What I’m currently reading. Not pictured: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente, The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Black Ships by Jo Graham, Make Your Own Damn Movie by Lloyd Kaufman, The Grief Frequency by Kealan Patrick Burke, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, Orwell and the Refugees by Andrea Chalupa, and The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. Some of these I’ve been reading on and off for years.

I’ve always been a juggler, but this is getting ridiculous.

I‘ve been sick for what feels like an eternity. We all have. When I was in school, I stayed sick. I was so used to it that when the coughing spells and sinus infections magically stopped¹, I kind of freaked out. Being able to take a deep breath without gasping was foreign to me. But since we moved out of the shithole² four years ago, my allergies are making up for it big time. The grass here is toxic; even the dogs break out in hives. There’s ten times as much pollen which means I spend all spring weeping from one eye, and the carpet – at least in one place – sports the ruin of one of my exceptionally heavy nose bleeds.

I wish this was just a bout of heinous allergies but oh, no, we’ve most definitely contracted the cold from hell.

I read once that honeysuckle was an excellent cough remedy. Last year, I tossed some into a glass bottle with apple cider vinegar, pushed it to the back of a cabinet and forgot all about it. I pulled it out the other day and curiosity got the better of me. I popped the top. I didn’t taste it, but the stench was enough to make me wretch. I still haven’t tossed it out, don’t ask me why.

Next time, I’ll try it with honey.

The honeysuckle’s chokehold on our fence.

¹ I dropped out at 16. As a result, I got very little exposure to anything past my mailbox. Amazing what that does for one’s sinuses (assuming you clean your house which, ironically, we rarely did; I’m shocked the mold didn’t kill us).
² My name for what’s also known as “the other house,” where we lived happily for the first two of ten years. Then things went to shit. The last couple of years, we had neither air nor heat nor running water.

Not to be confused with our Jack. Taken Saturday at dusk with my old Digital Rebel XT.

With classmates in what appears to be a crowded warehouse, waiting out a storm and watching TV. A bizarre movie is playing where giant bugs terrorize the cast which includes Anthony Hopkins. In one scene, a praying mantis (colored and patterned like a moth¹) climbs onto a flying contraption that looks like a large broom stick and zips away over the woods, chasing someone. I look down and see a pair of spiders embedded in the crook of my right forefinger. I casually pluck one out but one is larger and very detailed – black and yellow with orange eyes. Its head and upper body stick out with the legs inside and I tug at it but it doesn’t budge. This has occurred in more than one dream and I have no idea what it means, but now my hands are driving me crazy.

- February 19, 2011

© Mike Keeling

¹ But which moth? I want to say it was black and white. The pattern escapes me.

Staying with Momma and [Liz] in a hotel room. We get in late and find two teenage girls have crashed the place. One’s caught rummaging through a bag and tries to play it off while the other is napping under the covers. All our lights have been shut off, and Momma rushes us to throw whatever we can into the car. We start out with luggage and once that’s full we start stuffing things into white trash bags. Books, stuffed animals (I remember Pooh Bear, Chip, a Sonic doll, possibly my Cabbage Patch doll), and a lot of broken plastic toys. We assumed once we’d done that we’d throw away all the trash. A man is arguing with someone outside the window of our room and [Liz] and I crouch low to the floor as we work. Momma suddenly bursts in and grabs hold of [Liz], dragging her out and shouting for us to go. I hurriedly ask my sister if everything else has been stowed in the car and she says yes. I grab the bag nearest me and [Liz] holds on to the one she has as we race outside. I fall into the passenger seat but [Liz] can’t open her door and begins screaming as I fumble with it over the seat as a car pulls in beside us and tries to cut us off. Panicked, Momma tells us to scream to get his attention to lure him around to our side of the car so she can gun it, and we do as she says. The man – skinny with glasses and a goatee and a resemblance to Jeffrey Dahmer, may have been wearing a plaid shirt – stumbles to our right and starts throwing rocks at the windshield. One cracks it, but by now Momma’s backing down the driveway (we’re now fleeing a house on a dark street). She murmurs she can’t see out the back for all the bags and the car feels like it’s moving slower and slower. The man hesitates then heads around the front of his car.

I wake up in a cold sweat. As dry as my eyes are, my right eye won’t stop weeping. I hear the Shawshank Redemption credits kick in as I step into the hall …

- March 21, 2012

© Algy O’Connell

Image courtesy the Associated Press

• Jaw-dropping art carved from encyclopedias, dictionaries, and medical journals.
• Fantastic shadow art of severed heads composed from, suitably, taxidermy and trash.
• The 100 best opening lines according to Stylist.co.uk. Looks like they forgot one -

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

• Little libraries! If only I were a carpenter (and lived somewhere else, where something like this would take off).
• Michael Chabon discusses the bias against science-fiction. Love him!
• If you’re of the geek or nerd persuasion and haven’t subscribed to the Nerdist channel on YouTube, you should. Is it weird that the show I’m most looking forward to is Rob Zombie’s?
• Wil Wheaton’s list of things every person should have.
• And I know you’ve seen it by now, but … an excerpt from Wesley Crusher, Teenage Fuck Machine.
• Francesca Lia Block is in a battle with Bank of America over her home. You can stay updated at Save Francesca’s Faerie Cottage. I really hope things work out; we’re facing the same situation and it’s enough to drive anyone mad.
• Steampunk Thing! How cool would it be to have one of these attached (and working, of course)?
• Here’s why Cinderella III: A Twist in Time is the best Disney sequel. I’m still cackling.
• Mark your calendars: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King (4/24), another tale in the Dark Tower saga, and Railsea by China Miéville (5/15), a salvagepunk retelling of Moby Dick.

I now have two favorite commercials …

The TV was on. I want to say we were watching a Saturday Night Live skit but for the life of me I haven’t been able to find a clip online. A young couple, the jock boyfriend and the pretty blonde with her hair pulled into a ponytail, stood looking up at the Lincoln Memorial. They turned to leave when the statue lifted one hand then the other before rising from his seat, glowering down at them like an angry god. Naturally, they screamed and ran away. But they weren’t quite fast enough. I don’t remember what happened to the guy, only that he died first. The girl must not have been very bright because she just stood there aghast. Abe reached down and made a fist and then he was holding her up to his face. She screamed one last time before her head disappeared in his enormous maw. He spit it out – close-up shot of her head rolling across the ground – and the audience went wild with laughter as he shuffled away to wreak havoc on the Washington Monument.

Now, this did nothing to soothe my cries. I’m fairly certain I puked.

Sometime before dawn, I heard a woman’s scream followed by a crash. I opened my eyes and stared at the window on the other side of the room. I didn’t move. If I had been capable, I would’ve pulled the blanket over my head and cried myself back to sleep. Instead I was forced to watch through the dingy glass as a pair of legs, stone white and as big around as tree trunks, strode past and out of sight. Something downstairs shattered. A chair or other wooden object was dragged or pushed across the floor, punctuated by audible wibbling. I knew then Lincoln had forced his way into the building.

Let’s be real, you’d have shit your pants.

It turns out that a drunk had broken into the apartment below us. Besides smashing a window and frightening the female half of the couple who lived there by exposing himself (it’s my understanding that this was the same drunk who spent nights singing in the street, sometimes clothed but most often not, sometimes with a guitar and other times with a harmonica), no real harm was done. So what the hell had I seen moving past my window at the height of the ruckus?

Maybe my mom had spiked my formula to lull me to sleep. Maybe it was the first of many hypnagogic hallucinations to come. But I saw something, something that looked an awful lot like a large marble statue’s large, stiff marble legs.

You tell me.