Picking up the stick again

Okay, the break's over. Time to hit the keys again. Way back when, when I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, I used to head to the base library on weekends. We didn't get every weekend off, and even during the ones we did get off someone had to sit in the duty office and answer the phone. But when I could, I spent twenty or so Saturday or Sunday afternoon minutes walking across the base to that one building that smelled of age and paper, and found the dusty table where a single typewriter sat. What makes me uncomfortable is the fact that I'm not sure whether or not it was the first typewriter I ever used. I wrote a small game module when I was younger, based on the ridiculous exploits of the gaming group I belonged to in middle school, and I have a half memory that it was typed and a half memory that it wasn't. But that old chunk of metal on base is what I think about when I picture typing. Carefully feeding each sheet of paper in, hitting the lever when you came to the end of a line, and keeping a few pieces of correction paper close by and living with the fact that the whited-out letters never completely covered up when you hit a 'w' instead of a 'q.' You couldn't just touch the keys and expect the lever to make it all the way up the paper. You had to pound on those fuckers, like you were Bruce Lee rupturing some villain's spleen by poking his earlobe. That's how I write to this day, wearing the letters off the keys of my keyboard before I need to replace my computer.

It's time to get back to treating this like my primary business.

Sort of fitting that I'm currently reading something from Stephen King. I like his stories, and they roll across your brain at a smooth, easy pace that's so comforting that you don't notice when they pick up speed. You can sit down to read a few pages before bed and when you finally close the back cover you have to say, 'Oh hell.' Not because the story was that good, which it (probably) was, but because you now have about twenty minutes to sleep before it's time to get up and go to work.

I have also dragged my poor wife into the dark world where the series, 'Penny Dreadful' takes place. I bought the first season a while back, and we finally sat down to watch it together. One episode became two, which then became three and 'Oh hell, I need to get to bed.' I don't expect the rest of the season to last much longer.

So it's back to horror, back to fun things like mental isolation, subtle xenophobia, and what the devil might look like as he tries to seduce a medieval nun. Time to think about bad childhoods and the cold-blooded bastards they sometimes produce. This is the now of the whisper in the dark when you're alone, and the dying sigh at sunset. Know what?

It's good to be back.