I Reviewed an Ann Beattie Novella from 2010

on Goodreads and Medium.

Twas a good read for me.

She even got turkey buzzards in there. Turkey vultures (buzzards) are a huge part of the life of my small town.

For some reason, they congregate here in huge numbers. Usually in the colder months.

They glower like Poe demons from our chimney every autumn and winter.

They terrorize the local stray cats and steal their eleemosynary food from their eleemosynary bowls.

They even perch on the nearby schools and give children the Evil Eye as they enter and leave. (Okay, that part's fun.)

TIL from the Beattie novella that they are descended from lovely storks and ibises. You'd never guess. No, really.  You would not.

But maybe she made that part up. I have yet to Google it. I'm such a trusting soul and putty in the hands of unreliable narrators.

I'm sure there are examples where a narrator in a novel seems trustworthy and then later some very important assertion is proven to be a brazen lie; then you have to wonder if everything that's been related is a house of cards based on that single lie.

Postscript: turkey vultures (buzzards) are indeed related to storks. So sayeth the Great Oz Google; so say All. Hips don't lie, and neither do genetics.

The Dropouts

The county is as rural as rural gets. Its population is exceedingly small, 328 people according to the census-derived info on the internet. But there’s actually just under sixty more, hidden away where even the drones don’t fly.

Og was screaming. Several of his tribe were trying to remove a spear from his leg. This was tricky work. The only halfway appropriate tool the half-naked medics who were treating Og’s leg had was a rusty old saw. Just then, the busy saw teeth made it through the shaft of the weapon penetrating the old man’s leg.

“Got it, Og!” Daryl crowed.

Others rushed in to clean the wound and apply healing herbs.

“Any whisky left?” Og begged.

“No, they got our still last week, old man. Remember?”

Indeed, the two tribes were often stealing from each other. Raiding each other for women. And, of course, killing each other. Cops were never called. Nobody ever went to a hospital. Everything was off the grid and off the record.

It had started as a dare between two rival factions of survivalists who knew each other on the internet. It was a couple of extended families of survivalists from the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. It was going to be a long weekend survivalist challenge, a contest between two tribes. Many of them were fans of the grittier reality shows, like Survivor and Naked and Afraid. But those shows never went far enough, everyone agreed.

Things soon got out of hand. Someone died in an honest accident a few days before the thing was to end, but the other tribe didn’t see it that way. They thought one of their own had been murdered. This triggered a blood feud. Harsh insults were lobbed. Group pride was injured. Another gauntlet was thrown down. All the members of both tribes swore a pact to stay on. They sent their last text messages to family, giving their bogus excuses for their staying on, and then the phones were switched off and locked up again. They went back to their respective caves and huddled around their fires. Somebody was pregnant. It would be the first baby born in the new Stone Age.

It had been two months and change out of civilization by this time.

The spearing of Og was a really dirty thing. Og was the oldest member of the Red Ford Explorer Tribe. He wasn’t harming anyone. True, he had sticky fingers and was making night raids over there around their stores and animal pens. But they could have just thrown a rock. There were revenge grumbles going around the cave.

Nobody in the Red Ford Explorer Tribe knew that Og had killed a twenty-four-year-old man the previous night when he had tried to stop the old codger from stealing some coyote steaks. Og wasn’t offering that part up.

So over at the Pabst Blue Ribbon Tribe they were planning a massacre. One of the woman suggested they return to their (forbidden) vehicles and retrieve their (forbidden) modern world weaponry. This was roundly shouted down. There was to be honor among caveman. There might be a massacre, but it would be done with the correct tools.

While Og was being treated, Jeremiah was being buried in a very private grave alongside a creek where he loved to catch crayfish the tribe all enjoyed together in an improvised broth. His young widow (stolen from the other tribe) cursed her own parents in the enemy tribe as the young man’s body was placed in the hole which had been dug with a shovel secretly retrieved from the Vehicle Field (totally cheating).

Two men from the Pabst tribe were nearly a hundred miles away in a small town, watching a suburban street. It was early morning. They were watching students walking to high school. The man on the passenger side beckoned a boy with a blue backpack to come over to their S.U.V. He was holding a road map out the window, waving his bait. All the other kids were gone now. The blue backpack was the last walker on the street.

“Yeah, he’s got nice muscles. A nice solid build. Probably a wrestler. He’ll do,” the driver mumbled, while smiling at the boy the whole time through the windshield.

Once the tall young man reached the S.U.V., it was over in a minute. Bound on the floor in the back, tears soaked his face.

The guy on the passenger side rifled the kid’s phone, caught up briefly on the news in the outside world, then took the battery out and chucked the phone.

The kid was pleading by now through the duct tape across his mouth, but those weren’t words coming out. The shot he had been given was starting to take effect. It would soon be lights out.

“Don’t worry, kid. We ain’t a couple of perverts. We’re taking you to a great place. You have a destiny to fulfill. You’re gonna be a warrior. Old school warr-i-or! Much better than whatever shit you were going to do when you went to school today. Trust me.”

It was true that the tribe had a 100% success rate so far with abductees. They adjusted after a short period of rebellion. Usually only a few days, really.

Of course, if you wanted to leave, you had to go for a walk in the woods with Psychopath. He was the least nice member of the Pabst tribe. Psychopath would always come back from that walk alone, and the other members of the tribe would be told that the member who went with him was “restored to civilization.” Everyone knew what that meant. So people didn’t ask to leave. The Ford tribe also had an enforcer. Her name was Margaret.

So MISSING posters continued to go up on telephone poles and in storefronts in the small towns around the state. But never any too close to the caves. Always they drove far out to find the young men and women they needed.

The tribes had initially numbered only 51 people combined. A net increase of eight bodies had been realized by the time of the second casualty. There had been three whiners taken out between the two enforcers from the separate tribes. There had been some wife swapping and some agreed contractual hunting for additional warriors on both sides, both male and female. It kept the contest interesting.

“You want to stop at Mickey D’s?” the driver asked the rider. “Before heading back and drawing up them battle plans? That boy’s totally out cold.”

“Shit, that’s cheatin’ and you know it, Sam. But alright. Don’t tell a soul and get rid of all the trash, for sure. Fast food is capital punishment now, remember?”

“Don’t fucking burp or fart around any of the tribe, either. Get us both killed. But I’d like to hunt them son’a’bitches on something more solid than plant roots. And that coyote gone bad tasted like shit. I think I got Lyme Disease or some shit like that.”

“Tell me about it. We’re going to have to go on more of these people runs, ya know. After we take out as many as Sondra is planning. I don’t want to wipe ’em out completely though. Would ruin the fun, know what I mean?”

“No, I totally agree. We can seed the other tribe with newbies after it all goes down. Man, I really don’t miss my job back home. Not one fuckin’ bit!”

He laughed.

The other man laughed too.

“Me neither, man. Me fuckin’ neither.”

“We have a special on the new egg sandwich today,” the nerdy female voice coming out of the menu board offered.

“Give me ten,” said the driver. “And two milkshakes as cold as you can make ’em, sweetheart.”

Housewife

Every morning, he wakes, turns to her, and asks her the same question: “How did you sleep, beauty?” And always she shows him the same contented smile. The comfort of all those years spent together is apparent in the curve of those lips. No words necessary. And then he is able to face the world. That’s all he needs. “Get your rest,” he says. “I should be home around six. But I’ll be thinking about you all day.” Oh, make no mistake. Once, there were bad times, very bad times, and they used to try each other greatly. Marriage counseling didn’t work. An open relationship didn’t work. Nothing did. And then he stumbled on the solution. Now they’re just perfect together. She feels it too. Just look at that face. He can’t resist doing so, one last loving glance, as he stands dressing before the closet. Mummification makes the heart grow fonder.

Arrivals / Departure / Ocean

I'm really enjoying reading the current issue of Modern Haiku, edited by paul m. I'm very happy to have poetry in this issue.

This is a classic magazine with a storied history. I collect back issues as I find them on various bookselling sites.

The history of the editors:

Kay Titus Mormino, Founding Editor, 1969-1977
Robert Spiess, Editor, 1978-2002
Lee Gurga, Editor, 2002-2006
Charles Trumbull, Editor, 2006-2013
Paul Miller, Editor, 2013-present

As you can see, the magazine is enjoying its Golden Jubilee this year. Congratulations, Modern Haiku!

Thanks to editor paul m, whose work you should really seek out if you love poetry.  He has a gendai streak I grok.

I also received in the mail a wonderful labor of love zine from Maine, Letterfounder. Editor Jessy Kendall is keeping the Age of Zines alive. No end date in sight. I was quite honored when he wrote me out of the blue to ask for a poem he saw online, which is included in this issue. It's neat to be in an issue with Malok and Terry Gilliam. And it's still rad (in 2019, seven years after the Mayan  Apocalypse) to receive a letter written in ink on paper asking one to send some more poems, and on paper please? I will write some more and send some more. On paper. It feels like an act of defiance, in an age when the growing consensus is that print itself is an anachronism. No! Print's heart, like a certain Canadian talk show staple, will go on. Ooh...staple. I made a zine pun without even intending. I'm imagining a shrine of staples as a conceptual art object.  Thanks Jessy, see you again soon through the eye of paper. You inspire me.


I've just begun mourning a love, so talking about happy things feels like looking through a window at a festive gathering I can't really join. We just lost our one cat after seventeen years of sharing every day with him, except for short travels elsewhere. When we adopted him and found out he had feline leukemia, we were told to expect a short lifespan, that he might die in the first few years or improbably make it to ten. But he remained vibrant and never really had any serious health issues. He just suffered the decline of old age, as all of us do. Chronic kidney disease is a tough one to beat. We've spent many days of the past year adjusting to his disability and trying to cater to him. He knew he was loved and I'm happy to know he never experienced cruelty in this life, that he felt safe and secure, that he felt special, and that he still enjoyed some of his favorite things within days of the end. His going was peaceful and he was surrounded by his loved ones. I will have to write a proper story about his interesting life. It would be better if he could have told it. But we make do with what we have here.

I've begun to realize shaping absence is something that never ends. I don't think I've suffered a single serious loss in which the process of shaping that absence is not ongoing and constantly changing. Ghosts don't stay in the same clothes and they don't even wear the same face forever. Keep watching your goners. You are a part of their afterlives.

Sometimes, Justice Is a Pale Thing

But I am really proud of the jurors who made the right decision on Friday in the McStay murder trial. Their verdict was only announced today.

Thank You, Jurors! Good people, listening people, Thank You!

That was an exceedingly long trial. Not quite O.J. Simpson trial length, but it was working its way up there. It ran five months.

The evidence was clearly there. But there was so much obfuscation through overload (the defense strategy) that it risked jamming the jurors' gears. This did not happen. Instead, Charles "Chase" Merritt will be consigned to a small cell for the rest of his life. Doubtless, he will continue to manipulate people on the outside from there. Why let a little thing like a quadruple murder conviction stop your game?

Even if Merritt receives the death penalty, it is almost certain he will never be put to death in the state which let Charles Manson live long enough to be idolized by Axl Rose (who ignominiously recorded one of Charlie's songs) and then die of old age.

A family of four (including two very small children) was murdered, almost certainly within a matter of minutes, in a blitz attack in their own home. What a horrible reality this is to digest. Many people will live with the void which hangs there where four lives were flourishing. Not only their family and loved ones will miss them. Many who never knew them in the flesh mourn them, for in investing care in their fate we came to know them as individuals and as a loving family embarked on a wonderful adventure together. This absence stays with all  of us who followed this story from the early days of mystery to the later days of justice.

I wish peace for the McStay family. I wish peace for the family of the convicted killer. There is pain on all sides.

How many years of suffering in countless people one reprobate soul can unleash.

Often, justice is a pale thing, a pale shadow of something our soul wants to exist, call it God or karma or whatever you call that force you wish existed to set things right again in the universe. Justice is a shadow of that thing cast into our broken world. And it has to be enough. It is horribly never enough in tragedies like this one. But it is something. It is the contract between humans, the commitment to decency.

Decent people were murdered by a man who allowed himself to become a monster. Decent people stood up for the murdered and spoke for them and honored their lives with this verdict.

I hope people remember the great love the McStays had for each other, and cherish the people in their lives the way they did each other.

That would be Carver's "small, good thing." That is all we get here: the gift of translating darkness to light. We can hold on to the light of these good people. They are with us, still with us.

Donald Trump In Hell

Donald Trump began insidiously developing certain tracts of land in Hell. He had his usual b.s. eminent domain arguments pre-loaded for litigation. He had a number of contacts (eternally damned friends and business associates) already on the inside, and they had greased the palms of some of the lesser demons with baksheesh. You’d be shocked at the sorts of things they crave down there, copies of Dancing with the Stars and Pepperoni Bites, crap like that. Pretty much the same stuff as North Korea, really.

But the Devil eventually found out that someone was building on his property. He only uncovered this when he found paperwork from the Infernal Zoning Board (DING!: there is no “Infernal Zoning Board”) purporting to approve the Don’s latest monstrosity. This was a sprawling titanium-facaded hotel designed to resemble his coif, or rather anti-coif. It was designed by Frank Gehry, no less. It looks like a giant Trump toupee sitting there amid the countless grease fires of hell. It does feel weirdly appropriate. Except it’s shiny and it lights up like a merry-go-round at night. And it’s very, very large. Because the suites inside are also very large, designed to pull in celebrity demons and their so-called families, the rates are astronomical. Working class demons simply can’t afford this putrid pile of putatively-pedigreed poshness.

And what does this hotel have to offer amidst the (admittedly boring reruns of) eternal torment of human wrongdoers?

Donald Trump has the answer: “Fresh hell!”

Yes, he’s many other things, so why wouldn’t he be a plagiarist too? It’s emblazoned on the towels, and even embroidered in minuscule flowing script of black thread on the heavy Le Jacquard Français napkins: “What Fresh Hell is This?” And the bastard even had the nerve to add a little TM there at the end. It’s also used in the commercials for the resort, you know the ones with the dancing she-devils really letting down their cat-o-nine-tails and exploring their sensuous side. It’s typical sexist Trump fare. The she-devils were plied with alcohol and fake telephone numbers of demon celebrity bad boys to make sure they really let loose in those ad spots. Even in hell, the bad taste goes on, coeternal with the Trump name.

Soon thereafter, the Devil showed up at Trump Tower with his Dream Team, a cadre of the some of the best, fast-talking, long-dead attorneys ever to walk the planet and end up in perdition. The cease and desist’s were duly delivered. And then a few thousand pages of impending litigation were dumped on the desk of T., who was, of course, too busy watching reruns of The Apprentice (fast-forwarding always to his lines) to give a shit.

The Devil spun Trump around in his chair without touching him or the chair.

“The Trump Do? Seriously? That’s the name you give that piece of shit-welded-to-gimcrack you call a hotel that you’ve placed on poached ground in my demesne?”

“That name tested very well in several rounds of live trials. The info-metrics are good on that. See, people like my hair, it’s part of my brand, unlike whatever that shit is you’ve got scribbled up there on your red noggin. What is that? Brillo?”

(Here Trump’s lackeys, and aren’t they all, pretended to enjoy the enjoined laughter that must follow what palely passes for wit around those parts.)

“Mr. Trump, you do realize we have a future assignation in my nation, where the only Red State is eternal fire for slippery pollywogs of evil such as yourself. We both know your pro forma, external piety is not fooling the Old Guy Upstairs. I heard he’s actually thinking about adding a few new commandments based on your tenure as presidency alone.”

“What a lovely piece of work he is, up there. He created tarsiers. Tarsiers! Have you ever seen those goddamn things? Who in their right mind would create a tarsier? What a lovely piece of work you are, too. You’re a Nasty Worm, Man. You two both mismanaged your affairs. If I was running Heaven, there never would have been a Fall from Grace. And if I was running Hell, the Guy Upstairs would find himself in the same place I put Merv Griffin.”

“Merv is in Hell,” the Devil said, shocked at Trump’s effrontery.

“Exactly!” Trump said and laughed. Of course, all his lackeys did the mandatory chuckle. A woman brazenly fake-snorted.

“Listen, I got a little deal I want to discuss with you. You pay those demons decently down there and then they go and spend their money on the most ridiculous, cheap-ass, 7–11 type stuff. You ever step inside the homes of that peonage? I have. It’s unbelievable. They have these animals they call pets. They give up a significant share of their capital to a creature that’s lunch over in Asia. And your low-class demons are like that. You could be turning all their salaries right back into Hell to build the infrastructure. What do the wives of demons want? They want to have a story they can tell their neighbors, the other wives who they hate. Give them a little visit to a Trump resort and they have all the ammunition they need. Walk with me a little bit and let me explain. “

So, after waving a quick personal hi to Kellyanne, one of Satan’s favorites, the leader of Hell went with Trump for a stroll and a summit, tailed by Secret Service bodyguards who were all collectively considering leaving T’s employs to become a team of male strippers known as the “D.C. Acey-Deuces.” Don’t ask, it’s complicated.

Hours later, the Contract was inked and the Bearer of Light put down the oldest existing signature in the universe right next to Trump’s scrawled signature, which, appropriately enough, resembles the jagged lightning of electrocardiograph paper indicating a heart attack.

The Devil went back down to Hell (didn’t even stop off in Georgia for nostalgia’s sake, as he had planned) and the further he descended, the more he realized he had just been shafted by a man whose only raison d’etre is shafting, and his tail began to slink between his legs. Tears fell on his cloven hooves.

When he got back to his offices, his Unholy of Unholies, he noticed the way all the other demons looked at him now. They had that knowing look of scorn dipped in the au jus of ridicule. Everyone knew he had been taken and that the Glass Ceiling in Hell had just been shattered for humans by something very closely resembling a human.

When Trump got back into the Oval Office, he had to tell Kellyanne to get out of his chair and take her shoes off his desk. but she did that thing she always does to him with her killer clown eyes, stared him down, unmoving, and he decided he would go and eat an egg salad and pepperoni sandwich instead. He would see if Melania felt sorry enough for him to go and lie and tell Kellyanne that Putin wanted to continue that game of “Truth or Dare” they had been playing on Snapchat which almost resulted in the nuclear annihilation of Montenegro, just for shits and giggles, last week. Because then he could get his chair back without losing face. And that was sort of important.