Sixteen years ago today, on Cinco de Mayo 2008, I was hanging out at the local Clicks where I shot 9-ball on a pool league. I went to the bar for a refill and found a twenty-dollar bill on the ground. The only other person around was the woman sitting at the bar, so I asked her if she was missing any cash. She wasn’t, so I put the twenty on the bar and ordered a round for both of us.
She later told me she thought I was lying about finding the money as an excuse to hit on her. Maybe after sixteen years of my sticking to the original story, she might believe me.
Anyway, there was a simple melodic idea in D Major I would play on acoustic guitar when I stayed at her place. At the time, she had trouble sleeping — and no one needs to tell me what it’s like dealing with sleep disorders. But when I’d play guitar, she would peacefully drift away. Even when I was playing absolutely insane shit on my electric Ibanez Iceman at three in the morning, it was like a tranquilizer.
I took the first idea and added a second bit in E minor, which became the first part, and I experimented with looping both parts, adding multiple layers to the loops, and even running them backwards using the Boss RC-20XL pedal I used to go nuts with. And that was Gina’s Place.
One afternoon, in my livingroom jam studio in Phoenix, I switched on a single microphone and made the only surviving recording of the piece. I opened the windows and doors to capture the ambient sound of the rainstorm that had kicked up out of nowhere. The result is my favorite single-take improvisation that never got a studio-quality recording. The timing on the E minor loop is imperfect, the overall warbly quality sounds like warped magnetic tape, and the performance is obviously off the cuff.
But it was an awesome rainstorm, and I had a blast playing a duet with it. Near the end of the recording, the sun has come out and is pouring through the windows.
Iron Man #215 and 216 hit the magazine rack at my local Walgreens in 1986 when I was thirteen. I’d only recently become interested in the series due to the stunning covers and interior art by the late Mark “Doc” Bright in issues 205 through 208. Then came some fill-in issues by various writers and artists I didn’t find especially interesting, and I basically gave up on Iron Man.
Issue 215 turned all that around.
Hyped on the cover as the beginning of “A New Era of Greatness”, issue 215 brought back not only Mark Bright as a regular artist, but the creative team of scripter David Michelinie and inker Bob Layton — the duo that co-plotted a now-legendary Iron Man run beginning in the late 1970s that hit its high points with John Romita, Jr. penciling. We’re talking about a multi-year run that included the critically acclaimed “Demon in a Bottle” story about alcoholism, a crossover with Hulk and the Scott Lang version of Ant Man, and the story where Iron Man and Dr. Doom traveled back in time and formed an alliance in the days of Arthurian legends.
The hype on 215’s cover was no lie. Reuniting Michelinie and Layton while bringing back Mark Bright’s penciling talents kicked off a storyline now called “Stark Wars” in collected editions, but more commonly known to Iron Fans as an epic that culminated in the eight-part “Armor Wars”.
Nearly forty years after they first made their way into my eager little hands, these stories don’t rock my world as hard as they once did. These days, I’m reading them from a different perspective. But one thing is for sure: They made such a massive impression on a younger me that I ended up stealing story ideas from them as recently as last year.
In my story “Falling Objects”, which now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, I realized after finishing the story that I’d lifted the following ten ideas directly from these two issues.
1) The main character and best friend go to a space station.
2) There is a battle involving projectile weapons on the space station.
3) The space station is overrun with a biological menace.
4) The characters barely escape the biological menace with their lives.
5) The space station is destroyed.
6) The characters’ escape involves one of them putting on a spare armored suit before leaving the station.
7) The escape involves recklessly descending to a nearby planet.
8) During re-entry to the planet’s atmosphere, the spare suit begins to burn — and the occupant of the suit does, too.
9) The re-entry ends on an urban rooftop.
10) The wearer of the spare suit ends up in a hospital with severe burns.
So much for originality! It turns out that reading comic books as a teenager really does warp your mind — forever!
One final thing I find amusing about issue 215 is how the creative team tried to make Tony Stark sexy in a way that we usually see applied to female characters in pop culture. Tony’s first scene involves his receiving a clue that his red-and-white armor is killing him. But as he ponders this on the drive home, a pair of women are checking him out and discussing how hot he is.
After he gets home, Tony provides a gratuitous shower scene that has become such an obnoxious cliché for female characters in science fiction — and pretty much any other genre.
I don’t have any objections to bathing, nudity, or enjoying photos of hot naked babes slathered with soap bubbles while I sip my morning coffee — but I am so damn tired of seeing male writers put female characters into showers for no reason other than a lame attempt at soft-core porn. Seeing the sex-object tables turned on Tony Stark is more hilarious to me now than I could have appreciated in 1986.
And what a way to herald a new era of greatness! Thank you for taking this walk down memory lane with me and reminiscing about vintage superhero comics. A lot of what today’s Iron Fans enjoy about the character can be traced back to the groundwork laid by Michelinie, Layton, Romita, and Bright — and the stories have proven to be an ongoing source of creative inspiration.
Don’t tell Chris, but I’ve been modifying some of the best postcards I’ve received over the many years of Martian blogging to bring him a few laughs and possibly WTF moments now that he lives a bazillion and a half miles away in the mysterious lands of Scandinavia.
When I was in grade school, Chris was one of my best friends. We lived on the same school-bus route, and he wasn’t afraid to stand up to the white-trash bullies who made my daily rides a living hell. Chris and I lived on opposite sides of Mockingbird Park, so we would often meet up and hang out in a totally random way that might seem odd to kids today in the age of cell phones, social media, and getting a million notifications up the wazoo about what your pals are doing. It was a different era, when you could ride your bike over to your friend’s house unannounced and knock on the door, and maybe they weren’t even home or maybe you could kill a couple hours reading comic books together and listening to the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album on cassette tape when they were still an underground thing.
Anyway, Chris got married and moved to Finland ages ago, then he became a single dad to a son he has absolutely hilarious adventures with. But like a lot of us Gen-Xers in our fifties now, he’s fallen out of touch with most of our old high-school buddies. Hell, some of our old friends aren’t even alive anymore. So, I recently bought a sheet of USPS International Postcard Stamps and started sending him re-worked versions of some of my favorite postcards I’ve received over the years and have been hoarding in the Martian Archives.
I don’t speak a word of Finnish, so I hope Google Translate hasn’t fed me any totally offensive phrases that will get my modified postcards banned. But you know what? Being banned in Finland would be fucking awesome. When was the last time your mail was banned from an entire nation? Never?
Before Chris moved to Finland, I bought a box of comics from him, including some amazing issues of Weird War Tales and Green Lantern I featured here years ago. I kept the things I couldn’t live without, scanned a whole hell of a lot of pages, and sold the rest on eBay to more than make back the cost of the original purchase.
You don’t know Chris, but he was just about the coolest guy you could hope to meet in grade school, a good friend all the way through high school, perpetually hilarious, and a pretty awesome dad. I hope he gets my postcards, because I don’t know what the hell happens to them after I slap on an International Stamp and toss them into the mailbox.
On 8 April 2024, Georgia got to see about 85 percent coverage of what was a total solar eclipse in some parts of the USA. Despite using a special cover for the lens of my phone’s camera, I did not get any good shots of the sun itself. But the tree in the front yard made lots of truly trippy shadows. And I got a plate of brownies!
I was outside about an hour before maximum coverage and noticed one of the neighbor ladies on her porch, shielding her eyes with one hand and squinting at the sky. I said, “Hey, neighbor. Don’t look at it without these.” I offered her the glasses I got for last October’s eclipse at the Athens public library. Then she went inside to get her mother. More neighbors saw us gawking directly at the sun, so they came over to join us and pass around the glasses. It was a fun way to meet three or four generations of mothers and daughters.
And right around the moment of maximum coverage, the little girl returned to our impromptu eclipse party with a plate of brownies for me — which I immediately began devouring before realizing the moment might be photo-worthy.
Now I know you barely glanced at the photo, so look again. In the center of the shadow, there is a tiny crescent of light. That’s the eclipse, baby! It might not be the best eclipse picture ever taken, but it’s definitely a contender for the tiniest. While my glasses were being borrowed, I’d whipped up a pinhole camera — more like a pinhole lens, really, as I didn’t build a whole contraption around the single piece of cardboard with the hole in it.
The portable lens allowed me to project the sun onto pretty much anything: the porch railings, the electric utility box in the yard, a plate of brownies, and even the palm of my hand. I have now held the sun in the palm of my hand and will add that to my list of noteworthy accomplishments — and maybe the nice lady next door will email me the photo she took of it.
By the way, did you notice the brownies have star-shaped sprinkles on them? Absolutely stellar.
If you’re following developments in AI-generated art, then you’re familiar with the negative criticisms: AI is garbage. AI is racist. AI is plagiarism. AI is putting artists out of business. In the face of such backlash—all of which I take seriously—why would I even consider using AI to generate illustrations for my latest book?
The only criticism that might actually hurt my feelings is that my decisions are putting artists out of business. The reality is that Gods of Titanand Other Tales generated more income for other artists than any of my previous works, because I hired a professional comic-book illustrator to draw a six-page story that’s included in the book, and we plan to work together again in the near future. And in The Second Omnibus, there’s another six-page comic-book story I paid an old friend to draw, plus I hired a talented young artist from the Philippines for the cover illustration.
In my work as an editor of other people’s books, I’ve referred several projects to a UK-based artist who does excellent book cover design, original illustrations, and maps. I’ve also used Shutterstock to get images for several of my own books, and though I can’t imagine the artists get paid much for the image licensing, I have to assume that if the scenario was completely worthless to them, then they wouldn’t have a relationship with Shutterstock.
It’s also worth considering that, as far as my fiction series and most of my other books go, I am the artist. My interiors and covers have often featured my original drawings and paintings, logo designs, and cover designs. So who would I be putting out of business—myself?
With that context in mind, I enjoyed playing with AI to add some visual flair to the latest book. I got images I thought were pretty cool for the chapters and cover, far more than I had the time or skill to draw or paint on my own, and within my limited production budget. It wasn’t like anyone else was going to get paid for illustrating the book. It was either AI or me or nobody.
While exploring this relatively new technology, I learned a lot through research and reading and discussions with other creative types, and thought more about the implications of AI than I would have otherwise. It’s been a recurring topic on this blog in the two years I’ve been working on Gods of Titan.
I also found ways to use AI that would help the artists I’ve employed or referred to. By playing with the robots and feeding them concepts I was working on, I could eventually get visual results that depicted a certain mood, or color scheme, or scenario I was going for—something I could show my artists not with the intention of asking them to replicate it but as a springboard for stimulating ideas and inspirations, a starting point they could work from to do their own thing. Sometimes it’s easier for everyone if you can show someone an image rather than write a thousand words telling them about what you have in mind—kind of like taking a photo from a magazine to your hair stylist instead of trying to explain the haircut you want.
And as a writer and artist, I found ways to bounce ideas back and forth with AI image generators and chatbots to initiate a flow of creative ideas. This was especially helpful to me as I haven’t had a critique group to work with in a few years. And even if I did, no one wants me calling them at three in the morning to argue the moral implications of building a positron machine to send messages back in time. But robots? They don’t mind my weird insomnia at all.
Can AI be used for nefarious purposes? Of course. A hammer can be used to build a house to shelter people, or it can be used to bash in their skulls. Nuclear fission can provide electric power to an entire a city, or blast it off the face of the Earth. A tool or tech is not inherently good or evil, though its uses most definitely can be.
Finally, from the philosophical perspective of a lifelong reader and writer of science fiction, it seems natural to creatively explore a technology that once dwelt exclusively in the realm of fiction but has now become real. Incorporating a sci-fi tool in the production of a sci-fi book feels like too tempting of an opportunity to pass by! If I had a total lack of curiosity about AI, I would probably not even be qualified to be writing SF in the twenty-first century. When writing about the asteroid-mining frontier, how could I not be interested in the current real-life frontiers in space exploration, robotics, genetics, and more? Did you know a new aircraft is being designed to explore Mars, and that its name is MAGGIE? Meteor Mags would love it!
While I understand the criticisms and fears about AI, and I feel they are all legitimate things worth discussing and addressing through public policy and efforts to improve the tech, I couldn’t see those things as reasons to not take the robots for a test drive and see what they could do. The printing press might have put a lot of monks out of a job of transcribing manuscripts by hand. The camera was once feared as putting painters out of business. Desktop word-processing software might have threatened the jobs of typists. And on and on. But technology keeps moving forward, and creative people can move forward with it. The future keeps arriving with every passing second. What will we do with it?
Last week, a friend asked if I had ever heard of Jeff Buckley. The short answer is “yes”, but the real answer is a lengthier tale of cross-country travel, long-lasting friendships, and an incredible book that was more than twenty years in the making.
It began in 1998 with a phone call from Ann Arbor legend Arwulf Arwulf. Wulfie, as those close to him liked to call him, rented a room in his former house to me for many years, engaged me to fill in for him on numerous jazz-themed public radio shows at the University of Michigan’s student-run WCBN-FM, shared his massive record collection with me, and had me back him up with improvised electric bass or acoustic guitar in several of his spoken-word performances at local galleries and bookstores.
Apparently, Wulfie had been asked to offer a place to stay for two guys who were travelling not just the entire country but the globe itself on some kind of photography project involving balloon hats. But it wasn’t a good time for him to be opening his new home to visitors, and frankly he was a little sketchy on the details about these guys. I will never forget how he said to me, “I think they are clowns—or something?”
As a twenty-four-year old bachelor who had recently obtained his first one-bedroom apartment and was up for just about any whacky adventure involving art or music, I told Wulfie to give my number to these guys. I only had a couch and some floor space that would fit a sleeping bag or air mattress for them to sleep on, but I was happy to share what I could.
That was how I met balloon-hat artist Addi Somekh and photographer Charlie Eckert. They stayed with me for about a week and were the nicest guys you could ever hope to have as guests. I was living in Ypsilanti, Michigan at the time—Ann Arbor’s low-rent neighbor and the birthplace of Iggy Pop. Neither Charlie nor Addi was from Michigan, but their mission to America’s “Third Coast” originated because they wanted to photograph people wearing balloon hats in the city of Flint.
If you follow national news at all, then you know Flint has had some terrible problems with water in recent years. But in 1998, it was more well-known as the location of Roger and Me, the film that put director Michael Moore on the map. Charlie and Addi also wanted to visit Detroit, which was just a short drive from Ypsi. They had heard—quite correctly—that the Motor City was home to absolutely amazing record stores.
I was working a day job at the time, so the guys had to visit Detroit without me. But they returned from their excursion with many treasures, including a vinyl copy of Jeff Buckley’s album, Grace. Fortunately, I had a turntable back then, and the guys played the album for me for the very first time.
Wow. I think the first thing we did after listening to it was to listen to it again! Addi and Charlie were great company, and we eventually parted ways as they continued their journey across the planet to photograph so many different people in different cultures—all wearing elaborate balloon hats.
But the story does not end there. In 1999, while driving around in my old Pontiac Sunbird and listening to NPR, I found out that a massive Jackson Pollack retrospective would be held at New York’s MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art.
Charlie had told me that if I ever wanted to visit NYC, he could return the favor and get me a place to stay. So I called him that same night, and booked a plane ticket the next day.
The exhibit was amazing, and I have posted before about the exhibit catalog I still have in my library. Charlie accompanied me to the MOMA, and he graciously took me to a few awesome places in the city. We visited the site of the big art piece that is on the inside cover of the Beastie Boys album Licensed to Ill. We enjoyed Turkish coffee and a hookah at an Egyptian café, both of which were new to me. And we were blessed with a jazz fusion set at the legendary Knitting Factory, where a random guitarist and his band on a random night of the week absolutely blew my mind. I had been playing albums from the Knitting Factory label on my jazz shows at WCBN, so being there in person was incredible for me. And the fact that the weeknight show wasn’t even well-attended suggested to me just how high the bar was set in NYC for even the most casual musical entertainment.
Years later, I tried to find the book that Charlie and Addi were working on. But it didn’t seem to exist, and I can find just about anything on the Internet. In fact, it wasn’t until relating this story to my friend who just discovered Jeff Buckley that I gave it another shot—and was pleasantly surprised.
Charlie and Addi finally got their book published in the last year, with a publication date in December 2022. Along the way, Addi has gained national recognition for his unique artform by appearing on many television shows, and Charlie has received numerous awards for his journalistic photography that has taken him on such perilous adventures as being embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
I’m happy to see my old house guests enjoying such long-term success, and it makes my memory of a great evening with them listening to an amazing album purchased in Detroit even more special. Thank you, Charlie and Addi, for giving me an awesome story to tell people so many times over the years, and congratulations on finally seeing your epic collaboration in print.
The cartoon above comes from Marvel Super Adventure, a comic produced for the UK market featuring black-and-white reprints of Daredevil and Black Panther. It was published weekly in 1981 for twenty-six issues, and the first three issues included iron-on transfers you could put on your own t-shirt. Some issues included the cartoon “Earth 33 1/3” by Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett, who also spoofed Doctor Who.
The strangest thing about this cartoon is that Captain American and Iron Man appear to be playing poker in their underpants. Are the male Avengers playing a variation of Strip Poker? This raises so many questions I am not prepared to address on this blog, but feel free to send me your fan fiction about it.
In any case, I was thinking about card games because when my mom’s family would gather for the holidays, the go-to pastime was Euchre. For many years, there would be a big lunch served at the large table for the adults, with the kids at a smaller table. After the dishes were cleared away and the smokers had a smoke outside, and I wandered off to find a stack of comics in the garage, many of the adults would play Euchre for a couple of hours. Candy and homemade cookies were had in abundance, and supper was generally a “help yourself to leftovers” affair.
The way I remember events was that the kids’ table was just me and my sister for a few years. Then more grandkids came along, and I eventually got moved to the grown-up table to make space for my younger cousins at the little table. But nothing signaled my transition from childhood to young adulthood so much as the first year in which I joined the adults for a few games of Euchre. I needed some help at first, as the rules were a bit confusing. And it wasn’t until decades later that I discovered what I thought my family was calling the “right and left bar” in their midwestern accents were in fact the “right and left bower.” But I soon got the hang of it and was doing well as a partner, and even understood when my hand was good enough to “go it alone” without a partner and score more points.
It wasn’t exactly a coming-of-age event for me, but it was close. And to this day, I’d rather spend family time with the structured activity of a game, friendly competition, conversation, and laughter more than anything involving a television. A few years ago, my sister got us the hilarious card game Exploding Kittens to while away the cold winter evenings. When Dad was alive, he and I often played Scrabble—and for several years after, Mom kept as mementos our old scorekeeping pages and the paper Taco Bell take-out bag that held all our letter tiles. I’m sure it also held some kind of world record for being the most re-used Taco Bell bag in all of human history.
I recently got a few new games to play with my mom and sister on afternoons when we don’t feel like going anywhere but just want to hang out. The most interesting is a game where instead of competing against each other, we all need to cooperate to win as a team. It’s called Forbidden Island, and two to four players work together to retrieve four treasures on an island that is sinking ever more quickly into the ocean. After a practice game to understand all the rules, it’s fast paced and fun, and an entertaining way to get everyone thinking strategically together.
So, whether you are gathering this year with family, friends, or the mighty Avengers in their underpants, may you enjoy good food, good games, and good company.
The small Ohio town of Xenia was where both sets of my grandparents lived when I was a kid. Xenia is kind of famous for the massive tornado that almost wiped it out in 1974, a year after I was born. The storm destroyed the house where my father’s parents lived, and I’ve seen photos of that destruction in old family photo albums. In the 1980s, my class at school watched an educational film about tornadoes, and the Xenia disaster was included. That day lit the first spark in my young mind that I wasn’t merely learning history; I was a part of it.
Grammy and Grampop eventually rebuilt their house. My sister and I spent large parts of our summer vacations there. One of our favorite memories is making ice cream by hand with Pop every summer. We used an old hand-cranked device that seemed—from a child’s perspective—to take hours. But the result was always amazing, and even better because we had made it ourselves, together.
Grammy passed away in 2005, Dad in 2015, and Pop just a few days ago. Pop was a veteran of the Korean War, and although I remember the shrapnel scar on his leg that you could see whenever he wore shorts in the summer for his route as the local postman, he never talked about his wartime experiences.
Perhaps he was from a generation of men who did not openly discuss their emotional pain. Or perhaps telling your grandkids about the horrors of war isn’t the most natural thing in the world. But in later years, he connected with other vets and began giving presentations about his experiences and supporting and counseling other vets. Having read his typed memoir of being wounded, the subsequent airlift, and his hospitalization, I can only hope that talking about his experiences was part of a healing process.
Pop also did beautiful woodwork in his shop in the basement—the only part of the original house to survive the tornado, and a place where my sister and I often spent hours with the toys stored there from the childhoods of my dad and his sister, my aunt. Pop made a ton of frames and glass-fronted cases such as the one that still hangs in Mom’s kitchen to display her glassware collection. I remember how excited he was to recover old lumber in the form of oaken pews from a local church that was shutting its doors.
Though my grandparents disdained alcohol for religious reasons when I was very young, Pop eventually began brewing dandelion wine in that basement, and grape wine from grapes he grew himself in the backyard. It had nothing to do with the fact that Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is one of my favorite novels, but that was one more reason to appreciate what Pop was creating.
This week, I requested that a tree be planted in Pop’s honor. I felt it was a fitting tribute to a woodworker, and doubly so since his grandson has printed so many books on paper. The tree will be planted in Michigan, where I spent so many of my most formative years as a writer, musician, and artist. Pop will always be with me in my creative endeavors. Whether they are paintings, books, drawings, comics, home-brewing experiments, or whatever, I learned something from Pop about the value of making things myself.
Cheers, Pop. Let’s make something awesome for them to remember us by.
One of the perks of my current location is being an easy walking distance from the Athens-Clarke County Regional Library which hosts a wide variety of free educational and social events for people of all ages. On the Monday before the October 14thAnnular Eclipse, I and a couple dozen others enjoyed an hour-long presentation about the history and orbital mechanics of eclipses. The speaker was Dr. Maurice Snook, a retired chemist who gives science-related talks all over town, including places like the Sandy Creek Nature Center.
Dr. Snook’s eclipse slideshow incorporated his enthusiasm for stamp collecting by including images of eclipse-related stamps from many nations, adding an interesting visual element with stamps which, for example, connected the study of solar eclipses to the development of spectroscopy and how studying the light spectrum of eclipses gave us the name of the element helium. He also shared his own beautiful photos of eclipses over the years, beginning with his first eclipse experience in 1970, which he photographed three years before I was born.
The icing on the cake was the big box of eclipse-viewing glasses freely given to all attendees. Under normal conditions, the thick mylar lenses are impossible to see through, and the frames are cardstock with instructions and warnings printed on the inside. For example: Do not use them continuously for more than three minutes. These ones came from the National Science Foundation.
The event was fortuitously timed, as it was my last night in Athens before taking a trip to visit my mother and sister. As a result, I had glasses for all three of us on the fateful Saturday, and we shared the experience of directly observing a solar eclipse for the first time. (I’m not counting the time in Phoenix I got a half-second glimpse by stacking three pairs of sunglasses over my eyes—a super-sketchy method I absolutely cannot recommend.)
We were a bit north of the path of the maximum eclipse effect, so we didn’t observe the full annular event of the perfect ring of light around the moon. (“Annular” means “ring-shaped”.) But even several hours north of the main path of the moon’s shadow across the continental U.S., we got sixty percent coverage of our nearest star. For about three hours, the sun became a glorious crescent, much like a crescent moon at night, but waning and waxing much more quickly. Even with the mylar glasses, the light was intense and strained my eyes a bit. I made it gentler by putting a pair of regular sunglasses over the top of the mylar ones.
Despite being “only” a partial eclipse from the Atlanta area, it was the awesomest solar-eclipse experience so far in my half-century on planet Earth. A big thank you to Dr. Snook and the County Library for making it possible!
Today was my second visit to the Tellus Science Museum of Cartersville, Georgia. I posted some pics from my first visit four years ago in 2019, but I’ve since upgraded to a phone with a better camera. So, the new gallery below showcases some of the dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts on display including giant bony fish such as Dunkleosteus, swimming reptiles such as Mosasaurus, and mammals such as Glyptodont.
Today was an especially fortuitous day to visit Tellus because the museum’s planetarium was showing a short film called The Edge: Pluto and Beyond. When I posted my recent thoughts about Pluto last week, I had no idea this film even existed, much less that I’d be seeing it a week later while the subject was still fresh in my mind. The Edge is an excellent presentation with dramatic visuals, lots of great science and history, and much to learn even for a writer who regularly obsesses over planetary documentaries.
It’s been seventeen years since Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet instead of a planet, yet some people will still argue the point. I suspect the main reason is that change is uncomfortable for most if not all people to some degree or other, and few changes are more psychologically difficult to accept than those that challenge our previous beliefs or things we were taught as children or young adults.
But a commitment to scientific, rational thinking and building a better—though never perfect—understanding of ourselves and our universe requires intellectual flexibility. When I was a kid, I was taught that humans have five senses, four areas of taste on our tongues, and only use ten percent of our brains. But these claims have long since been debunked.
We have additional senses, such as balance and an awareness of heat. Taste receptors are more spread out over the entire tongue, and the old “sweet, sour, bitter, and salty” model completely ignored the “savory” quality that has long been recognized in Asian cooking as “umami” and is enhanced by monosodium glutamate (MSG). Even long-held beliefs about MSG in the States have been debunked and found to be mostly rooted in anti-Asian racism. I used to be scared of the stuff, but now my spice rack is never complete without a bottle of MSG or its brand-name version, Accent.
And although I grew up on New Teen Titans comics of the 1980s where the villain Deathstroke the Terminator became especially awesome because he jacked his brain usage up to ninety percent instead of a paltry ten, that origin story no longer makes any scientific sense. This debunked myth was more recently recycled in the 2014 filmLucy.
Sometimes we can discard old beliefs because technology has made them irrelevant. I can’t tell you how many writers still insist on putting two spaces after a period instead of one in their manuscripts, because that’s what they learned to do on typewriters. I took a typing class in high school in the 1980s, and this was drilled into us. I also got a D in that class, which is a pretty silly start for a future author and editor. These days, in the era of digital word processing, there is absolutely no point in the two spaces—but you would be surprised how irate and resistant some older people get if you tell them they don’t need to do that anymore.
The irritation and resistance about Pluto seems to me like the exact same phenomenon. Someone told us thirty, forty, or fifty years ago that Pluto was a planet, and we’ll be damned if we let anyone tell us otherwise. We cling to this outdated idea and will not let it go without a fight.
Personally, I’m a big fan of the reclassification because it acknowledges some other super-cool residents of our solar system such as Eris and other semi-planetary objects in the Kuiper Belt. Eris wasn’t discovered until 2005, so of course it had no bearing on what I was taught about planets in the 1980s. But you know what? In the 80s, we didn’t realize many dinosaurs had feathers long before they took to the skies and became today’s birds. It isn’t like all human knowledge reached an apex when I was a child, and beyond which nothing new could be discovered.
Clinging to what was standard teaching in textbooks from decades ago makes no sense when our greater understanding has changed, and I’m even more excited about recent developments in determining the actual colors of dinosaur feathers based on microscopic analysis than I am about the latest dwarf planet. But just between you and me and the Internet, my favorite thing about Pluto’s reclassification is that it recognizes the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres is an awesome ball of rock on which many of my science-fiction stories are set, and I don’t see anything wrong with Pluto being as cool as Ceres.
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / Justin Cowart
And it isn’t like Pluto cares. On Pluto, a year is so long that the dwarf planet didn’t even complete a single revolution around the sun between its discovery, classification as a planet, and reclassification.
On the other hand, in the interest of intellectual flexibility, we do need to admit that our definition of a planet is one of convenience, not absolute truth. There’s a good case to be made that Pluto and its moon Charon are a binary system, and also a recognition that some of our criteria for planetary status might not apply in extra-solar systems that our new and advanced telescopes are discovering all the time now. Besides our current standard that a planet needs to be massive enough that its own gravity has forced it into a spherical shape—something true of Ceres in the asteroid belt—it also needs to have cleared its own orbital pathway of other rocks.
But maybe that isn’t always true in all solar systems, and maybe some younger planets in other systems haven’t achieved it yet, and maybe we should have some distinction between gas giants such as Jupiter and more rocky places like Mercury. Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is larger than Mercury and generates its own magnetic field—something even Ceres doesn’t do. Saturn’s moon Titan is bigger than both Pluto and our Moon. So it is no stretch of the imagination that in the vastness of space we will encounter objects of “planetary” size that blur the distinction between planet and moon, and we have already discovered numerous “rogue” planets that have apparently been kicked out of their orbits and origins to hurtle through space alone. Maybe some of them are old moons of even larger planets.
This natural color image of Ganymede’s anti-Jupiter hemisphere comes from the Galileo spacecraft. NASA/JPL (edited by Wikimedia Commons user PlanetUser)
The seemingly endless arguments about Pluto are something we can take several lessons from. One, we need to resist becoming intellectually and emotionally ossified by clinging to outdated ideas. Two, we also need to recognize that unthinking adherence to new models of ourselves and our universe does not serve us well, because that just leads us into a new trap and keeps us from advancing just as much as the old models. Three, all of the ways in which we label and classify everything are merely a convenience and not some absolute, unwavering truth.
The definition of “science fiction” has often been discussed and debated but never convincingly achieved, and my current opinion is that we can’t precisely define it because it doesn’t really exist. Maybe that sounds odd coming from a guy who’s been devouring sci-fi books, comics, and films for more than four decades, blogging about them since 2010, and writing an ostensibly SF series for ten years. I love science fiction, so how can I also believe it doesn’t exist?
The label “science fiction” is a lot like the label “vegetables”. What is a vegetable, really? It isn’t a scientific term for any actual taxonomical category of plants. Many things we call vegetables are really something else. A tomato is a fruit—or, more precisely, an edible berry of a plant that botanists group with nightshades. Botanists also consider a banana to be a berry, and the plant it grows on is categorized as an herb. A potato is a tuber, commonly considered a “root vegetable”. That label simply means we humans eat the underground part of the plant. A carrot is also called a root vegetable, though the orange part we eat is not a tuber but a taproot. Broccoli is considered part of the cabbage family, but that family (brassicaceae) includes both herbaceous plants (herbs) and shrubs (perennial woody plants that can be either evergreen or deciduous). Then we have spinach (a leafy green flowering plant), corn (a flowering plant often considered a “grain crop”), and squash (a specific type of fruit called a gourd that grows on a vine).
We haven’t even touched on the confusing categories of beans, legumes, seeds, and nuts. Is a bean a vegetable? Is a peanut? Is a pea? Is a walnut? Exactly what is a vegetable?
The truth is that “vegetable” is a term of convenience, not a precise definition. “Vegetable” is a section in the grocery store where you know you can find plants or parts of plants you can eat. Would your shopping experience be improved if all berries were grouped together, then you could proceed to the tuber aisle, and then the taproot bins? Not really. You’ve been trained to expect that plants with a sweeter taste are in the fruit section, and everything else is in the vegetable section, except for nuts that might be shelved with the snacks, and dry beans that might be shelved with grains. And if you want to find them all in the same aisle, you can head over to the canned-goods section where canned pineapple (a bromeliad) is just a few steps away from the pinto beans (a legume) and some tasty crushed nightshades (tomatoes).
To me, science fiction is like the canned goods aisle. The science-fiction shelves at the public library are where I can find, all in one place, stories about time travel, space travel, aliens, mutants, and robots. The SF aisle has evil scientists who want to destroy the world right next to rugged adventure junkies who use fantastical pseudo-science powers to explore new realms and rescue people. The styles and flavors of these tales vary wildly from one to the next, just like turnips and kale have very little in common but are adjacent in the store. But the people selling these things know that if you buy one, then you are likely to buy another—so they all get grouped together.
The caveat is that if these stories are told in the illustrated form of sequential narration, then you’ll need to go to the graphic novels and comic bookshelves where stories are grouped not by content but by form. I don’t imagine that anyone’s perusal of the comics and manga shelves would be improved by sub-dividing them according to genre.
In this sense, science fiction is purely a marketing term. Leaving behind the vegetable comparison, the most obviously comparable marketing term is one I came to loathe in my twenties in the 1990s: “grunge”. It’s an absolutely garbage term created for the sole purpose of selling stuff. None of the pioneers of so-called grunge rock would have used that label to define themselves. Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, and Melvins were in no way grunge bands—until somebody in a marketing department decided they were, because that could help the record labels sell a bunch of other bands.
The film 1991: The Year Punk Broke is probably the best place to start for those of you who didn’t live through those years and might also love those bands. The result of the marketing mania is that now, if kids want to get into “grunge music” of the 90s, they will encounter all kinds of bands that have about as much in common stylistically as pineapples and kidney beans. Or Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and the indie time-travel film Primer. Grunge, like vegetables and science fiction, has never existed—except in a marketing plan.
So despite my lifelong love for science fiction, I don’t think it really exists. Like vegetables and grunge, it’s inconsistent and impossible to define. By brute force—like the questionable label “jazz” before it—”science fiction” groups together too many things that are vastly different in meaningful ways and which deserve their own categories if we want to really understand them.
But when we deepen our understanding beyond a superficial level, we learn that all categories are inherently artificial and simply convenient shortcuts. Is the egg-laying platypus a mammal? Or does it defy our longing to categorize it?
In the disciplines of biology, genetics, and evolutionary research, we see an increasing understanding of complexity that defies our old categories of the so-called “kingdoms” of living beings I learned in the 1980s. When I was in elementary school, there were five kingdoms. Now, thanks to more detailed genetic analysis, we are realizing that our earlier classification system was too simple.
Maybe you don’t care about all this, but it’s a meaningful question for me because when I make my books available for sale, one of the first things I need to do is choose categories. Like it or not, I need to label and categorize my books for marketing and sales purposes.
I’m totally fine with my biographical, alternate history of the universe of Meteor Mags and Patches being labeled as science fiction. But the number-two category I prefer is Action and Adventure. My felonious felines are action junkies who embrace the tropes of both the action girl and the dark action girl while being ready to subvert those tropes at a moment’s notice.
But as a writer (as opposed to a seller), I’ve never had any interest in limiting myself to the expectations of a genre, any more than I ever did as a musician exploring every possible form of the art. Some of my supposed sci-fi stories incorporate historical fiction while exploring Mags’ life and the lives of her ancestors. And despite presenting the series as interconnected short stories, I love using novelistic techniques such as multiple points of view and multiple narrators, epistolary writing in the form of letters and articles and essays, non-linear storytelling, and plenty of satire.
Despite writing an ostensibly science-fiction series replete with all the tropes of the ill-defined genre, including giant insects, I’m way more focused on telling interesting stories about characters I’ve increasingly come to care about over the years. Genre be damned. Character is everything. Full speed ahead.
I returned some library books on Sunday — including Kate Darling’s fascinating book about robots — and noticed the bushes were full of pretty, pink blossoms. I like to stop to smell the roses or, on my walks at night, stop to marvel at the planets. After a minute of admiring the flowers and touching their petals, I realized I was inches away from several colorful spiders.
At first, I thought they were garden spiders. But the telltale extra-thick zig-zag in the webs was missing. So I am guessing they are joro spiders, a species from southeast Asia that arrived in Georgia about ten years ago and started becoming common around 2019. The Internet tells me they are harmless to humans despite having a venomous bite because the venom is too weak to hurt us and their bite force is so weak that they usually can’t even penetrate human skin.
I’m not about to test that notion. But from a guy with a lifelong enthusiasm for Spider-man and twenty-four years of having a big black spider tattoo on his right forearm, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when I say that spiders are pretty awesome. No, I don’t want them crawling on me or my bed, but that’s true about a lot of things I find awesome.
In fact, one of my all-time favorite pieces of prose is a 2018 non-fiction article about the life and death of the world’s oldest known spider who lived forty-three years, as published in the Washington Post by Avi Selk. Avi’s article became a major influence on how I approach writing about animals, and it begins with my favorite first sentence:
She was born beneath an acacia tree in one of the few patches of wilderness left in the southwest Australian wheat belt, in an underground burrow lined with her mother’s perfect silk.
The article just gets better from there. You’d have to be Henry Beston or David Grann to compete on that level of amazing prose. So don’t mind me as I stop to admire the spiders at the library and get a couple photos even though my phone camera sucks at close-ups. We’re having a moment.
September Update: Every time I go out for a daytime walk, I drop in to check on the colorful spiders. This week, I noticed the biggest spider is no longer there. We had some heavy thunderstorms recently — possibly related to hurricane Idalia that swept over Florida and the southern regions of Georgia about an eight-hour drive from Athens. Maybe her web got wrecked. Maybe she ended up as a snack for a hungry bird. But there are still several smaller spiders in the bushes, some with their molted exoskeletons dangling in their webs, and some of the flowers are now blooming in red instead of pink. It’s a reminder that nature is brutal, yet life persists.
October Update: On my recent visit to Mom’s place, we took a little nature walk in a nearby park, and I was telling her about these critters. She said she’d never seen one. Minutes later, our stroll took us to a patch of trees connected by a sprawling, gargantuan web with multiple layers. Near the center of it all perched a brightly colored joro spider whose oustretched legs would have been wider than my hand. Then another. And another. It’s surprising how common they’ve become, and they are remarkably easy to spot!
I wrote my second story when I was seventeen, in 1990. Every copy of it has long been deleted, though I recall my friend Dave was impressed by it. He also had aspirations of being a writer and had cranked out a couple of short tales that were heavily influenced by the transgressive aspects of Charles Bukowski’s stories, which he discovered by way of Henry Rollins, who remains one of my favorite performers both for his music and his spoken word, and for his dedication to self-publishing.
Dave circa 1990.
We were just suburban kids discovering punk rock in the mid-1980s and early 90s, when wearing all-black clothing was considered edgy or freaky instead of being the default uniform at Safeway and the Hard Rock Café. We weren’t smart enough to know what life was all about, but we understood that most of what adults told us was complete bullshit.
Some of my punk friends from those days ended up merging back into the mainstream, and I can’t really hold it against them. The pressure to conform in order to make a living and not end up on the streets is massive and all-pervasive. Hell, I even had some jobs where I wore a tie. One of my friends told me several times that the scariest thing about me was how I could pretend to be totally normal when I needed to. It took decades to carve out a different life for myself where I could be honest about who I am while still getting along with people and not starving.
My second story has been forgotten by everyone, and no manuscript has survived. But I recall the premise. A man built a machine he could plug into, and it would stimulate his mind and senses. His goal was to gain access to all kinds of fantastical imaginings that would inspire him to create great fiction. But at the story’s climactic moment, when he plugged in, the plan went awry. Instead of being inspired, he slipped into his fantasies and became so detached from reality that he never again wrote a single word.
The point was that we need to be in touch with real-life experiences to find inspiration and create great art. The execution was amateurish, as one might expect from a seventeen-year-old.
Looking back on it now, I feel ambivalent about that message. I still believe that any decent fiction writer needs a wealth of real-life experiences to draw on for emotional truth, but I’ve also experienced the power of plugging into fantasy worlds to set free one’s imagination.
Like many of my once-teenage friends who aspired to be writers and artists, I had this idea that we needed to go out into the “real world” and live lives that were worth telling a story about or expressing though music, painting, and other art forms. I suppose I still believe that, but I also know that approach will lead you into times that absolutely suck. It isn’t always romantic. Sometimes, it’s bloody awful.
Plus, real life rarely makes sense, at least in terms of a narrative. In good fiction, everything happens for a reason and is unified by themes and motifs. In real life, shit happens unexpectedly in the most senseless, absurd, and incomprehensible ways.
So, to young people who set out on a course of adventure to seek inspiration, I would never say, “Don’t do that,” but I would advise keeping in mind that the people and events you encounter along the way will not be what you expect, and you will eventually need to take the interesting parts and craft them into something that actually makes sense. Because on their own, they won’t.
Age might have something to do with it, though every writer moves through stages of life at a different pace. I’ve seen brilliant stories from people half my age. But I found I wasn’t ready to start with fiction until I was forty. It wasn’t until I had a massive backlog of real events and stories that I could begin incorporating and crafting them into something imaginary. As much as I tried in my early to mid-twenties, I was stuck in a mode of trying to take my real-life experiences and fictionalize them, and the results were lackluster.
Oddly enough, the events that made it possible for me to start writing fiction were contradictory to the story I wrote at age seventeen. It wasn’t until I plugged into a fantasy world that I experienced events that would become the particles of sand around which the pearls of my fiction series could form. But the layers of those pearls were often constructed from highly emotional real-world events I’d lived through and people I’d met along the way.
I understand now what I did not understand at age seventeen. Inspiration for fiction is not an either/or proposition. Writers need a mix of both real-world experience and fantastic imagination. Authors need a wealth of experience to draw on for expressing emotional truths about the human condition, but they also need flights of fancy—and unifying those two dimensions into coherent narratives requires a study of the craft of writing. Any one of those things will not be enough, but putting all three together just might get you where you want to go.
The Bing art robot has a lot to learn about chess boards.
I’ve been playing on Chess.com for about a year and recently learned how to save animated gifs of my games. So, here are three I won last month as Black using the Traxler Counterattack against one of the most annoying openings of all time: the Fried Liver Attack. It’s quite common at beginner and intermediate levels because White thinks Black will never see it coming — which in many cases is true, and can be absolutely terrifying when you are new to the game. White sneaks a protected Knight into Black’s position on the fifth move, threatening to murder either Black’s Queen or the kingside Rook, and the winning tactics for Black are not at all easy to find. But with some study and practice, Black can prevail.
All the following games were played with five-minute timers at the 600 and 700 rating levels. My rating in 10-minute games is around 1100, but I can’t yet think fast enough to get much above 700 in five-minute games. Still, thanks to the Traxler Counterattack, I won by checkmate in 12 moves or less in these games, which is a pretty good feeling after months of being destroyed by Fried Livers.
The game above was over in eight moves. It’s a textbook example of how White can be so focused on taking Black’s Rook that he completely misses the point of Black’s Bishop sacrifice and incoming Queen. Chess.com gave me a 100% accuracy rating on this one, which made me happy. But let’s face it, White handed me this victory on a silver platter.
Below is a nine-move variation which is instructive because my eighth move was an awful mistake, but White once again was so focused on taking my Rook that he missed my mistake and lost immediately.
My Queen on move eight handed the advantage to White — I only got a 77% accuracy on this one — but the moral of the story is that many Fried Liver players at lower levels don’t understand the counterattack and can be defeated even if you haven’t yet mastered it.
The game below is a good twelve-move example of that. On my eleventh move, I missed something even better that would have been a forced checkmate in two more moves. But White played a terrible response and immediately lost.
Despite my mistake, I still got a 96% accuracy rating. I can live with that!
I’ve also played several games that went on for much longer than these and involved chasing the White King into the middle of the board and hunting him down. Although it was my fault for missing better moves that would have gained me victory in less time — oversights that are super-easy to make under the intense pressure of five-minute games — I still won by putting relentless pressure on White with check after check after check until his King had no escape.
The Traxler is fun because you come from an apparently losing position, fearlessly sacrifice an important piece (the dark-squared Bishop), then completely overwhelm an opponent who thought he had you at his mercy. Who doesn’t love a victory for the underdog against seemingly insurmountable odds? That’s good drama! It takes repeated study and lots of practice to get a feel for the Traxler if, like me, you aren’t a person who memorizes millions of variations. But the Fried Liver is so common at lower levels that the Traxler is an indispensable weapon for your armory of chess tactics as you climb the rating ladder to new heights.
As an instructive bonus game, below is an example of a Traxler I played inaccurately and still won in fourteen moves. I missed an easy three-move checkmate on move eight, and a more complicated forced mate-in-seven on move ten. But thanks to Levy’s advice, I just kept hunting the defenseless White King. Off with his head on move fourteen!
Notice that on move eleven, we once again see White being way too focused on taking my kingside Rook. Sure, he killed the poor Rook, but it was senseless slaughter that gained White nothing when his King was in such imminent danger.
My accuracy rating as Black was a paltry 78% on this one, but White only got a 51%. That seems to be typical of Fried Liver players at lower levels; they aren’t all that great, so they rely on one tricky opening to terrify other chess noobs. Arm yourself with the Traxler and watch them fall.
At this point, I have about 26,000 words of six new short stories about Meteor Mags and Patches plus three thousand words of notes on the next phase of their adventures. July 2023 marked the ten-year anniversary of beginning the series. For most of those years, I published a new collection every time I hit about 20,000 words. But I really liked that the most recent book, Permanent Crescent, weighed in at about 60,000 words and felt more substantial. The hardcover edition looks especially awesome on the bookshelf, and two more volumes like it would make a lovely third omnibus when combined.
Plus, waiting to publish a longer work made Permanent Crescent feel more novelistic and less chaotic than the deluge of novella-length collections that came before. As a result, I plan to wait until I hit a similar word count—and in the meantime, I can scratch my itch to publish new stories by posting the drafts on this blog. I’m not getting any younger, and I’m occasionally haunted by the idea that I might suddenly die with unpublished episodes existing nowhere else but on my hard drive. So, I gain quite a bit of peace of mind by posting new episodes here for sharing, feedback, and tracking my progress.
The most recent six episodes, under the working title Gods of Titan and Other Tales, develop the years of Mags’ life where she works to create a utopia on Ceres in the aftermath of the destruction of her old home on Vesta and the subsequent revolution on Mars. The stories continue several ongoing subplots that began so long ago in Red Metal at Dawn: the fate of her telepathic mutant octopuses, what she’s learned from the genetic research tools she discovered on the day she met the octos, and the lives of the young people she also rescued on that day. The stories also advance the social and technogical progress Mags and her friends make on Ceres, the deeper meaning of something they discovered in the Ceresian oceans in Permanent Crescent, and how all this ties into Mags’ large-scale dreams about the future of the solar system.
But it’s been going slower than I anticipated. After the publication of Permanent Crescent, I had a mysterious—and as-yet unsolved—medical problem that laid me low for about four months at the end of 2022. I had only begun to recover by the time I left Arizona in December 2022 to relocate to Georgia to be closer to my mother and sister. While the transition went fairly smoothly, it was still a big upheaval after twenty years in the desert, and it took a lot longer than I expected to find a new place of my own—several months instead of several weeks, along with the adjustment period it takes to find a new groove after leaving behind everything you’re accustomed to for something new, and the loss of the collaborative support networks that helped me advance the series since I first realized I needed help getting to the next level as a fiction writer back in 2016.
I can’t complain, though. Everything in life is a trade-off. As Shondra said in The Martian Revolution, “I’m a firm believer that you can have it all in life. You just can’t have it all at the same time.” Sometimes my fantasy world needs to take a backseat to sorting out real life—and I am far from the first fiction writer to face that fact. Heck, Stephen King was horrifically injured and almost killed by a motor vehicle while taking an afternoon walk in June 1999, and he’s still cranking out novels. While I am nowhere near as prolific as King, I like to feel I am continually moving forward and making progress, even when it’s slow.
After getting soaked at the end of my afternoon excursion on Birchmore Trail, I stopped in for a set of clean, dry clothes and figured, what the heck? Why not check out Lake Herrick at sunset? It’s only a few miles from my place. The lake is part of Oconee Forest Park, and both are adjacent to a huge recreation complex for University of Georgia’s intramural sports. Woven into the landscape are several tennis courts, a mini football field for the marching band to practice on, and much more. I didn’t get a chance to explore the forest trails of Oconee, but it looks to be a beautiful place to return to for a stroll sometime when dusk is not swiftly surrendering to night’s advances.
Only unpowered boats are allowed on the lake, so it’s really a lovely, peaceful spot on a spring evening. Magnolias were blooming. A pair of geese tended to their fuzzy gosling between the shore and the trail, and people were stopping to hang out with them. My pictures of the birds did not turn out well enough to share, but I was glad to get some shots of the pretty sunset clouds reflected in water. At times, there was the kind of softly colored haze you might see in a classic landscape painting due to the recent storm and humidity. I hope to visit again soon.
The afternoon was 90 degrees Fahrenheit and oppressively humid, but since it was my last full day with my rental car from the weekend’s travels, I wasn’t going to let the weather stop me from exploring Birchmore Trail, which is part of Memorial Park. It’s only a few miles from my new place, but there’s no bus from here to there, and the roads aren’t pedestrian-friendly. I took the trail head from a dead-end residential street and was happy to find such a pretty, green place to walk nestled in the city. It starts at “The Great Wall of Happy Hollow” and winds alongside and across some creeks, and at least one of the many magnolia trees was in bloom with big white flowers.
I hoped to walk the entire trail and maybe stop at Bear Hollow Zoo, which is about halfway through the entire trail’s loop from where I started. But the humidity was insane, and the sandwich I’d taken didn’t agree with me. I did not regret my decision for long, because a couple of minutes after heading back the way I came, massive thunder rolled in. Rain began a few minutes later, and although I got quite wet, I would have been absolutely drenched in the ensuing thunderstorm. The rain was hitting my car so hard that it sounded like hail! Then after a torrential twenty minutes, the rain stopped and the big fluffy clouds looked gorgeous in the sunshine.
It was a good walk, and I look forward to visiting the rest of the trail in the future.
It’s the morning of my third full day as a resident of Athens, GA, so I am going to take a little break from unpacking and assembling shit, put on the kettle for a second coffee in my brand-new, one-of-a-kind Meteor Mags mug, and recap how I got here.
It begins with Fugazi. In 1996, I drove from Ann Arbor, MI to Georgia to catch as many concerts as I could by my favorite band: Fugazi from D.C. I’ve told the tale many times, and it now appears in the book Two Hundred, my published scrapbook of drawings, memoirs, poems, and song lyric from the 1990s and early 2000s. The first concert on that journey was at the Masquerade in Atlanta. So in January 2023, when I was staying at my sister’s house north of Atlanta and looking for a place of my own, I checked out the Masquerade’s concert schedule.
I was thrilled to see on the calendar one of my favorite heavy rock bands. King Buffalo has been rocking hard for a decade and recorded a trilogy of brilliant albums during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. But despite appearing on the Masquerade’s calendar, the concert was actually at a smaller venue called Hendershot’s in Athens. I bought a ticket anyway. Compared to the absolutely bonkers road trips I took in the name of music in my twenties, renting a car for a 2.5-hour trek east seemed both like small potatoes and an opportunity to re-connect with the more adventurous guy I used to be before spending my forties mostly isolated indoors bashing out the world’s awesomest fiction series.
An epic track from an epic album.
I left Arizona and moved to Georgia to be closer to my mother and sister, but I was having zero luck finding affordable housing in their neighborhoods or in any location where public transportation could get me there. My search began broadening in ever-widening circles. And I thought, “As long as I am not going to get the location I want, why don’t I consider Macon and Athens as possibilities?” They both have universities, which tends to make for a more progressive and artistic local vibe compared to other areas of any state. Macon must not be a total hillbilly hellhole if Adam Ragusea can enjoy living there, and Athens has a relatively hip reputation compared to the rest of Georgia. I’d been to Athens once before in the early 2000s but only for a couple of hours and wasn’t impressed, but times change and maybe it deserved a second look. I’d be there anyway for King frickin’ Buffaloooooo! So what the hell.
Amatuer chef and food scholar Adam Ragusea succinctly explains a few things about peaches, racism, and history.
Mom graciously offered to pay for a rental car and hotel if I took the opportunity to scout for my own place to live, so I reserved a compact car through Enterprise. A compact is the smallest size you can get at Enterprise, even smaller than “economy” size. But on the day I picked it up, no compacts were ready for me. So for the same price, I got a goddamn beast.
The guy at Enterprise called it “a little bit of a free upgrade for you”.
The Toyota 4Runner SR5 is a bit too much car for my taste. I prefer something smaller that gets great mileage and can easily get in and out of tight spaces. And I certainly don’t need six bloody seats. But the beast ran great, rode smoothly, handled well, had serious pickup, and was overall pretty fun to drive. Plus, it was my favorite color and went with everything I wear, and its voluminous interior came in handy for moving my stuff. 9/10, would destroy civilization again with this gas-guzzling monster.
The King Buffalo concert was good. I was disappointed that I didn’t have much of a view of the band — just the tops of their heads, mostly — but I got the last available seat at the bar, enjoyed a pint of a great local ale and one of my old favorites from Michigan, and was blown away by how the band sounded even more awesome in person than on album. Hendershot’s clearly wasn’t built with the acoustics of a loud rock performance in mind, but the sound guy did an amazing job with the rhythm section. The bass guitar and bass drum were vibrating my barstool, and the snare-drum hits cracked like lightning. The audience and staff were friendly and mellow despite the place being fully packed, and everyone seemed to be having a groovy time. I’m sure I will be visiting Hendershot’s for more entertainment and hanging out.
I spent the rest of my days and nights that week scouting Athens and applying for apartments from the comfort of the Howard Johnson hotel, and on my final day got approved for a place within easy walking distance to the county library, public transportation for getting to downtown, and a Kroger to get food and supplies.
All the comforts of home during hotel week.
The stuff that looks like weed in the picture above is Urb, and it is legal in Georgia for two reasons. One, it has a mild chemical called Delta-8 THC, not the Delta-9 TetraHydroCannibinol responsible for the “high” of marijuana. Two, the THC content is 0.24 percent, well below the legal limit for Georgia. By comparison, in states such as Arizona that have legalized weed for both medical and recreational purposes, you can walk into a dispensary any day of the week and buy stuff that is one hundred times stronger at twenty-four percent THC. When I saw Urb for sale at the local Hop-In convenience store in Kennesaw, I figured what the hell. You could probably get just as much of a buzz from smoking cooking sage: a mild relaxation that goes great with a pint or two. You can read all about this wacky product and why it is legal in all fifty states in a 2021 RollingStone article.
While waiting for my move-in day, I returned to my sister’s place and spent the next two weeks taking nature walks. The walks were a confluence of many things. I had wheels and time. I needed exercise after medical problems rendered me mostly immobile for three months last year. I had just bought my first pair of prescription eyeglasses for distance viewing, which meant I could see mother nature in high definition again after several years of deteriorating eyesight. And much like my decision to travel 2.5 hours to see one of my favorite bands, I needed to reconnect with a sense of spontaneous adventure and exploration I kind of lost in my forties.
Now my second cup of coffee is done, and I guess I should get some more things sorted in my new place before my virtual storytime group meets this afternoon to begin celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. After three months, my scanner is now unpacked, and in its absence I’ve accumulated so many recent additions to the big box of comics to share with you in upcoming weeks. Plus, I need to call an author to wrap up my editing of his third novel and move forward with producing it for print and ebook.
Huge thanks to my mother and sister for all their love and support during this transition.
In 2009, my sister visited me in Arizona, and we went to the Dale Chihuly exhibit at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix. I used to have a lot more photos at higher resolution, but many of my photos from the early 2000s were victims of a transitional period where I made some mistakes with photo storage. So, here are the seven survivors from that amazing exhibit of glassworks in a desert environment that was in full bloom for spring. The glasswork was gorgeous during the day but also impressive when it was lit up after sunset.
Smith-Gilbert Gardens features a network of walking trails that wind their way through all kinds of plants and various sculptures — some abstract, some representational, and some a bit of both. It’s an easy walk, and if you have a couple of free hours, you can see just about everything. If the weather’s nice, you could sit on one of many benches and just enjoy the serenity of this lovely place in Cobb County.
Mom and I didn’t do a lot of sitting on the day we went, because after several weeks of glorious mid-seventies temperatures for my recent nature walks, we had to brave chilly winds at barely fifty degrees. Still, the day was sunny and pleasant, and I swear we were the only two people in the park who weren’t employees. Although the gardens were not yet in the full bloom of spring and summer, we enjoyed many splashes of color and greenery, the gentle sound of water splashing over rocks, and being serenaded by a cardinal.
And what better song for gardens and flowers than the live version of Gardenia by Kyuss?
The Sope Creek Paper Mill Ruins are the remains of an industrial complex that was large enough to be a military target in the American Civil War. The mill produced, among other things, paper for the Confederacy’s currency, and Union troops pretty well destroyed it. The walls that stand today are a historic feature in a maze of walking and biking trails of various difficulty that offer scenic views of the creek and plunge you into the forest despite never being far from civilization.
I say “maze” because although the trails have many markers and maps posted, it can be challenging to get a sense of scale and direction if you haven’t been there before, and many trails intersect at weird angles. There is an easy way to get from the Sope Creek Parking Lot to the ruins, but there is also an easy way to miss it and make the journey much longer than it needs to be.
Plus, although Google Maps shows exactly where the ruins are, my portable Garmin GPS unit for driving had no clue. But hey, I don’t mind a little wandering and getting lost on the way to something scenic, or musical, or fun. It’s part of the adventure, and I was driving to random places all across the States for years before we had global digital mapping conveniences. I used to get so damn lost in states I’d never been to before that I’d have to stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and buy a paper map, and maybe ask some locals for help. Taking a wrong turn in the forest when I can still hear cars in the distance is nothing.
Anyway, I would rate this mini-hike as moderate, not easy, due to the fact that it requires some moderately steep uphill walking, and portions of the path are rocky or muddy (or both). Traipsing around the ruins and the surrounding creek rocks could be dangerous for the less sure-footed. I was here in the fall about eighteen years ago, and this time was the cusp of spring. I’d like to return someday when all the greenery is in full bloom.
Today’s tune from the psychedelic woodlands is Ruins by Wooden Shijps, performed live in the studios of Seattle’s KEXP.
For an hour-long, paper-themed musical adventure, crank this up:
PBN 118: Paper and Fire. January 2023. Listen or Download the MP3. 56 minutes. 128 Kbps. View or Download the playlist.
Getting to Toonigh Creek Falls involves taking trails in the opposite direction of the ones I took the previous time I visited Olde Rope Mill Park. But the specific trails to the waterfall aren’t marked at all, and it’s easy to take a wrong turn, get spooked by No Trespassing signs, or just walk right past the correct path entirely. Unlike some other nature walks I’ve taken recently, this was a fairly strenuous trek where the path was often covered with rocks, or roots, or mud, and it involved climbing over fallen trees and jumping over small streams with muddy banks. The trail also resembles the proverbial path my grandfather took to school during the Great Depression: It’s uphill both ways.
You need to walk under the bridge that supports highway 575, then through a mining area that is ugly and stinky. But just past the mine, you will be rewarded with a gorgeous forest path alongside the Little River. You might, like me, see some fish in the muddy water, a crane or heron, and a couple of deer. One of my wrong turns took me to a mud flat where I found mollusc shells, flowers, and deer tracks. Eventually, exhausted, I found the Falls, and though they are not the most spectacular falls in Georgia — an honor that belongs to Amicalola Falls — they were well worth the journey. I could have laid back on a rock and just listened to them for an hour, but I’d started out late, and both the temperature and the sun were dropping quickly. I’d like to visit again when I can spend more time with this lovely little waterfall.
Today’s musical waterfall appears in a gorgeous interpretation of Jimi Hendrix’s May This be Love by Emmylou Harris, with guitar layers by Daniel Lanois, and U2’s Larry Mullen Jr. on drums.
The weather forecast for the afternoon said “100 percent chance of rain”, but I wasn’t about to sit at home feeling bad that I missed a chance to see some scenery. Etowah River Park turned out to be a lovely place to walk for a couple miles despite the moderate rain that made good on the forecasted promise about 1/3 of the way through my excursion. The park has a pretty awesome playground for kids and also a built in ping-pong table and chess table near a wide expanse of grass encircled by a paved path. Take the path to a wooden bridge to cross the Etowah River and enjoy the view, and keep an eye out for little unpaved side paths that get you down to the riverbank. The paved path ends eventually at another lot which, if I read the map correctly, is called Heritage Park. It’s a mellow, level path suitable for a leisurely afternoon jaunt, and though you are never far from civilization, it’s quite scenic with an abundance of greenery. It also features a place to launch a canoe, complete with life jackets you can borrow.
It was a pleasant but overcast day at Blankets Creek Mountain-Bike Trails, and the forest is not yet in full bloom. Still, it was a nice place to take a 1.375-mile stroll along the Mosquito Flats trail. It’s a mellow, level, unpaved path alongside the creek and through the forest. Cyclists have the right-of-way, but respectful pedestrians are welcome — even if, like me, they brought a cheeseburger and a large basket of french fries to fuel the journey. Mosquito Flats starts at the parking lot and is a beginner-level trail for cyclists. At several points along the way, you can access much longer trails and presumably more challenging terrain.
For today’s woodsy soundtrack, enjoy the retro-psychedelic Secret Enchanted Broccoli Forest by the Babe Rainbow.