The Cat In The Cactus Mask

The door separating the office block from the warehouse slammed shut behind me, and I pushed a hand through my hair to brush off the dust of the day as I crossed the parking lot to my car. It was quarter-past five, and being October, the daylight had already dwindled to dusk. I hadn’t seen the sky–or natural light for the matter–since my lunch break at noon. Since then the bright blue had bruised over for the most part, and the few rags of cloud sleepily floating in the darkened blue-grey, reflected in their folds the ember-glow of the setting sun, which had lingered at the horizon long enough to cook the lowest strip of visible sky medium-rare before continuing its slide to the other side of the globe. 

As I reached my car I paused, keys in hand, sucking in the welcome fresh air and weighing the ritual inanities of my personal life. What to do with one’s self on a lonely Thursday night? I could haunt the aisles of my favorite used book store, but I still had a small cityscape of unread novels waiting for me near my nightstand from the last visit. I suppose I could have stopped at one of the handful of small, quiet restaurants I frequent, grab a bite to eat before heading home to read one of those books and wait for sleep to drive me to bed.

The routine was comfortable, but in all honesty it had become a bit stale. The gears needed greasing with a liberal application of joie de vivre. 

Well, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of watching the sands of my evening slip to the lower half of the glass while trying to figure out what to do with it, so I got in my car and headed home. Halfway there I decided to pull in to the grocery store and find something for dinner, maybe break up the dregs a little. And it was there, in the vestibule between the two sets of sliding doors, that fate dropped a whopper into my shopping basket.

I didn’t see it at first, and I wouldn’t have at all if a little kid hadn’t pushed it on me. Or, rather, me onto it. I was walking through the skrish of the sliding door, into the carpeted entryway, as a little boy and his mother were coming out. The kid had one of those small junior shopping carts they give to children to push around so they can feel like they’re doing the shopping too; helping keep their little hands and minds occupied, so they’re less likely to get fidgety and cause a ruckus, and training them to be nice little consumers in turn. I heard “Ethan, watch your cart, honey!” and then found myself dancing to the left to avoid getting said junior shopping cart square in the kneecaps. I ran slam-bang into the cork bulletin board on the wall, feeling the jab of several plastic pushpin ends in my shoulder blades. They must’ve caught in my shirt, because as Ethan and his mother pushed through into the parking lot, her giving me an “I’m so sorry, he’s really a good boy” expression, without actually voicing an apology, I stepped away from the wall and heard them clatter to the floor along with a couple of the flyers that they had been tacking up.

I grabbed the handful of pages off the carpet—mostly ads for local Daycare providers, carpet cleaning services and lawn care businesses, when I came across this sheet of yellow paper with the most enigmatic promise on it:

OASIS SLIM PRESENTS: DESERT BLUES

ONE NIGHT ONLY

OCT. 6th 7PM

Maplewood Cultural Center

Desert blues. There was no description beyond the title and time and place; no picture of the performer or tag to the come-on “Desert Blues” to build up what it might mean. I have to admit I was intrigued. Normally I don’t go for local cultural events beyond the occasional movie on the weekend, but I had just been bemoaning how stale my routine had become. Maybe it was worth checking out. Having taken Friday as PTO for a much-needed three-day weekend, it wasn’t like I had to be at work in the morning,.

I bought my groceries and headed home, all the while pointlessly weighing the possible scenarios of what leaving the house and trying something new might bring. It’s a little head game I play with myself. All it really accomplishes is building my anxiety and keeping me a misanthropic shut-in; but I get excited about something and then create these two ideals in my head—one this incredibly fulfilling experience, the other a banal letdown—and then I let the two wrestle it out in the arena of my psyche until one dominates and I either pull myself up by my sneaker laces and go, or decide it’s probably not worth it and just stay in; maybe read another book or go to one of those handful of small, quiet restaurants and tell myself perhaps next time. 

It could be great, I thought. It sounded so exotic: Desert Blues. I was a blues fan—the old stuff; everything from Slim Harpo, Big Maybelle and Lead Belly to R.L. Burnside. I was still mulling it over when I got home. An internet search left me clueless and frustrated. Whoever Oasis Slim was, he didn’t have any semblance of an online presence. No social media accounts, no website, not even a cryptic review of a past show on some online bulletin board somewhere, and the Maplewood Cultural Center’s website had nothing to offer beyond what  bare bones information had been enigmatically printed on the flyer. Was it some local guy who played in his garage on the weekends? Someone more invested in the joy of performance than selling CDs or working a regular gig? If so, that would explain the lack of information online. Especially if he was older and maybe not so internet savvy. In that case, though, what if he was one of these boring suburban Strat’ slingers that considered Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn the apotheosis of the genre? I wasn’t in the mood for an evening of middle-aged white guy bar blues.

Well, curiosity battered caution in the last round of deliberation, so I ate, cleaned myself up, and with a film of hesitance coating the inside of my mouth, headed to the Maplewood Cultural Center. 

I honestly don’t know what I was expecting. I pulled into the parking lot, a blacktop  patch in a cubby hole flanked by identical beige strip malls, and found myself nearly alone there. There were two or three other cars parked near the front of the building, which surely had to have belonged to whatever MCC staff were present. Maybe the date had been changed? I made my way through the front door of the Center, a squat redbrick building with some dark wood facade embellishments, and a foundation-to-roof A-frame peak on the front that led me to believe it had been a small church at some point. Inside I found two middle-aged women sitting at a card table, garbed in chunky sweaters, tasseled wool scarves, and fluorescent lighting so pale it almost looked green. On either side of them stood a darkened doorway.

Both of the women smiled as I approached. “Welcome!”

I proffered the yellow flyer.

“This is tonight, right?”

The woman closest to me took the sheet from me and studied it through her thick-lensed bifocals. “Oh, yes!” she replied, her smile somehow stretching even wider. “Right through the door behind me.” She jabbed a thumb at one of the darkened doorways. “It’s five dollars for the show, and the money goes right back into our cultural event support fund! Would you like some literature?”

There was a look of eager expectancy on her face, the way her hand went to a stack of folded pamphlets sitting on the table before her, but I really wasn’t concerned with their events calendar or whether the five bucks went to pay for future events or bags of that pink hand soap one was likely to find in the bathrooms.

“No thanks,” I replied sheepishly, handing her the five. It didn’t seem to diminish her smile any. She took the crumpled bill and dropped it into a small aluminum-colored cash box, then pressed a small hand stamp into an ink pad and raised it in my direction.

Seconds later I was maneuvering the aisles of the dim auditorium, a smudged smiley face stamped on the back of my right hand. There was a handful of people scattered throughout the room: a bored looking couple sitting in the back row, an elderly man with a houndstooth trilby and a meticulously manicured white beard up front on the right, someone I couldn’t quite make out a few rows behind him. I chose a spot in the middle, near the aisle, and waited.

There was no announcement, no emcee who stepped into the blazing circumference of a spotlight to tell us what was going to happen next. The smiling ladies from the foyer didn’t wander in to thank us for our attendance and gleefully tell us about what wonderful programming might be coming to the Maplewood Cultural Center in the upcoming weeks. The dim lights simply lowered further until the room was in total darkness, and then some scalloped stage lights flared to life. The stage, which had previously been a dark, black patch at the front of the room, was suddenly illuminated. A pair of crimson curtains parted slowly over a platform about six inches off the ground, and there, on a simple metal folding chair, small amp between his feet and sky-blue Fender guitar in his hands, sat Oasis Slim. 

I was dumbfounded.

He wore a grey wool suit with a white button-down dress shirt. The two black strands of a bolo tie dangled at either side of the descending strip of pearl-white buttons on the dress shirt, crowned by a steel clasp set with a small bird’s egg oblong of turquoise. His scuffed black dress shoes bookended the small guitar amp as if it might run off if he hadn’t. And his face…well, he didn’t have one. Not that I could see. You see, Oasis Slim’s head looked very much like a cactus, pricks and all.

Was this a put on? Some sort of theatrical flourish? Is this what was going to make the music Desert Blues—a cactus mask? I noticed that the backdrop behind Slim was a very stylized western desert scene that could’ve been pulled from the cover of any pulp cowboy magazine or novelty postcard, replete with a series of sandy plateaus fading into the distance, covered with whiskery cacti. A sun-bleached steer skull and busted wagon wheel nestled in the foreground under the watchful eye of a hungry tempera paint buzzard. 

Oh god! Had I stumbled into some esoteric amateur comedy act?

Well, it was weird, but I liked it! I felt like I was seeing something that hadn’t been seen before. And, if it had, how had Slim kept the lid on it so well? Someone—one of the couple in the back row—had chuckled at the reveal; otherwise the room was silent.

Finally, after seconds which had seemed to draw on for hours, Oasis Slim moved. His hand jerked from his guitar to his face—or his cactus rather; the movement quick and jerky, as if he were an animatronic display suddenly switched on. With a thumb and index finger, Slim chose one of the bone-colored needle stickers that covered his head, one from the area that would’ve been his right cheek had he had one, and plucked it out.

Without so much as a second’s hesitation, Slim gripped the needle between thumb and finger like a guitar pick, and began to play.

Whoever Oasis Slim was under that cactus mask, he must have been either damn good, or blind and playing purely by feel and muscle memory. There were no eye holes that I could see anywhere on that bizarre, bulbous green head. Slim started to play a basic twelve-bar blues riff without so much as a word of introduction. Just picking and pressing the strings into chords.

I noticed, a few minutes in, that the room seemed to grow warmer. I began to swab the roof of my mouth with my tongue, noticing my saliva had evaporated and leaving me with a bad case of cotton mouth. I could feel sweat start to bead at the back of my neck, right at the hairline, and trickle down my shoulders and spine like small beetles scurrying for shelter.

Slim played on but the music seemed to fade into the background. The songs were all instrumentals, and didn’t really have a beginning or end, at least not that I could tell. I felt a bit disoriented. I could still hear the tremolo of the strings around me, as if the soundtrack to some movie I found myself in, but the shadows and silhouettes of the dark theater had glommed together and become somehow faded, less definite. It was as if I’d developed some sort of miasma. I could see very little; all was a barely-lit darkness. I could swear, as the music continued, that I could feel the unfiltered heat of a desert sun baking my neck and face until it hurt. I felt downright feverish! I became aware of the coarse grit plastering my pores, the lethargy tempering my joints and muscles. 

There was the dry-hinge squawk of vultures somewhere overhead, but I couldn’t see them. The sensation of something brushing against my ankle caused me to grope for it in the darkness. For a second I froze, a cloud of ice blooming in my chest as my fingers found something rough and dry scuffing their tips, but a second investigation found only the coarse cotton weave of my socks.

Eventually the sensory spook show ended. The deluge of strange sensations ceased,   the darkness evaporated, and I found myself in the same raggedy seat in the same dark auditorium I’d sat down in. Slim, however, was gone. The few other people who had been in the theater were missing as well. 

I took a second to collect my thoughts–or to try rather, but there was little likelihood of any cogent brain activity. My skull was buzzing like a kicked hornets nest. 

Once I was sure my faculties were more or less in working order, I made my way to the lobby. The two women were still there, this time out from behind the card table and one was dragging a broom across the parquet floor, the other was half visible through a half-propped restroom door, doing the same with a mop.

“Have a good night!” chimed the woman with the broom. I wasn’t sure what to say, or necessarily how to say it, so I just nodded in her direction and kept moving towards the door.

Once I got home and sat down, made myself a cup of tea, I sat and tried to piece the evening together. An hour had passed from the time I’d walked into the Cultural Center to the time I’d gotten back into my car. And the kicker was, I wasn’t even entirely sure what had happened.

It was an experience, though. I have to admit that even though I wasn’t sure how to process what had just happened, my gamble had paid off in spades! I wasn’t likely to forget whatever it was for some time! More importantly, my thoughts strayed to Oasis Slim himself. How had he done what had he done? And, perhaps more importantly, that cactus head of his had just been a mask, right?

A Poem We Weren’t Sure What To Name

“Kicks just keep getting harder to find,”

I can hear Mark Lindsay say

from the radio on the counter in the kitchen

you leave on for your pets all day,

tuned to the station you play in your car

so you can stay connected

even when you’re away.

From my seat on the chair

you drove North

from your grandmother’s basement

after she passed away,

I can see the black nose of

a schnoodle bob up and down

as he stops to investigate

before giving up and sauntering off

to lie down under the coffee table

in the living room

to lazily watch flecks of dust

suspended like glitter in the sunlight

and the stretching shadows

of the afternoon;

before being roused by

the barks of his brother,

each bark punctuated by

his four hopping feet,

at the sound of the mailman outside

or a truck with an empty trailer

hitting potholes in the street

which elicits irritated grumbles

from a lazy tabby trying to sleep

curled in his sun-soaked bed

his two front paws covering his head

and one back leg dangling free.

It all probably sounds

so inconsequential

but right now my world is this room.

I write what I see,

so here in my words
is a picture of a Tuesday afternoon.

The Successful Proliferation of the North American Reverse-Bill Ballcap

Members and Supporters
I write to you today
To bring you joyous news
All our efforts have held sway
Despite the encroaching
Endemic problems and dismay
The current of favor has been dammed
And redirected our way
And the American Reverse-Bill Ballcap
Is a dominant breed species

All of the hurdles these Poor
Creatures had to overcome
A baseline standard reading
Acumen and the general assumption
Of humanistic clemency
By the others for everyone
Has made proliferation
In the past not easy

Some notes on the species
For those who aren’t aware
How to spot one in the wild
–If you do please do not stare!
For their egos are fragile and
Secured by the impression
That aggression is impressive
And to impress is to be respected
Hence the angry hunched gorilla
Stance that’s so often affected
Bolstered by the belief
That compassion is disease
And the spatial occupation they consume
Stretches to all they hear and see
And will arbitrate within such
What is judiciously accepted
Which sparks the constant social
Confrontations they've perfected

Listen for the hollow uninspired
Sound of boastful music played loud
That radiates a warning of the posture
Of the creature coming ‘round
A musical tensed muscle
Brined with swagger and assurance
That your feelings and existence
Take a backseat to their purpose
A soundtrack to the character
They’ve cobbled in their heads
Cut and pasted from dumb archetypes
With their face in place instead
Fueled by whiskey to keep them mean
Because to not would make them pussies
And pussies aren’t tough
(Which one needs to be)
To bear the slaps in the face
The world reciprocates
From constantly lashing out at it so much

Ladies and Gentlemen
Take a good look around
I’m sure you can find examples
Of the expanding varieties in your own town
Prosperous and plentiful
Their numbers now compound
I present to you this bird of prey
Known also as The Angry Clown.

The Crow Song

A lanky crow
saws his way across
a grey wool sky
with serrated wings
and bellyaches
as he cuts by
he is so hungry
but first something
must die
so he finds a branch
and sings the Got No Roadkill Blues

Brunch In Hayward

I'd added too much milk to the coffee, and let it sit too long; ruminating on the sights from the smudge-filtered window that walled in the booth I was sitting in, thinking I might, somehow, spot some I-spy hidden truth carefully lodged amongst the snow-caked boredom of Hayward, Wisconsin, some cipher used by the cosmos the way Guy Williams used to leave the sign of Zorro in the flesh of his enemies with a few elegantly adroit whips of his rapier, had drawn me away from my lunch. And the coffee. Now it was tepid and shared a cloudy hue with the puddles of congealing earth outside, as Old Man Winter had decided his stay in Wisconsin had run quite long enough, thank you, and packed his snow and his arctic airstreams and waddled his gruff ass out to wreak misery on some other suchplace where people needed to be reminded how it was to lose the ability to blink while walking into the wind.

It was the first week of May for Chrissakes.

But for the moment the sky was as blue and the sea in a Hiroshige print, the sun was pleasantly baking the left side of my face, and the lunch was gratis, so I did what anyone oughtta do: kept my mouth shut and enjoyed it.

Waiting Room For The Beyond

(for Jo Ann)

The leaves flared high in shades of brown
to match the January ground
you sank into but we couldn't stand to see;
instead we crowded in a chapel
speaking lowly
while icy winds rattled the eaves.

And strangers squeezed
at shoulders forging comfort,
diversionary memories on their tongues
to distract us from the future
that the present had just undone.

In a corner Father's trying
to keep himself from crying
and his sister's keeping pace
with the itinerary:
visitation, mass, then sandwiches
in the church basement
post-cemetery.

Through clouded conversations of the past,
drinking etiquette and plans
to stay in touch
I was asked how I was doing
by a stranger.
And though I didn't say it,
afraid it wouldn't make much sense.
how I felt was like a shadow in a Register.

They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be...

Guarded eyes behind bus shelter glass
freckled with bird shit watching
the afternoon traffic pass,
silently conjuring curses towards
the vehicles weather hasn't
yet tattooed orange
like the stains on their knuckles
and gums and their clothes,
just as smudged as the ads
for fast food and car loans
that carpet the concrete
with the sand and the slush
and the yesterday hopes
that today didn't touch.

One more deep breath;
exhale and exhaust
swirling together
to freeze into frost.

As pocketed fingers curl
to keep warm you think
"Today could have been anything."

When the driver's bad day
and bus radio songs
make seven short miles
seem thirty miles long,
it's home to unplug the
present with drinks
or pictures of when you were young.
Swear that maybe a new town
or a job that you love
would dust off this mess to
which you loathe to belong.
Or someone to be with at home,
something on TV you'd actually watch
and not just use for noise
so you don't feel alone
to the tune of the ticking wall clock.

The penumbrae of objects you
dare to call home stretch
out through your darkened room
as you're guided by flickers
of reruns to toothbrush
then sleep before life can resume.
But as head hits the pillow
remember each blind
can be raised to let in
light and the sound of robin who'll sing
"As cold as it is,
though the days seem so short here
tomorrow can be anything."

Parking Lot Liturgy (Thoughts on Thanksgiving Day, 2014)

It's too cold for snow
But the sky doesn't seem to know
Mother Nature's flaked on us again
As I sit in my car
And watch my cellphone's dancing bars
Certain it's withholding messages

As the heater slowly starts to heat
Everything except my feet
I watch light play off the snowflakes
On the windshield glass
And as I start to warm
Ideas start to swarm
And crash like tangled birds
Upon the dusty dash

Like:

Will this Christmas be a black suit affair?
Will the winter cease by April Fools' ?

I'd make something of these
Thoughts if I could
But long ago I gave up on the tools
That I (truthfully) never really
Learned to use
A rusty hammer
Pliers I can't ply
But if you were to ask me
If I had
I'd probably swear
It's not 'cause I didn't try

Hey, It's Me!

It is no secret that I do not suffer fools well
So it should be obvious
That I don't much like myself
Every breath wasted in argument
Just multiplies its wealth
When I later on argue
The point with myself
And find myself all the poorer for it

10th to the T

Afternoons in April
look much like September
without the benefit
of all the local color

Potato salad sunshine burning
up the sudsy snow
still clinging to the ditches
and the fields like piles of mold

A sturdy wind chafes the chaff
that will soon be mowed
down and cleared
to make way for empty condos

They'll drain the ponds
and cut it up for buyers
who will evict the ducks
to install deep fat fryers
and serve up hamburgers
to put more pressure on tires
on the vehicles more
war machine than wagon.

Lady, Let Me In

Lady,
let down your braids
and tie me in
the plaits

Absorb me
into your light
–every mircrodrop of cytoplasm
every lipid molecule, every chitinous bit

Because the world
is a harsh darkness
and my eyes
are sore from
the sanding

THE GIGGLING GHOST vs DR. ZOMNOMBULANCE, CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The Giggling Ghost

Dinnertime had come at last to the final Thursday in April; the sky that had been threatening snow all day with its falling temperatures and teary drizzle, had finally acquiesced, and as the sun turned its golden gaze from the city of River Bay, small, delicate flakes—like ashes from some distant fire—began to salt the sidewalks and windshields of the city. Springtime in Minnesota.

With the snow had come the darkness of night. Alleys and gutters had coughed up shadows that spread like ink dripped into water, blurring the edges of the buildings and blotting out the surrounding nature of River Bay until it was nothing but a collection of floating orange and white window panes, and the odd multi-colored eyes of stoplights. As a city headed home from work, free from the day’s drudgery and anxious for the delayed delivery of summer, a lone figure, shrouded in black, made its way to a more curious destination. 

Oakland Cemetery had no gated fence around it to keep the dead in or the riff-raff out, which made it a hot spot for those who tended to show up at such places long after such gates might have closed anyways. Largely teenagers looking to get drunk in seclusion, vandals busting headstones, or self-styled sorcerers who practiced at fabricated occult nonsense, wrapped up in the notion that they had a winking third eye open to some ethereal truth that the rest of mankind had not. The consensus around the River Bay Parks and Recreation office was that the cemetery was secluded enough, pushed back in thick patches of brambles halfway up a bluffside overlooking the city, and pain-in-the-ass-enough to get to in good weather by daylight, that there wasn’t much call for the expenditure of erecting a barrier. Some century-plus after it had fallen out of use, there were more beer bottle shards and bits of fast food packaging lodged in the dirt than grave markers, and most of the relatives of the few corpses interred there, had long moved on or withered away themselves; most in the newer, sprawling Pine Shade Cemetery at the foot of the bluff.

Ask the River Bay P.D. about cult activity in their city, and they’d be apt to tell you the closest thing they had to one was The Ladyslippers Club: a clutch of septuagenarians who got together on Thursday nights to share Crock-Pot casseroles and local gossip. And yet, now, faintly dusted in the chalky moonlight bleeding through the overcast night sky, bathed in the penumbrae of the rough tombstones jutting from the hard ground like the great teeth of some half-buried dinosaur, moved a living shadow.

The figure approached the graveyard, pausing as it crossed under the half-collapsed, trellised metal archway that read OAKLA D C MET RY. Satisfied that it was alone and unwatched, the silhouette continued into the throng of the weathered headstones. The figure moved with purpose, its shadowy form swimming through the gaps between the markers as if it had done so many times before.

Finally it came to pause in a small clearing before a time- and weather-eroded sepulcher, no bigger than a garden tool shed. It was a thin, squat building of limestone, it’s ornamental cornices chipped and covered with the weedy remnants of dead nightshade vines. The dark figure knelt by the base of the structure. With gloved hands, it lifted a rust-pocked, cobweb-coated urn on the right of the lower of two steps leading up to the gated entrance to the tomb.  The lifted urn triggered a mechanism, causing the wrought iron gate caging the door of the sepulcher to unlatch and swing wide. The figure paused again, taking another survey of the dark, snow dabbed woods beyond the cemetery. The black figure set the urn back in its place and stepped up into the entrance of the sepulcher, melting into the black aperture as if it had in fact been an errant part of it returning to the whole.

After the figure had vanished within, the iron gate once again closed and sealed itself.  A stiff, bracing wind threaded through the skeletal tips of the still-nude tree branches that whiskered the bluffs, crashing against the tombstones like a ghost wave, obliterating any trace of the mysterious visitor and its secret in its tide.

*

Though night had indeed fallen and blotted up Mankato Avenue, not all were aware of it. In fact, a parade or a fire could have swept the street both ways in front of The Spying Eye booksellers, and its proprietor would have been none the wiser. It was one of the few businesses left on the quiet thoroughfare; a street that had once been a main artery between the highway and the river, the two landmarks boxing in most of River Bay, but was now a quiet, largely residential area on the east side of the city. The shop was an appealingly rustic brownstone storefront, with an unassuming, and just-north-of-dilapidated, apartment occupying its second floor. Over the front door of the shop hung a sign, now flagging in the wind, depicting a magnifying glass with a large human eye set within the circular frame of its lens.

Inside the shop, amongst the smell of yellowed paperbacks and chai tea, quite unaware that closing time had come and gone an hour ago, sat its proprietor: a small, portly man with a fuzzy brown caterpillar moustache sleeping above his upper lip. He was engrossed in a book about Amazon headhunters—the Ecuadorian Shuar Indians, and their now-taboo ritualistic practice of producing tsantsas, or shrunken heads.  

As he was reading, a fluffy gray tabby leapt onto the countertop near the register and walked, stretching its legs in the process, to the open book. The cat circled and sat itself in the center of the open pages, mrow-ing in the little bald man’s face. Clearly the king was requesting an audience with his attendant.

“Hello, Raffles. What can I do for you?” A glance at the clock on the wall told him it was shortly after six o’clock.

“Dinner time already?” the man muttered. “I’ve lost track of time. My apologies. Let me prepare your plates.”

Raffles responded by bashing his forehead into the man’s chin and dragging his fuzzy little face across his jaw.

“Wentworth!” the man called, stepping out from behind his counter. “Dinner!” His summons produced another cat, a buff colored tabby who appeared from some obscured sleeping space amongst the books in the shop.

After adroitly scooping the pungent pâté from the cat food can, and smearing it onto two saucers, he set the plates down in the kitchen of the small apartment attached to the back of the shop. It was the living space he shared with his two feline roommates. The cats having been fed, he stepped back into the bookshop and drew the shade over the glass of the front door, locking it tightly and testing the handle. He switched the fluorescent lights off and lingered a moment in the dark, his spectacled eyes surveying the darkness outside, partially exposed in the pumpkin-orange glow of the nearest corner streetlight.

What mysteries were lurking out there, unraveling beyond the scope of observation? What villains were secretly formulating their next attempt at public destruction or vile treachery?

It seemed laughable in this sequestered little burg, but the fact remained that though the prominence of River Bay had been washed downstream as its founding logging industry had been pulped, reduced now to a sleepy college town, it somehow had accumulated a magnetic draw for darkness. It wasn’t common knowledge, but without this unassuming little man, the unassuming little city of River Bay would have been ground up within the gears of the sinister machinations of that masked fiend The Salamander, or crushed beneath the designer heels of that perfidious millionaire—and secret crime king—Richard Esquire, aka The Whispering Skull!

There had been many threats to the city, but they had all been thwarted. Thwarted by a round little man with a fuzzy caterpillar moustache, his face hidden behind the sackcloth mask of his alter ego: The Giggling Ghost!

Back in his apartment, Hollis Hastings, self-made super-sleuth, filled his teakettle and set it on the burner of his stove. He switched on his police radio, nestled into the over-stuffed armchair where he did his best thinking, and waited, fingers steepled before his lips.

There was nothing that required his services so far. A car pulled over just outside of town for having expired license plate tabs; a report of a break and entry in a garage on Belleview, about a mile west of the bookstore, and a drunk and disorderly at one of the college bars downtown.

The night would prove uneventful, but with the new day would come a new adventure for The Giggling Ghost!

*

There was a feint mechanical whir as the lid of the coffin closed, and the dark form of the mystery figure, lying supine in the folds of the moth-eaten satin lining, began to slowly lower. The satin-lined interior came to a stop some thirty feet beneath the floor of the sepulchre, and tilted upward. The dark stranger walked off down a narrow earthen hallway, just tall enough and wide enough to accommodate his figure; the passage lit every so often with electric lamps bolted to wooden supports along the walls. 

At a point, after a half-mile or so of walking, the tunnel bent downward, and the figure paused again, this time at a tangle of thick tree roots snaking from the seeming dead end wall of earth before him. A black-gloved hand grasped an imperceptibly artificial segment of root, and twisted it just slightly. The roots parted like saloon doors, revealing an alcove. The black stranger stepped into the large crevice, closing the rootball door behind it. The cloistered space the figure now knelt in, concealed behind the camouflaged root barricade, was in fact the box platform of a small freight elevator–a dumbwaiter leading to the basement of a house high atop the bluff overshadowing River Bay.

The platform rose through over twelve-hundred feet of stony soil, coming to rest beneath a large grandfather clock in a lavishly furnished den in the house's basement. The figure in black stepped out of the hollow clock, walking through the narrow glass door beneath its face, and into the large room. The figure removed his dark mask, revealing a middle-aged man, his turnip-shaped head capped with a wild shock of white hair. A large, soot-black scar ran diagonal from above his left eyebrow, over the bridge of his aquiline nose, to just below his right eye-socket. His eyes themselves were obscured behind thick black lenses, strapped to his face in what appeared to be some sort of welding goggles.

The man passed through the room, seemingly out of place and unconcerned with the marvelous antiques that adorned it, and passed into another room. His laboratory. The fluorescent lights flickered on with a reedy, mosquito-like whine. A smile raised the sagging, dour flaps of his stern features as he surveyed his workshop. Rows of operating tables stretched across the room, each one occupied by a figure–a corpse–entwined in a series of hoses and cables, all feeding into a large machine against the room's west wall.

"The preparations have been made, my children," the man said. "Tomorrow we begin Operation Puppetmaster! Starting tomorrow, the city of River Bay, and the planet, for that matter, will know the name Zomnombulance!

MOSFET Morass

A piece I made in Photoshop. Just experimenting with
colors and shapes.

There was a great deal of hesitance on my part before putting fingers to keys for this post, because I didn't want to indulge in an exercise of maudlin mopery, or babble on in what could very easily be interpreted as a cry for anonymous internet affirmation (perhaps a bit presumptuous on my part to even assume anyone reads this blog; with bots and such skewing seen-by numbers these days, it's truly hard to tell if there are human eyes behind the figures at all).

My last post was just under three months ago. I feel as though I'm at an impasse. Right now I feel creatively impotent. Every-so-often I'll get a wild creative hair up my backside, and in the fervor of immediate inspiration, I'll start to passionately work on something. But whether due to a lack of skill, fuel for inspiration, or whatever the case may be, it soon peters out and I find myself with a load of unworkable dreck, which only leads to more frustration and infertility.

To put it plainly: I am feeling uninspired and more than a little stagnant. When I sit down to apply myself, I find my attention span dancing like a candle flame in a draft. I can't seem to focus. And when I do, I don't like what I produce.

I think it might be time to unplug. I find myself less a composite of personal interests, curiosity and creative fire, as I do a mass of impulse-driven schizophrenia. I need to intellectually, emotionally and spiritually detoxify. I don't mean unplug from the things I love, or from my writing exercises, I mean from the unhelpful and toxic distractions that seem to sap my drive and direction, like the useless meandering on the internet, the too-accessible distraction of my oxymoronic "smartphone", and the too-easy decision to just throw something away if it isn't creatively satisfying on my first go at it. Rather than mining my own abstraction or creative ore, I find myself rushing to imitate (poorly) something interesting that someone else has done. Perhaps to see if I could create something like that too, or perhaps because I'm afraid I can't produce something of quality on my own, using just my own skills and sensibilities.

This all sounds far too New Age-y for someone like me, but I think I need to rediscover myself. Again, this isn't a tract on down-in-the-mouth self degradation, but a treatise on cartography re: the road to happiness with myself.

More writing soon!