I Can't Possibly Be The Only One Thinking This...

Okay. With luck -- or rather, draftsmanship -- on my side I'll be posting a sketch of Anomalocaris canadensis later today. But just in case, here's a little political raving to keep things from slowing down too badly. Please feel free to ignore this; and remember, these are the opinions of a raving nutbar.

Right now the economy is a central issue in all our lives. Exactly why is America's economy in the shitter? We're conducting a war -- to conduct a war and ruin an economy at the same time seems like some sort of magic trick.

I'm no economist, I'm woefully ignorant of politics. But it seems to me that when you run a war you have to fucking well run a war. That means paying for the war, not just sending people off to battle.

It means victory gardens, scrap metal drives, war bonds. It means that the civilian population has to throw its support behind the military.

The current administration paid for the Iraq war (or, currently, occupation) with credit cards.

Your credit cards.

To conduct a war and cut taxes at the same time means that the war has to be paid for by going into debt. This is profoundly foolish.

Worse than that much of the money funneled into both the war and anti-terrorism efforts turned out to be straight-up pork. "No-bid contracts?" Wiretapping? Give me a break -- these were excuses to move money from public to private pockets. And given the administration's connections with companies like Halliburton it is difficult not to read this as a case of a bunch of war criminals plundering one nation while bombing another.

If this government had actually conducted the war on a fiscally responsible basis they would have needed cooperation from the nation as a whole. Which means they would have had to justify the whole shebang. Which they could not do.

So they ran the country into debt while a handful of private interests almost choked themselves to death on the flood of dollars cascaded down their throats -- and that money had to come from somewhere.

Whoever comes into office next is going to be reaping the harvest of the last eight years -- or rather, the accumulated harvest of every administration from Reagan on. That's when the deregulazation of the financial industry began and things have been going downhill ever since.

Of course the American people are also responsible for this. By allowing ourselves to be controlled by fear, by listening to the Big Lie over and over again, by simply being selfish and short-sighted we have helped to bring this situation to pass. Shame on us.

Interesting that the bill is coming due just as Bush is on his way out of the White House. I really, really hope there is some legal recourse we can take to bring him, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of that bloody-snouted herd of anthropophagous swine to some kind of justice.

But I doubt it.

I'm Gonna Be In A Book!

The teacher asked for a subtle use of gradient. It works but it seems a little... lacking.

Ahhh, that's better.

A little while ago I stopped sending stories out to professional markets. There were a number of reasons for this. First, I've been putting my writing energy into the novel. And right now I work with an editor who likes my fiction well enough to place it in the two small-press magazines he edits.

Of course, I also stopped because when I started sending stories out I got personal rejection slips -- here's what didn't work, came close, strong writing here -- but as I improved I started getting form slips and that hurt my little feelings.

So a little while ago I said the hell with it, worry about selling short fiction once the novel's finished.

So of course that's when a small-press editory, Dave Byron, contacts me and asks me to write a story for an upcoming anthology. (I'm putting his site up in my links section -- it's New Voices in Fiction.)

The book is to be titled Grand Guignoir and it's intended to combine Grand Guignol theater with noir fiction. In other words, over-the-top crime stories. "Doc" Byron ran across a sample of my writing on the Swill site and figured I was good at bad so he signed me up.

Bucky Sinister is going to be there -- he was in the first issue of Swill. (Tragically, both he and I submitted clown-oriented horror. Very different stories but it was enough to give the issue its theme.) Cool!

But the big news? Joe R. Lansdale has a story in there. I'm gonna be in an anthology with Joe R. Lansdale! The man is one of my minor heroes and has been a bit of an influence -- more than anyone else he taught me not to look away from what you're writing. He's also an example of someone who started off writing what was more-or-less pulp fiction and who has grown over the years into a very respectable author, one with real depth and strength who uses the tropes of popular fiction to address personal and political concerns.

Like I said, a minor hero of mine.

How about a little fake Mondrian while we're at it?

And the story? I first submitted a piece I'd had trouble placing elsewhere, and in an email to my writer's group I admitted that it was a story that didn't quite work for me and that I'd submitted it as an act of unconscious self-sabotage. (The world's most popular indoor sport, at least in my world.) I've since realized that it's really a spoken word piece and that's why it doesn't work on the page...

So then I went through my notes to see if any concepts seemed as though they'd work for an ultraviolent crime story. That was when I remembered a character I'd created for a novel, a costumed vigilante. He was based on my readings concerning organized pattern killers -- whose behavior was very strongly reminiscent of some superheroes.

Right now there's a celebration in the culture of the good guy who acts like a bad guy, of the man who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty when the time comes. Who isn't afraid to kill and torture as long as he does it to people who deserve it.

To say the least I disapprove. I see this as a corrosive concept, one that leads into a downhill spiral. Yes, I'm thinking Guantanamo among other things. And there was the question I had to answer.

If the bad guy is really bad -- really, really bad -- how can you show the agent of justice confronting him as being repellent in his own right? How do you show a strong man acting in opposition to evil in a way that doesn't engage the sympathies of the audience?

I think I pulled it off.

Hopefully the last on the shootings.

Hey, all.

Hopefully this is the end of the posts about the shootings. That isn't what this blog is about, after all. But that being said...

My neighbor escaped serious injury. If the bullet had gone one way, spleen, the other way spine. But she's gonna be okay.

My wife is organizing the neighborhood. A news team found out about it and put her on the air last night. She screamed for a police presence on the block, which was immediately followed by a shot of the chief of police explaining why they weren't going to put anyone in our neighborhood.

We had two officers on the block last night. If Karen says a pissant's going to move a bale of hay you may as well clear a space for it.

My reaction to the whole thing? I believe the technical term is paradoxical. I'm pretty much nuts and have been going through a rough patch of the crazies lately. But put me into an actual crisis situation and I calm right down. I've been eating and sleeping. While I worry it is much less of an issue for me than the free-floating anxiety I've been dealing with. No fear; just concern.

I guess I need to live under circumstances where my overdeveloped fight-or-flight instincts aren't overdeveloped. I am just not fit for decent living.

Oh, well.

She was coming home to her kids.

Tonight after band practice, around ten-thirty, I was in the bathroom when I heard three shots. When my wife and I left the house to find out what was going on we found that our neighbor across the street had been shot. I understand that her chances of survival are good. My best wishes go out to her and her family.

To the best of my knowledge she had absolutely nothing to do with the situation last night.

The details are none of my business and none of yours but she's someone who had at one point hit the kind of place in life that you don't come back from.

She came back. I always had the impression that she did it because she had a kid. And tonight she was coming home from work to her family and someone shot her.

The information I received was random; one person said it was a drive-by, someone else said it was someone at the memorial that's been put up for one of the shooters from last night.

Everything I know tells me that it happened for the sake of shooting; that someone was overcome with grief or rage or stupidity or self-importance or some ungodly emotional cocktail and decided that shooting someone at random was the thing to do. I wouldn't mind being wrong about this.

And now my wife, bless her heart, asked me to put a futon over the window by our bed. Because I sleep next to the window and, again, bless her heart, she cares whether I live or die. It's good to have someone who cares about that.

Right now I care about my neighbor from across the street, with whom I've had a bit of friction and a few friendly hellos. Someone I hardly know. Someone I just saw lying on the sidewalk between her car and her front door. And I care about her kids; when I asked if there was any way I could help with them the police were very kind. The officer I spoke to clearly understood how it felt to want to do the right thing and how sometimes standing back is the right thing. And he understood how that hurts.

A couple of reporters were talking to me this afternoon and they were clearly angling for something bad to say about the police. I can understand this; I grew up in a community with a notoriously racist and corrupt police force and I can clearly see the racist side of law enforcement in America.

But here and now the police have been responsible. Prompt. Courteous. And compassionate.

You know what's kind of fun? Thanking a cop and meaning it. It seems to take them by surprise. And when someone you've never met in your life is obviously despondent and they cling to you and you hold them and they calm down? That's good too. Introducing yourself to neighbors for the first time and speaking in true camaraderie. That's good too.

I need more of these things in my life. But I don't need to have someone shot in order to get them.

Welcome to Homicide Central.

Last night I was awakened by a burst of gunfire outside my bedroom window at midnight; it was quickly followed by a second and then the sound of a car driving off. My wife rolled over and touched my arm -- "Was that gunfire?"

It's like the sound of a car crash. Once you've really heard it you can't mistake it for much else. I've heard gunfire in my life, once had the chance to spend an afternoon at a gun range. And this would make the third time I've heard someone shot to death.

Karen calls nine-one-one; the line is busy. She tries again. "Is this about the shooting on Derby?" She wasn't the first to phone it in. People in our neighborhood have gotten a lot more interested in calling the cops about this kind of thing since the last murder on our block.

We had emergency vehicles there within minutes. I stayed in bed; if I had nothing to contribute I didn't want to get in the way. Karen went to find out what was going on; she lives here and she needs to know. We've got different ideas as to what constitutes our business -- in this case I think both positions were legitimate.

The details she returned with? There's a body on the street in front of the house next door. There's a bullet hole in the front window of that house; the glass was double-glazed and the shot failed to penetrate the second pane. That surprised me.

Well, it turns out that there were three bullet holes in that house and the young man on the street was not the only one killed in the incident. It had been an exchange of gunfire and the driver of the car died just a while after he'd left the scene. Word is that there was a dice-related dispute but at this point all I've got is gossip.

When this first happened my immediate sympathies were with the victim and his friends and family; now I have little but contempt for both parties. If you get in a gunfight and shoot up a house with kids in it and then die? Very little sympathy -- and if a bullet had gone through our porch window it likely would have hit me while I slept.

Another bit of gossip -- that the Channel Two news is going to give our neighborhood a new nickname.

Homicide Central.