Thursday, September 29, 2011

Not One of Us #46





Not One of Us #46

They Were Doing Okay, by Patricia Russo
Sheydim-tants (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
The House of Rejoicing, by K.M. Ferebee
Dead Hotels (poem), by Anna Sykora
Heart’s Delight (poem), by Mike Allen
The Lily of the West (Blue Vervain Murder Ballad #5), by Erik Amundsen
Humpty’s Wife Remembers (poem), by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Tabula Rasa, by Ray Cluley
Eating the Ghosts (poem), by Jeannelle Ferreira
Giant, by Rose Lemberg
Infectious Paranoia (poem), by Trina Gaynon
Cemetery Theater (poem), by Sonya Taaffe

Artists

John Stanton
Kathleen Weldon

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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Tales of Bigfoot



Table of Contents for Tales of Bigfoot

BIGFOOT'S FOOT BY ALAN SPENCER
KEVIN BY REBECCA SNOW
THE STONE GIANT OF SHELVING ROCK BY ADAM P. LEWIS
BIGFOOTED BY PATRICK MACADOO
THE HOLLOW BY DUSTIN READE
GRAMPA'S STASH BY J. D. STANTON
I THINK WE NEED A BIGGER GUN BY SUZANNE ROBB
THE ART OF WAR BY DANE T. HATCHELL
A NEW CALLING BY MATT KURTZ
ALGERNON WOOD BY NICKOLAS COOK
AREA CODE 51 BY WILLIAM R. D. WOOD
ABERRANT BY PATRICK FLANAGAN
UPRISING AT RED HAWK RESERVATION BY SEAN GRAHAM
UNCLE JOE BY ANTHONY GIANGREGORIO
THE JOKE'S ON HIM BY SCOTT SHOYER


Thursday, May 26, 2011

Brown(ian) Noise Free MP3


 Spectral View of Stereo Brownian Noise

One afternoon when I was a teenager, my father misplaced his wristwatch, and searched the house for it in vain. He often left it on the mantle in the living room, but this time it wasn’t there. I asked my folks for quiet for a moment, and after circling the living room, I stuck my arm under a couch cushion and retrieved the watch. When dad asked how I found it, I told him I could hear it ticking. He insisted I’d planted the watch in the couch myself, so I had to find it three more times before he reluctantly believed me.

While I doubt I could repeat that stunt today, I’ve always been hypersensitive to light and sound. I’ve tried every type of ear plug I’ve come across, from cheap plastic to foam to high-tech plugs used by competition marksmen; most of them just hurt my ears. The best were made of soft silicone, but those fell out easily, attracted dirt, and my cat thinks they’re chewing gum for felines. While they did effectively block external sounds, they provided a new problem: every sniff, snort, gurgle, snurf, and other indescribable internal noises were amplified.*

I also tried a variety of sound-masking devices; surf and sea was nice, but the pauses between waves allowed external noise in and didn’t help me to sleep. White and pink noise, especially white noise sounds cold and annoying. Finally, I discovered Brown noise.

Brown noise differs from other “color” named noises, in that it is actually “Brownian” noise, named after Robert Brown, who discovered Brownian motion.

According to Wikipedia: “The graphic representation of the sound signal mimics a Brownian pattern. Its spectral density is inversely proportional to f², meaning it has more energy at lower frequencies, even more so than pink noise. It decreases in power by 6 dB per octave and, when heard, has a “damped” or “soft” quality compared to white and pink noise. The sound is a low roar resembling a waterfall or heavy rainfall.”

The sound is rich and warm, and the higher power at the lower frequencies helps to mask low frequency annoyances, including all but the most over-powered trunk blasters. With it, I can now sleep through most sounds that used to have me leaping out of bed. I can sleep through thunderstorms, ringing phones, even salesmen pounding on the front door.

Whether your need is undisturbed sleep, or you just want to work uninterrupted or block out chatter or distractions, Brown noise could be the answer. I have a Sansa MP3 player set to automatically replay the track endlessly. Just set the volume to a comfortable level and you’re good to go. Quality earbuds do make a difference – cheap buds don’t reproduce the lower frequencies well, and the result sounds like white noise. While earbuds do pop out occasionally, it’s surprisingly easy to adapt to sleeping with them. Just remember to keep them clean to avoid infections.

I have a few recommendations from experience – make sure your battery will last through your entire sleep period. If the Brown noise suddenly stops in the middle of sleep, I awaken instantly, wondering if the power has gone off to the entire house. Keep a spare set of earbuds nearby, because they tend to short out when you really need them. Common sense dictates not using such effective sound masking in situations where one would need to be roused by disturbing sounds. Brown noise is particularly helpful with meditation, self-hypnosis and writing. While music can be a great aid to writing, some people are distracted by lyrics or certain rhythms. Brown noise can help to retain mood and focus without the abrupt changes one faces with radio programs.

 If sleep is your objective, you might consider adding a technique such as meditation or progressive relaxation, and four-count in, six-count out slow deep breathing; Brown noise won’t stop anxiety or brain chatter that keeps you awake, but when it is combined with a relaxation protocol, you can create and reinforce an anchor or mental association that will facilitate a restful state of mind. Once that is trained and locked-in, Brown noise can become an automated trigger for peace of mind.

Usually, you will drift off into sleep imperceptibly. However, if you are into Lucid Dreaming, or stabilizing the hypnagogic state for creativity or problem solving, it is interesting to note your individual responses as you approach sleep. I have often observed the moment of a shift in consciousness, when a very pleasant silence in my mind replaces the Brown noise, as I’ve internalized enough to ignore it entirely. It also might be possible to use this phenomena as a springboard to block certain types of pain, as I’ve read in some studies.

Brown noise is also very helpful in blocking tinnitus; it’s not a cure, but it can give you a welcome respite when the ringing becomes overwhelming.

One small caveat: any sleep aid or ritual can form a habit. If you like falling asleep while listening to the radio, the sudden absence or failure of that radio could affect your sleep patterns. However, the inconvenience is minor, and certainly not as daunting as a drug dependence, be that dependence physical or psychological.

If you think this is something you would like to try, the following is a link where you can download 30 and 60 minute MP3 files of Brown noise, that I made:

Brown Noise MP3s (Fixed this link!)
90 Minute MP3 Added January 29 2014 (Via DropBox)

They’re all free, no strings attached.

An excellent sound machine that features well-implemented Brown Noise:

LectroFan High Fidelity White Noise Sound Machine with 20 Unique Non-Looping Fan and White Noise Sounds and Sleep Timer by Adaptive Sound Technologies

You might also want to check out "Make Tomorrow Great!"

 * I find it intriguingly ironic that we need a certain level of noise to experience “silence” as we conceive it. In the Anechoic Chamber, the world’s quietest room in South Minneapolis, no one has so far been able to stand the silence for more than 45 minutes. http://huff.to/14cZekH

This Is Your Brain on Silence  (Added 4/4/2019)

The Quietest Place in America is Becoming a Warzone

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Shotgun Memory




a forgotten scent
flares nostrils of the damned
a song comes on the radio
a torrent unleashed
blood rushes to the head
neck flushes & pressure
behind the eyes
a lacerated mind
hemorrhages
rage
sorrow
blinding clarity:
hair-trigger holograms
primed & pointed at the base of the skull

(Originally published in Theatre of Decay)

Friday, April 15, 2011

Not One of Us #45




The Sweepers, by Patricia Russo
The Hidden Places (poem) by K.S. Hardy
Understudy (poem) by Lee Clark Zumpe
A Wolf in Iceland Is the Child of a Lie, by Sonya Taaffe
A Storm at Night, and (poem), by Erin Hoffman
Mote, by Erik Amudsen
Birch (poem), by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
The Candle Folk, by Phoebe Nir
Incubation (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
Dead Man Watching, by Sunny Moraine
Down the Drain, by Francesca Forrest
Another Day (poem), by Malcolm Morris
I Bet Pliny the Elder Didn’t Cite His Sources, by Jason Maurer
Birds Fly (Poem) by Holly Day

Art Credits:
John Stanton – front and back covers, 24
Francesca Forrest – 39

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Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Memories of the Old Northside

 
(Click on photos for larger versions)
   
Recently an article about the 13-million-dollar renovation of the Methodist church at the northeast corner of 12th Street and Central Avenue in Indianapolis triggered a cascade of memories from my early childhood. Here is a link to photos of the restoration efforts.

My mother and two of her three siblings were born about half a block from that church, and her parents and my great-grandparents lived in that Italianate mansion at 1121 Central; they also owned the house next door, at 1127. Those houses were built during the Civil War, and were part of the Old Northside. The Romanesque church at 12th and Central was formed as a merger between two Methodist churches, and was built in 1891; that is where my parents were married.

After my father left the military, my folks rented part of the home at 1127 Central. They lived there when I was born, and stayed until I turned five.

Though we moved to a new home a few weeks after my fifth birthday, I still remember quite a bit from living on Central Avenue, as well as frequent visits until the houses were torn down in 1966, as I-65 gouged through the Old Northside.

This is a link to a street-level panorama from Google Maps—the I-65 overpass itself is where the houses once stood. If you hold down the left mouse button and drag from left-to-right, you can see the church and how close it was to the homes. The original plans for I-65 would have taken out the church, but they were altered to preserve it and the Morris-Butler home right behind it. It turns out that Flo is related to the Morris family, and her great-grandparents lived behind us on Park, in another home demolished for the interstate.

When my father first joined the Indianapolis Police Department, he didn’t own a car, and the city did not allow officers to use a patrol car after work in those days. I remember running out to meet him when I saw him step off the bus. I also remember the lines and the feel of the blue Buick, our first car, purchased when we lived on Central.

My father was once called to help a little girl who was being savagely attacked by several dogs in her backyard. He rescued her and took her to the hospital, and after discovering he had the same blood type, donated to help save her life, then went straight back to work. On hearing of this, reporters were sent out to do a story on my dad, and took a photo of him with me and my Cocker Spaniel puppy Jet, in the back yard at Central.

The apartment we lived in was rather simple and plain, but comfortable. Both houses were subdivided decades before into multiple apartments. I remember Eileen Goldstein, a friend of my mother’s, who lived in one of those apartments with her husband. There also was a nice elderly lady who never left her apartment—she was very heavy and could not get about well. She would talk to me as I played on the stairways in our house. I remember that it took a half-dozen or so young firefighters to carry her body down the narrow stairwell when she died.

While 1127 was a huge wood-frame house, the mansion at 1121 was a solid, imposing brick and stone structure—the house was long, and much larger than it appeared from the street. I would like to study the records of ownership—rumor was that it was built by a physician. My mother told me a story when I was young, that they were replacing some wall paper in a room, and found where someone had written a date in 1865 on one of the walls. (Scroll to the end to find an obit for the original owner)

These houses were built before gas, electricity and indoor plumbing were established or reached the neighborhood, and thus had to be renovated each time a new utility became available. Indoor bathrooms were constructed as additions on the sides of the homes; there were still carriage houses in the alley. Dark, chained and locked, the carriage houses were mysterious and inviting. I remember straining to get peeks through the doors and windows, seeing shadows of perhaps remnants of buggies and what seemed to be tools or farming equipment, and Victorian-era oddities a child couldn’t quite catalog in his memory. Had I been a few years older, I would have found a way in and explored thoroughly.

One tale I do not myself remember: I was an infant and my father had just started on the police department—my mother awoke in the middle of the night to fix me a bottle. She heard groaning coming from the alley, and calls for help. She did not want to wake my father, who had just gotten to sleep after a long shift, so she ignored the cries. The next morning, my folks saw police and onlookers crowded into the alley behind the house. About a block away, a man had been caught cheating on his pregnant wife. The couple had a fight, and she stabbed him with a butcher knife. He staggered down the alley crying out for help, and died behind our house. My dad was teased for some time for sleeping through that one. Click here for an update!

The house at 1121 thoroughly retained the feel of the Victorian era. Old, dark patterned carpeting and ornate furniture. My great-grandparent’s apartment was on the ground floor, while my grandparents took the upstairs; there were also apartments on the other side of the building. The first piano I ever plunked on was in my great-grandparent’s apartment. I am not certain, but I believe they purchased the homes around 1910. A dark, imposing curved stairway led upstairs to my grandparent’s digs. Numerous outdated relics still adorned the apartments. Fixtures for gas lighting that were no longer used, as well as an archaic louvered grill covered with asbestos—a gas fireplace, long out of use. The first electric lighting, installed in the mid 1870s, featured push-button wall switches—two black buttons with white tips—as you pushed one in, the other came out—absolutely fascinating to a toddler—I must have pushed those hundreds of times. Modern switches were installed, but the older ones for the most part remained, no longer functioning.

One of the most intriguing features to me was the tall, arched windows. On the second floor, in the grandparent’s living room, they had latches and hinges and once swung open, so one could walk out onto a wide stone balcony where you could oversee Central Avenue. I begged many times for them to open them and let me out—but they had not been opened for a generation or more. I would peer out and wonder what it was once like, to chat on this patio and feel the breeze and listen to the sounds of the city from a height. My imagination could easily take me back to the last days of the Civil War, and what one might have seen from that balcony.

From front to back, the building seemed to change personality several times. At one point, the hallway narrowed, and there was a small desk next to more arched, inoperable windows that looked into the house where I lived, next door. The corridor quickly widened again to a dining room with a formal dinner table, and a row of narrow closet doors, locked and forbidden to open; of course, I tried.

I loved my grandmother’s kitchen—it had such an unusual feel to it—I’ve never seen a kitchen quite like it since. A series of old but well-kept, odd-shaped kitchen devices that never seemed to be used—food was cooked on a conventional stove, but the other appliances were objects of fascination. Rounded lids and corners, strange gauges or meters, thick old fiber-wrapped electrical cords. I’m sure their actual functions were quite mundane, but when I was little, they were Victorian Steam-punk, elaborate in construct and purpose, to my imagination. I wish I had photographs documenting each room of those houses.

To the right in the kitchen was an old wooden door, nothing as elaborate as those in the front of the house. It opened to another stairwell, a steep, narrow, straight-shot to the ground-level back door, and the shared backyards. Worn wooden steps and plain, tall slat walls, and I remember a touch of vertigo because the stairway was steep unlike the graceful curve of the front stairs.

Out the back door, to my left as I left the house, were the classic slanted doors to the cellar. It was a rare treat when my grandmother unlocked those doors, and rarer still when I was allowed to descend into the dark, spider-webbed recesses of this house. I can still remember the earthy smells of that cellar, the ancient black topsoil from the forest that once stood here. With modern homes, the rich humus is all bulldozed away, down to hard clay; but not in the days these homes were built.

The cellar was another world entirely, the stuff of dreams and imagination. Seemingly ancient tools and farm implements hung on the walls and were scattered on workbenches. Storage dating from pioneer days. A rack of wooden shelves where my grandmother stored jar after jar of homemade jellies and jams, made from grapes grown on the arbors between the two houses. Underneath the lids, the jars were sealed with paraffin; a few jams were gritty from undissolved sugar, but still tasty. I can still remember the scent of that cellar.

Out back, facing the alley and to my right, a row of trees served as a property barrier. The branches of a tall weeping willow formed an overarching tent that kept out the sun, and left plenty of room for a child to hide and watch everything going on. At least I believed, no one knew where I was when I hid under that tree.

There once stood an imposing birdbath in that backyard. No longer used for birds, in its center was an enormous geode—it looked to me like a giant cauliflower, or perhaps the crystallized brain of a titan. I was convinced that it possessed some sort of magical powers, though precisely what they might be, I never quite figured out. I still remember peering into the geode, in the blue and black of night, and watching the moonlight sparkle and dance in the clumpy crystals. (I've added a newspaper mention of this birdbath below.)

I remember the old-style radio my mother kept in the kitchen; tan leather on the front and sides, a curved, rounded top with a large dial and a red pin or pointer that moved left and right to the different station frequencies under the curved glass. Those cool, rectangular buttons that were mechanical presets—each one you would push would cause the red line to zip across the dial to one station or another—there was a “crunch” sensation whenever you pushed one of those buttons. Mom listened to her radio soap operas on this box; they lasted 15 minutes each, while she was cleaning and cooking, and I followed her from room to room with favorite toys.

The more I reminisce, the more images and instances come bubbling up. My father trying to teach my mother how to handle a gun, just in case… the time an aunt and uncle dropped off one of their sickly children… for a year. I had a brother of sorts for a while. In the middle of the night, Christmas eve, finding my toys under the tree, when I was about four—woke my folks up with the noise I made playing. Before the house was razed, we rescued armloads of books from an attic a family of four could have lived in comfortably. From pulp fiction to The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant, also a 2nd or 3rd edition of the collected poetry of Lord Byron.

The clatter of a wooden screen door… the city sounds and summer breezes, the moods, memories and histories of a century that included my first five years… now just an embankment supporting concrete, home only to the ceaseless drone of interstate traffic.

Other photos of 11th and Central, and Abraham family businesses.








 

















 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(From The Indianapolis Star, Wed. Feb 13, 1946) 











The Original Owner - Indpls. News, Sept. 26, 1901











An interesting tenant (Indpls. Star April 22, 1946)

  C.W. Abraham

Nellie Correll Abraham

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Love is a Hurtin' Thing


Love is a Hurtin' Thing
A Not One of Us Special Publication
Contents

People Love What They Love, by Patricia Russo
Romance (poem), by Gale Acuff
Wrapped, by Caitlin Campbell
Inheritance (poem), by Dolorez Gomez
Waltzing the Tempest, by Jason S. Ridler
Forty-Fifth Birthday, by Kent Kruse
Sefer Yetzirah (poem), by Sonya Taaffe

Art by John Stanton

Purchase a copy

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Tales of a Woman Scorned



"Fidelity" by Ash Krafton
"Saving Alice - The Brotherhood" by Neil E. Leckman
"Maggie's Wedding" by Nandy Ekle
"The Thing About Hate" by Flo Stanton
"Don't Speak" by Charlotte E. Gledson
"Scorched" by Nate Burleigh
"Blood Will Tell" by Ken L. Jones
"Model Behaviour" by David Bernstein
"Fairytale" by Christopher Hivner
"Eat Your Heart Out Lorena" by Nathan Robinson
"Deer Gap" by Thomas M. Malafraina
"Popsicle for Emmy" by Terrie Leigh Relf
"Red Riding Hood Bites" by A. E. Churchyard
"Gargulax" by John C. Lewis
"Sex, Lies and Death" by S. E. Cox
"Prince of Tortured Hearts" by Kimberly Graham

Interior artwork by John Stanton

Buy a copy here