Proof

We have fake spiderwebs over the front door, grinning stuffed spiders hanging from the silk, and six pumpkins in varying degrees of scariness lining the steps (I was worried Halloween would bring up some disturbing imagery to the girls so soon after their Grandma's recent death, but it turns out the holiday is much too cartoonish to summon anything emotionally real). We have candy. We have costumes. We have roasted pumpkin seeds.

Adding to the flavor of the season: every kid in the neighborhood is convinced our house is haunted. I am not. I'm open to the idea of ghosts, though I've never seen one (with possibly one exception, but that's another post). But our house feels too sane, too safe, too comfortable. I will admit to visualizing a ghostly woman at the end of the hallway late at night, some nights, but I have a laughably active imagination.

The girls, blessed/cursed with similar imaginations, both say they've seen a woman walking past their bedroom doorways, in the same hallway where I imagine my own apparition.

Still, I am unconvinced. Bolstering my beliefs is the fact that ghost hunters actually investigated our house the year before we moved in. I say ghost hunters; they are a group of stoner kids that work at the Loaf N Jug down the street. But they've got ambitions, they've fashioned themselves into a team of ghostbusters, and so brought in video cameras and sound recorders, searched the house, found nothing.

No matter. Our house is 117 years old, it looks haunted. Add in the dusty attic, the Hannibal Lecter-ready basement. Who need proof? Not our kids, or our neighbor's kids. They have something much more powerful: belief.

The Future of American Fiction

I helped with the spelling - note curious is spelled "cireis" in the illustration - but all words and pictures are K's.



The Cat
written by Kaylene Wood
illustrated by Kaylene Wood



I once had a kitten named Blake. I named my kitten Blake because he was a blake cat. And was very curious.



After that he accidentally ate dog food and got sick because he ate dog food.



He was very tired and so he dropped on the carpet.

Zombies in Space

The Damned Thing just won't die.

The Galaxy 15 C-band telecommunications satellite went off orbit and out of control in April. It can't be repositioned, it can't be turned off, and interference from it is disrupting signals from other satellites.

Admittedly, the reason this is in the news at all is likely because someone nicknamed it a "zombie satellite." To my mind that is somewhat of a misnomer, as a true zombie satellite would not only kill other satellites but turn them into other zombie satellites as well. The glitch would go viral. Sadly, all the Damned Thing does is temporarily disrupt signals.

Still, scientists predicted it would die in August, after all its power was drained (the different orbit means its solar panels are not pointed directly at the sun anymore). What they didn't count on was that the satellite is able to save energy during periods it is in the Earth's shadow. No one expected that to happen. So it's still alive, still kicking, still spreading its zombie goodness throughout the solar system.

They have had to change the orbits of 6 satellites so far to avoid the zombie, and expect to have to change the orbits of 7 more between now and December. By then, the experts say it should die.

I'm hoping otherwise.

Democracy

Hux and I took the girls and my Dad to the Gubernatorial debate downtown last night. John Hickenlooper, Don Maes, and Tom Tancrado. My proudest moment was when eldest pointed to the stage and said "which one is crazy as a loon?" The answer, of course, being Tom Tancrado.

Our kids were only two kids in the audience, it turned out. And they behaved very well, though youngest and I went out to the lobby a couple times to get her wiggles out, and watched much of the debate from the back of the room. It turned out to be a good vantage point: TV cameras, reporters, lotsa folks typing on laptops, lotsa aides running around.

Tancredo got my vote as the guy I'd most want to have a beer with, though I disagreed with virtually everything that came out of his mouth. It's odd to say something like "there is no money in green energy" in a small, job-hungry town where a wind turbine plant is creating employment for hundreds of people. My pick - Hickenloooper - did not do particularly well. He's not well spoken. But he'll make a good governor, I think. Made an excellent mayor of Denver. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative. My kinda guy.

Democracy is being driven close to the breaking point by an over-reliance on television ads, as opposed to actual public discourse, and the ensuing huge sums of money those TV ads entail. It's become a game for billionaires. So it was refreshing to see a full auditorium where people applauded and booed and shouted questions at three flesh and blood human beings who were asking for our vote. And after it was over, we all walked out into the cool autumn evening, toward our cars and bikes, towards home, where the debate likely continued, in kitchens and bedrooms and bars. No celebrities telling us how to vote. No attack ads with foreboding music and lurid claims. Just real people, discussing real issues. Democracy.

Whatever’s here is just here.

Burial Rites
by Philip Levine

Everyone comes back here to die
as I will soon. The place feels right
since it’s half dead to begin with.
Even on a rare morning of rain,
like this morning, with the low sky
hoarding its riches except for
a few mock tears, the hard ground
accepts nothing. Six years ago
I buried my mother’s ashes
beside a young lilac that’s now
taller than I, and stuck the stub
of a rosebush into her dirt,
where like everything else not
human it thrives. The small blossoms
never unfurl; whatever they know
they keep to themselves until
a morning rain or a night wind
pares the petals down to nothing.
Even the neighbor cat who shits
daily on the paths and then hides
deep in the jungle of the weeds
refuses to purr. Whatever’s here
is just here, and nowhere else,
so it’s right to end up beside
the woman who bore me, to shovel
into the dirt whatever’s left
and leave only a name for some-
one who wants it. Think of it,
my name, no longer a portion
of me, no longer inflated
or bruised, no longer stewing
in a rich compost of memory
or the simpler one of bone shards,
dirt, kitty litter, wood ashes,
the roots of the eucalyptus
I planted in ’73,
a tiny me taking nothing,
giving nothing, and free at last.

Just Married

My Mom and Dad, 19 years old. Just married (Dad wasn't sure until he spied the wedding ring on his finger). It looks to me like Mom is pulling Dad's hand up to somewhere more appropriate, but Dad's theory is that the photographer just made a risque remark.

They sure look happy. Off in their own little world.

After my mom graduated from high school in Idabel, Oklahoma, she hung around town for a couple weeks, helping around the house. One morning she helped her Mom pick blackberries, went to her brother John to borrow 8 dollars, and left town. Took the next bus to Dallas, where she stayed with an aunt, and waited for my Dad to return home from the Korean War. It was a leap of faith into an unknown world.

She died last month, on September 21. She was 78 years old. A life is so much more than just memories, but memories are what remain. She lived a long and courageous life. She will be missed, and always loved.

The Jiffy Pop Effect

Got a new story up at Fiction@Work. Baby Teeth. An early version of it appeared on this blog. It's a little cleaner now. I'm fond of it.

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The novel rewrite is going well. About a quarter of the way through. Two chapters cut, one major character cut, and another seriously downsized.

What's making me feel good is how the surviving chapters are plumping up (I think of this as the Jiffy Pop effect; do they even make Jiffy Pop anymore?), even as I cut large chunks of the novel away. Stories, regardless of length, kinda harden after awhile. They turn brittle. You pick apart a sentence and realize your changes affect three other sentences later on. It's been too long, there's too much distance. Happily, the novel is still alive, still reacting to changes, still capable of surprising me. New character details, new plot points, more dialogue. At one point two characters just started talking to each other at the end of a chapter. I let them. I'm glad I did. I learned from them.

A concession I am making to the marketplace is to give the couple in the novel a more traditional love story. I'd strenuously avoided that during the first two drafts, as I felt it was important thematically for the two lovers not to communicate well, to show their interactions as stumbling and incomplete. I realize that's not a very satisfying experience for the reader.

Now I'm beginning to see how to approach the theme of disconnection from the other side, by showing those rare and meaningful moments when they do connect as a contrast.

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The Copenhagen Suborbitals attempted manned space flight last weekend was a scrub, but they vow to continue, and launch next year. They designed their own rocket, their own submarine, their own floating launch platform. They'll figure it out.

Life Imitating Photoshop

This looks like a badly Photoshopped picture, but it's real, and required a half an hour of Hubble telescope time to get enough light to resolve the image. It looks like a ghost of a dead galaxy. Sadly, it is not. It's the result of the death throes of a carbon star, throwing off material, and because it's orbiting another star the ejected material comes out in a spiral. Think of a rotating sprinkler head to visualize the effect.

What I like about the picture is that it looks like this, another example of life imitating bad Photoshop. But this spiral was caused by entirely different circumstances: a missile launch gone bad, spewing fuel in an exact spiral. I love the recurrence of certain basic shapes and patterns in nature. Spheres and discs, spiral arms. The golden mean. Fibonacci numbers.

Thanks to APOD for the pic.

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We went to a campground with Tolstoy and the boys this weekend. We have a recent habit of arbitrarily choosing Colorado campgrounds, showing up, seeing what it's like. This time the campground was maybe 300 yards from the Interstate. You could see a McDonald's sign and three different motels from the tent. You could hear the dull throb of traffic day and night.

Still, it's hard to be unhappy while camping. We had several ponds and a rubber raft to play with. We saw an egret, a HUGE heron, several killdeer. The campground was formerly a series of gravel pits that were filled with water and turned into a wildlife refuge. Traffic noise notwithstanding, it's hard to argue with the result. And a gorgeous Saturday night sky, despite the lights: Jupiter anchoring one end, Venus and a thin crescent moon anchoring the other, and Cassiopeia, Pegasus, Sagittarius and Scorpio spread out on the canvas between them.

The Forge of Memory, pt. 2

Memories rarely stick when you think they will. You can't make them stay. They do or they don't; you aren't allowed into the decision. They're ornery that way. It's a neural hat trick, which events stay embedded in the folds of the brain, which get discarded. It's alchemy.

I remember few Christmas mornings. You're supposed to, of course, that's where the emphasis goes, what all the commercials point to as the most important moment. It's what everyone prepares for, when everyone takes out the camera. Why some families spend hundreds of dollars on presents and decorations: to make a perfect family memory. But it doesn't work, not very often. You can't force a memory. They do what they wanna do. Like I said: ornery.

My Christmas memories are of being on the roof putting up Christmas lights in the weeks beforehand, of playing with Play-doh in the languor of the days after. Of wondering what the giant present hidden in the closet is. Of watching my sister open wrapping paper with the cat's claw so she can see what the present is, yet preserve deniability by blaming the cat.

Toys breaking, I remember. Arguments, I remember.

Several years ago, the girls and I were putting up Christmas lights, and a deer wandered onto our block, elegant, unhurried, strolling from one lawn to the next. I called the little Hux out to watch. Then boom!, a backyard dog began to bark, the deer vanished in a series of leaps, pogo-ing away, all four legs pumping at the same time.

It's a reindeer, said the eldest. It's flying!

That, we've all remembered.

The Forge of Memory

The State Fair dominated the week, beginning with the parade on Saturday morning, ending with the way-past-bedtime stroll through the midway Friday night. I grew up going to the Iowa State Fair (as well as various county fairs), and now, decades later, the best bits are pretty much unchanged. The Tilt-A-Whirl (the girls ran to hux afterward yelling "Daddy didn't puke!" which would make an excellent tee shirt). Six separate rides on the bumper cars. Corn dogs and funnel cakes. Sheep and cows and roosters and petting zoos, yada, yada, yada.



The memorable piece came at the very end, and was memorable primarily for what did not happen. Friday night was packed, and the line for the bungee jump was long, so we saved it for the very end. Took over an hour to get to the front, and you'd expect that to be a recipe for full tilt whining and are-we-there-yet level boredom. And yet. The bungee jump itself was almost an afterthought. Three girls were in front of us, and our girls talked and played with them the entire time. It helped that the eldest was fourteen, making her a Rock Star in the eyes of our own girls. Helpful as well was the summer night, the hint of the coming fall in the air, the bright lights of the midway, the flirting teenagers, the smell of the corn dogs and the funnel cakes, the clamor of the sideshows and the crowd and the creaking machinery. They all conspired to push the moment out of the ordinary, into the bright alchemical forge of memory.