Return of the Red-eye

Most of the time, I don't even remember that I have a blog. That's a shame, as I think I have a lot to say. I have a friend on Facebook who constantly posts...talks about his kids, his job, music, his ex-girlfriend who left him a month ago, his insomnia, music, his radical chic life as a high-powered attorney, music, his band, song lyrics, quizzes...you get the idea. His life is an open book. Sometimes it's even interesting. It's almost always amusing. But it's his life and I think probably he's the most interested in it.

I post too, though not as often. I try to respond to the status updates of most of my "friends" on Facebook. Sometimes I don't, especially if they update frequently. I'd like to say there is tangible value in Facebook and other social networking sites. For some, I'm sure that is true. I haven't really found the value yet. I'd rather blog, but like I said, I forget to most of the time.

How do I spend my computing time? I'm on at odd hours throughout the day and night. My work schedule is erratic, at best -- chaotic at worst. I get on when I can. I have fifty stocks on a watchlist that I look at every single trading day. I have two brokerage accounts. My net profits in 2009 are $237.00 and a wealth of education in trend trading. I'm determined to be an independent, financially free trader in three years. It's an ambitious goal. To not try feels like slow suicide. To fail is faster. I'm going ahead anyway.

I'm a writer. This babble may not convince any casual reader of that. I write poetry, song lyrics, and short stories. Those works I finish. I'm trying to become a novelist. To do that, I have to finish a novel. There are four unfinished novels on the hard drive of my computer. One of them has gone through at least twenty-five drafts and never reached the end. That frustrates me.

Perhaps if I discipline myself to post on this blog as diligently as I scan my trading charts, I might eventually get over whatever mental hurdle is keeping me from writing all that is in my head and heart. Then again, it might just make me crazy and I'll end up like Hemingway, only not famous, just drunk, and then dead.

I have not had a drink in nearly ten years. That's because every bad decision I ever made in my life was made under the influence of alcohol. Like the times I cheated on my first wife. Like the times I spent money foolishly. Like the times I nearly got arrested or killed while driving under the influence. I'm what is commonly called a recovering alcoholic. That means as long as I don't drink, I'm recovering. If I drink, I'm just an alcoholic and might end up suddenly dead. Not a pleasant thought for an unenlightened being.

Seeking enlightenment occupies a significant amount of my time and energy. I meditate. I practice yoga. I read a great deal from spiritual and not so spiritual but highly functioning minds. I exercise in a kind of zen trance. You really have not lived until you've completed a complete circuit training session without opening your eyes except to move between machines. Even better is to get on an EFX trainer, set up a challenging course, and run the whole thing with your eyes closed, counting your breaths and trying to 'feel' when you've reached the end. It's like going out-of-body and off planet for thirty minutes or so. It's definitely better than drinking.

There is no television feed into my house. I watch movies. I have a pretty good setup for that...plasma TV, Yamaha/Bose sound system...a great couch and a leather chair, depending on whether I want to be prone or upright while watching.

The Red-eye return in the title of this post is a rhyme with Jedi. I used to write late into the night...hence the red-eye reference. I think Jedi values are interesting. Now, I write when I can. When my schedule lets me. I manage a retail bookstore. It's a great job if only because I get to hang out with really smart, funny people who like ideas and aren't so caught up in their own values that they have closed their minds to reason and learning...People who listen to Oprah and Dr. Phil don't have closed minds, they have just stopped using them. People who say they are conservatives have closed minds. People who claim to share any fundamentalist religious belief have closed minds. At least, that's what I think. Marx missed the mark on what was ultimately best for the advancement of the human condition and quality of life. But he was dead on in his indictment of organized religion. At least that's what I think.

This is a chaotic post. Very random. Meanders and sways and makes sharp turns from topic to topic. It's a mess, but it's my mess. I posted the opening of one of my novels in a previous post. Here's the opening of another one...




BLOOD IN THE SNOW...by Stephen L. Russell


“The absence of freedom must never make us forsake the path of human love for the path of caged fury.”
-Dennis Banks, AIM Leader, 1984

Prologue – Late January, 2018
Duncan opened one eye. The other remained closed, pressed against the cold, urine-soaked tile along with his cheek, shoulders, chest, hips, thighs, and knees. His lower legs and feet were suspended by a thin length of nylon cord, looped and tied to the grab bars in the handicapped stall of the restroom.
A crushing headache radiated from the back of his skull in both directions, searing the top of his head like a boil and running like a river of lava into his cramped neck and shoulders. Three fingers on one hand were broken. His jaw felt as if it were dislocated. Despite his pitiable condition two facts remained clear in his mind: he was alive and the building he was in still stood. The latter provided a small comfort, powerless as Duncan was to preserve the condition of the structure against the conspiracy he knew to be unfolding a short distance away. The former was a certainty of dubious value. Really, he thought, I’m better off dead for everyone’s sake.
He tried to focus. His vision blurred. He opened the other eye and tried to move. Every muscle, joint, bone, and nerve in his sixty-five year old body screamed at the effort. Somehow, he turned onto his side, rolling from there to lie flat on his back. Duncan fought for breath as he gazed at the ceiling.
Dirty fluorescent lighting cast a bloodless glow over the room. The white industrial tiles reflected it in shadowless silence. Duncan glanced around, confirming that he was alone. A dark line under the door on the far wall might mean that the door had been blocked by something — perhaps a body — or that the hallway leading back to the stairwell was dark.
Stairwell, the word echoed in Duncan’s mind. He’d been looking for something or someone, in a stairwell of the Capitol Building. Who? Why? His confusion took the form of a sensation that a terrible truth was about to dawn on Duncan. Something awful, sinister, and conspiratorial had been unfolding and he was the only one with any power to stop it. He’d failed. Whatever the quest, he’d miserably failed and now would probably die in a pool of piss in a D.C. restroom while the State of the Union…
Duncan arrested all thought. The State of the Union was tonight. That was it. The conspiracy involved the President’s speech, no, something before that, some ceremony that was to take place in that hallowed congressional chamber where the myriad ghosts…Ghost Dancers! Duncan remembered. He had to stop the Ghost Dancers. He reached for the wet nylon that bound his ankles, felt something tear deep in his back as he struggled with the knots.
The lights flickered once, twice, and then the room was plunged into blackness followed immediately by a blinding flash of light that seemed to chase all the air out of the space. Duncan felt himself lifted as the floor of the bathroom bucked and then collapsed beneath him. His head hit the tile and he fell unconscious while the State of the Union altered irrevocably as a vast and horrible conspiracy achieved the unimaginably terrible and great purpose for which it was born.



“We become stronger through the pain inflicted upon us. If one does not become mean because of it, becoming an enemy to oneself, the pain can give strength to a person and add a feeling of victory to mere survival.”
-Dennis Banks, 1984

Chapter One – Year of the Locusts
Halfway across the country, in Duncan Proud’s Lakeshore Drive Condominium, his daughter, Allison, clicked on the LCD monitor and settled down with a drink: vodka, tomato juice, and a liberal sprinkle of habanero pepper sauce over ice. Her short-cut blonde hair and penetrating green eyes caught the last rays of the sun before it sank into the dusky winter twilight of the Illinois prairie beyond the city. Dressed in nondescript black and olive athletic clothing, her parka and gloves tossed over the sofa back, her cell phone on the small table next to the leather recliner, she might have been an attorney or school teacher or even a physician relaxing in front of the television after an early evening run. The leather wallet with its conspicuous gold shield that read “Special Agent – S.O.C.I.A.L.” next to the cell phone denied her any of the rights of those more prestigious and mundane lines of work.
Her clipped nails, tan and athletic body, and controlled breathing – coming as it did in long, steady draws that filled her lungs from the diaphragm up, connecting her body to the earth even in Duncan’s twenty-seventh floor home – spoke more fluently than any resume about her qualifications as a defender of some higher cause.
Allison sipped the drink, letting the bite of the pepper sauce comingle with a transient ice-cube that slipped into her mouth. She keyed the remote for the electronics and finally settled on Murdoch’s Wall Street World News Network where a talking head finished describing the latest violence in the Saudi Revolution and invited all the billions of viewers to stay tuned for the second State of the Union Address of President Spencer “Luke” Stratton, the former governor of Delaware who had dodged the press for weeks on what further measures he intended to take to insure the nation’s security, prosperity, and permanence under the auspices of the S.O.C.I.A.L. laws.
Allison guessed that just over two billion people would be tuning in to watch the highly anticipated speech. The rumor control had been excellent. Nobody, including the President’s closest advisors, had a clue what President Stratton had in mind. “Change is inevitable. Accept that, and nothing I propose to do will be impossible or intolerable,” Stratton had said during the many teaser feeds he’d given to Murdoch and the other members of the global news media over the course of the past month.
Allison was apathetic about the whole thing. She wasn’t so much apolitical as she was realistic. Events such as the State of the Union had long since lost their power in terms of policy-making tools. They had become a form of ceremonial theater, an evening’s entertainment for the great unwashed population of video game players, church goers, and/or conventional wage earners that comprised ninety-nine percent of the educated population. These were all people born after the dawn of MTV, nearly forty years ago. The sound-bite and the shortening of the human attention span to milliseconds of time in a world filled with digital noise replaced real news, analysis, and influence in shaping public opinion. The lower economic and social classes would watch, but even the simplest of Stratton’s ideas would sail right over their heads. They merely wanted to adore the charismatic and handsome leader of the world’s only superpower. The upper end of the spectrum got their data in a much more complete format on their own.
Allison coexisted within the instant message gobblers that humanity had evolved into, but she wasn’t like them. No way. She was analytical, skeptical, and smart – magna cum laude smart, ‘Top Secret’ state property smart. An asset of the government, a member of the S.O.C.I.A.L. surveillance unit, referred to obliquely as “The I,” and as dedicated an operative as ever carried a shield. Defending the United States against all enemies, by whatever means necessary, and doing so without remorse, pity, or regret took a depth of perception and a willingness to act that the soft-bodied consumers and psycho-dropouts could never imagine. Not that the rest of society lacked opinions, but Allison knew how to tune out that sort of thing. It was how she’d been able to turn away from her father’s fantasies for her life. It was why she’d been able to stay clear of him for so many years. And it was why, when the country needed her to, she came back to him, and now sat in Duncan Proud’s apartment.
No, the State of the Union was a drug, the drug of choice prescribed by the power structure to dull the population’s curiosity, creating the appearance of a formal statement of principle while administering a dose of societal laudanum, sedating the masses so that Congress and the President could continue to shit all over the Constitution while still maintaining the consent of the governed. It was a way to ensure that taxes, war, and the other occupations and blessings of liberty continued for the next generation without any undue interference from something as crude and ignorant as a free-thinking population of those whom government served.
The whole process had been seventy years in the making and was reaching its apex as the twenty-first century moved toward its second score of years.
Allison wasn’t bitter about any of it. Nor was she cynical about the methods and practices of “The I.” She was a realist. She knew that security and freedom had a price. Abuses of power for the preservation of the greater good weren’t, in her mind, abuses so much as expedient protocols.
Allison tuned in because she hoped to see her father. He should have been at home. He wasn’t and Allison now knew he was in D.C. and she thought she knew why he was there, which is precisely why she’d come to Chicago in the first place – to stop the old man from making a fool of himself and ruining a deep cover S.O.C.I.A.L. surveillance that was several million dollars and nearly two years in operation.
She’d risked everything by leaving her post and coming to persuade the man whom she despised perhaps as much as anyone on the planet from traveling to D.C. All she’d found when she arrived was an empty condo with a note pinned to the door telling the cleaning service that Duncan would be gone for several weeks and would call when he returned.
She considered immediately hopping a flight back to D.C. but determined that the risk of exposure from inadvertently running into Duncan in the nation’s capital was too iffy. If she couldn’t see him in the privacy of the condo, then she’d just let him make a damned fool of himself. He’d done that before, barely missing out on a long prison stretch in Super Max. Maybe that was the lesson he needed. Allison took another sip of the spicy drink, feeling it burn as it expanded in her gut.
“The State of the Union” appeared on the screen with an overlay of martial music.
Allison watched as a series of overhead shots of D.C. at night, provided by Murdoch’s armada of airships, established the fact that the most powerful goddamn media force on earth was going to inform the world of this broadcast in excruciating detail. Allison hoped so. If Duncan Proud was determined to disgrace himself for good, then it ought to be recorded for posterity. She’d set her father’s VidPro hard drive to capture all the network and independent feeds then settled down to watch Murdoch’s people do their work.
“Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States.”
Good, Allison thought, no commentary to taint the announcement. She watched the standing ovation, noting with interest that a line of what appeared to be Native Dancers, Sioux from the look of their costumes, occupied a special row of seats near the front of the house chamber. Stratton strode down the aisle like Caesar crossing the Rubicon, his omnipresent smile and all-embracing wave taking in the whole assembled body. Both houses of Congress, the Joint Chiefs, the entire cabinet – except for the one designated secretary who remained home in the event of some catastrophe – heads of state from a half-dozen global economic and industrial powers, all the surviving past presidents and their wives, except for the peanut farmer – Carter – who was too aged and frail to make the trip.
So what was it with the Native Dancers? Stratton didn’t keep anyone waiting long as he mounted the raised platform and began to speak. Interesting, Allison thought, no notes. She knew Stratton hated tele-prompters and generally gave most of his talks extemporaneously, but this one was special. She thought he’d at least have a digital card to read from.
“Good evening,” the mellifluous baritone voice began. “I promised you that if you accept the inevitability of change, nothing I would propose tonight would be too difficult.”
Allison looked at the notepad that she’d automatically taken out when Stratton began to speak. She scribbled her impressions quickly. No notes, no greeting of any length, no acknowledgement of respect for the assembled audience, very uncharacteristic of the politician that she knew Stratton to be. What’s up? Her cell phone vibrated. She glanced at the number and ignored it. It could wait. Something odd was happening here.
“I’ve deliberately eschewed the protocols attending this address because I want you all to understand something: I’m not here tonight as your President. I’m not here as a representative of the executive branch to address the legislators about matters of importance facing our nation. Our nation is in safe and competent hands in every way. S.O.C.I.A.L. agents have secured for us ‘the blessings of liberty’ in a manner more certain than at any time in our history. There are no new threats to discuss.”
Allison frowned. Was anyone buying this? The cameras remained locked on Stratton’s face. She studied it. Took the remote and zoomed in close. He believed it. Every word he said. Allison scrawled another note: Is he an automaton made up to look like Stratton? He’s a hell of an actor.
“So, tonight, I thought I’d take a few minutes to do something that should have been done a couple of hundred years ago. I’m here, in all humility, to apologize and to try to make amends for a great injustice done to the original inhabitants of this nation that we call the United States of America.”
The camera pulled back and took in the Native Dancers along with the President. Stratton’s eyes rested on the ancient warriors. Allison got a good look at them. They were all old, at least seventy, and all appeared to be authentic Sioux Medicine Men. There were twenty-one in all. She knew some of their names from studies she’d done on radical movements in the United States during the twentieth century. Some of the dancers were members of the American Indian Movement, the group that occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building just down the street from the Capitol during the Nixon years, and Alcatraz, and Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Lakotah Sioux Dancers, medicine men, the caretakers of a religion once forbidden in the United States.
“One hundred and thirty years ago,” Stratton continued, “members of the Sioux Indian tribe were held under close confinement by officers and enlisted men of the United States Army. Hundreds of men, women, and children were herded into a camp in Wounded Knee, South Dakota in the middle of winter. They were held on suspicion of plotting the overthrow of the United States through the use of a mysterious and terrible power.
“The power that so terrified our government officials was called ‘the Ghost Dance’.”
Allison leaned toward the screen, zooming in on the individual faces of the dancers. They wore red and black paint. Some had blue waves across their foreheads. The fronts of their jackets were all open. The bare bodies were painted as well, though she couldn’t tell what the markings were.
Stratton’s voice echoed slightly in the house chamber. Duncan’s sound system captured the echoes perfectly. Allison felt as if she were in the Capitol with the President. Her breath quickened. She stopped taking notes, letting the pad fall to the floor.
“For the crime of dancing, the government ordered the Sioux to lay down their arms. What happened next depends on who is telling the story, but the outcome is clear. The Sioux, most of whom were unarmed, were slaughtered. Many were shot while attempting to surrender. Others felt the brutal Gatling gun shells take their lives as they fled the scene. Officers with pistols walked among the wounded and finished them off. For dancing.”
Allison now knew why the Native Dancers were present. Stratton told the rest of the world.
“A little over a year ago, prior to the inauguration ceremony, another group of fearful government officials, conspired to stop the orderly change of leadership that is the hallmark of our constitution. Through the use of Native American suicide bombers, these traitors sought to kill both the outgoing and incoming administrations, along with a great many innocent civilians.
“The conspiracy was uncovered and stopped. Those responsible were arrested and prosecuted. Because it was a matter of national security, many of the details of the conspiracy were not made public.”
Stratton stepped to the front of the podium. Half-a-dozen Secret Service agents looked uneasily around the chamber. The President extended his arms, palms up in a gesture of warmth, toward the Native Dancers.
“A part of the conspiracy involved the voiding of all treaties with the indigenous peoples of this land, something that has been happening one piece at a time for several centuries. It was unjust. It was wrong.”
Allison held her breath. She’d been an activist in her youth, seeing the world through the idealistic eyes of those who believed it was possible to change the past. But time and experience had taught her differently, taught her that you couldn’t undo a wrong once it was done. You could only learn from it and move forward. Yet Stratton had something in mind. A change – perhaps in the fundamental nature of morality – that could repay a debt owed to generations long dead by a people who had seized the lands and rights and destroyed a way of life that for tens of thousands of years had sustained a culture that intimately knew what was sacred. The sanctity of the earth, the bond between man and nature, the timeless perfection and unity of creation all lived in Native cultures.
What did Stratton have in mind?
“I met with the tribal leaders after those who sought to unmake them were safely locked away. I apologized. I asked forgiveness. I asked how this government could show that we are sorry, that we are truly sorry.
“What do you think they asked for? Money? Land? Power?”
Stratton shook his head, moving down the steps to stand in front of the Native Dancers. The Secret Service agents went nuts, moving all at once toward the President, but he waved them off.
“The leaders of the Sioux told me that they had met with one of our nation’s true heroes. And indeed he is. The man who uncovered the conspiracy and who saved our government had, on his own initiative, met with the tribes in their council and gotten to the heart of the matter.
“Chad Walker? Are you here tonight?”
Shielding his eyes against the glare of the cameras, the President looked out over the thousand or so dignitaries assembled in the chamber. Chad Walker, Secretary of Homeland Defense, former President of Walker Investment Group, and the alleged author of much of the language of the group of laws that became the cornerstone of the nation’s security, the S.O.C.I.A.L. laws, was conspicuously absent from the ceremony.
A Secret Service Agent approached the President to whisper something. Stratton nodded and grinned.
“Just like a great man. On the night of his greatest triumph, he draws the short straw. Chad is the cabinet member who stayed home in order to ensure continuity of our government in the event some tragedy befalls us here.” Stratton’s grin and laughing eyes offset the dark nature of his comment.
Allison began to feel uneasy.
“Well, Chad, I’m sure wherever you’re tucked away you’ve got us on screen.”
Stratton saluted.
“Congratulations and thank you for your service to the nation.”
A round of applause filled the next minute and a half. Stratton moved back behind the podium.
“What the tribes asked for was the opportunity to come to Washington, to one of our great councils, and to show us, through their most sacred rite, that they mean us no harm. That they have always wanted only to live with us in peace. They want to show us their peaceful intentions. By allowing this, we offer our apology for the injustices of fear.
“The massacre at Wounded Knee happened because government officials and the population at large feared a tradition among the tribes of dancing in a way that connected them to the wisdom of their ancestors. The ‘Ghost Dance’, banned until the 1940’s, along with the Sun Dance, make up the most sacred of Lakotah rituals. Even after the ban was lifted, Native Dancers generally refused to dance the Ghost Dance in the presence of non-Native peoples. It haunts them as it degrades us. Tonight, we hope to begin to heal the wounds of centuries, to form a new pact of peaceful cooperation, to make a new start with the wisdom of experience that our fearful forefathers never had.
“Tonight, we are honored to surrender the floor of this house, the seat of our government and the home of our constitution, to the Lakotah Sioux Ghost Dancers.”
Stratton stepped back from the podium as an anticipatory silence spread over the murmuring voices in the chamber. The Native Dancers stood as a unit, throwing off their jackets to reveal their hairless torsos painted with the sacred markings of their ancestors: sun, moon, rain, fire, bird, bison, snake, rabbit, and deer in stark white paint covering the slack brown skin of the dancers.
A public address microphone clicked audibly as a uniformed Marine stepped to the side of the podium. Allison zoomed in, her unease growing.
“We will be dimming the lights for the dance. Please remain in your seats,” the voice of the officer ordered. Allison gasped. Though the speaker kept his head down and his face hidden beneath the bill of his cap, the voice and the conspicuous Congressional Medal of Honor centered between the starched points of his collar gave away his identity. Allison reached for her cell phone. The lights in the House Chamber dimmed. The sound of a Native drum began, followed by an aged Sioux voice, chanting. Allison turned the LCD’s brightness all the way up. She could just make out the outline of the Marine. His right hand held the microphone. His left hand was moving upwards. He held something dark and cylindrical.
All at once a flash of light filled the screen. A scream of white noise forced Allison to cover her ears. In two seconds it was over. The picture vanished, followed in a few seconds by the blue-screen of a lost signal.
“What the hell?” Allison said. Her cell phone vibrated. She picked it up.

Boldness

Another perfect day dawns in the desert. Jezebel, Cindy, and I enjoyed an early morning walk, marveling at the spring blooms accompanied by a full choir of bird songs. All live. All free for the senses to delight in. We met two other people and one dog on our walk today. Michael and his miniature Doberman Max strolled out a few minutes ahead of us. We caught them on the first long hill. Michael is in his 80's, old Italian blood, probably first or second generation, certainly still in touch with his native land. He smiles constantly, walks up and down the steep hills of our neighborhood without strain; an effortless ease to his stride, which like his laughter is long and melodious. Doris, the other person we encountered this morning, also appears to move without effort through the world. I wonder if the wisdom that comes with great age and experience translates into that grace of being that allows the ancient, wise ones to become one with their environment? Does that then make the moment of death a simple easing on, like water flowing over a stone?

My boldest move this week was to register for the Great American PitchFest, Twilight Productions June project. I'll be in Los Angeles for three days: two of them in class with such screenwriting teachers as Syd Fields and Blake Snyder and then a full day of meetings...as in "take a meeting." Producers, directors, studio execs, agents, writers, and financiers from over 100 Tinseltown insider companies will listen to pitches from 500 aspiring Hollywood career types, like me. I'm finishing the second draft of LUCKY BOY, my screenplay, and developing a pitch that I hope sells this spec script during those three days. At any rate, I'm learning a great deal about the craft of screenwriting and beginning my preparation to present, one-on-one, the sound bite that gets the words from the page to the big screen. It's not frightening, I got past that as soon as I finished the registration phone call. It's very exciting. And I feel the challenge, the exhilaration that comes from preparing for something that feels bigger than me.

Gavin de Becker's book, THE GIFT OF FEAR, reprinted this year, brought me another level of experience this week. There are enough ideas for conflict and drama in that book to fuel a hundred thousand scripts. I only hope to be able to pick a couple of the strongest and do them justice.

Jezebel is boldly barking at lizard on the patio. Fortunately, there is a pane of thick glass and a screen shielding the critter from her attention. Such wasn't the case when we met a rattlesnake on our walk earlier this week. I'm still processing that and will discuss it further in my next post.

SUN-day

The west wall of my bedroom consists of a sliding glass patio door that opens into an Arizona Room. The west wall of the Arizona Room consists of two sliding glass patio doors that look out over a cliff on the edge of a ridge. Below, the city spreads its limbs across the calderra that lies between the mountain ranges. That's what I see when I open my eyes in the morning.

Dawn slipped around the house and tapped me on the eyelids at around 6:00 a.m. Dawn, as in daylight, clothed in golden lace with crimson highlights. As opposed to Dawn, the dark-browed, unsmiling loss prevention manager from a previous career path. My dog, Jezebel, an eight-year old cocker spaniel, crept up from the foot of the bed and curled herself tight against my left shoulder. I looked at her and she licked my nose before leaping, using my chest as a springboard to launch her into the morning's first and most important priority.

"DAD! TIME TO TAKE A WALK... I GOTTA GO!"

And so it begins. We walk about two miles through the foothills. I watch the sunrise on the plants while Jezebel sniffs every suspicious leaf, trembles with excitement at the sounds of bird calls, and tries vainly to escape her leash to follow pairs of gamble quail as they scurry like overdressed penguins hyped up on amphetamines across the narrow roadways of my neighborhood.

We jog down a long hill. A wash at the bottom carries a river of damp, cool air, the final remnant of the departing night. When we ascend the other side, there is a palpable sense that the day is going to break open soon. We walk in silence, enjoying the suspended moments before that happens.

It's been a few days since I walked Jezebel; owing to my work schedule that duty has fallen to my wife. Spring is not the time to skip walks in the desert. You miss so much. Plants that were dull, sage-green nothings blossom into bouquets of yellow flowers with smiling brown centers. Marble-sized blooms covering great hulking shrubs fall away and disperse on the afternoon breezes, leaving behind hundreds and hundreds of seed pods hanging in neat ornmental rows. Squat barrel cactus put on crowns of golden fruit. Cholla dangle their mysterious spiny chains, the almost invisible spines waiting to hitch a ride on the unsuspecting who venture too close. A great factory of life renewing itself.

Most amazing of all, to me, are the Ocatillo. The scarlet tips that showed only a week ago, burst forth in exquisite blood red cascades. Cone-shaped and sometimes a foot long, they erupt from the tips of the green tendrils like rich, warm bits of flame. I imagine a series of time-lapse photos and stand open-mouthed, lost in the brilliant images that play across my mind. Sparrows and wrens sit atop the flower heads, chirruping to greet the dawn.

There is one house, formerly covered in green ivy branches that have miraculously transformed themselves into magenta blossoms.

Jezebel is dragging me along now, the final leg of the walk, back into the walled safety of our yard. There's a big lizard living on the south patio. Although it isn't yet out, she knows it is there, somewhere, waiting, and if she can only find it...it will want to play.

The sun crests the ridge and the world takes on its familiar daylit form. We're going to Tubac later, to soak in the atmosphere and bathe ourselves in creative energy. Be present for everything, I remind myself as I hang Jezebel's leash back on its hook.

The smell of coffee, fresh ground and brewed in the french press, greets me as I open the door.

Here's the opening 1500 words or so from my Novel in Progress...there's a little bit of adult language here...PG-13 in my mind.

A FABLED LIFE

by

Stephen L. Russell

Chapter One – Journal of Despair

The events I’m relating to you took place awhile ago. My name is John Kennedy Nolan. I hate fall, the South, and my name. My mother killed herself on my fifteenth birthday. Cheap scotch, valium, and sleeping pills, in case you’re wondering. I developed a taste for Irish whiskey---Old Overholt, if you want to buy me a bottle. No pills of any kind other than an occasional aspirin. I celebrated my thirty-eighth birthday the same year the twin towers fell. Like mother like son? Not yet. Mother would be disappointed. Her final words, raggedly scrawled on a postcard with a worn fountain pen: “It isn’t worth it, Johnny. Think about it.”
# # #
October, 2001 -- I was in Arizona, feeling sorry for myself while the world raged against an elusive madman in the mountains of Afghanistan. Civilization was distracted by its self inflicted chaos. The moment ripened for a dormant force beneath the sands of the Sonoran Desert to return to the world. Something older than human memory awakened on that night, and under cover of darkness, began a quest that nearly ended the whole party, for all of us.

I was writing in my journal, a black bound spiral, one of many, into which I dumped my insanity. Oberon snoozed beside my recliner. Whiskey number three reflected amber light through a sweating glass atop a side table. No coaster, the water ring outlined my drink like a bullseye. The fireplace remained dark. My mantle clock chimed 8 p.m. The television was tuned to the weather channel. Sound muted. Talking heads pointed at maps above a running strip of local conditions that showed the temperature still over ninety. It was hot, even for Arizona, given the time of year. Did I mention that I hate the fall?

As I reached for the whiskey glass a tremendous, fast, and sharp pounding reverberated throughout the house. Echoes of what sounded like a six-foot woodpecker with a ball peen beak trying to batter through my newly painted front door. It made me more angry than afraid. Irish courage, whiskey that is. I threw my journal in the safe, slamming the steel door, grabbed up my glass, and headed to the front of the house. Oberon raised his head just long enough to throw me a glance of disgust at allowing this disturbance to his nap. The laziest dog that ever burped a Milk Bone, that one.

When I looked out the peephole, I saw my ex-wife, Sandra. Dressed like a twelfth-avenue whore in a red dress that almost covered her surgically tightened ass, holding a sequined handbag in one hand and a red stiletto heel in the other. She used the heel to beat out her arrival.

Sandra leaned forward and licked the peephole lens. She’d pierced her tongue. A jeweled spike stood erect behind the leering veneers of her teeth. Her hair was a catastrophe. Some alien shade of purple. It clashed with the dress.

Feeling spiteful and figuring she was drunk, I flung the door open. I intended to get some satisfaction from the sight of her sprawled on the tile of the entryway. As short as her skirt was, I might even get a chance to spill my whiskey right on her hot spot. Send her home smelling like fermented fish. She’d pissed me off, beating up my door with her goddamned spiked heel. The door opened inward, outside the porch was empty.

“What the hell,” I thought. She couldn’t escape that quickly, especially not in one heel. I went outside and around the house. The garage door and back yard gate were both closed. No sign of her. No traffic on the street. I lived in a gated neighborhood with a fascist homeowner’s association that kept things quiet and clear. People got up, hit their garage door openers and went to work, came home, closed the garage door and disappeared until morning. There were few streetlights, no sidewalks, and high privacy fences around yards that served as moats to Mediterranean stucco houses with pink and red tile roofs. Nobody gave a damn about anything except what went on inside their own walls. Sandra and I learned this through the many nights our fights spilled out into the street. Nobody so much as cracked a window to see what the commotion was about. A thousand satellite dishes showed what held their attention.

The world became desensitized to the humanity inhabiting it about the time of JFK’s assassination. Things got worse in the following decades. This hot autumn night in 2001 confirmed it for me.

I thought about calling the gatehouse to complain to the guard for letting an obvious drunk into our peaceful enclave. Instead, I decided to go back inside, finish my whiskey, and hit the sack. I had a breakfast meeting scheduled with my boss where he planned to reveal his latest “how-to make us all billionaires” scheme. Being late or hung over would put me at a real disadvantage when he started the next phase of his ubiquitous power trip.

The porch light was on and I bent down to look at the damage to the door before going back inside. I frowned. The door was unmarked. “Good paint,” I said, patting the door, before closing it behind me.

The smell hit me in the hall. Before I turned the corner into the study, a stench like rotten potatoes mixed with sulfur and something else, something that made my eyes water and had a sobering affect. Oberon, the great guard dog, was pretty much as I left him, half asleep on his side next to my chair. My chair. Only something else sat in it.

A wreck of male indignity, lounged in filthy rags. My journal lay open in his lap. A complete impossibility, as the journal was locked in the safe. Then I noticed a stack of them, ten or eleven in all---bound in black with wire rings. No evidence of fire damage. The derelict, as I came to call him, didn’t even glance up as I entered the room. He focused on the long, yellowing fingernail with which he underscored the uneven snake of my handwriting across the page. His face reflected a peculiar cast that was something between olive-green and orange depending on how the light hit. Wrinkled and broad, it expressed great amusement, apparently at the words on the page. My words, it seemed, though all of it looked to be impossible.

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked, tilting quickly past civility. He ignored me. I moved a step closer, though the smell kept me from immediately grabbing and tossing him from the chair. “What are you doing here? Who are you?”

He raised a hand. His nails traced little smoke lines in the air as he waggled two fingers in front of my face. “Shush, John.” he said in a voice that rattled with phlegm. A burst of laughter followed by a hacking cough. He spat a long, yellow stream into my empty fireplace. It hissed when it struck the stones. Oberon raised his head and looked at me.

“Get the fuck out of my chair!” I shouted, grabbing at his shoulders with every intention of using the rags he wore to mop up the slimy coating in the firebox. It was like grabbing water, only I didn’t get wet. My hands passed through the molecules of his body. I felt the cloth, skin, muscles, and bones, but only for a second before they parted and I fell, nearly landing on Oberon, who licked my face when I hit the tiles beside him.

“Want something to drink?” the derelict asked, offering me the remains of my own whiskey bottle. I hate ironic statements. I wondered what happened to my glass and got lost for a moment, uncertain whether I had set it down outside or left it on the hall table by the front door. The long fingers offered the bottle to me. I could see through the glass, the distorted features of the derelict sharpening as he glanced up from his reading. “Clumsy sort, aren’t you,” he said, retracting the bottle and taking a long pull. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, shaking it so that I felt a cold spattering of saliva mixed with whiskey on my cheek. “You need another chair in here,” he said.

I sat up, crossing my hands on my knees and rubbed the back of my head where the beginnings of an ache throbbed just at the point where Axis and Atlas meet. “What the hell?” Bewildered? You bet I was.

Ignoring my question, the derelict laughed and tapped the journal. “This is great stuff, John! I’ve never found anything quite like it before. You ought to publish…” he paused as if considering that thought, “No, no, forget that. The world isn’t ready for this.” He shook his head and muttered to himself. I wanted to lie down and cradle my head in my hands. The headache was as real a presence as the derelict. “Sure you don’t want a drink?” he asked, waving the bottle at me again. I swatted at it, intending to knock it from his hand. He possessed hair trigger reflexes, pulling the bottle back and staring disapprovingly at me. “No need to be rude, John.”

Eight Years Late

Start Here: January 01, 2001.

Pause...pause...pause...fast forward to March, 2008. Nothing lies in between.

What did the old Sith say about lack of vision? I'm behind the curve on this technology. That's a strange admission from someone who once described himself as THE cutting edge. Not on the edge. THE edge. Take that any way you like.

Take a word: technology

Put its letters in alphabetical order: ceghlnooty

What can you make of that? loot, not, note, goon, ten, yen, ley, cey, on, ton, tone, tool, tole, hole, hoot, gel, leg, gent, tog, got, lye, lent, get, hot, echo, tony, cool, eon, noel, hone, cone, con, cot, goth, ...lots of three and four letter stuff. You're at the first level of creativity...taking something and making something else of it.

Five and six letter words start to appear later...length, lengthy....if you keep looking. How far can you go? What's the biggest word you can make out of that?

There's abbreviations in here too: etc.

Put your words in alphabetical order: cey, con, cone, cool, cot, echo... etc. Use them to write poetry, to tell a story, to create rhythmic gibberish.

Misspellings can be fun: looce, tyle

AND made up words: chog, cenology

Cool? Not yet.

Got no con. Got no tool.

Got no loot. Hot hole.

Eon Echo.

Techno-gel,

Hot tone,

Tony gent,

Not cool.

Not yet.

Yeah, I'm behind the curve. But that's where we all start. Even the innovators. Infinity is that big.