Jeff Suwak's Blog

There are few easily accessible hikes I’ve ever seen turn away more would-be climbers than Mount Storm King does. I met the victims, walking wounded, several times on my way down the mountain.

“Are we almost to the top?” these strangers asked between labored gasps. They tried to smile, but the desperate glint in their eyes indicated something other than humor.

I would answer with something like, “You’re pretty close,” but then, compelled by a humanistic urge to Truth, would add, “but the trail only gets harder. A lot harder.”

Sometimes they would laugh, thinking that surely I jested. How could the trail possibly continue to go straight upwards any longer without reaching the sun itself?

(Continued at http://nwestnomad.com/washington-plac...)

Just a brief post here to share some pictures of a funny event I witnessed while climbing Mount Si on Saturday.

There was a fellow hiking up the same time as me with a full-sized tuba on his back. It wasn’t even stored in any kind of outdoors/sports backpack, but was just jammed into a giant instrument pack.

Mount Si is not an easy hike. All respect to this man for carrying his tuba to the top of Mount Si and playing it. I was on the top of the Haystack when I heard the sweet, surreal sound of tuba calling out like some kind of alpine whale.

(continued at: http://nwestnomad.com/uncategorized/m...)

Chapter 1



In ninth grade, Toddy told everybody that Don Romeo had unleashed the rancid-egg-salad fart of death in history class, when actually it had been me. Every sixteen-year-old needs a friend like that, but such allies were doubly indispensable for Lords and Lairs role playing game enthusiasts in 1994. At that time, we geeks were like early Christians, persecuted for our beliefs. Without Toddy, I never would have survived it.

All of that changed, though, the day that Sir Drexler Impaler came along and ruined everything.

It was a Tuesday. Toddy and I had gotten word that Mark Trunlo intended to dunk both of our heads in urinals after gym class, so we decided to forego school attendance for the day. We didn’t admit to each other the real reason for our truancy, of course. We just acted as if we were tough guys who refused to assimilate into the scholastic machine. It felt a lot cooler to quote Nirvana lyrics about rebellion than it did to discuss our aversion to getting our asses kicked.

Cops often parked at the bottom of the hill near the school in order to catch skippers, and that day was no different, but Toddy and I were no mere amateurs at the craft of truancy. With the danger spots already mapped out in our minds, we used the baseball dugout and bleachers to conceal our escape route, cutting across a tract of woods to the Ransom Green neighborhood. Once there, we were out of sight of the teachers and police and had only five blocks to go to reach the train tracks.

We were joking and shoving each other around when Toddy stopped abruptly in his tracks. I followed his gaze to a garden gnome standing at the edge of a well-manicured lawn a few feet from the street, grinning.

"Look at you, you pretty thing," Toddy whispered to himself. "You pretty, pretty thing." He walked over and fell on his knees before the statue, caressing its face tenderly.

Toddy had a deep affection for garden gnomes. He had no less than ten of them stashed in his bedroom already. I often wondered how he slept with those creepy ceramic eyes watching him.

I laughed nervously, scanned the windows of the houses, and tried my best to sound cool and indifferent. "Somebody’s going to call the cops, man. Let’s go to the tracks."

Toddy sat back on his haunches and cocked his head to examine the statue. "You know, Sean, in all seriousness, this may be the ugliest garden gnome I have ever seen."

He was right. The statue’s hat, pants, and coat were all painted an identical lime green. The face was cobbled and cracked. I was in no mood to joke about it, though. Toddy had been acting increasingly erratic in the previous weeks. His volatility put me on edge, especially in broad daylight during school hours.

I pulled at the back of his shirt. "Come on, man. It’s time to go."

"Yes," Toddy whispered to the gnome. "It is time, isn’t it, old friend?" He stood and I thought we were about to leave, but in one swift motion he hoisted the statue over his head and smashed it in the street.

I looked up in shock to see a woman’s wide-eyed expression in a big picture window. A moment later, a police siren blared in the distance.

"The truancy cop," I said, as if it mattered.

Toddy took off running down the street, hooping with laughter all the way. I looked to the woman in the window one more time, trying to appear apologetic, and followed him.

Three blocks later we crashed into the foliage between two houses and slid down a leaf-covered hill to the train tracks. The siren sound neared and tires skidded to a screeching halt. We ran harder.

We continued at top speed, almost tripping every time we looked over our shoulders. After a solid mile we finally felt safe enough to slow to a walk.

"Why the hell did you do that, Toddy?"

"I couldn’t help myself." He clutched at the air over his head like a mad scientist in ecstasy. "The sight of that lime green garden gnome drove me mad with ecstasy."

His pointless daytime destruction of the ornament aggravated me, but his refusal to take it seriously annoyed me even more. "You’re a real asshole sometimes," I said.

"Watch it, skipper. I don’t want to have to smash you like I smashed that poor gnome." He shoved me so that I tripped over the train rails and almost fell.

I pretended to laugh, just like I always did when Toddy threatened me, which was something that had been happening more and more frequently.

"So, what have you been cooking up for Lords and Lairs, oh great Lair Guide?" My flattery was basically sincere, though my use of it to dispel the tension was probably more than a little cowardly. Toddy really was the best Lair Guide in school and, far as anyone knew, the world. "The party is getting pretty powerful, slaying dragons like they’re nothing. Pretty soon you’ll have to throw Nexus Darks at us."

Toddy scoffed. "Nexus Darks are nothing. You guys are going to have to fight Don Romeo’s egg-salad-fart of death."

"No one’s going to survive that." This time my laugh was authentic.

The hypothetical presence of the cop pursuing us acted like a force field pushing us farther down the tracks and away from town. Pretty soon, we were farther than we’d ever been before.

The woods lining the tracks thinned out and revealed a pothole-covered street with a row of old storefronts. Only one of the businesses seemed to be occupied. Cracks spider-webbed through the building’s exposed foundation, and a sign over the door read “Tempest Gate Games.” Like ants responding to an identical chemical command, Toddy and I hurried towards the store.

The interior was crammed full of board games and toys, all looking very old and alien. Dust-covered Jack-in-the-Boxes marked with esoteric symbols, decks of playing cards with otherworldly suits, board games with dice that looked like they’d been carved from bones. Somewhere inside the store a radio played one of those witchy old Delta Blues tunes that sound like they’ve been fermenting inside the bayou for a thousand years.

We drifted apart from each other. A museum-like silence filled the place, so pristine and delicate that a single word might shatter it. No signs marked off the sections, but the items were collected into categories. Without consciously looking for it, I found myself in the area with role playing games.

Most of the gaming systems were foreign to me. Half of them weren’t even in English. But as I picked through the tomes, I found one Lords and Lairs gaming book. It was an entire module dedicated to a figure named Sir Drexler Impaler, Beheader of All That is Good and Innocent. On the cover, a blonde-haired man with blue-fire eyes and black sigils tattooed on his neck and emblazoned in his plate mail armor hoisted a sword into the stormy sky.

"What’s that?" Toddy asked over my shoulder. Without waiting for an answer, he snatched the book from me and opened it. Handwritten red words filled black pages. Picture after picture showed Sir Drexler Impaler massacring elves, dwarfs, and humans, always with the same malicious sneer on his face. The artwork was disturbingly graphic and gory, and twice I had to avert my eyes. Toddy just whistled. "Bad ass."

Some instinct compelled me to grab the book from him. It was that same reflex that takes over when you see a child about to stick their finger in an electrical socket. But, before I could reach it, a woman’s voice startled me. "Can I help you?"

I spun around to see a stocky, bearded woman watching us. As if sensing the discomfort I felt as I tried not to react too overtly to her facial hair, she started combing her fingers through the whiskers in long, thoughtful strokes.

"How much is this module?" Toddy asked. His eyes were still glued to the cover. I didn’t think he’d even actually looked at her yet.

"It’s not for sale."

Toddy scoffed. "You might want to consider refraining from putting things on your shelves that aren’t for sale. I’m no businessman, but I do believe that’s how businesses are usually run."

The woman tipped her head aside with a cocksure smile. "Smart mouth little punk, aren’t you?" For the first time, I noticed that her eyes were two different colors. The right was hazel while the left was blue. She snatched the book from Toddy’s hand. "This particular item doesn’t like being kept out of sight. That’s the only reason it’s out here."

Toddy scoffed again. Scoffing was sort of Toddy’s trademark move. "You talk like it’s a living thing."

The woman studied Toddy through her mismatched eyes. "Be careful the games you play, kid, or else the game might play you."

Toddy snickered. "Thanks for the bearded-lady wisdom, bearded lady."

"You’re welcome." She set the book back on the shelf.

Toddy nudged my shoulder. "Didn’t you want to check out that satanic Jack-in-the-Box?"

No, I had not, actually. The satanic Jack-in-the-Box actually creeped me the hell out. But Toddy knew that, too, and was really asking for a distraction. I knew it instantly. Best friends develop a psychic rapport with each other over time. A single flick of any eyelid can communicate worlds of information. Because I wanted to be a good pal, I asked to see the satanic Jack.

The woman led me over and took it down from the shelf. I turned the box’s crank until the monstrosity sprang out with its smashed pumpkin head and jagged teeth holding a pair of bloody garden shears.

"That’s the most terrifying toy I’ve ever seen," I said.

The woman belted out a deep, good-natured laugh. It was infectious, and I laughed a little, too. "Well, you’re the one who wanted to look at it."

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Toddy tuck the book into his jacket and walk around us to the front door. I honestly didn’t know that that was his intent upon manufacturing the distraction. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t suspected the possibility, but I had hoped I was wrong.

"This place smells like dusty pee," Toddy said over his shoulder. "I’m out of here."

Shoplifting was the most serious crime I’d ever experimented with, and the guilt I carried over that bag of candy fish still affected me, almost a full year later. So, my first instinct upon seeing Toddy actually stealing the book was to shout at him. But of course I didn’t do that. I was sixteen years old, and he was my best friend.

The woman watched Toddy’s exit intently. She took the box out of my hands and pushed the Jack back inside. "Don’t go opening a monster box unless you’re ready to deal with the monster inside."

I started to tell her that Toddy wasn’t such a bad guy, but was frozen in place by the sight of her eyes. The right was blue, and the left was hazel. I could have sworn they’d been opposite just minutes before.

"The Jack is a hundred dollars," she said.

"That’s too expensive for my blood." I backed casually towards the door, fighting the instinct to run. "Thank you, though."

"De nada. My name is Olga, by the way."

I stopped at the door. "Mine is Sean."

She twisted her beard between her fingers and smiled. "We’re open seven days a week, Sean. Stop by any time."

It was a regular enough invitation to hear from a store owner, but the way she said it seemed to insinuate something deeper. I nearly asked her what it was, but then I remembered I was an accessory to shoplifting and decided to just get the hell out of there.
Toddy stood in the middle of the train tracks with the module in hand.

"Great, man," I said. "You’re a thief now. That’s cool."

Toddy shrugged. "I would have bought it if she was selling."

"It’s not up to you to decide."

"Excuse me, fan of Bearded Lady, but you stole worms once, if I do recall."

"Fish."

"Whatever."
​
We headed back home, not saying much. Toddy held the module loosely in his hand. It swung back and forth beside me like a scythe, Sir Drexler’s blue-fire eyes holding relentlessly on mine.

###

Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree is a challenging read. Nothing in the novel is given easily to the reader. The diction is archaic, words are sometimes wholly fabricated, and the symbolism draws from such a broad range of cultural sources that it is nearly impossible to make sense of. Even more confounding than the literary tools employed in the novel are the decisions made by the novel’s protagonist, Cornelius Suttree, whose inexplicably erratic lifestyle is made all the more frustrating by the fact that we are rarely given even a passing glimpse inside his head. The general oddity and interpretive challenges presented by Suttree probably explain why the novel has never enjoyed a popular readership, and why it has received relatively little critical attention. On cursory examination, the book gives the impression of a semi-comedic tale about an impoverished, alcoholic fisherman getting into legal trouble with a cast of illiterate, violent degenerates. But such a crude assessment of Suttree is no more accurate than saying that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a story about an itinerant seaman following a crazed captain on a doomed quest to harpoon an anthropomorphized whale. Both novels aspire for something much higher than they initially present.

Beyond their general thematic scope, Suttree and Moby Dick share several similarities. Both novels trace the life of outcasts who strike out into foreign lands in search of a truth that is as difficult to obtain as it is to express. Along the way, they become caught up in the quests of maniacal, heroically-defiant figures waging personal wars against indestructible foes. By the end of their journey, the seekers find that the knowledge they hoped to attain is beyond their ability to grasp. However, though the journey may fall short of its lofty goals, it helps them achieve greater self-understanding and reconciliation with the human world from which they had originally fled.

Because they bear so many similarities to each other, comparing Moby Dick with Suttree is useful in that we can draw upon the considerable critical work that has been done on the former to illuminate the latter. Melville’s magnum opus and its attendant scholarly work are effective lenses through which to view Suttree, allowing us to discover new layers of meaning buried in the narrative, to arrive at a greater understanding of its protagonist, and hopefully to find a deeper appreciation for its high ambitions.

Continued at...http://www.beyondthetempestgate.com/b...

For a limited time, No Punchline can be downloaded for free to Kindle devices. Give it a shot. It's free! And it's good! I hope!

The Subterranean Quarterly published my short story "The Dancer Versus the Mustache."

http://stquarterly.com/current-issue-...

 

For a limited time, “Beyond the Tempest Gate” is being sold for only 99 cents on Kindle. It’s not too often that you’ll find a work of art for less than the price of a soda.

Sarah Chorn of Bookworm Blues: “If you are any great follower of this website, you’ll know that I enjoy my books with a fun plot and full of deeper, more ponderous themes, and that’s exactly what you get here. What makes it all even more incredible is how Suwak manages to play with these weighty themes despite the short length. Bravo, sir.”

Reviewer/blogger William Wall: “Beyond the Tempest Gate, as written by Jeff Suwak, takes the deep emotional journey of The Wizard of Earthsea and combines it with the poetic beauty and tragedy of The Name of the Wind.”

Author Matthew Keith says: “Jeff Suwak’s novella Beyond the Tempest Gate is the perfect example of a story that doesn’t have to use filler or worry about a word count to be absolutely amazing. For me, as I read this story, it felt like Mr. Suwak must have already had the entire thing in his head before he wrote the first word. Every part of the story was necessary, every moment an exciting segue into the next.”

 

My book is for the sort of cerebral reader that enjoys thematic complexity and deep characterization with their action-adventure. If you’re a fan of dark fantasy looking for something different, looking for something that excites the intellect AND the imagination, check out Beyond the Tempest Gate while the sale lasts. You’ll be glad you did. Trust me. I’m the author

Beyond the Tempest Gate

My latest article is up at the Prague Revue.

This one was particularly fun to write. I’m honored Mark let me share his story and, more than that, I was thrilled when he let me know he was happy with it. He’s an intelligent guy with ideas that will truly benefit the world. This one was an article I will certainly remember fondly for a long time.

http://praguerevue.com/ViewArticle?ar...

We cannot envision

the glory of God,

but we know exactly

what our demons look like.

 

 

I’m a writer, which means I spend a great deal of my time walking around, observing things, and scribbling into my notebook.

Yes, I actually scribble, with a pen and paper and everything.

As inspired by author and friend Robert Mitchell, I’ve decided to start publishing some of these snippets to my blog. This one is titled Selling Out at the Coffee Shop.

 

Coffee Shop Sell Out

 

Sunday morning and the Olympia, Washington coffeehouse was packed full of politicos in sharp suits pecking absently at laptops. Scattered all around them were hipsters slouching with flair into leather recliners, flaunting the fact that they had nowhere to go and nothing better to do.

I ordered a vanilla latte decorate with a floating cream heart by a surly girl who left my thank you conspicuously unacknowledged.

I took a seat near the window.

Beside me sat a large man in a navy blue suit and a young woman in business formal. The man had the biggest mustache I’ve ever seen that wasn’t on the face of a porn star or drug dealer. He doesn’t wear the mustache, I thought. The mustache wears him.

“The people in this country have lost their complex reasoning skills,” he grumbled.  “People don’t know how to goddamn think anymore.” He jabbed his finger at the side of his head as though contemplating over and over again driving it through his own skull, but always at the last minute pulling himself back for the brink.

He realized how loud his voice had become and lowered, but soon worked himself into a new diatribe about healthcare, taxes, and all of the dimwits in the country – by which he meant, apparently, everyone but him.

The classically-pretty young woman asked the mustache question after question, leaving her notebook opened on the table before her but never writing anything down.  She just grinned and nodded.

He doesn’t mean me when he talks about stupid people,  her grin said.  No, not me. 

She had the look of a heady idealist just out of college, caught between the worlds of school and career.  Her outfit was standard professional fare, but she still clung to the last vestiges of her tie-dyed integrity with a love bead bracelet, no makeup, and hair pulled back in a bun.

With the mustache raging on, I finished my coffee, scoffed loudly, and walked out the door.

I looked through the window as I passed to see him still talking. He watched me through the glass. I stared back until his eyes diverted.

As far as the young woman, all I could see was the back of her head as her brown bun bobbed up and down her eager nodding.

I felt sorry for her and headed to the bus station.

###

 This story actually happened a couple years ago. I found it in my notebook and couldn’t help but wonder what happened to that young woman.

As for the mustache, I can’t say I really care.