New Year, New Stories

 

Congratulations! You made it through another year! Some years feel longer than others, don't they?

Hopefully your New Year's Eve was a good one. In my neck of the woods we've got a few families that take their celebrations seriously, and every New Year's Eve, and Christmas, and Fourth Of July, they go whole hog with the fireworks. Like setting one of those thick metal launch tubes up in the street in front of their houses, and loading it up with industrial-grade rockets that you can see for over a mile. Hit the deck.

Last month I took a leap, and put one of my stories up for sale on Amazon, something that I've been reluctant to do. That reluctance stems from the fact that it's awfully similar to self-publishing. If you know anyone who's been in the writing business for a while, say those two words to them. They might react with an expression that makes you think you've triggered a memory of the time they came home from a long weekend trip during the summer, only to discover that someone left the milk out on the counter, left the container open, in fact.

Yeah, historically it hasn't been regarded highly. Think about what kind of a reputation 4chan has today, and you'll get the idea.

But that was over a generation ago. Want to know how many books I have on my Kindle? Here's a hint, it's in the triple digits. A bit of non-conclusive research shows that while printed book sales still outnumber their cyber counterparts, the gap is narrower than most people would think.

I'm still working on getting my works published on paper, because I don't think anything is ever going to replace that magic of holding a book in your hands. Touch makes the fantasy seem a little more real, it leaves an impression in out nerves. To quote an obscure comic limited series, 'That's old power.'

So check it out. It's in the Amazon Kindle store, under my name, Stephen Pope, and the name of the story is Simple. A short story, but I think you'll like it.

I've a whole year to fill up. Better get started.

Still writing.

Catching up

 

How many times have I let the dust build up here? Right now my honest answer is, at least once more, Miss Swann. As always.

But I'm brushing off the dust here again, throwing the switches to see if the circuits still work and if the juices still flow. They're flowing. Yes, they're flowing.

About a month ago, I started watching X, the movie by Ti West. I shut it off after a few minutes, my mind drifting and me realizing I wasn't in the mood for anything I had to seriously focus on. I've watched bits and pieces of it since then, but nothing more than a bit at a time. Sunday night I finished it, and I'm glad I did.

Now from here on I'm going to get into spoilers. So if you haven't seen X, step away and fix that. I'll still be here when you finish.

Damn, was that good or what?

A lot has been said about starting a movie by building tension right from the beginning. I think that one of the reasons I didn't finish X in one sitting is because I wasn't expecting it to do that as effectively as it did. The opening teases us with just enough of a hint at the ending to let us draw our own, likely false, conclusions on how things would turn out. Then we cut to our heroes, two beautiful ladies take center stage, joined shortly by a third. Three men, and three women. Maybe we don't like all of them, but we can relate to them. We're already emotionally involved.

The tension builds. There are conflicts within the group because they're all working toward a single purpose, yet no one's motivations quite line up with anyone else's, do they? They head out to the country, silent and isolating, where they meet an old couple who are definitely not on the same page as our heroes. Lust, frustration, jealousy/envy, and betrayal all keep things rolling at an increasing pace. Add spices like guns, cocaine, (most people are still puritanical enough to get uneasy witnessing casual drug use) all the issues surrounding sex, and the fact that being around people who are really old gives us an uncomfortable reminder of our own mortality, and you've got a damn good recipe.

There are little treats sprinkled here and there, too. The movie referencing itself ('one god damned fucked up horror picture') and other films. The first and last shots of our protagonist have them repeating the same action. All those moments when suddenly something we've become familiar with now has a deeper, shocking reason for being there.

There's a prequel, and I'm looking forward to it, wanting to see if it can fill those big shoes that X delivered. Will they connect the two stories as well as I hope they do? (Those holes in the wall of the barn, hell of a coincidence that they were spaced just right, isn't it? Or were they made for that purpose, years before our three women and three men ever arrived out in the country?) I don't know, but I'm going to find out.

As for me, my pen and keyboard are cranking out fiction again, so I'll be dropping things in the dark, murky waters once more and seeing what gets hooked. Like getting back up on a bike, you can still do it and you can also remember the pain of every time you fell. I still feel it.

By the way, it's okay. I won't tell on you, hiding back there. Yeah, I know you kept reading even though you hadn't seen the movie yet. Don't worry, those surprises are still waiting for you.

Still writing.

Again, why? Also, for who?

 

It's October, and right now, somewhere in my head the Silver Shamrock company song is playing, on and on and on. The weather is cooler, and when I get up in the morning, the earth and the sky are still cloaked in glorious darkness.

(Why does that last one make me happy? I suspect it has something to do with my insomnia. Dragging myself out of bed only to find that the sun, and therefor the rest of the word, is already hard at work just gets under my skin. The night is mine, so quit stealing it, you over-sized Hindenburg)

I've recently been taking advantage of the fact that someone at Amazon was clever enough to realize that a lot of people would pay money to read all the full-sized horror comics that used to exist in my younger days. Creepy, Eerie, and all the rest always had a special magic that no one else seemed able to replicate. Maybe they seemed a little wilder, or more disgusting. Probably both, and probably due to the fact that they never sported the fashionable little seal of approval from the Comics Code Authority. Now that I'm a bit older and know a little more about the kind of insane, paranoid claims people used to (and still do) make about the effect of this kind of stuff, they seem even better.

That's good. Because, to put it kindly, now that I'm using grown-up eyes to look at them, these charming tokens of yesterday have a few, well, warts. There's a lot of repetition of the same basic themes, and oh lord but some of these stories are dumb. Also, and there's enough plagiarism in these titles to nominate them for an award. But did my naive younger self know that? Oh hell no. Wow, this guy rebuilt his ancestral home, only to find it infested with a swam of cursed, hungry rats? Why can't the people who write print books come up with stuff this good?

But at the same time, these stories never seemed to take themselves seriously. All the groan-inducing one-liners and semi-homophones that we now associate only with our favorite Cryptkeeper? Liberally sprinkled through every introduction. Plus, there's something about the hosts that have the feel if not a bit of the look of another less-scary comic-book character, Alfred E. Neuman. Can a character be creepy but not scary? Maybe. Maybe that's what they were going for. If so it might support a thought I have to explain some of those comics' appeal.

The special recipe that made up Creepy and its ilk is different from 'mainstream' horror comics, (yeah, I know there's no such thing) but it achieves something that's a little more subtle than you would expect. List out the essential ingredients, like the all-visual format, lack of adult themes, generous dose of humor, and simple, almost clownish narrators that speak directly to the readers. That almost sounds like it's designed for a child, doesn't it? The next step up from Richard Scary is Uncle Creepy? Given the fact that when these stories came out, a lot of the target audience was in the 12-15 year age range, that fits.

Now these stories do the same thing, maybe to a greater or lesser degree, that 'grown-up' tales do. They give us something to believe in. Murder your wife and stuff her body up the chimney? The maid will light a fire which will build up heat and pressure, and your wife will blast out the chimney like a bullet from a barrel and then she'll land on top of you, just as you were outside at the front gate, explaining to the sheriff that you have no idea where she is. Use hypnosis or special effects to convince your business partner that their dead child wants them to sell the company to you, cheap, and retire? Don't worry. That person will find some way to sell the whole thing so that you can retire, too. You've been such a good friend, after all.

Remember that I'm an atheist. These stories rarely if ever drop the literal god out of a machine, unless it's a little known protector god of a forgotten tribe or village, and even then that divinity almost never speaks. We see the business end of religion, delivered like a fastball to the face. We see results without needing to hear the dogma.

This gives us something important. Justice. Simple justice, delivered on time every time. Oh yes, we get irony too. But it and the good-person-triumphs-in-the-end trope that we sometimes see has a vector, a purpose that we can understand. The unwritten message is blunt, and reassuring. Maybe the universe doesn't care what happens to us, but maybe there's some mechanism to balance it. Hurt, and you'll be hurt. Take advantage, and you'll be taken. The cosmic rule of get what you give.

Now remember the age range that I said I thought these books were targeted towards?

How well do you remember your life from those years? Were you happy? Loved? Were you one of those weirdos who looked forward to going to school?

Did you feel powerful?

How secure was your fresh, ten-year-old world? When did you first have a family member or a beloved pet die? No one is dealt the same starting hand of cards as anyone else, but I'll bet if we all policebox-hopped back a few decades and one by one splashed a dash of vertaserum to all of our younger selves and asked, 'do you think you're safe?' then the nays would be in the majority. Life cannot be consistently kind, and some kids learn that lesson early. Bad things happen, really bad things. An adult can fight, or buy something to help protect against those bad things. What can a child do? Yes in theory the parents have the job to protect, but let's be honest here. You learned the adults in your life had limits on what they could do before they ever admitted it to you, didn't you? Seeing them every day, relying in them for food and shelter, you took special notice of their flaws and failings. Oh but don't you dare discuss it openly. Keep it secret, and forget that you ever saw it. If you pretend the danger isn't there, then it won't hurt you, right?

Wouldn't it have been nice to have a little reassurance, delivered in a humorous format, that you're not alone in this big, scary world?

This idea could be reaching, certainly. The stories in these old comic books were fun to read, and that was reason enough for kids to buy them. In most cases a cigar is just a cigar. But I do think there's truth in this thought. You and I are members of a species that rarely, if ever, has only one thing to say about any particular topic, and often the best lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves.

I'm looking at the short story market once again. An idea that was born during that hard freeze of nearly a year ago is still kicking around, and I still have other stories that haven't been published yet. Oh and I haven't forgotten my novels.

Am I still writing? Yes. Still writing.

A complicated Shape

My girlfriend once asked me who my favorite horror movie icon is, and it took me a while to decide. I had a long list to sort through but ultimately I had to eliminate all the less-popular ones. If Richard Matheson were a little better known I would have said Emeric Belasco. But in the end, I named a good one. Michael Myers.

She later gave me a beautiful, hand-made print of Michael enduring the horror of being lovingly nuzzled by some lazy kittens. I'm looking at is as I type this in, and suffice to say that this is probably not a situation that John Carpenter ever pictured.

Michael Meyers is a creation with a lot of different elements in him, and they blend together so well that usually we can't even see them . But they make him what he is, and we feel them every time that we see him.

Look at Michael's face. It's made of stiff, spray-painted rubber. Touch it. It's cold and rough under your fingers. That face never changes. Its black, empty eyes never blink. The face is stark, dead, and unchanging. Michael moves at a steady, unhurried pace, always in a straight line toward his goal. One of the first episodes of Dr. Who that I saw contained a plot point called robophbia, a dread and paranoia caused by being around androids and their stiff, dead features for too long. Seeing something move like a person but that doesn't meeting the criteria of being a person pushes the bad buttons in us. Some half-assed research shows that there's no such thing as robophobia in this world we live in. But give it time. We communicate among our own kind with facial expression, and Michael only has one. Do you remember the scene in part two where Myers walks through a plate glass door without breaking that relentless, direct stride of his? What if, once we develop real, functioning androids, someone were to dress one in coveralls, hand it a carving knife, and program it to stalk and carve? How similar would that result be to what we see on the screen? Carpenter's Shape and Cameron's Terminator both draw from the same source of dread, and it won't run dry until the human race is a cold, dead echo.

Yet, Michael has two arms, two legs, and a head. He was born from a woman, ate food to grow up big and strong, and was even examined by multiple doctors. There's a man inside those dark, bland, coveralls, and that fact has implications. Because multiple writers invented and then reinvented Michael over the decades (damn I feel old) I'm going to distill my observation down to what I consider our topic's essence. The exact nature of that essence is unknown, and we'll cover more on that later. But let's look at this: Michael Myers is a fictional character, who has a physical form in the stories that he appears in, and that form is indistinguishable from a human male. He expresses himself with face to face murder. That's Mr. Myers 101. Curse of Thorn is iffy at best, so I'm not going to include it as a factor when I ask this question: what prevents you from picking up a knife, from stalking babysitters and horny teens? What prevents me from looking people in the eye, letting fear build, then killing them? Arrest? Imprisonment/execution? Homeowner with a twelve-gauge blasting a hole in me? Sorry but those are risks and possible consequences. The honest answer is nothing. If I want to dress up and kill, you can't prevent me, and I can't prevent you. It's an ugly reminder of the flip side of human potential. What took us to the moon can also take us into nightmares. That's what makes Myers a warning of what we are and what we can be.

But keep going deeper. Yes, there's a man inside that mask, but what's inside the man? Evil, according to Doctor Loomis.

(Am I the only one, though, who sees hint after hint that the good doctor lost his objectivity, and lost it early on? His pursuit of Myers drives him to mania, and if Loomis isn't trying to patiently explain to you why you need to do things his way, then he doesn't seem like a very pleasant person to be around. What would Loomis do without Myers? Maybe that's the most telling point about the doctor, and a significant point in our discussion. Because the likely answer is, not much that would grab our attention. There's no hint that he's naturally obsessive, in fact there's no hint of anything about him that doesn't relate to Myers. He's a part of the Shape that extends beyond the man's body)

Aside from Loomis' claims, we have no idea what goes on inside Myer's head. He doesn't speak any language except body language, and analyzing that yields nothing we can understand. His movements are simple, direct, and mechanical. We know he wants to kill his one special girl, anyone close to her, and anyone whose death will hurt her. He wants to hurt her, but we don't know why. His goals, sadly, are very human, and very male. But they are no less out of our reach of understanding. His drives are a black box, as black as his eyes.

That's where we come back to horror, because we've come back to fear. We already fear the unknown, and we'll fear it even more when it picks up thin, sharpened steel. If Freddy or Velma ever pulled off the Shape's mask and explained him, that would be the end. Not of murder, maybe. But of the sort of fear that we cultivate and harvest here. The magical sort of fear that traces its roots back to shapes in the darkened closet and unexplained sounds in the night.

If times were normal, this is probably where the post would end. But they aren't are they? If you're reading this when I post it, then you're living through an age that will be included in the next generations of history books. This post started because of a feeling I had that connected Michael Myers' flavor of fear to what we're all going through right now. But that idea is elusive, and needs some time to gel. I'll either put it up here, or I'll write a story from it, and later you may get to read my grousing that no publisher is willing to buy quality literature these days.

Still writing.

Black lives matter.

All Hallow's Eve

I admit it, when it comes to this time of year, I'm twelve years old. I love all the decorations, the cool costumes, and the hundreds of different sources of myth that get dredged up and mixed together into a rich, spicy soup that feeds every fear of the dark and the unknown that has crawled around in the back of mankind's collective heads since we started banging the rocks together. Does it hurt that down here the temperature finally takes a bit of a dip this lovely time of year, and that it gets dark sooner? No, not at all.

Problem is, these last couple of Halloweens have not been as epic as I had hoped they would be. Something always seemed to pop up at the last minute that would wreck my plans. Or, and this is the shitty part about real life, that really awesome idea I had come up with that looked so perfect in my head turned out to be something off the set of the original Doctor Who series when I translated it into worldly matter. That's how it goes sometimes.

This year, it looked like the same thing was going to happen. There's still leftover problems from Harvey to deal with, I left renewing the registration on my car until the last minute, and I've made three trips to the dentist in the last month to take care of a problem that's been causing me enough pain to keep me from sleeping at night. This morning I got up early, headed in there again, and got a set of stitches taken out that I've been feeling inside my mouth for a week. Then I came home and let the pain killers kick in.

Then, I got off my butt and got to work. I hit Home Depot and picked up a couple of poles and some jute twine. Then I slapped together a pair of Saint Andrew's crosses, dressed up a dummy I had lying around, (go ahead and ask) and with the addition of some lights and the plastic, pre-carved pumpkins Claudia and I have been collecting over the years, my house was ready. A few days ago I stopped by one of the Halloween mega-stores that I've mentioned in a previous post, and picked up a mask that wasn't half bad. Add that to some black ren faire garb, and I was in business.

There was rain, but it stopped often enough to let the kids get out. I was up and down most of the evening answering the ringing of the doorbell, and I got another taste of that lovely moment when small children don't get to finish saying 'Trick or Treat.' One little girl came right out and said that she was scared of me, but that she loved my costume. She left smiling.

Let me know what you think. B-movie material?

Still writing.

A feast of flavors

How many Hannibal Lecters are there?

Well, that depends on how many you've gone out and met. The first one I met was a small man with six fingers on one hand. The second was a man with a subtle, sinister smile and who sometimes made a lisping, slurping noise when excited (and he looked a lot like Odin from the recent Thor movies). The third had darker hair, a much bolder voice and pronounced the first syllable in 'privacy' as in 'prim.' The fourth was a young man, and I followed him through the sort of childhood that would either make a sane person hope for the end of the world or drive them to nudge it along toward that end. The fifth I recently made the acquaintance of, and he's a quiet, cultured man who moves through his life with a slow, deliberate grace.

All of them are killers, and none of them would blink while they cut you open and browsed through your insides like a housewife at the local farmer's market.

Makes you wonder. There's only one source, regardless of the inspiration for that source. So where did they all come from? Why, from you and me of course. Let's take a moment and feel pride in our creations.

Why did Thomas Harris give the good doctor his initial traits, small, with slicked-back hair, limbs possessed of wiry strength? Well, Harris encountered a real-life killer who looks a bit like that, only at first he didn't understand the crimes the man had committed. I'm pulling this from Wikipedia, so there's likely a richer story behind it, but every good character has multiple roots, and you and I only have so much time here. Harris had a gut-level experience that was back-dated with the word KILLER in bright, bold letters, and he picked details from that experience with the intent of us putting our own KILLER stamps on his character, on his book. We were the target audience. I'd say the technique worked rather well, wouldn't you?

If we work chronologically, the next incarnation comes from Brian Cox working in front of a camera for the film Manhunter. He has a some of the physical traits, but we never see him kill anyone, despite all the backstory we're given about the bodies he's left in his wake. Instead, this Lecter is a button-pusher. He sends our hero running out of the room in a panic with a few well-placed points of conversation, and the tortured, murderous psychopath who slaughters whole families admires Doctor Lecter. These facts are presented to us to make us think, 'Christ, if this man can do all this while he's locked up, what would happen if he could get his hands on people?' What indeed.

Now we come to Mister Hopkin's portrayal. Yes, in a movie where you don't have a powerful actor there are some things that you can do to compensate for it, and hell no I'm not saying Cox's performance is sub-par, by any means. But Hopkin's Lecter has enough presence to blow all the other characters in Silence Of The Lambs out of the water. The accent he speaks with alone is just creepy, and the quiet monotone that it's delivered in makes me think of an audio recording of The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar I heard many years ago, the voice of the dead speaking to the living. See you soon, it whispers, at all of us.

Then there's that boy, that fine young Hannibal. (Nope. Couldn't resist) We see him portrayed with more than one actor's face, but there's only one that we associate with the cold dread that the name Hannibal inspires. Give me a contrary opinion if you want to, but that face is a little... Off. It's odd in the same way that Christopher Walken's is, handsome, but not something a lot of us would want to open our eyes to in the middle of the night. This Hannibal starts off his life a little better than most of us, which adds another dimension to the intelligent personae that's consistent through all the incarnations of our anti-hero. He gets dealt a bad hand of cards in his life, but presses on, though the part of that boy that might have once been able to laugh at himself seems to be missing. He wanders through life until he has a new family to replace the one that was killed, and for a moment maybe we get to believe that the rest of his life could have been lived 'normally.' He kills before the opportunity to avenge his little sister's death presents itself, but only after being insulted and bullied by someone bigger, stronger, and dumber than himself, and I think that qualifier is important. For all his skill and rage, this future icon is still a boy. We can enjoy stories about evil kids, but how many good or successful ones are there that don't have the child infected by some outside element, be it extra-terrestrial or supernatural. Innocence and childhood are intertwined icons, and if this handsome blond boy had begun his grown-up life already indulging his murderous urges, he would have lost our sympathy. As a character, Hannibal needs our empathy. This is one of the bigger challenges facing everyone who re-imagines him.

Of course we also have the latest and certainly not the least. In the TV series, Hannibal seems inhumanly poised and cultured, so much so that I think the only reason we can believe in him as a person is because we walked into this story already knowing the characters. Using my in-depth research techniques (browsing IMDB when I can't sleep) I discovered that Mads Mikkelson approached the role with a fresh perspective, playing this charming killer as if he was the devil. If you watch the series you'll see that the character does a good job in this role. He tempts, and it might even be said that he fulfills the traditional duties of the devil, dealing harshly with those who transgress. Though it might be more accurate to say that he does the work that we wish the devil would get around to, chopping up that asshole who cut us off on the highway and making that snooty clerk at the DMV regret being so rude. That's the key.

I'm not trying to just gush here about how engrossing Hannibal is as a fictional character, I do that in private. This is peeking into the whys and wherefors behind the fact that a lot of people (myself included) are willing to pay money to read and see this man's story. Hannibal is an anti-hero, like any other bad guy we root for. But the intensity of his actions make it hard to admit why we like him. I think a lot of us have moments where we would love do exactly what he does, kill some person in our lives who offends us (not hurts us, offends us) and express such pure contempt for that person that we eat them. I try to avoid getting too graphic here, but let me address an unspoken fact that would be a part of Hannibal's life if he existed in the real world: his digestion. We all know what goes up must come down, right? Well, what goes in must come out. Imagine all those faces of Doctor Lecter, each taking care of personal business, remembering their meals and remembering the preparation. These men would be smiling while they sat.

But we never see, or even hear about that. Why? Because while our egos would love to lead us on an exploration of alternative cuisine, those same egos don't want us within a thousand miles of all the complications. Lecter went to medical school. Look around, because it's not difficult to find horror stories about that experience. Have you ever smelled the insides of a mammal that's been opened up? How about had fluids from those insides splash over you, soaking down into your socks? Once the good doctor removed the delicacies he was after, there would have been a hundred and twenty more pounds of person to dispose of, minimum. That weight comes from bones, blood vessels, organs, and goopy stuff inside those organs. Yeah, the movies never show our well-mannered gentleman dealing with bowels.

By not showing that, it lets us gloss over the ugly bits of reality. We get the good without the bad. The gourmet meal without having to pay the bill or wash the dishes. Obvious, right? The trick is knowing which is which, what to serve and what to toss in the trash and hope our neighbor doesn't get nosy. If I had the secret to that, well for starters I'd be getting paid for these words you're reading. But I can at least recognize when someone gets it right, like with the good doctor. I can think about what I like and what buttons it pushes inside me. I can put all that in my own blender, hit puree and see what I end up with. Dinner is served.

By the way, I'm eating while I write this. Eating meat.

While I write.

It was a dark and -

So there's this Harvey. Drops in uninvited, and won't take the hint and get the hell out. Now true, he did give us some notice that he was coming. But, honestly? He's the sort of jerk who's so unreliable that notice isn't really much help. We can't keep him out, can't tell him to stay away, and even if we leave to avoid him there's a risk he'll break in and trash our place. Hell, he might even show up early to catch us while we're packing the car or delay his arrival so we waste time out of town and end up exiled, unable to come back to our home until who knows when.

I'm finishing this on Friday, the Friday after the huge rainstorm that hit Houston so bad that the damage is being counted in billions. I started writing it the previous Friday, hoping the power would stay on. It did, and for the first day or so when the hurricane became a tropical storm and hit Houston with endless water and wind, things were okay. My friends and I passed texts around to say who had the lights off in their neighborhoods and everyone swapped videos of rivers that have street signs barely sticking out of them and the roofs of cars that can almost be seen under their surface. It rained, hard and fast, then it would stop long enough for me to take the dog for a walk around the neighborhood. Of course, we had to walk in the middle of the street because a lot of the sidewalks were either caked in mud or under water, and we could only walk so far before we hit places where the streets themselves were submerged. Then we would head back in before it started pouring again. At night, during the quiet moments, there were frogs all over the neighborhood, singing. At home, with the storm locked outside but raging, it felt like all the real disaster was a comfortable distance away.

That was it through Sunday. On Monday evening as I was forcing Diamond to tend to her business in the backyard even though the sky was pouring water on her head, Claudia yelled that she needed me. I got in to see that the ceiling was leaking in the library, less than three feet from her desk, where her computer is. We got buckets and plastic bags under the leak, which was coming down in multiple streams. While we were trying to come up with a long-term plan, we noticed the sheet rock was sagging.

The whole piece fell down within twenty minutes, all in a mess of insulation, cardboard backing for the sheet rock, and the nails that had been holding it up. We got a tarp under the buckets, and watched a part of our house fall apart while trying to make peace with the fact that we couldn't do anything to stop it.

Eventually the rain stopped for a while. I stayed up that night to make sure it didn't get worse. I'm not sure what I would have done if it had.

Cabin fever is a real thing. Claudia and I were cooped up in the house from Friday afternoon until Tuesday, when I was able to drive around and find one of our favorite Mexican restaurants open. But on that Monday night, we had been crammed together the whole time, both worrying. You would think it would be a perfect time to binge watch Game of Thrones, or do anything else that eats up time, but it wasn't. We gave each other space, both of us feeling tense and anxious. Sad fact is, I couldn't even write, especially after the leaks made the ceiling fall in. I was too locked in the moment to go anywhere else in my head, even though a trip elsewhere would have been just the thing at that time.

The next day we heard that the national guard had been called out, and on those moments when I got out of the house I started seeing and hearing helicopters. There was water built up along the edges of the streets around my house, but not covering them. I had slept during the morning, and I stayed up again the next night, insisting that Claudia get some rest. Of course it was raining that night, and the ceiling started leaking where our kitchen meets our living room. I got some plastic tubs under it, cursed, and tried to keep an eye on it to make sure I caught any leaking water. There was still water leaking into the first set of tubs in the library.

At around one in the morning, there was another wet, tearing sound and another piece of my house hit the floor hard enough that I was sure it was going to wake Claudia up. At that point I just said fuck it, made sure the buckets were still catching the old and new streams of water, and started on the mess. I put on latex gloves, because my hands began to itch not long after picking up the huge piles of insulation from the first collapse, and scooped handfuls of wet gunk into a trash bag. I took the larger pieces of what used to be my ceiling and put them in a cardboard box. (trash pick up had not happened, naturally) I got out my old ka-bar knife and cut the pieces of sheetrock that were broken off but still hanging from the cardboard backing at the edges of the hole. While I was doing at this I would pause every once in a while to look up through the hole that was the size of a car door. I could see the slats of my roof.

That's where we stand now, except that I noticed a slow leak in the damned garage too, some night when I was walking around the house. The rain is gone for now, and Claudia hit the ground running as soon as it did. We've already filed an insurance claim, had FEMA come out, and now we're just waiting on the roofer, who understandably is a tad busy right now.

Now I've got a moment to sit still and really think. My workplace opened up on Thursday, and and during those disorganized two days we got some hint of the real mess. Some of my friends and co-workers got out in their trucks and boats during the worst of it and rescued people who were trapped in their houses or up on their roofs. Despite, or maybe because of, all the crap that I needed to keep an eye on at home, when I read their posts and saw their pictures I really wanted to get out there, to ride out there on the cold, black water and help all the people who are a hell of a lot worse off than I am. During the storm there would be occasional photos of flooded houses and rescues by jeep or boat. The official death toll has risen, and I don't think anyone's surprised by that. Pieces of overpasses have collapsed, and at one place so much water washed over one of the highways that the concrete barriers along its sides were pushed perpendicular to the line of traffic, forming an above-ground river channel.

So what's next? Start fixing. Though we've got some ugly damage, Claudia and I still have a roof over our heads. Other people are still in shelters, some are throwing out all of their furniture because their house was flooded, and others have to go hunting for wherever their cars were washed away to. Gas prices are going up, and there's a curfew on. But we're alive, and we're moving on.

As for me, I'm still writing.