Category Archives: confessional crap

a year

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It’s been a year now. A year without the cat. I don’t check the perimeter anymore.

Checking the perimeter. I should explain that. The cat was already living here when I moved in. Every morning, I’d get up, start the coffee, then I’d go stand by the sliding glass door that led out to the deck and the back yard to see what the weather was like. At some point, the cat decided to join me. And that became our morning routine.

August 31. 2014

Almost every morning for years. Once or twice a month the cat would decide to sleep in, but usually she’d hear me getting up and would meet me on my way to the kitchen. I’d start the coffee, then we’d stand at the door and look out. Nothing special, really. It was just a thing we did.

December 4, 2016

The cat would usually lean up against me when we did this. Sometimes she’d sit on my foot, which couldn’t have been comfortable for her. We’d look outside for a minute or so, then the cat would either suggest I feed her or she’d quietly slide off to some other part of the house.

January 2, 2018

Almost every day, we did this. Some mornings, if I had my phone with me, I’d take a photo of the cat beside me. I don’t know why; it was always the same basic photograph; my feet, the cat, the door. Some photos were in color, some black-and-white, some square, some with the standard 3:2 format. It would depend entirely on which app I opened on my phone (yeah, I’m the sort of guy that has a dedicated b&w app on my phone). Usually I deleted the photos shortly after I took them. Usually. Not always.

Periodically, I’d post a photo on Facebook or Instagram of the two of us at that door and caption it ‘The perimeter is secure.” My friends found it amusing. So did I. It became a thing, checking the perimeter. It turned into an accidental photo project.

The photo below is the last photo I shot of us checking the perimeter. I don’t think I posted it. A couple of weeks later, she was gone.

October 25, 2022

You do something together every morning for years and then one day it’s just you. It leaves you off-balance. For a week or two after the cat died I’d step over to the sliding door after starting the coffee and I’d check the…and I’d look outside. It wasn’t checking the perimeter anymore. It felt wrong. It felt wrong, and it just hurt too fucking much. So I stopped.

It’s been a year now. If I want to know the weather, I look out the window. Some mornings I still expect to see her waiting for me. Every so often I still get weepy, thinking about her. It still hurts. I hope it will always hurt.

It’s been a year. I miss her so much.

a candy corn centrist

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Every year around this time I feel the need to eat candy corn. And every year, after I eat a few pieces, I find myself wondering why. Because of that, I find it impossible to take sides in the ‘candy corn’ debate. I feel about candy corn the same way I feel about some of the more esoteric sexual practices: if you enjoy it, have at it. If you don’t, you still have lots of options.

But for fuck’s sake, people, don’t try to stop others from enjoying their candy corn, and don’t shame them for liking it. And candy corn aficionados, don’t try to force your candy corn on anybody who doesn’t want any. This is NOT complicated.

Candy corn has a long history in the US. It’s been around since the late 1880s. As far as I can tell, the company that’s been continuously making candy corn the longest is Jelly Belly, which was originally called the Goelitz Confectionery Company (and I have to say, I think the name change was an unfortunate decision; some poor bastard is now forced to introduce himself as the CEO of Jelly Belly, and you know all the other CEOs are laughing).

The Goelitz brothers began producing candy corn in 1898. Unlike the white, orange, and yellow candy we’re mostly familiar with, Goelitz candy corn (also apparently referred to as ‘chicken feed’) was white, brown and yellow. I’m sure there was some rational corporate explanation for the change in the color scheme, but I’m going to assume it was because orange is simply a more jolly color.

The commercial manufacture of candy corn was NOT the most unfortunate event of 1898. Henry Lindfield became the world’s first fatality from an automobile accident on a public road (his car rolled down a hill in Purley, England and struck a tree–which is less embarrassing than having to introduce yourself as the CEO of Jelly Belly). And the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, sparking the Spanish-American War (which, although it was fought primarily in the Caribbean, resulted in the US owning Guam and the Philippines; the US also annexed the Hawaiian islands that year, which was unrelated, but you have to wonder about the sudden desire of the US government to own islands located way the fuck away from the mainland). And Caleb Bradham invented Pepsi-Cola (so named because it was intended to relieve dyspepsia, whatever that is).

I seem to have lost track of my point, which is that despite the attempts to vilify it, there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating and appreciating candy corn. Even ordinary decent citizens (such as myself) have been known to enjoy it (or at least wanting to enjoy it, even if afterwards it turns out we do not). Nobody needs to justify their taste for candy corn.

Licorice, on the other hand, is an offense to the gods.

done and dusted

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A few days ago I mentioned I was actually busy, that I’d found myself in “one of those rare instances when I’m working under a deadline.” Some folks wondered about that deadline business. Allow me to splain.

Twelve days ago (on Tuesday the 3rd) I noticed a post on Bluesky (which, by the way, is by far the most engaging and positive (and frequently very weird) social media platform I’ve ever encountered) stating that Uncanny Magazine had opened submissions for short fiction. Uncanny has been publishing science fiction and fantasy fiction for about a decade. The magazine itself and the fiction it’s published have won numerous awards. Uncanny has published short fiction and novellas by a LOT of the big hats in the SFF biz.

I don’t write science fiction or fantasy. I write detective/crime stuff. I’ve always read SFF, and I’ve occasionally banged out some ideas for SFF novels, but I’ve never followed through. So when I saw the post about open submissions, I said to myself, “Greg, old sock, why not give it a shot?”

The obvious response was, “I’ll tell you why not. First, you’ve never written SFF in your entire semi-wicked life. Second, you’ve got less than two weeks to come up with an idea and write a short story, which is another thing you’ve never done. Third, there are a million other things you actually WANT to do instead of sitting alone in a quiet room making shit up. It’s October, for fuck’s sake, and you’ll want to ride your bike and see people and go on long drives to look at autumn foliage. Fourth and finally, let me repeat that you’ll only have two weeks to write a story in a genre you’ve never written and it’s the best two weeks of autumn, you massive idiot.”

So I decided to write a story and submit it.

Which is exactly what I did.

Finished it last night, formatted it this morning, just submitted it moments ago. About 9500 words in eleven days. It doesn’t sound like a lot. Less than a thousand words a day. But that includes coming up with the idea, envisioning the story world, populating it with believable (I hope) characters, ensuring the plot holds together, arranging the scenes, and putting all those words in a row. I’ve never written an entire short story, nose to tail, in such a short period of time.

I have absolutely no idea if it’s any good. I mean, I was satisfied enough with the story that I submitted it, but Jesus suffering fuck, 12 days? And, of course, the fact that I’m satisfied with it doesn’t mean a damned thing. The folks who’ll send you the contract and cut the check, they’ve got to be satisfied…and who knows what they’ll do?

But THIS is the part of the writing gig I’m really very good at: letting go. Most writers I know tend to fret about the stories they’ve submitted. Me, once I submit a story for publication, I basically forget it…until I get an acceptance or a rejection. Out of sight, out of mind. Done and dusted.

Which may be good for my mental health, but is a terrible business practice. Because if a story gets rejected by one publisher, you may want to submit it to another. This actually almost happened to me last year. I’d submitted a story to Alfred Hitchcock’s magazine and immediately forgot about it. Well, I forgot about it until I was ready to submit another story to different magazine. Then I remembered, “Hey, dude, it’s been maybe 3-4 months and you haven’t heard about the other story; that ain’t right.” So I sent an email saying ‘Don’t want to make a fuss, but if you’re not going to accept the story, let me know so I can sell it elsewhere.’ The magazine responded with a contract. That story eventually won an Edgar award. Go figure publishers.

Anyway, the story is written. It’s been submitted. And I feel liberated. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go for a bike ride.

layers

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I almost never look back at my own photographs. I figure I’ve already made the shot, processed it in the way I wanted to, then either posted it somewhere or…you know, didn’t post it at all. Either way, I’ve already seen the photo; why look at it again?

I don’t feel that way about the photographs of other folks. I’ll still look at photos by Eggleston (today is his birthday, by the way) or Kertész or maybe one of the Pages (Tim or Homer), for example. There’s almost always something new to be discovered or appreciated when you look at the work of the photographic Big Hats.

But this morning, as I was going about my usual morning routine (after watching Nigeria’s amazing win over Australia in the Women’s World Cup), I saw this photo on Facebook:

I thought, “Damn, that’s solid work, right there.” Then I realized it was a photo I’d shot nine years ago. It was a weird experience–seeing a photo I’d taken but looking at it like it was the work of a stranger. What made it weird was that as I looked at the photo, I could remember why I’d shot it and what sparked the desire to shoot it.

It was all about layers. The wooden bridge under my feet, the water under the bridge, the lily pads on the water, the fish under the water, the stones under the fish in the water, the reflection of the bridge on the water, my reflection on the water standing on the bridge above the water, the reflection of the trees above me on the water, the reflection of the clouds above the trees.

I remember standing on that bridge in Wisconsin and being struck with an immediate sense of absolute location, if that makes sense. I was at that particular spot on the globe on that particular day. It was sort of a Doctor Who moment–time and relative dimension in space. No other person could be in that particular spot at that particular moment. That’s true constantly, of course, but it’s pretty rare that we actually think about the reality of it.

I also recall very deliberately composing the shot in my head. I shot two frames; this one, shot rather quickly but intentionally slightly askew. The second shot was more formally composed, with the line of the bridge horizontal along the bottom of the frame. The more formal shot was…well, uninteresting. It has all the same elements as the photo above, but it’s strangely unemotional. Two photographs of the same thing, taken seconds apart, but only one of them works. That just seems sort of freaky. But normal. Freaky-normal.

I like this photograph. I like it both as a photo, and as a personal experience. Maybe it takes the distance of a few years to be able to actually see your own photos.

the first book i bought with my own money

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I don’t remember how old I was. Maybe ten or twelve. It was summer vacation; we were staying at the family house on the south end of Pawleys Island, South Carolina. The island was pretty primitive back then. There wasn’t much for a kid to do–wander around the dunes, play on the beach, noodle around the salt marsh, walk to a sort of gas station/market where you could buy an RC cola and a packet of Tom’s peanuts.

One day I saw an old guy sitting in the dunes, reading a thick paperback book. Because I was just a kid and probably bored, I asked him what he was reading. And instead of giving me the title, he read a couple of paragraphs aloud. It was language unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Something about a forest at dawn and knight on a horse in misty light, the horse stamping its foot, its nostrils flaring and the vapor of its breath hanging like smoke in the air, and something about flashing of silver.

At least that’s how I remember it. The scene was as distant from summertime Pawleys Island as you could possibly get; I was enchanted. I don’t remember anything about our conversation, but at some point he wrote the title of the book on a scrap of paper. Le Morte d’Arthur. Even the title seemed wildly exotic.

Summer ended, we returned home. I hoarded my allowance, learned where a bookstore was located (I hadn’t even been aware there were shops that sold nothing but books), and asked for the book. The clerk said they didn’t carry it, but offered me another book, which he said was the same story. The Once and Future King, by T.H. White. I don’t recall how much it cost…buck and a quarter, maybe. But I bought it. And read it.

In a way, it was the perfect book for a kid. It begins as a children’s story–the protagonist (Wart, who will eventually become King Arthur) is the companion of Kay. Kay is destined to become a knight; Wart will be his squire. But Wart meets and befriends a wizard–Merlin, of course–and under Merlin’s tutorage, Wart begins to have adventures. He’s magically transformed into an ant, a migrating goose, a fish. There are episodes in which Wart helps Robin Hood or meets King Pellinore who is searching for the Questing Beast. It’s all amusing and fun, but there are subtle lessons being taught about power and privilege, about violence and pacifism, about decency and friendship.

As the novel progresses, it morphs into a more adult tale. Wart yanks a sword out of an anvil and a stone, becomes King Arthur, and the lessons he learned as Wart are translated into adult struggles. He has to deal with love and lust and jealousy and greed and betrayal. He tries to find a balance between strength and mercy, between law and justice, between love and friendship. Issues of ego and concepts of self-worth complicate everything. Relationships get really fucking complex.

Unlike the beginning of the story, the ending of The Once and Future King is entirely unchildlike. Arthur fails. He tries very hard to be a good person, but the world he tries to create comes undone. Cruelty and violence and war unravel his attempts at kindness and decency. The ending is sad and beautifully tragic, but still weirdly hopeful.

Decades have passed since I bought that book. The summer house on Pawleys Island is gone. In fact, the entire southern end of the island is gone, swept away by Hurricane Hugo. I hung onto that paperback copy of The Once and Future King for a couple of decades, but like everything else in the world, it eventually fell apart. At some point I bought and read Le Morte d’Arthur, and I searched the novel for the scene I remembered as a child. Couldn’t find it. I’ve decided it was swept away along with the beach house. That old guy I met in the dunes? He was almost certainly younger than I am now.

As I write this, it occurs to me that my entire life sort of resembles the story arc of The Once and Future King. I never pulled a sword out of stone or became rightwise king born of all England, but I’ve had my share of adventures. And while I’ve tried hard to be a good person, I’ve often failed. I’ve seen much more of cruelty and violence and death than I’d like. I have, at times, been cruel and occasionally violent, which fills me with regret and for which I try to make amends.

I suppose that makes that old guy in the dunes of Pawleys Island my Merlin. That’s a nice thought. Like Merlin did for Wart, that old guy introduced me to the lessons that have shaped the way I’ve moved through the world. Curiosity is good and should be indulged, strangers are often worth talking to, justice can be tempered by mercy, might doesn’t make right but some things are worth fighting for, love is never wrong but is sometimes painful, and it doesn’t necessarily matter if you lose so long as you’re trying do what’s right.

gender bullshit

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There’s a long…and I mean seriously long, as in Please babby Jeebus, is this thing ever going to end long…opinion piece on the meaning of masculinity in this morning’s Washington Post. It’s entitled Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness, and frankly, that title alone would normally be enough for me to ignore it. Except it was written by Christine Emba, whose opinion I value. So what the hell, I read it.

And hey, she does a good job of examining the ways people are trying to define masculinity these days. The piece is well-researched, thoughtful, well-written, and determinedly even-handed (which is probably why it’s so fucking long). But as I continued to read it, I kept asking myself the same question: who the fuck cares?

There are some really really really broad categories of being that are ultimately undefinable. They resist definition because they’re so broad and vague and elastic. Who is a man? Who is Black? Who is an artist? Who is a parent? Who is a Red Sox fan? Who is a healer? Who is an athlete? Who is an influencer? Who is a cook?

I mean, it’s possible–even necessary–to organize a specific set of requirements necessary to meet professional standards to define some roles. There are prerequisite training and skills to become, say, a licensed hair stylist. But that’s an administrative thing; if you style your own hair, then hey bingo, as far as I’m concerned you’re a hair stylist.

But trying to define these broad generic categories is basically bullshit. Don’t nobody get to set any goddamn rules on who is (or is not) a man or a woman. And why the fuck would anybody want to? Why would anybody waste a single fucking moment fretting about it?

Toward the end of her opinion piece, Emba writes this:

For all their problems, the strict gender roles of the past did give boys a script for how to be a man. But if trying to smash the patriarchy has left a vacuum in our ideal of masculinity, it also gives us a chance at a fresh start: an opportunity to take what is useful from models of the past and repurpose it for boys and men today.

Well, she’s right that the past DID give boys a script for how to be men (and for girls to know how to be women), but isn’t that the source of the problem? A script is just the written text for a performance. We don’t need no script to be who we are. We are already who we are. People need to stop acting and just fucking relax.

(Engraving by Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc)

Emba also mentions that ‘trying to smash the patriarchy has left a vacuum in our ideal of masculinity.’ Well, yeah. That’s the whole fucking point, isn’t it. Scrap that shit. Scrap the ideal of femininity too. Scrap the concept of ideals, because they’re imaginary. There IS NO IDEAL man or woman. No ideal cook or artist or Red Sox fan or parent or Black person (and stop thinking of Idris Elba, okay, just stop it). There’s only somebody’s bullshit notion of what they think is ideal.

Here’s another part of the problem. If we smash the patriarchy and replace it with the matriarchy, would that be better? Well, yeah, probably. But that has its own set of problems, and eventually we’d need to smash that as well.

Emba ends her opinion piece with this:

The old script for masculinity might be on its way out. It’s time we replaced it with something better.

This is just my opinion: if you define yourself as a man, then you’re a man. If you refuse to define yourself along any gender line, ain’t nothing wrong with that. Because the problem isn’t gender, really. The problem is the script. Emba got that point right.

People are comfortable with a script. A script tells them what to do, how to behave, where to stand, what to say and when to say it. People like a script. So yeah, maybe Emba is right that we need to replace it. Not just the ‘masculinity’ script, but the gender script. Maybe all we really need is a script that says this: Don’t be an asshole.

That’s a good script because asshole is also one of those categories that resist definition because they’re so broad and vague and elastic. If the script is don’t be an asshole, the actor would have to consider their entire galaxy of self-defined asshole behaviors. And then NOT do those things. That would solve a whole lot of problems.

a writer, not an author

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I don’t spend much time thinking about myself. I mean, I’ve lived with me my whole life; there’s not much unknown territory there for me to explore. But I had this exchange on BlueSky (one of the more promising ‘next Twitter’ social media). There was a call to create an ‘authors feed’. My response:

This is probably silly, but I tend to be uncomfortable with the term ‘author’. I’ve published some stuff–short fiction, nonfiction books, a novel–so ‘author’ technically fits. But maybe it sounds too pretentious for me? I think of myself as a writer. I write stuff.

The reply:

Yeah, that’s the old imposter syndrome kicking in. The only requirement to being an author is to have authored something.

And I thought, “Yeah, that’s probably it.” I suspect anybody who has had some success in anything has, at one point, thought, “Lawdy, who do I think I’m fooling?” Normally, that would be it. Question asked, question answered, end of story.

But this morning, after I sat down at the keyboard, drinking my morning cold brew, looking out the window, reading the news, going through my usual morning routine before starting to write, I thought, “Naw…I’m not an imposter. I mean, I won a damn Edgar this year. That’s a pretty big deal.” And I looked at the mantle…

…and then I thought, “Hey…where’s my Edgar?” Because it wasn’t on the mantle.

Okay, some history. I learned I’d been nominated for an Edgar from Lori Rader-Day (who, by the way, is the real deal; you should go out RIGHT NOW and buy all her books). I thought that was pretty cool, but aside from doing some of the scut work associated with the nomination, I didn’t give it much thought. I didn’t expect to win. I even forgot about the big Edgar event when they announced the winners. Again, it was Lori who alerted me that I’d won. Again, I thought it was pretty cool and I understood I’d be getting a statuette at some point. And again, I pretty much forgot about it until it arrived.

Now THAT was cool. I took it out of the box, put it on the kitchen table (where I usually keep my Chromebook and do most of my writing in the mornings), looked at it a few times, then pretty much ignored it. Until I was reminded I hadn’t taken a photo of it. So I did that.

See? I won that thing right there.

Some time later, I happened to notice it sitting on the mantle over the fireplace. And I said something clever, like, “Hey, look…my Edgar.” To which Ginger replied, “I put it there a couple of weeks ago, you idiot.” So this morning, when I looked at the mantle to remind myself that getting an Edgar is a big deal and I’m not an imposter, I realized she must have moved it somewhere else. I’ll have to ask her later.

My point–if you can call it that–is I don’t feel like an imposter. I have actual, physical, tactile proof that I’m not an imposter. So what is my problem with the term ‘author’? And I’ve decided it’s this: ‘Author’ is a fixed, static state. You become an author when the work is done. ‘Writer’ is dynamic; it’s a thing you DO. I don’t think of myself as an author because I’m not particularly interested in what I’ve already done because…well, I’ve already done it. I am interested in what I’m doing, which is writing.

Like I said, I don’t spend much time thinking about myself, mainly because I’m not that interesting to me. But I realize some of this crap–like why I prefer to be a writer instead of an author–might be interesting to other folks. So, there you have it.

keeping balance

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I declare, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. Between insane weather events, and imploding submersibles, and bizarre Russian semi-coups, and insane imploding bizarre Trump criminal developments, it’s been difficult to focus on a single topic for more than a few minutes at a time.

So I’ve been riding my bike. I mean, when you’re riding a bike, all the rest of that shit fades into vaguely annoying background noise. Like tinnitus. It’s there all the goddamn time, but you just sorta kinda get used to it.

Besides, I have a new bike. Well, it’s not new new. I’ve had it for about a month or so. So it’s still new. Newish. I’ve only put about 170 miles on it. That may sound like a lot, but when you do a few 20-30 mile rides interspersed with sporadically cycling back and forth to the gym, it slowly adds up. And because it’s a new bike and I’m still enamored with it, I’ve been photographing it wherever I’ve gone. Yes, that’s right, I’m taking pictures of a fucking bicycle. Which is just as ridiculous as it sounds.

This is my second electric bike. My first was a fat-tire bike; I described it as the best purchase I’ve ever made. That’s still true, although I sold it when I bought my new bike. It was the best purchase because it allowed me to enjoy cycling again, after years of NOT cycling (because of knee pain). It was a big bastard of a bike; it could go anywhere, but it was cumbersome. The new bike–an Aventon Level 2–is more of a commuter bike. The tires are half as wide, and it’s a lot more nimble. It has a torque sensor instead of the fat bike’s cadence sensor (which will only be of interest to other folks who have ebikes), so riding it feels more like riding a regular bike.

But even on my bike, I can’t fully escape the outside world. For example, President Uncle Joe passed the infrastructure act, which means there’s been a massive increase in transportation construction and repairs, and that includes bicycle paths. Normally, there are a couple hundred miles of easily accessible, dedicated bike trails I can ride, plus all the local bike paths. But with all the new construction, a lot of those paths and trails have been disrupted. It’s a small, temporary inconvenience, and good for Uncle Joe and all…but it’s still annoying to set out on a ride, only to find an excavator has torn up the trail.

And I can’t exclude former President Comrade Trump when it comes to problems. A couple of days ago I rode down to a nearby reservoir, which is a popular sport for boaters, folks who like to fish, and birders. There’s a large paved parking area where folks park their vehicles and leave their boat trailers. As I was riding along, a couple of guys (white, short hair, in their 20s) driving a Jeep approached me, going the opposite direction. They slowed down, looked at me, and one of the guys yelled, “Fuck Ukrainian Nazis!”

It seemed like an odd thing to shout at a random stranger…until I remembered I was wearing a t-shirt with the Ukrainian flag and ‘Україна’ written on it. I’m assuming they recognized the flag, although I suppose it’s possible they were also familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet. I’m actually kind of impressed they recognized the flag; I don’t expect MAGA-Anon folks to have much awareness of geography or vexillology.

The incident put a very short-term damper on my enjoyment of the day. Maybe five minutes. It was just too nice a day to allow fuckwits to disrupt it. My biggest disappointment that day was arriving at one of my favorite bicycle bars and remembering they didn’t open until 1500 hours. There’s a pair of large open-air pavilions nearby, with restrooms and a public bike repair station, so I considered just hanging out for an hour or so until it opened. But home was only a couple of miles away, and I have a refrigerator stocked with an assortment of beers, so for once I made the logical decision.

Okay, I can’t write a blog post without getting at least a little bit pretentious. So here’s Albert Einstein, in a letter to his son:

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving

This is me, keeping my balance.