Cleaning Up One's Act

 

About a week ago an important question arose on FaceBook.  Well, maybe not that important.  Someone wanted to know if something mentioned in a Godzilla movie was actually from Japanese legend or just made up for the film.  I happened to have run across a similar legend years ago, and I knew exactly which book it was in in my huge book collection.  Unfortunately, I didn't know where it might lie in my piles and piles of books, magazines, DVDs and papers.  I looked in closets and in boxes and under the sink and in cabinets, and it took me three days to find the right volume.  By then the world had moved on to other pressing questions.

"I've been in this apartment for four months," I said to myself, "and it still looks like I've just stepped in and dumped everything on the floor!"  So I spent a long hard weekend stacking books into columns by subject (so I will at least know to look in the Science pile, the Myth and Legend pile, etc.), boxed up magazines and comics, crammed DVDs into unused cabinet space, and put bill stubs, Xerox copies, and various important papers into manila folders.  I slowed down during the work-week, but by Friday night I was amazed -- my apartment looked rather neat (as near as my tiny one-bedroom place can, with so much stuff packed in it).

Then -- around 10:30 PM I picked up a magazine at random and actually started reading.  Even including more than eight hours of sleep, I was halfway through the magazine by 9:00 AM.  Then I started reading one of my intimidatingly long volumes . . . and opened a few of my collectible comic books and actually read them . . . and pulled out a random manila folder and read the clippings within . . . and I even took out some stories of my own and reviewed them.  This reading (and writing) thing might just get to be a habit, at least I hope so!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation -- Or At Least Last Week

 

There is a light switch in my new apartment which logically should have turned on the hall light but which instead shut off all the electricity in the living room.  I've flipped it accidentally several times (it is now taped down).  When flipped back on, the electricity returned, my computer came back on -- but my modem could not connect with the Internet.  The first couple of times I called Cox, and they were able to reboot my modem from their end, but Saturday it remained resolutely inert.  The person at Cox said maybe it was "fried".  From flipping a light switch?

Anyway, I had to take off part of Wednesday to wait for the Cox repairman to come.  He examined the modem, replaced some wires/cables he said had been spliced in badly, and, Lo!  The Internet!!

He left -- and two hours later the first of a series of thunderstorms marched through the Tulsa area and knocked out the power.  Only for a few minutes, but afterwards -- you guessed it, no Internet.

"Now, come on!" I told myself.  "There was a time you had no Internet.  There was a time you had no CD player, DVD player.  You were about the last person to buy a PC or cell phone.  So why the panic over a temporary Internet outage?"  True, but these days I pay most bills via the Internet (and billing time was almost here); I can't send out stories to magazines without it, and I tossed my last phone book long ago so I can't look up many important phone numbers without traveling elsewhere.  So I called for a repairman again; he'd be there Friday.

MEANWHILE -- My monthly rent is on automatic payment.  So is water and sewer and Cox itself.  I could have sworn the Public Service Company of Oklahoma was, too, until I idly opened an envelope from PSO late Wednesday night and found a Final Notice and a date for cutting off my electricity.  The date: a week earlier.

MEANWHILE MEANWHILE -- the storms marched through Tulsa.  Because of them my power went off twice a day anyway, judging by the number of times I had to re-set my clocks.

Thursday I fretted all day about PSO.  At lunch I spent half an hour on the phone trying to talk to someone.  Eventually someone answered.  I explained my non-auto-payment mixup, and I was assured PSO wouldn't actually cut off the power until August 9.  I hung up in relief -- 

But it was too late.  You see, the air conditioning where I work is always cranked up to subarctic conditions, especially so during the recent heatwave.  Thursday it was only about 80 degrees F. outside, but the A/C roared on as cryogenically as ever.  It was insanely cold.  Being on edge the previous few days didn't help.  I guess I lowered my bodily defenses, and by the time I went to bed that night I had the first raging head-cold I've had in years.

On the way home Thursday however, I stopped at the library to use their Internet and try to pay PSO's bills/late fees/reinstallment fee/whatever.  But I couldn't create an account unless I got their activation code from an email -- and I didn't know my passwords for AOL or OUTLOOK.COM (come on!  I signed on once 15 to 20 years ago, and they've stayed on since!  I forgot 'em!)  Replace the passwords?  Sure -- but you had to answer an email each company sent to the other email address . . .

Friday I stuck a check to PSO in the mailbox on the way to work; it would get there long before August 9.  I felt so ill at work I went home early.  I tried to call PSO to tell them the check was on its way, but a recording flat-out told you not to call for the present because all operators were tied up answering lines down and power out calls.

Yes, the storms were still around.  I got home about 3:00 PM, and the power was out.  The Cox repairman called and said he was amazingly ahead on his calls and could come at once.  I said the electricity was out; well, he couldn't do much without that.  He told me to call him if the power came back on.

So I sat there on my little bed, head pounding, snot dribbling, in my dark little apartment, and a horrible little thought came to me:  What if, despite all the assurances of the PSO operator, I had only reminded them of my tardy payments?  And they had finally gotten around to cutting me off?

I stumbled outside.  Other apartments had lights on.

"It's Friday, 3:30.  I have a 90 minute window before the libraries close," I muttered.

This time I took credit cards, bill stubs, the file of papers I signed when I first rented my apartment, my thick three-ring binder full of IDs and Passwords, everything.  I got online about 3:50, created a PSO account, gave PSO $180 in fees, late or otherwise (there's another $180 check headed their way in the mail even now, I hope that holds them for a while), and got home about 4:45.  I'll give 'em this, my power was already back on.  The Cox guy came, found out my modem was way too powerful for the apartment's wiring capacity (didn't follow it all -- he said something about needing a "four-way splitter"), and finally I was back in business.

I flopped into bed for thirteen hours.  I still have some hacking and coughing, but I feel like I've hit the bottom of some sort of abyss and am now bouncing up.

It's hard to explain, but most of the events of the past several years seem to fit a pattern -- learning experiences of a sort.  Problems and catastrophes, yes, but ones that settled themselves in an orderly fashion, and would have been utterly devastating had they occurred in any other order.  I'm not quite sure what I was supposed to learn from this week's events, though.

Oh, well -- writers are supposed to produce material for blogs, websites, FaceBook, Patreon, Twitter and more if they want to keep in the public eye, and my flow has atrophied over the past year.  Maybe now I can start churning out interesting essays and anecdotes again -- starting with this one.

The Continent of Cronos

 

                            Well, one of the above is Francisco Goya's Kronos Devouring His Son.

In trying to recapture the magic of my college days, I've been writing notes on index cards and in notebooks as I did in the days of yore.  One of my (admittedly malleable) categories is "Mythical Lands", fantasy places which might be real in some Otherworld.

Having mentioned it in a story, I decided to scribble notes on "The Continent of Cronos."  Briefly, according to Greek mythology, after Zeus overthrew his father Cronos [or Cronus, Kronos, etc.], he exiled the tyrannical Titan to a place far to the west, beyond the limits of the Greeks' known world, an extensive land known only as the "Continent of Cronos."

I decided to find an authentic reference to this fragment, just as I found similar tid-bits in old texts and journals at college.  It ought to be easy, I thought, since it appears early in the Grecian timeline -- probably in Chapter One of any book on Greek Myth.

I flipped through Apollodorus' Library of Greek Mythology but did not find the anecdote.  I looked well into the night through Gertrude Jobes' Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore, and Symbols, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hesiod's Theogony, Graves' The Greek Myths, to no avail.  I finally found the reference I wanted in Plutarch's Moralia, in an essay called "Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon."

Cripes, I'm putting as much effort into writing up a couple of 4" x 6" cards as I would writing an actual article, I thought.  And my articles are often long in appearing because I want them to be the most thoroughly researched essays ever!  Oh, well -- when I churn out enough articles, sketches, anecdotes and essays, maybe I can divide them into categories and publish them as a series of books.

The Children's Crusade

 

I've mentioned several times how my writing was inspired in my college years by wandering through the Oklahoma State University's Edmond Lowe Library and delving into its hundreds of volumes on mythology, folklore, ancient and medieval history, cryptozoology, biography, and everything else under the sun.  A large part of the "mythos" that evolved sprang from the idea of a parallel world touching occasionally upon our own, into which earth people -- Amelia Earhart and the Roanoke colonists, among others -- have occasionally stumbled.

The Children's Crusade of the Thirteenth Century was to have a major influence on the Other World -- the hundreds of misplaced earth children were to found several countries therein.  Naturally, George Zabriskie Gray's 1870 book The Children's Crusade -- the first major work on the subject -- was of immeasurable help here.

After college (and after being laid off from my first major job), thoughts of writing stories and novels set in a fantasy world began to fade.  The nasty ol' real world kept impinging on my life and creativity.  I just sort of puttered along, not really trying to further my writing career.

One Saturday I visited the Tulsa Fairgrounds, which used to house the state's biggest flea market in the enormous IPE Building (now called the SageNet Center).  I wandered down aisle after aisle of tables full of pottery, toy cars, oil paintings, old tools and the usual flea market detritus.  I took little interest in anything, because money was tight at the time (when isn't it?).

One table featured books, so many some had to be pinned in plastic baggies to a huge vertical pegboard.  I glanced up at the pegboard and spotted, hanging over the rest like a Christmas angel, a small, reddish-brown hardback with gilded gold highlights on the front cover.  The Children's Crusade:  An Episode of the Thirteenth Century, proclaimed the title.

I asked to examine it.  Yes, it was the book by George Zabriskie Gray, an original edition published in 1870.  Someone named E. G. Patterson purchased it in 1886, as his ancient pencilings informed me.  It was in amazing shape for a century-plus-old book, and the bookseller wanted a measly ten dollars for it.  Of course it became mine!

Since that day The Children's Crusade has been one of my favorite possessions, and along with Curious Myths of the Middle Ages by Sabine Baring-Gould, No Longer on the Map by Raymond H. Ramsey, and Aristeas of Proconnesus by J.D.P. Bolton, it has been one of the major foundations of my story-universe.

Well.  Having written that after a very creatively-dry six months, I guess I'd better dig out my Children's Crusade novel and finish it!

My Work History: Ending as It Began?

 The letters, applications, birth certificates, Degree of Indian Blood cards, Tribal Roll lists, etc., pile up every day at work.  I've got to log and scan them all!  I learned a week or so ago that I was the only person doing that job; maybe I was hearing wrong.  But Friday someone mentioned that two temps had been hired to help with the mail-ins -- and that they stopped showing up almost immediately.  I guess I'm the only one stupid -- er, man enough to handle the job.

My latest position reminds me of my very first job as dishwasher at the Bixby Cafe in Bixby, Oklahoma.  This was washing by hand -- none of those fancy dishwashin' contraptions around here.  Only occasionally did I get help from a part-time fellow who was more janitor and line cook.

I needed help, and my boss Louise Gordon kept hiring help -- that vanished quickly.  I left my day shift one Saturday, pausing long enough on my way out to say hello to the new evening-shift guys -- two big and burly Good Ol' Boys.  I fell exhausted into bed about 10:00 PM . . . and about 10:15 my father dragged me out of the sack, because the cafe had called.  Both new dishwashers had ducked out the back door about 9:30 and never came back.  So I was scraping baked-on crud from the pots and pans until about 2:00 AM.

[These guys had the gall to come back for their paychecks for their brief time at the restaurant.  Louise asked them what happened.  They said they'd never seen anything like that pile of dishes and pans and silverware, and it frightened them off.]

Another assistant was Jim Ramsey, a fellow Bixby High student who didn't know his own strength, and he was the most easy-going guy I ever met.  I hung out with him because basically, if you told him to do something, he'd do it.  "He won't be intimidated by the pile of detritus," I told myself.

He had the day shift while I had the evening, this time.  I arrived at work in time to see him yank off his damp, dirty apron, yell "THIS IS THE WORST #$@% JOB I EVER #$%! HAD!", throw the crumpled apron into Ms. Gordon's face, then storm out.  So I was alone again.

One Mark Allen Winkle, my younger brother, told me he wanted some of the "easy money" I was making, so he went to the Cafe as well.  I actually had a day off.  He shambled in that afternoon.  His legs and hips seemed to work, but his upper body sort of deflated like a balloon, and his hands hung down around his ankles.  "AAAAAUGH!  I CAN'T STAND IT!  AAAAUGH!  I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!", he said, or something to that effect, and, needless to say, he did not return.

Well, there were other fun incidents, but after nine months at the Bixby Cafe even I ran screaming into the night.  Still, I toughed out while everyone else fled.  Was that being steadfast and true, or being an idiot, though?

Inspirational Reading

 Well, with multiple books to edit, re-read, and polish up for agents, not to mention coming up with material for Patreon, the ol' blog gets neglected.  Since there come long periods when I have nothing else to do but read, I thought I'd give space to some inspirational pieces of literature.

Golden Apples of the Sun, Ray Bradbury

What can you say about Bradbury?  His prose holds more imagery and metaphor than most poetry.  It's almost too good to start off with; an aspiring writer could get a complex!  "Golden" contains famous SF like "A Sound of Thunder" and "The Fog-Horn," but only a few stories are fantasy or SF.  Don't try to hem Bradbury in with labels and genres!

 

"Empire of the Ants," H. G. Wells

Had to look at a bit of Wells as a change from Bradbury.  There's a stretch of Bradbury-like prose in the description of the Amazon and the smallness of humanity compared to it.  The new species of intelligent ant is pretty formidable.  They should have taken over by the 1960s, according to H. G.

 

"The Snow-Women," Fritz Leiber

Leiber's back story for Fafhrd, the first tale of the first Nehwon book, Swords Against Deviltry.  A long, long story, over one hundred pages, with no chapter breaks, it's rather slow going until the last quarter.  The second volume, Swords Against Death, would probably be a better introduction to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

 

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thought I'd try a little classic poetry.  Creepy imagery of the Flying Dutchman-like curse of the sailor who didn't like albatrosses.  Some bits have become a little too familiar due to overexposure ("Water, water, everywhere . . .").  I didn't quite understand the need for the glosses (apparently by Coleridge himself), although I liked the references to Josephus and others to explain the type of "nature spirit" it was that the Mariner offended.

_______________

And one full-fledged book review:

The Intruders

 

Pat Montandon

 

(New York, NY:  Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1975)

 

Pat Montandon was a local TV talk show hostess in San Francisco in the late sixties.  She became a professional “party thrower” to S.F.’s rich and famous (everyone from the Great Gildersleeve to Ted Kennedy), as typified by the title of her first book, How to Be a Party Girl.  Unfortunately, her life and career went into a spin after she threw an “astrology” party, and the reader is pulled along for the ride.

 

It seems a self-important Tarot reader was displeased with Pat’s supposed rudeness (she was busy greeting her important guests and forgot to bring him a drink).  Whereupon he grandiosely put a curse upon her and her house – a rather cold, old, empty place to begin with -- in front of dozens of San Francisco VIPs.  Her problems seemed to begin after this.

 

Montandon makes her case for something supernatural haunting her – she does list strange noises, music from nowhere, cold spots, and a sense of “presence”; her dog becomes so frightened of the house she has to give him away – but much of her book seems to be a record of simple bad luck.  Someone breaks in and steals jewelry, her car is hit on the bizarrely-curved street on which she parks, fires break out in odd places, and drug addicts and pushers move in upstairs.  Those seemed to me like normal big-city risks.  In these cynical times some of her other disasters seem rather tame:  She is supposed to be on Merv Griffin but gets bumped because the British model Twiggy takes too much time.  (“I felt myself retreating into the nightmare that had surrounded me for so long.”  Get over it!)  TV Guide advertises a televised appearance as “From Party Girl to Call Girl” (implying she was a prostitute; at least she sued them for $150,000).  After this a pimply-faced teenager calls her a hooker at a book-signing party (“I continued autographing books, but everything was a blur.  I could hardly see to write my name”).

 

So what makes the book interesting?  Well, there’s the man given the pseudonym “Earl Raymond”, an uninvited guest at the astrology party who dates Pat once or twice.  He devolves into the craziest SOB on earth during one date; I remembered him thirty years after reading The Intruders in high school.  Then there is the strange death of Mary Lou Ward, Pat’s secretary and best friend.  Much of the book is devoted to this tragic event, and we are given police and coroner’s reports, yet the more details we see, the murkier, stranger, and creepier her death becomes.

 

Reading it again after thirty years, another factor set in:  The book is almost a companion piece to Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac, though the infamous serial killer is never mentioned.  Names familiar from the Zodiac case pop up here, including Herb Caen’s and David Toschi’s – Detective Toschi is almost a “guest star” in The Intruders.

 

. . . So I read Intruders yet again, pretending that Zodiac was the cause of Ms. Montandon's problems:  the mysterious fires, the threatening and obscene calls, the break-ins . . . and damn if Pat’s “disasters” didn’t mesh well with the Zodiac timeline!

 

And the crazy boyfriend “Earl Raymond” becomes even more noticeable:  a large, heavyset man, he crashed the astrology party to begin with – paralleling the Darlene Ferrin painting party.  His attempted abduction of Pat Montandon across the Bay Bridge to “Squaw Valley, where he had a cabin” is uncomfortably like the Kathleen Johns abduction.  Just who was “Earl Raymond”?

 

Why would Zodiac zero in on Pat Montandon and her cold, dark haunted house in the first place?  Remember the astrology party that seemed to spark the curse?  “I planned to have a huge round panel hanging by the entrance, with the signs of the Zodiac on it.” (p. 27)  So Z was wandering down the street and saw the big zodiac on her door . . . naturally he had to wander on in . . . practically an invite.

 

Not mentioned in the book is yet another tie to Zodiac:  Ms. Montandon was married, apparently, for two or three days, to Melvin Belli, the attorney who received at least one letter and phone call from the killer.  As I understand it, Montandon and Belli happened to be in Japan at the same time; they got a little tipsy; Belli took our heroine to a strange Japanese ceremony; the next day he announced that it was a Japanese wedding, and that he and Pat were now man and wife.  I suspect there was a major ass-whuppin’ after this, and Belli insisted it was all a joke.  Were they married or weren’t they?  Inquiring minds want to know.

 

So here it is.  The Intruders is mostly a rambling memoir of a really crappy period in Pat Montandon’s life.  Interesting in its details of a minor celebrity’s career, creepy in parts but unconvincing as a tale of the paranormal, and interesting in retrospect as a kind of sidebar to the Zodiac mythos.  Worth a read, especially if you know anything about the Zodiac case. ***

"Countdown" is Coming!

 I finally gathered together enough of my short stories to make a collection.  The provisional title is Countdown.  The theme is:  each story is as short as or shorter than the one before, for those with limited time (or attention spans).  We end up at the end with VERY short stories, so I needed well over 100 to make a full volume.  What kind of stories, you ask? Well, I reviewed them, and among other subjects in the book are:  anthropomorphic insects, a sperm whale, Sherlock Holmes (several times), the Mothman of West Virginia, cameos of Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry (unnamed, of course), Jack the Ripper (multiple times), the Pied Piper, invading aliens, werewolves, the Cthulhu Mythos, The Hook and other urban legends, the Invisible Man (a few times), a scruffy little mutt, the Giant Rat of Sumatra, the Last Man on Earth (more than once), a stag-headed Wendigo, a pre-teen dragon, and a Jabberwock.

In other words, something for everyone!