A short debate at work today, involving the classic “nature or nurture” question.
I’ve always said Nature, but sometimes with a nurturing moon rising.
This–of course was sparked because the job entails constant discussions of reprehensible behavior by the toxic underbelly of visible culture.
One co-worker asserted that some of the more malignant criminal elements simply learned by example.
“Lucifer didn’t need a role model,” I said.
At least I thought it was clever.
This would be the one and the same lecture I attended last month. I was sitting just a few feet away.
Not much to post, really,except to say I have almost completed my overview of the second book in the Zombie Bible series, as the British like to say, I’ve been “on about.”
Beyond that the day has had a rather sinister pall over it. And no, this has nothing to do with the books I’ve been on about, either. It’s something else. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something feels odd in the air.
Really, though. What good is it for me to start flailing away with ambiguous, paranormal-sounding claptrap when I have ZERO direction with which to aim it?
I could go ahead and start peeling forth like one of those Midway necromancers, and get all muttery and stuff and say “I think this sinister harbinger I feel begins with the letter …. Q!”
Oh, and I have to admit. The Litore books have given me inspiration of an entirely different direction. Actually, I have to toss Clive Barker in here too, because one thing he wrote in a book I really didn’t like very much had a BRILLIANT premise barely grazed by him. Between he and Stant Litore, I might actually be able to write a serious work along with the complete and unadulterated farce I have in my head. Either that or I need serious meds.
So . . . off to write I do. I have decided that I am going to commit to writing a review of every book I read from here on out, unless I hit the EJECT switch and have my cockpit dump me out over the Sierra Nevadas because it’s so awful. And then I still might come in here and testify to its completely awful offering.
On the advice of Uber-faithful commenter and generally awesome friend and musical homie, Ann, I’ve taken the plunge. I’m already transfixed a few chapters in.
One of the difficult decisions about posting new blog posts on top of others is whether or not to bury perfectly good posts under ones like this, that have zero caloric value.
The reason is plain. I’d like for a few recent things–especially yesterdays’s article “about” spoilers to see more traffic than it did, because I was personally proud of it.
I wonder whether or not if the “breakthrough” moment for this blog will be something that goes all pyro from the beginning, or when an old wine skin sees a new day.
We all want that moment. I for one, would love to blog for a living. I can’t imagine a day that it really happens, but I will flail away nonetheless.
For death is come up into our windows, and is entered into our palaces, to cut off the children from without, and the young men from the streets.
Jeremiah 9:21
I’ll just say this at the outset. To simply categorize this series as a biblical narrative with the enemies of Israel transposed with zombies might be the verbal synopsis I give to someone whom I might think would like this, but it is so much more than that.
Anyone familiar with Jeremiah’s plight will know the schematic here, even if Litore takes certain liberties with a few things. In reality, the libertarian license was taken the minute the undead were placed in the narrative in lieu of the Babylonians anyway, so really the question isn’t “is he going to take this license,” but “how far?” And I personally think he stopped short of losing anyone who might be uncomfortable with an out-and-out departure.
Essentially, the prophet is tossed into a cistern, because no one really wants to hear the uncomfortable information he has to put out—a plague—an invasion is coming, and there are things you need to do to stop it. One of those things being the cessation of the horrific practice of child sacrifice to idols. And this invasion, of course involves the walking dead.
As is the usual case with municipal authorities needing to make examples of supposed religious fanatics, they toss a zombie or two down into the muddy well with him, and listen to him struggle for supremacy in the mist of dehydration, hallucinations and dreams mixed with the prophetic as well as the nostalgic.
In this narrative Jeremiah has a wife—oddly enough, a character that probably never existed in real life, yet becomes the apex around all emotional investment I made into the story. And believe me, for a simple 89 pages, the author had me invested in that relationship.
Two caveats for the conservative reader. God is referred to in the feminine pronoun in this book, and while I was at first thrown by it, I managed to see a larger thought in this narrative; that a subtle, maternal side in the midst of a raging prairie fire of manhood, testosterone, and death would provide the gentleness to an Old testament God who gets a bad rap for something other. I don’t feel the characterization was made to mollify some socio-political worldview, and the ultimate treatment of God and his non-changeability is actually held very high in the book. So for me, the 180 on the gender reference simply covers the gentleness and lilting touch of the Creator.
The other caveat would be what some reviewers have referred to as a “sex scene,” but really, it is more an implied conjugal moment between husband and wife. There is no salacious material there, and quite frankly, Song of Solomon carries far more material than this moment provides. Somehow the sanctity and privacy of their marriage is kept intact, all the while letting you know they are bonding under the worst of human circumstances.
No spoilers here. It’s a short book, but big on investing your mind and heart. It’ll also drive to back to the primary source material, if you’re devout in any fashion.
The Ruggles Brothers help local law enforcement test what is known as “tinsel strength.”
By “us,” I mean a regional thing here. If you’re a reader from, say Serbia (and yes, I do get traffic from there. Thank you, whomever you are), you may not care. Except, you still might, because of the way I’m going to explain it.
One week, usually in May, the Northern California locale hails back to the western days that founded the cities here, including Redding. Even though Redding wasn’t exactly a hot bed of the most notorious shootouts in the world, it did manage to be host to some stagecoach robberies by the infamous Black Bart, and the Ruggles brothers, just a few blocks from where I am sitting, managed to give the punch to the phrase “a short drop and a sudden stop.”
So during rodeo week, a whole host of things go on, culminating in the actual rodeo, which also happens a few blocks from here as well. But the real intrigue happens at the beginning–on Monday.
A fake bank robbery is staged by a local group called the Asphalt Cowboys. This “robbery” involves two public figures wearing masks, who always manage to get away in a ridiculous hail of faux gunfire. (Yes, guns are prevalent here, I’m glad they are, and yes I have them too). The “loot” is hidden within the city limits, and a set of daily clues are released to the media.
Of course the “loot” is usually an envelope, containing instructions inside to claim a prize, which starts at 500 DOLLARS in cash. This reward goes down by 50 dollars every day, as long as it isn’t found. There is a separate reward for identifying the robbers,too. I don’t do this part, because I don’t schmooze at the local political levels.
Yet, to this day, I have not yet been THE ONE. Every year, I set out to the fields, riversides, parks, benches, barbecue pits, statues, fountains, boat ramps, stairwells, overpasses, flower beds, trees, bushes, homeless camps, parking lots, lamp posts, paper dispensers, coke machines, and any other possible denizen of said recompense. And every year I come up NAUGHT.
I’ve been doing this ridiculous form of self-flagellation for thirty-five years. I have been standing next to it when another child of the corn was wandering near me, and found it underneath an electric box by the river. Two years ago, I was walking to the spot when the guy who got there TWO MINUTES before me was running past me jumping around screaming that he found it.
Seriously, I almost shanked him for it.
But here’s the radioactive isotope. Those clues are written by someone who knows where the loot is. That’s ALL I know. This does NOT grant them an automatic ability to cast the subtle hues of region and placement in the rhythmic confines of iambic pentameter. Or, for that matter, a badly-constructed haiku. So ultimately, the clue will be so ridiculously ambiguous, that hordes of neo-zombies are scurrying through MY YARD thinking they’re onto something. But this kind of ambiguity raises another specter:
In Shasta, the county, the loot you will find
You may have to sit on your behind
At which time the loot is located approximately 35 minutes later inside a multi-layered Russian egg, nested inside a ten-numeral cylindrical codex, and wedged in a tree knot by the Bonneyview boat ramps.
Of course. The clue gave all that to them. If they find it early, the local news interview them. At which time they tell the reporter that the clues, while not specifically pointing to an INSIDE TIP, gave them little nuances that simply are part of the larger “hunch.
One year, a punk-rocker who crawled up on the train trestle to, and I mean this–“write poetry,” laid his head right on the bag. he found it because he was getting ready to smoke–I mean WRITE–poetry.
I was on to him. because I too, used to write poetry in that park. Especially the kind that wasn’t mixed with free verse and irony.
Then of course, there always holds out the possibility that the clue writer this year earned a liberal arts degree majoring in Blues Clues. Then, I won’t stand a chance, because the ink won’t be dry before some other “poet,” unencumbered by an addiction to employment runs out and becomes the immediate beneficiary of:
We just got a letter!
We just Got a letter!
We just got a letter!
The loot’s under Sundial Bridge!
The next opportunity for me to debase myself before my fellow man begins Monday. And you know what? I’ll be out there.
And I’ll be covering my sad, vacuous progress here.
I
just had a short conversation with my 15 year-old daughter about a particular book she’s reading. I will refrain from saying what that book is, because I have to discuss a minor event in it–or should I say the series in which it exists.
She says “this first book is more of an introduction,and I can’t wait to go to the next one.” Then she says “even though my favorite character dies in the fourth book.”
I said “who told you that?”
I really didn’t need to ask. The endless hemorrhage that is social media will take anything that has any popular visibility,and disambiguate it right before your eyes, beginning, middle, denouement . . . whatever.
I feel for those guys that go to church and simultaneously Tivo the Superbowl. Trying to get out of the sanctuary without seeing a smartphone update, receiving a handshake from someone who saw a smartphone update, seeing any local football sycophants posting signs on the roadside or whatever, has to be the backyard-barbecue equivalent of negotiating IED’s in Afghanistan. You have to seriously become a single-trajectory luddite if you’re going to watch that game in real time. Oh, and shut off all the phones. Even the body language of a fellow sports-fanatic who didn’t go to church and might be inclined to wave at you could devastate the mystery you’ve desperately tried to protect.
My daughter tries to convince me that her ever-spoiling associates “don’t ruin anything” for her–that her surprise synapses are not in any way dulled by these revelations.
I beg to differ. The huge revelations are only given their strength by the contrasts leading up to them. As a musician, some of my favorite musical solos were given their entire breath of life by the moments of the song leading up to that point; the lyrics, the urgency, the dynamics . . . the buildup. Isolate the solo, cadenza . . . whatever you want to call it and play if for someone with no reference point. See if it hits home in the same way an organic presentation would.
This is not exactly the same as revealing a literary death prematurely–but, in some ways it is. Because once you know that transition is coming, there will be no appreciation for even the greatest writing, and clever machinations that shrouded that revelation. In reality, a writer’s skill can be greatly diminished in the eyes of a reader when their friends start carping about “Dumbledore.”
And since I’m going to invoke Harry Potter in one of the more notorious examples, I’m also going to say that cheap shot revelatory grenades not only reduce a writer’s skill cred, it also reduces their bank accounts. JK Rowling or SOMEONE spent the equivalent of the Gross National Product of Guam to protect the last books from leaks–precisely because spoilers would cause a downturn in sales, and an understandably demoralizing turn for the reader and fans, who deserved to live through it–not be unwittingly freebased to the end of it.
And when this happens, and news reports of depression and even suicidal turns can invoke thoughtless reactions about fandom mentalities,and such. But there IS something to it. Because the investment in the larger story is what gives smaller moments their life. Just as a major plot twist can be enjoyed for its full impact, having it artificially revealed or destroyed can have a depressing one as well.
And yes, there is a larger issue here.
There is something to the idea of mystery anyway. The very reason I ever read the Sherlock Holmes novels, or for that matter any other mysteries was because there were punctuated moments of revealtion–we all live for the piecemeal dissemination of light. The idea that there is continually something “right around the corner” gives purchase to the mundane.
My 15-year-old, who says she is unaffected by the literary spoiler, though, is also in a novel herself, known as life’s “Book” as it were. And she doesn’t need any spoilers, either. I work in a facility full of young people for whom someone has maliciously introduced them to the concept of life all at once. When it was meant to be learned in serial form. Bit by bit. Line by line.
And don’t think the scions of pop culture care about “mystery.” Not from an industrial, and philosophical malignancy that is only concerned with disrobing everything: life, sexuality, people . . . faith. The idea of hiding nothing, and bringing all punctuated mystery to the immediate here and now is all that matters.
Spoilers. Straight up spoilers.
And some of those spoilers will kill the most important character of all. Them.
 | Ron Giesecke on Ken Tamplin told me I’m going… |
 | Anonymous on Ken Tamplin told me I’m going… |
| Anonymous on Ken Tamplin told me I’m going… |
| Anonymous on Like Father Like Daughter |
| Ron Giesecke on Like Father Like Daughter |
| Ron Giesecke on Ken Tamplin told me I’m going… |
| Anonymous on Ken Tamplin told me I’m going… |
| Anonymous on Ken Tamplin told me I’m going… |
| Anonymous on Like Father Like Daughter |
| Ron Giesecke on Like Father Like Daughter |
Box Number Seven 
Blogging my spam comments on purpose
Plus, he makes short blogs about a sundry list of subjects, so eventually, bloggers like that are going to give me the spark. So thanks, Tony.
According to my spam filter, it has supposedly protected me from HALF A MILLION spam comments in a year. Wow. I wish it would let me rack up the traffic clicks, and forget the vacuous attempts at interaction by automatons.
Nonetheless, a few hundred leak through. So let’s look at a few these epic missives of sincerity, clarity and warmth. And chances are, Tony has these same ones in his catch-all, too:
First off we have Carina, who, is either completely unaware of the King’s english, or threw a cerebral clot right before joining the Unit:
Let me jump right into an interactive frenzy with that. I can feel my traffic counts going up like the National debt. Next, is possibly the most pedestrian and boilerplate attempt to get me to board the SS Spiketraffic I’ve ever seen:
Not all these are in English, however. Somewhere along the line, some wily spammer must’ve googled “bloggers with ridiculously-German surnames” Take it away, Sgt. Schultz:
And, when baptized by immersion in the equally-feeble waters of Google Translate, give me this:
Apparently, my little thing I wore that mentioned Flannery O’Connor, and the Ape Suit made this seem like it would’ve fit right in to the organic framework of my comments section:
So anyway. I’m going to delete these now. But trust me. These people . . . or drones . . . or cyborgs . . . or mindless, faceless, useless advertising mechanisms will be back tomorrow. I don’t necessarily like everything about this WordPress fever-swamp, but I have to admit. Thus far, they’ve kept the soulless barbarians outside the cyber gate.
Share this: