Tag Archives: Stephen Brophy

There’s A Riot Goin’ On

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Greek debt crisis news: 14 people arrested during violent protests ...

Word of the bombing spread virus-quick across the hi-tension infovine, fingers pointing and accusations flying through the humid miasma of Puerto de San Frantic. Free D. knew about it soon enough to make a few bucks off it before it hit the metamedia. Possibly the last readicash he’d lay hands on for quite some time. Situation ripe for a riot, had been for months, years, maybe the whole of the century, and most of the one before. Free D. could smell the bitter end of his own San Frantic era, already laying the groundwork for his next move, a new base of operations in another hotspot far from home, another 3rdWorld subsidiary a year or two from absolute boilover. For San Frantic, the moment had finally arrived.  Thousands of angry citizens, many indigenas, pressed to the limits of their long-seething outrage. Such a minor indignity, this, an indefinite number of civilian casualties caught within the blast radius, wrong-place/wrong-time pedestrians, extras in the epic pageant of subsidized violence, bit players in the corporate cold war. Somebody’s spouse, still and all, somebody’s sibling, parent, offspring.  Innocence could only be measured in degrees, but these unlucky few were now instant martyrs, unable to enjoy their elevated status, the spontaneous emergence from anonymity into historic posterity, 15 minutes of posthumous fame for a few dozen corpses blown to glory.

            A rally in the zocalo, bracketed by the church, the Edificio Federal, the Nordstrom’s and the US Embassy, remained peaceable for nearly half an hour before incendiary remarks sparked volatile tempers and rebellious fire smoldered, flared and finally blazed out of control. Free D. watched it all from the vista of a penthouse suite at the Mono/Hilton, sipping top shelf scotch with foreign journalists from all over the 1stWorld, tuning in on the Wavemonitors an event that was occuring live right outside their windowall. Copying each other’s notes, Xeroxing each other’s dispatches, transfaxing glib, indifferent, and utterly half-assed reports to UPI and the InterSystem Wavewire, vocalizing contempt for the wretched citizenry and their ill-timed pseudocoup, interfering as it did with  3rd World Cup coverage and delaying  payoffs from the bookmakers. Only Free D. and a couple of others watched it live, a Frenchman from the Paris Match overcome with ennui, way past horror or disgust, just plain bored, and a hearty blonde from Lapland, oohing and aahing and trying to figure out just who she should root for; in the end, she went with Nordstrom’s.

 On the square, rocks, sticks, bottles, claw hammers, axe handles and small arms flew, swung, and fired, even as gun-happy government thugs rubber-bulleted, tear-gassed, stun-gunned, and billy-clubbed the huddled masses.  Clashers on both sides fell, clutching bloody head wounds only to be trampled by boots, sandals, sneakers, and high heels. Not that there were sides, as such. Just a surging mass of bodies, the individuals who comprised the whole somehow able to distinguish the enemy in the midst of all that heat and dust and chemical smoke.  Clusters of luckless rioters found themselves coated in fast-hardening crowd-control foam spewing from hoses like a monster-mutant moneyshot from some XXX-rated Japanime. Still others were snared in Taser-charged webs of shocknet.  But they were greater in numbers than the better-armed goons, and even the high-tech hand-me-down weaponry was no match for the amorphous collective of raw primal fury. 

            Free D. looked on, rapt, fascinated, secretly loving it for a bundle of contradictory reasons, happily sucking back the ill-gotten booze from these ratbastards’ double-stocked minibars, ignoring the sophomoric babble of wisecracks and Catholic jokes and Universal toilet humor delivered and traded in two dozen languages, most of which Free understood. Outside, the American Embassy troops remained blandly neutral, stony eyes observing events from their own semi-remote vantage, behind the electrified perimeter gates, as a section of the hostile mob detached itself and surged up the steps of the federal building, into a stuttering hail of real bullets this time, panicky soldiers on full automatic.  Another group, mostly women, some kids, swept south, hurling fury at the plate glass display windows of the department store, the overwhelmed Nordstrom’s security contingent resorting to their own lethal means of merchandise protection, negative publicity be damned. Only the church, more or less defenseless, remained immune to the conflagration, regarded by the mob as both sanctuary and headquarters, though a lone altar boy guarded its entrance, equipped with an  Israeli flame thrower, mostly for show. Within the cathedral, priests, nuns, and other clerical workers were shuttling gilded treasures to a basement vault, just in case.

            Rioters inside the fed edifice now, Free D. didn’t even have to use his imagination; Wavelinx connected the metamedia suite to all the action, covered now by oldschool wallmounted vidcams, images instantaneously colorized as they came over the monitors.  Bloodthirsty San Franticanos carrying the carnage down the sumptuously carpeted and ornately adorned halls, into the offices and apartments and conference chambers, bludgeoning hapless secretaries and low-echelon civil servants, left behind when el Presidente and his entourage fled for safety through the labyrinth of subterranean tunnels that led west to the airport, east to the harbor, or straight down to the fortified bunker, an artifact of the Atomic Age. The vidcams down there had all been disabled by a previous administration, during the turnover coups of Decade Zero.  Apparently that long-gone dictator’s mistrust of the metamedia joybuzzards extended to the potential betrayal of his sanctuary location; should he be compelled to flee, he didn’t want either his destination or hiding place broadcast to the free world, or even a roomful of pisstakers like this one; from what little history Free D. could remember of that era, the epaulet marionette in question didn’t reign—or survive—long enough to realize his concerns. 

Back in the present, whatever passed for leadership on either side was maintaining a profile so low as to render its representatives invisible. Free D. couldn’t help thinking that if the movement possessed any organizational faculties, they might take this opportunity to install a new leader, claim their restless uprising as a legitimate coup, wait for the smoke to clear, the blood to dry, the world to recognize their legitimacy, and the corruption to take hold. But this was classic chaos, old-fashioned anarchy, even the ostensible instigators and principle agitators no longer held any sway over the teeming throngs, their outrage now a multi-headed, many-limbed beast of its own, mythic in proportion, mindless at the core. Wild-eyed, unrelenting, some among its number now armed with the lethal machinery absconded from fallen loyalists, catching each other in the misdirected crossfire of their sadistic ire.

            As the melee swirled outward and on, something less than thirty minutes having passed since the first stone was cast, the zocalo ran red with the slick spillage of vital fluid, bodies broken and scattered, assuming impossible contortions, faces frozen in expressions of agony, surprise, terror, and dismay.  Even way up here, safe and soundproofed, the screams of the injured and dying could be heard, mingling with the frenzied cacophony of righteous defiance and unbridled contempt, the same rage no matter who fought on which side.

            Looters pouring out of Nordstrom’s, Free D. aware of his companion, the girl from reindeer country emitting throat-stuck ululations of outrage and envy as the desperate citizens rushed around frantic and antlike down below, clutching clothing and cosmetics, jewelry and appliances, furniture and housewares.  Politics forgotten, ideals abandoned in the mad rush of conspicuous consumption, seizing whatever useless gewgaws were at hand, possession at last of the material trappings so long denied them, inanimate iCons of the good life, as if bath towels and table lamps and IntraVid rigs guaranteed sudden prosperity, an instant change of status inherent in their bulk and heft, the softness of cloth or solidity of hard plastic, the aesthetic freshness of something brand new, mass-produced items heretofore known only to those among them fortunate enough to be involved in their production, handling each fleeting item as it rolled by on the ceaseless assembly line. Willing now to catch a bullet to bring home a handful of the middle-class dream.

            And so it raged, bloody and feverish and savage, well into the night, the antic madness backlit by the hellish glow of burning dumpsters and shopfronts and an occasional warning flame from the altar boy when things got too close for the church’s comfort. Diplomats within the embassy reporting events to stateside liaisons, who in turn kept the corporate interests apprised, as the stock market closed at a record low for the day.

Irving fuckin’ Pentler, Pornographer to the Stars

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Sleazebag = Someone who you think is dishonest or immoral. Pessoa considerada desonesta ou imoral. Picareta.

Victoria Atomblast. Damon goddam Ross. Fuckin Anthrax fuckin Ripple. The Bogart bitch. Not to mention, the Feds®, the Mob®, Disney®, and every easily offended religious group in the flippin’ freakin’ fuckin’ world.  He had nowhere left to go, no country could, would, hide his sorry ass, not even if he offered to pay off their national debt, and there were not a few hot spots his fortunes couldn’t aid considerably.

So here he was, halfway to heat stroke in Sedona, Arizona, waiting for a MONOlimo to haul his ass to Reno, when he really wanted Canaveral, one shot, off-world, hitch a ride with the boys from Global Armed Service, lay low on the moon until things cooled off, or catch a McD® shuttle, assume a whole new ident and buy into a franchise outlet on the Galleria Cluster.

Absurd, what it was. Irving Pentler, wanted for no greater crime than entertainment, a felony count of giving the people what they want.  Consumercide. The devil out of context, convenient fall-guy for overzealous neo-Victorians and the self-righteous ultra-Right. But even the Farther Left refused to embrace or endorse him as the last bastion of free speech, and so he remained its bastard. Lonely token of absolute truth in marketing; one man’s sin was another man’s religion. He dealt straight dope to the masses. 

Sedona was supposed to be some kind of “power spot,” this according to one of the girls who worked his psychic sex line, 1-900-MINDFUK, something about a High Magnetic Resonance, which she’d probably read in one of those TIME/LIFE® books, Mystic Drivel, or somesuch. Meant nothing to him, Irving being a fast and firm pragmatist, believer in the here and now, that which could be seen and touched, bought and sold. Commodity dogma, the only $piritual rhetoric he understood. Televangelist of the flesh. The guru of bodily fluids. Metaphysician of earthly prurience. The High Priest of Porn, one journalist had called him, and he liked that. 

He’d been waiting three hours in a window booth at Ronnie’s Super Pumper just off 89A, still no sign of his scheduled pick-up, the thought of which gnawed at the greasy edges of his still-digesting Western Omelette, butterfly anxiety sloshing about forlornly in a pot and a half of truck-stop coffee; the fellas at MONOLITH were notorious sticklers for punctuality.  Couldn’t help wondering if he’d somehow slid from their favor, if they were just fucking with his head or maybe they were out to whack him, too. 

6am, almost, no one else in the place but the short-order, the hash slinger, a couple of road-bleary long-haulers trembling on the verge of amphetamine psychosis, apple pie a la mode for breakfast and they just sat there watching the ice cream melt.

A Meat City wagon pulled off the highway and rumbled across the lot, belching smoke and pissing radiator fluid, obviously fresh from a Safety Belt run, punctured from grill to mudflaps with bulletholes and crossbolts, armored side panels scorched and rent by various explosive projectiles. Shuddered to a stop in the space right out front of Irving’s booth, blocking his view of the road.

“Bastard,” he muttered, rising from his table to go confront the thoughtless trucker. Stopped short when he saw the Caddo Indian lower his burly frame from the cab, bare-chested except for a denim vest emblazoned on the back with the famous tongue-and-lips logo of the Rolling Stones. Sputtering expletives, Irving fumbled for his wallet, cursing further when he noted the lack of cash within; he didn’t want to use plastic, too traceable.

The Indian eyed him darkly, and Irving shivered involuntarily; the trucker passed the wait station, indicating his desire for coffee with the slightest flip of his twin ponytails, came straight for Irving’s table, motioning for him to sit back down, which Irving did, much to the chagrin of his own whim.

“Mr. Pentler,” the Indian said, no question of doubt in his rumbling voice. Seated himself without invitation.

“Can I help you?” Irving asked, a taste of venom in his tone, tapping his MONOVisa debit card against the linoleum tabletop.

“My name is Benedict Red Eagle,” the Indian replied, sliding one of Irving’s First Strike’s from the pack on the table. “Gotta light?”

Snarling inwardly, Irving flipped his Zippo open and thumbed the spark wheel, butane reek tingling his inflamed nostrils as he proffered the flame. “So, whattaya want? Free meal? A job? I ain’t a freakin’ flippin’ fuckin’ charity, red.”

Ben Red Eagle laughed, hearty, borderline maniacal, took a long drag and lapsed into a deep, phlegmy fit of coughing. “I got a job, Mr. Pentler.”

“Yeah, uh-huh, lemme guess, delivering meat, right?” Irving snorted derisively, jerking a thumb at the battered wagon just outside the window.

Red Eagle smiled, smoked. “You could say that.”

“Look, Geronimo, it’s a little early in my mornin’ for Native American crypticisms, aright?”

“Sure, sure,” Red Eagle replied, watching his smoke ring spread, then exhaling a series of smaller ones, each passing neatly through the center of its predecessor. “You’re, uh, waiting for someone, right? A ride, I think.”

“I dunno, yeah, maybe. Who the fuck are you, know so much?”

“I’m him.”

“You’re who? Goddam Crazy Horse?”

“I’m your…ha…chauffeur.”

Irving wanted nothing more than to wipe the insipid grin off this redskin’s hatchet face, feared losing his fingers to a sudden tomahawk.  “This some numbfuck’s idea a funny?”

            Ben Red Eagle shook his head, a shadow of solemnity passing over his features. “I don’t think so.”

Irving eyed the truck, turned back to the driver.  “Uh-uh.  I don’t know what those MONOLITH sonsabitches is tryna pull, but I ain’t goin nowhere in that rollin’ target.”

“You don’t really have much of a choice.”

“I suppose yer gonna tell me it’s for my own safety.”

“Safety?”  Red Eagle smirked. “Sure, sure, it’s all about Safety.”

Irving rubbed his itching eyes, his pounding temples, his burning nostrils, contemplating his options, which amounted to little more than nervous breakdown, psychotic episode, toxic personal apocalypse. “So, yer, like, takin me to Reno, is that it?”

“Somewhere,” Ben Coyote answered, shoveling a mouthful of home fries from the plate the waitress had just wordlessly set in front of him.

Irving blinked, confused and jonesing. “Reno.”

“Whatever,” Coyote said, ketchup staining his heavy lips, grease dribbling down his hairless chin. “You da boss,” the red man doing an absurd and awkward Stepin Fetchit parody.

“I’m dead,” Irving muttered.

“Not yet, chemo-sabe.”

“Can we get outta here?”

“I’m eating.”

“Fuckit, I’m usin’ the toilet, an when I’m done, we go. Kapeach?”

“Sure, sure.”

No stall door in the john—”fuckin christ”—but Irving drew out his stash anyhow, used his Beamer key to scoop up a hefty clump of white powder and raised it to his nose, hand suddenly possessed by a violent paroxysm, watching in frustration and horror as the coke tumbled into the backed-up toilet bowl like soft snow falling on wet mud. Attempted again and again to administer his quarterly dosage, each time losing it just as the fine flakes tickled his nose hair. Emptied the bag that way, finally licking his finger in desperation and sticking it in the crystalline residue, but another convulsion shook him and the baggie followed its contents into the vat of fecal stew. He knelt on the sticky floor, wanting to scream, to sob, to mourn this worst of all possible losses. Furious, stricken, he scanned the toilet seat for a hint of the dust, but whatever might have landed there was now dissipated in droplets of urine. He slammed out of the bathroom, sweaty and fuming, stormed over to the table and gestured wildly at the masticating Indian. 

“Okay, Sitting Bull, let’s go.”

“No luck, huh?”

“What the fuck’re you talkin’ about?”

Red Eagle pointed at the men’s room. “You were in there a long time,” he explained, mopping at his mouth with a napkin. “And you still look like you need to take a shit.”

More Will Be Revealed: The Secret files of the dept.

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How Prohibition made us more reliant on the income tax - Don't ...
After two disastrous attempts at creating mind-controlled combat slaves, the DEPT. temporarily abandoned the project and turned to more theoretical, not to mention political pursuits. Laboring in self-imposed exile and under a veil of secrecy to rival that of the Masons, the DEPT. embarked on its most ambitious undertaking–some would say overtaking–yet.  They were also about to make their biggest blunder to date, one that would come dangerously close to revealing their existence and agenda to the larger world.
 
In the 1920’s, the DEPT. managed to plant an inside man in the very home of the nation’s chief executive.  Neither a cabinet minister nor an adviser, the man who would come to pull the presidential strings with all the moxie of a latter-day Rasputin was none other than Dr. Cygnus Salem, the president’s analyst.  Salem, who had studied under Freud in Vienna, came to the administration with impeccable credentials.  Not until four generations had passed would it be revealed that Cygnus Salem was in fact the reincarnate embodiment of a sorcerer who had been burned at the stake in the Massachusetts town from which he apparently took his name nearly three centuries before.
The DEPT.’s plan was diabolically clever. Using methods that had been employed in Cuba, Dr. Salem and other agents hypnotized or drugged the President and key congressional leaders and used the power of suggestion to influence their respective opinions, and votes concerning the constitutional amendment that would outlaw the sale, purchase, possession, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Evidently, the powers that be at the DEPT. felt that major resources of man-hours and mental energy were being waylaid and usurped by the demon alcohol.  They wanted to harness and channel the suppressed psychic faculties of some 150 million suddenly sober Americans. Inevitably, the rest of the world would bear awed witness to the undoubtedly positive changes taking place in the States and follow suit.
 
But it was not to be.
 
Prohibition, while an utter boon to the Mafia and other crime syndicates, was an abysmal failure for nearly every branch, faction and aspect of the Federal Govt., not least the DEPT. T. Magnus Reid, A Top Secret History of the United States (2nd Edition)

The CIA's Appalling Human Experiments With Mind Control | HISTORY
The DEPT. had scored a major victory for the forces of good over evil, not to mention for the interests of the US.  Their fearless and unflappable savvy in the face of the unknown and the unlikely did not go unnoticed in the invisible circles that constitute the true American govt.  While their methods and beliefs were still largely held suspect by the nation’s upper echelon, their carte blanche was extended, their access to intensely regulated information and heretofore off-limits facilities increased, their tireless efforts on behalf of the undiscovered nether regions coming due in increased influence and notoriety.  Unexpectedly, and tragically, years of suppression and isolation had caused fetishes, obsessions, and resentments to fester in the souls of the DEPT. agents Allowed a glimpse of daylight, these malignancies grew and spread in several of the members, manifesting in addictions to alcohol, narcotics, and other altering substances acquired from shaman, yogi, medicine men and quack pharmacists all over the globe, not to mention subversive behavior, sexual dysfunction, social retardation, and brutal, even murderous tendencies.  Dr. REDACTED, asst, deputy sub-director of the DEPT. from 1940 until 1963, (when he was quietly dismissed for his rather public presumption about who–or more precisely, what–really pulled the trigger on JFK, and later found dead of curare poisoning in a motel room in Galveston, Texas), would later claim that the afflicted DEPT. employees were under the influence of malevolent forces seeking retribution for the defeat they had suffered at the hands of the DEPT.’s spook troop during the War.  True or not, this was the first time any DEPT. member had openly claimed–at least as much as their secretive position would allow–that nonhuman powers beyond our control and comprehension could and did willfully direct the actions of those susceptible to such forces.  It was speculated that these extradimensional invaders had long sought an expansive enough access point to provide easy and unguarded passage between their world and ours.  Ironically, the DEPT. formed the ideal nexus at which such a gate way could be established.

A collective of absolute believers, even the most cynical and jaded amongst them were thoroughly convinced, whether by evidence or conviction, of the existence of uncharted dimensions of space and time, and that these regions, which could not be located on any map, were densely populated with beings both wondrous and horrific, beings whose ultimate intent might well be the subjugation of the human species, or even its utter destruction. T. Magnus Reid, A Top Secret History of the United States (2nd Edition)
MK-Ultra - HISTORY
In the late sixties, such bastions of yellow journalism as the New York Post reported on a series of incidents in which a self-described “freelance subatomic particle fetishist” appeared unannounced in a honeymoon suite at the MGM Grand in Vegas, the living room of a retired dentist in Seattle, Washington, a Dunkin’ Donuts employee bathroom in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and in a passport photo booth at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. The man, whose accent suggested an Eastern European origin, would give his name only as Satellite, and claimed that he had traveled from his homeland-, and from point to point, not by air, sea, or superhighway, but rather via a dimensional portal of his own design.  He turned up in Washington, DC, perched on Lincoln’s lap in the Memorial, and attempted to patent his invention, of which he would disclose only the blueprints and a blurry Polaroid of what he called the Transspatial Enabler, or Doormension, as Satellite was nothing if not consumer conscious.  The photo resembled nothing more than a black square, just the right size that a medium sized man could squeeze through with some small effort, provided that it wasn’t just a shiny square of acrylic tile adhered to the wall.

Satellite’s bold claims and grand entrances created a low-key buzz amongst a population hungry for light shows, parlor tricks, miracles, anything of entertainment value in the overwhelming midst of social upheaval, assassination aftermath, and the nightmare of jungle warfare.  Satellite sightings were almost as common a phenomenon as glimpses of undead superstar Elvis Presley would come to be a decade or so later.
 
Though the Enabler’s existence was neither proven true nor exposed as fraud, despite the best efforts of everyone from the DEPT. to their archnemeses, the infamous World Skeptic’s Society, Satellite ignored and refused all challenges to present hard evidence to support his boasted feats of dimensional daredevilry for public scrutiny, even when promised big bucks and endorsement possibilities.  Eventually, the public lost interest in the shamelessly self-promoting dimensional drifter and he vanished into the back pages of historical obscurity, the D.B. Cooper of quantum breaking-and-entering.
 
Top fedgov officials, agents of both the NSA and the CIA, and other lifetimers in the inner sanctum, who paid scrupulous attention to such anomalies, however absurd or even comic, speculated that Satellite might have been nabbed by the boys at the Spookhouse, as they could not help but think of it. T. Magnus Reid, A Top Secret History of the United States (2nd Edition)
Why the Story Behind the Manson Family Murders Is Suddenly ...
Meanwhile, the DEPT. had their hands full with the Manson slayings, an orgiastic rampage of West Coast psychosis that had left a seemingly endless stretch of unsolved, unclaimed, and unidentified homicides.  And in Vietnam, after 75-some-odd years of trial-and-error experimentation, the DEPT. of Paranormal Affairs had, with a certainly qualified success, succeeded in fulfilling the legacy of their founder, Dr. REDACTED REDACTED. 
Dubbed the Suture Soldier Project, the foray into reanimation science involved reassembling and reviving the corpses of soldiers whose mangled bodies were deemed too toxic to be returned for burial in home soil.  The first Suture Soldier unit, which consisted of a dozen troops stitched together from the bodies of some 32 men blown to Heaven during a VC ambush on a convoy of armored personnel carriers.  Their lieutenant was a green and fresh-faced officer school type, very much alive.  He thoroughly expected to provide a fleshly feast before his troops even encountered action.  The zombies’ supposedly insatiable thirst for human blood, however, was only ever evidenced, and perhaps sated, in swift and decisive combat maneuvers in which the emotionless and rather single-minded undead units were almost invariably the victors. Their pain centers had all been detached; bullets chewed them up a bit but did little by way of slowing them down. The lieutenant, who received a Distinguished Service Cross at the end of his third tour, and subsequently the first and only military personnel ever to be elected to the DEPT., reported that his initial fears were soon abated when he discovered that most of the soldier’s in his charge were vegetarians. Only once did he witness one of the suture soldiers eat meat.  Powdered steak. The zombie spit it out.
He was so young. They all were': 'Picturing Nam' shows America's ...
The Suture Soldiers were an over-the-wire legend in the embattled cities and sinister jungles of Southeast Asia. As one GI pondered at the time: “If they got dead guys can fight this war as good or better’n me, then what the hell am I still doin’ out here?”
Why didn't we get a future where swimming pools have pinball tables?
While a nation turned its lonely eyes to NASA and Watergate, Patty Hearst and boogie fever, the DEPT., cocky and brash after a round of supersecret successes, turned their singular minds to ever-more ambitious attempts at traversing the dimensional boundary and gaining access to the NeoAtlantean continents of limitless unmapped reality planes. Professor Boston Faraday, DEPT. director since 1963, knew that the only greenlight for his proposed experiments would have to come directly from the American people.  He wanted desperately to go public, but endowed with a more pragmatic brand of wisdom than his departed predecessor, Dr. REDACTED REDACTED knew that widespread awareness and mainstream acceptance of his organization’s existence, and its radically sidereal agenda, could be achieved only by way of a meticulously planned, surreptitiously staged media event that would result in inevitable worldwide coverage and unquestionable exposure of the DEPT. and its eccentric staff of dimension-straddling ethereal pioneers.
The Culham Laboratory Open Days. Photograph by Retro Images Archive
Dr. Lucius Blakdragon first developed the Karmometer in the late 1950’s, in an effort to establish the validity of his theory of Karmatic Physics (now known as SupraQuantum Physics).  He foresaw his machine, a crude assemblage of jerry-rigged gauges, wires, voltage meters, tickertape machines, WW2-era computers, and an authentic witches’ cauldron (acquired from the estate of none other than the legendary Cygnus Salem), as a technological breakthrough that would eventually lead to the inevitable wedding of secular science and applied metaphysics. 
Retro Science Fiction
Dr. Blakdragon, in an address to the London Guild of Apprentice Sorcerers and the Oxford Academy of Science -‘In 1957, described his machine thusly: “The Karmometer, which I have developed almost solely at the expense of myself and a small number of key private investors, performs a rather quite simple task, irrespective of its daunting size (the Karmometer took up nearly the entire space of a two-story barn on the Doctor’s New England estate).  Its sole purpose is to measure the karmic weight, volume, and density of a particular object, and to determine the level of negative or positive karmionic energy emitted from said object.  This enables the owner or prospective owner of the given item in question to determine what type of power the object holds, with regards to whatever psychic baggage has been acquired in the time since its production, and whether or not the object’s influence serves or hinders the interested party.  While the Karmometer has yet to be tested on more advanced life forms, a series of successful experiments recently conducted by myself and my anonymous colleagues on several species of insects and small rodents suggests that my machine’s potential for enhancing the quality of terrestrial existence is not only tremendous, but quite possibly limitless.”
1953 ... emergency in space! | by x-ray delta one
While Blakdragon’s proposal garnered little attention from the “serious” scientific community, the metaphysicists curiosities were predictably peaked.  While celebrated theorists from Altvgeld to Einstein derided him as a “crackpot egoist” and a “20th century snake oil huckster”, Guild members and others in the occult community plotted in secret to wrest control of the Karmometer from the playboy superscientist, to what end one can only speculate.  Whether his pet project was a shameless scam, a profound discovery, or a noble failure, the world would wait 30-some-odd years to learn the truth; Blakdragon’s research came to an abrupt halt with the disappearance of the Doctor on October 31st of that same year, a date which the significance thereof was not lost on either schooled occultists or the simply superstitious.  While investigation into Karmatic theory did continue, it did so on a much smaller scale; Blakdragon’s associates, perhaps fearful of their own fates, or possessed of disturbing information regarding the mystery, went underground, and the scientific community, obsessed with cancer research and the space program, all but forgot the spectre of Lucius Blakdragon until the emergence of quantum theory.

Free to Be You & Me, but Mostly Free to You: The Devil’s Right Hand

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As I further contemplate the turning of the screw that is achieving a half century of life, I find myself wanting to give away my earthly possessions–well, some of them anyway; definitely not the ones I use daily, like my car or any of my flatscreens or personal electronics–so I figure it’s a fine time to keep it rolling with a digital giveaway of the HandCannon origin story, The Devil’s Right Hand. So let your keyboarding fingers do the walking over to Amazon where, from February 15th to the 19th, you can get yourself familiar with the life and times of Duke “HandCannon” LaRue.

And if you happen by today, the book that started it all, The Villain’s Sidekick, is available for that same non-price for a few more hours. Makes a great Valentine’s Day gift (for lonely types who like their book-readin’ anyhow).

from the author of -The villain's sidekick-' (1) copy

It Ain’t Shakespeare, but It’s Definitely Suicide Squad

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SUICIDE SQUAD

Maybe I was just seduced by the tantalizing marketing, but up until very recently, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad marked the first time I was genuinely excited about an upcoming DC/Warner Bros. property since at least The Dark Knight. Critical response, and feeling pretty burned by Green Lantern  and The Dark Knight Rises, was enough to keep me from experiencing Man of Steel or Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Suckness in theaters, and watching them later on home video did neither film any favors. If the BvS director’s cut was really the more coherent version of that story, I can’t imagine the mess laid at the feet of those of you who did deign to watch it on the big screen. Not only was that movie all over the place, tonally and plotwise, but the behavior of its so-called “heroes” made the impending “get ready to root for the bad guys” aspect of Suicide Squad seem almost redundant.

But it’s exactly that Dirty Dozen with Supervillains concept that had me hooked early in regards to the Squad. After all, as my own book The Villain’s Sidekick and its sequels ought to prove, I’m a sucker for a supervillain redemption story. Full disclosure:  I never read John Ostrander’s seminal ’80s run and in fact only really got drawn in to the book by Ales Kot’s brief sojourn with the team from a few years back. In many ways, though, it’s that version of the team that is reflected in the movie version, so between that, the intriguing portrayal of Task Force X on a few episodes of Arrow’s high-point second season, and the animated Assault on Arkham (far and away my favorite of the DC animated films so far, and unlike Ayer’s film, deserving of a strong R rating), I felt pretty primed for the big-screen adaptation.

I was able to ignore the more irritating details of Jared Leto’s fratboy-on-crack on-and-off-set behavior, the stories of panicky post-Deadpool/BvS reshoots and other potential red flags coming out of the geek press and just focus on the stellar trailers (hoping as usual that all the best gags and plot points weren’t being revealed with every teaser and TV spot). But then the reviews started to roll in and it felt like BvS all over again. “Cool your jets, fanboys,” those reviews seemed to say, “not only is Suicide Squad not all that, it’s pretty much a digital shit-show.” I had the sinking feeling I’d only ever watch it half-distracted in a late-night on-demand viewing.

Well, praise be to the God of Managed Expectations, because I went ahead and took the plunge with a couple of ten-year-olds in tow, and much to my surprise, the movie that unfolded in front of me was almost exactly what I’d hoped for/expected when I first saw those high-energy trailers. It’s mostly a light-hearted, fleet-footed action-comedy romp with terrific performances, particularly from the luminous Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn and a let’s-have-fun-again Will Smith as Floyd “Deadshot” Lawton. I also thoroughly enjoyed what the underserved Jai Courtney, who I usually find quite bland, brought to Captain Boomerang (who would guess that he’s a better actor when he’s allowed to play a born Australian?), and likewise Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s very earthy Cajun take on Waylon “Killer Croc” Jones, whose brown velour pimp hoodie may be my favorite costume detail in the whole movie. Critics and more than a few fans have complained about the extended “intro” sequences for most of the core characters, but I found that this first act moved with the rhythm and style of a comic book, embracing that energy in a very similar manner to the much-loved Deadpool. 

A major complaint about this film, much like Bvs, has been its purported incoherence, but I found it to be pretty streamlined, easy to follow (maybe even a bit simplistic) and moved from A to Z without a lot of unnecessary filler. Was character development sacrificed here and there to keep the story bulldozing ahead? No doubt. I would have loved to know a little more about Croc’s inner life, and the significance of Boomerang’s stuffed unicorn. Did the Joker sequences detract from the main story to a degree that rendered them all-but-superfluous? Abso-freakin’-lutely. It didn’t help that Leto’s performance was so hammy that he left the scenery sticky with his saliva; he ‘s earned his seat at the horshoe-shaped table in a Legion of Doomed Characterization alongside Jesse Eisenberg’s equally ridiculous take on Luthor. Was the hypersexualized male-gaze nature of Harley’s portrayal problematic? A case could most certainly be made, but I still enjoyed everything from Robbie’s off-kilter line deliveries to the way she frequently allowed the broken woman to peek out from behind the stream of sassy banter. (SPOILER AHEAD) Could they have given Slipknot maybe one more thing to do than just die without making an impression? Yes, dammit. I’m not some gigantic Adam Beach fan or anything, and I don’t even know who Slipknot is, but the poor guy deserves better than what he got.

Probably the most disappointing aspect from a story perspective is that, much like so many of these comic book movies, the Big Bad is a bit of an underwritten disappointment, though the connection between Enchantress (Cara Delevigne) and Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman) at least gave his subplot some emotional momentum. And yes, the fact that our anti-heroes have to save the world from a big cross-dimensional laser-pointer aimed at the sky was an unkind reminder of The Avengers’ third-act problems, but again, that’s a frequently committed sin, and the short-sightedness of rarely allowing these films to have even slightly smaller-scale problems. Part of what worked so well for me in Civil War was that the final confrontation came down to three guys in a room tearing each other apart because one wounded man wanted to make it happen. But in the end, the Squad’s final confrontation wasn’t any more preposterous than the climax of Hellboy II, and I’ll watch the hell out of that movie just about any time.

I’m not saying rush out and see it, because I don’t want to shoulder the blame if you hate it as much as so many others seem to, but for my money, I got my Dirty Dozen with Supervillains, and in the end, the Squad proved to be much less reluctant, much less disturbing, and significantly more entertaining heroes than those cape-clad mopes in that other big DC release.

The Best of Marvel Lives in the Margins

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-SpiderWoman-cover

First off, apologies to all three of my regular readers (okay, I’m probably inflating those numbers) for the inexcusably long break between blog posts. I’d like to say that life gets in the way most days, but the fact is, so does laziness. Yes, I’ve been churning out new fiction at a rate unheard of since the days when I did meth on the regular, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to find an hour a week, at the very least, to punch some keys and paste something here to justify maintaining a blog in the first place. I could make promises and claims to do better going forward, but I’ve done that before and much like all the times when I’d say I was going to quit smoking and then smoke twice as much in defiance of my own better angels, I’d probably just double down on the apathy and take a whole year off from here.

And it’s not like I don’t find inspiration everywhere, from stuff I’m reading to things I’m watching to the eternal tectonic shifts of dark reality, but every now and again I find a reason and a minute and all the stars line up and BAM, you guys get another blog post. You lucky fucks!

The unlikely source of today’s inspired ramblings is a comic book character I’ve rarely thought twice about, except whenever Comixology puts some of her books on sale and I see a writer’s or artist’s name attached that piques my interest. I’m talking, of course, about your friendly neighborhood Spider-Woman. I don’t know much about her historically as a character, except that she exists as the result of Hydra genetic experiments and not because she was standing at the back of the class and got bitten by the same radioactive spider as Peter Parker later that same day (there’s a whole other recently introduced character, Silk, with that origin, because comics!). I imagine she exists as a result of the same possibly craven motivation that’s given the world Supergirl, Batgirl, Batwoman, She-Hulk, and various other gender-swapped variations on wildly popular superheroes. I don’t know if that impulse involves a desire to recruit more female readers and thinking that’s the best way, or if comics creators just wanted to craft versions of their power-fantasy figures they could daydream about having sex with after a super-battle (“That Spider-Man sure is dreamy–golly, if only he was a girl! Hey…!”).

Whatever their inauspicious origins, once these characters prove to have some lasting appeal, they inevitably fall into the hands of writers and artists who genuinely find them interesting, or at least seize the opportunity to do interesting things with characters who are perceived to be “second-tier.” That’s how you get books like J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman’s incredible “Batwoman” run, Babs Tarr and Cameron Stewart’s recent bestelling “Batgirl” revamp, “She-Hulk” in the hands of Dan Slott or Charles Soule, and now, Dennis Hopeless‘s excellent take on Spider-Woman.

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Hopeless is a writer I’m not particularly familiar with, so if anything made me snap up digital copies of these books, it was Javier Rodriguez’s glorious artwork, which strikes the perfect balance of cartoony without going too broadly comical, realistic without belaboring the details, and enhanced with Alvaro Lopez’s fine-lined inking and Muntsa Vicente’s bright poppy colors. What that told me at a glance was that this book was going to be fun, embracing the inherently over-the-top silliness which is the only sane way for a grown-ass adult to approach and engage with a superheroic universe. The borderline indie-comic spirit put me instantly in mind of Fraction’s “Hawkeye,” the current “Ms. Marvel” and my much-loved “Superior Foes of Spider-Man,” all books that bring a kind of cable-series vibe and a much-deserved spotlight to some of the outliers of the Marvel Multiverse.

What I love about those other books, and indeed what I usually look for in a superhero book these days, is the way they engage with this preposterous reality from a fresh perspective, sneaking humor, humanity and even heart into the dialogue and character interactions, creating small relatable details that don’t interfere when the action gets big; in fact, they enhance it. I love stories that dig into unexplored nooks and crannies of the superpowered world, like who a D-list henchmen hangs out with in his downtime, or what an Avenger watches on cable on her nights off, or the consequences of sneaking out past your bedtime when you’re a hero who still lives with your parents. I also love to see an industry titan like Marvel upgrading its characters so that the “world outside your door” at least starts to look somewhat like the world outside mine. Making the new Ms. Marvel a Pakistani Muslim immigrant was an excellent step in that direction. Giving Jessica Drew a new costume that looks like something she picked out for herself, rather than had painted on against her will, is another. For a character that’s always been presented as a powerful, if conflicted, woman, she’s spent too many years in an outfit that rendered her a hypersexualized male fantasy figure rather than a legitimately self-empowered individual.

I’m not saying I hate this, because my Neanderthal lizard brain most certainly responds to it…

Sex-woman

…but this is way more practical, a whole lot cooler, and while I can’t necessarily picture my wife in it, I could at least imagine running into her somewhere…

SpiderladyContinuing this streak of real-world feminism and self-propelled sisterhood, Hopeless and Rodriguez craft a terrific story arc in which Jessica, now striking out on her own as a private detective, her time with the Avengers in the rearview mirror (for now), takes a keen interest in the cases of multiple missing women. All of these women–and some children–have one thing in common: they are the wives, girlfriends and significant others of a who’s-who of supervillains, henchmen, and assorted powered goons. Teaming up with the Daily Bugle’s hardest working investigative journalist, Ben Urich, and a third-tier criminal with a bad rep and a big heart with the unfortunate alias Porcupine, Jessica finds her way to an idyllic small town inhabited almost solely by women and children. As it turns out, an enterprising abuse survivor has established a kind of underground railroad for women who’ve been victimized by their good-for-nothing, often psycho costumed spouses and boyfriends, spiriting them away to this rural getaway to live a peaceful life off the abusers’ radars. Unfortunately, the brains behind this operation has become something of a criminal mastermind herself, convincing a number of the crooks that their loved ones are being held hostage and forcing them to pull jobs that will funnel funds and resources to the fledgling community/sanctuary. That’s how Porcupine ends up in Jessica’s orbit, becoming a surprisingly sympathetic ally as Jess attempts to find a solution that will put an end to the criminal activity while preserving the much-needed retreat for these unfortunate women and their offspring.

Needless to say, when I downloaded the first issue in this run, I was not expecting a story of such depth and complexity, where a segment of the expansive Marvelverse becomes a potent metaphor  not only for the victimization and subjugation of women, but of the potential for even long-suffering victims to find the inner strength and resources to stand up and fight back, not with the fists of their oppressors (well, not just the fists anyway) but with solidarity, and smarts. It’s the second time inside of a year that I’ve come across a Marvel story with such a well-crafted contemporary feminist slant, the other being the Netflix version of Spider-Woman’s namesake and fellow superpowered P.I. Jessica Jones. If this is a sign of things to come as Marvel plays catch-up with the world, and caters more carefully and overtly to their many female fans, I can only say we geeks are richer for it. And it leaves me eager to get my hands on the next volume, where this happens…

Spiderpreggers

 

Another One in the Can

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Update: It being my birthday and all, I figured it’s only right to announce that The Devil’s Right Hand will release on February 29th, just in time for Leap Day. Makes a great gift for that special someone you only think about once every four years…

Available for pre-order right here.

from the author of -The villain's sidekick-' (1) copy

Just over two weeks ago, I typed the final words of the first draft of Citizen Skin, my long-gestating sequel to The Villain’s Sidekick. Now the hard work lies ahead, of doing a major revision, then recruiting a few beta readers, then polishing the hell out of it, then having an editor fine-tooth comb it, many steps I was confident enough to skip when I threw Villain’s into the world. But that book was less than a third of the length, had a much simpler, more streamlined plot, and poured out of me in a very short time. Citizen I’ve been hammering away at almost since I first finished that one, and it’s a monster by comparison.

Still, in the interim, I did manage to churn out The Eternity Conundrum, which like Villain’s was born after a quick, mostly painless delivery and a very short period of labor (yeah, I’m running with the pregnancy metaphors, as if there’s any real comparison). It hasn’t been quite as widely read or well-received as my first, but it serves its purpose and I still stand by it as something I’m proud to have made, even if it maybe could’ve used a little more time in the oven. Not that it’s half-baked, just a tad undercooked. And now I’ve got another one of those, a short story, even leaner than Conundrum, that explores Duke’s HandCannon origins, how a war-wounded veteran turned petty criminal found himself swept up in the world of supercrime and metahuman villainy. It’s called The Devil’s Right Hand (at least for now) because I was listening to the Steve Earle song of the same name (“mama says a pistol is the devil’s right hand”) and it was so literally perfect to describe a guy who’s right arm is a machine gun. Of course, in this story he doesn’t even have that bit of his identity yet, but you can get a good glimpse of where his life is headed. Also, without spoiling anything, I will say that this little tale contains possibly my favorite of all the ridiculous superpowered characters I’ve come up with in the HandCannon Universe.

This is an early announcement, as I literally just finished the first draft of the story a few hours ago, so I still have to do my own revisions, let a beta reader or two opine on the story, and then get it as polished as I feel like getting it in time for my publisher, Budget Press, to have it on the table for the L.A. Zinefest in early March. But it’s been such a goddamn productive few weeks on the writing front, I just felt like I needed to share. Plus I knocked out a nifty cover that doesn’t  exactly match the uniform aesthetic I would love all the books to have, but for a guy with absolutely zero graphics skills, I don’t hate it as a placeholder.

Anyway, more news as it comes along in the next week or so, but for now I just wanted to whet your appetites.

The first taste is free:

“Load up on guns, bring your friends…”

                                                                                    Nirvana  “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

El Paso, Texas, November 1991 

Everyone’s got an origin story, but not all of ‘em are created equal. I mean, on one end of the spectrum there’s you, right? Just some regular schlub trying to get through your life and not die before you’re ready—good luck with that, by the way—and on the other end there’s the lone survivor of some vastly superior but still inexplicably humanoid alien race who shows up on our planet and gets to live out his days playing messiah to every hapless fuckwit too useless to rescue their own damn selves. How relatable is that? In between you’ve got your obsessive, vengeance-minded billionaire geniuses, one-percenters who think they know what’s best for humanity and have the toys and means to force their worldview on the rest of us. And then there’s the angry narcissists, despotic freaks deformed by rotten luck or raw nature acting out egomaniacal agendas; a lot of these guys and gals have their own secret bases, their own armies, even their own countries sometimes, full of slack-jawed goose-steppers that willingly follow these id monsters in spite of the fact that they’re usually just cannon fodder or targets for misdirected rage. And that’s not even covering your ordinary Joes with deep personal flaws and devil-may-care life approaches who stumble into industrial accidents or come across ancient talismanic objects that grant them amazing powers and turn them into low-level deities for good or ill.

And then, somewhere below all of them, luckier than a lot of you Jane Does and Joe Six-Packs but unluckier than most, there’s folks like me. Criminal chumps on a downhill slide to the Big Nothing before getting unexpectedly called up to the majors, coasting for awhile on the same thrill that athletes, actors, musicians and politicians must get when their star first starts to rise.

***

I wake up to the sound of snoring—deep, loud, and disconcertingly male—and after a few foggy moments I start to piece together where I am. The hard thin mattress barely protecting me from the metal struts of a cot screwed tight to a cinderblock wall. The overwhelming stench of piss, vomit and despair. The reverberating clang of metal on metal and the murmur of discontented voices.

Jail.

Of course.

Where I else would I be after a string of days and nights spent and wasted on border-hopping bar-crawling culminating in an epic-length blackout? The final hours of my latest self-annihilating binge reduced from a hi-def videostream of crystal memory to a series of time-lapsed Polaroids, like the film ran out of budget and the third reel consists of nothing but storyboards and snapshots of scouted locations. My next question: what side of the border was I on when they rounded me up? I dimly recall an El Paso drowning hole called La Boca del Leon, a couple of mouthy shitkickers who didn’t understand how I could shoot pool so good with just the one functioning arm, and the kind of all-hands-on-deck bar fight you assume only ever happened on a Hollywood soundstage in the heyday of the Western. I get my answer only when my head clears enough so that I can suss out from the nearby voices of jailbirds and law enforcers that most everyone seems to be speaking Texas-accented Americanese.

I try to sit up and literally everything hurts, from my alcohol-drenched brainpan to my war-wounded arm stump. My insides roil and heave with an admixture of every kind of booze, most types of pills and an unhealthy gut-bomb of grease-sealed Tex-Mex. The rust-crusted, shit-stained steel toilet seems impossibly far away, even in this 6×8 cell, so I just roll over and aim for the floor as my body rejects a platter-sized splatter of semi-digested flotsam from deep in my innards. I expel so much I’m pretty sure I’m puking stuff I haven’t eaten in years, like baby food, or even in this lifetime, like primordial soup. It’s only when I go to brace myself to keep from tumbling off the cot that I realize my prosthetic arm is missing.

The queasier among you will not want to hear this next part, so, yeah, spoiler alert: I go face first into my own belly stew and split my chin on the cold cement floor beneath it, which at least does me the favor of giving me an entirely fresh shock of pain to focus on.

“You mind keeping it down over there, pal? I need my beauty sleep before I bust outta here.”

It takes a few to realize that A) the snoring has stopped and 2) that rumbly voice, more amused than threatening, must be coming from my cellmate.

“Yeah, well, pardon me,” is the best I can muster, about 30% sincere and the rest however-much-amount sarcastic.

“S’matter?” my celly asks, and as he sits up and lets the thin scrap of what’s meant to pass for a blanket fall away, I realize he’s at least as big as I am. And at seven feet plus and close to 300 pounds of mostly muscle, I am nobody’s idea of small. “Bed wasn’t cold or hard or vomity enough? Decided you’d be more comfy in a warm puddle of your own sick?”

He’s a black guy, the kind where you actually get why they call ‘em black, with skin the shade and sheen of a well-worn leather biker jacket. 400 pounds easy, with shoulders practically as wide across as the front grill of a ’65 Lincoln Continental. Even just sitting there, in boxers and a wifebeater, I know he’s ex-military, although I can imagine the NFL champing at the bit just to place him on field in the defensive line like an immovable human wall.

“Kelvin Watts,” he tells me, even though I haven’t asked. “Friends call me Battery.”

“Cause you’re so powerful?” I hazard. “Or as in ‘Assault and…’?”

“Pretty much every reason you could think of,” he says, smiling wider than he already was.

“Duke LaRue.”

“I’d shake your hand but…” He indicates the mess I’m still extricating myself from, then tosses me his blanket scrap so I can start toweling off.

“What you get popped for, Kelvin?”

“Same as you, I’m guessin.’ Makin’ more trouble than a man my age oughta be.” He glances, then gestures, at my arm stump. “When’d you get back?”

“What’s it been? Six months I guess. You?”

“Shit, I’m not sure I am back. But about a year, if you go by the Gregorian calendar. How’d it happen?” He taps his elbow to indicate he’s referring to my stump. Guess that’s more of a conversation piece than the facial scars and glass eye.

“Chopper went down.”

Kelvin nods, then, “Friendly fire?”

Helluva guess. “How’d you know?”

“Lotta that in Desert Storm. Plus, the ones it happens to tend to be more pissed off than the ones who came about their wounds the so-called ‘honorable’ way.”

“I seem particularly pissed off to you?”

“You were when you got here. They musta worn out five TASERs puttin’ you at your ease.”

“Since when do El Paso cops have TASERs?”

“It’s the ‘90s, baby. Brave new world. So, how you earnin’ your beer money these days?”

“Sympathy, mostly,” I say, waggling my stump for emphasis. “And when that runs out, cheating. At cards, at pool, with rich guys’ wives. Supplemented with the occasional strong-arm robbery.”

“I see.” He gives me a long once-over, his expression turning 100% serious for the first time since we met. “You affiliated?”

“What…like…am I in a gang?”

Kelvin comes back with a noncommittal shrug.

“Yeah, sure, I’m an honorary Crip. But only because I don’t look good in red. I hope you ain’t a Blood. Nothin’ personal if you are.”

If he grins any wider, the top half of his head might come off.

“I’m not really talkin’ street gangs. I mean, once you been to the other side of the world, that shit starts to seem kinda pedestrian, doncha think?”

My turn to shrug.

Kelvin stands up and finds the county-issued orange jumpsuit folded neatly under his bunk, starts forcing himself into it like ground pork into a sausage casing.

“Well listen, friend. It’s been real nice chattin’ with you and all, but I got places to do, things to be, people to kill. You know the drill. So if you’ll excuse my abruptivity and forgive my shortage of social graces…”

With that, Kelvin “Battery” Watts gives me my first-ever up close and personal demonstration of what it means to have superpowers. Quicker and more graceful than I woulda thought possible, he heaves his enormity up off his cot and unscrews the lone bare light bulb that hangs in the middle of our cell. With nary more than a jovial wink in my direction, he jams two thick fingers into the empty socket, making contact with the live exposed wires inside, a shower of sparks cascading down over him like little electric snowflakes and his eyes glowing yellow, maybe just from the reflected electricity though it seems more like the light’s coming from inside his head. The lights flicker and dim in the corridor and the other cells and the ongoing murmur of voices shifts suddenly to a louder chorus of mild alarm. Without removing his fingers, and reacting to the surge of power coursing through him with a kind of ecstatic shiver, Battery reaches over with his free hand and pounds the cinderblocks once, twice, three times until the back wall crumbles to small chunks and pulverized dust and Texas morning sunlight streams into our tiny shared space.

“You’re welcome to join me, of course.”

The frenzied sounds of human confusion are already swelling in intensity as a gaggle of guards clomps down the corridor outside our cell, and as tempting as the daylight looks, I think maybe I don’t have it in me to move far or fast enough to outrun these chumps and making a break for it would just be turning a pretty minor misdemeanor into something I might not be legally or emotionally ready to handle. Plus, I’m in my skivvies and they’re holding my other arm.

“Not today, man,” I say, settling back onto my cot.

“In that case, I appreciate you not trying to score brownie points by shouting for the uniforms. If you ever get south of the border, look me up. We could have us some fun. Maybe even turn a dime for it.” And with that, he steps through the hole and disappears into the El Paso morning.

“I’ll do that,” I say, knowing full well that I won’t, and that I’ll never again lay my good eye on Kelvin “Battery” Watts.

Funny thing about certainty though: in this life, it’s not really so much a thing.

 

 

 

 

Space Oddities, Supercreeps & Spiders From Mars

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or: Everything I Know About Science Fiction Worldbuilding I Learned From David Bowiedavid-bowie

Words, even Bowie’s own strange elliptical cryptic lyrical vocabulary, will never be sufficient to describe or define the shock and loss I felt when I woke up to learn that he was gone. As so many others have said so much more eloquently, I thought you had to be human to be mortal. And more importantly, I thought that David Bowie would always be around because in my world, he always had been. Of course, not only by virtue of being born terminal but in every crucial way that counts, the man born David Jones was as human as they come. It’s just that he realized from an early age that being human also meant that we all carried a little alien DNA inside.

I admit that when I was a young suburban Texas kid seeing him for the first time singing alongside Bing Crosby on a televised Christmas special, he was a mystery to me, an out-of-place ethereal character in this old-fashioned setting, where even Bing asked him about his holiday rituals back home as if he were an off-world visitor. And a few years later, when I caught his insanely inspired performances on Saturday Night Live, with the puppet bodies and the architectural cross-dressing, singing songs about transgendered folk heroes and carnivorous TV sets, I’ll confess that my tiny young mind was a little bit afraid of the guy.

https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/david-bowie-tvc15/2969207

But a few years later, now a high school student just beginning to explore the significance of being a left-leaning, freak-admiring outsider in a world of preppies, rednecks, jocks and homecoming queens, I was more than ready when my friend Jim “Seamus” Moran turned me and my friends onto the exquisitely weird musical wonders of this boundary-pushing, genre-straddling, soul-weird superstar in the years just prior to the release of “Let’s Dance.” Sure, I knew “Changes” was a great pop song and thanks to Pink Floyd I had a rough idea of what a “concept album” was, but even the brilliant navel-gazing of The Wall couldn’t prepare me for the science fiction drenched plunge into the fully realized worlds of Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, Aladdin Sane, or the Thin White Duke.

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Ziggy lit my inspirational fuse from the cover image on down, opening with his blearily apocalyptic promise that the world he was living in, maybe one dimension over from our own, had just five years left to exist, and everyone on the planet had to figure out how to wrestle with that knowledge. Ziggy wouldn’t be the last time Bowie played around with the image of an alien savior quite possibly too pure for this Earth, but it would be the only time he’d really lay it out in a series of interrelated songs that were brilliantly accessible pop rock while also serving as lovingly sketched micro-short stories about a fantastic and tragic reality he seemed to be perceiving within the confines of our much more mundane one.

Around the time we were assigned to read Orwell’s bleak, despairing, joyless “1984” (in the actual year 1984 no less), I had my limited edition picture disc of “Diamond Dogs” in frequent rotation on my cheap plastic turntable. Knowing that the songs had evolved from a planned stage musical adaptation of the book, I marveled at the way he exploded my notions of dystopia with characters, settings and ideas that had more dimensions in a few lines than Orwell’s characters gained over 200-plus pages. Could the glittering Diamond Dogs even co-exist alongside the gray-faced Winston Smiths of Oceania? While Winston sat in his drab flat drinking Victory gin or stood with his co-workers for the Two-Minutes Hate, could an eye-patched punk pirate really be sliding down a rope like some swaggering vigilante from his penthouse squat atop the Chase Manhattan building?

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I sure wanted to think so. The songs became the soundtrack for the drug-fueled story ideas my friends and I concocted on long stoned wandering nights in a world that was as drab as Orwell’s even if the lawns were lush and green. They were an escape into fantasy as fully realized and satisfying as Planet of the Apes or Star Wars had been a few years earlier. More so, because there was so much left to the imagination, and ours were literally exploding with ideas. Listening to Bowie was like experiencing cyberpunk before the subgenre even existed. We wanted to take that cross-country journey with Aladdin Sane and meet a man who “looked a lot like Che Guevara” in a burned-out war-torn Detroit. We wanted to head to an anarchic New York or London to see Ziggy play live, then flee in terror across Northern Europe from the ever-looming threat of the Thin White Duke, always just one train car behind us.

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So as much as I’ve ever been moved by Bob Dylan’s next-wave hobo troubadour stylings, or Tom Waits ragged vagabond Americana, or the Rolling Stones distillation of rock star excess, no musician, no songwriter, and few other artists in general, have ever had quite so much influence on what I write, why I write it, and how it feels-and sounds-in my head when I’m trying to squeeze it out, as David Bowie.

I’m not the first one to say it, and it’s just a weak paraphrase of a quote we all read on the day, but if David Bowie wasn’t strange enough to somehow exist forever, at least he was here at all. For that I will always be grateful.

 

The Villain’s Sidekick 2nd Anniversary Sale

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This week marks two years since I threw common sense to the wind and unleashed my self-published novella onto the world. As I chip away at the sequel that’s taken twice as long as originally predicted, I pause to celebrate by putting the original e-book up for sale on Amazon for a mere .99c. I know most of you who bother to read this blog have long since read it (or at least bought a copy that you have every good intention of reading when you really genuinely feel like it), but maybe you can pass the good word on to a friend, coworker, associate or stranger who’s a degree or two away from the short arm of my marketing reach. It’s still as good as it was 2 years ago, and most of its contemporary references have not been consigned to the dustbin of “That is sooo 2013” just yet. The sale starts tomorrow, Friday Sept. 4th and continues until the following Friday, the 11th.

So give it a shot, huh?

And for those that haven’t heard it yet, here’s a link to the Dork Forest podcast that I participated in just recently. If, like me, you can’t get enough of this whole superhero fiction phenomenon, then this is the online chat show episode for you!

Infinite Midlife Crisis

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If I were to try and trace the beginnings of my midlife crisis–such as it’s been–I imagine I could source its origins back to early 2008, when I was deeply unemployed and desperately depressed enough to seek help via a depression study I heard about in a radio ad. I’d been in a deep funk for months, the kind of constant emotional turmoil and pain that was reminiscent of the darkest depths of heartbreak I’d experienced at the crash-and-burn of romantic entanglements, or the bleak apocalyptic despair that inexplicably overwhelmed me during my first semester at college, when my personal uncertainties about the future manifested in the certainty that mankind as a species was doomed. A chronic self-medicator, I’d eschewed therapy and prescribed chemical assistance for the depression that had been my bane for most of my existence, from at least adolescence onward.

That depression, which the octogenarian head of the study would later refer to as “profound,” consisted of some fairly straightforward talk-therapy sessions, some very “Parallax View” computer memory tests, a little bit of cognitive conditioning, one of the scariest blood draws I ever experienced in my life (the slightly daffy, possibly incompetent nurse couldn’t seem to locate any of my admittedly pale veins, and I doubt GPS tracking would have helped her), and the administration of a drug that may or may not have been akin to Lexapro. It was a blind study, and of course no one could tell me if I was in the control group or the experimental group, so I had to take it on faith that I was actually getting help in that regard. I drew my own conclusions when, within two weeks, I started to feel like a human being and not a shambling meatbag full of simmering anxiety, swampy self-pity, bitter resentments and societal rage all swirling in my personal shame spiral.

Equally important, my wife noticed too, which was fantastic because my moods were not exactly contributing to harmony in the homestead, as you can imagine. Our son was a toddler at the time and my inner lethargy and emotional muck-wallowing meant I could barely see past the tip of my dick, much less offer any meaningful parental assistance. So in the nick of time, and while I had the time, thanks to unemployment, I took some action–mildly absurd action, it felt at the time, but at least a research study seemed like an interesting thing to do–and managed to rescue myself from ennui and maybe oblivion in the bargain.

There were still plenty of challenges to come–shitty jobs and worse bosses (but at least I was working again), personal setbacks, life shit, plus while things got easier at home, they didn’t suddenly become perfect. Magic pills they may have seemed, but even magic takes effort to keep working. I’ve remained on medication ever since, and fortunately I react well to what I’m on–no noticeable side effects and no recurrence of major depression, which is a big deal considering that in those early years I was still augmenting the meds with alcohol and drugs, self-medicating my mid-life away.

I suppose phase two of this crisis made itself known in earnest around 2010, when I was deep into popping a constant stream of unprescribed (at least to me) painkillers while simultaneously rekindling my long-shelved love of funnybooks. I’ve written a bit about this before, but I blame Ed Brubaker, particularly his Sleeper, Incognito and Captain America, in re-igniting this fire, to the degree that I began reworking a straightforward but stagnating (and still not quite finished) scifi novel I was writing into a superhero-stuffed opus involving Nazi scientists, atomic-powered sex goddesses, human-ape hybrids, ultrasecret agents and all manner of mid-20th-century craziness (gimme a couple more years and a few more books in between and I promise you it’s on its way).

The drug and alcohol abuse went the way of the dinosaur, but the reborn passion for comics didn’t. Good timing, too, because somewhere in there my wife bought me a Kindle and I discovered the joys of comixology and digital comics in general (if you’re a Luddite print-freak who takes issue with this, I respect that, but I still selectively collect when I can, and I only got so much shelf space). Not to mention the fact that Marvel’s complete takeover of Summer blockbuster cinema also coincided with all this, and suddenly my deep middle ages are a pretty incredible time to be a fan of well-made escapist entertainment.

Don’t get me wrong–I still enjoy serious grounded arthouse drama onscreen and on the tube and on the printed or computerized page–but if I have to be honest, 40-something me seems to crave, desire and appreciate the indulgent fun of alternate realities and costumed crusades more than adolescent me ever did. Which makes sense, seeing as I’m more or less the same age as a lot of my favorite creators of this material.

I’m also fortunate that, in creating and publishing my own superhero-centric fiction, I’ve discovered a whole vast narrative prose subgenre, much of it of great quality and sophistication. From Austin Grossman’s “Soon I Will Be Invincible” to Mike Leon’s “Kill Kill Kill” to Casey Glander’s Gailsone series and on and on, there is just a wealth of this stuff to be found on Amazon and elsewhere at very affordable prices and it’s a shit-ton of quick-reading fun that covers a lot of ground, from balls-out satire to sharply human drama to blood-soaked action.

And then there’s TV. I mean, seriously, just between Arrow and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. alone it is truly a great time to be a fan of this stuff, weekly doses of genuine comic book awesomeness beamed straight into my eyes for free! And if you’re a true Marvel fan who checked out on S.H.I.E.L.D. in the early, pre-Winter Soldier portion of its first season, I strongly urge you to give it another shot because not only did it come screaming to life after that shot in the arm in the back half of last season, it’s come roaring out of the gate in season two with a kind of confidence in its characters and storytelling that makes it seem like everyone on staff over there started taking the creative equivalent of supersoldier serum over the Summer. Seriously, last year Arrow was my favorite piece of pure entertainment on the idiot box, but so far this year S.H.I.E.L.D. is just crushing everything in its storytelling path. But I digress.

I guess my point, if I have one, is that there are certainly worse ways to “suffer” a midlife crisis. My life is better than it’s ever been. I’m writing, I’m creating, I’m being a better husband and father than I ever thought I could, and in between, I spend a lot more time with superheroes than I do with drug dealers.

So my Bukowski and Hunter Thompson-worshipping/emulating days are behind me. I’m not going to buy a Harley, have a tawdry affair, go on a wild bender, quit my job and run off to an ashram. Or at least, I won’t as long as I can keep getting my superhero fix.