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Tales from Topographic Oceans [21 May 2012|12:00am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Only tenuously related to the Yes album of the same name, widely considered the most navel-gazingly pretentious prog rock album ever recorded. (No, I will not attempt to relate the Shastric scriptures to Mayan prophecy. Maybe another time.) The Roger Dean cover, however, is awesome: See the Castillo over there on the horizon above the Nazca monkey? The other week I was back in Yucatan. It’s been six years. Not much has changed. A lone wind turbine has sprouted over Quintana Roo Highway 308 south of Cancún, and a dozen new all-inclusive resorts have elbowed out another few hundred thousand acres of coastal swamp, though you’d hardly know it from the road except for the twenty-foot white concrete faux-Mayan monoliths marking the entrances surrounded by landscaped agave and coconut palm. The real ruins are all still there, the big ones a little more harried maybe what with the approaching end of the world, the less impressive sharing the sun-baked empty stretches between hotels with more recent ruins, failed tourist traps abandoned a year or a decade ago, their pale dirt parking lots filling with trash like alluvial silt from the underground rivers. The coastal reef, second largest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef, hasn’t recovered–it’s still all bleached and apocalyptic, like the ash-caked girders of a collapsed skyscraper a hundred miles long, an aqua-tinted desert broken only by occasional tiny, mind-blowingly colorful fish flitting in and out of gray-blue darknesses. If anything, it’s getting worse. Still, the apocalypse feels just as far away (and just as close) as anywhere else I’ve been. Even Detroit. Even though the entire Yucatan Peninsula is so low-lying and flat it will likely be underwater as soon as Micronesia and Manhattan, and it’ll look even more like the Yes cover than it already does. By the way, for those of you who haven’t seen it, a recently discovered Mayan mural at the Xultún site in northern Guatemala includes explicit references to dates after December 21, 2012. So the world isn’t ending. Which means we’re going to have to live with what we do to it. But I’m not here to preach about the end. I’ve done that enough. I’m here to share a bit of the beauty before it’s gone. These are not the pictures I would have taken of Tulum in 2006. Maybe the difference says something about the person I’ve become in the years between. Because the place hasn’t changed. Salt wind and time have done what they can, at least for now. And all of Antarctica would have to melt before the Gulf will make it up those cliffs. Who knows, maybe that’s part of why they built it here. One of three offeratory altars on the cliff below the Templo del Viento–not unlike another shrine I found years ago, ten miles to the north. The coastal Maya had a lot to thank the sea god for, not least the reef, which made a natural breakwater for hundreds of miles along the shore, allowing easy trade between cities. Masked face, Templo de las Pinturas, southwest corner. One of the last Mayan structures built before the conquest and the best preserved at Tulum. This is the building with the seven-fingered red handprints I so lamented not having photographed last time. But you’ve seen those. I’d love to know who this mask depicts—Itzamna? Don’t have the research at hand, unfortunately. East face of the Castillo, the large central pyramid, the side that faces the cliffs. The architectural style at Tulum is unique…of course that’s true of every Maya site, and Tulum benefited from trade with both the Mexica (the Aztecs) and the Toltec-influenced Maya of Chíchen Itzá…but the skewed lines of the temples here are different from either. There are no right angles anywhere, hardly even any straight lines. It’s like something out of…Dr. Seuss, crossed with Lovecraft. It’s awesome. The first time I was here I didn’t appreciate it—after the mathematical, acoustical perfection of the Castillo at Chíchen Itzá, it seemed sloppy, a sign of a civilization in decline. This time, after gawking at those beautiful masks for awhile, then at the Templo del Dios Descendente, I realized it could be something else: a sign of a civilization passing its peak, developing into decadence, developing a higher (wierder) aesthetics. This curve…it echoes the sea, obviously. All of Tulum is about the sea, really: the location atop the cliffs like a lighthouse, the protected beach below, the temples to the morning star. The sea was their livelihood, their garden, their connection to the outside world. The curve of the Castillo wall distills that to one calligraphic gesture, a sweep of a brush.

Marchflowers [01 Apr 2012|11:29am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. They’re like March Hares, you know. Rue Anemone, Thalictrum Thalictroides, moist oak ridge, Ortonville, MI Some variety of flowering sedge I am unlikely to ever identify. Sandy trailside, mixed deciduous woods, Ortonville, MI Donwy Serviceberry, Amelanchier arborea, mixed deciduous woods, Ortonville, MI American Fly Honeysuckle, Lonicera canadensis, oak and pine ridge, Ortonville, MI After all these years of photo blogging I finally caved and started using the convenient “web 2.0″ image upload features of WordPress. So much easier! Why am I so stubborn.

Sympathy for the Lorax [29 Mar 2012|09:29am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. The other day I went to see this indie documentary, Kalamazoo River: Us, which tells the history of that river’s pollution since the frontier era and the efforts of activists to get it cleaned up. It’s a bizarre film, full of hilarity and musical numbers. The director, Matt Dunstone, was on hand to answer questions afterward: a quiet, humble guy about my age, with two young kids and a wife in academia. He made immediately clear the love and dedication and enormous heaps of painstaking work that had gone into making it. I came away full of turmoil. Sure, it made me happy to be reminded there are people who care that much and the news isn’t all horrible. And it filled me with sympathy for those tireless activists and the frustrations they’ve suffered in the face of indifference and corporate stonewalling. I know a little of what that’s like. A tiny bit. But not enough to keep me from wondering what heartwrenching environmentalist tragedy I could have made a documentary about, or written a book, or chained myself to something in protest against, if I’d just left off banging my head against fiction. They tell you a writer is someone who just can’t not write, and there’s truth to that. But they also tell you short fiction is dead, and they’re not entirely wrong about that either. And I didn’t have to be writing short fiction. I could have written environmentalist documentaries or journalistic research or bitter political screeds. Not that it’s impossible to send a message or win hearts to a cause with fiction, but it’s hard. And doubly hard with short fiction because nobody reads it but other writers, for most of whom it’s all they can do to glance up from their own navels at the world. Didacticism, it’s called: trying to teach people something in a medium intended to entertain. People hate it. Not everybody, certainly. I’m not one of those people. In fifth grade, not long after seeing the maligned Ferngully for the first time, I helped write and appeared in a play about the importance of protecting the rainforest. Looking back, I feel bad for the parents who had to sit through that. They were probably bored, annoyed out of their skulls. That, no doubt, was didacticism done badly. It certainly can be done well, or at least better. Swift and Voltaire have survived this long. Ayn Rand still hangs on, though she’s bored plenty of people out of their skulls. Even Dr. Seuss had his conservationist masterwork, The Lorax. But look what’s happened to it now: neatly neutered and injected full of SUV tie-ins for a new generation of the coddled oblivious. Fiction wins people over and changes minds by happy accident, not because that’s what it’s for. Of course, I know why I chose short fiction over film. For one thing, with film you have to rely on a ton of other people to help get your final product out there. With fiction it’s just you and the page: control. The selfishness, the unwillingness to engage, the navelgazing: these things are inherent in the form. And they’re common flaws in writers. Go look at your nearest online writers discussion forum (yeah, you know the one) and see what they’re talking about, fencing their way endlessly through meaningless nitpickery week in, week out, exploding like moldy confetti the moment anything really serious comes up. Who cares? But who can blame them? If writers could be heroes, pathmakers, changers of the world, they wouldn’t be writers. Except for the rare, unspeakably lucky few who can be both. Which I guess is why this blog post: my feeble effort to try and get there. I do what I can, I tell myself, but it’s not very much. Not compared to those activists or to Matt Dunstone. I’m too busy gazing into my own bellybutton trying to divine the universal truth. But the dream, the thing that lets me sleep at night, is the hope that of course on of these stories will be so fucking good that it makes people care, enough of them that, even though maybe I’ll never know about it, they’ll go on to chain themselves to trees and make heartwrenching documentaries.

The Monastery in the Woods [13 Mar 2012|03:47pm] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. I dreamed again of the ruinous Buddhist/Benedictine/Mayan monastery in the nonexistent rocky wilderness off High Street in Westwood. It’s been a long time. Awed visitors meandering through hilltop temples and colonnaded passages came upon apocryphal relics of their own past, worn objects invested with vast emotional weight from childhoods half remembered but never lived. A tyrannosaur-headed throne presiding over a room full of plaster skeletons with windows looking out on stony, forested cliffs. A white-shrouded dining room crowded with old books and toys, the air aglow with dust motes. A corked ceramic bottle in the shape of a precolombian idol, the effervescent drink within a swirl of heady beer and butterscotch liqueur. All of it carrying the atmosphere and reverence of a shrine. My father walked with me, quietly affirming the truth of these fictional histories, and I thought of giving up worldly pursuits, donning a brown habit like the holy men I’d seen, in order to curate and protect these mysteries from the encroaching world and those who would shatter their significance with questions.

Staff, Inkwell [03 Mar 2012|12:00am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. There is absolutely no use for a hiking staff in the flatlands except for playing wizard. I don’t play wizard anymore. Now all the muscles in my forearms and triceps are sore from forgetting how to prevent a fall. Satan’s Kingdom (recently rechristened “Sen Ki”, I wonder why), Westwood, MA A riddle: Why does one drill a six-inch hole into a granite ledge? Answer: To drop in a stick of dynamite. Whenever anybody wants to build a McMansion around my childhood home, or to transform a formerly reasonably-sized, non-ugly house into a FrankenMansion, they first must blow up some beautiful granite ledges. It’s been going on since I was a kid. I have not yet cried about it for the last time. This one, thank god, seems to have been forgotten about for long enough that I can now thank the Westwood Land Trust and Hale Reservation that I’ll never have to worry about it again. The original inkwell

February Herbs [29 Feb 2012|12:00am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Princess Pine, Lycopodium obscurum, so called because it looks like a tiny girl-sized version of King Pine aka Eastern White Pine, so called because its trunk is tall, straight, lightweight, full of pitch, and in the colonial era the king declared they had all been grown by God exclusively as masts for the royal navy. Princess pine is three inches tall, not a pine, and puts out little brown flowers like pipe cleaner tips in the fall. In the 70s it was endangered cause ladies gathered it for Christmas decorations. Now it’s everywhere again. “King Pine”, Pinus strobus Wintergreen, Gaultheria procumbens. Smells delicious when you crinkle it up. Indians dried it for tea. They use it in scented candles. Someday I’ll use it in mead.

I Took It All for Granted [26 Feb 2012|11:38am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Months ago I moved to the flatlands. You didn’t hear about it here cause nothing I wrote about it was fit to print. Recently I took a three-week hiatus back to Western Mass. I walked every day on trails I never knew existed, under (and up) hemlocks and pines I’d never seen, leaped streams and sipped from them without terror of gastrointestinal retribution, looked over cliffs I’ll maybe never look over again. I used to live here. There were days, especially in February, during which every year I’ve been here but this one there’s been two and a half inches of ice covering all the paths and bruises waiting at the base of every hill, when I never left my house. I took it all for granted. I’ve been reading Thoreau again. I’ve long considered this to be something of a mistake, since pretty much everything he said is what I’ve always already been thinking, with the same flaws, only he said it more eloquently and eruditely 180 years ago. I’m too influenced by him already, and I’ve avoided reading him for years. I loved him in high school to the point that teachers assigned me his last name as a diminutive. I hitched the wagon of my identity to his with no consideration whatever for the consequences, and the failure of a theory of Thoreau to function as a guiding principle for my existence deeply informs my own alienatingly close relationship with hypocrisy, my desperate-to-be-disproven agnosticism and my halfassed hedonism of opportunity. His writing is pretty much talking to hear himself talk, shouting eloquently into the aether to justify his own not-entirely-hypocrisy-free lifestyle choices. What could demonstrate this better than his legacy? Walden tries to sell its readers on the joys of a life of contemplative privation and near-total solitude. Now it costs $5 to park at Walden Pond and its shores are encased in chickenwire and netting to prevent the hundred thousand annual followers in his footsteps from trampling it into lifeless desert. By succeeding so well at making us want to emulate him, he’s made it impossible to do so except in the shallowest fashion. Still, of late I have found myself in need of him, warts and all: a validation, however guilty, of my way of thinking. I could quote him here at length year in, year out and cease needing to write a blog. I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,—I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. … They who have been traveling long on the steppes of Tartary say, “On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” … I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. … Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library—aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature. I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. —Henry David Thoreau, Walking I should add that, appropriately, I think, Walking is the very first book I’m reading on my new e-ink reader.

I Believe [26 Feb 2012|10:34am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. —Thoreau, Walking

SOPA/PIPA Blackout [18 Jan 2012|12:00am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. It’s amazing to see all these huge cultural institutions (Google, Wikpedia) standing up for freedom on the internet. And I’m happy to stand up with them (Weightless is participating too). However I am more than a little disappointed that there was no such uprising a couple weeks ago when it was time to defend actual individual freedom from the NDAA. I guess when they come to take me away, at least I’ll have the comfort of knowing Google is still out there fighting the good fight. Great. If I’d given myself a little more time to plan this out you’d see here one of those empty Anonymous suits with a skull floating on top. Ahh, hell.

God I Hope the End Is Near [09 Jan 2012|07:00am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. How many jokes/invocations/questionably ironic references/panicked remonstrances will I hear this year about the coming end of the world? When they’re talking about it on The View and the Nightly News with Brian Williams, it’s time to give up counting. How much more mainstream can a nutso newage conspiracy theory get? Consider Y2K. That apocalypse was about Jesus and Revelations; its poor conclusions and minimal research were drawn from the mythology of (one of) the world’s most popular religion(s). This apocalypse is about obscure blood-drinking deities last best personified by Hernán Cortés and a religion legitimately practiced by far less than 0.01% of humanity. Yet already the 2012 hype seems to have far outstripped the 2000 hype. Blame the internet, I guess. It was a far tamer place 12 years ago than it is now, that’s for sure. For the title of last bastion for shamanistic folkloric mythmaking on earth, the competition is hot between the internet and one tiny uncontacted village in the Amazon. I’ve already done all the debunking of the Mayan apocalypse I’m going to do on this blog, at great length and with much windbaggery, in posts such as Circular Time and No Apocalypse. I also have a little sidebar essay about it (as applied fancifully to the plight of the working writer) in A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2012, available from Small Beer Press in print-on-demand and ebook form. Instead I want to talk about how great it would be if there actually was an apocalypse. Read the rest of this entry »

Signal Degradation, Small Beer Podcast, HM at WFC, Suchlike [10 Nov 2011|03:45pm] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. I realize it’s been months since I last posted. My computer HD died sometime in September, causing me to lose a month’s worth of cool mushroom photos, Hen of the Woods, Giant Puffball etc, which I would otherwise totally have put up here otherwise. But it’s cool, no need to pretend like you noticed—who reads blogs anymore? I’ve been tweeting some, that’s got to count for something. Maybe I should port my tweets over here so the skull doesn’t look so dusty. Anyhow, I have not been idle in the interim. Weightless Books is tearing right along; this month we’re running an Apex subscription drive, 25% off, plus some freebies for participants and a game of Nook Tablet roulette. The Homeless Moon put out a special edition best-of chapbook for World Fantasy, which you didn’t hear a thing about unless you were there; it was all very hush-hush. We used the space octopus cover castoff from chapbook 4, I thought it came out quite nice. And, the real reason for this update, Small Beer intern and audiophile Julie Day has started a podcast series, the current episode of which features me, yes me, talking a bit about Weightless, a bit about beer, then reading aloud “The Hour of the Fireflies” by Karen Chacek, one of the stories I translated for the forthcoming SBP anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic. Which is a lovely story, a brief, crisp confection with a darkly bitter center, into the translation of which I put much effort, just so that you, non-Spanish-speaker, could enjoy it. So please go listen. Then in a week or so, I believe there may be another podcast episode wherein Gavin, Julie and I sit around on a late Thursday morning drinking beer and rambling about beer on tape. Fun! And that’s about it from me. I have another of my own stories upcoming on Pseudopod—I’ll let you know when it happens. In the meantime, be well. Don’t lick any toads you haven’t first positively identified.

“The Eater” at Pseudopod; Pink Lady’s Slipper [09 Sep 2011|09:32am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. My story “The Eater”, about the guy at the beginning of time whose job it is to taste everything and decide what will kill us and what will keep us alive, (which originally appeared in Apex back in July), is live today at Pseudopod! Pseudopod, should you have been unaware, is a weekly horror fiction podcast, sister to Escape Pod and Podcastle, a triumvirate I have been struggling to break my way into for quite some time. I love reading fiction aloud, and hearing fiction read aloud, and “the Pods”, as they are affectionately known, are some of the best places to do that. For a reader, I am lucky enough to have netted Laurice White. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet—will do so on my ride home—but I expect it will be great. Pink Lady’s Slipper orchid, Cypripedium acaule, mixed deciduous woods, Bull Hill, Sunderland, MA (AKA/e.g., the replenishing pitcher flower of legend.)

Watch Ridler [25 Aug 2011|03:25pm] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Jay Ridler’s first novel, a noir wrestling thriller (!), is up now at the Kindle store: I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this. Amanda Hocking and Konrath have been made much of (and have made much out of themselves) as the poster/tentpole children of a brave, new, exponentially expanding market for self-published ebooks, raking it in hand over fist, generating buzz and dreams and misconceptions wherever they pass. But they appeared on this stage fully formed. They were already successful, hugely so, before most of us heard anything about them. We can go back and read about how they did it (as much as they’re willing to share), but we won’t be getting the whole story, and what we do get will be all distorted by the rah-rah haze of success. (So, nephew/son/grandson/husband/cousin/brother, when you going to write the next Harry Potter? Bleh!) And by now it’s completely unclear whether what they did will work for anyone else, because the market they’re selling through is so new and changing so rapidly. Nor does it make any sense to compare them to grassroots print self-publishing successes like Christopher Paolini (and certainly not to Rowling), because there was barely any market in place for them to target/advertise to/gladhand. All of which makes me very excited indeed to watch Jay’s epublishing debut, because it gives me (and you, too!) the great advantage of observing from the ground up, from the inside. Yes, of course, I’m rooting for him because he’s my pal and I’m already vested in the whole ebook thing. But I also know (because I read all that stuff about Hocking and Konrath ad nauseum) he’s got a lot going for him. I know how much thought Jay has put into this. He’s a brilliant, lovable guy who keeps an entertaining blog and knows everybody. He’s incredibly prolific. He knows how to spin a yarn. I know how much heart he puts into his writing, and it shows. I guarantee Death Match will be fast-paced and gritty with a gripping emotional core. Frankly, he’s a better writer than Hocking and Konrath put together. Which may or may not mean a thing in this context. But it will be fascinating to watch. I can’t wait to see what happens–not just in the next couple of weeks, but when he puts out the next book and the one after that. Should you care to watch him too, Jay’s blog, where I hope he will regale us with further news of his forays, is at ridlerville.wordpress.com.

Permanently Unlost in the Infinitely Receding Forest [11 Aug 2011|10:16pm] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Where I live now, no matter where I stand or how far I walk, it always looks like the woods are just beginning beyond the farthest-away squat little fenced-in company cottage I can see. I can pursue them, but when I get there, they’ve inevitably receded to exactly the same distance as before. These days the actual forests have barb-wire fences around them and the skulls are decidedly un-mossy, so I dwell in forests of the mind. Justin has recently introduced me to the concept of psychogeography, which I gather basically demarcates any attempt to interpret urban landscape as the product, or the manifestation, of the internal landscapes of its inhabitants. I’m going to bend that a little to fit my own purposes. Or maybe completely ignore it, just fall back on the usual influences—Castaneda, Borges, Freud and Thoreau—under a different auspice. Outside my office window there is an auto-body shop. It’s ugly. It makes high-pitched metallic noises repetitively. I have undertaken the mental exercise of replacing it with various monolithic elements of natural landscape lifted from my experience: a lichened granite ledge shaped by glacial processes, a kettlehole pond, a field of wildflowers, a hemlock glade, a Yucatan thicket, a colossal zoomorph of the Classic Maya. It works, to a point. There are some landscapes to which that space just won’t lend itself, even in my imagination: the mazelike warrens of thirty-foot boulders populated by owls and deer and Polyporous berkleyii in the woods of Satans Kingdom surrounding the neighborhood where I grew up. Or, you know, any mountainside I’ve ever fallen down. But it keeps the bats out, if you get me.

Jack in the Green [11 Aug 2011|09:23pm] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Jack, do you never sleep does the green still run deep in your heart? Or will these changing times, motorways, powerlines, keep us apart? Well, I don’t think so I saw some grass growing through the pavements today. —Ian Anderson

Chapbook 4, Readercon, Beer, Updatey [08 Jul 2011|09:23pm] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Against all odds, there will be a Homeless Moon chapbook number four. I just sent it off to the printer. This year’s theme is a shared world generation ship, though I suspect you’d be hard pressed to guess that from the stories alone. We’re very different writers—it’s our shared hell-bent-ness that holds us together—and it’s awesome. As usual (though likely for the last time), I’ll have 200 copies to hand out at Readercon, and when those are gone, there will be ebooks on the HM site and at Weightless Books. Here’s a cover we decided not to go with: Space Octopus! Readercon, by the way, is next week, and I have a ton of stuff going on. My schedule looks like this: 11:00 AM Friday – What Writing Workshops Do and Don’t Offer. 2:00 PM Saturday – Three Messages and a Warning group reading. This is Small Beer’s Mexican SF anthology, which I hyped up at last year’s Readercon. I translated two stories for it and have read a bunch of others, all fascinating, very different, surprising stuff. 2:30 PM Saturday – Beneath Ceaseless Skies group reading. 3:30 PM Saturday – My solo reading, wherein I shall read my Apex #23 story, “The Eater”. I’ll also be at the Small Beer table in the dealer’s room quite a bit, and hopefully at Kelly and Gavin’s Kaffeklatsch, where awesome not-so-very-secret things will occur. This summer marks Small Beer’s tenth anniversary. I think there are t-shirts to celebrate the occasion. I have also brewed a beer. O it is an exciting beer I am having to struggle very hard not to crack open and drink. I wrote a Literary Beer entry about it. And then—even then, after Readercon, it still is not done, because then I’ll be at another reading on Thursday the 21st at the NEIA Library in Brookline for the new LCRW #27, which also happens to be coming out at Readercon. And then that same day I move.

Solstice in the City [22 Jun 2011|08:46am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. It used to be easy. I could just step out into the garden with my whiskey and corncob pipe of a steamy midsummer night, maybe fiddle about a bit with the maize god statuettes guarding the tomatoes, look up across the hazy cornfields at King Philip’s Rock and pour out a bit of libation to the turning wheel. Instead, I spent the moments surrounding midnight wandering the side streets east of a walled-off Boston Common, looking up past the evocative rootlike patterns of plinths and facades at the starless sky, smelling the smells of stir-fry and subway exhalations, marveling at the thirty kinds of not-English I heard from passersby. Here’s this new blog Justin led me to, Next Nature, that deals with the unpredictable “natural” phenomena which arise from human culture. Fascinating stuff. I love this: Our technological environment becomes so complex we start to relate to it as a nature of its own Gray Catbird, Dumetella carolinensis, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, MA Happy Solstice, wherever you are.

Broken My Fairy Circle Ring [16 Jun 2011|09:36am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Conifer mulch under hemlocks, Hemlock Hill, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, MA. I’m not going to be able to positively identify the species… best guess is the deadly Galerina marginata. O I am so neglectful of posting…these are from the end of May, nearly a month ago. I’d say I promise to get better, but it’s busy times. No dancing in fairy rings for me, not these days. Not that I’d do that. It would hurt the mushrooms. Someone has drained the colour from my wings Broken my fairy circle ring And shamed the king in all his pride Changed the winds and wronged the tides Mother mercury Look what they’ve done to me I cannot run I cannot hide —Freddie Mercury, “My Fairy King”

The Ritual of the Mountain [02 May 2011|12:00am] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Sitting through my semi-annual Catholic mass the other Easter Sunday, I thought about ritual. In some ways, it seems a silly thing to do–the same thing, over and over. But we all do it. We all have rituals: religious or not, spiritual or not, whether it’s watching The Princess Bride for the umpteen thousandth time and struggling not to say every line along with the actors or lurching out of bed and blearily assembling the material components for a cup of tea. A ritual is a benchmark, a means for acknowledging and measuring change by observing something that doesn’t change. A ritual is also something you gain some emotional benefit from–otherwise you wouldn’t keep doing it. I have climbed a lot of mountains. Not as many as some, not enough. But I’ve climbed my share. And there is absolutely a ritual to it, though I’m only really becoming conscious of it now. It goes like this. Get up early, full of mixed dread and anticipation. Assemble what you think you’ll need to carry with you, then cull it down. The more you carry, the slower you’ll go, the harder it will be. Bring what’s essential, leave everything else. On the way to the trail, be aware of the ease of your conveyance. Shortly, by choice, you won’t be able to rely on it. At the beginning, move too quickly, tire yourself out prematurely. Rest. Tire yourself out again. Repeat until you settle into a rhythm. Time your breaths, count your heartbeats. Sing songs in your head–only the ones with repetitive riffs, those to which you remember almost all the words, and preferably those with relevant lyrics. Knocking on Heaven’s Door has always been a favorite of mine. Remember to look up from the trail from time to time–but not for too long. The higher you climb, the more careful of your footing you must be. Rationalize the exertion required. Are you a third of the way? Halfway? Three quarters of the way? At the peak, drop everything you brought with you and stare empty-minded into space for as long as it takes for your pulse to subside. Close your eyes and point yourself at the sun. Eat any food you carried with you. It will stick in your throat, but taste different from all other food you’ve eaten since the last time you stood on a peak. Drink water. Relive the ascent in your head in preparation for the return. Resist the urge to fall asleep. Think how far away the world is, how here you are, without all of it, still alive. All that stuff you left behind–you didn’t need it, even though you’re already missing it, already anticipating the moment when it will be returned to you. As you begin to descend, favor your ankles and knees. They’ll turn rubbery soon, you’ll risk falling. You’ll fall. By the time you get down, you’ll be sticky, dirty, so tired you’ll be barely in control of your extremities. The view from the summit will flash before your eyes when you blink. Stumble back to your conveyance. If you’re not driving, it’s okay to sleep. Stop somewhere along the way to eat a ridiculous meal, more copious and more rich than anything you’re used to. Consider it the first step in piling back on all that stuff you left behind. When you get home, shower. The dust and sweat and bits of stick and pine needle and sap and dead bugs that slough off down the drain–that’s your old self. Step out from under the stream. You’re renewed. This is the tallest mountain I’ve ever climbed: Volcán Santa María, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 12,375 feet. Santa Maria has been dormant since 1902. The smoldering protrusion on its left flank is Santiaguito, 8,500 feet, which began forming in 1922 and has erupted every few years or so since. The rocky cut in the foreground is the path of the pyroclastic mudflow from an eruption in 2008. Variations on the ritual: I got up at 4:15 AM. Venus and Orion were in the sky as we started hiking. I could barely see my feet. Our guide was Edgar, a 21-year-old, four-foot-tall Mayan cabbage farmer who does this once a week. There were hummingbirds everywhere, hundreds of them, sucking nectar from trumpetlike clusters of red flowers, shooting up into the heavens above the slopes and then diving madly, according to Edgar, for the pure joy of it. The locals, of the Mayan and Christian religions alike, consider this mountain sacred. We didn’t see practically anyone on the way up–it was too early–but at the peak, panting for breath and incoherent with altitude giddiness, we found altars of calla lilies and an old, old man with his wife and daughter singing laments, burning incense, importuning the saints. On the way down, there were scores of them, carrying offerings of flowers, food, huge jugs of orange soda. The boys stopped to congratulate us and shake hands. The adults looked suspicious. All of them indiscriminately tossed away their trash on the slopes of the mountain–water bottles, plastic packages of toasted corn nuts, chips, gummy candies, tissues. This saddened Edgar to no end–that people who purportedly love this mountain so much, even to the point of considering it holy, don’t have enough respect for it not to cover it with trash. For years he’s been trying to convince them to stop, organizing teams of foreigners to pick up trash thrown by his own people. But he’s young and idealistic, and his elders don’t seem much inclined to listen. So my sisters and I collected trash, filling up about a dozen plastic grocery bags in the course of our descent. We tried to help brainstorm solutions, but it’s a hard thing–there’s no way to get the word out. They speak lots of different dialects. Many don’t know a common tongue. Most don’t know how to read. My sister El Nubo, who works with community radio stations (about the only form of mass communication that works out here), said she’d try to help him get out some PSAs over the airwaves. I hope it works. The Central American volcanic arc, looking east from Santa Maria.

Soma [04 Apr 2011|10:54pm] Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there. Pardon a short hiatus from the Guatemalan ramblings while I dig myself out from under this pile of work. In the meantime…. The word “soma” came into Sanskrit from some even more ancient Indo-European root tongue. I’ve seen it translated as “flesh of the gods”; it referred to a sacred ritual drink of the Vedic culture in the third millennium B.C. Little is known about it except that it was made from an eponymous and equally unknown plant, but I think it can safely be assumed to have been a psychotic doom hallucinogen of some sort. Occasionally I’ve come across the titillating but unsupported speculation that soma might have been Amanita muscaria. The Olmecs held a certain mushroom sacred too. These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night. Or at least give me interesting dreams. And sometimes they work their way into my fiction. This month’s Apex Magazine #23, edited by the fabulous Catherynne Valente, features a rather dark story of mine about the beginning of time, “The Eater”, in which soma plays a passing role. Should you care to try it out, there’s a teaser here on the Apex site. Get the whole thing in print through the Apex store or in ebook form from none other than Weightless Books.

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