Echoes in a Hollow Space

Well, this Musings post is grossly long, and maybe a bit dated, but I started throwing things into the file, then got caught up in the holidays—and God forbid anyone should be deprived of my Musings. [insert barf emoji] At least it has a lot of pictures.

*
One of my most profound mystical experiences, or contact with the numinous, was invoked by a dead cat. It changed me from near-atheist to "oh I get it now." Thank you, Mocha. The Mocha Hierophany.

Mocha, an old soul from the 80s:



*
New Year’s Day sunset: Even enhancing the color on this doesn't come close to the intensity of the light. Nothing ever beats Nature. Thank you, Nature.



The same sky from my friend who lives a few miles from here. This one captures the immensity of the sky better than mine did, how the clouds seemed to go on forever.



*
Here's a question for you: is poetry a purely mammalian response to the world? Is magic? Would intelligent and highly advanced reptiles, for instance, have that sense of wonder and awe and poetry? I don’t want to be Mammalian-Centric.

*
I always think of the four of swords as the "rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated" card. (Yes, dad jokes help me remember the meanings.)



*
A few days before the new year (December 30th) I found out that I share blood with one of the accused Salem witches (Mary Leach Ireson). We're descended from the same ancestor (Richard Leech) through the brother (Lawrence Leech) of my direct ancestor (Thomas Leech). Maybe that's why I've always been obsessed with these trials. I particularly like the "maybe you were a witch but didn't know it" line of questioning. Apparently, the "maybe I'm a witch but didn't know it" defense worked because she wasn't executed and lived until 1711.




As I’ve said before, women rarely appear in the historical record unless they’ve suffered some trauma.

*
I have so much work to do and a limited amount of time. But time is not my enemy. If I focus on what needs to be done, not allowing myself to be distracted, I will do what I need to do. The only reason I say it isn't against me is because I will do what I can do. If time runs out, then it does. It will eventually anyway so why so sweat it?

*
You know that weird stuff you have to clear from your parents or grandparents' homes when they pass? When you reach a certain age you can't be arsed about good taste. Sometimes you just want stuff that makes you giggle or because you know it will chagrin some of the people who inherit it.

*
I finally got my Red Book set up so that people can actually see it instead of being hidden away in a room they can't go in.



*
Last month I pulled my novel Venus In Transit out of the trunk. I started working on it in 1999. It was inspired by Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality and later given shape and spin by George P. Hansen's The Trickster and the Paranormal. Plus all those thousands and thousands of paranormal shows I've watched over the years and many another paranormal book. I had the novel in a fairly polished state and was getting ready to start marketing it when my mother had a stroke and my world went all to hell for several years. Then there was the very long and painful writer's block afterwards.

Things started to loosen up for me artistically after watching season one of Hellier last year—and that's when I had my Hellier related synchronicity storm. Which let me know I was on the right track creatively. I finished one novel this summer and started working on another. Then Hellier Season 2 came along. It fed my head yet again, and there was something about the discussion in that series of pushing through frustration that reminded me of the artistic process.

Whenever an artist, or at least any artist I know, reaches a point of frustration it's often the sign of imminent breakthrough to a new way of doing things. Pushing through that frustration is a vital part of the process. So I got out that old paranormal novel with an idea to see if it really was ready to market and I fell into a hole with it for about a week. That edit is done, but when I got to the part in the story where my investigator discovers strange, small, three-toed footprints with dermal ridges, I thought, "No one will ever believe I didn't get this from Hellier." But those are the breaks. Hellier2 did encourage me to pull it back out of the trunk and that’s got to be a good thing.

*
Hellier is beautifully shot and edited. I remember when the granddaddy of paranormal shows, Ghost Hunters, premiered. They used that cinema vérité style which gave a feel of credibility (and because it was cheap to produce), but imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. Most of what's come since has been crap.

*
My life is a lot better since I've given up trying to find ultimate answers. I'm more content trying to find ultimate questions.

*
Well, I got within 100 pages of finishing Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson but my medieval porn book arrived so...sorry Neal.

*
Cats exist simultaneously in this time/space and in hyperspace which is why they always seem to take up a vastly greater amount of space than their physical bodies would imply.

*
I've been to both Disneyland and the "Disneyland of Cemeteries"—Forest Lawn—and I would choose to spend my eternity in neither of them. (Talk about terrifying!)



*
Lt. Col. Vindman during the impeachment hearings reading that paragraph to his dad and talking about it? "Don't worry. This is America. We do what's right here." We have to justify his faith in this country. It's been what was true in the past and we can't let it fall away. DO THE RIGHT THING, AMERICA. And Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi talking to Vindman about the pride of being an immigrant and being an American? Yep, that's the essence of what this country it's always been.

"All this time I thought I'd been lying to myself, but I was just kidding myself."

—Peter Serafinowicz on Twitter


In yesterday's post, I wrote:

And then there are the stories my father used to tell, some of them true (sort of), and some of them more creative, and the screwy family legacy that's caused...Ah, but that's a story for another day. Perhaps tomorrow.

My father, my biological father, had already lived a good long while by the time I was born—a child of his senior years. He was many things, amongst those things a great storyteller. Some of the stories he told about his early life were even true, but I learned in my twenties that I had to take everything he had ever told me with a large grain of salt. Dad was a storyteller, not a historian. Now and again, in my research I'll come across a factoid and say, "What do you know? Dad may actually have been telling the truth that time." Other times I'll come across information that lets me know that what Dad said about the family history had been—how shall I put it?—highly colored by imagination and the desire to tell a good tale.

Like the story about my father's first wife, the mother of my half-brother, J. (who was actually only two years younger than my own mother).

( Read More )

I was tagged by mnfaure and was so very, very tempted just to update this entry from a few years back and pretend it was new. That wouldn't be sporting, would it? But that list is much more interesting. I've been squeezing my brain to come up with some more things. I'm really quite a boring individual and if I'm ever asked to do this again, I'm definitely using a previous post.

1. Although I'm right-handed, I'm quasi-ambidextrous in that I'm always doing things left-handedly. I wear my watch like a lefty on my right wrist, for instance, and, weirdest of all, I taught myself to use the mouse upside down. It seemed natural to me to go UP when I wanted the cursor to go DOWN.

2. I am related by marriage to the Old West desperadoes, the Dalton Gang. One of the siblings of one of my ancestors married one of the Dalton boys.

3. I once asked Danny Elfman if his mother was named Rosemary. We were at Madame Wongs, he was in Oingo Boingo at the time and between shows, I was drunk, someone dared me. I've been humiliated in retrospect ever since, but at the time I knew no shame. Hussy! (Hmm. Maybe I should have posted this to postsecret instead of here.)

4. There are three degrees of separation between me and Marilyn Monroe. 1) My friend, Stephan, had a writing partner I knew as 2) Bobby Miller. I later found out his real name was Arthur Miller, Jr., and 3) Marilyn Monroe was once married to Arthur Miller, Sr., therefore Bobby's stepmother.

5. I've been to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It has an open-air ramp winding all the way around the outside, always going up (naturally). When I got to the top, an Italian film crew was filming a commercial.

6. I've had my purse snatched three times, and my old apartment which I shared with roommates, was robbed four times. I am hypervigilant and distrustful as a result.

7. I have roughly 400 books in my To Be Read pile (really, three small bookshelves), and that's not even counting most of my nonfiction and the one or two boxes still packed in the garage. Can you say "sickness"?

8. My biological father was a lot older than my mother. Added to that, I was a late in life baby for my mom. As a consequence, the timeframe on my father goes back much further than most people my age. Dad was born in the year 1900, lied about his age (by one year) in order to join the Army, and fought in World War I. This also means my half-brother (now deceased), fathered by Dad in his mid-twenties, was two years younger than my mother. It also means that all but one of my nieces and nephews are older than me.

9. On another genealogical note: two creeps from history share a common ancestor with me—the genocidal maniac and incompetent general George Armstrong Custer, and the obscure, crazy, Nazi-sympathizing poet, Ezra Pound. I sure hope it doesn't run in the family. Why couldn't it have been somebody cool???

10. The house I grew up in was in the middle of the city (Venice, part of Los Angeles), but had open fields on both sides, which was quite lovely. However, this house no longer exists. Developers bought the entire block and turned it into a public storage facility. This makes me very sad.

Quote of the day:

"Gods are great. But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return . . ."

—Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Things I thought of blogging today: The fact that this new movie, The Island, is a remake (or rip off?) of a horrifically cheesy scifi movie (The Clonus Horror) from the 70s that wound up being parodied on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Why anyone would want to remake such a turkey is beyond me, but the current moviemakers seem to have given it a high-gloss finish.

God, I miss MST3K.

One of the great ironic highlights of my writing career was when I realized that one of the stink bombs being parodied on MST3K was written by a writing teacher I had at UCLA whom I loathed—not because he was a stinky writer, but because he was a pretentious bully and control freak.

God, I miss MST3K.

Just the thought of the poopie suit scene in Starfighters has me laughing until I...

Random pretentious thought of the day: Poetry, it seems to me, is about the willingness to be naked in front of strangers.

No, that's not quite right. It's about the willingness to appear to be naked in front of strangers. It isn't confessional, not the good stuff. No, it's more like doing a strip tease, but when you get past the point of your skivvies what the audience really sees is a marvelous body suit that gives the breathless illusion of skin.

Odd discovery of the day: One of my ancestors showed up being discussed on a mailing list called CIRCUS FOLK. Imagine my delight! I had so hoped he'd been a two-headed man or a wildman of the woods—or at least double-jointed—before converting to Mormonism and acquiring nine wives back in the 19th century before the church outlawed it. But no, the wildest he got (before the wives) was playing clarinet in the band. Of course, the nine wives were a bit of a feat—and makes for some amazingly tangled genealogy, I can tell you.

Fortunately, I'm descended from the black sheep line of that family.

Of course, he also spent time as a ship's carpenter. I like to think of his polygamy as a formalized and sanctified extension of his seafaring days.

Here's a verse for Kevin of the day: From today's Edward Gorey calendar:

The seaweed on the shore cries out,
But only it knows what about