. And Fruit Witch."//"William's Burrowing Amish. Tapeworms who look like William Burroughs with Amish beards..."//"As the Burroughs Amish Bible Says..."//"Uncle No Feet. Or Stumpy, as we called him, & My Face, & Broken Bat..."

SARAH:"New show: Compton 90224."//"Throw another Sherpa on the fire. We ran outta Sherpas. Chew the Sherpa slow. We got Sherpas and Smidgets. Only at Jim & Ed's Sherpa Shack."//"Deep-Fried Smidgets. And Shtoomps* all night long. With Deep-Fried Smidget Dipping Sauce"

BLOSSOM:"Would you like to taste my MIND??? My mind is behind. It floats up in the brine when it has the time..."

ED:"Harry Potter and the Bestiality Bus."//"Yore purty as a spring faggot, pickled and ready for hogs."// "What the fuck is next, 'The Jeffersons: Year One'?"//"And this is our third child... What did you do, piss in the VAT??!?"//"Our Founder, Cyrus McHonkyDevil."

JIM:"Uncle Jesse's man-partner..."ED"Uncle Messe."JIM:"He tuaght me to fuck with a compound bow."

ED:"Cast-iron taints?"
JIM:"They ring them when they need a streetcar."

ED:"Sizzlean taint strips."
JIM:"They go great with Smidgets."

ED:"I have buttocks up and down my back."
JIM:"So I can sit while I'm lying down."

SARAH:"By then, the Hippety-Hop was far above the rectal shelf..."(longer conversation that should not ever be transcribed even if I could read my own handwriting)
JIM:"You're goin' to Extra Hell. That's the Time-Out Place in Hell."

ED:"No matter what, if you get hit with a cast-iron stove lid, it will... change you."
JIM:"You'll be a little slower."

(*Earlier quote, from TV's Bud Bedell, Mighty Handy Inc. ---A 'Shtoomp' is the noise a head makes when inserted into a rectal cavity. ---ed.)

JANUARY MUMBLESOMETHING ---'Journey' acceptance (And no, this has nothing to do with Steve Perry)

"When you realize that the only true yardstick is your own past, that gets you through the times when you ask yourself 'Why am I still doing this shit?' "
---'Imagine', in Interzone ..200

I take great pleasure in going back and rewriting my own history, as well as everyone else's. Paul Di Filippo, one of the most prolific SF authors this century can boast, called me the ultimate mashup man, who plays with history and word and image instead of chords. That quote came from the blurb on 'Journey to the Center of the Earth,' which will be available as a free download on WWW.TTAPRESS.COM in mid-March, complete with hyperlinks to the works of all the real-life characters.

'Journey' is a send-up of the Jules Verne story of the same name, and has to do with a group of scientists called the American Miscellaneous Society, who tried to drill the deepest hole ever dug off the coast of Guadalupe Island, Mexico, in 1961.

They hired a Halliburton subsidiary to do the actual drilling, and of course Halliburton ruined it. "It was a beginning that only got to begin, and never got to be."

However, that voyage produced an ancient mariner, who moved on and kept going, whose work in the field has garnered him accolades from presidents. Dr. Walter Munk is still alive and teaching at the Scripps Institute in San Diego. Walter filled in "Project Mohole" for me, and sent me to the library to do several weeks of research before I even thought about writing this beast.
The premise of Project Mohole sounds like alternate history even without my help. What if they'd succeded, and not hit solid basalt (what later proved to be an out-poking tip of the nearest continental plate...) With a gentle push from Paul DiFi, the guiding hand of Walter Munk, and generous amounts of hard work and ...uhh.... other stuff... a new Sixties were born, one where WWII lasted until 1947, Adlai Stevenson was President, Bob Dylan was dead, and Dr. Hunter Thompson was the beloved, fuzzy-voiced anchor of the CBS evening news.

Jetse deVries, editor of Interzone, told this story about a million times when we were stumbling around the World Science Fiction Convention together in Anaheim last August:

"I got it and I said, 'Ed, at twenty-three thousand words, this had better be better than sliced bread.' Then I read the thing, and said, 'Who needs sliced bread?' "

As well, my version of Moby-Dick, a Neal Asher-inspired piece about online gaming addiction called 'Game Over'. will be up at ALLPOSSIBLEWORLDS.NET in their second issue. Jason C. and the crew are commissioning a cover based on my story.

Neal Asher is a wonderful person and a writer of such strength and grace that I'm proud to get to bullshit with him online now and again. I posted something on his blog about 'Game Over' and got reply on my private email that went something like, 'Where might I find this, please?' (which is the British translation of, "Huh-huh. Huh-huh. COOL.' )

Lots more such things on the way, as always. Now if only some of these editors would send the checks within a year...

It's hard to separate the dirty hardscrabble roach-motel of my current existence from what I wrestle from it, "living PKD-style raw in a tin shack and sucking meat out of the wall," as I wrote somewhere. I've got more strikes against me than most, and have been dealt a lot of shitty hands.

But Jeff VanderMeer, another luminary and friend(VANDERWORLD.BLOGSPOT.NET), always reminds me of the courage it takes for any of us to do what we do. When there are disabilities involved, or horrid things that have happened to us along the way, he points out, that rule applies in spades.

"New Lands, and the horrors and lights, explosions and music of them, rabbles of hellhounds and the march of military angels. But they are promised lands, and to reach them, we must first traverse a desert. It will be weary going.. but that depends.

If out of a dreary academic zenith shower betrayals of frailty, folly and falsification they will be manna to our malices---

Rocks to strike with our suspicions, and the gush of exposures foaming with new implications---
Tyrants, dragons, giants, and if all be dispatched with the skill and the might and the triumph over awful odds of the hero who himself tells his story---

I hear three yells from some hitherto undiscovered, grotesque critter at the very entrance to the desert."

---Charles Fort, 1928

Sunday, October 29, 2006

I wrote a poem once about a fake Hauka-style possession ritual occurring on the top of Chimney Rocks, a mountainish thing in the middle of town where I grew up. Like most Vodou possession-rituals, the one in the poem was basically an excuse/ritual where everyone cut loose and let themselves become possessed, let their hair down, etc. It was a metaphor for late adolescent partying, coming together, things like that.

In the last canto, I discussed what it was like to be the last one possessed... 'And at the end, no one brought me out of my trance.'

I'm still there. I'm still stuck in 1998. That was the last year my life made sense. Everything after that has been a kind of incidental, grab-what-you-can game where native intelligence did not end up magically solving every problem I ever had, and there's no time to do anything over or take anything back. Yeah, yeah, welcome to adulthood, nobody said life would be easy, and other songs from the same album. But.

Since 1991, I never got a lot of the same things that most people did (never learned to drive, never got enough work experience soon enough, things like that.) I was too busy trying to bail out the sinking ship of my family home with a wooden spoon. Even before that, I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The shrinks say I probably had it since I was about five.
All of that doesn't make anything any easier, or make anyone understand me any better. Everyone else got to move on and live their lives and grow into their ages. I haven't. I'm still running around trying to pick up all the pieces from way back when.

I'm just tired of it. The writing, and Blossom, are the only things that keep me going. I'm about to change into something profoundly different, but the lack of understanding I receive from the world in general has left me with a chip implanted in both shoulders. That chip disrupts the frequency of just about everything I ever walk in on.

I'd like to think that I haven't left a swath of destruction in my wake. I'd like to think that I don't need to be put in my place, and that people can either demonstrate understanding and empathy or get the fuck out of my way and quit wasting my time with their bullshit headgames they play with themselves and impart on everyone else.

I'd like to think that. At the moment, I'd just like to find out what I did with that baseball bat.
Boy that felt good to get out. I should do this more often. Thanks for listening. And if this hit a nerve, you know who you are.

REPLY FROM TERRA PEACH, Portland polymath rock star and all around neato human:

I hear ya, I've been so quiet lately since I'm currently re-doing 1996. Writing lots of songs, working out things on paper, taking photographs, failing to communicate with the world outside my head, trying to get through a major creative transition. I think it's pretty impressive you're all the way to 1998 ;)

REPLY FROM KAT MC BEATH, Portland polymath rock star, character model for Fortuna in Arkadia II):

I hear you man. Sometime's it seems like not having a driver's licence is some kind of fucking disability. Except you don't get any social assistance for it and human resources people can discriminate against you legally. They're obvously bastards.

Anywhore, as far as I'm concerned, you haven't left any carnage in your wake. Honestlly, I'm very impressed with you and what you've done so far with your writing. In any case, we need to hang out again soon. Give me a call. You de man wid his dick in de fan!

MY REPLY: Well, the license thing has the sting taken out of it by me and B both having electric vehicles now (such as Mabel is... she's sick, needs a bike vet... but B's electric motorbike is doin great.)

Mostly I was just bitching because I hate being Peter Pan, stuck in this prison of liminal identity while I watch fuckers I used to run around and raise hell with turn into something else that's not me. Thank you for both paragraphs but especially paragraph 2. You're a good friend, Kitty. This week's sketch as hell and I have to go hang out w/Doug Lain (Oregon Symph vet, fellow SF semi-pro) at some point, but... yeah, if it's not too shitting cold one of these nights and I end up ditching the stupid night-shift phone gig, we still have movies to swap and B. wants to raid your MP3 collection....

REPLY FROM JESS GULBRANSON:

I feel you, old son. I don't know what it was, but '89 was such a fucking good year for music(see what Metallica, Anthrax, Voivod, Prong all released, and the list oes on and on) and then in '91 all hell breaks loose. "The Soul Cages" came out that year, as an indicator of the kind of intensity you're dealing with.

I think in '91 I even wrote a story about walking into a fairie ring and coming back out, but not coming back out the same. I feel like Streiber's theory about magnetic disturbances are correct- walk across the wrong spot of soybean field, walk down the wrong trail in the woods (and I did both of those that year, but that's another tale...) and your brain goes somewhere else. I don't think mine ever came back. And I'm definitely a different person, though I think most of my adult life has been about denying that.

I hate to proselytize, but for me Zen has been the catalyst for this shit to come back, though it's been actually a little too scary for me to be the diligent Buddhist I'm trying to be. You're reading a koan, and suddenly you realize that you had a gun in your pocket at your grandpa's funeral, and you were going to kill someone. You realize you've written a novel, though it took you four years. You realize that the future is wide the fuck open, and hopefully you haven't psychically crippled yourself during those blacked-out periods when you were in Interzone or parts even stranger.

So what to do? Go back to '89 and listen to "And Justice" or "Persistence of Time." Return to the scene of the crime and dig around in that tombstone-filled forest looking for your own name on a 300-year-old headstone. Touch that spot where it hurts until it spins out a helpful nightmare.

We're brothers on the wind, Ed. Glad you're still kicking.

REPLY FROM JOSH "LESTER" LAY: Man, you read my mind, i feel like ever since i got out of school my life has fallen the fuck apart. ever since i got outta school (just stopped goin to college) my life has just been one giant shit covered blister. the weed is to ease my mind, the booze is to loosen my tongue, the comedy is to stop living inside my head and reach out to the other earthlings. i love fight club when tyler says "atleast somebody is trying to hit rock bottom" i feel thats what i am doing now. iv lost my car, i lost my cd collection which meant everything to me cuz i love music. besides my mouth, brain, and joke books, i dont have much left.i think iv reached rock bottom. i think the pirate blackbeard said it best when he said "let us create our own hell, and see just how long we can stand it."

Friday, June 30, 2006

www heliotropemag.com

The first issue of Heliotrope will feature my homage to the early, early days of TV, based on events that actually happened, "On the Air." I gotta tell you, getting this one out there has made me more than a little choked up, almost as much as the Holocaust story did.

Hugo Gernsback was responsible for the first TV broadcasts, out of WRNY New York in 1929. The stock market crashed and Uncle Hugo went bankrupt for a while. But before that, he was working with radio pioneer Lee DeForrest and pimping "television hobby kits" like mad, with rotating disks to be placed atop one's home radio.

And nobody wrote alternate history about this before. I verified this fact through Paul DiFilippo,.My hair is still standing on end. This story pays tribute to some very familiar faces, from radio to jazz to the pulps. I'm glad someone bought this.