Wherever you go,

there you are.

Ain't no way around it. I made peace with that long ago, so it doesn't bother me to encounter myself anymore. Sometimes I even look forward to it.

I have to wonder, though, how some people deal with it. They probably have no idea who they are, reflection being toxic to the venomous, but I do, and I can't help but pity them. Must be a bitch to keep running into the same asshole over and over again.

Or maybe not. Unlike the back, the front of the mirror often shows you what you want to see.

Guest Post and Giveaway by Lee Thompson

You've seen me share links to Lee's work on Facebook, heard me talk about his dedication and devotion to the craft of storytelling, and the grit and honesty with which he writes his dark tales. Lee is a hell of a guy, a true friend, and I'm proud to have him as a guest poster on this humble blog. So without further ado, here he is:

A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS BLOG TOUR + GIVEAWAY

A Texas Senator and his wife go missing… On the same day, their son is slaughtered by an enigmatic killer on the lawn of ex-Governor Edward Wood's residence. Sammy, Wood's drug dealing son, suspects his father of the crime. After all, his old man snapped once before and crippled his wife with a lead pipe. But there's something more to these events…something deeper and festering just beneath the surface…

In direct opposition to Homicide Detective Jim Thompson, Sammy begins an investigation of his own, searching for the truth in a labyrinth of lies, deception, depravity and violence that drags him deeper into darkness and mayhem with each step. And in doing so, brings them all into the sights of an elusive and horrifying killer who may not be what he seems.

A brutal killer on a rampage of carnage…a hardened detective on the brink…an antihero from the shadows…a terrifying mystery that could destroy them all…

Welcome to Lee Thompson’s A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS blog tour! This blog, and the others participating, will receive a paperback copy to give to a random reader who leaves a comment and shares this post.

Throughout the book tour, I’ll be sharing fun facts about my first Mystery/Thriller, and also offering dubious advice to novice writers because I’ve had writers and editors farther along the path than myself give me tips that have helped me tremendously. If you want to up your game, pay attention and pass what you find useful on to those in your critique groups.

If you’re here as a reader, thanks so much. You’re every author’s life source. You’re the yin to our yang. The stories we set down on paper don’t seem to exist until someone else has read them, and the more the merrier.

Finding What Matters to You

I’ve helped unpublished novelists and this is something I’ve seen over and over and over. Usually what really matters to an unpublished novelist is what they least want to write about.

Why? Because it hurts. So we avoid it. Not many people like pain, but we have to write about what hurts us if we’re to touch the core of who we are.

Like many men, when I was younger I had serious problems with my dad. It took my buddy, fellow writer Shaun Ryan, to point out that dads in my novels always go through hell. And they do, they got it tough, and as I mature, I realize how I used to want to only hurt him back, but as my novels mature with me, I see how the fathers in my stories become more and more unreachable and I pity them in a lot of ways.

One thing most of my characters realize—and Sammy in A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS is no different—is that we cannot change the old man despite how he’s shaped us, damaged us, put us under his boot.

But he’s still human isn’t he?

So we hope for a healthy relationship with him.

Yet we still fear becoming him. And that’s Sammy’s internal plight, knowing that his dad, who was once the Governor of Texas, had cracked, nearly beat Sammy’s mother to death with a lead pipe, and then come back to his senses, an utterly changed man.

They say madness is in our genes, don’t they?

Sometimes we can possess a sleeper cell, a dormant demon, and when it wakes, usually under years of emotional duress, how do we keep from losing control of our grip on reality?

How do we not become that which we most want to love us and what we hate the most for not doing so?

When my mother had a stroke and was in a coma three months after she retired at age 52 from the State of Michigan, I watched my dad become a man, one I was proud to call my father, and one I was surprised to meet, as if for the first time. My momma couldn’t talk, couldn’t see well, had to go through lots of physical therapy, became diabetic, and he took care of her as if she were his only child.

It still makes me tear up a little replaying those years, and how much he has changed for the better—more patient, more forgiving, more understanding, relentless in his selfless actions to make her feel comfortable and loved.

And it still amazes me how tragedy can truly pull us together. It’s one of the themes I’ll probably always write about because it fills me with wonder and hope.

Is it the same for women with their mothers?

Buy A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS (Kindle:)  http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Madness-Lee-Thompson-ebook/dp/B00K36ITGS/

Buy A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS (Paperback:) http://www.amazon.com/A-Beautiful-Madness-Lee-Thompson/dp/1940544297/

Author bio: Lee Thompson is the author of the Suspense novels A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS (August 2014), IT’S ONLY DEATH (January 2015), and WITH FURY IN HAND (May 2015). The dominating threads weaved throughout his work are love, loss, and learning how to live again. A firm believer in the enduring power of the human spirit, Lee believes that stories, no matter their format, set us on the path of transformation. He is represented by the extraordinary Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary. Visit Lee’s website to discover more: www.leethompsonfiction.com

A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS main page (http://www.leethompsonfiction.com/?page_id=2423)

Enter to win a paperback copy! There will also be a grand prize at the end of the tour where one winner will receive my novel, and four other DarkFuse novels in Kindle format!

Simply leave a comment on this blog and share the link.

Thanks to those who participate.

Happy reading~ Lee

It’s heavy down here,

at least according to the Cowboy Junkies. Life is heavy, despite our constantly trying to make light of it. We can buy the shiny toys, repeat the snappy slogans, pass around cute fuzzy memes, and still some suburban Midwest girl will step off a bus in Manhattan and be welcomed by a guy with bad intentions. She may well end up hooked on meth or heroin, selling herself for the profit of another. Some guy in a suit will rent her for an hour then go home to his wife and kids and watch a sitcom. The next day at the office he’ll espouse family values and conservatism. Then he’ll formulate a plan to fuck the workers below him out of a portion of their wages and glow with pride while his supervisor pats him on the back for being a Great American. On the evening commute to Connecticut he’ll inch past a car wreck with bodies scattered across two lanes of I-95, probably caused by the driver texting on the smartphone lying shattered amid a glittering spray of safety glass. He’ll roll his eyes and tap a finger on the steering wheel like the rest of the impatient, inconvenienced people around him. An hour after craning his neck for a macabre glimpse the dead will have ceased to exist as things once human in his mind, if they ever did.

And this guy? He’s one of the halfway decent. In that same span of time, in that same metropolitan area, hundreds of children will have been abused and molested, millions of dollars will have been stolen or misappropriated, armies of homeless men and women will have been viewed with pity or loathing, or ignored altogether, dozens of women will have been raped and battered, and scores of animals will have been mistreated, sometimes for entertainment.

And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

All the while, people will drive and ride and walk around with fake smiles on their faces and false platitudes on their lips. They’ll lie and say things like, “Fine,” or “Good,” when someone asks how they are without really caring one way or the other. It’s just what you say. And most of the rest of their day and indeed their lives follow that same pattern.

A few will smile in genuine delight at the warmth of sunshine on their faces, or the clean smell of recently fallen rain, or the wise and baffled expression on an infant’s face. These little beacons of light in a drab and darkening world send ripples outward into the crowds around them, and for a brief moment the emotions they emit touch others and are shared, and sometimes, hours or even days later, one of the touched will recall that moment without consciously remembering it, and reach out in some way to touch another, whether with just a smile or with physical aid or an act of kindness, and all the anger and frustration and resentment brewing in the cauldron of teeming humanity will lose some of its force for a time.

And that’s heavier still, because the smallest glimpse of hope outweighs the longest stare into the dark. Every sliver of rising sun peeking over the horizon offers a shot at redemption, a new start. It burns the darkness away into the cracks and crevices. But the tallest and broadest of things and men cast the longest and widest shadows, always, and even at its highest and brightest, the light cannot penetrate there. The darkness crouches, waiting, and we always reach into it with one hand even as we reach for the light with the other, because we’re made of both, and are called to both.

That’s why I write the kind of stories I do. All good fiction peers at this paradox and tries to peel away layers to see what’s underneath. It peeks at the horror and joy of it all. But crime fiction tears those layers away violently, and stares unflinching at the heart thus exposed, in a way that cannot be denied or written off as fanciful. It’s bald truth masquerading as fiction. Only the names have been changed.

And that’s how it should be.

Yeah, it’s heavy, and down here includes everything under the sun, from the poshest penthouse to the dimmest subbasement. The high and the low alike are subject to the gravity of things, no matter how they might cry out in denial, or more accurately, because they do.



SR

They want to slap a brand on you,

because people have this need to know what to expect. Apparently the sense of adventure and willingness to take risks that started things rolling in this country fell by the wayside somewhere in the 1950s. It’s why McDonalds is such a smash hit. Doesn’t matter if it’s crap, it’s familiar crap. Who wants to eat red beans and rice with alligator sausage or Grenouilles a la Provencal or Arros con Pollo when you can have a Big Mac that looks like a fat guy sat on it and fries that smell great while they’re cooking but deteriorate to the consistency of greasy cardboard ten milliseconds after they’re pulled from the fryer?

It’s a no-brainer. And that’s the problem. The non-thinking, fast & easy trend is turning the world into a no-souler.

So you’d think people who read books for entertainment (and hopefully more) would buck that like crazy. But according to the publishers and editors and agents, it ain’t so. They want you in a readily identifiable box for easy marketing and mass consumption. That’s right, folks. We’re fucking Coneheads. Rejects from the planet Remulak. Mass quantities is where we’re at. Big steaming piles are in, take a look at the parking lot of the Old Country Buffet on any night you can manage to pull your head out of the tube.

I don’t want to be branded. Cattle are branded. It’s a stamp of ownership, and I ain’t fucking livestock. You want a box, hit the drive-thru.

Of course, those same publishers and editors and agents will tell me I’m making a mistake by adopting this attitude. Well, I’m not adopting anything. It’s not an attitude, it’s just me. So that’s what you can expect when you read something I’ve written. Pick any label you like. You can even try to apply it. But don’t get all upset when I peel it off.

Still, I’m driven to write about certain themes. My characters tend to be outside the norm, black sheep, if you will. I do fit a genre, but it’s a damn broad one. Crime. You probably guessed that if you’ve read these pages at all. Not the same old formulaic cop books though, I tend to walk the thin line between what’s lawful and what’s right, because they’re not always one and the same. And not caper books about criminals pulling off a heist either. These days I write stories about flawed people in bad situations that have to make hard choices to survive. My settings tend to be rural, because I’m a country boy at heart. I was born in the city and lived there until age fifteen, when I moved to the Arizona high country. There, I lived ten miles from the nearest pavement, and then it was another ten to the nearest town. I found magic, and it shaped the man I became. Tracking mountain lions hoping to catch a glimpse of one, hunting rabbits on a crisp January morning, or sitting on the edge of a caprock mesa with a pair of owls perched in the top of a lightning-killed ponderosa looking you in the eye will do that.

Western Montana shaped me too, as did years of roaming all over Canada, far from the U.S. border. Alaska poured a profound silence into my cracks that dwells to this day.

Now, after a nine-year fiasco in a small Wisconsin city where the prevailing mentality felt way too Mall of America for my taste, Victoria and I are back in the country, in her home range, the southern Missouri Ozarks. We’re only four miles from town, but town is a general store that doesn’t accept credit cards, a rural fire department, a tiny community center and library, and a riverside restaurant. Not even a post office. That’s twelve miles in the other direction. Next door are millions of acres of ridges and hollows and woods, creeks and springs, oak and hickory and pine, deer and black bear, and a cougar or two, and coyotes that sing you to sleep at night.

What the hell does any of this have to do with crime? That’s easy. There are humans too. And people are people. Go do an online search, and you’ll discover the area has a rep for meth and racism and whatever else. Some of it is true. But it’s a big area, and what applies to Franklin County or the country around Springfield doesn’t necessarily apply elsewhere, at least not to the same extent. But regardless, you don’t go driving up on folks at night out here, banging on their doors. The same was true in the White Mountains of Arizona and Catron County New Mexico and Montana's Blackfoot Valley. There’s trouble everywhere, because people are trouble, and you can’t get away from them.

That’s what drives all good fiction; people and trouble.

Some folks I trust and admire have said I fit a subgenre called country noir. I’m not certain that’s true. Noir tends to slant toward the hopelessness of things, regardless of setting, and while my stuff is plenty dark and gritty enough to be rough on your gears, I can never exclude hope, or hold it out of reach of my characters. That’s not my place. Hope is an essential ingredient in us all, so it seems to me that to withhold it is to be disingenuous. Shit, the act of creating is for me an act of hope, even faith. So noir might not be quite accurate in its strictly defined form.

But the masses demand that easy to read label, so it’s as agreeable and acceptable as I’m likely to get and still satisfy the marketers. Still don’t really like it though. I’m with Bill Hicks when it comes to those fuckers. But it is what it is. I’m in good company, and more than one of my heroes defies the branding iron by wielding it himself. Writers like Joe Lansdale and James Lee Burke and Tom Piccirilli, to name but a few, those guys brand you with their stories, and I’ll always strive to do the same.

I write from the heart, and that makes me wide open to you, the reader. You’re getting a glimpse inside me. It’s part of the joy of storytelling; making a human connection with people I’ll likely never meet, across miles and years alike. I invite that, which is why there is no comfort zone or taboo subject or PC bullshit in my stories. I want you to see, hear, and feel it like it is. Fair warning though, that means I’m not after providing you with some happy escape. You bang on my door after the sun has slipped behind the tree line, you’ll find yourself looking down the bore of a shotgun.

If the bears and lions don’t get you first.

SR

Politics ain’t my bag.

My take is that we have one party in this country, the money party, and all the bullshit the people running for office spew at voters is just that. They don’t follow through. And the people who buy into it, year after year, cycle after cycle? Well, you can’t really blame them for clinging to the illusion that everything will be okay as long as they vote against those other guys, the ones who are out to destroy the American Way of Life.

And they are, only it isn’t just one party or the other, it’s both. They're one and the same, and they’re succeeding by keeping us divided, which they do by convincing us that that the other guy is evil.

They are the other guy. It's all vote-pandering rhetoric. But people believe this stuff, even though they mostly agree politicians are liars.

And that brings me to the point of this post.

We need to lose the either-or mentality. No rational person capable of critical thinking can tell me they completely agree with everything the Reds or the Blues supposedly represent. Most people are somewhere in the middle. But they get no air-time, so everyone in that gray area is either disgusted and says fuck it, or goes with whoever spouts off the loudest about whatever issue is closest to their heart, ignoring the universally important stuff.

When it comes to government, black or white is bullshit, folks, because very little is that simple. Life doesn’t fit in a convenient box, no matter how badly you want or need it to. Things that are that straightforward are beyond the scope of legislation, and we have a constitution recognizing this. And still the politicians spew, poking at hot buttons.

The result?

Buying into the bullshit, the big issue we based our decision on evaporating as soon as the election is over, never to be mentioned again by the guy in the suit with the porcine eyes who told us he was going to make addressing it his primary mission, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the manipulation we’re subjected to every second of every day. We get billboards along the highway telling us we stand united, when in reality we’ve never been more divided.

It isn’t about politics, it’s about being human. Unless you’re one of the venal few who are driven solely by the desire for wealth and dominion, that’s all of us. Together we are the majority. The only true minority in this world are the people running things for their own benefit, the interests of We the People of no concern at all. Their sins are not venial, they’re mortal, folks. Remember the money-changers? Yeah, well, we voted them into office last election, and the one before that, and the one before that. Look into their eyes next time they smile into the camera and ask yourself what you see. Be honest when you answer.

Makes you wonder beneath what patch of sand or under what rock they lay their cold little eggs, doesn’t it? You can’t help but wait for a forked tongue to come flicking from between their lips to taste the fear it is their business to spread.

And the rest of us inhale that fear, eyeing each other suspiciously over the invisible barriers we’ve allowed these creatures to erect between us. We tell ourselves we’re different, but we’re mostly not. We all want to be happy and successful and wish the same for those we care about.

Recently this was driven home hard. I was speaking with an attorney in southern Missouri, where I live. The guy’s honesty was quite un-lawyer-like, and I don’t just mean concerning his trade, but about life and himself as well. He was telling me how there’s a dividing line across the state, and south of it, people carry a bible in their back pocket and own at least one AR-15. He said he was from north of that line, and hadn’t fit in so well. So he moved. We talked about some of the harsh realities this nation faces, or rather, refuses to. We had to chuckle, you know, to keep from weeping. 

A day or two later, Victoria and I were in a pawn shop talking with the owner and his wife, both lifelong locals from farm and ranch families. During our conversation some of the same stuff came up, as did gardening and raising or hunting your own meat and not liking to eat toxic food, having no faith in toxic leaders who care only for money and its accumulation, or their corporate masters who poison our land and our hearts and minds in the name of increased profits. Skepticism of a public that continues to ignore it all while they run around chasing the next shiny gadget and the latest-model SUV.

That was when it hit me. All of these people who would doubtless be labeled right-wing conservatives had offered the same opinions on some very big, very weighty issues.

Yeah, so what? Right?

Well, their opinions exactly mirrored those held by more than one person who would be labeled left-wing liberals. That’s right, exactly.

Why? Because all this labeling mostly comes down to social issues, which are important, sure, but far from overriding when life and liberty are under attack by people who claim to represent the best hope for it while doing their best to erode it. Then it doesn’t matter who you have sex with, which church you belong to, what color your skin is, how many years you've been walking the earth, or what mortal tax bracket you fall into.

In that situation, there’s a hell of a lot of common ground shared by that “conservative” lawyer and that “liberal” comedian, and you and me, and everyone else, because we didn’t sign up for America by Globalcorp. That ain’t the nation they sold us on when we were kids and we bought wholesale as adults. In truth, I don’t think that America ever really existed. But the idea did, and it lives still, inside us.

If we ever want to see the real thing, we’d better start recognizing that common ground, walk out in the middle of it and take hold of some hands. Bring your bible and your AR-15 if you want. You might need them. Bring your hope for peace and love of earth too. Bring your significant other, and your children, and most of all what honesty you can muster. Bring every fucking thing you've got, people.

Bring it.

Together.

Or stop lying to yourself and get used to the reality of the biggest billboard alongside all our roads being the one that reads, Divided We Fall.

SR

I'm switching gears here, because so far I've just been grinding them.

I wanted to offer readers a glimpse of what I write, and why, as well as who I am. I believe I've done so. With that in mind, I'm not going to give away any more stories here. That's something I'll save till later, for promotional purposes. From now on I intend to use this blog as a way to connect with readers through discourse, and I invite you, dear reader, to speak up. If you agree with what I have to say, tell me and others why. If you think I'm full of shit, say so.

Now that's out of the way...

This essay began life as a comment in reply to a post titled, "Self Publishing as Amway," on agent Chip McGregor's blog. Self-publishing is a hot topic right now, lots of confusion and assumptions, and even some obfuscation going around. It's also something I'm studying, along with the entire business end of writing, a topic Chip and Amanda are very knowledgeable about. So if you're interested in that sort of thing, and want to keep up with what's happening in the publishing world today, check out Chip's blog. There's a link to it at the bottom of this page, in the Cool Sites and Favorite Authors section.

Anyway, I think there are some harsh realities about writing and publishing that a lot of folks don't want to face. Many have been covered in Chip's article and the ensuing discussion. I would ad that writers need to stop bitching about how tough it is to get in these days. It always was, and you can't really blame the publishers for being narrow--my choice of words over the much-bandied "picky" I keep hearing in this context--in their choices of titles to publish. Self publishing has sort of enabled this by absorbing the midlist. But in the end it's the readers who are driving it. The bean-counters running the bottom line mentality at the big houses are just selling what people are buying.

E.L. James, as Chip Opines, writes like an eighth-grader? I agree. Thing is, apparently millions of people read like eighth-graders. Sort of scary, really. So "picky" doesn't fit, in my opinion. We-want-to-publish-only-best-sellers is closer to the mark, and unfortunately, a lot of best-sellers are crap. But look at any interstate business loop through Main Street America, note the mile-long chain of neon stabbing the night sky, vying for your attention and your dollar, see the $60,000 SUVs lined up at the drive-thru. Visibility and ease trump quality in a ton of cases, across the board.

 I give you "Bose is best."

No, Bose sounds like tin and cardboard, but Paul Harvey says otherwise, and he has the ear of millions, and they repeat what he tells them, whether they've heard Bose--or anything else--or not. So we need to look at ourselves and the mentality we've adopted as a society, not point fingers at the publishers and cast them in the role of Big Corporate Bad Guys. They're only selling what we're buying. Consumer is as Consumer does, and if you invest in that identity as a human being, you have to live with the results, and if you don't, you still have to live with the results, because those of us who disagree aren't doing much to change things.

As a writer, I'm studying this issue for all I'm worth these days. In the past, I was of the opinion that most self-published work was crap, and was reducing the overall body of work out there by diluting both its content and value, and still am to some degree. But I've revised to ad that this is only the case with writers who aren't investing in either the craft, or the business end of the job, just throwing first drafts out there and hoping to sell. Which is most of them, apparently.

Ain't never going to work. But they heard it will on the internet.

Bose is best.

Part of me rebels at the idea of standing on a virtual corner with a flashy sign in my hands hawking my goods, but that's the only thing that gets anyone's attention in a crowded marketplace. I and my stories are commodities, plain and simple, and I'm still learning the art of promotion as I hone the art and craft of writing. Hell, I still hate writing pitches and synopsis, although I think I'm getting the hang of it. Finally. But regardless of where I am with that, lots of folks are going to bypass my driveway and pull into the fast and easy drive-thru, because that's what they want, and it gets more air-time than me, has a bigger budget to grab their limited attention and time.

Fifty Shades of Flash and Grab is where we are, and all we can do is keep writing and bust our asses doing our best to be heard, studying the market and formulating a strategy that fits us and our stories. Like Chip says, it's on us to get it done, no one else.

My biggest disappointment is seeing knock-offs selling like hotcakes for a few years, and then what? After the public gets tired of the flave du jour? The author keeps jumping on trends or disappears? Has become disposable? Seems so, given the number of Twilight, Hunger Games, and Harry Potter clones out there. Best of luck with the log-term thing, I guess. Investing in an author and building their career and audience and down-the-road profitability over a number of books is a thing of the past. Welcome to the next-quarterly-report field of view.

It is what it is, and it's still evolving. You can't think about all that while you're writing, at least I can't, and don't.

My biggest hope in all this, strangely enough, is T.V. (I call cable and HBO and Showtime T.V.) Still a lot of garbage out there, but there's some really good shows too, and they're popular, which tells me that not everybody wants fast food stories, but real meat, real drama and not melodrama, substance and not air. Having said that, and being a music lover, the parallels between what the recording industry went through over the last decade and a half and what the publishing industry is going through now haven't escaped me, nor has the fact that I haven't bought a new album put out by a major label in a long, long time. Just about all of my favorite artists who've hit the scene in the last twenty years record on indie labels, or just create their own and put it on their website for sale and download.

Food for thought.

Now, if I could just convince some of those artists to offer FLAC and high-res downloads in addition to the MP3 garbage. ;)

P.S. If you follow this blog, you know that I change the background image every time I post, to something apropos. For this post I wanted a night shot of that Main Street America strip I mentioned above. Couldn't find one. A couple of day shots, and they lacked the oomph I was looking for. Apparently suburban commercial bliss isn't something photographers want to capture. I wonder what that says about it?

In any case, I chose to leave the background black for this one. Like a good sound system, a black background makes the message leap forward all the more. Or so I hope.



SR

You’ve heard it all before.

From Cindy Lou Who, when she told the Grinch and all of Whoville. From Jimmy Stewart every year, trapped in his black-and-white wonderful-life time warp. Charlie Brown said it. Even totally lame shows on the SyFy Channel try to get the point across.

I don’t think any of them succeed for more than a few seconds. About the time it takes for viewers to pretend they’re not a little choked up—or that they are—and get off the sofa to hit the head or pour some more eggnog. Dad grabs another beer and Mom dabs the corner of her eye with a tissue while Sis rolls hers and fires up the smartphone to check her Facebook. Little Bro wants to know can they watch a movie now. And those are the people actually tuning in to the yearly Ho-Ho-Jingle-Bell Blah, Blah together, in the same room. Imagine that.

So there’s this little moment where something tries to sink in. Then it passes, and it’s business as usual. Another year and another big glitter-ball set to drop in a near future we almost have the foresight to envision. Almost. I suspect if they did away with the Super Bowl a big chunk of America would lose their año nuevo compass altogether, drift around with zombie eyes like folks north of the arctic circle in January, their needles pointing in all directions and none. Stars and moon and seasons don't cut it any more. Got to be big and gaudy and well-lit to be seen over the horizon these days. Otherwise Miley’s tongue might eclipse you.

Who cares, says a large slice of population. It’s all marketing. Get real. And in a way they’re right. It is. But, like a lot of marketing, it’s actually trying to sell you something good. Unfortunately, we’re so inundated with people trying to sell us bullshit that it’s safer to just assume it all falls into that category.

And it must fall into a category. That way you know what to do with it.

But I digress. The category in this case is Holiday Cheer.

Snappy, huh? Pulling Your Head Out Of Your Ass And Seeing What Really Matters, not so much. Honesty makes shitty marketing, for the most part. This isn’t anything new. Even Jesus had to market his teachings to the masses, and I’m pretty sure he understood that meant selling out to human nature. I could list all the adjectives covering that, but you probably get it. People who show up at the ER with a candy cane stuck in their rectum. Or worse. Jack Ass goes to Washington, with stops in L.A. and New York along the way.

The end result is that we pay the obligatory lip service to what this “season” is supposed to mean. But looking around makes it pretty clear it’s just that.

Us blowing ourselves.

Oh, there are always people who get it. One of my favorite authors had his first post-surgery radiation treatments to battle brain cancer around this time last year. He sits down with family and friends, dude gets it. He probably did before all that, but he's an exceptional guy. Most of us aren't. 

So I’m sitting around in my slippers and fleece pajama pants writing this post. I can’t go back to work for a few more days due to mechanical issues, and that’s going to kick my ass financially. Been off since Tuesday evening, and you know what? I love it. Yesterday, I did some major surgery myself, on a peach tree that broke under the strain of wind and ice. Then I pruned its little cousins. Four days and counting of being with my wife and our little family of fuzzy-butts, cooking good food and watching good movies and listening to good music, doing chores around the place, smelling the earth and fallen leaves and wood smoke and feeling the sunshine or the cold wind on my face.

And yet I got up this morning worried about how taking a week of is going to affect us. Then Victoria asked what was wrong, and looking at her with the covers up to her neck and a puppy on her head, I realized nothing was, and it didn’t matter. We'll get through like we always do.

So I think I’ll go see why our bathroom plumbing is backing up, prune an apple tree, maybe prep some beds and plant next summer’s garlic. Nothing like getting your hands dirty with someone you love to celebrate the days.

All of them.    

How about you?



SR       

She was dressed like a lumberjack,

and she made it look good. Black and blue checked flannel tucked into tight-fitting Wranglers, long black hair and not much makeup, an easy smile as she sidled up to my table and asked if I wanted to dance.

I did, and we did, one of those slow Eagles numbers, Lying Eyes maybe. Apropos, though I didn’t know it yet. She sat with me after the song ended, bought us a round, and I thought, okay then. It was Friday night in Bozeman, Montana, and I was a cab ride away from the K-Mart. Freshly showered and shaved with a lot of time to kill, I’d told the driver to take me somewhere with live music. An hour later I was three beers into a hell of a night and no longer alone, twenty-two and stupid, but who isn’t at that age?

Her name was Robin, and she was older than me. Quite a bit older, she told me later, when we were naked and sweaty and spent.

 Forty. And married.

Knowing none of that at the time and glad to have a woman to talk to about crazy shit like coyotes howling to make you cry and the way the stars move in a circle that's too big for us to see all of, and to sway to the music with, our respective holds growing tighter as the night wore on, I felt pretty good. After we closed the place and the cab took us back to the K-Mart and she bounced me off the walls of my Kenworth, I felt even better. Then, like a dumbass, I started asking questions. Too curious to just have fun and take the moments as they came. I’m still that way, I guess, only these days I ask the questions up front. Maybe there is some benefit to growing older.

She was from Cody, Wyoming, and her husband was back at the hotel with the friends they had come with and the other friends they had all driven up to see. He was probably fucking somebody, she said. I had no idea if that meant they had some kind of open thing or he was just a shit and she was getting even. In the end it didn’t matter. I was doing someone’s wife, or she was doing me. Both, I guess.

I felt like a piece of shit.

But I felt really good too, because of the way she clung to me as we danced, the way she looked into my eyes as we moved together, and the way she laughed and nodded her head in four-four time while Bonn Scott wailed from the juke.

Forty, I thought the next morning as we ate biscuits and gravy and drank gallons of coffee, both a bit fuzzy around the edges but not too bad, considering. Wow, I thought. Looking back I still have to wonder what was missing from her life. She seemed to have it together, a lot more than I did, if the conservative gold bracelet and matching necklace and hundred-dollar hairstyle were any indication. I wondered where her wedding ring was, and how long it had been since it had graced her finger. No mark there, not like the one on my finger now, engraved into the flesh after almost ten years.

When the cab pulled up to her hotel I expected to see some grizzled biker-type waiting at the entrance, pissed as hell. He would rush over and yank open the door and I’d have to put up or shut up. That didn’t scare me much, I knew a little about fighting, real fighting, not that movie shit or even some on-the-mats sport kicking. Down and dirty, short and sweet. I’d fought a guy in his forties when I was fifteen, and come away without a scratch. Not that I’d kicked the guy’s ass. But he hadn’t been able to land anything, and I figured I eventually would have. Like I said, twenty-two and stupid.

But there was no husband waiting to jump us, only the cold wind and the blinding sun and the long miles between both of us and the places we had to go next. She kissed me and got out of the cab then leaned in the open window and handed me a slip of paper with her phone number on it. Call her when I got to Cody, she said. Then she was gone, and a half-hour later I was rolling east on the interstate, headed for the high-line and North Dakota.

I got to Cody a lot with that job.

All these years later, I still wonder what I had that she was looking for, beyond the obvious. Did I make her feel young again? Was her old man cold or distant or broken? Was I a fool?

Sure I was. We all are at that age, and maybe at any age.

The night I met my wife, Victoria, at a little Texarkana dive bar behind the Flying-J, I recognized something in her eyes, though I didn’t understand it at the time. She was slinging drinks and her smile lit the place up, her crazy mane of flaming hair drawing my gaze as though it were a moth. But she had to ask me twice if I wanted to hang out and shoot some pool after her shift was over. Older and wiser maybe, or just more scarred, and therefore more scared.

But I agreed that second time. I’m glad I did. No one else could have gotten me playing air-drums on their dashboard while doing my best Diamond Dave doing Ice Cream Man.

I still feel like a piece of shit every time I think about Robin and the husband I never saw. But I also feel good, just like I did twenty years ago. Because that tall redhead with the kind eyes and the sexy shoulders peeking from her blouse cut-outs directed her room-lighting smile toward me the night we met, and thinking about that one day I realized what it was I saw in her eyes, and in Robin’s.

It was them seeing something worthwhile in me, and not being afraid to grab hold of it. And if you ask Victoria, she’ll tell that the good ones don’t let go.

She's right.
 

 
SR

The doe in the the road was dying,

huddled upon itself the way they do, curled around the pain. As I got closer it tried to stand, its broken back legs folding before the deal was done. I grabbed a gear and rolled on past, the deer collapsing, a median-strip planted with something that was probably colorful in the summer momentarily screening it from view. Through this neat row of skeletal symmetry, a pair of oncoming headlights burned.

In my side mirror, steam was rising from the deer, marking its position, right in the middle of the passing lane. It saddened me to see. I couldn’t help wondering if the poor creature understood what was happening. Then I was eyes-forward again, my mandatory second’s worth of checking my six complete, telling myself I wasn’t rubbernecking. Then I looked again. The doe stayed down. The headlights came on.

It was one of those minivan taxis, the kind that makes you shake your head and wonder how it came to this. The driver was running in the left lane, him and me the only traffic for miles, jumping puddles of sickly sodium glow.

I shook my head, hating the nature of a fabricated world. My eyes flicked the mirror, searching for brakelights and not seeing them.

Asshole, I thought.

Too late, those twin red eyes flared, and the minivan lurched and veered right and swerved left and yawed back again, and did the exit stage left thing, making a drunken beeline for the trees, all in less than two seconds.

That’s how fast it happens. 

Unless you’re the doe. I guess it drags out a bit longer from that angle. No smartphone to distract you, no tweets to keep you entertained on that long highway crossing, just the cold and the sudden glaring noise and the pain, and in the end, the same confusion as us. The same futility. It comes at you in plain sight, and you miss it every time, and it rolls right over you.

I wondered if the great green pasture in the sky was a reality now, no wolves and no deep snow to bog down in. Then I wondered if the stupid taxi driver was okay. Half a mile ahead, a possum waddled across the road, one twentieth the size of a hunkered doe, and I marked its passage.

Hard to miss. Lots of things in the road are.

But we drive blindly toward whatever demands our attention, we try to hold in our hands the things we tell ourselves are important, make them real with the press of a key or the swipe of a soft finger across a touchscreen, and we miss what’s in the road.

Sometimes the movie has a fast-forward button, and if you hit it because you aren’t paying attention you go right to the end.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for that.

And from most places on the road, it’s a long way home. So I topped the hill and grabbed another gear.

SR

We knew what Anthony would say before he did,

because it was what he always said, and maybe it was true. Thing was, nobody cared. I don’t mean just Julio and I, but the world. It didn’t give a shit. So we didn’t either, not because we were callous--which we were to a degree because life forces you to grow thick skin in the places where it rubs you raw--but because we had heard it before, too many times to count. You grew callouses or you blistered. Anthony didn’t seem to get that. He expected the world to give when he crashed his head against it.  

It didn’t. But the people around him usually did, for a while at least. It was just Anthony.

But there comes a point when you have to stop giving, no matter how sorry you feel for someone, because if you don’t, you turn into them, ramming your skull against a wall. It’s not a wall made of bricks or stone but of forgiveness. You let things go that you shouldn’t. Then you do it again, and again, until somewhere along the line you realize there’s nothing left, and you just can’t give any more. We were at that point, Julio and I. Some things you can’t forgive, and everybody has their line.

Anthony hadn’t learned where ours were yet, but he was about to.

He came rolling up in his beat to shit Ford Maverick, gunning it hard into the turn onto the wheel-rut trail leading down to the campsite. He almost lost it, cutting the wheel too late and fishtailing, no doubt caught somewhere between a grin and a grimace as he fought for control. I’d been in the car with him when he pulled a similar stunt once, two summers ago, as the Fourth of July bash Nancy and Grover had thrown was winding down. We were on our way to Leonard’s place, to beg a doobie from the grizzled ex-con. Anthony piled it onto a big rock that time, and we walked the rest of the way. I stayed outside when we got to Leonard’s. Janet, Leonard’s wife, answered the door and tried to tell Anthony to come back tomorrow, Leonard was crashed. He barged past her into the trailer and about five seconds of banging and cussing later, came bouncing back out, blood gushing from his nose and the promise of a cut throat following him into the yard.

He said it then, as we were walking back to Nancy and Grover’s. He always said it.

Now he killed the engine and hopped out of the Maverick, sashayed over to the fire and sat on one of the stumps across from us. Julio handed him a beer, asked if I was ready. I shook my head and lit the joint I’d been rolling and passed it to Anthony. He grinned and took a long hit, nigger-lipping.

Nobody said anything until the joint was gone, more beers opened. Then Anthony broke the silence. You could always count on that.

“What’s up?” he asked.

Julio shrugged, looked out across the lake, anger smoldering in his dark gaze.

“Fuck you, Anthony,” I said.

“What?” Like he didn’t know.

He did, I saw it in his eyes, flicking back and forth between Julio and me, never stopping on either of us for more than half a second. They found his feet.

Julio said, “Suzie told me.”

Anthony watched the scuffed toes of his boots dig in the sand, hoping for purchase. They would never find it, because the world was too slippery for Anthony, and he wasn’t slippery enough.

“Finish your beer,” Julio said.

Anthony did, in one long pull. He was a trooper, I’ll give him that, only he had no fucking idea in what army he belonged, or in what war. Nobody had the heart to tell him there were neither. That shit was for the TV news, boardrooms and back rooms where the cigar and single-malt crowd did the quid pro quo shuffle. In real life, where real people had to do or die, there were only skirmishes whose meaning fled before the dust had settled, and sides that were never really drawn so much as roughly sketched.

Anthony let loose with a booming belch.

Julio nodded and stood. “Get up,” he said.

Anthony got to his feet and Julio hit him between the eyes, the sound of it ringing out across the water. Anthony stumbled back and Julio belted him again, a jabbing left, followed by a powerful uppercut that put Anthony on his ass. He sat there, legs splayed, a stupid expression on his face, like he had no idea how this had come to pass. Julio stepped in, his foot reared back to kick that face with its ridiculous chin beard. Then he stalled, his foot slowly dropping back to earth, his anger burning out, leaving disgust in its wake.

“Shit,” he said, “asshole.” He went back to his stump and sat, Suzie’s honor defended and its marring avenged. Steam rose off his shoulders in the chilly air. He opened a beer.

Anthony looked at me as I got to my feet.

I wanted to pick up where Julio had left off, kick that stupid face to mush, leave his mouth a bloody toothless door swinging on broken hinges. He deserved it. At least then he’d have an excuse for not keeping it shut. My uncle was sitting in the Holbrook Hilton because of that mouth, the lack of brains behind it.

But I couldn’t. He was too pathetic. It would be like kicking a retarded dog to death.

“Shit,” I said. “Get up.”

Anthony shook his head, looked away. That really pissed me off, almost enough to say fuck it, start kicking, but not quite.

“Get off your ass or I’ll boot you into a coma, Anthony, I swear.” I took a step forward and Anthony scooted backward, all heels and elbows.

“I mean it,” I said.

He met my eye and saw that I did, that I hoped he would make me angry enough to do it, and he scrambled to his feet, turning over so his bony ass stuck in the air. It was tempting, but I held back.

When he got turned around I was right there, in his face. Before he could move I grabbed his belt and the front of his lined flannel shirt and heaved, and he was up over my head, his whole buck-thirty. I took two lunging steps and threw him into the icy water of Fool Hollow Lake, as far out as I could. His head missed one of the slabs of volcanic rock jutting from shore by two or three inches. Pity, I thought, as I turned and went back to my stump.

Julio handed me a beer and I drained it, took out my bag and rolled another joint. Anthony splashed and cursed his way to shore, sat on his stump, dripping and shivering. Julio threw some more logs on the fire and it reared up, flooding the drowned canyon with that eerie glow only campfires throw, making our shadows into mad dancers.

Capering was the word. Like the dude that lived in Anthony’s head.

I grunted and lit the joint while Julio passed out beers. Anthony took his and grinned. All was forgiven, that stupid grin said. It wasn’t and never would be, but you couldn’t tell him that, could never make him see. He’d served his penance. Like some Catholics. Someday, somebody would shoot him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Fuck you, Anthony,” Julio and I said, in stereo. We didn’t laugh, because we knew what was coming. It wasn’t funny, not anymore.

Anthony didn’t disappoint.

“Tough job, but somebody’s got to do it,” he said, and tilted his beer, Adam’s apple bobbing.

I looked at Julio, his black eyes like holes in his dark face. He gave a little shrug, an involuntary snort puffing air from his nostrils. Futility, it said.

But maybe Anthony was right, and if so, I wondered why, knowing I’d never find out. God works in mysterious ways and all that shit. Apparently the world needs its walking disasters to remind the rest of us how thin the knife-edge we walk really is, how easily they could be us, we them. Or maybe they exist to serve as an analogy for the entire human race. It’s a good one, I sometimes think. Then I wonder what kind of fucked up God would delight in such absurdity. And then I shrug, just like Julio had, that same little snort escaping me.

Tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

SR

***

We've all known someone like Anthony at one time or another. What did you learn from yours? How far did he or she push you until you pushed back?