Mostly happy, anyway.
For us, things’ll be a little … quieter than usual.
My wife and kids love fireworks. Me, I can do without ‘em. They mean crowds, jerks, noise, stench and lack of ability to enjoy myself. Most of the time, this isn’t a problem – last year, for instance, it was easy enough to just sit on a blanket in an area which wasn’t too crowded and watch people trickle in. The kids did their best to be patient waiting for the show. And there’s always the jackass who can’t turn off his headlights when he’s gathering his crap from the car so everyone’s shielding their eyes, yelling at him to turn off the lights, they can’t see. That last chump is sure to show up twenty minutes in to a forty-five minute show. And he’ll want to leave early too, crowing to his wife while they waddle with arms full of chairs, blankets, thermoses, sunscreen, and beach totes made of flexible straw, about how smart they were to wait for traffic to die down before they showed up, and how smart they are to leave before rush for the road. He’ll pronounce it rudd, too. And he’ll lift the straw panama hat from his gleaming pate combed over with three mouse-gray hairs and chuckle while he scratches his shining scalp. Every step is more of a side-to-side shuffle, with his legs swinging in front of him to provide locomotion, and when his elephantine ankles and flip-flop clad duck-wide feet strike the ground his thick, meaty jowls will tumble and churn.
Then there’s the old guy, the one who was old when Montezuma was a child, who sits in a banded nylon lawn chair wrapped in a woolen blanket shot through with moth holes and cigarette burns; the fringe hangs off the ends in dreadlock dusty frays like tattered old rope. He’s got a ratty old baseball cap on, with unidentifiable logos from some forgotten company extinct before Tyrannosaurus roamed the Earth. His pencil thin ankles vanish into battered canvas sneakers the color of dust bunnies, spindly and riddled with spider veins and scrawling hooked white hairs. He’s dragging an apparatus with him, an oxygen tank on wheels, and there’s an unfiltered cigarette hanging from between the gnarled twigs of two knobby, nicotine-stained fingers. He goes into long, spastic fits of coughing which cause his entire torso to lock, and the duration of the lock determines the duration of the cough. The conversation of his fellow trailer-trash dwellers – family of some extended variety or other, of varying and declining degrees of inbred hickitude – have learned to speak around his coughs. They start a sentence and pause while his gives a long, drawn-out spasm – haaaaaaackhackhackhckchck!! – then resume the sentence for another couple of words while he’s gulping in wheezing gasps of air, clutching at his chicken-waddled neck with arthritic, bent fingers, before launching an even longer spastic fit – haaaaaaaaaaaaaackhaaaackhaaaackhaackhackhackhckhck!! – then they go back to their conversation again while the cycle continues. Eventually the wafting cobwebs of hair on his liver-spotted head stop waving with the effort, and there’s a huge guttural snorting hock, then a wad of yellowish-green pus-like matter flies into the ever-growing pile beside him. A few gulps on the oxygen mask, light another smoke, and back to the sparklies. They ask him questions, his spawn and kin – “Yew aw raht thar, gran-da?” – and the scarecrow mutters in a surprisingly deep rumble with a stiff-necked nod.
Then the morons who think it’s all right to set off their own fireworks … you know, right there on the lawn where you and about eighty other families are watching the fireworks show. There’s the sulfuric stink of the fuse, the hissing whiz as the little cardboard stump bursts into yellow, green or magenta sparks and flames, spewing blue smoke like a Wisconsin Chevy, and the amused and amazed laughter of the brain-dead. A couple of minutes later, while the bombs are still bursting in air, and without dropping either the can of Budweiser from their hand or the Marlboro from their lips, another one goes off, this time flying over the parking lot – and all the dozens and dozens of cars parked there – and pops into a billion shards of hot cinder which rain down on your clear coat and open sunroofs to light gently on your leather upholstery. The cackle of the uneducated and unthinking, and someone will eventually cry out “OUCH! Day-um! I’m bernt!”
*Sigh*
So, you can imagine my deep, stabbing disappointment to discover this year’s festivities have been canceled due to lack of funds.
Maybe next year.
Have a happy and safe Fourth of July weekend, everyone.
-JDT-
All original content copyright DarcKnyt, 2009
ALL Rights Reserved
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Okay, I did it! I wrote something!
I know, I know … I’m supposed to be a writer. But I’ve been in an awful dry spell for so long I almost forgot what it feels like to get words down out of my skull. It felt pretty good if you want to know. Pretty doggone good.
My blog buddy Mapelba challenged me with her recent post about telling the hard things in fiction. It inspired me to remember, as I write, that this is fiction. I can do whatever I want and even if it parallels real horror, and actual horrible things, it’s all made up. I don’t have to be afraid of bringing it down upon myself by writing it. Writing it doesn’t make it real. (She also challenged me to think of my faith as a more interactive entity which isn’t separated from my writing. Thanks, Mapelba. I needed that.) So I tried to write something hard, something I wouldn’t normally write.
Now, most of you have read my statement of belief which states horror doesn’t have to be gory. I don’t believe the two go hand in hand. I think horror can be invoked in a reader without making them sick to their stomachs, or going for the visceral horror of disemboweling and dismemberment. While my latest piece includes touches of that, the descriptions aren’t graphic or vivid, and yet, I got a genuine horror response from my first, best, constant reader: my wife. That, for me, was a coup. A great compliment.
She also wanted to ask where it came from, what’s wrong with me to write something like that. Nothing, babe. I promise. It’s just … harder to write that stuff, and I wanted to write what I wouldn’t allow myself to write before.
So there it is, rarin’ to go. I finally broke a tiny bit of inertia and got something written. I don’t think the piece wowed me, but I wasn’t disappointed. I felt good enough about it to enter it into a contest on deviantART. More importantly, it stretched me to touch upon subjects I didn’t know I could touch on and still be okay.
Okay, one step toward conquering my cowardice – at least in fiction writing – albeit a small one. But it shows me I’m able to branch a little bit and still get horror written without having to resort to an all-out gore-fest.
*Whew!* I feel better. Wish me luck on the contest. Oh, and if you’re interested, you can read it here.
How are all of you feeling?
-JDT-
All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.
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I remember my eighth grade teacher. And my sixth grade teacher. I’m having a harder time with the seventh grade teacher, because that time was in the south, and I never really fit in with those folks. Truth be told, I never fit in anywhere, but in the south the outcast feeling was more pronounced.
My sixth grade teacher was a great guy. Nice guy. Fun teacher. Sort of an easy-going, relaxed teaching style. I learned a lot. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what subjects I had with him now, more than thirty years later, but I remember homeroom. Does that count?
In eight grade I returned to the school from the deep south, from being outcast, from being the alien amongst the natives. I need not go into the reasons why that was true, but it was. I remember the gentle nature he had, how he was patient and encouraging. I enjoyed my time in his class. He taught math, I think. The math teacher I’d had in sixth grade moved on to be dean of discipline for the high school I eventually attended. But my eight grade homeroom teacher and math teacher, and a couple of other subjects as I recall, was as great a guy in a different way than the sixth grade teacher.
The seventh grade teacher was the upper grade science teacher. So from fifth through eighth grade, he was your science teacher. While I missed having him for homeroom, he was … different. A portly man with a waddling throat and double chin, soft lard coated and more business-like than the others. He took himself more seriously. He was also part of a choir group at my parents’ church. He had that unusual tenor voice heavyset men seem to have, and sang well.
Eventually, I grew up, finished high school, and set out on my long, winding and dusty road which eventually lead to continued failure and hardship. As I wandered along this lonesome trail, I went out one night with a friend from school. We both lived in the same crappy town, went to the same elementary school, but he went to the local public high school while most of my other “friends” went to the Catholic high school I attended. I still saw him on a regular basis though, and one night I caught up with him and we went out drinking.
In those days, drinking was a specialty of mine. I got warmed up at a place on the main drag of town, notorious among those of us who grew up in that particular burg for being a rough, edgy place of mafioso and drug dealers. I wasn’t scared of anyone or anything then … not even bullets. So we decided to go in and have ourselves a li’l drink.
It didn’t take a lot of liquor to loosen my tongue in those days, but it did take a fair amount to get me ripping drunk. When I reached that point, my companion pointed out to me that our sixth, seventh and eighth grade teachers were sitting at a table not too far from us. Well, I’ll spare you the gory details, but one whispered rumor led to another, led to another, and another.
Long story short, when my father roused me from my drunken slumber the next morning, I couldn’t find my glasses. He was shouting about his truck — I’d borrowed his truck to go out because I didn’t have my own vehicle — and raging to know what I had done. Then he stopped, mid-scathe, and gestured at my hand.
“What happened to your hand?”
I looked down. My knuckles were scrapped, scabbed and red. Both hands. I quickly felt my face, then body … no bumps or bruises, no injuries I could find. I looked at him helplessly, and shrugged. “I don’t know,” I whispered, and realized I had no idea where my glasses were.
I don’t remember what happened that night, and I don’t know if I ever saw those men again. I know I probably never will now, but I can tell you this — if there was an exchange of violence between us and them, they must have gotten the worst of it. I found my glasses amid my bedclothes later, but never did remember what happened to my father’s truck or my knuckles.
It’d be nice to tell you that was the last time I ever got that drunk, but that’d be a lie. I was just getting started and my inebriated escapades had only just begun. But that’s the last time I couldn’t explain what happened to my physical person.
I still wonder after those teachers of old. I wonder what they must think of me now, once a prize pupil, with their last memory (so far as I know) that of a raging, nasty drunk making horrible accusations in a full bar. If they’re still alive, I hope they find it in their hearts to forgive me — but I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t.
Not one bit.
-JDT-
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Oh, how I miss the stars!
Growing up, I could look up on any given night. If it wasn’t raining or foggy, I’d see the sky plastered with bright, crisp points of blue, white and green light, shimmering in the black velvety sky. Toward the horizon the bright lights shot the horizon with whitish-green or orange and blotted them out, but above the canopy was a diamond glitter matting of sparkling jewels. The Milky Way laid itself in a hazy, wraith-glow across the sky and invited grass-and-dew imaginings of far away worlds.
Things seem different to me east of the Rockies. The stars seem so few, so faint, so isolated and rare. They poke through the sky desperate and weak, seeking someone to notice their presence, to turn a smiling eye on them. But they don’t have much of a chance here – the air is heavy, humid, murky. The ravaging city lights cast blinding, harsh, glaring and merciless coronas. The stars are blotted behind clouds, wet air and the smothering, suffocating scattering of sodium-vapor lamps, headlights, neon signs, marquis signs, golden arches, grinning monarchs and roller coaster decoration tubes of yellow, green, red, purple.
I haven’t seen so many of the familiar night companions I watched in my youth – Orion, Ursa Major, Pleiades, the Milky Way. The last I saw of them was on a wind-swept, ragweed crusted hilltop on the southern edge of a river, staring through binoculars to identify the Seven Sisters independently. The blanket of shining lights above seemed to ripple with the warm winds which raced breakneck through the valleys and canyons and rattled the skeletal grasses and gnarled old oaks.
My wife and I traveled east with Orion on our right shoulder for three thousand miles, and when we at last turned north to head for what we have come to call “The Black Hole,” I began to reflect on how, perhaps, that name is more fitting than I first thought. In a black hole, even light cannot run fast enough to escape. And here, we can’t seem to run fast enough to escape. But we’re in good company, because this black hole in our world seems to even suck the light out of the stars before it reaches us.
-JDT-
All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.
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It wasn’t a great movie, by any stretch, but JEEZ, with the way things have been going for me cinematically lately, I thought I’d never see another decent movie again.
So enter The Flock, starring one of my least favorite actors in the movie industry, Richard Gere. He plays a sex offender registrar keeping watch over a certain list of registrants which he refers to as his “flock”. Hence the name.
The agent is being forced to retire – seems to be a retire or be fired situation – and during the last month of his employ he must train a young woman as a replacement. She’s much more by-the-book than he is (he’s become jaded by the work and the type of people he’s overseeing) and a little naive and idealistic. He’s given a new registrant to watch over and a teenaged girl is abducted. The older agent is convinced it’s one of his “flock” gone astray, and the hunt is one to determine who it is, where the girl is, and the clock is ticking.
Overall, it was decent. They billed it as being in the tradition of the movie Seven (remember that one? with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman? good movie), and while it wasn’t quite as creepy, it did have a good bit of tension. It was also slightly predictable, but not so much it wouldn’t be worth seeing, and the characters are pretty well acted. I’d recommend it. If you have a chance to see it, check it out.
On the other side of this spectrum, I decided to indulge my poor, long-suffering wife’s Johnny Depp fetish and we got a movie with him in it. It’s called Dead Man. There’s a lot of other recognizable faces in it too, and Neil Young provided an electric guitar “soundtrack”. How wrong can you go with all that in the movie’s corner?
Evidently pretty doggone wrong. The movie wasn’t even a “meh”, it was a “wtf?”
Long. Slow. Boring. And even my wife didn’t like it. Much as she likes Icabod Depp, she didn’t like the movie. It had moments, but we couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be a comedy or spoof on westerns. Whatever it was it failed miserably. Hopefully his gangster movie will be better.
Nothing else going on really. Just trying to stay afloat and awake over the weekend. How ‘bout you all? Anything interesting happening with you?
-JDT-
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