Kurt Brindley's Blog, page 96

So, based upon your awesome feedback and the awesomeness of free stuff off the internet…

These are the new covers that I am going with for both Part One and Part Two of HERCULES GONE MAD.

 

Now that that’s settled, I have a lot of updating and writing yet to do…

Thank you all for your fantastic feedback!

Write On!

 

 

Filed under: Books Tagged: art, authors, book covers, books, design, drawing, dystopia, graphic art, graphic design, Hercules Gone Mad, Heroes of Dystopia, Indie Authors, post-apocalyptic, writing

They Came, They Saw…and They Napped

Zeno, Aurelius, and Napper X showing us how it’s done

 

Awesome photo courtesy of the lovely and loving Megi of

 

 

Filed under: Photography Tagged: abundance, Aurelius, dogs, family, life, napping, pet photography, pets, photography, puppies, Zeno

A Guest Post by Poet & Author Manizha Sepas

I first reached out to Manizha Sepas to invite her to share more of her writing here right after she submitted her captivating poem A DIME IS WHAT I NEED to the Relating to Humans Poetry feature under the nom de plume of tamednomad. Well, my patience – and persistence – has finally been rewarded as she has shared with us two wonderful pieces: a poem and a travel essay, which, itself, is as poetic as any poem could be. Needless to say, I strongly encourage you to visit Manizha’s site to enjoy more of her work.

 

Poet & Author Manizha Sepas

 

Idle dreams

The pretty little house upon a hill

In flowers and myriad greens adorn

A symphony of bird songs

While muses dance above

A silent cat stretched out in the shade

Sun rays upon our faces as we laze

Radiating on sunny afternoons.

These are treasured times.

And of more we dream.

Alas! Few will be content

In this age of men of doings.

A sense of purpose of Gods we’ve made,

To be watched over and orders kept.

Of idleness we dream; In idleness condemned,

To slave away the youth.

At the nearness of death time abundant to be found

For nostalgic contemplations:

The rewards of the dogma of the era of the self.

Fear and ambition are our masters

And we the dancing fools –

Malcontent marionettes.

Dreams left in wastelands of our teens

Forgotten tomorrows and lost days,

“What is it you want to be?”

Cuts the knife of purpose.

Broken reveries; harsh realities.

To be! For existing is mere.

Childish. Primitive. Senseless.

It is the age of categorisation,

The hierarchy of ants,

Times past in wretched standardisation.

Thoughtlessly enslaved.

A need to be. To do. To better.

Insanely labelling the sane,

A return to what is true

The naked man is caged

For the good of man

Bodies enshrouded in shame and sin

Gloriously protected.

In gowns we tread along the aisle

Piously fearful facing beneath the ground

Wonderfully meaningless.

 

 

Helios conquers Hermes

To love not bound but much to give. Like the faithful addict I am besotted. Excitedly impassioned and from withdrawals I suffer; yet no relapse. I am afflicted by this glorious disease. The tempestuous serpentine with smiles and gentle caresses like a breeze passes, communicating a love that is greedily and without prejudice struck. Among Olympians I have come to wander. By the window I sat gazing onto the hills. The nomadic mind for a body tormented by restlessness. A painful existence defined by rage it was; but itchy feet and the vagabond mind is here united. Ataraxis at long last. I sought meaning and found an occupation but I was discontent. It is a failure to be accepted and an acceptance to fail. What are wrongs when solipsistic truths subsist? I turn to look inside and you sit before me, the very embodiment of serenity. I am thirsting. To share in your calm. To feel your soft whispers in my ear and your lips against mine. Sweet intoxicant, I am drunk. A selfish desire you have inspired in me to make mine your every essence but for now, I am a novice. Gems along the road await me and with grateful curiosity I follow.

A brief moment spent in dreams and another reality. Under the cloak of the night we set upon the trail of effervescent chatter. Songs heard and laughter echoed. Drinks pass lips and the herb circulates. The cold is the cherub that draws us together. At the foot of the cross we sit sharing in the joys of your youth. The stage is set and another play ensues. Such are the highs of the opiate seeker. You lead the way to a rocky garden of unquestioned welcome. Upon uneven ground the bodies exchange secrets. Locks of onyx beau, new heights, new desires and the vagrant is once more intoxicated. Stories of troubles told, of loss, suffering and a futile search for happiness where none was to be found. Discourse of fears and pains, and praises made – smiles so readily present and a heart so big. Boundless is this heart and without limit it loves. What is the one when love is abundant and abundantly I love?

Restless days and long nights spent in waiting. The gem is here found distant from my touch. Your desire I have sensed but questionable is mine as I am in character. Perceptions can be deceptive and here, my dears, you have been deceived. The contemplative eye, for Nietzsche, is “like a smooth and irresponsive lake, which is no longer moved by rapture or sympathy;” for far too long I have been lost in the turbulent, perpetually dark world of the phantoms of my mind and at times these eyes betray a challenge to cope with reality. I lust for the chance to share in all the wanders of your dream-like existence here in the Middle Earth of our age. Had Tolkien experienced such a place himself to have imagined this meridian of magnificence? I digress. It is the thoughts that flutter like excited butterflies, offering only glimpses of its promised pleasures. You have been a recurrent attraction like a source of light. An aching lust. To be ventured dangerously close. It is the eyes that I could not look into. A journey’s beginning so abounding in passion but I am of the road. Love is a disease that is bewitching. I am once more consumed. My ailments are concerns of the self; yet despite knowing this I cannot be helped – I must see you again. It is the lips I did not kiss. I fear that the drumming of my heart might be echoed aloud. I am the excited adolescent.

On the move again and true as the addict idéal, the spark is once more set. Perfervid love in which I am immersed. All that happens, happens for a reason. The reason may be doubted but the passions are engulfing and I am the invariant, variedly loving and ardently loved.

I speak of my addiction to love and to lust – to dive into the glory of this most beautiful of human experiences. I love passionately, tenderly and erotically. Always my love is erotic but not necessarily sexual. All my relationships defined by intimacy but not necessarily of the body. I love honesty. I love the flawed and seek not the perfect. I love the best for the best are honest with themselves and thereby deserving of love. To accept one’s own mortality and stupidity is to be the best. To seek not to prove. The best loves as the self dwindles. She is her own subject and her own critic. The best is drunk on life for in sobriety she understands the joke played upon us.

I could not know. My position was one of perpetual torment. Life played its joke and I was the laughing matter. I could only lust passionately to bring to an end the tragicomedy of my pitiable existence. To close the curtains and to have the final laugh. In suicidal contemplations I passed my days not from a selfish desire but from a deep selflessness to free the world of my disease of the soul. It was on the brink of absolute loss that I made a final grasp at happiness only to be found among the children of the sun. Like Tolstoy, I too had a dream in which I saw our sun but I knew it could not be my sun which had begotten my earth full of terrors. Yet, somehow I recognised that it was the same sun, a “dear power of light,” which revived me and from the outstretched arms of death inspired me. Tolstoy dreamt but here I live.

bedevilledadventurer.wordpress.com

 

 

Filed under: Writing Tagged: addiction, authors, Greece, Guest post, Helios, Hermes, idleness, Manizha Sepas, mythology, philosophy, poetry, poets, travel writing, writing

Less the Impermanence

Nothing lasts

Not the blossom

Not the stone

Nothing lasts

Less the impermanence of it all

 

 

Filed under: Photography Tagged: blossoms, Buddhism, existentialism, flowers, impermanence, life, nature, philosophy, photography, poetry, spirituality, stones, writing

THE GHOSTS OF THE EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT – A Relating to Humans Philosophical Issues Feature

It’s been a while since I have shared a submission from the Relating to Humans feature and I so pleased to get things started again by sharing this hauntingly beautiful piece from our Philosophical Issues feature by Philip A Green.

As a quick update, on Wednesday evening we’ll have a much anticipated (certainly by me) Guest Post by author Manizha Sepas (bedvilledadventurer.wordpress.com) and next Friday evening I will post my review of our IABS&R Volume 3 pick HAWSER by author J Hardy Carroll (jhardycarroll.com).

THE GHOSTS OF THE EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT

by Philip A Green

I worked in an ER once with old wooden doors on the rooms. The patterns created by the grains in the wood became a Rorschach test for patients- some saw mountains, some saw animals, some saw nothing at all. But room nine, directly across from the trauma rooms, was different. Something in that door frightened patients.

It was the schizophrenics who first made me aware of it. God, they hated that room when the door was closed. I lost track of how many times the crash of that door being kicked open shook the department. The wall behind it had a fist sized hole from the handle punching into it. It finally reached the point where I had to make a rule, no psych patients in room nine.

I blew it off for years as a strange quirk until one morning, about three am, when I was interviewing a patient. In a sleep deprived stupor I sat on the stool next to the room nine bed, the gurney with the patient on it between the door and myself. The door was closed to give us some privacy. I was talking to the patient when the hair on the back of my neck began to rise.

There were faces in the door watching me. They wavered back and forth between a pattern in the wood and the Lost staring me down. I sat afraid, frozen in place, unable to understand what they could want from me. Finally, my patient on the gurney before me gave an awkward cough, and asked if I was ok.

That was a long time ago. I’ve moved on since then. Other ER’s, other towns, other stories. I never told anyone at work that I too, could see the faces. I’ve often wondered if a few of my nurses saw them as well. More than once during a trauma I’d catch a nurse staring off at the door on room nine across from us. The nurse and I would make eye contact, both waiting for the other to acknowledge the impossible. In the end, we never spoke of it, some things in the ER best being left alone.

The roughest part of what I do is getting out of bed each day, knowing an onslaught of suffering is barreling towards me. As I wake, so too are my patients. Perhaps we all drink coffee, sitting at our own breakfast table, chatting with our families about the day ahead.

I can’t help but think if only there were some clue, some way for me to warn them. Today is the day we will meet in the ER. Do not glance down at your phone on the way to work. Stay off Division Street. Wait, just one extra second, that’s all, just one second, before you step into the crosswalk in front of the school.

I imagine myself a ghost. Begging, pleading, screaming at them to stay home. Yet as a ghost, no one can hear me. My words have no meaning, my warnings no heed, my panic no justification. Nothing has happened yet. Today is starting out like every other day has started out, and those days were fine.

So instead we all get up, we go to work, and the day begins. I arrive at the ER, knowing my warnings have been unheeded. All I can do is prepare.

I walk through the department at the start of my shift. Airway equipment, check. Central lines, check. IV equipment, check. IV fluids, check. Room by room, item by item, I mentally touch and confirm each tool. As I see each item I make a quick practice run in my mind, so that when I need it I don’t have to think or feel. I can become pure action and resuscitation when need be.

Step by step I approach readiness, while somewhere, step by step, someone else approaches disaster. Like two planets whose gravitational fields pull them together, we begin on a collision course, gathering speed and momentum, neither of us yet aware of the other. I know a crash is coming but not who or what or where. My day is 10 hours of bracing for impact.

The buzzer on the radio squawks out through the department that a car has hit a pedestrian. The victim is unconscious on scene, rigs 7 and 12 are responding, and I know our planets are about to collide.

A hush falls over the ER as we listen to the call. They are on scene now, it’s bad. The victim is a child. She is critically injured. The car was speeding through a school zone. The quiet ding of a cell phone text has once again changed the course of the universe.

The medic phone rings and through the chaos and the static of the call there is only one thing I hear- the shakiness of the medic’s voice. ETA two minutes, he says, extensive facial trauma, chest trauma, maybe a collapsed lung. IV established, patient being bagged, not intubated.

My job now is to drain the department of all emotion. I become a human black hole. We cannot afford to feel. A child is dying. Feeling is for later. Now, we must focus. We must move. But we must not feel, or we will lose focus and fail.

My voice is calm, business like. As if we are getting a shipment of broken computer parts that require nothing more than reassembly in our shop. Part A will attach to Part B will attach to Part C. Nothing more.

I sound confident and ready, even to my own ears. It’s so convincing I almost believe it. Yet inside I feel it. The sheer terror. There’s no other word. The faces in the door of room nine show up in force for the show. They stare out at us, watching, observing, grading us. I try to ignore them as I prepare myself to once again bear witness to the horror of life tearing apart before me.

I take in a deep breath and push it down. Somehow I find a little space left inside to cram some more suffering. I shove one more round of fear into it, knowing at some point it’s going to break, but hopefully not today, not now.

We scramble to get the trauma room ready. There is motion everywhere. People run. Voices shout back and forth. Tubes are prepared, drugs are drawn up, machines are wheeled about through the department. Bright yellow gowns and blue gloves are handed out like bullets and helmets before a battle.

Everyone knows their role. The techs prepare the monitors and gurney. The nurses draw up meds one by one, laying the drug filled syringes out on the counter in a row, ready for whatever the enemy throws at us. Pastoral services arrive with a Bible. I stand off to the side, my head racing through protocols, doses, tube sizes, and back up plans. There is an excited buzz in the air as we prepare. Then it happens. We achieve readiness.

A silence settles over the room like a lens focusing us into existence. Nothing moves. Each of us alive and vivid and real and anxious and excited and terrified at what’s coming. The colors of the room seem brighter, my friendships with the nurses feel stronger, my mind feels sharper as I breathe air that suddenly feels cleaner. I can feel my heart in my chest, my hands, my skin, every part of me.

The medics come crashing through the door, CPR in progress, and once again motion returns. As they roll into the trauma room time slows. I focus all of my being onto the child sprawled on the stretcher before me. She is twisted and broken like a flower that has been stomped part way down into the soil. I know this battle has been lost before I even touch my stethoscope to her blood-covered chest.

The next several minutes are holy and private and terrible. And they shall remain that way forever. That is the one small power that I do have. Suffice it to say there is another face that stares out from the door in room nine, watching, waiting, perhaps remembering.

Weeks later, months later, years later, her face comes to me. I will be camping alone in the desert, as far from another human being as I can get. The door of room nine will rise in my mind, and I can feel the faces out here with me.

The desert, the stars, the heat, the desolation, the emptiness are not enough to keep them away. They follow me everywhere. That womb of stuffed down fear and horror inside me has to give birth eventually somewhere in my life.

I stare into my small campfire, the smoke twisting like ghosts rising to the night above. I wonder. Do the stars know? Does God know? Does the dirt know? What is this place, this life, this brief flash of light before we fall back into the darkness again from which we arose?

I watch the fire dance and the smoke rise for hours. The faces sit with me. I can feel it. They too wonder at it all. Finally, my fire burns out, the smoke stops, and the sun rises. In two days I have to go back to work. But now I understand.

The faces will always be with me.

Waiting. Watching. Making sure that I’m never alone when the next trauma comes.

philipallengreen.com

 

 

Filed under: Writing Tagged: authors, book reviews, books, emergency rooms, essays, ghosts, Guest Authors, IABS&R Volume 3, Indie Authors, mental health, Philosophical Issues, Relating to Humans, trauma, writing

Summertime Blues – A Call for Guest Contributors

I read an article a good while back about a study that concluded that we humans tend to be more productive and creative during cooler weather periods than warmer weather periods. Now, I cannot speak to the veracity of the study; however, I can speak to the fact that from now (and maybe even sooner) until the end of summer, if not longer, yours truly will be significantly less productive and creative.

Consequently, in an effort to, if not cure, than at least offset my summertime productive blues, I ask for your assistance. I am asking all you Indie-types, be you an author, artist, photographer, whatever, to contribute a guest post to this blog discussing what it has been like for you to self-publish your work.

You are free to discuss your creative process, the logistical process, the publishing process, or whatever process you have gained insight to during your Indie experience that you feel will both interest and instruct us, and, ultimately, improve and enhance our own future Indie efforts.

Oh, and while you are at it, don’t forget to pitch to us the final product of your creative effort (book, artwork, photography, etc.) for which you wish us to purchase.

You can email me your submission through the Contact page and we’ll work together from there to get it posted.

The more submissions, the merrier. I expect it to be a long, hot unproductive summer for me so I hope you all are willing to help me to keep this blog active and interesting throughout.

Please include links to any pictures or products you’d like to include in your post and I’ll format them to your liking.

Our first guest author post in this series is by author Jason Greensides and it will be up tomorrow evening, Inshallah. In the interim, you can check out Jason’s work at jasongreensides.com.

Let me know if you have any questions.

And let the long lazy hazy unproductive days of summer begin!

Right on?

Write on!

Filed under: Writing Tagged: art, artists, authors, books, creativity, drawing, Indie Authors, indie publishing, novels, photography, poetry, productivity, publishing, writing

An Ode to a Garden Hose

For pools Blue and lawns so Green

From the Garden Hose with its Humble mien

A Quench of water it shall Spout

‘Cept in sunny California

For it Suffers from a Drought

 

 

Filed under: Photography Tagged: California drought, climate change, droughts, garden hoses, humor, lawn care, photography, poetry, rhymes, swimming pools, water, writing

Baltimore v. Waco

Quite a contrast of our national reaction to and the national media coverage of the violent protests/riots in Baltimore and the motorcycle gang slayings in Waco.

#thingsthatmakemegohmm…

 

 

Filed under: Human Relations Tagged: Baltimore Riots, Banditos, Cossacks, Freddie Gray, human relations, media, motorcycle gangs, motorcycles, murder, police response, protests, race relations, Texes, Waco

A Guest Post by Author Jason Greensides

Mysterious Characters and Unforgivable Acts of Violence

by Jason Greensides

 

One piece of writing advice that never set well with me – however useful it is at a practical level – is to know your characters: that you should be able to understand every little aspect of your character if you ever want them to be believable, sympathetic, and to leap off the page. Of course, in general this is useful advice, however, not only has this the potential to make writing less fun (one of the reasons I write is to discover something I didn’t know), but seems a fundamental flaw in how we should perceive other people in everyday life, particularly the violent and anti-social ones. It presupposes that characters and real people can be fully understood (and therefore judged), which I believe to be not only impossible, but ethically wrong.

The Baltimore Riots and other events of social upheaval always produce the same reaction in me. Not: How could those people act that like that? But: How could those reporting on events (which, because of ‘likes’, shares and unseen algorithms, is actually you and I), cast absolutist judgement upon people whose circumstances we can’t fully comprehend, as they themselves can’t. This too is another reason why I hate that writing mantra Know your characters: How can I truly know my characters when I don’t understand all the things that make me me?

Not only do the episodes of one’s own life seen through the lens of chance obfuscate analysis of what motivates us – our childhood, our parent’s lives, our grandparent’s lives, and back through human history – but at a genetic level, when you analyse how genes move from generation to generation through natural selection. It is the interplay between their outward characteristics and the environment in which they find themselves, not foresight or inherent strength, that ensures their survival through time. Once you know this, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that really genes just make this shit up as they go along.

Then there are random geological and cosmic events that shape the course of the planet and life as a whole – an endless swirling and shifting series of events with (possibly) no primary cause, adding yet more uncertainly about what made us who we are.

And at the atomic level, Heisenberg stated that you can’t know the position and momentum of a particle to 100% accuracy. So if you can’t know that then how can you know everything about someone’s deeper motivations, which in turn are obscured by their own life’s events, and in turn their understanding of those same events.

Life is brimming with chance and the ever unknowable – it’s everything but perfect and absolute – and this is what we (as artists, as writers) must embrace if our work, however down-to-Earth, is to reflect the great mystery of existence.

The hard thing about this is, of course, when writing so called ‘evil’ characters (and if you’re still with me you’ll agree this is a useless term), or seeing ‘evil’ acts play out in society, trying to suspend judgement upon them is one of the hardest things we can do. If a group of guys broke into my house, for example, and assaulted me and my wife, I too would call them evil, would want absolute judgement to squeeze the breath from their throats. I too would not be able to forgive.

But we must try, because ultimately, however you think about it, there had to have been at least one Nazi who, while placing the cold barrel of his Luger to the back of the head of a Polish Jew, thought, ‘Seriously, what the hell am I doing?; there must have been one Cheka officer who, while denying a Kulak his daily allowance of bread, thought, ‘My wife is really not going to like this’; there must have been one RPKAD commando in Indonesia who, before raping the fifteen-year-old daughter of a suspected Communist, thought, ‘What if my own daughter found out?’ Then moral complexity is further muddled when we do not consider pilots of Allied forces carrying out the bombing of Dresden as monsters, do not view leaders of the Western world as having committed an atrocity when imposing economic sanctions on Iraq.

So, suspend your judgement in everyday life, if you can (and I, for my part, will try to suspend my judgement upon those who deal with sweeping, all-inclusive statements of evil), and maybe, just maybe, the characters you create may have a little mystery, may have a little of the unknown, may be dynamic enough to hold our attention until the last page.

Jason Greensides

 

A contemporary novel by Jason Greensides

WEBSITE: JasonGreensides.com

TWITTER: @jasongreensides

FACEBOOK: facebook.com/jasongreensidesauthor

GOODREADS: goodreads.com/Jason_greensides

 

 

Filed under: Writing Tagged: authors, Baltimore Riots, fiction, Guest Authors, Indie Authors, Jason Greensides, literary fiction, literature, novels, publishing, writers, writing, writing advice

Summertime Blues – A Call for Guest Author Contributors

I read an article a good while back about a study that concluded that we humans tend to be more productive and creative during cooler weather periods than warmer weather periods. Now, I cannot speak to the veracity of the study; however, I can speak to the fact that from now (and maybe even sooner) until the end of summer, if not longer, yours truly will be significantly less productive and creative.

Consequently, in an effort to, if not cure, than at least offset my summertime productive blues, I ask for your assistance. I am asking all you Indie-types, be you an author, artist, photographer, whatever, to contribute a guest post to this blog discussing what it has been like for you to self-publish your work.

You are free to discuss your creative process, the logistical process, the publishing process, or whatever process you have gained insight to during your Indie experience that you feel will both interest and instruct us, and, ultimately, improve and enhance our own future Indie efforts.

Oh, and while you are at it, don’t forget to pitch to us the final product of your creative effort (book, artwork, photography, etc.) for which you wish us to purchase.

You can email me your submission through the Contact page and we’ll work together from there to get it posted.

The more submissions, the merrier. I expect it to be a long, hot unproductive summer for me so I hope you all are willing to help me to keep this blog active and interesting throughout.

Please include links to any pictures or products you’d like to include in your post and I’ll format them to your liking.

Our first guest author post in this series is by author Jason Greensides and it will be up tomorrow evening, Inshallah. In the interim, you can check out Jason’s work at jasongreensides.com.

Let me know if you have any questions.

And let the long lazy hazy unproductive days of summer begin!

Right on?

Write on!

Filed under: Writing Tagged: art, artists, authors, books, creativity, drawing, Indie Authors, indie publishing, novels, photography, poetry, productivity, publishing, writing