“On my way up north, up on the Ventura

I pulled back the hood and I was talking to you

And I knew then it would be a lifelong thing

But I didn’t know that we, we could break a silver lining”

“A Sorta Fairytale” by Tori Amos. 2002

The first ten seconds of this song pinned me. I was in my work truck, eating lunch, and just stopped.

The weird thing is that I had no idea who the song was about until years later when a woman came along and slipped into the lyrics.

But before that happened, I was, again, at work, and this song came on.

“2 AM and I’m still awake, writing a song

If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer inside of me

Threatening the life it belongs to

And I feel like I’m naked in front of the crowd

‘Cause these words are my diary screaming out loud

And I know that you’ll use them however you want to”

The song “2AM, Breathe” by Anna Nalick, 2005

If you’ve ever had something inside of you that was fighting to get out, to become, to live, god fucking dammit, this song will stop you. I pulled over and listened. I was on my way to a meeting, and almost there, they could see me as I pulled over. The song’s beginning slowed me down, but the lyrics about getting it all down on paper all full stop.

Three years apart, two songs, and I still listen to them both.

Those two songs are part of my life, like air (jussssst breathe), like red cells, like hearing or vision. They are part of who I am. It’s like every minute that you ever lived, each second, brought you right here, reading this.

No matter how weird or shitty or hard life gets, you have those seconds that carry you. Songs, books, sunsets, moments when you’re alone with a dog and you know the two of you are sharing the moment.

Don’t you quit. Don’t you ever give up. It’s still there, someone is writing  a song right now that you are going to love so much you pull over and are breathless. At a party where no one even knows you there a cat is going to come out from under the sofa to rub faces with you, and one day you’re going to remember the way it felt when the cat purred in your lap.

No matter what, there are those moments waiting for you, just you, and no one else ever, and you haven’t the right or any reason not to allow them to come to you.

They’re won’t be anyone to tell us how they felt, if you aren’t there, and we need you.

Take Care,

Mike

Using a shovel to compost is like using a fly swatter to serve soup. It is possible, but there’s never a moment you’re unaware the wrong utensil is in your hands. But when life hands you lemons, throw them at people you dislike. After all, any supernatural event is worth expressing forcefully, so when a shovel is all you have, dig it.

            I shifted most of the mass of the compost pile from the south end to the north and then dug down another third of a meter or so. The heat was kicking in, the mosquitoes were flying in formations, and humidity had become the primary atmosphere. Yet there is something acutely Zen about manual labor to prepare the soil for a garden I will not plant for many months.  

            Too much time, far too much labor, and some aggravation of unusual size later, the pile is turned and ready for the next batch of yard debris. I dug down until I hit water, to find out how wet the area was, and it was.

            Composting works without optimum anything. I supply sweat, put the pieces together, and receive rich, black soil. Nothing is ever perfect but the ending.

            Why Time Travel is Fun, Yet Horrible to Write About in Fiction.

            Let’s begin with very simple things. If you went back and time and killed Hitler no one would know you had done something good. And now, at what age would you kill him? Worse, if you murdered Hitler when he was twelve, you might be arrested and executed, then you wouldn’t exist to travel back in time to kill Hitler.

            That went poorly. Let’s try this: You travel back in time to tell your ten year old self what stocks to invest in, who will win the Word Series, and to get the hell out of New Orleans before Katrina hits in 2005. Then you travel back to the future, where you arrive to find you lost the use of your legs in a plane crash when you were fleeing Katrina in 2005, and the past looks nothing as you remember it.

            Hmmm, this isn’t easy at all. Okay, then this: You travel back in time to tell your ten-year-old self how the world might unfold, desktops, laptops, nothing precise, but an idea of what inventions to invest in. He pepper sprays you and calls the cops. You get arrested, and hopefully, you were smart enough not to have any ID or cash on you. But then what?

            Take Three: As a child, you are fascinated with time travel, and at age sixteen, you meet a man who hands you a piece of paper with the phrase, “You did it. The machine works,” which is exactly the phrase you made up as a kid to your future self in case you invented time travel. You then go back to the future, and all is well, right? But if you went back into the past and found you were there, it stands to reason that once you leave the past and get to the future, you will also be there. Every timeline you visit will have you in it, wouldn’t it?

            I think the most exciting part about time travel in fiction is how difficult it is.

Here’s “The Matrix” movie I want to see: A woman is lying on the beach, enjoying the sunset, and watching her grandkids play in the surf. Her husband, a world famous cardiologist, just retired to spend more time with her. The novel she has spent so long writing was finally published, and is climbing up the top ten list. Their daughter is on the verge of inventing a vaccine for cancer.

Suddenly, she wakes up, tubes in her body, with Neo telling her it will be okay. She discovers her life never existed, she never had a husband,  kids, or grandchildren, and she’s twenty years old, naked and freaked out.

They woke her up by mistake.

Now what?

It’s the end of the first Matrix movie. The Matrix, as an entity, is waking up people at random, turning them loose on the Resistance, and it becomes clear that humans don’t have the resources to take in thousands of refugees, most of whom don’t want to be there.

The Matrix offers to stop releasing Sleepers if the Resistance stops hacking into the mainframe.

Now what?

The dream began with many people I knew walking to a lecture or a debate. I was young, maybe in college, as were the other people walking with me. A covered stage on the north end, where someone was speaking, then a woman on the opposite end of the venue, a woman I know in real life but still cannot place, stood up and said something shockingly disagreeable. I stood up and raised my right fist, clearly a sign I did not support her, as did many others. Then we left.

            On the way back, the mood turned more jovial, and I knew our route in real life. It’s a city street in Valdosta where I used to run, as there is little traffic. We came upon a device on a pedestal. Pushing the button would display the distance from the device to the road’s edge, which was 1.4 feet. Neither the device nor the road ever moved, so we laughed at the ridiculousness of it all but still pushed the button many times.

            Then, I was entirely in a different location, one I had never been to before or in a dream. A woman I knew only while asleep and I argued. She was leaving me but didn’t want to be the one who said it. In the end, she stormed out but didn’t take her stuff. This part of the dream lasted only a short while.

            The next part of the dream was more lucid. The set was a reoccurring dreamscape of an apartment building made of deep reddish-brown brick. The apartments are small. The building has four stories, and even though it’s rather cramped, the place is nice and clean, and the flats are well-kept.

            I had the key to a woman’s apartment, someone known in real life, and we were meeting soon. Yet a came upon a stack of doors on the sidewalk, stopped to look, and another woman put her coffee cup on top of the pile.

            “Do you come to these doors often?” I asked, and she laughed.

            Then I went up the stairs to my destination and stopped to think about my last time here. I remembered with great clarity the windows, the style of the rooms, the view over the town, and the smells of the building. I felt it fading away. Thunder awoke me. The sound of hard rain was the dominant sense.

I take a lot of photos. There’s very rarely a day that goes by a dozen or so shots aren’t taken. Sometimes, there’s many more than that. Why I do this is to better understand the tool with which I work. I learn from shooting, and I try to apply what I have learned to better use the cell phone’s camera.

I do get “lucky” shots, where moments are caught in time, rare photos of nature or the sky, where something unusual happens.

No one, anywhere, at any time in human history, was ever good at anything worth doing because they were lucky, or they had the right equipment.

They’re good because they spend a lot of time doing it and they work at it.

Sometimes, you can spend a lot of time doing something, and work at it, and still not be that good. But if you like what you do it is still worth it.

It’s still not luck.

            When the shelling started every man ran for his life, ran for his foxhole, ran for a bunker if he could make it. Some were caught in the open, torn apart, vaporized if one of the eighteen inch guns hit them, merely shredded if a smaller caliber shell landed close. Some lost legs, arms, and screamed as they lay waiting for the next barrage to finish them. Sometimes help would arrive, a buddy would rush out from safety, and sometimes he was killed, too. But the wounded might get dragged into a hole and bleed out.

            Our ships arrived. The battle raged from noon until past dark, when the flashes of light from the guns, and the orange colored comets passing in the sky passed back and forth, the shells either landing in water, never to be seen, or hitting their target in an awful sound, and fire. More ships joined in, and then suddenly it seemed the burning vessels, flashes of light, the sound of thunder from the guns, was all there was, or would be. Exhaustion took me, after being awake for three days straight, I slept.

            The next morning brought a gray sky, overcast, and dark. Bodies lay where they landed, pieces of men were scattered kindling for the next battle, hatred gripped us all, and the constant fear. The sea spat out survivors in rafts, ours, theirs, burned men who only spoke the language of agony waved blackened limbs at us, and begged for death. Bodies floated in masses, platoons of dead, face down, or staring eyeless at the heavens. Dozens, in pairs, one at a time, but the tide brought them in, and I wondered how many more had gone down inside burning ships, or drifted out into the endless sea.

            The radios were silent. Not our signals, not theirs, not a sound except the sea, and the wounded. We ran out of morphine quickly, and then, there was nothing but pain, and screaming. No planes flew overhead, no silhouettes of fear or hope on the horizon. Nothing but the heat and the gray skies, and the sounds of the men whose bodies demanded some relief.

            We buried men in the sand with the bulldozer until the fuel ran out, and then we buried men with shovels until we were too tired. Then we burned bodies until the smell was too much. Finally, exhausted and hungry, we sat and waited. For what, and how long, we did not know. Nothing was left to do, no one left to kill, and waiting to die seemed to be better than anything else possible.

            We sighted ships a week later. Our ships? Their ships? We could not tell and could not care. As they drew near the earth itself rolled, pitched, and heaved as if trying to vomit the dead from their graves. Bunkers collapsed, trees, what few were left, toppled, and we lay in the sand as if it were a solid sea of waves.

            As the ships drew closer and closer, we saw something else, too. A white line on the horizon behind them, at first small, then larger and larger. The ships turned, tried to outrun the wave, but they saw it too late. One by one we watched them flipped, overturned, or plain submerged outright as the water grew higher and higher and higher. Men ran, screamed, prayed, cried, but I sat on the beach and watched. The water retreated, was sucked away from the island for half a mile. Our antiship defenses lay open to the gray sky, the last time they would be.

            The wave came rushing, one hundred feet high, and I sat, waited, and made no sound.

end

            The last few nights I’ve had dreams populated by people who do not exist in real life, and dreamscapes which are a hybrid of the dreamworld and reality. The setting for one was Quitman, Georgia, the downtown area, but where there is a convenience store, in the dream  was a wooden building, old and sturdily built, which housed a hardware store.

            I didn’t go inside, but outside, a window that had been boarded up, and bars installed, had a live snake visible and its pattern changed so it was either a rat snake or a water snake. A young man was standing there talking to me, and I knew he worked for the store. A woman appeared, she was thirty something and scantily dressed, but neither she nor the boy were afraid of the snake. Suddenly, the window was full of snakes, rat snakes now, and the boy picked one up and offered to sell it to me. The woman also began to pitch her wares, and it took me a minute to realize what she was trying to do.

            The boy began talking to a woman who was slightly afraid of snakes, and the scantily clad woman leaned over with a leer and whispered, “What makes you think I’m not a whore?”

I woke up.

Today is the birthday of Roy Orbison born in Vernon, Texas, back in 1936. Vernon Texas is close to the Oklahoma state line, and in the late 1970’s, one of the electrical companies in Texas executed “The Midnight Connection”. Federal law states if an electrical company has connections from one state to another, the entire state then falls under the federal regulations. Texas electric companies didn’t want this to happen to they all made a deal not to connect to other states.

            All of this was fine until one Texas company who had holdings in Oklahoma and Louisiana decided they would sneak a connection over and bring the state under Federal oversight.

            The rest of Texas was displeased. After many legal battles, Texas courts decided to keep Texas electrical systems isolated from the rest of the country.

            I heard about this yesterday on NPR, and then today is Roy Orbison’s birthday, the only two events where anyone was likely to hear about Vernon, Texas.