Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 14

SATURDAY: SECOND THOUGHTS ON THE SOLDIER OF ORANGE

The more I think about it, the less pleased I am that I let a perceived necessity force me into rambling about my political beliefs. I grasp that escape from politics is virtually impossible in the world in which we live, and that it is probably irresponsible to try: that doesn't mean I have to add darkness to the sum of darkness already overflowing this planet. So I would like to finish my Saturday contribution to this blog by steering away from the subject entirely, and get back to the business of rambling about everything else. Specifically a movie I just watched: A SOLDIER OF ORANGE (1977), directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbe.

I found this early effort by the Dutch director, who also helmed ROBOCOP, BASIC INSTINCT, STARSHIP TROOPERS, and TOTALL RECALL, among others, to be a remarkable film in the literal sense. It takes a subject which has been much romanticized and distorted and places it under an uncomfortably close lens: specifically, what life was like for those under Nazi occupation, and the choices those who had to endure it were forced to make.

[Warning, ahead there be spoilers.]

The movie opens in 1938, and follows a group of friends -- six young men and a young woman -- living in The Nethelerlands in the idyllic years before the outbreak of WW2. Rutger Hauer is Erik, a scrappy but socially ambitious fraternity pledge; Krabbe is his suave fraternity president; Alex is the handsome son of German Dutch parents; Robby is the brainy, nervous type, engaged to Susan, who is Jewish and can't choose between him and Erik and sleeps with both; Jan is an aspiring boxer who is also Jewish; and Jacques (Jack) a bland but hard-working student. All of them assume the Netherlands will stay neutral in the coming war, and are shocked when the Germans invade in 1940. Two of the men, Alex and Jan, volunteer to serve in the Dutch army, and are dismayed when the country surrenders to the Germans. It is here and now that their paths begin to diverge.

Erik, Guus, Jan and Robby are all attracted to the amateurish but passionate Dutch resistance movement, but have -- to say the least -- different experiences as a result. Erik's initial encounters, including capture, cause him to abandon his role as a resistance fighter, only to change his mind later and flee to England with Guus, where they are trained by the British to perform spying and commando work. Jan is captured by the Nazis, subjected to torture, and finally executed by firing squad. Robby is captured as well, but turns coat and serves the Germans as a double agent when they threaten Susan with deportation to a concentration camp. Jacques, meanwhile, lives a quiet life as a student, neither collaborating nor resisting. Meanwhile, the war goes on -- for the Dutch population, seemingly without end.

Unlike most movies I have seen on this unpleasant subject, A SOLDIER OF ORANGE does not shy away from the complexities of life under a brutal military occupation. Erik, the titular hero, leaves the Resistance when he gets a taste of Gestapo accomodations, and has to be coaxed back to the cause. Jan, a tough as nails Jew, refuses to break under excruciating torture (look up "salt water rectal rehydration," if you dare) and dies heroically, but in a sense, he is the character with the least amount of choices: collaboration, or even passive co-existence, was never an option. Susan, a Jewess, is simply trying to survive, and overlooks the fact that Robby is now a German spy: at the end of the war she has her head shaved, and her house ranscaked, as punishment for collaboration.

Robby, on the other hand, is sincere and brave, but when caught, has to make a choice between the movement and his girlfriend, and chooses his girlfriend: he pays for this decision with his life, when Guus, realizing he is a traitor, tracks him down and kills him. Guus, brave and devoted though he is, nevertheless seeks life as a spy when service in the British army proves too dirty and disagreeable, and one is tempted to wonder what his final thoughts were, when his tongue is shot with novocaine because his German captors tire of him screaming, and he is dragged to the guillotine to face beheading for killing Robby.

The character of Alex is perhaps the most interesting if one of the least explored. Alex fights the Germans when they invade, but is deeply angry at the treatment meted out to his German parents, and hurt by the coolness with which his freinds regard him, being of German blood. He ends up joining the Waffen-SS as a foreign volunteer, becomes a big hero in Russia, and accidentally reunites with Erik, who he suspects is in the resistance but does not denounce. At a party, the two dance a mock tango while subtly taunting each other over their respective choices: it is an unforgettable scene, at once comic and dramatic, fraught with tension that is almost sexual but also tinged with sadness, as at this point both men are irreconcilable enemies regardless of how they actually feel about one another. (When Erik escapes to England, Alex sends Erik postcards with swastika flags upon them, which Erik hangs on the cockpit of his bomber, promising himself to "drop a bomb on Alex's head.") Alex is ultimately killed in Russia, as much a victim of circumstance as everyone else.

The final character, Jack, is actually the most understandable. Reunited with Erik at the end of the film, he explains how he quietly, patiently worked his way through school to get his degree during the war. He expresses neither embarrassment for his failure to resist the occupation nor the faintest trace of pro-Nazi sentiment. He is simply the ordinary man, neither a fighter nor a collaborationist, neither a coward nor a hero...like the great mass of any people suffering under similar circumstances. And that is what really makes this unususal, sometimes overly facetious movie so unforgettable. It does not present the usual ivory tower, debate-society arguments about good vs. evil and the "duty" of ordinary folk to resist oppression, which are so tedious because they are inevitably asked by university professors or Hollywood producers, neither of which have ever had to make a choice more difficult than "croissant or scone?" in their entire lives. No. It simply presents each of its characters with the brutal question: "The Nazis are at the door. What are you going to do?"

And indeed, SOLDIER OF ORANGE had me asking that question myself. Watching the torture sequences, or the psychological games the Nazis play with their captives -- cooperate and you live and can even prosper, defy us and up your ass goes this hose until your bowels explode -- I had to ask myself whether I would have been able to associate even tangenitally with the resistance movement. And my answer was: most likely, no. I believe I could fight in uniform, under at least the theoretical protections offered to POWs if captured, but not in a situation where torture followed by equally grisly execution were the only alternatives to active collaboration with the enemy. It is simply too much to ask of a human being to make such choices. Robby's capitulation is understandable, as is Susan's deliberate naivete. Likewise, if I were Alex, how hard would I resist the blandishments of the Nazis when my own parents were being mistreated by the Dutch government and its people? Why fight for neighbors who curse your for a spy and a traitor even after you took up arms in their defense?

As I said above, what I enjoyed about the film even more than its perspective was way it provoked thought...and the way it withheld judgment, leaving it up to the audience to decide how to feel about its characters. I also admired it, despite its occasionally clumsy emotional tone, for the way it presented the war as a tragedy in a highly personal sense: these are people who, but for Hitler, would have lived out ordinary lives and remained friends. They were forced into circumstances no one should have to face and make choices nobody should have to make. And this, of course, is the essence of war, a phenomenon I write about but have never experienced. But A SOLDIER OF ORANGE definitely left me with a better understanding of the practical consequences.

A GO AT THE RIGHT

In Wednesday's blog, I promised I'd "have a go" at the political Right, if only to prove what I have so often claimed in this forum: that I am basically a centrist, with zero devotion to any party. It would be understandable if you thought me a liar in this regard. I so often "have a go" at the Left that you might think me one of those fakers who insists they don't drink anyone's Kool Aid while secretly guzzling the stuff by the gallon. The stark fact is that I rubbish the Left more often than the right out of sheer selfishness: as a writer, and as someone who respects art in all of its mediums and forms, I sense more of a danger from said Left than I do from the Right. I truly believe, and have argued at great length, that it is Wokeism which remains the most imminent threat to freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of expression, without which art cannot exist. I am well aware, however, that to many millions of people, the politics of the Right are more threatening and also pose greater immediacy. And regardless of this, I'm also aware that the Right, in its present form, is terribly dangerous to everyone, including its most fervent adherents.

I am fifty years old, which is old enough to remember a very different political landscape. In the 1980s, for example, "Conservative" and "Republican" were not synonymous. The Conservatives were a wing of the Republican party, which also included Moderates and even a hefty proportion of people who identified as Democrats but agreed with the Right on foreign policy and certain other specific issues. (My father, a lifelong journalist who covered the White House for many years, called such people "Truman Democrats.") But regardless of what you called them, they existed, and in great numbers.

The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan had an ideology which was easy to identify. It favored a very tough foreign policy in regards to the Cold War, heavy military spending, and a sharply limited, hands-off Federal government. It was pro-business, anti-regulation, and socially conservative, and in this ideology it had been consistent for decades. It was, however, very much part of the "establishment" of American politics, in that it was effective in neutralizing its more radical elements -- keeping the fanatics and outright nuts in the basement, as it were, where they could not alienate the ordinary voter. It was also very hardheaded and realistic beneath its bluster. Reagan once famously retorted to someone who asked him why, since he didn't believe in abortion, he didn't do more to have it abolished, with the words, "Because I'm not insane." He understood -- the whole leadership understood -- that there were some issues near and dear to Conservatives which, if he pressed them in the legislature, would only lead to his political destruction. Reagan was smart enough to understand that he needed the Reagan Democrats, and could not afford to alienate them. Put another way: he was a politician, and knew how to deliver on his promises when it served his purposes, and to promise without delivering when it was good for him and his party. He had the sense to see there was a sharply drawn line between politics -- "the art of the possible," which require cold calculation and good sense, and ideology, whose chief appeal is that it requires neither.

The resurgence of the Republican Party after Nixon, which led to Reagan's ascendancy, owed a great deal to the fact that they were seen as the tougher and more ruthless of the two choices Americans had at the ballot box. Fleet Admiral Ernest King, who was taken out of an unwanted semi-retirement to basically run the United States Navy during WW2, noted that he owed the resurrection of his career to one brutal truth: "When the going gets tough, the send for the sons of bitches." The demise of the Soviet Union and most of its vassal states ended the Cold War, and with it, the need for those Sons of Bitches, the Republicans, who at least knew how to play rough. Bush the First's administration was essentially a momentum presidency, and lasted only a single term, and Bush the Second's presidency, which followed Clinton's tenure, did not really reflect the wishes of the American people. W.'s victory in the first election was questionable at best, and even this outcome was really the result of the fact he ran against an equally unexciting candidate in Al Gore. His re-election was due almost entirely to the fact he was a wartime president, and Americans strongly dislike changing their leaders in mid-conflict. He was never a darling of the Right, being viewed, like so many in the Party, as RINO's, opportunistic con men who really didn't give a damn about ideology, only power, and had long ago surrendered on key policy issues as well as the burgeoning culture war. These people talked the talk, but they did not walk the walk.

And what was the walk? A friend of mine who was active in the Tea Party movement of the late 2000s expressed it thusly: "We want Republicans who will actually DO SOMETHING about illegal immigration, governmental, regulations, abortion, political correctness, taxes, and gun control." This is by no means a comprehensive definition of the movement, but it is probably representative of how many others who supported it felt, and it was astonishingly successful in suddenly and radically reshaping the Republican party's leadership from that of smiling, smooth talking car salesmen into firebrands and idealogues who either believed in what they said or were faking it so well, through their actions, that it didn't make a difference.

And this new Republican party, being born in frustration and anger, made that frustrated anger central to its identity. For this we can largely thank Newt Gingrich, who decided in the late 1970s that the real problem in Washington was civility and compromise. He didn't want Elephants and Donkeys playing basketball together in the Capitol gym, or eating lunch at the Ebbit Grill, or drinking beer in Adams-Morgan, which had always been the custom of these supposed mortal enemies when off-camera (I saw it myself). So throughout his political career, he worked tirelessly to draft a new playbook in which the goal was victory by scorched earth and not a handshake agreement. And he succeeded. The increasing temperature of political rhetoric, and the Republican voters' eagerness -- not willingness, eagerness -- to tolerate that rhetoric, made for a very different atmosphere in American politics. Of course, the Left had been radicalising by degrees for many years, but the Right was radicalizing like a pot of water placed on a burner turned all the way up. The fanatics and crazies who Reagan would have deftly locked in the hold were now threatening to run the ship. The trouble was, they lacked a leader. The Republicans eyeing the office during Obama's tenure were all professional politicians, and no matter how loudly they bleated their commitment to the new Republicanism, they still looked, and felt, like insiders.

Then, along came Donald Trump.

Trump ignited the great mass of deeply frustrated Republicans with his now-infamous "build the wall" speech -- a promise, incidentally, he never delivered upon or even came close to delivering upon. By and large the platform he put forth was incoherent, inconsistent and incomplete, but it hit the right buttons. The Tea Party had identified the source of the discontent: Trump drove a spike directly into its taproot, releasing the pent-up sap of frustration. He quickly grasped that what he was running on was not a policy but emotions and feelings. Some Americans were deeply alienated by "politics as usual" and shifting cultural winds. Many Americans were tired of political correctness. Most Americans were sick of "the Establishment." So Trump threw a harness over the restless bad temper of the masses and rode it into office. And fair play to him for utilizing this energy. It existed for a reason, and the incompetence and neglect of the Right's old leadership was only part of that reason. The Left was doing its absolute best to estrange everyone by increasingly allowing its own culture warriors to dictate both message and policy. The white working class, 75 million strong, used to reside largely in the back pocket of the Democratic Party, who were generally union-friendly. The ceaseless "straight white male bashing," the aggressive environmentalism conducted without suitable propaganda to help ease down the bitter pill to people like coal-miners (whose institutions were being wiped out by change), coupled with a bizarre streak of anti-Americanism -- rather a curious feature of an American political party, nicht wahr? -- drove millions away from their tickets. Their defeat in 2016 was a deserved defeat, all the moreso because they failed to immediately diagnose the cause: their own ideology would not let them accept that what they were cookin', not everyone wanted to eat.

But we are discussing the Right, and while it took the White House in 2016 and for a time held both houses of Congress, too, it showed almost immediately why it was, and is, completely unsuited for power -- why it will always be unsuited to and unworthy of power, so long as it retains its present shape.

The old Right was many things, but it was not intellectually bankrupt. Men like William Safire, George Will, William F. Buckley and even Pat Buchanan were among those who nurtured the intellectual roots of modern conservatism. Who crafted arguments and wrote position papers, speeches, and books in support of conservative and libertarian ideas, and who lent credence to Republican policies.

In addition to its intellectual bedrock, the old Right was also quite efficient -- sometimes brutally efficient -- at maintaining order and discipline within its own ranks. It was efficient because most of its leadership understood how to wield the power they had, and how to compromise when that power was lacking. And because it respected tradition, because it respected decorum, it was able to restrain some of its own worst impulses toward the acquisition of power. Even someone as dimwitted and morally compromised as George W. Bush grasped that the president was not a king, and should not want to be a king, even though, in the modern era, there is very little preventing any president from effectively becoming so.

It is hardly a coincidence that the entire intellectual wing of the Republican Party went into revolt the moment Trump emerged as frontrunner for the nomination: indeed, almost the whole of the Never Trump movement is made up of intellectual Republicans. They knew brain death when they saw it, and they judged -- correctly -- that in addition to being almost incredibly uninformed and ignorant about everything a president needed to know to govern effectively, or even to qualify as a human being, Trump was also completely unteachable. His party was to be a party of anti-intellectualism, in which science was laughed at, critical thinking was abolished and "expert" became a dirty word (unless of course it was Trump claiming the expertise). And it is this culture rather than Trump's own semi-willful stupidity that makes it so dangerous. To gain traction in the party nowadays, it is necessary to emulate Trump, and to emulate Trump, one must either hide one's intellectual capacity or lack any to begin with. Politicians on the Right are judged solely by the intensity of their rhetoric and unwillingness to compromise, not by their brains. In the technological age, such a stance is ruinous.

Another feature of the modern Right is its astonishing incompetence. This is a result of both the innate corruption which emanates from Trump himself (itself just the apotheosis of the besetting sin of Republicanism: blind greed), and the fact that like all autocratic personalities, he is jealous and insecure and cannot abide strong, independent, capable subordinates. Mediocrity is threatened by genius, and Trump, who must be the strongest and smartest in the room, crushed, drove from the ranks, or suborned anyone in the leadership who could think for himself. The cult of anti-intellectualism at the core of the new party favors cringing, servile, boot-lickers who must simultaneously demonstrate their loyalty to Trump at all times, yet remain sufficiently unthreatening to him to remain in his good graces. This is not a recipe for effective leadership, especially since Trump cannot abide criticism, even well-intentioned criticism, which to him is indistinguishable from attack. This means course-correction is impossible. Anyone who watched the election of Kevin McCarthy to the speakership bore witness to a party unable to govern itself, much less a country. It is worth noting that Trump lost the house, the senate, and then the presidency, all in the space of four years, a feat of ineptitude unequaled in American history, and one which is a direct result of Trump creating an intellectual desert at the top of his party.

The second most fatal of the fatal flaws of the new Right is, of course, its moral bankruptcy. This is peculiar because the Right generally claims to be the stronghold of "traditional family values" and there is some substance to the argument that it has in fact been just that. Republicanism is by its nature literally conservative, conservative meaning a dislike of change and a reverence for the past, and there is great strength in such a position, especially during an era when America is plainly fragmenting and in decline. But modern Republicanism is a reflection of Trump himself, and Trump's outstanding characteristics are his selfishness, his cruelty, his contempt for the truth, his greed, his need for attention, his and his complete lack of anything resembling ethics, morals or scruples. Trump has normalized behaviors which the party of Reagan would have rightfully abominated, and it is no use to say that all politicians are equally sleazy with the shades pulled down: paying homage to tradition, civility, established norms of behavior and standards of common decency, even if they this is entirely pro forma and constitutes nothing more than lip service and pantomime, are crucial behaviors in public officials. They are crucial because they set the tone for the rest of the country. Leaders lead not by their words but by example. Trump's behavior has consistently been petty, vulgar, mean-spirited, vindictive, and completely lacking in any kind of self-awareness. He is frightening not because he has these qualities himself but because he has normalized them, and encouraged and empowered millions of others to do as he does. The phrases "post-truth world" and "alternative facts" are outgrowths of Trump's own view of life, which regards objective truth as whatever he needs it or wants it to be.

You will notice at this point that I am scarcely distinguishing between The Right and Trump himself. This is intentional. They are impossible to separate at this juncture of history. And this is especially important because it brings us to the final, fatal, disqualifying flaw: the lust for power for its own sake, and the desire to keep it all costs, even if it means annihilating cultural norms, American traditions, and the law itself.

The new Right, post-Trump, has had a taste of what real power, unfettered by democratic checks and balances, is actually like. They found it intoxicating and the saliva running from the jaws of men like Ron De Santis is quite terrifying to witness. They see in Trump a crude blueprint for how to transition the presidential swearing-in ceremony to a coronation, whereby the president becomes king in everything but name, above the law, able to rule more or less by fiat. I am not quite sure whether the new Right is in effect a monarchist party at heart, or whether they prefer a kind of Christian nationalism of the sort Spain experienced when Franco took power, or whether the ultimate goal is a harder fascism of the Mussolini type, which openly made the state the tool of corporate power. What I am sure of is that they have deliberately attacked the foundations of democracy for years and continue to do so with brutal vigor. This is not a party dedicated to saving America, as they claim, but to destroying America and recreating it in the image of Putin's Russia.

By this time, if you lean to the Right politically, you have either walked away in disgust or are deeply offended. And of course this is why I dislike talking about politics in the first place. I cannot open my mouth about either group without alienating people, including people who might otherwise be interested in my work. But the fact remains that we do live in a political age, and it is naive in the extreme to believe that we can ignore the harsh reality that both the choices we have in this country are bad ones, because both parties in question have allowed the nutters and mental defectives, the con men and grifters, out of their asylums and prisons and let them grasp the levers of power. It would be irresponsible and cowardly for me to pretend that I don't see a threat in this, and since I regularly "have a go" at the Left I felt incumbent to stick that same dagger in the soft white underbelly of the Right. I do this without feelings of rancor to those who identify with Right-wing politics: as James O'Brien says, "Contempt for the con man, compassion for the conned."

George Orwell once lamented that religion and international socialism proved to be "as weak as straw" against the flame of fascism. He was within his rights to make this complaint, because he understood that a large segment of the human population is disinterested by nature in what the Left has to offer them. I understand these people because I used to be one of them, and in some ways remain so: I will always be vulnerable to simple answers to complex questions, to appeals to nationalistic fervor, to those who stoke fear and nurse dislike of change. I will always have a deep reverence for my country's past, even when I know that past has many dark chapters, and harbor a belief that things were "better back when." Beyond that, I understand that the Right is in fact right on some issues, and that the Left is wrong on quite a few indeed. But I'm not blind to what the Republican party has become, or to its ultimate goals, which are un-American and antidemocratic. If the Right cannot come back to sanity and integrity, if this malarial fever called Trumpism is a permanent condition, that it has forfeited not only my vote, but my respect. Forever.

AS I PLEASE XV

I am writing this on July 4th, just as I hear the first of the fireworks popping off, probably over the minor league baseball stadium near my home. I am not joining the celebrations this year. I can't remember the last time I did: probably 2013 or so. This is not lack of patriotism on my part, nor is it a dislike of beer, picnics or fireworks. I consider myself a patriot (not a nationalist), I eat and drink too much as it is, and well, I love bright colors: so this day ought to be tailor made for me. But tonight I find myself reflecting on a whole slew of random matters, and when I am in such a mood, one of the few techniques I've developed -- or in this case, borrowed -- that helps to declutter my brain is simply to set them down in the As I Please format so kindly invented by Mr. Orwell almost a century ago. So, here we go.

* Yesterday I was sitting with a group of people I know at a local tavern which has a completely glass-enclosed patio. About an hour after we arrived, no more, I bore witness (through the glass) to the most savage, extended thunderstorm I have seen in three years, when I happened to be caught in one somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico. Living in Southern California for as long as I did, I had forgotten the savagery of the summer thunderstorm. But what really strikes me about them is how the sun usually comes out before they have actually stopped. In some cases they don't even reach peak intensity until the sun does appear. And then, just like that, they stop. There's no slackening-off period. Within just a minute or two you'd never know it had rained at all, except that the gutters are now overflowing.

* Today I drove through a second thunderstorm on my way to go hiking. The hike was not anything noble in conception. I was restless and wanted to work out some plot problems that I've been struggling with for my third CAGE LIFE novel. Driving through this downpour, I was reminded that from 1977 to 1992 or so, I watched the Fourth of July from the White House lawn. My dad was the White House correspondent for the Chicago Sun Times and had a standing invite for the occasion. In the early years it was a great deal of fun. We'd make a picnic of it and get a glimpse or two of the president, at that time Jimmy Carter. Actually, truth be told, never saw Carter. He walked right past me, but he was accompanied by a moving ring of Secret Servicemen, aides, and cameramen so deep that all I saw was the well-lighted ring as it walked across the lawn. When Ronald Reagan became president, he or his security people began to ban things like food, drinks, and eventually lawn chairs, so that attending meant laying on a blanket and going hungry for hours, often in very heavy thunderstorms, before the weather eventually cleared up and the fireworks began. My last attendance was in '92, when George H.W. Bush was president, and I mainly remember taking my girlfriend there. She was probably excited about it, too, until the boredom and hunger pangs set in.

* A year later I was at the White House again for a Christmas party my Dad had been invited to. Bush had lost the election and was marking time until the transfer of power, and he looked tired and defeated behind his obligatory smile. I hadn't forgiven him for the lack of hospitality the previous year, so I stole an ashtray from him and smuggled it past the Secret Service as we left. Actually, I did this to impress a different girlfriend, who was the ultimate recipient of this stolen property. I still cannot believe I did that. It must rank up there with the five dumbest, most irresponsible things I have ever done, but at the time -- I was twenty -- it seemed perfectly reasonable.

* Going back to being bored in fancy places: when I first began to work in Hollywood, at the age of 35, I was struck, as everyone in that business is ultimately struck, by how quickly the excitement of working in film, television, video games etc. turns to the same sort of clock-watching you'd see at any 9 - 5 cubicle job. The brutal fact is that nearly every profession perceived as glamorous or dangerous is, in fact, boring, at least most of the time, and even when it is not boring is often a grind of the worst type. Most people would think working in video games the absolute height of decadence, and they would be right. It is. You get paid to play video games, for Crissake, and eat like a king while you do it. On some gigs, you aren't even required to be sober (and believe me, when you weren't, I wasn't). What made the gaming industry so difficult was not the conditions per se, but the hours. Imagine sitting for 14 - 16 hours a day, in some cases seven days a week, in some cases for months on end. There is only so much stress-eating, conversation, book reading, music listening, bathroom breaking and whatnot to carry you through the 100-hour week, and of course 100 hours in M.P. bay means very little in the way of sleep. It also means heavy weight gain in a short period of time. There is nothing glamorous about the way you look, feel, and smell at 3:30 AM on a hot summer night when you just came off a sixteen-hour seige and 4,500 calories, mostly of fats and carbohydrates, knowing you have maybe five hours to sleep before you have to get in your car and do it again.

* Speaking of Orwell. He also made a remark to the effect that "any life, viewed from the inside, is probably just a series of defeats." Humans have a tendency to devalue anything we actually have or accomplish, and fetishize and romanticize that which we have not yet achieved: beyond that, we suffer from what Anne Rice called "vicious egotism," meaning not a refusal to believe that anything great could happen, but rather a refusal to believe anything great could happen to us. I sometimes have to remind myself of the extraordinary life I've lead, because like most other people, my day-to-day life is prosaic and unglamorous. I guess the moral here is that some interesting things are really more interesting to talk about afterwards than to do at the time.

* Speaking of Britons, someone of the British persuasion who read my previous blog, "J.K. Rowling and Frankenstein's Monster" rather acerbically asked me if I was ever going to pen a column that "has a go at at the Right for a change." The answer to this question is yes, absolutely yes. While I never intended Stone Cold Prose to mention politics at all, I concluded, as my spiritual mentor Orwell did before me, that it was naive to think I could escape them, and as a writer, I feel obligated to take up a lance in defense of art, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought, which are generally under attack from both sides of the isle simultaneously. So yeah, I will be "having a go" at the Right, too. No fear, no favor.

* I've got no segue for this remark, but yesterday I watched two quite good Korean-made movies about the Korean war. What struck me most about them was the fact that the South Koreans referred to their Chinese enemies derisively as "chinks." I don't know why this surprised me particularly. The historical animosity between Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. is not news. But in America, we have been so brainwashed to believe that racism is a fundamentally European concept, that when we see it in other parts of the globe, it sometimes comes as a mild shock.

I snuck away from the keyboard to watch the finale of the fireworks display over the ball field from my hallway window. It was, admittedly, spectacular and beautiful, the moreso because I didn't have to stand in a crowd of rowdy drunks to watch it. Some would say being fifty years old watching fireworks from a window in your one-bedroom apartment in York, Pennsylvania, with your arms full of hot laundry, is a comedown from watching them on the White House lawn. But hey, I'm not hungry.

J.K. ROWLING AND FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER

People find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right. -- Albus Dumbledore

To see an almost universally beloved figure tumble from grace is one of the most fascinating and pathetic spectacles life offers. There is an air of Shakespearian or even Greek-level tragedy in a downfall story, even if one happens to believe the downfall justified.

I don't think anyone would argue that J.K. Rowling has actually fallen. She has not necessarily even stumbled. When one has already crossed the finish line and taken the trophy cup, it is arguable if controveries ex post facto even matter. After all, the HARRY POTTER series sold over over 500 million copies. The films made from those books grossed 7.7 billion dollars. The authorized merchandise has sold $15 billion. He own personal worth is quoted as £820 million, making her, by American standards, effectively a billionaire -- and she could certainly be a billionaire, even in British pounds, if she didn't give so much money to charity. Perhaps most importantly, she retains enormous legions of devoted fans, people who grew up with her works and to whom the universe of Harry Potter is as important as STAR WARS, STAR TREK, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, or any other fictive universe in which it is possible to immerse oneself completely and forget "real life" even exists.

It is nevertheless true that Rowling's public image has been tarnished, deliberately and willfully, and her reputation in certain quarters diminished or destroyed as a consequence. The once-adoring, even sniveling way the media deals with her has given way to a barely concealed hostility. She is often identified in the first few lines of any article as a bigot, someone who is against trans rights, someone who betrayed her own feminism and alienated her adoring fans by revealing hidden prejudices. Few "journalists" writing about Rowling nowadays even bother with the pretense of objectivity: you would think her a polarizing political figure who'd happened, sometime in the distance past, to pen a few goodish potboilers, rather than one of the most influential writers of the modern era who has also given vast sums to charitable causes and championed the cause of feminism, but holds some slightly deviationist opinions about a tiny, fractious fraction of the population.

A few years ago this would have been unthinkable. Rowling hit almost every note possible on the "improbable success scale." A single mother living on the dole, almost penniless, without any seeming aptitude for writing, somehow rose in a short period to international mega-fame and entered the hallowed halls of authors who will go down in literary history not for their financial success, but for the degree to which they influenced the world around them: unlike E.L. James or Stephanie Myers, who put up huge numbers and also had lucrative movie tie-ins, Rowling's work has actual, cultural resonance. When I describe my graduate school as "looking like Hogwarts," I do not need to further explain myself: the image comes ready-made even to those who never saw the movies or read the books. Likewise, when I say someone "looks like Harry Potter" or "has all the charm of Lord Voldemort," no one is going to scratch their heads at the obscurity of the reference. Like Stephen King before her, Rowling's contributions to our vernacular are permanent.

The tarnishment -- some might say vandalism -- of Rowling's public image began with her sarcastic reply to an op-ed piece which referred to women as “people who menstruate." In this day and age, when vocabulary at large is being bent and beaten into vaguely Orwellian shapes to soothe the easily-ruffled feathers of a certain section of our political demographic, the idea that "women" as a word should yield to "people who menstruate" is not really a surprising one. Nevertheless, there are many who object to this sort of nonsense and Rowling is one of them. The reply she wrote on Twitter -- "I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” -- caused an immediate online furor, and when Rowling clarified her position later on, explaining that she supported trans people but that "sex is real" -- it only added fuel to this rather bizarre fire. The reaction among the Hollywood crowd, amateur activisits, and the intellectual Left was immediate and violent. A number of HARRY POTTER cast members, people who owed their entire livelihoods to her existence, turned on her with a speed that would have astonished Satan, a fairly accomplished betrayer himself. (One book reseller actually removed Rowling's name from the covers of her own novels, another touch Orwell would have found familiar.) And this backlash, far from exhausting itself quickly, has only strengthened over time. A few months ago, an open world video game called "Hogwarts Legacy" was released by Warner Bros. Software. Although Rowling had nothing whatever to do with the development of the game, she recieves royalties for it, and this, along with the fact the name "Harry Potter" was attached to it, was sufficient cause for "activists" to organize a boycott. This went as far as creating a website which would identify and publicize the name of anyone who actually purchased the game, a clear attempt at intimidation (a more and more common feature of "trans activism" nowadays). The boycott was a miserable failure, "Hogwarts Legacy" grossed over a billion dollars and received astonishingly high reviews on Steam (9/10), but the fact it was attempted, and the means by which its organizers were willing to try and carry it out, showed that Rowling's haters are not going anywhere. And the press has clearly taken the side of those haters by ensuring that any mention of her name is immediately accompanied by her "anti-trans positions."

Regardless of where one might sit on this issue, or whether one even takes a seat at all, the situation is fascinating. It is fascinating because it brings a much larger political-societal issue into specific relief, specifically the growing and increasingly bitter divide between the liberal and the progressive.

When one looks at what is broadly referred to as "The Left," it is important to understand that we are covering a great deal of political ground. The center-leftist, the liberal, and the progressive are all on one side of the political spectrum, but are hardly peas in a pod. Rowling is, of course, a self-admitted liberal. Now, "liberalism" in Europe is, of course, somewhat further to the left than American liberalism, or even Canadian liberalism (Canadians will please forgive me for implying they are not Americans too, it's just more wieldly to write "American" than "liberalism in the United States"), but suffice to say that liberals everywhere are in sympathy if not necessarily in agreement with each other.

What is liberalism, you ask? Before we can answer that we must briefly address the Left as a whole. If we start "just left of center," we find a person who, in the United States, votes Democratic but may have opinions on things like national defense or social issues such as welfare, immigration, gun control, abortion, etc. which are more in keeping with right-wing thought. They tend toward social conservatism in practice if not in expressed sympathy: they may be all for you to have dyed purple hair, a bone through your nose and an invented pronoun, but they woudn't want such a person in their house or their family. They are not overly political beings and do not obsess over politics. They believe they stand for decency and common sense, and radical ideas make them uncomfortable even if they feel pressured to express sympathy for them. They may want to see change on specific issues, but essentially stand for the status quo.

Liberalism is a more active form of leftism, touched in places by Marxist thought but not actually Marxist. Liberals have strong beliefs about what they refer to as social justice. Their sympathies are with the poor, the marginalized, the downtrodden. They are deeply discontented with the status quo and feel that society needs extensive change in order to become more equitable and just, and that many of our social, economic, and political institutions need a radical overhaul. A liberal is more likely to make their politics part of their daily identity, and to choose their friendships and romantic attachments based on political alignment. However -- and this is a key point -- liberals, like center-leftists, are generally quite comfortable in the world as it is. I don't mean they are comfortable with it: I mean they are comfortable in it. Though their beliefs are sincerely held, the insult often levied at them -- that they are "parlor Bolsheviks," people who cry for radical change from the ease of their middle or upper-middle class lifestyles, who decry "the system" while directly benefiting from its supposed injustices -- is not specious. Orwell himself, an avowed Social Democrat and a devotee of Marx, was the first to point out that many on the Left spent their lives complaining bitterly about things they really did not wish to change. A person who is genuinely upset about social inequality, racism, police brutality, etc., but is upset from the comfort of his suburban living room in his all-white, crime-free neighborhood; someone who wants "radical change" without actually wanting the consequences of it to his or her own lifestyle, and without necessarily seeing the inherent irony of these positions...this would be an uncharitable and incomplete, but not necessarily wrong, view of the liberal. On the other hand, the liberal is broad-minded when it comes to arguing points of doctrine with other liberals, and can do this without rancor and indeed, often with a relish for the clash of sincerley-held ideas. There is more than a touch of middle-class sensibilities in many liberals.

A progressive is on the further end of the leftist spectrum, in the Marxian realm. A progressive is someone who wants radical change to "the system" and wants to see it happen in their lifetime, and more than that, they want to help make it happen, sooner rather than later. A progressive has the courage of their convictions in that they are generally willing to endure (or at least believe they are willing to endure) all unpleasantness and suffering that comes with activism. They are also willing to shed middle-class/bourgeois notions of civility, politeness and decency to see their agendas carried out. Since they regard "the system" (the courts, the ballot box) as rigged, they tolerate it only when it rules in their favor, and tend to accept government as legitimate only when it falls on their side of an issue. Unlike liberals, who generally eschew violence if not confrontation, progressives have a violent streak in them -- violent not only in terms of rhetoric, but sometimes, in terms of action. Indeed, the hyperbolic rhetoric favored by progressives -- equating buying a video game with genocide, for example -- is a form of violence, since in effect that is what it encourages. And like all Marxists, be they avowed or in spirit, they are incredibly intolerant of disagreement within their own ranks. We will come back to this crucial point in a moment.

Now, these are only my incomplete, prejudiced, and too broadly-painted, definitions, but they will do for today's purposes, because it is impossible to understand the tarnishment and vandalism of Rowling, and its real-life importance, without understanding the role in which liberals have played in their own downfall, their own descent into powerlessness and irrelevancy. In a sense, and not surprisingly, it began in the halls of academia.

As long as a hundred years ago or more, it had become evident that universities in the Western world were a breeding-ground for left-wing thought. Orwell commented on this at great length in various essays, making his infamous crack about "professors who got their crockery in Paris and their ideas from Moscow." At the time, the ideas of Marx had great currency in many universities, appealing to the academic class in large part because, theoretically anyway, they stood to gain the most by a widespread acceptance of Marxist ideas. Marxism was, at its core, a movement meant to put the intelligencia in charge of society. However, because communism per se never took power in any major Western state, Marxism continued to exist only as an intellectual idea, sealed off from the great masses by ivy-covered university walls. It was all theory and no practice. Modern Western liberalism was at best a severely watered-down version of it, one which existed within the traditional societal framework, and still paid emotional homage to middle-class sensibilities and the status quo. However, as the decades passed, the intellectual and emotional influences of liberal professors on their students increased. The generation born in the 40s and 50s, who opposed the Vietnam war and fought for civil rights as young men and women, became the college professors of the 1980s and 1990s. They cut their hair and traded Nehru jackets for academic tweed, but they did not forget their ideals. Collectively, if unconsciously, they sought -- at the least -- to "open up" the minds of the youth to leftist or Marxist-style thinking, and at most, to breed a generation who would finish the work they had started, and which had been so rudely interrupted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And broadly speaking, they were successful, but in a curiously ironic way.

In 2015, Professor Edward Schlosser wrote a now-famous essay for Vox entitled: "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me." He lamented that campuses had become fear-filled environments in which the goal was no longer education but a "safe" environment in which students' beliefs and prejudices would be protected rather than challenged. Schlosser painted a picture of a campus in which curriculums had been redesigned to be as bland, inoffensive, and politically correct as possible, so as not to upset students with ideas or concepts which would make them uncomfortable. Schlosser summed up his essay by writing that "the real problem (is) a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice."

It's worth noting -- and Professor Schlosser does not -- that this problem, like Frankenstein's monster, did not self-create. It was the inevitable end result of teaching an aggressively intolerant ideology to young and impressionable minds, to wit: that feelings matter more than facts, and that beliefs can take the place of logic, and that all right reposes in one set of ideological beliefs. The liberal professors of the 70s, 80s and 90s created the progressive students of today, as surely as Dr. Frankestein painstakingly pieced together the abomination in his lab. They did so, presumably, with the best of intentions (or at least with understandable intentions), but they did so either without grasping, or without caring about, the dangers inherent in the project. And this, too, is classical Marxist thinking. Both Lenin and Trotsky freely admitted, when they took power in Russia a hundred years ago, that they had no idea what the end result of their social, agricultural economic policies would be. The whole thing was an experiment conducted with the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and if some millions happened to die in the process, well, as Lenin said, "you can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs." And it's worth noting that many of the "eggs" ultimately broken were loyal Marxists who simply deviated with Lenin on this or that specific issue.

I am not, of course, equating progressives with the mass-murdering Lenin and his gang. I am simply pointing out that they share a common ideological wellspring, as well as a common incapacity to understand the limitations of that ideology -- its inherent contradictions, and its tendencies toward authoritarianism, extremism and intolerance...as well as its built-in need to become more radical over time, and to smash opposing lines of thought.

J.K. Rowling is an avowed liberal by her own lights. She probably even identifies as a progressive on some if not many issues. Until very recently she was the darling of many a media outlet for these reasons -- admittedly, among many others. But she dared to deviate from the most radical of progressives on a single issue, and for this she has been "canceled" -- not altogether successfully, but with sufficient vigor that her standing has been badly tarnished. And quite tellingly, not only has the left-leaning side of the press facilitated this attack, many who are not radically progressive but who still identify as "left" have been reluctant, or unwilling, to come to her defense. The ordinary person who leans somwhere on that side of the political spectrum is leery of being seen as "anti-trans," and thus stands idly by while someone they once admired and idolized is rubbished and threatened. The climate of fear that Professor Schlosser wrote about in 2015 is hardly limited to campuses now that the monster has risen from the table in the laboratory and escaped: it is everywhere political discourse exists.

I believe Rowling's present situation is important because it contains within it a foretaste of what will happen to "centrist" or "establishment" politics if those in charge of same do not push back against this inreasing militancy, this tendency to pander to a gang of destructive radicals, some of whom are only dubiously sane. Those on the left like to quip, "It's a big tent" when they speak of the broad appeal of their political brand. This image, however, is illustrative of the problem: tents are for circuses, and no circus should be run by its clowns.

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "WEREWOLF"

In the pale, pale
light.
pale, pale light of
the moonglow.

I've got a hunger that's in
motion. a hunger that i
cant control.

I'm alone now, in my room
again. on the prowl now
through your dreams
again.

Howling.


It is an enormous pity that WEREWOLF is still stuck in DVD limbo after all these years. This crafty, clever, highly unusual 80s horror program briefly took the young-adult world by storm when it debuted in 1987, but was not renewed for a second season, and soon faded from memory. Thanks to musical licensing issues that prevented a DVD release, it's generally been impossible to find this program anywhere except on secondhand VHS tapes. If it weren't for YouTube, one might say the show itself had almost become a myth...much like the werewolf itself.

WEREWOLF is the story of Eric Cord (John J. York), a personable, handsome kid from L.A. whose "future is so bright, he has to wear shades." Eric's got a smoking hot girlfriend, lives with his best pal, and has a wealthy de facto stepdad. He even drives a convertible! Unfortunately for him, he also has a problem: his roomie Ted has a secret. Seems he's slipping out at night, turning into a werewolf, and ripping horny twentysomethings to bits. Before long, Ted has bitten Eric, Eric has killed Ted, and the werewolf curse has been transferred between them. Arrested for his friend's murder, Eric, realizing he must destroy the originator of his werewolf bloodline if he ever wants to be free of the curse, skips bail and leaves town. This creates an interesting situation whereby Eric is chasing one Janos Skorzeny (Chuck Connors), while a bounty hunter named "Alamo" Joe Rogan (Lance LeGault) is chasing Eric.

If this sounds familiar in tone, that's because it is. THE INCREDIBLE HULK used a similar premise of having a fugitive hero cursed by powers he doesn't want, who travels from town to town while searching for a cure for his condition -- always hunted, always alone, forever unable to put down roots. But there the similarity ends. For starters, WEREWOLF had the unusual conceit of being only a half an hour (23 minutes after commercials), which meant the stories had little time to develop their plots and had to move very quickly indeed. Additionally, WEREWOLF, though not without a sense of humor, was a horror program pure and simple, and generally quite dark in tone: one would have to reference something like FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES or THE HITCHIKER to find an analog in 1980s television. Lastly, and very importantly, the hero, in werewolf form, did sometimes actually kill people, albeit exclusively evil ones who really, really had it coming.

WEREWOLF turned partially on its effects, which were pretty good considering its modest budget, in large part because guys like Greg Cannom, Rick Baker and a very young John Vulich were behind the show's MUFX. It also featured stories which were sometimes far above average and quite a few episodes with very clever, interesting dialogue. One factor that gave it considerable strength was an endless supply of first-rate character actors: there is hardly an episode where you don't recognize one, two or even three of the guest stars from innumerable other shows of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. This was doubly important because the show's lead, the handsome John J. York, was at this point in his career probably the worst actor ever to land a starring role in a television show. Literally the worst. While I'm pleased to report he did get quite a bit better as he got older (millions know him for his lifelong portrayal of Mac Scorpio on GENERAL HOSPITAL), at this age he was absolutely abysmal: he delivers dialogue like he's reading it upside-down in a foreign language. Hell, even his physical acting is terrible. He can't even take a punch convincingly.

Some of WEREWOLF's other problems circle back to its premise. The idea of the ever-wandering hero means that every story takes place in a different town with different characters, leaving the audience with York, who is likable and handsome but cannot act, and LeGault, who can certainly act but has the thankless task of always being a day late and a silver dollar short of his quarry (LeGault had a similarly suffering role on "The A-Team" as Roderick Decker). Chuck Connors, who looks like a werewolf even without makeup and has a voice like a circular saw, is perfect as the wicked Skorzeny, but he opted out of the series not even halfway through over a money dispute. Brian Thompson, later to become ubiquitous in both TV and film (among a million other roles, he played the Night Slasher in "Cobra"), then became the principal bad guy, playing Nicholas Remy, a 2,000 year-old werewolf with mad conductor hair; however, his sauve, tuxedo-clad character was better suited to play a vampire and the hole left by Connors' departure was fairly large.

Having said this, WEREWOLF was a fun series and some of it holds up surprisingly well. Some noteworthy episodes:

Werewolf: The show's pilot was two hours, and despite some very silly and clunky moments is hugely entertaining and fun. It opens with a slam-bang kill sequence set to the tune of "Silent Running" and ends with two werewolves fighting in a burning barn. It also features Michelle Johnson in a one piece bathing suit and her body is so hot she makes it look like a bikini. (I met Michelle at a showing of the minor horror-comedy classic WAXWORK at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood a few years ago, and she still holds up. Great sense of humor, too.)

Nightwatch: This series usually failed to achieve actual scares, but this episode, in which Eric tracks Skorzeny to a creepy boatyard, is genuinely creepy. There is a great confrontation scene between Chuck Connors and Denny (TARZAN) Miller, a similarly menacing actor with a lot of presence.

Let Us Prey: One of many episodes directed by James Darren has Eric seek sanctuary at a monastery which happens to have its own resident werewolf. This is a tightly written, extremely clever and very well-directed episode which showed what this show could do in a short time, given the right tools.

A World of Difference I & II: Two the best episodes in the series fill out the backstory of Alamo Joe, who gets mauled by Eric and is now wondering if he too will become a werewolf. Lance LeGault shines in these stories as the gritty, pavement-voiced bounty hunter consumed by obsession.

Blood on the Tracks: Everett McGill (Twin Peaks, Dune, Heartbreak Ridge) guest stars as an ex-boxer on the run from the mob, who show up looking for blood but discover McGill's newfound friend is, well, an angry werewolf.

Nightmare at the Braine Hotel: This surreal episode sees Eric take refuge in a sleazy hotel occupied by a serial killer, and a manager who may or may not be a werewolf herself. (The show had several "is it real?" episodes, including "Friendly Haven")

Blood Ties: A very Film Noir episode (Film Noir with werewolves!) sees Eric working as a groundskeeper for the world's most treacherous family. A sly, sexy, somewhat tragic episode about trust, greed and betrayal, right out of a Philip Marlowe novel.

Nightmare in Blue: A highly effective, disturbing story about a rogue cop (or is he?) who has his own way of dealing with transients that involves an abandoned house and shallow graves. Unfortunately for this killer cop, it takes more than psychosis and a .38 to kill a werewolf.

Skinwalker: Eric seeks a cure for his condition from a Native American medicine man (seen years before on "Quincy") but also discovers he's the prime suspect for werewolf murders occurring on the reservation.

Material Girl: A werewolf is slaughtering young vagrants squatting in an abandoned shopping mall, but the guilty party is not who he expects -- and it's hunting him, too.

Gray Wolf - Eric meets an ancient werewolf (William Morgan Shepherd from "The Keep") with a vendetta against Remy, but the old wolf wants him to prove his "pack loyalty" by killing an innocent before they team up against the master werewolf. Larry ("Dr. Giggles") Drake also makes an appearance.

As you can see, the storylines have surprising flexibility and quite a few I didn't mention here take unusual turns of premise: some are scary, some more touching, a few are deliberately silly and a couple only feature the werewolf aspect as a kind of aside to the plot. Of course, there are a few total losers ("Running With The Pack" is both awful and boring), and some episodes would have genuinely benefited from being a full hour, but by and large I was very impressed by what the writers could accomplish in just 22 - 23 minutes, a format that in the television era is pretty much reserved for mindless sit-coms.

So where does the show stand now, decades after it was struck by the silver bullet of cancellation?

Where it mostly stands is forgotten, but if the show were merely resting comfortably in the dustbin of history, I would not mention it here. For those who actually remember it, it serves as a reminder of what can actually be accomplished in a half-hour television format, even one which clings fairly rigidly to a simple formula. And it happens that this reminder is much needed in an era where storytelling has become increasingly sloppy and incompetent, in large part because modern television and film writers often lack basic fundamentals. Nepotism (both familial and friendship-based), ignorance, arrogance, and ideology have replaced talent and craft, with predictable results. But there is hope, and it lies in the past. WEREWOLF is certainly not the blueprint by which "good" TV can be produced again, but it is a kind of minor study in how to do things on a shoestring budget. It is a also a reminder, as are shows from the Golden Age of Radio like THE LINEUP or ESCAPE, of what can be done with very little in the way of time or resources provided the writer knows what he's doing and has passion for his craft.

There is one more point I wish to make before I disappear before the moon rises and the wolf gets me. It is that whatever its other shortcomings, WEREWOLF was often damned good at establishing atmosphere. Many a sin can be hidden by a writer and a production team who understand the power of atmosphere, be it brooding, sinister, mysterious, haunting, or just plain menacing. WEREWOLF, at its worst, was fucking terrible. On the other hand, when it was mediocre, as it frequently was, it usually remained watchable and even enjoyable because it was quite good at establishing "the pervading tone or mood of a place, situation, or work of art." Some of the episodes have the exact qualities you'd find in a fever-dream, or more accurately put, a fever-nightmare: others are full of feelings of impending doom. Still others reach into basic human fears by harnessing the wolf's cry, the light of the moon, darkness and shadow, and, of course, the fear of being hunted. When the show employed this use of mood correctly, you knew you were in a horror movie, even if it was only 23 minutes long and running on prime time television, where gore was not much in evidence. I harp on this because as a writer myself, I have discovered one of the most powerful tools in the literary arsenal is the use of atmosphere to produce specific effects in the reader's mind. At the same time, however, it is often underused (and occasionally overused, to the point of pastiche). Striking the correct balance can produce extremely satisfying effects, and an episode like "Nightmare in Blue" or "Braine Hotel" can provide good, low-budget examples of how to do this.

And that brings us to the end of this branch of Memory Lane: Such was WEREWOLF, a brief moment in horror history which may never get its proper due thanks to some silly licensing issues which have kept it in limbo for decades. I am baffled as to why the songs causing all the drama can't simply be swapped out for different songs, the way they did on WKRP IN CINCINNATTI when they had similar problems, but that's Hollywood for ya. Once you get the lawyers involved, even werewolves aren't safe.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: UPDATES

Last week I told you that I would share the outcome of my one day promotion of Wolf Weather and Sinner's Cross on Amazon (for twenty-four hours, both books were available for free in electronic format). I do things like this because I believe there is some interest out there, not just in writing itself, but in the business of writing as it exists for the independent or semi-independent (hybrid) author.

SINNER'S CROSS was downloaded 1,197 times, including a number of paid purchases and KENP reads.
WOLF WEATHER was downloaded 711 times, and a small number of print copies (not on sale) were purchased.
THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER, which was not on sale, was downloaded 4 times as a purchased e-book.
THE ACTION, a short story of mine, was read via KENP reads.

The next day there was some overflow, as there usually is after a promotion of any kind, with 50 additional downloads, many of them paid. So the total number of people who claimed my works was 1,970, over about 36 hours. The amount of money I made on this was minimal, say $30, but of course the whole point of allowing readers a free download is to expand my audience and gain more reviews. Independent authors do not have publishing houses to promote their works: everything in the promotional sphere must be taken on by the author himself or by those he hires, in cash, to do the job for him. So while there is a small portion of me, mainly ego, which resents giving work away which took so long to write and required so much effort and passion, I would rather have people reading it for free than not reading it at all.

Paid book promotions are tricky things by nature. I have spent large sums to sell a few dozen books at the most, and I have spent trivial amounts and had surprisingly large successes. When Book Bub, far and away the most powerful, influential and hard-to-retain promotional service out there agreed to do a campaign for SINNER'S CROSS two years ago, I sold 200 copies on the first day alone -- and this, despite the fact Bub was only promoting CROSS overseas, not in the United States (if they had run it in America, I'd have sold ten times as many books: then again, I would have paid five times as much for the job).

Actually, when it comes to the business end of independent authorship, most promotions are big money-losers. In order to even get a promotional service to run a campaign for you, you must radically discount the e-book versions of your novel, often down to 99 cents, so that your royalty per book becomes something like 33 cents per sale. Only extremely high volume over a sustained period would make such a system profitable. However, the concept of the "loss leader" obtains: sometimes you gotta spend money to make money, and every sale or free download is another perspective reader, another perspective fan, who may choose to purchase physical copies of your next work. And that of course is where the real money lies. (This, incidentally, is why I have my own online bookstore:

https://www.mileswatsonauthor.com/

...which I just realized hasn't been updated to include WOLF WEATHER, which I will be taking care of later today. Sorry for the shameless plug, but if you don't understand why I have to shill for myself relentlessly by this time, you haven't been paying attention.

The greater issue, however, is not money. The vast majority of money I make writing does not come from my novels, novellas or short storie: it comes from book proposals or work on studio projects. I have made twenty times as much money doing these things as I do on my fiction. Indeed, I could not support the lifestyle I presently enjoy if not for such projects (none of which I can ever discuss here except in the very broadest terms due to nondisclosure agreements). Nevertheless, my central and abiding passion is storytelling. It was what I was born to do and what I have spent almost my entire life learning how to do well. I am always going to find ways to expand my audience, even if it means taking the occasional financial hit. It's what I signed up for when I decided to keep my fiction at the independent/hybrid level. And if there are any aspiring or new-to-the game authors at that level who can benefit from my experience (my failures as well as my successes), so much the better. In the mean time, the mechanics of independent authorhood may be of interest to the reader as well as the writer. If not, don't worry: this Wednesday we will once again visit Memory Lane.

THE THINGS I'VE SEEN

Tonight I was leaving the YMCA after a hard workout, and as I walked to the door, I suddenly became aware that the overhead radio was playing "Intelligence For Your Life," a popular podcast narrated by John Tesh. I often hear this podcast on my kitchen radio as I cook, or wash dishes, or feed the cat: but it occurred to me tonight, almost with a shock, that I had once gotten drunk with the man.

Well, to be specific, I had tossed back a few whiskies with the man at a wedding in North Hollywood. It was a peculiar experience for me, who had watched him as a child co-hosting Entertainment Tonight. In fact, Tesh hosted Entertainment Tonight until I was an over-aged college student, before departing to begin a musical career. I found him friendly and personable in the extreme, which is not always the case with well-known, wealthy people who have spent most of their lives in front of cameras or microphones. I'm not remotely sure about the date, but I believe this encounter occurred about five years ago, when I was living in Burbank, California rather than York, Pennsylvania.

I mention this because every now and again I completely forget that a quarter of my life was spent in the Los Angeles area, toiling in the entertainment industry. You won't believe that, because I so frequently reference Hollywood in this blog: but it is true. Memory is the most peculiar of things. It allows us to remember things that happened to us in a cold, dull, purely factual way, as if they happened to someone else, and it also allows us to relive experiences so intensely they may as well be happening now...even if they are fifty years old. Most of the time I hear the voice of Tesh in my kitchen, it's just that -- a voice, coming impersonally over the radio. I make no connection with the photo I have on my nearby wall of Tesh and myself, grinning like maniacs, clutching tumblers of whiskey on that hot summer evening a few years ago.

When one leads the restless, sometimes almost rootless life that I have, one accumulates huge amounts of experiences, many of them utterly improbable. I used to be annoyed, even outraged, when I would tell a story about my life and be greeted with disbelief by the listener: I later realized that this was a profound compliment. The way I live my life has not been easy on me (or others), and it has seen its share of disasters, failures, disappointments and humiliations, but no one can say it has not been filled with experiences -- in some cases, experiences I myself find difficult to believe actually happened. There are times I feel very much like Beatty, the doomed Replicant in Blade Runner, who laments that when he dies, the vast fund of his experiences will be lost forever, "like tears in the rain."

In that spirit, I thought I'd write a not-poem about some of the images which come to mind when I look back upon the fifty years I have spent occupying space on this troubled planet.

* I've seen Fourth of July fireworks from the White House lawn

* And been knocked silly by the blast of the President's helicopter

* I've arrested a hooker in a sleazy hotel and driven her, cursing, to prison in a driving snowstorm

* And

* I've given comfort to countless victims of crime

* And shaken hands with Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist

* I've tied a black belt around my waist

* And been beaten up in front of the California State Athletic Commission

* I've driven the length of the United States, three times

* And been caught in an Arizona thunderstorm with lighting blasts that filled up the entire sky

* I've seen an eel devour a fish in the waters off St. Maarten

* And been stung by a poisonous fish in the surf of Santa Monica

* I've published stories in long-defunct foreign magazines when I was barely old enough to shave,

* And written Amazon bestsellers

* I've stolen an ashtray from George H. W. Bush

* And stood above the clouds in Malibu, breathing in the air of other people's money

* I've seen the Eifel Tower, the Colliseum, and Buckingham Palace,

* And peered out at Washington, D.C., through the tiny windows of the monument

* I've worn a Union uniform while walking the hallowed ground of Gettysburg,

* And seen Ian McKellen on the stage

* I've made monsters in studios in Los Angeles, and video game trailers in studios in Vancouver

* And had a beer with the man who killed Che Guevera

* I've interviewed one of Hitler's most devoted soldiers

* And seen Van Halen with Roth behind the microphone,

* I've watched John Williams wave a baton in the Hollywood Bowl, and Mike Ness strum a guitar at the Greek, and Hope Sandoval sing "Fade Into You" live at the Ventura

* I've been cut open by the teeth of the Jaws shark (or maybe it was the fangs of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park

* And fist-fought a crazy man in a courtyard in the rain

* I've been under the knife, gassed, hit by a car, and had a gun held to my head

* I've been hit in the face by dead blood driven by a pathologist's circular saw at an autopsy

* I've looked inside the gutted remains of a human body and seen within it a lake of blood

* And held my infant nephew when he was no larger than a kitten

* I've owned a Jaguar

* And gone so hungry I couldn't sleep.

* I have seen Micky Ward fight Arturo Gatti as the crowd of ten thousand roared

* And stalked Don Johnson through the halls of a make up effects shop.

* I've shaken hands with three heavyweight champions, met two men who played Jason Voorhees,

* And had my picture taken with Captain Kirk.

* I've stood outside the house where Halloween was filmed, on Halloween night, beneath a full moon,

* And lunched with Nicholas Brendon while he gossiped about who he slept with in the cast of "Buffy."

* I've been in courtrooms, boxing rings, and cages; I've kept sixteen years of journals and have a glass case full of trophies nobody cares about but me; I've written books and shot skeet and cooked a Thanksgiving turkey to perfection. I've seen a boat come over the horizon at Martha's Vineyard and a rocket streaking into the skies above Culver City and got an allergic reaction to fiberglass when I was helping make a musical instrument for Lady Gaga. I've met four members of the original cast of Star Trek and lived with a stripper and been sued by my own bank. I've been interviewed by a former Mafia soldier and been appalled at how fat I looked in the YouTube video of the podcast. I've made love with two women in the same week and two in the same day and two at the same time.

I've been haunted by ghosts, perhaps one of them real.

All these things I have seen, and done, and many more besides, and the good gods willing will do many more, and set them down on paper for your pleasure or your pain, so they don't just wash away.

Like tears in the rain.

SUNDAY EDITION

I've once again missed my Saturday deadline for this blog. I actually have a good excuse -- my oldest friend, who I've known since 1988, was in town, and we had to celebrate the occasion. The older I get, the more I prize friendship as a thing-in-itself, and the older the friendship, the greater the prize. However, in the spirit of at least trying to keep my resolution to blog twice a week, I thought I'd share a little news.

Tomorrow my new novella Wolf Weather, and my most recent novel, The Very Dead of Winter will be available for free download from Amazon for one day only. I am not generally one to give away the store, but sometimes it's necessary for promotional reasons, and at other times, well, it's also nice to get the message out to the largest possible audience: people who won't spend a few dollars on an author they've never heard of are a lot more amenable to clicking the button when the risk is the same as the price, zero. The last time I offered a book for free, it was my short story collection Devils You Know, which immediately streaked to a bestselling slot on Amazon, albeit in the "free" category. (I suppose this is roughly the equivalent of an amateur championship: it's nice, but it doesn't pay the bills.)

To brush up quickly: Wolf Weather is a novella somewhere between horror and dark fantasy. It is the story of Corporal Crowning, the sole survivor of an Arctic fort besieged by werewolves. It is a story about discipline versus desire, civilization versus savagery. Pardon the egregious and possibly criminal pun, but it was a howl to write.

Wolf Weather

The Very Dead of Winter is the second novel in my SINNER'S CROSS series which has won numerous literary awards, including a Best Indie Book Award, a Book Excellence Award, two Literary Titan Gold Medals, a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, a Reader's Favorite "5 Star" rating, IAN Awards Finalist, etc. This novel takes place in the near-immediate aftermath of the first book, and follows the protagonists Halleck, Breese and Cramm as their lives, and possibly their deaths, intersect during the opening phase of The Battle of the Bulge. If you like deeply-written characters with complex motivations and a lot of atmosphere, this WW2 novel is for you.

The Very Dead of Winter: A Sinner's Cross Novel

I hope to have more news on the literary front for you this Wednesday, but for now I am going to blow out this candle and hit the rack. Do give one or both of the books a download. You have nothing to lose and, I hope, much to gain.

Happy father's day to all.

THINGS I LEARNED PLAYING "CIVILIZATION"

Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy video games, first released in 1991....The series is considered a formative example of the 4X genre, in which players achieve victory through four routes: "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate."

This introduction, courtesy of Wikipedia, spares me having to summarize the game which never fails to amaze me: Civilization. For it is by playing Civilization, more than history, that the present course of affairs in Europe and Asia becomes readily understandible to me. So too do past historical events -- wars, depressions, blockades, colonizations, religious crusades, genocides. Indeed, it isn't an exaggeration to say that everything a person needs to know about what Bismarck referred to coldly as Realpolitik -- "a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral, ethical or ideological considerations" -- can be taught simply by playing this game. Put simply, Civilization is a tutorial on the real world. Not the one diplomats and politicians and a willfully credulous public pretend exists: reality. Cold, hard, and cruel.

I first started playing Civilization sometime around 1993, and was immediately addicted and obsessed. The initial version was, of course, terribly crude and clunky by today's standards, and the artificial intelligence of my computer opponents was at best mediocre. Nevertheless, the game had intrinsic appeal. It not only required a knowledge of strategy, it demanded a deeper knowledge of how civilizations come into power, how they maintain it once they have it, how they expand it, and -- if incautious or cowardly -- how they lose it. Like Game of Thrones or The Sopranos, it was as much a study of power as a thing-in-itself as it was a form of entertainment. And it taught its lessons in the most brutal way possible: by punishing ignorance, mistakes and failures without mercy. Success meant survival, failure meant destruction.

As the years went by, Civilization became more sophisticated and nuanced, and the computerized opponents more intelligent. Features were added or expanded; other features were removed or replaced. But the basic nature of the game remained unchanged. Simply put, it was this:

Beginning in the stone age, you were tasked with building a civilization, expanding it, acquiring strategic resources, raising its level of technology, keeping your people happy, negotiating trade deals, building infrastructure, and protecting yourself from the aggression of hostile barbarian tribes and unfriendly nations. If successful, your society would last until the end of the game, roughly 4,000 years after it began. So you started with stone clubs and bearskins and ended with atomic bombs and orbiting satellites. How you achieved that end was up to you. Players had choices in styles of government, and they also had choices in foreign policy. But -- and this was key -- they also had to react to the choices of their neighbors. The computer played different rival civilizations in different ways. Some were outwardly friendly and simply wanted to trade, others were aggressive and bullying and preferred to take what they wanted by force of arms. Some were scientifically bent, some crazy about trade, and others concerned only with war. And some were unpredictable -- or simply treacherous. As I said above, playing Civilization did not require a tutorial: it was a tutorial. A completely amoral one. The human player had nearly absolute power over his society and was largely free to craft a strategy and a policy entirely in keeping with his own personality. Sometimes vice was punished; sometimes it was rewarded. Sometimes virtue led to downfall, other times to triumph. There was no right answer that covered every situation. Whatever worked was right. The goal was not to achieve some Platonic "ideal plane" but simply to survive -- and thrive. At any cost.

By playing Civilization, I came to see that while every form of government was represented -- despotism, monarchism, feudalism, republicanism, democracy, fasicsm, communism -- their ultimate ambitions remained the same. And when one's ambitions are the same, one's methods tend toward sameness. In 25 years of playing various iterations of the game, I began to grasp that its ongoing popularity stems from the fact that, when you scrape away all the rhetoric, there's nothing to distinguish a good campaign of Civ from a study of human history. Literally almost nothing. All the horror, all the carnage, all the cruelty and misery, all the seemingly needless tension and confrontation between nations and tribal groups, the complete inability of those nations and groups to act in unity even on issues of seemingly mutual interest, such as pollution or climate change...it's all here. So here, in a nutshell, is what I learned:

1. Resources are everything. In Civilization, there are strategic resources which are beneficial for the populace -- fish, for example, or game, or gold. There are others which are beneficial to trade, such as dyes, jewels, wines, or furs. But there are certain resources such as iron, horses, saltpeter, coal, rubber, oil, aluminium and uranium, which are indispensible to warfare. Iron makes swords and armor; saltpeter makes gunpowder; coal fires warships; oil fuels tanks and aircraft. In ancient times, the society which has access to things like iron has a huge advantage over societies stuck in the stone/bronze age; thus, the early phase of the game is a scramble for iron, and for horses to provide chariots. Later, as technology advances, different resources come into play, and so the scramble never ceases. Today's civ with the best swordsmen and archers and horsemen is mowed down tomorrow by the musketeers, rifleman and infantry of the society that first acquired gunpowder. Trade is always an option, but only a fool or a desperate king indeed trades away resources that can be used to slit his throat at a later time, and so an aggressive foreign policy is usually necessary, lest a nation fall behind in that never-ceasing quest for the earth's riches. In short, those who have, dominate, and those who have not, steal -- or die.

2. All alliances are of convenience. In world history, countries speak of "friendship" and "cultural bonds" and "international brotherhood." In Civilization, any nation that offers friendship either does so because they wish to trade (you have something they want, but can't or don't want to take it by force), or because they are weak and fear offending you, or because they are at war with a third power and hope to enlist you in the fight against them. Friendships in Civilization are transactional and never last longer than necessity dictates. Today's generous trade deal and mutual protection pact is tomorrow's unprovoked sneak attack. There is no loyalty and no gratitude. From a leader's POV, the world is divided into "threats" and "assets." There is no extra category for "buddies."

3. Technology is mainly for killing. All technological advancements lead to corresponding improvements in quality of life for the people. Granaries, aqueducts, hospitals, mass transit systems, etc., etc. are all wonderful for John Q. Public. On the other hand, the very first use of any new technology usually has a military application. Iron makes great tools: it also makes fine swords. Coal builds warm fires: it also fuels battleships. A nucelar power plant can light up a city; a nuclear bomb can flatten one. The first priority of a leader is to make sure his Civ has all the best weaponry technology can afford. Benefits to society are a secondary consideration, and any society that reverses this model and puts sanitation, medicine, infrastructure, etc. ahead of making barracks and handing out rifles will soon find itself invaded by a Civ with a different set of priorities. On the other hand, a society which doesn't feed its scientific research and build universities and so forth will not produce competetive technology, and it too will go down in flames. Leadership is a balancing act between guns and butter, brains and brawn. But ultimately, the nation that doesn't find a way to make a microchip lethal ain't gonna last.

4. There is no mercy. Just as there is no real friendship in world society, there is also no mercy in world affairs. In trade, one must drive the hardest possible bargain. In war, one must make the most rapacious demands the enemy will accept. In diplomacy, one must pile on alliances for the purpose of carving up once prosperous rivals like roasts. Why? Because this is what your opponents will do. They will never give you what you want in trade without demanding much more than it is worth. They will never offer peace terms in war which you would wish to accept. They will never hesitate to build multinational alliances to destroy you, and they will never hesitate to frustrate your ambitions in passive ways -- by hemming in your borders, colonizing resource-rich areas you covet for yourself, refusing to trade needed items, or signing trade embargos with your enemies. Act ruthlessly in your strength because you will be treated pitilessly in your weakness. And never forget the enemy you spare today will be at your throat again tomorrow. As Clauswitz once wrote, "The mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst."

5. Wars are like fires: starting one doesn't mean you can put it out. Nothing is easier than starting a war. However, once war is engaged, you may find the fighting going against you, and seek to make peace once again. Or you may achieve your limited objectives and seek to end hostilities before your army takes too many losses or your opponent bribes a third party to come in on his side. In either case, you may discover your enemy in no mood to come to the treaty table, what with the fact you burned down six of his cities, robbed him of his best agricultural land, and cut him off from the ocean. War is necessary in Civilization, but it should never be carried out offensively unless you have a) a clear idea how you plan to win it, b) contingency plans if things go badly, c) can afford to lose all the men you commit to the initial battle. Rulers always see war as the easy way out of economic or political troubles, without considering they may actually lose. Just ask Napoleon. Or Mussolini. Or Putin.

6. Conquest is easy (occupation is not). In Civilization, capturing an enemy city doesn't mean the local population wants a change of master. They will always be discontented, may riot, may even openly revolt and overthrow your rule. I have had to burn occupied cities to the ground and leave nothing but electronic ashes because I couldn't get the natives to recognize my claim on their land and their lives. There are limits to what pure military force can accomplish. The stick must be accompanied by a carrot. Pure power must be balanced with some kind of appeasement. Otherwise you will simply end up with a case of tyrannical indigestion, the inability to absorb what you have conquered. The practical alternative, genocide, is not appetizing even for a video game, though it does solve the larger problems posed by occupation. This leads me to...

7. Karma is consequence, not judgment. There is no morality in Realpolitik, but actions do have practical repercussions. Violating peace treaties without cause, betraying alliances, employing atomic weapons, burning down cities, etc. are all great ways to become an international pariah. The computer has a long memory for treachery, and today's actions of amoral convenience are tomorrow's moral retributions. The funny thing about being totally amoral -- neither good nor evil but simply opportunistic -- is that it does not spare you the consequences of your decisions. This applies not merely to warfare but to the environment as well. Chopping down forests, draining wetlands, using coal-fired factories, dropping A-bombs...all of this comes back to haunt you.

8. In for a penny, in for a pound. When two armies have exhausted each other without decisive results, the natural inclination for both sides is to make peace. This is the height of foolishness. No matter what the cost, it is necessary to keep fighting until you have broken the enemy's army -- broken his ability to keep an offensive-capable army in the field. To make peace while he still has a functioning fighting force means that he will inevitably reinforce himself and attack you while you too are rearming, and lock you in a perpetual cycle of starting over again. This is the reason why Ukraine has laughed off any suggestion of making peace with Russia. It must keep fighting until Russia's ability not merely to wage war, but to wage another war, is shattered.

9a. Government adapts itself to suit necessity. Playing Civilization in a "human" manner, i.e. adopting a democratic government, seeking trade and negotiation, etc., is all well and good until it is necessary to start a pre-emptive war: say, to deny a rival access to uranium. But since the population of a democratic country doesn't like pre-emptive wars (or even large militaries), it may be necessary for the player to overthrow his own government and institute a fascist or communist dictatorship, one in which public opinion is irrelevant.

10. Ultimately, no law, pact, treaty or code of ethics which threatens your survival will itself survive contact with harsh reality. A person who, in real life, abominates war and militarism, bemoans huge defense budgets, is environmentally conscious, preaches for social justice, etc., etc. will immediately become the most bloodthirsty and ruthless tyrant imaginable when handed the electronic reins of power. He will betray allies, bomb defenseless towns, massacre captured workers, conduct scorched-earth policies, launch nuclear missiles. Part of this comes from the fact that the killing in Civilization is, of course, not real killing, any more than the violence in a novel or a television show is real. But a significant part of it comes from the fact that ideology seldom stands up in the face of necessity. Pacifism is an easy stance to adopt when no one is actually trying to kill you. Environmental responsibility is common sense right up to the moment the alternative to burning coal is freezing to death. Civilization is a great counter to the clever, smirky, debate-society arguments, because it puts all the power in your hands and then says, "The enemy is at the gates. They refuse to negotiate. What will you do?"

You may think all of this is horrible. That these are manifestly not the lessons people need to be taught about world affairs, especially given the generally awful state of the world today. That maybe a game should be designed which only rewarded the most moral, the most ethical, the most benificent and merciful decisions. There is, after all, nowhere near enough compassion in the world, nowhere near enough empathy, and it would be grand if we could artificially stimulate a previously numb area of our brains and coax a greater affinity for these things. And I am all for such a game. But the stark fact is that the appeal of Civilization lies mainly in the fact that it is not a game. It is a reasonably accurate, if stripped-down-to-its-essentials reflection of the world we actually live in. To succeed in playing Civ is to demonstrate, to a small degree, the qualities necessary to succeed in the real world. This in itself is perhaps appalling, but that does not make it less true. As Sergeant Barnes opined in PLATOON, "There's the way it oughta be...and there's the way it is."

This, then, is what I learned playing Civilization. You may not like it, but if you can play a few rounds of this game and not come away with a better understanding of why nations do such cruel, destructive and ugly things, and why even vastly different forms of government often make startlingly similar errors in judgment, chances are you're either deluded or just very, very thick.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: REFLECTIONS OF ME

Tonight, as I watched an episode of the largely forgotten television series China Beach, I was moved by the show's opening theme song -- The Supreme's lovely, heart-wrenching hit "Reflections:"

Through the mirror of my mind
Time after time
I see reflections of you and me
Reflections of
The way life used to be
Reflections of
The love you took from me

While not at the moment lovelorn -- at least no more so than usual -- I must admit that with the three-year anniversary of my return to the East coming up in a few months, I am certainly in a reflective frame of mind. I have already written a blog about the passage of time, and how it becomes subjectively faster as each year passes ("Not Wheels But Wings") and have no desire to take a trip to that well tonight. On the other hand, the speed with which everything is going by is not something I can ignore. Every now and again I am jarred by a reminder that some event which feels as if it belongs in my immediate or near past is, in actuality, a decade or more behind me. I had occasion to dig up a passage or two from my 2010 journal the other day, and the fact that some of the events recorded therein are more than a dozen years in the past is almost impossible for me to comprehend. Likewise the fact that a high school reunion photo I discovered by accident on the internet shows, in 2015, that I bore a completely different hairline than I do today. In fact, if you read Wednesday's blog ("As I Please XIV"), you will remember I recently shaved my head down to a Marine like 1/4 to 1/2 an inch in length, for the simple reason that I was tired of plastering dwindling numbers of follicles over ever-increasing quantities of bare scalp. It seems only yesterday that I was still able to grow out my hair to truly epic proportions. But it wasn't.

In my novel Sinner's Cross, one of the protagonists, Martin Zenger, is so rattled by a mortar blast he loses all sense of time. Past, present and even future seem to be happening to him simultaneously. In my estimation, those sequences are the best-written in the book, and if they are, it's because I can relate to them. I have always had a very tenuous grasp of time: my brother constantly joked, when we were growing up, that three days and three weeks were essentially the same to me. This, of course, is both blessing and curse. As a writer, my ability to lose time is an asset of the highest value. When I'm truly in what I call The Writer's Place, an hour feels like a few minutes, with the resulting effect that I can write for eight, then, even twelve or fourteen hours straight, without feeling the least bit of discomfort or boredom. On the other hand, when my ADHD is in full effect, even a few minutes can seem interminable. And there is no real middle ground. Either I am entirely absorbed by what I'm seeing or doing or hearing, or I'm bored out of my fucking wits, unable to concentrate, unable to do anything but suffer. My view of time is similarly skewed. Either it's blurring past me with terrifying quickness or it is dragging like an anchor on the sea floor.

I recently saw an interview with William Shatner, who is now 92 years old and still kickin' as hard as Bruce Lee ever did. Shatner counseled the man who interviewed him to "say yes to life" and take every opportunity that came his way, because "it all goes by in a blink." He expressed dismay that the 50th anniversary of Star Trek had just passed: "I remember it like it was yesterday." Being only 50 myself, I can't fully relate, but by God I can do it partially. In my afformentioned journal, certain passages brought back memories so clear and sharp they cut my emotions into raw and bleeding ribbons. So much of my old life, which under ordinary circumstances exists in my mind like dusty old heirlooms in a fourth-floor attic, burst forth in life and color. I don't mean my reaction was nostalgic: a lot of what I was reading as unpleasant, or just sad. In 2010 I was still waging a brutal and bitter war to break into the entertainment industry while simultaneously trying to save a relationship which was dying by inches before my eyes. No, I just mean that...well, with a little prompting, I remembered it all like it was yesterday. As vividly as I sit here, tying over my cat, vaguely aware of the candle burning on my right, somewhat more aware of the dull thud of the bass from the bar below my apartment coming through my floorboards, I remember sitting in a similar office chair in my apartment (14G) in Park La Brea, hammering away on a similar keyboard, attached to a similar computer. It seems like yesterday. But it wasn't.

Oh, I'm all alone now
No love to shield me
Trapped in a world
That's a distorted reality
Happiness you took from me
And left me all alone
With only memories
Through the mirror of my mind
Through all these tears that I'm crying
Reflects a hurt I can't control
Although you're gone
I keep holding on
To those happy times
Oh, girl when you were mine

Three years I've been back, and boy, have they been busy. My "day job" as an advocate for victims of crime is as demanding as a job can possibly be, both timewise and in the emotional sense, but I have also managed to release a novel (The Very Dead of Winter) and three novellas (Seelenmord, Deus Ex, and Wolf Weather), and complete, finally, the first draft of my horror epic Something Evil, which took me six years. There have been other accomplishments as well...and there have also been defeats: personal, professional and otherwise. And yet for all this, I can't reconcile myself to the fact that three years have passed. Or to the fact that so many people from my past, who still reside here, seem to have aged out of recognition: not physically, but in terms of their outlook on life. For all my failures, all my hypocrisies and stupidities and self-sabotage, I feel as if I am still very much a work in progress, rather like a rosebud which is bursting into bloom with torturous slowness, shedding haphazard petals yet still growing. But so many people I cared for once with that terrible intensity of love, or lust, or comradeship seem to have wilted entirely, or else become like flowers under glass -- artificially frozen in time. It's as if time is passing differently for us in the Einsteinian sense, that I am a man-child who acts as if he will live to be 200 years old and thus learns everything slowly and clumsily, but is still learning nonetheless; but they have either given up on life and grown old prematurely, or stopped evolving, stopped hoping, stopped dreaming. There are those, too, who are addicts and seemed locked in a cycle from which they cannot or will not escape, and there are a few, not many but a few, who are no longer among the living, whose images haunt me on certain nights -- not because they are dead, but because they are forever young. There is something mocking about the way they smile at me in their photographs, as if to say, "Damn, lookin' kinda middle-aged there, sport."

As I peer through the windows
Of lost time
Keeping looking over my yesterdays
And all the love I gave all in vain
(All the love) All the love
That I've wasted
(All the tears) All the tears
That I've tasted
All in vain
Through the hollow of my tears
I see a dream that's lost
From the hurt baby
That you have caused
Everywhere I turn
Seems like everything I see
Reflects a hurt I can't control
In you I put
All my hope and trust
Right before my eyes
My whole world has turned to dust

I'm sometimes told that the writerly convention of describing a character by having them look into a mirror is a cliche strictly for hacks. In reality, the mirror is the only place where one comes quite literally face to face with oneself. A great deal of us lies within our eyes and what they reveal, and who can look into their own eyes without a mirror?

What do I see?

Reflections of
The love you took from me
Reflections of
The way life used to be

Is this nostalgia? No. Self-pity? Also no. It's more of a phantom pain, of the sort people who have lost limbs feel -- a leftover of something that was. And this is a necessary process. You cannot change, cannot accept change, without that pain. That dismay. That realization that time is a blur and the mirror is pitiless and undefeated. That people are not going to follow the paths you set for them, or grow in the way that you would wish them to grow. They are not yours to control. Hell, you are not always yours to control. We are all of us standing on a neon-painted streetcorner in the night, still as statues, while the traffic flows past on intervalometer, a silent and continuous blur of headlights, flowing ceaselessly toward destinies we cannot guess. What we feel, witnessing this, may frighten and hurt us, but it is not evil. The bad pain, the pointless pain, lies in trying to hold on, to make time stop. But as Leonard Nimoy once remarked, "Life is like a garden: perfect moments can be had, but not preserved -- except in memory."

We ourselves are like that. We can be perfect, but we can't be preserved.

Not even in reflection.