Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION

As we slide into Thanksgiving -- I'm already too fat, and now I'm gonna get fatter -- I realized that I have yet to finish off my Halloween Horror series for 2025. So without further ado, and because Spooky Season is a state of mind rather than a date on a calendar, I am leaving the last of the thirty-one reviews I pledged to drop in October. I do realize Goodreads is a strange place to review movies, but in my mind the line between television, cinema and the literary world is actually fine and rather blurry at that. I'm a big believer in the idea that readers and writers both can learn a great deal about the storytelling art from the tube, or the silver screen. And hey, this is where I blog, and I blog about what I like, so here we go:

Creature (1998). This two-part miniseries screams TV MOVIE but in its own silly way it's rather enjoyable...provided you unplug most of the higher centers of your brain. Another Peter Benchley novel adapted for the screen, this one pits Craig T. Nelson, Kim Cattrall and Giancarlo Esposito against a government-engineered "landshark" that escapes its Caribbean lab and begins eating hapless locals. It's ridiculous and could probably be served with crust and tomato sauce because it's so damn cheesey, but fans of Benchley's formula storytelling and monster movies may find it a good excuse to binge on popcorn for a few hours, as the land-shark monster is actually beautifully done via practical effects.(Incidentally, it's nowhere near as good as THE BEAST, another Benchley-adapted miniseries starring William Petersen.)

Phenomena (1985). Released in the U.S. as "Creepers," this is a hugely underrated Dario Argento movie starring a young Jennifer Connolly and Donald Pleasance. I don't really care much for Argento or "giallo" movies generally -- the are so violent they numb rather than frighten -- but this film is a terrific juggle of supernatural, slasher, and, well, just plain weird. It is the story of a young woman with the ability to communicate with insects who falls afoul of a serial killer prowling the halls and grounds of her Swiss boarding school. The story is really too bizarre to explain, but the sheer weirdness of it just seems to work, and hey, any movie that also features a really (and I mean really) dedicated helper monkey is worth consideration.

The Green Inferno (2013). I recently said of Eli Roth: "He's a step above a hack, but how big that step is remains open for discussion." This movie is his riff on the infamous found-footage 70s grue movie "Cannibal Holocaust," which created the genre (no, it wasn't "The Blair Witch Project"). Basically, a group of idealistic social justice warriors, trying to save the rainforest, ends up in the hands of a cannibalistic tribe who just wants to eat them. Although filled with the usual Roth hyper-violence (torture, dismemberment, evisceration, etc.) it actually has something to say about the complexites of eco-activism and the motives of some of the people in the movement, and the ugliness does serve the story, which in my mind is the measure of whether it comprises exploitation or not.

Drag Me To Hell (2009). Woman pisses of gypsy. Gypsy curses woman. Woman desperately tries to avoid her fate. This plot is as old as the hills, I literally remember hearing Old Time Radio shows recorded in the 30s - 50s with the same basic premise, and the Stephen King movie "Thinner" did it a lot better in 1996. Sam Raimi seems caught between his trademark hyperkinetic style and a more conventional approach, with the result that I was never sure whether this flick was a horror-comedy or a comedy-horror. Plus, the protagonist kills her own kitten to try and save her skin. How do we root for a protagonist that cowardly?

Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Arthouse films can try my patience, but this one spins exhausted vampire tropes into an unrecognizable blur. "Shadow" brings a delightful conceit to the castle, to wit: the first-ever vampire movie, "Nosferatu" was actually made with a real vampire. John Malkovich does his impressive best to play a director so obsessed with his movie he doesn't care if the vampire eats the entire cast. Willem Dafoe plays the vampire as a grumpy old crank, half-sympathetic, half-revolting, and all treacherous. A horror-comedy, but one with a lot to say about obsession and human nature and the wobbly line between art and insanity, this is well worth watching.

The Hunger (1983). As noted above, the vampire story has been told so often that finding new ways to tell it is damned difficult. Tony Scott does a credible job with this stylish, erotic tale in which an ancient queen vamp (Catherine Deneuve) can turn those she favors into vampires...but only for a few centuries, whereupon they age rapidly and horribly into living mummies. A play on the whole Greek tragedy of Tithonus, who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth, our queen consorts with David Bowie, her soon-to-be-discarded lover, but has an eye for sexy Susan Sarandon, who she wants as her next vamptoy. Creepy and sexy, eschewing nearly all the tropes (the vamps don't fear sunlight or have fangs, they just want blood) and even stressing some of the practicalities of having to regularly kill human beings (read: incinerator in basement), "The Hunger" is flawed but in its own stylish way, fascinating.

The Stepfather (1987). Terry O'Quinn was a hard-working, quietly successful actor for many years before "Lost" made him famous, and "The Stepfather" is fine evidence of why casting directors keep him on speed-dial. In this modernish horror classic, O'Quinn plays Jerry, a man looking to adopt the perfect family. He goes from town to town, moving in on single mothers who he charms into marriage, and then sets up house with them. Everything is "fine and dandy like summer candy" until someone in the family disappoints Jerry and upsets his notion of, well, perfection. Then he kills everybody with the nearest hammer, carving knife or 2 x 4 and starts the whole process again somewhere else. O'Quinn shines as the killer stepdad who just wants to be Ned Flanders but ends up more like Ed Gein. On the one hand he's a complete monster who needs to be shot dead immediately, and on the other, well, you kinda feel for the guy: if he wasn't crazy, he'd be the perfect stepdad.

And with that, I retire my Halloween mask until 2026 -- which, incidentally, is when Volume II of SOMETHING EVIL, my epic horror novel, comes out. The paint isn't even dry on VOLUME I, which dropped on Halloween, and which will be on sale (90% off!) from November 26 - 28. Consider it a Halloween treat on Thanksgiving Day.

SOMETHING EVIL: VOLUME I: BOOKS 1 & 2

Today I watched a video about life in Japan. The video was fascinating in and of itself, but what really got me was the comments. Here's a small but representative sample:

Everyone knows where to go, but no one knows why.

When I was younger, we were poor, but after years and years of hard work, I am no longer young.

It aint just Japan, it's everywhere. The marketing narrative has died. Nobody anywhere trusts their government, nobody trusts the media, nobody thinks they will ever own a house. People have just given up. When you take hope away there is nothing left.

Have you ever played Monopoly? There is a stage when your opponent has bought whole streets and built houses and hotels. You have not fun playing because you know you can not win anymore, but have to finish a game.

These sentiments struck me not only for the anguish implicit in the words, but for the fact they are indeed representative -- not of Japan, but as the one commenter pointed out, "everywhere" else.

One hardly needs to be a genius of renown to grasp that life is hard -- a bitch, if you like the word -- and always has been. Indeed, life in much of the world today is significantly easier than it has ever been in the history of the human species, and people are still miserable as all hell, which says a lot about us, or at least about "self-awareness," the thing which supposedly differentiates us from "lesser animals" and machines. The ability to think deeply, and to experience complex emotions, is as much a curse as a blessing if not moreso. But it seems to me that the misery referred to in these comments (and hundreds of others I have seen like them, posted from every corner of the globe) is more the rule than the exception nowadays, and this phenomenon is something new in my half-century of lifetime. As someone who experienced the Cold War, 9/11, the Great Recession, Covid, and all the rest of it, the fact that such cries of existential despair are commonplace is striking, because being 53 years of age, I well-remember the 1990s and the enormous optimism that drove them. If we view the 90s as one of those "long decades," then we can say they began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ended with the Twin Towers crashing down, and while they had their share of downs -- including a recession and a war -- what strikes me about them now is that we have never enjoyed a similar period since. The last 24 years have been a time of perpetual conflict, political division, and growing disparity of wealth; inflation and prices rise continuously but wages stagnate; ownership of property (once at the very core of American identity) is beginning to evaporate as a concept; extremes have become the norm and normalcy is now the extreme. Suicide rates have skyrocketed, everyone is on drugs of some kind, and loneliness is epidemic. As I pointed out recently in this very blog, we are increasingly faced with a choice between rainbow-colored neo-Marxism on the one side and a type of soft Fascism on the other. And all the while, millions toil in mindless jobs for low pay and then come home to cramped, overpriced apartments and order Door Dash while they Netflix without -- most definitely without -- the accompanying chill.

Some of you may remember that I devoted an entire blog to the subject of loneliness a few months ago. I was regarding it then as a thing-in-itself, but now I see that it is merely a component in a much larger problem grown epidemic -- pandemic? -- in this world, which is this: the world we knew is dying, but there is nothing to replace it. Our grandfathers worked for 30 years for the same company, got their gold watch, and retired on pensions that were as reliable as the tides, however modest they migh have been. The main desire of the ordinary person was to marry, own a home and die in bed surrounded by grandchildren. Nowadays all of these things seem out of reach, impossible. People shuffle from employer to employer like migratory birds, marriage is visibly dying as an institution, home ownership is a fantasy, and birth rates have plummetted in every First World nation.
Events have moved with nihilistic force, and in the wake of his social and societial nihilism uncountable millions drift in a gray void of hopelessness, numbing themselves with "content" and swiping fruitlessly on soulless dating applications. I can no longer watch YouTube (where I have a channel) without seeing advertisements for "AI girlfriends," a concept which ought to be amusing but is actually both terrifying and pitiful at the same time.

In the 90s, what struck me even as they unfolded was the idea that "we had won" -- "we" meaning humanity itself. The threat of nuclear annihilation had passed, democracy was everywhere on the march, and the economy was generally booming. The optimism I referred to was paper money, so to speak, but it was paper money backed by the gold of real-world events. There was a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction, of course, best articulated by the Grunge music of that era, but even this seemed to me a healthy thing -- a rejection of superficiality, materialism and status-seeking for its own sake. This music didn't say, "You shouldn't be happy with this" but rather "Why aren't I happy with this?" which is a distinction with a difference.

9/11 changed all that. 9/11 knocked us violently off our course and we never found it again. Never in all these 24 years have I experienced any real optimism or hope from people taken in the main. Yes, they have their moments of triumph, their personal successes, their vicarious political victories, but the trend is always in the same direction -- down. Boomers just want to die still owning their homes. Gen Xers stare down the barrel of the back half of our lives with no job security and no savings and a dollar that buys less every year. Millennials were sold on "hustle culture" that was nothing but a massive psy-op to turn them into donkeys for the billionaires and corporations they were brought up to worship. And Xennials, the first generation totally raised by the internet, now face being the first generation to be made redundant by their own technology: literally rendered surplus to requirements by the AI that is already taking their jobs away and doing their thinking for them.

What I see in the anguish of the comments I read every day is the anguish of humans who have lost touch with humanity's most important element -- hope. As the gentleman said, when you take away hope there is nothing left. Only the dull grind of existence. And existence is not enough. People, however unrealistically or foolishly, want to be happy. Whether they can ever achieve this state is an open question and often a loaded one, but the point is that the hope that they might someday be happy is often all they have to keep them going. Life, after all, really is a bitch, just as Langston Hughes said it was; and the fantasy of someday happiness is an anodyne for the pain of dealing with that bitch. Take the hope away and the whole rainy gray Monday morning slog through shit traffic to work for an asshole boss at a job you hate for trash pay, knowing all the while there's nobody waiting for you at the coffin-sized apartement you call home, and that life offers absolutely nothing but more of the same at best...becomes intolerable. Humans are almost supernatural in their ability to withstand punishment and pain, but this ability fades when there is no prospect of it ending and no point for it in the first place. We were taught as children that hard work would yield rewards, but for most of us, all we get is hard work; the rewards remain elusive, and indeed, as the years creep by, the promise of the reward itself is openly being reneged upon. "You will own nothing and be happy" is the unofficial slogan of the WEF, their vision for our collective future. Well, it seems they were half right.

In five days it will be Halloween, and to commemorate the occasion I am releasing my first full-length novel since 2023, Something Evil. As I write this, my long-suffering editor and pal, Michael Dell of One Nine Books, is toiling away on all the coverage, formatting and other details which are utterly beyond my comprehension, to make sure the various versions are up and running by the promised release date of October 31, 2025.

If you follow me here on Antagony, you know that I have promised (or threatened, depending o your view of my writing ability) to work in every genre before I cash in my chips and go to that Great Writer's Place in the Sky, and I feel I'm well on my way. My Cage Life series falls under crime / thriller / suspense / mystery and modern Noir; my Sinner's Cross series is historical fiction; The Chronicles of Magnus is alternative reality, dystopian, nonmagical fantasy or sci-fi, and speculative fiction in one shot. And my short story anthology Devils You Know forayed into the realm of horror. But note the word "foray." The thirteen stories enclosed in the book examine many of the darker aspects of the human condition, including the intersection of horror and humor we call "black comedy" or "tragicomedy," but they are hardly exhaustive. It was in the hopes of diving deeper into one of my favorite genres of both fiction and film that I wrote Something Evil, Volume I.

Now, to clarify before we go any further, Something Evil is actually two shortish novels, hence the "Volume One." It scales in at 300 pages. It will be followed by a second volume, also of two novels, and then by a third, which may comprise two or more. Whether it stops there or continues I have not yet decided, but six of the books in the series are already written, at least in second draft form. It's my plan to release a volume every Halloween until 2027, or until the story exhausts itself. So beware: if you happen to buy the thing, understand you are embarking on a multi-year journey. And as they say in many horror movies, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The basic premise of Something Evil is this: archeologists from an American university, excavating a ruined old witch prison in Scotland, discover a "bog body" in the peat marshes nearby: a bog body is a corpse almost perfectly preserved by the humic acid, cool temperature and lack of oxygen in the bog. Nothing about the discovery of the body makes any historical sense: the 400 year-old burial rite suggests both a ritual humiliation, an abiding respect, and a desire that the corpse shall never rise again. The so-called "Cipher" is shipped off to America in a containment unit for further scientific study. And that's when things get ugly. On Halloween night there is a terrible massacre at the university, perpetrated apparently without motive by one of the archeological students, and the few survivors of the rampage are deeply and understandably traumatized. Gathering almost a year after the slaughter, they resume their study of the Cipher, each nursing their own pain and grief and guilt. But no sooner have they committed to cracking its secrets than the perpetrator escapes the asylum to which he has been committed, apparently to resume his grisly handiwork. But is he really responsible, or is there another force at work here, something vastly more powerful, with an agenda of its own?

Something Evil is my attempt to combine the two major horror genres, slasher and supernatural, into a single storyline. It is also my attempt to populate a world with fully drawn characters who have depth often lacking in horror stories, where many characters are merely fodder for the madman's knife or the monster's drooling jaws. Although I began these novels before my time as a victim's rights advocate, one of my main goals was to delve into the area nearly all horror stories ignore: aftermath. Most horror novels and films either end with the protagonist dead or bloodily triumphant: we seldom get to see the months, the years afterward in which they struggle to return to "normal life" while battling their own inner demons. In the first book, we see our heroes at their pre-tragedy peak; in the second, we see their struggle to piece new lives out of the broken wrecks of the old.

Another goal of the series is to explore the nature of evil. This is a massive undertaking and it may very well be that I am inadequate to the task. After all, this is a problem with which mankind has grappled as long as we have had language, and perhaps before; who the fuck is Miles Watson to offer answers? Well, I can at least answer that: what I am looking for is not actually an answer to why evil exists, but what we believe it to be. I wanted to examine the concept of evil itself, in the spiritual sense, and then the way it manifests differently in every human heart. The villain of Something Evil does not possess its victims: it simply frees whatever inner darkness that exists in their souls. One memorable exchange from the 1985 Michael Mann movie THE KEEP (one of my all-time favorites), kept coming to mind as I slogged away on these novels, year after year after year:

NAZI OFFICER: What are you? Where are you from?
DEMON: Where am I from? (amused) I am...from you.

It is my hope that readers of these novels will enjoy them on both levels: i.e. as pure horror-entertainment, and also as a spiritual-intellectual examination of evil. But if that is too ambitious, I hope you just find it all, you know, spooky? The phenomenon of why human beings enjoy having the shit scared out of them is a complex subject, best explained by Stephen King in his famous essay "Keep the Gators Fed" (taken from his underrated nonfiction work DANSE MACABRE) but for my money it doesn't really matter. The fact is, we do enjoy it...hell, we even pay for the privilege. Maybe it's because, as King suggests, we need vicarious terror to both satisfy our primal bloodlust and release pent-up fears without actually risking our lives in the process. I dunno. What I do know is that if you've enjoyed my other works, any of them, you may very well find you enjoy these, too...even if you have to keep the lights on afterwards.

It's October again, folks, and you know what that means: it's time for your least favorite writer, blogger and YouTuber to watch 31 horror movies in 31 days, culminating, of course, in a final horror flick on Halloween Night. I've been doing this for four or five years now, and I see no reason to deviate in the Year Of Our Lord 2025.

Full disclosure: I began this campaign quite a bit earlier than usual, because I got tired of going into November still owing half a dozen movies. So as it happens, for once I am ahead of my own schedule -- considerably so. So without further ado, here's what I've watched as of the first week of the season.

Do Not Open Until Christmas (1984). This weird old British horror film pits a maniac with a grudge against Santa Claus against the London police at holiday-time. It's noteworthy mainly for its violently energetic absurdity and a couple of cast members I recognize from classic "Doctor Who." It did hold my interest, somehow.

The House on Sorority Row (1982). Sorority girls are a played-out megatrope for horror movies, but I really enjoyed this spirited flicktoon about a gaggle of gals who play a prank on their dragon landlady which goes horribly wrong, spiraling into yet more murderous wrongness. This movie deserves its small cult fandom.

Visiting Hours (1982). I don't know what the hell to make of this Canadian movie. Starring the redoubtable Michael Ironside, it also features William Shatner in a strangely pointless role as the beau of a female newscaster stalked by a relentless predator through the halls of a conveniently empty hospital. Too much plot armor weighs down a fairly earnest attempt at fright. It didn't suck, but it should have been better.

Happy Birthday to Me (1981). I remember the advertisement for this banger in the local newspaper when it debuted. How did it take me so long to watch it? "The Ten" are a gang of too-cool-for-school co-eds who have fallen afoul of a merciless and very inventive killer with a grudge nobody can understand. A well-crafted, well-acted story balances relentless violence with a gnawing mystery and a fairly fresh take on the "college kids getting slaughtered" trope so often found in these films.

The Initiation (1984). Despite an impressive cast, that features Daphne Zuniga, James Read, Vera Miles and Clu Galagher, this is merely another in an endless list of sorority-themed slashers spewed out in the 80s that features a bunch of bimbos and their boytoys trapped in a mall on initiation night while a loon with the usual hidden grievance hunts them down. Everyone does work hard in this film and there is a twist, but it's fairly forgettable.

Food of the Gods (1976). I watched this because the poster was in the lobby of a trailer house I worked at in Los Angeles. It's pretty fucking bad. A riff on an H.G. Wells short story, it's about a greedy corporation whose chemicals transform the local rat population on Vancouver Island into gigantic ravenous killers. Silly and low-budget, I spent more time laughing at the awful effects than covering my eyes.

Empire of the Ants (1977). What would horror be without silly monster movies? This entertaining piece of nonsense pits giant ants against a group of hapless investors trapped on a peninsula. The entertaining part comes mainly when they effect their escape, only to discover the ants have partners that walk on two legs.

House of the Devil (2009). This could have been a helluva movie. As it is, it is an interest-holder that never quite lives up to the promise of the first hour. A college girl strapped for cash gets a suspiciously large cash offer to babysit an old woman in a remote, creepy old house in the middle of nowhere. Bad idea honey. "House" does a fine job of building dread and suspense early, and there are some nasty surprises, but turns silly, predictable and portentious down the stretch. I call this type of film the two-and-a-half-star kind; just a half-star short of good. Still, it's worth a watch.

Kill List (2011). This ultraviolent flick is the tale of two killers for hire, one British and one Irish, who accept a contract from a mysterious employer to kill a series of people, only to discover their targets seem suspiciously eager, even thankful, to be killed. As their campaign of murder proceeds, they become increasingly baffled by what they encounter. Are they really the ones with the power, or are they being set up for something? It's an arresting and well-made movie, but even the director admitted the story is incoherent and the mystery without a solution.

Ghost Story (1981). Four old men are haunted, quite literally, by a long-ago crime they committed, and must come to terms with what they did before the vengeful ghost gets them all...and anyone else who gets in their way. I found this "small town horror" piece smart, well-acted and engaging, if a trifle stolid for a horror movie.

Threads (1984). Threads is not strictly speaking a horror movie, but it is far more horrifying than almost any horror movie ever made. A documentary-style depiction of what a nuclear war would do to Britain, it is even more devastating than "The Day After" in its no-holds-barred depiction of radiation poisoning, physical destruction, and societal breakdown on a massive scale. This movie is not for the faint of heart.

Alligator (1980). I watched this tongue-in-cheek debacle in honor of Robert Forster, a gentlemanly actor I used to encounter on my hikes in Hollywood. It's about, well, an alligator which lives in the sewers of Chicago after being flushed down a toilet as a wee nipper. The gator feeds on some plot-convenient chemically infused carcasses, and grows up big (36 feet) strong, mean, and well, hungry. You can imagine the rest. Forster plays a hard-luck cop tasked with convincing the powers that be that, well, there's a giant gator eating people in Chicago. It's silly rubbish, but undeniably fun.

The Car (1977). James Brolin versus a car from hell? Sign me up. A stupid riff on "Jaws," a sort of "Jaws on wheels," this is nonetheless a watchable low-budget flick which may have been the inspiration, of sorts, for Stephen King's "Christine." It's about...well, an evil car that runs people over, and the sheriff who tries to stop it. There are some very good set-piece scenes in this otherwise throwaway movie.

White of the Eye (1987). One of the five weirdest movies I've ever seen, "White" is about a serial killer prowling back-country Arizona who murders promiscuous women. It's one of those movies where the protagonist may or may not be the bad guy, and it has a distinctly Outback feel to it despite being set in the US of A. Dunno how else to describe this relentlessly weird, offbeat, unstructured acid trip of a film.

The Beast (Parts 1 & 2). A forgotten novel by Peter ("Jaws") Benchley led to this entertaining if utterly TV-movie-ish TV movie about a giant killer squid which terrorizes the waters off a charming seaside town. William Petersen rises above the mediocre material to deliver his usual excellent performance as an oceanographer tasked with fighting The Beast. This movie is basically "Jaws" with a squid, but it's a lot of fun, there are some very good actors in the cast, and the first of the two parts is hugely entertaining.

The Redeemer (1978): This very low-budget and obscure entry on my list has one redeeming (sorry) characteristic: it tries very hard. It tries so hard, in fact, that it is actually memorable, if not precisely good, or even mediocre. It's about, sort of, a group of people lured to a phony high school reunion and then stalked and murdered by a disguised attacker with a twisted moral code. Called by one modern critic a "proto-slasher," it is at that, though the supernatural angle of the film seems to have been thrown in simply to cash in on the popularity of "The Omen."

Jaws 3-D (1983). "Jaws" was an all-time great movie, and is considered by some also to be the greatest horror movie ever made. "Jaws 2" is an exploitative and totally unnecessary sequel which is nonetheless entertaining. "Jaws 3: 3D" is one of the worst pieces of shit I have ever witnessed. It's about a Sea World type operation that gets a visit from a killer shark. It's cheesy, stupid, preposterous, fake, dumb, boring, silly, stupid, a waste of time, and, uh stupid. What a piece of shit. The cast has a lot of heavyweights who probably want to forget making it.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). Few franchises have been exploited as mercilessly as the horro classic "Texas Chainsaw," and most of the entries are unwatchably awful, but this remake of the 1974 original ain't bad. Featuring the ass of Jessica Biel (the camera basically follows Jessica around from behind at just below waist level, and thank God for that!), it follows a van full of luckless twentysomethings who blunder into a chainsaw-wielding maniac and his fucked-up family deep in the Texas badlands. While it's not a patch on the original, and it foolishly leaves out the cannibalistic element that made the first so fucking unsettling, it's actually a pretty good movie.

Sputnik (2020). I had high hopes for this Russian story about a Soviet-era cosmonaut who returns to earth with a parasitical monster in his belly, and it's certainly well-made, but in the end it's basically just "Alien" set in the USSR circa 1980 or so.

God Told Me To (1976). Robert Forster quit this picture because the director was abusive. I think the director may have been on drugs, too, because even moreso than "White of the Eye," this movie is like a bad fever dream. It follows a confused NYPD detective on the trail of a cult leader whose followers are committing random murders because, well, God told them to. After a strong opening it rambles incoherently and endlessly toward a bizarre ending that is half-sci fi, half-religious, and all senseless.

The Falling (1988). Another low-budget 80s movie I'd never heard of, this was surprisingly fun. Three dimwitted Americans doing spain by van encounter a virus from space that turns people and animals into murderous lunatics. One of those stories that refuses to take itself seriously, it actually succeeds as a comedy if not a fright flick, thanks to a fairly witty script and actors that seemed to enjoy every moment of their screen time.

The Lighthouse (2019). This movie is technically horror-suspense, or suspense-horror, or psychological horror...who the hell knows? It too is massively weird and bizarre, almost incomprehensible, but I loved it, mainly because the two leads, played by Willem Defoe and Robert Pattinson, absolutely crush their roles as lighthouse keepers who go get cabin fever and go stir crazy manning their desolated rock in the Atlantic. The B & W cinematography is a character in itself, and while the movie is basically a sort of cinematic allegory of seafaring and Greek myths, served with a hefty dose of paranoia and surrealism, it just works somehow.

And that, folks, is it for now. I'm about 22 movies deep, so I can ease back and collect a few more modern entries to round out the collection before Hallowen strikes. And incidentally, they are rerelasing a trulystrange film, "Halloween III: Season of the Witch" in AMC theaters on Halloween, and I plan to be there. H3 is one of the most maligned movies in horror history, but damned if it doesn't draw you in to its web of weirdness.

This is a subject to which intend to return at much greater length at a different time. For the purposes of the night, I am going to keep this one short.

It struck me today, and not for the first time, that one of the fundamental differences between extreme left and extreme right ideologies is their ultimate intent vis-a-vis the individual human being. Both the extreme right (Fascism) and the extreme left (Communism) are of course ultrastatist, authoritarian, and totalitarian in character. Their methods are very nearly identical: what is to choose, really, between the concentration camps of Hitler and the gulags of Stalin? They differ in their dogma, but at a glance are nearly indistinguishable in practical effect. There are only two real differences between them, the first being who they tend to victimize, and the second, their innermost goals for those they dominate.

The first difference is not important to the subject at hand, so I will dismiss it quickly: Fascists oppress their ideological enemies, who are Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, and more or less anyone who believes in democracy or republicanism. Communists oppress their ideological enemies, who are Fascists, Socialists, Anarchists, and more or less anyone who believes in democracy or republicanism. So here too, the difference is really a similarity dressed as a distinction. No, the real difference is in the aims.

In my long and frankly scholarly study of Fascism, what I found -- to my surprise -- is that while Fascists are of course totalitarian and authoritarian, their main goal is the obedience of the masses and nothing more. Fascist movements are not obsessed, often not even particuarly interested, in winning the hearts and minds of the populace. Fascist movements tend to regard themselves as elites, and while they have a vested interested in perpetuating themselves through recruitment, this recruitment is usually aimed at very specific strata of society, meaning men and women who would be useful to the regime in specific roles, and of course, children, who represent the future of the movement. But even in their recruitment of children, Fascists tend to shy away from a catch-all strategy. The Hitler Youth, for example, was not a compulsory movement in Nazi Germany: far from it. The tendency of Fascists to see themselves as a stuff superior, cut from tougher cloth than the ordinary human, is a defining characteristic of the breed. Though Fascist movements must become mass movements to achieve power, they are uncomfortable with becoming the "dull gray mass of lumpenprolitariat" they see Marxist movements to be. Fascism, unlike Socialism or Commmunism, makes no claim whatever on universal brotherhood. The claim would be incompatible with their extreme nationalism, which divides the world into three basic categories:

1. Members of the movement itself, the top.
2. Members of the country they belong to, the middle, superior by simple act of birth but lesser than members of the movement itself, and;
3. The rest of the world, occupying the bottom.

Fascists being an elite in their own minds, they are content with the mere obedience of the masses they control. They do not require their countrymen to love them, or to truly believe in their slogans and aims. They do not demand that you join their ranks. Their ultimate goal is simply to be obeyed. To stay in power. Their worldview requires nothing more. The winning of hearts and minds is limited to those whose hearts and minds are viewed as worthy or necessary.

As I said above, Communists (Marxists) are at a glance identical to their Fascist enemies. Push aside ideology and everything is the same -- the uniforms, the prison-like borders, the mass demonstrations, the slogans, the work camps, the torture cellars, the deification of a single leader or leaders, the aggressive foreign policy, the disregard for law and for human life. There is however that one difference which changes everything. Unlike the Fascist, the Communist does not cease his battle when he bludgeons and terrorizes the populance into submission. Indeed, it is only when the population has submitted physically, when it is obeying the voice on the loudspeaker, when it is doing what it is told in the field or factory or schoolroom without any visible hesitation or complaint, that the real work begins.

The Communist / Marxist views outward submission as a mere step in a process. The final process is what the Soviets called The New Communist Man, someone devoid of ideological impurity, who works ceaselessly and tirelessly for the Party and its goals, who has no fear of laying down his life for those goals, and who not only spews leftist dogma, but understands the dogma and believes in it to the exclusion of everything else, including objective reality. Far more than his Fascist counterpart, he fills the role Orwell described in "1984," of the man who is so consumed by political belief that he is less a man than a cell in a body. His individual characteristics submerge into a kind of generic unipersonality, so that an encounter with one of these ideal Marxists in Nigeria would be exactly like an encounter with another in Vietnam. So ultimately the goal is to eliminate the categories the Fascist holds so dear: instead of a tier system, there is only a undiffernetiated mass...a commune.

Exactly why the Communist / Marxist desires this absolute and total control over individuals, when mere physical obedience would be enough to retain power, is of course the great question, and I believe I have an answer to it. Setting aside for the moment the psychological questions inherent in libido domanandi, the lust to dominate for the sake of domination, I believe that the Communist desires this sort of spiritual dominion because it is in the nature of Communism to reject the "extraordinary personality" around which Fascists base their entire identity. Though Communism is frequently hijacked by cultic leaders like Stalin and his progeny, this is a perversion of the nature of Communism. True Communism is not a cult of personality but the cult of an idea, and the idea must always stand over the personality. Indeed, in any area where Communism has reached its fullest expression, anyone who stands out from the crowd is the enemy. The goal is not to rise above, but to submerge, to submerge so completely that individual characteristics disappear. It has become almost axiomatic that no one suffers more cruelly than a left-winger who deviates from his fellow left-wingers on some point of dogma: witness the fate of J.K. Rowling, a hard leftist driven almost into hiding simply for rejecting leftist groupthink on one relatively unimportant issue. Conformity, not merely physical conformity but conformity of the mind, of the heart, of the soul, is the ultimate goal of these people. They cannot abide disagreement, not even from their own. The nature of the disagreement is of course not the issue: the fact it exists is. We could further explore the psychology of this inability to accept dissent, because it is a key feature of the personalities of nearly all Neo-Marxists, but for tonight's purposes I think it necessary only to underscore the fact that it exists, and defines the movement, and provides its one truly important distinction from Fascism.

I sometimes feel, looking at the news, that in the future, the very near future at that, I will be forced to make a choice between Fascism and Communism, and sadly enough, I already know which would I would choose if I lacked the courage to die for my freedom. For anyone who wishes to retain any sense of self, Fascism is always preferable to Communism, no matter how vile or loathsome it is in every other respect, because Fascism tends to end where the surface of your skin does. If nothing else, it leaves space for internal freedom, for the right to rebel in private, within your own heart and your own mind and in the confines of your own home. Provided one obeys and puts on an outward show of conformity, the subject of Fascism is reasonably safe. Hitler famously remarked of a certain former political enemy he allowed to live -- and the remark was repeated by countless of his flunkies and paladins in similar circumstances -- "He is not for us, but he will never do anything against us." And for Hitler, that was reason enough to spare him. He did not need the man's soul, merely his obedience, or at very least his inertia. But as I said before, a Communist subject is not permitted even this level of freedom. It is not enough for him to submit; it is not enough for him to conform. He must believe. And the whole of the Marxist apparatus is designed to pummel him ceaselessly with propaganda until he either believes completely -- "loves Big Brother" as Orwell put it -- or tips his hand with some form of disagreement and is consequently eliminated as an enemy of the state.

Both nightmare futures you say? I tend to agree. But perhaps that is all we have or deserve: the lesser of two nightmares.

A few weeks ago I came home with a four month old kitten. He was -- he is -- black with a tiny white star on his chest. His paws are oversized and he is polydactyl, but in an even more unusual way: instead of six toes, he has six claws on five toes. I had about thirty perspective names for him, none of which fit, but after watching his antics, I finally dubbed him Hilts, after Steve McQueen's character in THE GREAT ESCAPE: Captain Virgil Hilts, an American air force officer known as "The Cooler King" for his tendency to get thrown into an isolation cell (known as The Cooler) for constantly trying to escape the German prison camp in which he is imprisoned.

Like his namesake, Hilts is always trying to break the rules and defy authority -- meaning me. He bolts into the hallway of my apartment whenever I open the door. He burrows under sheets and blankets and piles of paper. He tunnels into paper bags and behind couches and beneath beds. He's forever running, jumping, attacking, retreating, and making an utter nuisance of himself. Today he discovered he is large enough to leap on the shelf over the kitchen sink where I keep my plants. One loud crash later, several of the plants were demonstrating the law of gravity.

To try and deal with his insanity, I have purchased a number of toys for him to play with. As of this writing, almost 100% of them are missing. I have no idea what he does with them. I live in a one-bedroom apartment. It is a large one-bedroom apartment, but still, it's not a mansion or a castle or even a two-story house. There are a finite number of places he could take these items. Where the fuck does he hide them? I lifted the couch and found nothing. Ditto the various pieces of furniture. It's all just gone. And don't tell me "look under the bed." A week after I got him, I removed the bedframe and lay the box-spring and the mattress directly onto the floor. I had no other choice. Despite every effort, including expensive plastic barriers, he was forever finding his way beneath the bed and then trying to eat the yellow foam found among its slats and springs. This foam is not poisonous, but it will block his intestinal tract, so now I sleep very low to the ground. Like a college student. It's not so bad, but it makes getting out of bed a little more difficult than I would care to admit.

Hilts has way too much energy for his five pound body. Indeed, I marvel at how long he will run, jump, roll, writhe, and generally go crazy, before he takes a breather. But even his respites from kitten insanity are brief. I would estimate on a given day he goes through three distinct periods of madness, each similar to the Vulcan "pon farr" on STAR TREK. "Pon farr," for those of you who are not nerds, is the time when Vulcans shed their sexual repression and go buck-fucking-wild, either screwing or fighting until they exhaust all their pent-up emotions. Hilts is fixed, but you wouldn't know it from how much pon farr he practices on stuffed mice, clothing, cardboard boxes, crumpled-up balls of paper, or my arm.

Hilts is very affectionate, but only on his own terms. He wakes me up via a ritual of snuggling, purring, snorting, and stomping. He repeats this ritual often during the day, but if I pick him up, he struggles just like Steve McQueen when the Nazis grab him. Like all cats, he resists any kind of direction and can generally be counted upon to do the exact opposite of whatever it is I want him to do. Again, just like Hilts in the movie, who doesn't even get along with his fellow inmates.

Hilts could not care less about my job, even though it keeps him in treats and toys. I work from home, but don't think for a moment he won't jump on my keyboard, swat at my power cords, or climb onto my shoulder in the middle of a Microsoft Teams meeting. He also enjoys howling and making a fierce trilling noise whose meaning I don't entirely understand, so let's see what the otherwise worthless AI has to tell me:

"A trilling cat sound is a short, friendly, nasal sound that indicates happiness, affection, or a desire for attention or a request. It's a positive vocalization, often compared to a chirp or a combined purr-and-meow, and serves as a greeting or an invitation to follow. The sound is produced with a closed mouth, involving the vibration of vocal cords, and is a sign of a good relationship between your cat and you."

Good to know. Maybe I should start trilling around girls I like.

Sometimes I try to write, and Hilts jumps on my desk and ensconces himself on my keyboard. At other times he hides in the sock drawer, fights the bathroom mat, or launches violent ambushes on my feet from 45 degree angles. He is a big fan of the perpendicular ambush. Like my dear departed cat Spike (2007 - 2024), he is very fond of butter: also eggs, especially the yolks. But there are hundreds of kinds of cat food he wouldn't eat if you paid him. I know, because I've tried.

Hilts is known for holding his mouth open in anticipation of a biting attack on man or object. His kitten teeth are as fine as white sand. The inside of his mouth is pink and sharply ribbed. He often looks like the Loch Ness monster as portrayed in the DOCTOR WHO episode "Terror of the Zygons."

And that's Hilts, or rather a portion of what I know about the demon my friend Penny calls "Five Pounds of Fury." He's nuts, he gives me little peace, and he seems determined to get me fired, but I can't say he's boring.

I am occasionally and justifably mocked for writing more about movies and television in this blog than I do books. As it happens, I have written a lot about books -- other people's, and my own -- but yes, it's undeniably true that I write more about what I see on the screen than what I read on the page. I think this is because, as much as I love reading (and writing), I remain a child of the idiot box and the silver screen. I grew up in a house stuffed with books and I am proud to have fallen in love with the printed word at a very tender age, but I'd be lying if I said the other mediums didn't have a similar appeal. For me, storytelling is storytelling regardless of medium: an animated series or an album can tell a story, so why reject the stories that flow out of the tube? There are good ones to be found among all the garbage, and let's face it, a lot of what gets printed is also crap, nicht wahr? So in the spirit of celebrating storytelling in all of its forms, here are some of the better flicktoons I've watched in 2025. And as you already suspect if you know anything about me, few of them were made remotely close to 2025.....

DEADPOOL VS. WOLVERINE: I am no particular fan of modern superhero movies. Way too much noise, not nearly enough substance, and bloody hell, are they all written the same way, or what? Is there an AI robot infused with Joss Whedon's brain engrams that just cranks these fucking things out six or seven a year, all in exactly the same ironic style? But D VS. W surprised me. It's a rollicking, irreverant, profane, inappropriate, hyper-violent yet decidedly cartoonish love letter to everyone sick of social justice messaging in movies, especially Marvel movies. What's more, it features superb performances by Ryan Reynolds and especially the always-reliable Hugh Jackman. The contrast of Reynolds facetious, childish, irresponsible manchild Deadpool with the brooding and ferocious Wolverine is wonderful. These two have such superb chemistry I could watch an entire series devoted to just the two of them, but if this is all we get, it's enough.

LAND AND FREEDOM. This obscure indie movie about a working-class English socialist who fights in the Spanish Civil War is by far the best movie on that conflict I have ever seen. Clearly drawn from Orwell's memoir "Homage to Catalonia," it adopts a cinema verite style which is almost documentarian. Like Orwell's tragic book, it charts the descent of cheerfully idealistic revolutionaries into embittered, conflicted, and ultimately disillusioned fugitives from their own cause, without either attacking the cause itself or forcing any conclusions on the viewer. Many of my readers (and my YouTube watchers) believe because I often rail against social justice warriors I'm against social justice: quite the opposite is true. I'm simply aware, as Orwell came to be, that there is a very sharp and very poisonous hook buried in the bait of Marxist and Neo-Marxist bait. Indeed, I am aware of it because he bit into it first.

THREADS. This British television movie scared the shit out of millions of people when it debuted in 198X, and having finally gotten round to seeing it, I understand why. If you thought THE DAY AFTER, ON THE BEACH, or FAIL-SAFE were terrifying depictions of nuclear war, this unsparing, absolutely pitiless "What If?" will leave you sucking your thumb in a dark corner of your bedroom. Set before, during and after a WWIII that sees Britain bombed by Soviet nukes, it too is shot in a fractured, documentary style, and mercilessly depicts the effects of destruction, starvation, radiation poisoning and complete societal breakdown which occur after the mushroom clouds blossom. No politics, no strategy, no heroism, just ordinary people going through something worse than hell, without any hope of relief. I didn't enjoy it, but by God it was well done. A true horror film.

HUNGER. I often dislike arthouse and indie films for their pomposity and self-conscious sense of importance, but HUNGER is one of those dialogue-driven movies where the writing is so crisp, and the performances so superb, that you can't help but be mesmerized. Michael Fassbender plays Bobby Sands, an IRA revolutionary -- or terrorist -- who goes on a hunger strike in prison. Fassbender's quiet intensity, his absolute belief in The Cause, the coolness with which he embraces his own impending doom, is unforgettable, as is his lengthy back-and-forth with a scrappy priest who tries to convince him that he is committing suicide and therefore endangering his immortal soul. Like LAND AND FREEDOM, it shows you revolutionaries (and some of their bloody deeds) without asking you to sympathize with them or cheer them on, but rather lets you form your own conclusions. Go figure that one.

THE LOST COMMAND. In this engaging and morally complex war movie about politics, ambition, friendship, and loyalty in the time of colonies and revolution, Anthony Quinn is a French paratrooper colonel fresh from their defeat in Vietnam, tasked with bringing a restive Algeria to heel. His chief opponent? A former comrade-in-arms from Algeria, now devoted to the cause of its independence. Though very much a war movie in the style of the 60s and 70s, it also explores the complexities of loyalty when one is torn between class and ambition, national identity and colonial fealty. Like PLATOON, it also examines the effect guerilla war has on conventional soldiers, who become increasingly cruel in the wake of bombings and ambushes. Both Quinn and his nemesis begin to lose their principles trying to fight, and win, a vicious guerilla war, and the question of who is right and who is wrong is, once again, left to the viewer.

OBJECTIVE: BURMA! Errol Flynn was known for many things, but playing serious, sober, duty-bound characters was not one of them. Too bad. In this 1945 movie about a commando raid in Burma (where a cousin of mine was killed in action in real life), Flynn does an admirable job of portraying a businesslike American officer whose mission to destroy a Japanese radar station goes off perfectly...until it doesn't. The last half of the movie is an edurance contest in which the commandos flee through impenetrable jungle while being constantly attacked by vengeful Japanese. If you ever saw BATAAN, you know that the question of whether any of them survive to see the final credits is by no means a closed question. Many of the "made during the war" war movies produced in America and Britain are unwatchable, Jingoistic crap, but this ain't one of 'em.

COLLATERAL. I was 20 years late seeing this Michael Mann movie, but I'm damn glad I did. Jamie Foxx is a Los Angeles cab driver who wants one last fare before he goes home. Tom Cruise is a professional killer who needs a ride. The two meet at LAX, and over the next two hours, mayhem ensues. Although not quite up to the legendary heights he scaled when he made HEAT, Mann still manages to pack a knockout punch with this carefully-crafted exercise in murder and moralizing.

THE GRAY FOX. This forgotten indie gem from Canada was described by one critic as "a wonderful adventure," and a wonderful adventure it is. Richard Farnsworth (THE NATURAL) plays a former Old West stagecoach robber named Bill Miner, released from prison after 30 years of very hard time in the States. He emerges into the early 20th century as a bewildered old man with no prospects, and after trying his hand at going straight, says "to hell with it" and resumes robbing trains, this time in British Columbia. The acting, cinematography and writing are all first rate, but it's the spirit of the movie that hypnotized me. I saw this when it came out (as a small boy), but I'd almost forgotten the lovely way Farnsworth portrays the Gentleman Bandit. Never will you more shamelessly root for a criminal than you will root for the good-hearted, nonviolent Miner, who means no one any harm, and even manages some romance when he's not planning robbery. It's just an utterly charming film, and damned if the scenery isn't absolutely breathtaking.

GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. While perhaps the whole is not as good as the sum of its parts, this cinematic adaptation of David Mamet's play is still one hell of a movie. Showcasing some of the best acting talent then working in the business -- Lemmon, Baldwin, Harris, Arkin, Spacey, Pacino -- it depicts a crew of sleazy and desperate real estate salesmen fighting to keep their jobs at any cost. Like DEATH OF A SALESMAN, it is an examination, and rather a cruel one at that, of the fear, greed, shallowness and amorality that lie beneath the American obsession with "making good." The scene in which Alec Baldwin verbally excoriates a roomfull of downtrodden salesmen has become a classic of modern cinema, and rightly so, but the whole film is a reminder that one does not need violence or sex to mesmerize an audience: a good script in the hands of good actors will do that for you.

PRINCE OF THE CITY. I'm told this movie has "mixed reviews" and was not a huge box office success. Whatever. Unlike the classic SERPICO, which portrayed one man's almost holy battle against police corruption as just that, a holy battle, PRINCE OF THE CITY takes a much more nuanced view. Treat Williams plays a mob-connected NYPD detective whose Catholic conscience forces him to expose a festering sewer of bribes, payoffs, illegal wiretaps, drug ripoffs, and collusion to the state and federal authorities. But as things turn out, our baby-faced hero is no angel himself, and his attempt to tell just a convenient portion of the truth backfires badly. I have just enough experience in the criminal justice field to understand the terrible, unwinnable conflict which often exists between the way things are supposed to be and the way they are, to bleed alongside Williams as his conflicted character endures not only a constant threat of death, but an increasingly unbearable pressure to testify against his partners and even his own family. This is the story of an angel who fell, and tried to save his soul, but strictly on his own terms. How that turned out, you need to watch the movie (or read the book; it's superb) to discover.

And that brings me to a conclusion. I have seen a lot of crap this year, but these represent the best of what passed before my willing if not always eager eye. I will drop the subject of movies for now, but Halloween is only two months away, so don't expect you'll escape another of my "31 horror movies in 31 days" blogs. Because believe me, it's comin'.

I now emerge from the longest hibernation I've ever taken from this blog: five weeks. I'm a bit embarrassed at this level of slacking-off, but frankly, I needed the break. I've been on a kick of trying to make sure my days are continuously busy, and to a degree that is almost impressive I have succeeded. I get up, I jog, I work all day, I hit the gym or go hiking, I edit my fiction, I write, shoot, or edit my YouTube videos, I read, I watch some selected TV, and once in awhile meet up with friends, and then I collapse. Then, ten days ago, I bought a kitten. So yeah, by my standards, I've been pretty busy. But now I'm back, and I hope to -- at least -- resume once a week blogging. So in the spirit of covering some ground, here we go with another edition of As I Please.

* First, let's talk about the kitten. I named him Hilts, after Steve McQueen's character in THE GREAT ESCAPE, Capt. Virgil "The Cooler King" Hilts. Why? Because he's an escape artist, tunneler, and mischief-maker par excellence. My beloved familiar Spike, who I had for 17 years, passed away last year, and after a significant mourning period, I decided it was time for the pitter-patter of little feet. So I adopted a tiny black void with endless energy and no respect for personal space. Who needs television when you have a kitten?

* Speaking of television, I just lied to you because I am still watching it. And folks, I have finally found an 80s TV show too shitty for even my gutter tastes. As you know, I still enjoy even the so-bad-they're-good shows of my childhood, stuff like T.J. HOOKER and MATT HOUSTON. But yesterday I caught a shotgun blast from the past...AUTOMAN. This Glen Larson-produced piece of shit was supposed to cash in on the phenomenon that the movie TRON was supposed to produce among kids my age. But TRON was kind of a dud, and AUTOMAN, an absolutely ridiculous heap of trash, was like the sweepings of TRON crushed into a ball and thrown at an unsuspecting public, only to strike them in the crotch rather than the heart. Starring Desi Arnaz Jr., of all fucking people, it's the story of a nerdy LAPD cop who somehow creates an uber-powerful 3D hologram crimefighter alter ago called Automan. The two then proceed to, you know, fight crime, using Automan's ridiculously convenient and flexible super powers, which, like KITT's aftermarket add-ons in KNIGHT RIDER, just happen to be whatever the heroes need in any particular moment. Although loaded with credible actors, including guys like Patrick McNee and Robert Lansing, the show is not so-bad-it's-good, like, say, THE DUKES OF HAZZARD or THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO. It's so bad it's gut-wrenching. It may in fact be the worst telveision show I have ever seen, although that title remains up for grabs. I pride myself that I can watch anything from the 80s, but this one may break me. I'm 1 1/2 episodes of a mercifully short 13 episode run, and I already want to quit. Funny thing? I thought it was garbage even at the age of eleven, and for once, my tweenage aesthetic tastes were correct.

* My reading campaign, this year's Goodreads Challenge, is going quite well. I have read five novels this year and a dozen or so nonfiction books. I'm currently working on Edmund Blundsen's UNDERTONES OF WAR. This British WW1 memoir is written in a lyrical, almost poetic style which mixes erudition, observation, wit and tragedy with considerable skill and not a little artistry. What strikes me about memoirs of WW1, however, is their similarity. Whether English or German, the themes, experiences, and even the physical sensations described are virtually the same. The experience of long-term trench warfare -- the mud, the barbed wire, the shelling, the rats and lice and rubble and corpses, the quagmires of filth, the mindless attack orders, the mismanaged raids into No Man's Land, the comic misadventures behind the lines, the sudden gas attacks, the bitterness of the troops toward their own officers, and of the officers toward their generals, the terrible food, the comradeship, the sudden deaths of close friends, the outbursts of hilarity amidst near-constant exposure to privation and terror -- is quite remarkable. Truly the Great War was a uniform experience, or as close to one as war can offfer.

* I am currently working on what I hope is the very last edit of DARK TRADE, the third CAGE LIFE novel, whose planned release date is Feb. 14, 2026. That would be the ten-year anniversary of the publication of CAGE LIFE, so I think it's fitting. I'm also doing last-minute work on SOMETHING EVIL: VOLUME I: BOOKS 1 & 2, whose release date is October 31, of this year. I have some anxiety about the release of this work. It is different from anything I have attempted and in some ways is the most naked attempt I've ever made to write a book that follows none of the rules that govern my other novels. Book 1 is a slam-bang, almost nonstop action sequence 100 pages long. Book 2, on the other hand, is mostly driven by dialogue, internal monologue, description, scene-setting, and so forth: not until the last few chapters does the action pick up again. Some readers may find the transitions too jarring, or the pace too irregular, for their personal tastes: others may not have the stomach, or the stamina, or the taste, for an epic horror novel of the style Stephen King used when he penned IT and THE STAND. What I was gunning for here, and may or may not have hit, was an immersive story that takes time to build story, characters and world. Perhaps it is simply indulgent. I don't know. But I guess I'll find out come Halloween. Trick or treat, indeed.

* I recently turned 53 years old. It's hard for me to accept. So hard that my mind is deliberately playing tricks on me. The other day I caught myself saying "forty-three" not to anyone else, but to myself, in my own thoughts: with a start I realized I left 43 in the dust a long damn time ago. Hell, when I was 43, I was living in Burbank and working full time in the videogames industry. My usual commute was a slog through Toluca Lake and Hollywood to Mid-City West, specificially the Farmer's Market, where I spent countless hours at a now-defunct trailer house called The Ant Farm. The difference in my life between then and now is not just years: it is light-years, and it makes me wonder what the future has in store. Certainly my life is a bit of a Mexican jumping bean, and I never know where I'm going to land.

* Pierre Poilievre won his riding in the last round of local elections in Canada, in a place called Battle River Crowfoot. This is potentially very significant, because Poilievre could have, and almost certainly should have, become Canada's Prime Minister earlier this year. Only Trump's idiotic decision to pick a fight with Canada on trade and immigration doomed what should have been a sure-fire victory for Conservatives up north. I'm not a conservative politically, but "conservative" in Canada means something rather different than it does in the States, just as "liberal" up there means something quite completely different than it does here, too. I truly believed that Poilievre represented Canada's last chance to avoid the fate of the U.K. by undoing the devil's work of Justin Trudeau, and that the election of Mark Carney sealed Canada's doom -- it's literal end as a functioning nation-state with an idenity and a culture and a future. I still believe it, but so long as Poilievre remains in politics, there's at least a small chance he can get into actual power, and if he can pull this off in, say, the next five years, before the damage is finally irreversible (if it isn't already), then Canada still has a chance. Because believe me, folks, if that battle up north is lost, then the States aren't terribly far behind. The forces that want to reduce sovereign nations to mere units in a global economy, to open-bordered characterless waystations where immigrant workers sluice in and out in massive numbers like transient wage-slaves, where rental and housing and job markets and health care systems are destroyed, where culture and heritage are wiped away, where freedom disappears under layers and layers of red tape, have a champion in Mark Carney. They have an enemy in Pierre Poilievre.

* In my recent attempt to rewatch as much of LAW & ORDER as I want to before I lose interest in the show itself, I was deeply affected by a scene at the beginning of the second season when Det. Mike Logan (Chris Noth) is forced to see a psychiatrist following the murder of his partner. The doctor is explaining the stages of grief to him, and he says, "Max is dead. I accept that. But part of me will never accept it. Y'know?" There is something about Noth's unguarded delivery that cuts me deeply. His character, a blunt, insensitive, tactless, tough homicide detective, is not the sort to admit any human emotions other than the approved one for cops -- anger. But when he looks at the shrink and says: "....y'know?" My heart just breaks. It is a genuine attempt of a man who doesn't know how to take off his armor and show vulnerability to do just exactly that: not because he feels compelled to, or because he's trying to impress the woman with his sensitivity, but because he needs to do it. The pain inside of him must be released. It's a scene I can relate to far more deeply than I wish. During the last year of my time in victim advocacy for the district attorney's office, I felt as if I were living in a juxtaposition. On the one hand my iron determination to remain in harness until I dropped, because doing the job was a form of penance for a life of selfishness and shallow pleasures; and on the other, an awareness that I was disintegrating emotionally, flaking away at the edges while burning to a cinder within. In a very real sense I was grieving for myself, just as Logan was grieving for his partner. Grieving, as it were, for the man I used to be, who needed to be buried but did not want to be buried, and who I will always miss. I accept that he is gone. But part of me will never accept it.

Y'know?

In Park La Brea, in Mid-City West Los Angeles, I got a serenade every evening. As the fulgent California sun went down, throwing the towers around me into silhouette, I would hear a woman who lived below me singing:

'Cause, baby, you're a firework
Come on, show 'em what you're worth
Make 'em go, "Oh, oh, oh"
As you shoot across the sky

I did not know this young lady personally, but I saw her often enough in the tower in which I lived: a tall, slender Asian girl in her 20s, with very long, lustrous black hair she usually wore in a shimmering ponytail, who drifted around Burnside Circle like a self-satisfied specter. I gathered from those who did know her that she was new to town, and hellbent on auditioning for, and ultimately winning, American Idol. Certainly she had a powerful voice: I could hear it from hundreds of yards away. But what struck me about her was that she seemed to possess nothing else. There was no nuance, no subtlety, no range to her singing. It was pleasant enough, and loud, but it was like a single note held too long, noise rather than music. Nor was there every any variation in the serenade itself. Always it was the same stanza of the same Katy Perry song, every single evening, over and over again until she tired of it.

Needless to say, though I will say it anyway, she did not win American Idol. She did not even make it past the earliest round of auditions. I think she was the only one who could have been surprised by this, but surprised she evidently was, and distraught, too. She had come to Los Angeles from afar in pursuit of a dream, which she chased single-mindedly and with as much determination and skill as she could muster, and when the moment came the gods of Hollywood said, "Next." She left Park La Brea not long afterwards and I never saw or heard of her again. She will never know that I, perhaps uniquely in this world, remember her evening serenades when the sun went down.

This is one of those memories I have which is peculiar and particular to Hollywood -- "Hollywood" meaning both the entertainment industry and the town itself, whose famous sign you could see from the stairwell outside my apartment door, and which, when I invoke the name, I mean to include Los Angeles and Burbank and all the other parts of the city and the Valley in which which I lived and worked. It is entirely wrapped up in both the sun-drenched atmosphere of southern California, with its breathtaking sunsets and nodding palm trees, and in the caprice and cruelty of the entertainment industry, which ultimately is a business of breaking rather than making dreams. On the one hand you have tens of thousands, if not several hundred thousand people, who work like dogs or slaves in the hopes of fulfilling some grand personal quest, and on the other, a town which feeds on such people the way a mosquito or a leach feeds, sucking them absolutely dry and then leaving their husks to rot.

When I think of my time there, quite a bit of which was recorded, in an incoherent and fragmentary way in this very blog, I am never far removed from memories like this, which belong to no really definable period and usually exist without context in my mind, but which come to me with an incredible clarity and immediacy, as if they'd happened yesterday, or two hours ago. These memories may or may not carry emotional content but they always produce an emotional reaction in me, which I believe may be nostalgia, or may be "hiraeth," the Welsh word meaning "longing for a place which no longer exists or which may never have existed." Because in a very real way, the Hollywood I myself pursued when I arrived there in 2007 may have been a phantom created by Hollywood itself: by the movie industry, by films I'd seen, magazines I'd read, interviews I'd watched, and all manner of red carpet spectacles I had borne witness to. A sort of romantic glamour, a deliberately conjured mirage which had lured me from the nondescript Pennsylvania town in which I had lived and into its bosom like a siren luring hapless sailors to shipwreck-hungry rocks. And the first two years I lived there were essentially the struggle of a shipwrecked man. Every day, every week, seemed to bring a new hardship, a more stinging setback, a more demoralizing humiliation. I never had any money, my relationship with my girlfriend became increasingly unstable and joyless, and the industry seemed determined to make sure I never worked in the town at all, much less again. Only the fact that I had burned my boats and could not retreat allowed me to endure it all. Men with nothing to lose are dangerous, but men looking at losing everything are ten times moreso. I had spent my last dollar coming into town. I had no way out. I had to succeed or thumb my way back across the United States.

A friend of mine, now an ex-friend because he became too Hollywood for his good or mine, once observed that the first two years of your time in town were merely a test of your commitment. Los Angeles, he maintained, tortured you ceaselessly for that period simply to see if it could break you. "You almost have to have something wrong with you to make it here," he said. And indeed, the vast majority of people who arrive in the city hoping to break into the entertainment industry in any aspect give up within that time -- six months to two years. It's entirely understandable. You would have to pay me a million, no, make it two million in hard cash to make me live that siege over again, and even then I'd probably hold out for three -- or four. It was that bad.

But I was speaking of memories, that jumble of memories I carry in my mind that often get triggered by the simplest phenomena. I hear Lady Gaga on the radio and remember, halfway through the song, that I met her: she stuck out her hand and as I took it in mine she said, "Gaga," as if I didn't know who she was. I hear John Tesh on the radio doing "Intelligence for Life" and remember the time I got drunk with him at a wedding. I watch an episode of CSI and remember the time I got drunk with George Eads, and we air guitared the entirely of "Freebird" -- no easy task, let me tell you. I do not pretend any relationship with these people or the countless others I worked alongside, bumped into, met at parties. I am 100% certain that 99% of the famous or semi-famous people I met forgot me within seconds of our meeting, if they were even aware I was there in the first place. I merely mention this because my life now is so different and so far away that those memories seem surreal, almost as if they happened to someone else. In a sense they did. The me that sits here, 2,650 miles from Los Angeles, is very different from the one who labored on the outer edge of the industry all those years in a vain effort at recognition. But, damn it, I do carry his memories. The most satisfying, and the worst, are all related to much more prosaic events:

* I'm driving home from a long, long shift at a trailer house next to CBS Television City, and get stuck in Hollywood Bowl traffic. It's horribly hot and the asphalt shimmers and my air conditioning doesn't work. My car begins to overheat. I have no escape, no way even to pull over to the side of the road. The needle creeps up and up until it pegs itself in the red and stays there, and I still have a long way to go to get home, and have to return tomorrow for another sixteen hour day, and I want to scream, because I'm sure that in a moment my radiator will give and I'll disappear in a cloud of white steam.

* It's three in the morning and I'm on Sunset Boulevard, drinking whiskey from a chrome flask and talking to my friend Dan in the parking lot of the Director's Guild of America. We're exhausted and punchy and there's still no sign we're going to be sent home, but we're happy while the whiskey lasts. Then we cross the street and go back inside, back to work.

* I'm in the desert in Palmdale on a shoot for "True Blood," and when the sun goes down so does the temperature. In an hour or two it's seventeen degrees and the make up effects technicians and production assistants are so cold we huddle together for warmth like animals in a snowstorm. We have no place of refuge but a wind-whipped tent with a broken heater. I have two very lovely production assistants clinging to me, one on each arm, but I'm too cold to take pleasure in the circumstances. I have no gloves and my hands are numb. When I try to find food at the Craft Services table, the granola bars are frozen stiff and the peanut butter is iced over and the coffee is colder than the air. In the lighted trailers nearby, we hear more important people laughing.

* I'm at a wrap party for "Heroes" being held at Strike! which is a bowling alley in Hollywood. I haven't bowled since college and don't want to embarass myself, but my boss, the ex-friend, bullies me into a game. I'm just drunk enough to play perfectly. Every single frame is a strike or a spare. I even make a 7-10 split. My boss does not take these defeats well. He looks me in the face and calls me a cunt. Several of us leave and find a nightclub and dance to 80s music. Finally, drunk out of my mind, I sit on the curb and wait for my rideshare. As I do so, two Bloods in red bandannas roll past in a tricked-out Impala, blasting rap music and leaving a fog of marijuana smoke in their wake. Their gold Daytonas gleam in the light of the streetlamps.

* It's raining, and I walk down to the palm-fringed pool and get in the hot tub and read a book. There is not a soul in sight and the blue-lighted waters shimmer and steam as the rain pummels them, and I turn my pages and listen to traffic sloshing down Sixth Street on the other side of a huge glass brick wall, and I'm enclosed in this womb of water and warmth and solitude, and it's bliss, sheer bliss.

* I go to Santa Monica on Thanksgiving Day, and after some hours of sunning and swimming and reading and dozing, I decide to take one last plunge in the water before I leave, and wouldn't you know it, some sea monster gets me. A poisonous spike through the foot. Blood and everything. My leg turns a fiery red, and there are no clincs open, and I have to drive all the way back to Burbank to go to the ER, and when I get there they look at me, sandy and wet and sunburned in the middle of the desert, and when I say I got stung by a sea serpent I'm pretty sure they'd rather commit me to the psych ward than treat my wound.

* I'm driving up Mulholland, trying to sneak into Hollywood via Outpost Road, and there, standing on the edge of the cliff, is one of the most beautiful, voluptuous women I have ever seen, very nearly stark naked. She's literally wearing a veil of gold coins and nothing else. A photo shoot, of course, not a hullicination. I stare so hard I very nearly drive off the cliff.

* I'm walking up from Beechwood Canyon back to the Hollywood Reservoir, and nearly get hit by a distracted driver. As he passes me, I recognize his face: it's Kevin Costner. He's obvious lost and can't get a GPS signal. Very slowly he drives down the road directly beneath the Hollywood sign, which is crowded with toursists. Every single one of them has their back turned to him because they're all taking selfies with the sign in the background. Not one of them notices that one of the biggest movie stars in the world is yards away. I stand at the top of the hill and laugh.

* I've just finished a tough practice at White Tiger Martial Arts and after a shower I amble down to Callendar's on Wilshire Boulevard. I sit at the green and black marble bar and Jimmy the Bartender gives me a beer and serves me margherita pizza and we talk about life, and this is one of those little moments I treat myself to now that I'm single again, because I love the old world, 1940s, ferns and brass and mahogany and leather look of this place, which even has its own shoeshine stand, and I don't particularly want to share it. Everyone needs a place all their own and this is mine.

* My cousin Scott and I are emerging from Freddy Roach's boxing club, the Wild Card Gym, early in the morning. We are so drenched in sweat we have to wring out our shirts in the parking lot and then snap them in the air: the sweat glitters in the sunshine. As we slip into my cousin's car, I say, "What great shape we'd be in if we quit drinking!" And he replies, "Yes, but at what price?"

* I'm in line for coffee, talking to some old lion of the entertainment industry. He regales me with stories of the Golden Age of Film which he witnessed firsthand. When he finds out I'm a writer he askes me if I'm interested in doing scripts for a documentary series he's producing -- on spec, of course. I reply, "No, I don't work for free. Do you?" He never speaks to me again.

* I'm blasting down Highland with the top down on a lovely, lovely summer night, about to hit the well-lighted heart of Hollywood, singing "Give Your Heart A Break" by Demi Lovato at the top of my lungs and laughing hysterically at the comic adventure that is my life.

This is a random sampling of things which are now deeply in the past but seem real and immediate to me, almost painfully keen. I realize that for all the hell it put me through, all the crushing disappointments and petty frustrations, all the times it dangled the most tantalizing bait imaginable only to yank it away at the last half-second, I miss it. I will always miss it, and always miss being a part of it, however small. There is something magical about the place, after all, and the industry, in both the good and evil senses of that word. Not a grandeur, but a charisma. Hollywood is like the bad girl in a film noir movie, the femme fatale you know is fatale but who draws you in anyway, because you want to be drawn. Your suffering is an implicit part of your role in the scheme of things. You have a dream, which like all dreams is selfish, and your suffering is the price tag, the peculiar caveat being that you must pay the price whether you realize your dream or not: the pay is for play, for the chance itself, not for the outcome. Only dillettantes and trust-fund jockeys glide through the industry as if oiled: everyone else scrapes and screeches and sparks their way around, either disintegrating in the process or finally breaking through. Me? I disintegrated. Not wholly, not completely, but enough that I knew that if I didn't do a bunk soon, there'd be nothing left to rescue. So out I went. An easy decision at the time, and the right decision in retrospect: Sun goes up, sun goes down. Still, there are times, days at work, nights when I'm watching a movie or a show and realize, hey, I worked with that guy, or hey, I got drunk with that girl, or hey, that building in the background, I used to live there. That's the place I used to listen to my evening serenade...to the sound of someone else's dream.

One interesting effect of being both lazy and incurious as a younger fellow is that, having arrived in middle age, I now have a distinct hunger for experience. This is a good if belatedly-acquired characteristic, but like most good characteristics, it comes at a bit of a cost.

Last weekend, I attended the In Your Write Mind conference at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I grant you that going to a writer's conference is not exactly an adventure by most people's standards, but I aimed to make it one, at least in the lowercase sense of the word, by traveling to it by train. My idea was to use the very fact of traveling to the conference, which is usually a tedious and uncomfortable slog up the Turnpike, into an experience worthy of writing about. I have always had a romantic fascination with travel by train, but except for a trip from D.C. to New York City and back about 25 years ago, my experience with distance travel by rail is nearly nil. I wanted to change that, so I booked a trip by Amtrak. I had vague notions of recording the phases of my journey, and of the conference, in this very blog -- a kind of traveler's journal, delivered in installments. As it happened, I didn't have time.

On the day in question, a Thursday, I worked until noon sharp, then jumped into my car, stopped at a thrift store and bought a second suitcase, in which I could pack the books I intended to offer for sale at the conference book signing scheduled for Saturday. From there I drove to Harrisburg, parked in a poorly constructed garage, and dragged my luggage to the train station in heat so godawful I was drenched in sweat by the time I traveled the short distance in question. (I actually had to change my clothes in the station restroom.) After that, I bought a bottle of iced tea and relaxed on the bench, thinking my adventure had begun. In fact it was only my troubles.

The train never arrived. That is to say, I gave up on it before it appeared. Seems the locomotive blew its motor somewhere west of Philadelphia, and after waiting around for a few hours in increasing dismay as repairs were effected, I began to realize that, factoring in the five hour travel time when the train finally did leave the Harrisburg station, I would arrive sometime around midnight instead of my planned seven o'lock. So I got a refund, dragged my luggage back to my car, and departed for Greensburg in my car, which I had just taken out of the shop the previous day and which I did not want to be using at all.

The trip was uneventful until I was about 45 miles short of town, when I had left the Turnpike for isolated country roads surrounded by thick woods. Then my battery light came on. As my battery was brand-new, installed literally the previous day, I suspected the alternator, but the alternator was also new. Needless to say, this made for a tense final hour or so of the journey, and I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that if the train had showed up on time, I wouldn't have had to deal with this shit.

I got to the hotel, settled in and decided to test the car by letting it sit and then restarting it and driving it locally. No battery light now, so I grabbed food and beer and went back to the hotel. The next morning I went about my writerly business, but realizing my teaching module ("Writing Violence") had been pushed up from Saturday to Friday, I had to spend some hours working on my presentation beforehand. As I did this, I lost a flash drive which contained a lot of backup writing material, and was never able to find it. This bothered me a lot more than it probably should have. So too did the fact that my module was put up against a Crime Scene House tour offered by the program: in the tour, you are shown simulated crime scenes and the forensic techniques used to gather evidence at them. I wanted to attend this tour, had signed up for it, and now had to compete with it. I lost. The previous year, my module was SRO. This time four people showed up. I attended a module afterwards, pitched an unpublished novel of mine to an agent (who requested the full manuscript), ate dinner in the dining hall, went back to my hotel for a few hours, and then returned to campus for a "Ghost Tour" which sounded really interesting. Seton Hill University looks like Hogwarts and its nearly as old: there is a lot of history there, and a lot of atmosphere, especially on a summer evening when the sky is a fiery orange-purple above the beautiful but haunting nun's cemetery built on the hill. The tour, however, proved to me more about the architecture of the main building than a series of ghost stories, and I confess some disappointment.

On Saturday I decided I'd best handle the car business. I had the alternator tested as soon as the nearest shop opened and lo, it was bad: bad at six months of use. Most alternators last the life of the vehicle: I was on my third in two years. And of course the local shops couldn't handle me, so I had to drive 30 miles to Monroeville to drop the damned thing off, taking an expensive Uber ride back to campus. I then attended a lecture by the guest lecturer R.G. Belsky, leaving when my phone rang and discovering my car was already ready to be picked up (if I'd known they worked that fast at the Monroeville Firestone, I'd have stayed in their lobby). I decided to finish the lecture first, but when I returned to the speaking hall Mr. Belsky was on the floor, having collapsed during the Q & A after his very interesting talk on, among other things, the Son of Sam case. It later turned out he was merely dehydrated, but for a time we didn't know if something really serious had happened to the man. Fortunately, the author John Fortunato and my editor Mike Dell jumped into action and in the end, all was well on that front. But it was a jarring experience to say the least.

I also discovered around this time that my friend and mentor, Pat Picciarelli, would not be joining Michael D. and myself for dinner as a storm on the previous night had caused flood damage to his home. As this dinner was one of the highlights of the trip, or was supposed to be, I was again disappointed, but trudged manfully to a panel called "Writing Crime" in which had been impressed to serve as a panelist. Because Mr. Belsky, the guest panelist of honor, was unavailable for obvious reasons, and because Mike Dell was seeing to him at the hospital, it fell upon me and three others to carry the event. Losing the guest of honor is always going to kill off a lot of attendance, and it didn't surprise me that the audience outnumbered the panel by the humbling margin of about two to one, no more. Although the discussion was lively, the cameras recording it malfunctioned, so any pearls of wisdom we might have dropped or been dropped upon us are probably lost to history.

At that point John Fortunato (a Tony Hillerman Prize winner, by the way, and all around good guy) drove me to pick up my car. When I asked if there were any reason my car might be eating alternators, which cost like $500 - 700 to replace, the mechanic said dryly, "Your car has 192,000 miles on it." I guess that is as much as an answer as I'm likely to get, but I'll nevertheless have to have my own hometown mechanic find out if there's a faulty voltage regulator or some other goddamned thing that has gone wrong and needs fixing.

That evening came the book signing. The parking lot was inexplicably nearly full when I arrived early at the theater and speaking hall just off campus, but I managed to get a space and set up just in time for a heavy rainstorm to ensure attendance at the lecture by Alexander Darwin would be dampened as a consequence, along with the subsequent foot traffic into the signing area. I nevertheless sold eight or nine books, which is not great by any means but not terrible, either. Still, compared to my last two signings it was again a bit of a letdown. I did avoid the parking tickets almost everyone else found out they'd received, however, when they left at the end of the evening.

The previous year, I had stayed in the dormitories on campus, which allowed for a lively evening social interaction with fellow conference-goers as well as students attending the Writing Popular Fiction Program. We ate delivery food, we drank beer, we talked about writing, movies, and life generally, and had a very good time. This year the school refused to rent the dormitories to the conference-goers for some reason, so that was not possible. I ended up in the never-before-seen-by-me commuter lounge with my editor Mike, talking for an hour or two, but it was hardly the same.

The next morning I decided I had best try and salvage as much of Sunday as I could, so I ate breakfast in the dining hall, said goodbye to Sally Bosco (organizer of the conference), John and Mike, and then hit the road. The trip back at least was drama-free, and I even managed to secure a parking space directly in front of my apartment. So ended my "adventure," which turned out to be merely an experience, and not a terribly positive one at that.

Obviously in life, shit happens. Two years ago, on my first night in Montreal, my rental car was stolen off the street, necessitating a lot of improvisation if I wanted to salvage the trip. I was successful, but the stress of dealing with the theft certainly added a dimension to my vacation I could have done without. In this case, I was not really on vacation, but it was supposed to be a "pleasure before business" trip, and by that standard it was more or less definitely a failure. When I came home, after unpacking and relaxing for a few hours, I actually roused myself and took a hike in the deep woods, trying to sweat out the toxins that disappointment likes to hide in the body. I reflected too on the fact that trying to bring a little more adventure and "experience" into a life defined by routine (work, writing, exercise, a little socializing) is no proof from misfortune. Indeed, the more chances we take in life, the more opportunities we say "yes" to, however pedestrian they may be, the greater the likelihood that we will bang our metaphorical shins in the process.

I mention this because, even though it is all quite obvious, I have noticed in myself and others a very distinct habit of using negative experiences as an excuse to avoid breaking from routines, taking chances, etc. I cannot tell you the number of times I have attempted to visit a new hiking trail, or said "yes" to an offer of a getaway weekend, or plotted a day trip or RSVP'd to an unexpected invite at a faraway location, only to meet with some unpleasant experience, or experiences, that soured me on saying "yes" the next time. There are times in such circumstances that I seem almost to be waiting for the other shoe to drop, and feel what might be called disappointment that it did not: the lazy, incurious part of me that I thought faded out of existence in my middle thirties evidently lingers like a ghost in my conscious mind: not powerful enough to be called a poltergeist, too transparent to prevent me from breaking routines, but persistent enough to make me hesitate before even minor deviations from my groove. In a sense this ghost is the "negative Nelly in Sector 7G" who advises me to take counsel of my fears and my social anxieties and my tendency to catastrophize ("What if the apartment catches fire while I'm away?"), and just stay home where it's safe. I have discovered that people like myself, who have social anxiety but for the greater part of their lives never knew it, always look for excuses not to do things, and when they in fact overcome that anxiety and partake in said things, look for things to go wrong so as to justify their reluctance after the fact. The routines that anxiety-ridden people like myself build (and this includes watching TV shows and movies over and over again and re-reading books; even for returning to the same topics of conversation again and again with friends and family) are not for convenience or organization: they exist solely for comfort. In a routine there are no surprises, good or bad, only outcomes which are already known. And this not only discourages deviating from routine, it is the very opposite of adventure, which is defined as "an unusual or exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity."

If you're reading this, the chances are that you are a bookworm, and if so, probably share some of my eccentricities: you may be an introvert, or like myself, an "introverted extrovert" who is both eager to be among people and desperate to avoid them, who enjoys socializing but needs significant recharge time in solitude afterwards. You may have to force yourself to do anything new, and probably experience high levels of discomfort while you do it...even if it is inherently enjoyable. You may have a well-thumbed card catelogue of excuses you can reach for whenever you're offered a chance for a trip or a weekend getaway or those karate or knitting classes or a seat at that concert or ballgame. If so, you have my sympathy whole and entire, but not if you choose to live a half-life in consequence, staring at the world from behind your double-plied living room window. Wiring like ours provides an explanation for our reluctance to engage, but it is not an excuse not to engage. Our terms of engagement are necessarily different, of course, but in the end we are offered the same choice as everyone else: spectate or get on the field. When you come down to the last act of your life, you may find the bitterest regrets lie not in the chances you took that crapped out and left you penniless or stranded somewhere, but the ones you passed up out of cowardice masquerading as apathy.

I had a disappointing and depressingly expensive three and a half day weekend. There was no aspect of it that exceeded or even really met my expectations. I came home feeling relieved that I simply managed to avoid any more disappointment than I had already experienced, and my initial reaction was, "OK, if that's how you want to reward me for trying something different, I guess I won't fucking bother." This sort of pouting is understandable, but like all sulking it is meant to pass quickly, not to become a lifestyle. So despite the discouragement and the expense, I am already planning my next experience, my next "lower-case" adventure. Dunno exactly what it will be, or when it will take place, but the fact I'm not using it as an excuse to withdraw turtle-like into my shell shows at least that I have grown a little in the last twenty years. And if that's all I take away from my failed adventure, then perhaps it wasn't so much of a failure after all.