Shotgun Memory

Not One of Us #46

2011-09-29T16:41:00.000-07:00

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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Tales of Bigfoot

2011-07-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

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

Available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble

Brown(ian) Noise

2011-05-26T01:32:00.000-07:00

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 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 couple of other 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. 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 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

They’re both free, no strings attached.

Shotgun Memory

2011-04-27T02:01:00.000-07:00

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

Not One of Us #45

2011-04-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

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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Memories of the Old Northside

2011-04-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

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 backyard 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 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.

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 remember myself: 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.

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 1920. 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 rich earth 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 sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, and peering into the geode, in the blue and black of night, and watching the moonlight sparkle and dance in the clumpy crystals.

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 such dense reading as 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.

Cabbages and Kings

2011-03-26T20:21:00.000-07:00

Cabbages and Kings - a new story by Flo Stanton

Love is a Hurtin' Thing

2011-01-19T23:02:00.000-08:00

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

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Tales of a Woman Scorned

2011-01-01T23:52:00.000-08:00

"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

Dark Dreams and Synchronicity

2010-11-20T03:12:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in Twisted Dreams Magazine, June 2008)

The summer I turned five, my parents’ first new house was being built. We made many trips to the place that would soon be home; exciting, interminable drives to the inner clockworks of a child. The route to this new world slowly became familiar – a winding road from the comfortably old to the exquisitely new. From playing around a forbidding, locked carriage house in an alley to standing on ripped and clotted amber clay, in utter awe of the neat concrete slab, pipe-and-wiring entrails and a growing skeleton of wood. I shuffled too close once, gouging my ankle on a rusty rebar snake that hadn’t yet been trimmed, and left behind a bloody trail. I can still find the scar if I look for it.

Bulldozers tore away farm and trees and almost everything that wasn’t fresh and new; just about everything that held a memory of what once was. Bright light, the scents of spackle and paint; symmetry and order, Formica and plastics replaced the must and ochre, the rich shadows and contours, the haunted cellars and mystical grape-arbors, the burdened and elder weight of the only home I’d known. It was a newborn world, and I ran with the other children in the freshly-sodded meadow behind our houses, before wood slat and wire fencing cubed-off our homes into distinctive principalities, forbidden zones and the occasional no-man’s lands.

Still, I dreamed of cemeteries. Solemn men and women dressed in black wide-brimmed hats, long coats and dark shawls. Of roughshod hills and gullies, of protruding belly-mounds of earth, of crude stone, and wooden markers. Of a silent procession in the black of night, led by torches, delivering a black casket to its grave amidst bare trees and cloud-swathed moonlight.

And the sporadic visit by the Blue People.

Facing our house: to the left, another young couple, a girl and a boy; playmates. To the right, a quiet couple, who at least seemed elderly to a kindergartener. In between, the little pink house, home.

I remember it as a balmy summer night when I was perhaps seven – it could have been spring or fall, but there wasn’t the feeling of school encroaching. It had been too quiet, too peaceful, too idyllic an evening for something not to have happened. The shriek of a woman, the sounds of clatter and activity. The insistent pounding on the door. My father, a police officer, answering the call for help from our quiet neighbors in the brick house.

Activity. Adults – raised voices followed by murmurs, soft sobs. Porch lights and flashlights, and neighbors congregating in the yard, in front of the brick house. Whispers and shushing and “Stay in the house!”

I wandered out to the front steps but dared not go any further. They were looking at something in the front yard, not far from the curb; flashlights playing over something that looked like stone. “Who could have done this?” and words like “Cruel” and “Heartless bastards” drifted over from next door.

Hurried trips in and out of the house. Phone calls. “Stay out of the way.” A police cruiser arrived, and uniformed cops peered at the object, talked to witnesses, took notes. Somewhere in there, the object was taken away. The couple from the brick house clung together. Stooped as if from a great weight, heartsick, they returned to their home. Neighbors and police left. The porch lights clicked off one by one.

Aroused by a noise, perhaps a loud dull thud, the couple from the brick house had found a grave stone had landed in their front lawn. It belonged to their son, who had been killed in the Korean War.

They were convinced that night that it had been a cruel prank. How could it possibly be anything else? What were the odds? Who could have done it?

Over the next few days, there was a thorough investigation. An old cemetery nearby was being moved to make way for another housing development. That particular night, an overloaded flatbed truck rumbled down our street. This gravestone and this one only fell off of the truck and landed in our neighbor’s front yard, past the curb and into the grass.

None of the workers knew our neighbors or where they lived. No knowledge, no intent, no malice was ever discovered.

From then on, I remember our neighbors in the brick house, who used to smile and talk across the fence, as gray and silent and broken as the slab that fell into their yard that night.

It was some time after I was married that I was told that the little pink house, and most our neighbors’ homes, were built on the site of another old country cemetery.

Not One of Us #44

2010-10-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

Not One of Us #44
Contents

The Seal Wife by Jeannelle Ferreira
In the Earth in Those Days (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
Catalyst by Loren Rhoads
With the Blue Heart People, by Patricia Russo
Turning a Blind Eye (poem), by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Last, by Jamie Mason
Lost in the City of New Orleans (poem), by Kent Kruse
Myrna: San Diego #9 (poem), by John Berbrich
Fortune Cookie Mother, by Phoebe Nir
The Dementia Dimension (poem), by K.S. Hardy
Angels, by Blaise Marchesani
Traveling (poem), by M. C. Wyant

Art by John Stanton

Available at: http://goo.gl/GQEF

A Pint of Bloody Fiction

2010-08-23T17:56:00.000-07:00

"A Pint of Bloody Fiction" - features a bloody good story by my wife Flo!

So, why not belly up to the bar and order a pint today?

Mention "Flo Stanton" when you order, and she will receive a special royalty!

Table of Contents:

“200 Words” Neil Leckman
“Pistol Whipped” Dave Rex
“The Blade Bites Deep” Stanley Riiks
“Insomnia” Pat Lewis-Bussard
“The Toy” Charlotte Emma Gledson
“Jilted” Brian Barnett
“I love my Job” Gary McKenzie
“Jars” Neil Leckman
“Crimson” Meagan Elizabeth Hightower
“The Worse Thing I Ever Did” Jason M. Tucker
“The Yearning” Sara Saint John
"A Woman of Taste” Angel Zapata
“The Idol” Terence Kuch
“Ladies Man” Pat Lewis-Bussard
“Library Of Souls” Neil Leckman
“Night Song” B.A. Sans
“Home Movies” Kevin L. Jones
“Salvation” Gary McKenzie
“Rorschach's Vampire” Jason M. Tucker
“The Door” Adam Francis Smith
“The Devil's Quest” S.E.COX
“Instruments of Torture” Flo Stanton
“Spiders” Neil Leckman
“The Lady or the Vampire” Ken L. Jones
“The Shoot” Brian Rosenberger
“Funeral at Louisiana Bayou” Theresa C. Newbill
“The Winner” Gayle Arrowood
“Water's Pity” Chris Keaton
“Little Nikita” S.E.COX
“Down a Hole” Gary McKenzie
“Gift Wrap” Neil Leckman
“In the Moment” Nandy Ekle
“The Good Husband” Christina Hugh
“Bellies Bucket” AJ Brown
“Faceless” Nate Burleigh
“Shard” Brandon L. Rucker
“Jack” Francis W. Alexander
“Three Degrees of Freedom” Theresa C. Newbill
“Lost Connection” Neil Leckman

http://www.houseofhorror.org.uk/#/book-shop/4535143845
or
http://tinyurl.com/2cqtpkk

God/no god

2010-08-11T01:26:00.000-07:00

I’ve seen so many debates about religion online; even when I’m tempted to chime in with a comment or an observation, I don’t, because the structure is always the same: stylized flaming believer vs. stylized flaming non-believer.

I doubt!! exhorts the skeptic. I believe!! wails the faithful. Who cares.

How about a different premise? An idea to smack around for a few seconds:

“The issue of deity, pro or con, is profoundly non sequitur.”

Quick! Hit the pause button on emotions for a moment. Are you pissed off, or intrigued?

The above statement is qualitatively different from my or your belief in a god.

If I believe there is a god, or I believe that there is not a god, it is still a belief.

Let’s kick in one more qualifying premise: diatribes and categorical syllogisms aside, neither you nor I can actually prove the existence or non-existence of god.

Belief vs. Functional Conventionality

We need to agree on certain terms and standards if we are to get along. If you ask for a glass of water and I hand you a chunk of ice, you will probably think me an idiot, even if we both agree that the ice is composed of good old H2O. If we both obey the traffic laws, it is not an issue of social hierarchy, regardless of the respective blue book values of our vehicles, but a simple matter of physics: two separate cars cannot occupy the same space at the same time without serious legal and financial consequences.

(I live in the United States. To simplify the discussion, from now on I’ll use Christianity generically as religion, and atheism as its counterpoint.)

To a Christian, belief in god and all attendant doctrines may be a personal matter of great importance.

Conversely, an atheist chooses not to believe. That non-belief is in itself a belief: nature abhors a vacuum.

There are gradients between the two polar extremes above, such as agnosticism, which in practice is more or less a “church of just in case.”

To differentiate from all three, I’ll label myself as a “nontheist.”

One more stipulation, to keep things civil: regardless of the stance any individual may take on the religious issue, let’s say we all agree to functional conventionality: within reason, we all obey the laws of man and physics, we love our families and friends, we all agree on both the similarities and differences between ice and water and steam. We all breathe, eat, sleep, crap, weep; we suffer, and we enjoy.

Beyond this “functional conventionality,” what does it matter what an individual needs to believe?

If you believe in god, if you truly believe that your due diligence has secured your place in eternity, then how can you possibly be intimidated and enraged, how can your deity possibly be insulted or diminished, by some lowly individual’s lack of faith?

If you truly believe that this is IT, that there is nothing beyond death but oblivion, then how could any opinion, in dissent or agreement, be of any value to you?

The potential—indeed, the proclivity—of tyranny and domination by both camps is precisely equal.

Allow me to believe—or disbelieve—as I need.

One of the tenets influencing my break with religion when I was a child, is its ubiquitous extortion—“believe what I believe or you will never see your loved one again.” Sorry, but no belief system owns the patent, copyright, trademark or service mark to the concept of survival; nor does an equal and opposite, adamant denial of that possibility carry any weight. If skepticism is an honest admission of “I don’t fucking know,” then sign me up. If atheism is a strident assertion of existential finality, then "to hell" with both the atheist and the true believer—both in that case being just bipolar mirrors of the same compulsive need to dominate via absolutism and adamancy; to conscript adherents, as if at some date, a final tally will be made and the issue will be decided once and for all.

I find myself in an untenable position, blackmailed by both sides. Believe what I’m told to, and I’m entitled to all the benefits of membership. If I don’t join up, I’m slow-witted and pathetic, and probably amoral. It is something akin to being mugged by "metaphysical" gangbangers.

No matter how much else I share with the true believer and the skeptic, this membership issue usually becomes a deal-breaker to them.

Who can prove that groveling before a deity purchases grace, wisdom and immortality? Who can prove that a tacit denial of our own marvelous potentials and uncharted possibilities makes us practical, trustworthy and intelligent?

My son died some years ago. A beautiful child, a brilliant teenager. An accident at school, nothing dramatic; his death was just tragic and pointless, a waste.

Here, I have a problem, equally with belief and atheism. I refuse to believe that my boy is plucking a harp at the feet of some deity, and I equally reject the idea that he no longer exists. Physics asserts that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and quantum physics posits other versions of him exist in parallel dimensions. Mathematically alone, the possibilities number beyond that which we can imagine and catalog.

Now, exactly how or why or where or in what form he continues I cannot say, but it is something I personally need to believe. Whether or not it is “true” is irrelevant. In this case, your need for me to believe, or disbelieve, any particular doctrine, concept or notion, on either side of religion, is profoundly irrelevant.

The day we lost him, I felt as if I would never sleep again, but late that night I tried, because there was so much I had to do. I dozed off for only a minute or two, and in that time I dreamed we were walking together down a gravel road, on an unfamiliar landscape, lighted eerily. He was looking down at the ground, just ambling along, dejected. Suddenly, he kicked the gravel hard, and with a sheepish grin looked at me and said, “Aw, shit, Dad!”

The next day, a friend dropped by to visit, compassionate and supportive, until I told him my dream. I had just offered the dream as above, with no beliefs or doctrines appended. Instantly his countenance changed, and he told me “that can’t happen,” and went off defending his religious beliefs. What, I can’t have a dream? What exactly had I said to make him so insecure?

Beyond that which I think that I know, beyond the dictates of “functional conventionality,” I believe what I need to. And that is subject to review and change. By me, not you.

In both “I doubt!” and “I believe!” the operative word is the great “I.”

Legions of voting believers/disbelievers won’t make the world flat, raise the dead or obliterate the soul.

Beyond the conventions we need to function in a civilized manner, if you will permit me to believe—or disbelieve—what I need, then I will be sure to extend to you the same courtesy.

Double Troubles Part 1

2010-07-21T13:36:00.000-07:00

I think I’m an average looking guy. Even a bald head is not such a novelty these days, so you are not as likely to notice me now as much as you might have singled me out some years ago had I been bald then. One thing I would assume, though: if you had a friend who looked somewhat like me and at some point noticed me across a street or a room, as you approached me, I am sure that you would notice enough differences not to confuse me with him for long.

I imagine something would have to be a dead giveaway. If not directly in my face, then the color of my eyes, or my clothes, the way I move, my choice of words, the sound of my voice—something. Even if I had an identical twin—which I don’t—there would have to be a tell.

This year was the third time I’ve run into someone who thought I was someone else. Not the casual mistake of an acquaintance. Not an old friend who has changed so much I have a hard time connecting his face to his name. Someone who adamantly and persistently insists that I am someone who he knows, and sees on a regular basis.

The first one on my list was a white guy of average height and build; seedy, smirky, he at first thought I was playing some kind of a game with him when I politely told him he must have mistaken me for someone else. He insisted we had been friends for years, and frequented the same watering hole just down the road. When I told him I don’t drink, he seemed genuinely confused, even hurt.

This was about a ten-minute walk from home; I saw him twice in the space of a few days, at the same place while out on a stroll. The second encounter was creepy. He approached me with a broad swagger, jolly and smug, apparently sure I’d drop my “pretense” from the other day and let him in on the joke. I again politely declined and repeated my assertion that he had confused me with someone else. The friendly façade dropped in an instant—he was getting pissed, so I got up in his face. In one of the strangest body-language morphs I’ve witnessed, it was as if rage and fear had plowed into each other headlong, and fear had won. In one instant, he looked as if he was just about to take a swing at me, in the very next moment, he backed away with a look of horror in his eyes. I gave him a cold stare, and you would have thought I had stuck a knife in his gut.

As I resumed my walk, he stalked me for a block, muttering, coming closer than backing off, as if the neurochemistry of fear and courage pushed and then pulled him. His pattern mirrored incidents in which an angry dog circled me, growling, barking menace, working up enough rage to attack. I watched him in my peripheral vision and maintained my stride, just a bit concerned that if I turned or stopped, he’d charge. Apparently fear or discretion prevailed, and he backed down.

The second incident on my list also took place while on a walk, also about ten minutes from home, but in a different direction. In this instance, I had taken my notebook to Steak & Shake, and worked on some story notes and lists; when it was time to meet up with Flo, this scrawny black guy approached me. The exchange was similar to the first encounter above, and this fellow also became quite pissed when I told him I didn’t know him. When I insisted the second time, he snarled, “I don’t like you since you shaved your head.”

That was a few years ago. This year, Flo and I were shopping together, and we split up to find different items, at a thrift store close to the Speedway race track. While scanning an isle for, I believe, a flavor of mustard I favor, this huge black guy came up to me. He was friendly, like we were pals. Like the two previous guys, he acted as if we regularly saw each other, as if it had only been a day or two since we’d last visited. He also seemed put out that I didn’t know him, as if there were something wrong with me, or else I was playing a cruel game on him. I calmly assured him I wasn’t who he thought I was, and he started dropping names of people we supposedly knew, as if he were trying to jog an amnesiac’s memory. After blankly shaking my head at six or eight names I’d never heard before, he became impatient, perhaps a bit angry. I tried to excuse myself and slip past him, but he blocked my way and became more insistent. He threw two or three more names at me, and nothing rang a bell. I think we got the willies at the same moment, and just parted ways. Still curious, I cut to the front of the store, intending to stake out a place where I could watch him leave, see what kind of vehicle he got into, or which direction he took – but he was simply gone. I grid-searched the store, but never got another glimpse of him.

In all three cases, I made a point of getting up close enough, talking enough that something should have clued them in to the fact that I wasn’t who they thought I was. In case number two, apparently my “double” had started shaving his head around the time I did. In all three instances, instead of realizing their mistake, not one of them could be convinced I wasn’t who they thought. Of the three, the huge black guy seemed more upset and confused instead of angry, though the choice of street names he tossed off at me added him to the other two as volatile characters I would not likely count as friends.

The one thing that puzzles me about my own behavior in each of these instances, is that in none of them did it occur to me to ask the name of my apparent double. If this happens again, that will definitely be my first question.

Dream Hangover

2010-07-13T20:45:00.000-07:00

Today was one of those rare days when several factors dovetailed – I didn’t have to be up early or go anywhere in a hurry, the weather was overcast and quiet and rainy, but not violent or threatening, and there was a pleasant feeling left over from my dreams. I woke up gracefully, and felt as if half of me were still connected to that inner landscape. At those times, one can shutter the left eye, and allow the right brain to dream on for a while.

Too often I awake quickly, snapping to the impinging responsibilities of life. While most are not actual demands or threats, our society has conditioned us to start our days on red alert. An austere envelope sporting the vague threat “OFFICIAL BUSINESS” turns out to be just another flier soliciting my business. Radio, television, junk mail, religious zealots at the front door, email, even the neighbor’s yappy mutt stridently demand attention.

There are those times when a nightmare is so intense, so real that it hovers over me all day, and the demands of the outside world are welcome to slap me out of the inner chaos and terror… but fortunately, those are few and far apart. You might think that someone who paints with a dark palate as I do would find nightmares a rich source of inspiration – I wish it were so, but that is very rarely the case for me. Dreams are often pointless, muddled, rife with anxiety; a redundant process-sort-file batch-job of memory, a vain attempt to impose order onto the randomly neurotic transactional quagmire of existence.

Yet, there also exists this wondrous place, where self-consciousness and hierarchies, pecking orders and politics, physics and boundaries and even the cage of the expected personality, all slip away, and everything becomes possible again. In the absence of alarm clocks and phones and knuckles on the door, this soap-bubble of synchronicity can linger near consciousness long enough to offer up possibility and poetry.

I wish for more of these days.

"Hidden"

2010-02-01T21:29:00.000-08:00

Table of contents for Hidden:

Hey, by Patricia Russo
The Propagule (poem), by Wade German
Gabriel, by Meredith Roe
Death Dreams (poem), by David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Grinning Like the Dead Man in His Tomb (poem), by Kent Kruse
Strawberry Ghoul, by Erik Amundsen
The Monastery, by Brent Knowles
Oneness (poem), by Erin Hoffman
Anakatabasis (poem), by Sonya Taaffe
Art: John Stanton (cover), John & Flo Stanton, Teresa Tunaley

Hidden is available from The Genre Mall.

Static Movement Special Print issue #2

2009-12-23T19:59:00.000-08:00

The Static Movement Special Print issue #2 is available now, and it includes stories by both Flo and yours truly, along with three of my images. You can pick up a copy here:

http://tinyurl.com/ybp2toe

Download an MP3 of the appearance of publishers Chris Bartholomew and John 'JAM' Arthur Miller on blogtalkradio’s House of Horror-The Lounge, discussing this issue:

http://tinyurl.com/yllj7dg

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays to all!

John

Zazzle Tip – Wear A Cup

2009-12-17T15:42:00.000-08:00

One piece I’ve held back because I thought it would someday make a great book cover, is entitled “Identity Crisis.” A digitally sliced, diced and morphed composite of about a dozen photos I’ve taken of one of my skulls, it’s one of my better attempts at surrealism.

A few days ago, Zazzle offered its photographic postage on discount for four hours, starting at midnight. Since I decided to debut “Identity Crisis” in Parallax, it seemed like a good idea to promote the book with some custom postage, so I ordered a couple of books.

About a day and a half later, I received the following excerpt in an email from “Zazzle Content Management”:

“We’re having trouble approving your ZazzleStamps design titled “identity crisis b.” In order to assist us, would you please reply to this email with honest responses to the following question(s):

1. What is the source of this image? Where did you find it?
2. Do you have permission to use this image?”

Now, I realize that there is an entire laundry-list of restrictions and exceptions regarding content, and I didn’t really worry that my stylized disintegrating skull would pose a serious threat to mental health, but I certainly did not anticipate this kind of treatment.

If Zazzle had asked nicely, I would have been delighted to certify that “Identity Crisis” is indeed my original work, and reassure the company that I own all rights to the image.

“Where did you find it?” Zazzle apparently doesn’t bother with the throat – it goes directly for the ‘nads.

I personally do not see any reason to do business with a company that-even by implication-calls me a liar and a thief.

Caveat emptor.

Point of irony: posters and T-shirts of book-cover art I’ve licensed to sell for charity are still for sale on Zazzle. You can see one of them here: http://tinyurl.com/ye7qwbf

Balloon Synchronicity

2009-10-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

Looking back, I suppose I was a strange, nerdy teenager. One lonely summer, I took some of my photographs, wrote some of my poetry on the backsides, affixed the photos to the strings of helium balloons, and launched them into the sky. I wondered if they would ever be found.

On our first date, I bought a helium balloon, and Flo and I wrote something on a card and sent it up. It became a small hobby, an occasional indulgence for us to fly off a balloon with a note, a photograph or even a postcard attached. Once, a balloon made it all the way to the East side of the city, and drifted down onto some fellow' s driveway; he was kind enough to return the card with a comment.

One spring day, at the Broad Ripple Art Fair, we bought a helium balloon along with some other treasures, and returned home. Normally a small helium balloon would not last the night, drifting down to the floor before sunup. This time, the balloon was still pressed firmly against the ceiling when we rose the next day, so we took it with us to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and launched it from the grounds with a self-addressed postcard attached. I certainly did not expect it to go far, thinking it had at best an hour or two of flight left.

The summer passed by quickly, and we did not expect the postcard to return. One day though, the card arrived at our P.O. Box, with a short note and several thumbtack holes to suggest it had been on display for a while. The card was postmarked at Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It had drifted down at the Ohio and West Virginia border, and crossed over to West Virginia after it was mailed. Of all the places it could have ended up, it was a bit odd to me that it had traversed the replacement for the Silver Bridge, at the very site where The Mothman Prophecies took place.

Over the years, we occasionally sent balloons aloft with postcards or notes, and our son enjoyed joining in on our hobbies and adventures. One day, while we all were headed to the grocery store, I noticed something drifting down from the sky toward the parking lot. A small helium balloon with a postcard attached floated down to a height I could reach up and snatch it. The activities director of an Illinois Senior Center had provided balloons and postcards for the residents as entertainment one day. I returned the postcard with a note, and the message I sent was eventually published in an article in a local newspaper serving the area of the Senior Center.

What are the odds?

It's been years now, since we last floated off a message attached to a helium balloon, but I'm sure that someday we will do it again.

"Thanks for the Meteor Shit!"

2009-08-20T03:19:00.000-07:00

It was the summer before I started college. I remember listening to the radio one night, during a thunderstorm. Callers to the station reported seeing a meteor streaking down, somewhere on the southwest side of Indianapolis.

The next day, my father returned from a fishing trip, excited by something he’d found. He had pulled off of the road to check a noise under the hood, and noticed the top sheared off of a tree, then a trench where something had hit the ground and shattered. He picked up a piece, and came back home to have me take a look at it.

He drove me back to the scene, and I took a few photos. We gathered up all the pieces we could find, and put them in the trunk.

It was obviously a meteor, but there was something unusual about it. Shiny and metallic, it didn’t look like the burnt rock most meteors appear to be.

At home, we devised a number of tests we could try out on it. The meteor was porous and brittle; a good smack with a hammer broke off shards easily. Apparently molten when it hit, the part that had hit the ground was more compressed than the upper portion. The meteor had shattered, so there was no way we could fit the pieces together or determine the original shape. A propane torch got it good and hot, but we couldn’t get it to melt. Nothing from my chem. lab – nitric, hydrochloric or sulfuric acids - had any effect on samples.

Since it looked metallic, we decided to test it – it was non-magnetic, but when we tested for conductivity with some copper wire, a battery and a flashlight bulb, we were surprised – expecting little or no conductivity, we found that the bulb shone just as bright when a chunk of the meteor was in the circuit, as it was when directly connected with wire only.

We tried it again, this time with two good-sized chunks touching – then three – each time, the bulb was just as bright – an exceptional conductor, whatever it was.

When school started, I took a piece to the geology department. A crotchety professor gave it a momentary glance and dismissed me, telling me it was “crap.”

My father, an IPD police officer, took a sample to the crime lab, and was told that it had tested as close to titanium in specific gravity and hardness, but no known acids had any effect on it, and a sample could not be burnt – attempts at spectrophotometer analysis failed – it could not be identified.

Over the years, I sent off samples several times for analysis. In one case, I was told: “The sample consists of 60 percent silicon, 36 percent iron, between 2 and 4 percent aluminum, and has traces of calcium chromium and manganese in it. It is my belief that it is meteoric in origin, and is not anything unusual. Silicon meteors are common. Usually the iron and the silicon are not mixed, but the shape of the sample and so forth indicate that it has been mixed and perhaps homogenized by the process of coming through the atmosphere.”

Fine, but that still begged some questions. Friction with the atmosphere would burn a meteorite from the outside in, but how could one explain the uniform homogenization of the iron and silicon? There were no veins or chunks of non-homogenized silicon or iron anywhere in our samples. I am not familiar with the technology, but if one desired to make this mixture industrially – the temperature, pressure and mixing necessary to produce a uniform batch would be quite different from the conditions of a meteor burning through the atmosphere.

Plus, iron is a poor conductor of electricity. Place the same gauge of iron wire in a circuit with copper – and the light bulb will dim considerably, and the iron wire will get hot, because of its greater resistance than copper. Glass, on the other hand, is an insulator – it does not conduct electricity. Laboratory pure silicon is used in computer technology – but again, no such purity would be found in a meteor. So – just how does the uniform homogenization of iron and silicon take place in a meteor? How does the mixture of quartz and iron – insulator and poor conductor – produce a superior conductor? Could this hybrid have any use in semiconductor technology?

None of the samples I’ve sent off for analysis have ever been sent back to me, even though I’ve always requested the return.

One analysis reported that the meteor was Martian in origin. Fanciful bullshit, but entertaining.

My father and I both gave away numerous samples over the next decade; most of the haul we brought home has just simply vanished.

A “psychic” once stated emphatically that it came from a comet. A possible, but functionally irrelevant response.

Not one analysis – scientific or otherwise – of this meteor has agreed significantly with another.

In fact, only one proclamation regarding the meteor’s origin or composition has ever been of any value to me.

Some years ago, Flo wrote a couple of pieces for Stephen King’s newsletter, “Castle Rock,” including a review of Tabitha’s novel, “The Trap.” We found out that King collected paperweights sent him by his fans, so we sent him a chunk of meteor, to add to his collection, and made reference to Jordy Verrill’s exclamation in “Creepshow.”

A few weeks later, we received a post card with “Thanks for the Meteor Shit!” and Stephen King’s signature.

Now, how cool is that?

Phone Booth Psych

2009-07-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

I’m not a psychic. I can’t tell your future, give you winning lottery numbers or read your mind. If I could have seen my future, there’s a hell of a lot I would have changed.

It doesn’t work like that, anyway.

We “read” people and situations, relationships, transactions, all of the time. We observe, catalog and track patterns. First and foremost, we learn social survival. How a cry brings mother, a coo produces a smile, a caress, perhaps a little more food. We observe, analyze and produce these strategies before we learn the words and syntax it takes to articulate them.

We learn these transactions first, and far in front of anything else. Have you ever gone out of your way to impress a stranger, only later to wonder why you even bothered trying? This tracks back to our earliest, most primal survival strategies.

Most of what we would label as “psychic” is nothing more than observation and processing.

Still, occasionally, something else is in play – something that appears beyond the five recognized senses.

For example, when Flo and I were first married, we lived in a tiny third-floor apartment with no phone. We would call friends and family from a pay phone on the corner, a couple of blocks away.

One evening, I was looking forward to a chat with my father. I dressed appropriately for the early fall weather, and on my way to the door, a wave of apprehension and anxiety overwhelmed me. I simply could not make myself go out the door.

This was not something commonplace for me. My relationship with Dad was fine, and I was eager to talk to him. Nor did I feel something was wrong with him. I talked about what was happening, with Flo, and experimented with it for the better part of an hour.

If I stated “I’m not going,” I felt immediately relieved. If I tried to leave, the apprehension hit me again. I could not come up with a plausible “why” – just that my visceral response was strong enough to stop me in my tracks. It was all terribly odd, senseless, silly.

Then, as suddenly as it had come over me, the feeling was gone. Not a trace of it left. I shrugged it off, and left to call my father.

Not far from home, I saw the flashing lights of a police car. A little closer, and I saw a car up on the sidewalk, where the outline of the phone booth should have been.

I asked the cop when this had happened, and he told me, about five minutes ago. A drunk driver had hopped the curb and plowed through the phone booth. The driver was in the back of the police cruiser, and while I was there, a tow truck arrived to haul the drunk’s car off to the impound lot.

I ran home, loaded my camera, and returned just in time to see the car disappear into the horizon. I snapped the photo below, of the smashed phone booth.

Typically, I stood in the phone booth with my back to traffic, phone pressed against one ear and my finger in the other, to block out the city noise. Also typically, Dad and I would have a lively conversation that often lasted more than an hour. The weather was pleasant, I had been in a great mood, and I definitely would have been in the booth when the drunk hammered it.

I can’t explain this away by saying I “heard” the crash or the police car unconsciously and somehow processed the data correctly. The crash occurred at the approximate time I felt that wave of relief.

And, to be honest, I probably would not have believed that this sequence played out exactly in the order told above, had it not happened to me.

To run it back, slow it down and try and make it more clear – what I experienced was an intense physical balking, much like a mule that sits down and refuses to budge. The apprehension, the anxiety, were more of a result of that balking than the cause of it.

Events such as this do pique my curiosity – as to just what we are capable of knowing and doing, outside the constraints of ordinary experience and social convention.

It sure would be handy if I could turn this on when I need it. Whatever “it” is, it certainly doesn’t seem to work that way. “It” seems to assert itself before or during a disaster, but not point the way to things happy or positive, indicative of it being a primal survival mechanism. “It” happens to me mostly in dreams, and when it does, events generally play out according to the dream, without any efforts on my part having any effect. Providing, of course, that the obtuse dream symbolism is decipherable at all to my conscious mind – more often than not, the meaning becomes crystal clear ex post facto. And that can be explained by the tendency to morph the ambiguous to fit the specific.

If there is a point here, it is this: the gypsy with the crystal ball, the dude in a turban with intense eyes, the gifts and curses of gods and demons – the way society has stylized the phenomena and trained us to respond to the strange and the unknown – is functionally pointless, and serves generally to set us up for the astute predator.

Still, we are remarkable creatures who have only recently become aware… adrift in a universe of possibility beyond the best efforts of our imagination.

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Yet…

If I’m lucky, if I’m aware, I might occasionally snag an insight that will be useful to me or someone I care for. You might, too.

A Letter from Charles Fort

2009-07-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

I found the above letter, in the envelope below, glued to the inside back cover of a third-printing (Feb. 1931) of “The Book of the Damned,” at a used book store, for $4.

The Avon, IN Haunted Bridge

2009-07-14T03:12:00.000-07:00

If you live in Indiana, this is THE Haunted Bridge. The triple-arch railroad trestle spans a rural road and White Lick Creek in Avon, a short distance west of Indianapolis.

A crumbling, weathered antiquity from 1906, this brooding expanse would inspire gloom and legend even if no true stories were attributed to it. A number of reputable publications have claimed that a worker was entombed in the concrete while it was being built – an urban legend, sure – but it is supposed to have happened here. There is another story of a young woman and her infant who plunged to their deaths – versions range from accident to suicide; visitors claim to hear the screams of the worker at sundown, and see the mother looking for her child atop the bridge late at night.

On a short trip one night with my folks, we stopped by the bridge for a look. My mother stayed in the car, not the least interested in such creepy nonsense, while my father, Flo and I strolled up for a closer view. Upon our return, mom was irate; how could we have let Flo climb up and walk across the tracks? She blanched when we told her Flo had stayed at ground level with us, and we saw no one at all atop the bridge. Mom had never heard of the legends of the bridge – yet she saw a woman walking across the railroad tracks, pausing to look down as if looking for something – as the ghost story goes.

Previously, I had taken infrared shots of the bridge after midnight – and in one, a misty form appeared where the ghost is supposedly seen.

I’ve never heard the screams, nor seen the apparition, but I understand the fascination and the foreboding this bridge inspires. Many of the most common urban legends have been falsely attributed to it – the first version I ever heard of “The Hook” was set here. Once, when I was a guest on a radio talk show, a caller insisted he saw a three-eyed hellhound guarding the bridge. It might have been a tad bid more convincing if he wasn’t piss-drunk when he told his story.

Isolated for generations, only recently has the area been developed. Avon holds an annual “Haunted Bridge Festival,” and an image of it is featured on the Avon city web site. Its macabre appeal, and recent restoration efforts, has prevented the bridge from being demolished and replaced.

One legend of the Haunted Bridge I believe without reservation is that, over the decades, young couples have conceived countless children while parked hoping to catch a glimpse of the ghost.

Rusty iron plates now prevent access to the inner workings of the bridge – the tunnels cut through all of the arches. I’ve been through those tunnels, and in its guts, the bridge subtly undulates and shudders as if alive. Haunted, whether by tragedy and death or the focused imagination of generations, it is still one of the most eerie experiences you could hope for.

There are a couple of 3D stereo pairs of the bridge, over at my Flickr gallery:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnstanton/

The Cornettsville Dust Devil

2009-05-01T06:04:00.000-07:00

View Larger Map

The last time I visited the Cornettsville Cemetery, I was a teenager. This time, my mother had decided to catalog the entire cemetery for her genealogical research. A long, lazy summer drive from Indianapolis south to Daviess County, Indiana; the cemetery is only slightly smaller than downtown Cornettsville itself.

A winding access road though the middle of farmland took us to a parking place next to an old fence. There, we drank from an artesian well, the distinctive “rotten egg water” that supposedly has health benefits.

My folks, my sister and I took an orderly approach this time, working a grid to document all the graves, including that of an ancestor, William R. Baker. In chapter 7 of The History of Daviess County, reproduced online at

http://www.millersofwashingtoncounty.org/Daviess/Chapter-7.html

it states “Among the business men of the place are William R. Baker, general store and post office; John N. Killion, blacksmith, and Dr. J. M. Achor. The handsomest public school building in the county, outside of Washington, is located at Cornettsville.”

Baker was a Civil War veteran, and I’ve restored several photos of him, including one on our web site, www.3AMBlue.com. That one in particular, I remember from my childhood, because it hung for years on the wall by our front door, in a flaming pink frame. Baker, posed proud and stiff, in full Union Army regalia; the photo caught sunlight and had faded significantly before I had a chance to bring it back digitally. No matter how many times my father teased my mother about relegating the poor fellow to the pink frame, she never relented.

I remember this as an enjoyable excursion, though it took most of our day to catalog the cemetery. Shortly before we were planning to leave, I was standing at the northeast corner of the cemetery, looking out over the patchwork quilt rectangles of crops neatly laid out among the southern Indiana hills; it reminded me of photos I’d seen of the British countryside, arranged in peace, grace and order.

It was a sunny summer day, not too hot, perfect for this kind of outing. As I looked out over the farmland, I saw something odd stir a couple of rectangles over to my right – at the ground, something began to churn the dust and detritus up from the cornfield, and spin it up into the sky in a tight spiral; a dust devil formed in front of me. It seemed completely out of place – there had been a light breeze, but no wind, and there were only a few wispy clouds far up in the sky that day. It seemed as if the dust devil had started from the ground and moved up.

I watched with fascination as it began to move, and then hop towards me like a miniature tornado. It bounced up the hill and paused right over me – I was in the center, and watched the leaves and dust just spin around me. It was eerie – in the eye of this “storm” it was peaceful, and yet there was this energy completely surrounding me. No noise, no wind except for the rustle of the spinning leaves. Just to describe my feelings – I was suddenly cold, as if from the inside out, and I felt as if I were being touched, scrutinized perhaps, by something intelligent. Just a subjective description, yet…

It moved off from me, and then stopped with my sister at its center. Then it hopped again, visiting my parents exactly the same way. As it left them, we all started to follow it, as it approached our car.

On the hood of the Chevy was one of the notepads, filled with details transcribed from the tombstones. As all of us watched, one by one, the top three sheets were torn from the pad, left to right, as if an invisible hand were ripping them off methodically; the pad itself stayed stationary on the hood.

From there, the dust devil made one more hop, about 20 yards past the car. We stood there utterly amazed as we watched those three pages circle around and around, up and up, until they were out of sight. Then just as suddenly as it had begun, it simply stopped. The heavier leaves and dust just dropped straight to the ground, while that which had been spinning ever upward, fluttered down in random trajectories.

We split up and ran in different directions, 20 or thirty yards out from the epicenter, trying to catch a glimpse of the missing pages, in order to retrieve them.

Except, they didn’t come down.

When it made the last hop past the tree line, the dust devil spun the pages up, out of reach, but we could see them for a while. There was nothing but open ground, and the pages did not reappear. We walked another grid, and never found a trace.

By now, all of us were spooked, and it was a long drive home.

Other people have since cataloged the names at the Cornettsville Cemetery, but it seemed at the time, that something didn’t want us to have that information. Yes, it is an irrational, even superstitious, emotional reaction; one that made its own kind of sense to us, in the moment.

From the above Google satellite map, not much has changed there in all these years. And somehow, that’s a comforting thought.

Below: Mary Jane and William Riley Baker.

Dumpsite Diving UFO

2009-03-29T17:44:00.000-07:00

(Photo Copyright John Stanton 2006)

Over the past six months, while culling through approximately 40,000 photos for my first photography book, I’ve scrutinized both mutts and gems. Shots I’ve overlooked while working on a deadline, as well as favorites I’ve simply not been able to find a home for, are making the cut for “Parallax,” scheduled for release this summer.

Some photos possess their own unique points of interest, such as IMG_3485, which was shot the day before Thanksgiving, 2006, at an undisclosed industrial dumpsite.

According to the EXIF info, 3484 was shot at precisely 3:27:00 P.M.; the subject in question was photographed at 3:27:06, and the next frame at 3:27: 22. Frames 3484 and 3485 were both landscape orientation - 3485 was zoomed-in a bit more than the previous shot. 3486 was a zoomed portrait shot of the vaguely humanoid form of concrete and rebar.

There is an object in frame 3485 that does not appear in the adjacent frames. The insets in the photo above depict the object at 400% and 2000% magnification.

It appears to be a solid, ovoid or disc shaped object, of unknown configuration, composition and purpose. It doesn’t appear to be motion-blurred, as best I can tell, and seems to be too detailed, solid, stable and high-up to be merely a passing insect. The photo was taken at 1/1000th of a second.

The previous frame, 3484, was shot at a wider angle, from the same position I took 3485. There appear to be no wings, fins or aeronautical stabilizers on the object. Since only 6 seconds elapsed between exposures, I think it is fair to rule out balloons, clouds and blimps as possible explanations. Frame 3486 captured less of the sky than the previous two shots, but still, there is no such anomaly present.

What it isn’t seems to be apparent: what it is, is not. Hence the term “Unidentified.” Make of it what you will.

Witchwire

2009-02-22T16:18:00.000-08:00

After an evening of unseasonably warm rain, storm squalls and high winds, the skies quieted around midnight, the morning of February 12. At 3:50 A.M., I was at my computer and online when the power went out. I fumbled around for about a minute, lit a candle and located a flashlight. Flo came in, and we checked out front – some lights were on, but the street light was out, as well as a row of homes to the south. I looked out back: the power line to our house was still intact, and the security lights were on at the school. I went to the phone to call in our outage – DOA. Since the phone company generates its own electricity, it seemed reasonable that a downed pole took out both power and communications, somewhere near where underground phone lines become airborne.

Six hours later, power company trucks and cherry pickers circled our block, and the power came back on. Still no phone – might have to call that one in. This being the sixth phone outage since last June, I knew the drill, and I took a phone and a screwdriver out back to our terminal box. When I plugged the phone in, I got a nice clear dial tone – so the only possibility – the wiring between the box and our house decided to fail at the precise time that the power went out. It only took about ten minutes to rig a temporary line, but the odds of the simultaneous failures struck me as yet another anomaly to add to my ever growing list.

Here we are, now, on Oscar night, Feb. 22. Watching the last few minutes before William Holden gets shot and stumbles into the pool in “Sunset Boulevard,” when we hear a strange scraping sound, almost as if somebody is shoveling snow right outside our front door. No, the sound is wafting its way up from the basement. The paper shredder has turned itself on, lurching and gagging on nothing. It has never misbehaved before, and it has been a month or so since I last used it. I’m back up stairs in time to see Holden get plugged.

Once again, electrical anomalies appear to be the Motif du Mois.

"Traps" Released November 11

2008-10-31T12:50:00.000-07:00

TRAPS

baited, set & ready

edited by Scott T. Goudsward
Introduction by T.M. Wright

Order you copy from AMAZON.COM today!

The sound of the snare, the scream of an unsuspecting victim—the deadliest part of a trap is not knowing you’re in one until it’s too late! Featuring top-shelf terror and a rogues’ gallery of twisted tales by some of the genre’s best writers.

CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE:

P.D. Cacek
Del Howison
Nancy Kilpatrick
Rhys Hughes
Paul Finch
Hal Bodner
Wendy Brewer
L.L. Soares
J.M. Heluk
David Simms
Tracy L. Carbone
Scott T. Goudsward
K.K.
A.E. Martineau
T. Rex Armés
John Dimes
Mark Rigney
Caroline Allen
Dan Foley
Lorne Dixon
Gregory L. Norris
Cody Goodfellow
Lisa Mannetti
Elizabeth Blue
Martel Sardina
Lyn C.A. Gardener
Flo Stanton
Sarah Totton

No such thing as "Orphaned Works."

2008-08-20T19:20:00.000-07:00

(Please scroll down to read my reply)

From the Office of Senator Evan Bayh
Monday, August 18, 2008 11:56 AM
From: "noreply@bayh.senate.gov"
To: johndstanton

Dear Mr. Stanton :

Thank you for contacting me regarding S. 2913, the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 . I appreciate your thoughts and concerns on this issue.

Innovation, creativity and hard work have fueled the growth of our economy and created countless jobs. I believe that our country's success in a globalized world depends largely on its ability to protect its innovations and breakthrough designs. Yet today, American businesses lose an estimated $250 billion a year to intellectual property theft. One of the most important steps Congress can take on behalf of our content creators is to ensure that adequate protections are in place so that they will be compensated for their work. That is why I authored the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Act, a bold new strategy for protecting Americans from criminals bent on pirating or counterfeiting their products. My bill would improve enforcement by elevating the government's response to IP offenses to the same level as money laundering and other black-market crimes. This legislation would also enhance cooperation between the myriad federal agencies responsible for carrying out the protection of intellectual property rights. We need this reform to establish a focused, aggressive coordination plan for our domestic and international efforts to protect our best and last competitive advantage in the global economy: American ingenuity.

I am pleased that nearly all of the ideas embodied in my legislation have been incorporated in a new bill introduced by leaders of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and myself on July 24, 2008. The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008 will protect American innovation by addressing the shortcomings of our current enforcement regime. This bipartisan, measured compromise represents the best components of a number of intellectual property proposals introduced in Congress. Key among the legislation's provisions are: authorization for the Attorney General to enforce civil copyright laws; enhancements to civil intellectual property laws; enhancements to criminal intellectual property laws; coordination and strategic planning of federal efforts against counterfeiting and piracy; and increased resources for key programs within the Department of Justice to combat intellectual property theft. I am proud to cosponsor this comprehensive approach, which will equip our Government with the tools it needs to investigate and prosecute those who violate the intellectual property rights of American citizens. I look forward to working with my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee to move this bill towards enactment into law.

As you may know, S. 2913 was introduced in the Senate on April 24, 2008. This legislation would limit liability for the use of "orphan works"-copyrighted works whose owners may be impossible to identify and locate. The bill would provide a means for anyone to make use of copyrighted material whose owners cannot be identified. Opponents of S. 2913 are concerned that the bill does not contain protections such as requirements that a user file a notice of use with the Copyright Office in order to claim orphan works status with respect to a work and that an archive of the notices be maintained by the Copyright Office.

S. 2913 was reported out of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on May 15, 2008, and placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar. Please be assured that as it makes its way to the Senate floor, I will keep your views in mind.

Again, thank you for contacting me. I hope the information I have provided is helpful. My website, http://bayh.senate.gov , can provide additional details about legislation and state projects, and you can also sign up to receive my monthly e-newsletter, The Bayh Bulletin, by clicking on the link at the top of my homepage. I value your input and hope you will continue to keep me informed of the issues important to you.

Office of Senator Evan Bayh
(202) 224-5623
Russell 463
Washington, D.C. 20510

My Reply:

Dear Senator Bayh,

Thank you for your reply, and your concern. I did sign the online-petition opposing S. 2913, but I would like to take this opportunity to express my vigorous opposition, not merely in regards to the fear that “protections such as requirements that a user file a notice of use with the Copyright Office in order to claim orphan works status with respect to a work and that an archive of the notices be maintained by the Copyright Office,” aren’t provided, but to the entire concept of “Orphaned Works.”

First off, the very concept of “orphaned works” is in violent conflict with both the letter and the spirit of the international copyright convention of 1977, in which it was asserted that your creations belong to you the moment they exist.

To give you an example: I was commissioned to produce an illustration for a short story that was published online. My work, as well as the author’s, were credited there. The author subsequently copied and posted my illustration on his web site, promoting his story – however, he failed to credit my illustration. I contacted him – he lives in New Zealand – simply asking he add my credit to his page. As of the last time I checked, he had not complied. Now – if someone else comes to his site, notices my illustration and captures it, he has no idea of who originated it and owns the rights.

You cannot presume this is an “orphan” work simply because a third party overlooked crediting me. NOR should I have to pay some bureaucracy more than I earned for creating it, just to keep someone else from stealing it.

The very concept of “orphaned works” is thievery, and equates the finding of it on the Internet to garbage left at the curb – finders, keepers. An easier concept? If it doesn’t wear a sign saying it’s free, it is NOT. Would you eat an apple in a grocery store, assuming it was free, because it lacked a price tag?

The problem here is that dishonest concerns are trying to railroad through legislation that legalizes the theft of intellectual property, simply because of easy access, due to the openness of the Internet.

It would be like passing legislation that makes it legal for me to walk off with your lawnmower, simply because it was “abandoned” in your front yard while you went into your home for a drink of water.

The law is very clear. What I create is MINE from the moment I create it, until I sell or license it otherwise. There is public domain work, there is free work. In the software world, there is even what they call “post card ware,” meaning you can have this for free, but I’d just like to get a post card from you. Not too much to ask, right?

But WHO so desperately needs my art, my writing, my music so much that he has the RIGHT to claim it as his own and PROFIT from reselling it, that the law should support this thievery? Can’t the individual create it himself? Can’t he afford to commission the work from someone who has the skill? The law is clear – if it isn’t yours, HANDS OFF.

There is NO SUCH THING as “ORPHAN WORK.” If there is, then everything we create is simply garbage on the great cyber curb.

Please, do not in any way support such a vulgar concept. Once such a law is passed and entrenched, it is nearly impossible to undo the damage.

Thank you for your consideration,

John Stanton

"Zero Point"

2008-07-05T22:16:00.000-07:00

- A new video of photos, with an original soundtrack:

Of Shadow and Substance...

2008-06-14T18:34:00.000-07:00

- A new Anthology, with cover art by Yours Truly.

http://www.lulu.com/content/2719693

Things That Go “Uuuungh” In The Night

2008-05-30T00:23:00.000-07:00

Last Monday AM, around 1:50, Flo was sitting at my computer, and I was in my chair, about 10 feet away. She’d been doing some online research, and turned to chat with me – we’d been talking for a few minutes, and she was mid-sentence when a loud noise practically drowned her out.

It was a very load moan or groan, “Uuuungh,” deep and resonant. The best I can describe it: as if someone had plunged a butcher knife into the gut of a large, robust old man. To me, the sound appeared directly between us. Flo told me that she thought it might have come from out back, though the window and door in that direction were shut tight. Still, we checked both out front and back, and found nothing whatsoever to account for the sound.

Sounds rarely rouse me when I’m asleep, and when they do, if I can’t find anything to account for them, I write the experience off as an artifact from dreaming. But, when something like this happens when I’m awake, and there’s a witness, that shines a different light on the phenomenon.

Micro-anomalies are for the most part overlooked, I think, because there is simply nothing of value that you can extrapolate from them, at least not individually. If, say, tens of thousands of fish or frogs dropped from a clear sky into your neighborhood, it would provoke mass speculation; theories would abound, and range from freakish weather to black holes to Biblical plagues.

We’ve lived in this house for a number of years now, and while we’ve had a fair share of these micro-anomalies, the “groaning old man” is not a regular occurrence; nor am I inclined to call TAPS and report a haunting. If the groan appeared regularly, I’d be sure to record and time it, and stake out various possible entry points – but I doubt he – whatever “he” might be, will cooperate.

The natural tendency is to toe-tag such happenings and file them away in the “unexplained” drawer. The event is neither broad nor significant enough to make any useful speculations about – and if you dwell on it enough, you will look like a nut to everybody else.

I once approached an ATM just as the woman ahead of me left; the machine displayed “Thank you, Mrs. Stanton” for a few seconds, and I turned to see her climb into an elegant white car with an Ohio license plate. I never saw her before, and had no idea if she was related to me – in fact, the happenstance is only significant if I feel that it is to me – yet it is not a commonplace occurrence. How often might I have stood behind or in front of another Stanton in some line somewhere, and simply not known it? What were the odds that I would have noticed this time?

Synchronicity can be incidental – such as a name or verbal pun – or a physical event – something tangible beyond syntax and the coincidences of language.

One Thanksgiving when I was a teenager, we heard the screech of tires, and an ensuing ruckus out front – a child had bolted from our next door neighbor’s front yard, and a middle-aged woman had almost hit her – in fact, she had run over the very tips of the little girl’s shoes; the child was unharmed, but both she and the driver were almost in shock from the near-tragedy. The driver was rushing home after making a last moment purchase for the holiday dinner. She wanted everything to be perfect, because her son, who lived out of state, was visiting for the first time in years.

Almost exactly an hour later, another screech, another ruckus out front. Another neighborhood child, about the same age as the first, bolted into the street, from the same place in the same yard. This time, she was hit, and her leg was broken. You guessed it – this driver was the first driver’s son, who didn’t want to be late for Thanksgiving dinner.

This was on a quiet side-street, not a thoroughfare. There was no geographical reason why a child would choose to cross at this point over any other, and neither child had been visiting next door. Both had just been walking along, and for no understandable reason, had chosen that place and moment to run across the street.

Micro-anomalies – the eerie confluence of implied purpose and possibility – if you catalog enough of these, they just might be sufficient to entertain a dinner guest or two, but they also have a cumulative, disquieting effect. Like a pixel-glitch, a video-hiccup in the face of the person across from you.

At the signpost, up ahead…

While you're at it, check out the publications below - I have an article and three photos in Twisted Dreams, and a photo on the title page in NexGen Pulp.

http://www.lulu.com/content/2622568

http://www.nexgenpulp.com/Subscriptions.html

Long Distance Call

2008-02-19T21:18:00.000-08:00

The phone call came one cold January evening; it was my father’s ex-fiancé. They had been engaged for a short while, some time before he eventually met and married the woman who would be my mother. Dad never really talked about the personal details of the relationship, but he made it clear he didn’t think they would have been good together. Still, over the decades, she would contact my father. I don’t remember any visits from her, but my mother knew her enough to recognize her, and knew her voice on the phone.

She tried several times to get back together with my father, which of course really piqued mom, that she would have such gall, all those years later. I’m not sure when the last time was that Joanne contacted dad, but I was at least a teenager; perhaps it was even after Flo and I were married.

Dad called my mother over to the phone, and had her listen in for a few minutes. It was definitely Joanne’s voice, mom later concurred. All told, they chatted for at least twenty minutes. Shortly after the conversation ended, dad called me.

The strangest thing about the conversation with Joanne, at least so I thought at the time, was that she had been murdered six years earlier.

According to D. Scott Rogo in his book “Phone Calls from the Dead,” recipients of these calls generally appear to be “blocked” somehow from recalling that the person on the other side of the conversation has died, until the call is ended. This apparently is what happened to both of my folks.

Dad insisted it was Joanne, and said she’d spoken of things only she could have known about. Flo and I visited, and we all talked about the conversation at length. Mom shortly blanked on any details she might have remembered, but still remembers firmly that it was Joanne. At the time, dad recounted a few trivialities from the conversation, though he left out details of most of it; and when pressed, his response was disturbing. There was some part he didn’t want to speak of, and said he would talk about later. That part, he later denied remembering, or that it was in any way significant.

I brought it up a few more times, and while we occasionally chatted about how strange it all was, he always managed to evade any more discussion of the content of the conversation.

My father died of a heart attack three months after that phone call.

Twisted Dreams

2008-02-19T21:16:00.000-08:00

For those of you (Both of you!) who read my “Synchronicity and Dark Dreams” blog from a few weeks ago, I pulled it because I had the opportunity to submit it for publication. It will appear, along with three of my photos, in the June issue of “Twisted Dreams” – I’ll put a link up at www.3AMBlue.com when it’s available.

Requiem for the Damned

2008-02-15T23:28:00.000-08:00

“By the damned, I mean the excluded.” - Charles Fort.

What I photograph fits this criteria. The abandoned – a shack at the edge of a cornfield, a derelict factory, an asylum that’s home only to rats, ghosts, the memory of horror.

I find an ancient tree, etched with character, shortly before it is cut down and fed through a wood chipper. I make a study of a stone chimney standing long after its house burned away from it, or a ruined cinderblock filling station; I often find my subject just before the wrecking ball excises the scar, and all trace of memory. This is my art.

I come across abandoned domestic rubble beneath an overpass; a makeshift table, a tiny wooden chair, a mattress dragged who knows how far; a long screwdriver, stuck in the ground behind weeds – easy to grasp for self-defense. A thick folder of seemingly random newspaper clippings, hidden in an electrical box.

Factory walls and railroad cars tagged by artists, bangers or just someone who just wanted to leave his name behind after he no longer needed it.

Transient relics of our transient existence.

The abandoned. The excluded. The damned.

A fat spider I found hanging on its web in the gap between fence and gate, dangling above chain and rusted padlock guarding yet another empty factory… appears on the cover of “Requiem for the Damned,” an Anthology of Horror that goes on sale February 22, 2008.

With fiction by:

Jennifer L. Miller
Eric Enck
Jordan M. Bobe
Cassandra Lee
Dave Rex
Jessica Lynn Gardner
Kevin Lucia
John Stanton
Charlotte Emma Gledson
Jane Timm Baxter
Colin M. Maguire
Scott Harper
Matthew Alan Pierce
Stephen W. Roberts
Michael A. Beaudry

Order a copy here: http://www.lulu.com/content/2088659
Or click on the link from my web site:
http://www.3AMBlue.com

Trainbending

2007-10-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

I bought my first tape recorder when I was 11 years old; it may date me, but it was a little portable reel-to-reel unit that required a 9-volt battery and four C-cells to operate. My father bought an identical unit, and for a few weeks, we had a blast, recording everything we could think of - nature, sounds around the house, radio and TV broadcasts. I recorded dad's voice off of the police-band radio - he was a dispatcher at IPD at the time. We made recordings of ridiculous, spontaneous skits and silliness-I remember dad's "Granny Goggins" voice, doing an advertisement for "good 'ol Poison Oatmeal," a not very kind send-up of our regular breakfast mucilage.

A lifetime later and a couple of lifetimes ago, I was a recording engineer for a small local studio, doing grunt work mostly. Often my responsibilities entailed such exciting tasks as tearing down worn speaker systems from restaurants my boss had acquired from fixture-auctions after a local business went bust. It was also my job to replace the wiring from these speakers, which was so old that the insulation was cracked and falling off. Then, he'd resell these components as new to his customers. Some times my job was multi-tracking commercial jingles in his studio; at other times I'd be vacuuming the birdseed from the walls - he'd picked up used carpeting cheap from a pet shop, and used it to soundproof his studio.

Once in a while, though, I'd get a choice assignment, like running the audio mixers for a fashion show downtown. My boss brought a couple of his Ampex tape decks - old enough to have recorded Caruso live, and of course, one of them was D.O.A. He offered to rent my Teac deck, and sent me home in his station wagon to pick it up. His wagon ran out of gas six blocks from the event, so I coasted into a parking lot, then chunked the 65 lb. deck the rest of the way, and still managed to set it up in time for the show.

I loved that Teac deck, and managed to make some interesting recordings while we had it. Still, it was A/C, and too bulky to really make any field recordings like I did with my first recorder.

Times have changed, and now I have a digital field recorder - a shirt-pocket stereo that has more built-in effects than my old cheapskate boss could cram into his cheesy studio, and the darned thing cost about as much as a camera you can buy at a grocery store.

I need to add a little "multi" to my visual "media" these days, and I'm in need of some original soundtracks to add to my photographic art slide shows. To entertain myself once, I sliced Slash's guitar solo from "November Rain" and added it to one of my slide shows; but of course I can't use anything of the sort in a public venue. Besides, artistically, I'd prefer the whole thing to be original, even if I could use someone else's music.

So, Flo and I are taking the recorder with us on our photo shoots. The audio dimension has been an interesting experience-forcing us to notice sounds around us when the emphasis has always been on the visual. And, I feel like a kid again, recording sounds we usually ignore or take for granted. A rusty door hinge, a power drill: sounds around the house, as well as urban noise or rural ambience. We've both tried to record our cats purring, but the wily little devils clam up at the first nuance of anything unfamiliar.

A couple of weeks ago, we returned to one of our favorite haunts, the docks down at Eagle Creek Reservoir, and the ominous oak I photographed last winter for the cover of "Midrash." Down at the water's edge, I recorded the sound of a distant train, echoing across the reservoir, along with splashing fish, and a clanging buoy that fit in with the train sounds. I looped a thumping bass, added a couple of notes and a crunch guitar chord from the P.D. "Loopology" files from Adobe Audition, and then set about playing with the field recordings.

I need a driving, urban beat-something perhaps reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, or eerie and moody like an early Pink Floyd song. Perhaps something provocative, like Skozey's Noisician tracks: a functional, quasi-musical hybrid of digital noise and rhythm. Music that, like photography, gives the brain a chance to cool off from the verbal modality, yet still keep the juices flowing.

If you'd like to give a listen to one of my tracks, you can download "Trainbending" from our web site, with this URL: www.3amblue.com/trainbending.zip.

Later,

John

Return to Central State

2007-09-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

A little over a week ago, ambitious plans to redevelop the grounds of the former Central State Asylum were announced on local TV. This rejuvenation is long overdue, and should help to revitalize the entire neighborhood. The project will take up to a decade to complete, but demolition could commence as early as next spring. So, we will return several more times with photographic and audio equipment, to capture what we can of the ambience of one of Indiana's most haunted sites. I wonder what it will be like; to live there, say twenty years from now.

By the way, there is an eerie Central State documentary on DVD - you can find more information at http://www.central-state.com/.

City of the Insane

2007-05-03T02:01:00.000-07:00

I suppose you could say that we have odd hobbies and adventures - for example, one year, Flo was closely following a local murder case and voiced an interest in writing true crime, so for her birthday, I um… procured press passes. We joined the press pool, and Flo attended the trial while I took photos outside, and managed to get a good shot of the manacled murderess while she was being led out of the courthouse for lunch. Flo's feature article, along with my photos, appeared in "True Police" magazine.

Last year, Flo voiced an interest in visiting the Medical History Museum on the grounds of the abandoned Central State Mental Hospital, here on the west side of Indianapolis. That sounded like another unique birthday adventure, so off we went. The experience was so fascinating that we returned twice more for all-day photo shoots.

We chose brilliant, cerulean days for the best lighting, to shoot digital and video. I would love to stalk those grounds on an oppressive, foggy morning, but this was the best for imaging.

First, we took the tour of the Medical Museum, visiting the teaching arena where students from all over the world would learn from autopsies of the mentally ill. We learned that, for generations, syphilis provided the greatest population of the severely mentally ill, and was treated experimentally - with malaria. The extreme fever of malaria could kill enough of the syphilis for significant remissions.

We saw sectioned brains in jars of formaldehyde; disease, injury, genetic defects. We studied the preserved brains of the elderly, of children, of murderers. We were told the spotted history of Central State; a smattering of the hopes and success stories, the scandals and tragedies spread out over 146 years of operation.

The monstrous Gothic dormitories, once know as the "Seven Gables," are long gone; razed in the early 1970's, to be replaced by sterile brick "Borg" cubes, situated elsewhere on the compound. However, when you stroll across the well-groomed commons where the dorms once stood, the sensation is something akin to walking a deceptively peaceful Civil War battlefield, like Chickamauga. Just behind the adult eye, the imagination spins tableaus of the tales one has heard, intermixed with information from one's senses, as well as one's intuition.

Once a self-sufficient community, inmates worked and maintained the compound, even growing their own food and preparing it on site.

The ground is firm - you don't feel any physical sense of the five miles of underground tunnels beneath your feet, though you know that homicidal maniacs were once chained to the tunnel walls, never again to see daylight.

Down a gently sloping hill across from the administration buildings, a few trees remain of a grove where an inmate was savagely murdered by his peers.

And the tunnels, again… once shuttled the dead from the dorms or the hospital, to the pathology lab for autopsy, unseen by the general population.

The most foreboding structure left standing is the old steam power house, which went online in 1930, providing steam heat through the underground tunnels to all of the buildings on the 160-acre compound. It is easy to imagine the mechanical drones clanks and hisses from the building - it's something out of a Tim Burton nightmare. Generations of savage heat, and a decade of neglect have weakened the walls - as I snapped photos, bricks dislodged from two stories above me and crashed to my feet. Fleeting shadows darted around inside the power house, which I attributed to shattered windows and passing clouds.

Padlocked chains deter but do not prevent entry to this death trap - where I photographed some of the rotting industrial entrails of the building, and "Insanity, Please" scrawled in huge letters on one of the inside walls.

A pair of corroded iron doors to the power house became my current signature piece "Asylum Door," once I added my Shadow Man.

Central State was referred to in newspapers of the Civil War era, as "the country asylum," before the urban sprawl completely surrounded it. Still enclosed by tall fencing, it is now flanked by cheerless, shabby housing and urban decay; excepted only by a couple of huge, ornate churches.

We were exhausted from walking the length and breadth of the compound and almost out of digital film, when we strolled in the open toward our car, for the last time. An almost cloudless day, we were stunned as a sharply defined birdlike shadow swept across the grass and passed over us, leaving us shuddering. Not a plane, nor bird, branch or cloud in sight from where we stood offered any rational explanation for what we both saw - and felt.

For those of you who are interested, "Asylum Door" first appeared on the back cover of issue #36 of "Not One of Us," and now represents me on this blog and our web site.

My four-page photo-essay on Central State is now available in issue #2 of Razar - you can find links to both publications on the main page of our web site, http://www.3amblue.com/.

Synchronicity and "Where's George?"

2007-05-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

“Where’s George?” (http://www.wheresgeorge.com/)– the Internet bill-tracking project – is generally either an obsession or a “Who Cares?” proposition. A couple of weeks ago, I was razzed by a Blockbuster employee for passing some marked Georges. He couldn’t think of anything more boring than tracking where your money goes. That is, perhaps, other than working the night shift at Blockbuster.

Curiosity seems to be the primary motivation driving the average George aficionado; though some rather ambitious enthusiasts have circulated marked bills numbering at or near 100,000.

By common standards, I’m not a rabid “Georger,” having only “EMS’ed” (Enter-Mark-Spend) a tad over 500 bills in a year and a half – more avid hobbyists will put that many bills out in a week or two, forsaking debit cards and other electronic transactions for the opportunity to circulate more green.

For me, it is an experiment in and perhaps a barometer for synchronicity. It is the odds and oddities, the stories – an initiative marker for the eerily recombinant possibilities in life.

Most “George” hits are mundane and disappointing, I’ll admit. Most bills that have been re-entered into the system have traveled a scant few miles, and been re-entered by people curious enough to login and type in the serial number, but not sufficiently cooperative to enter a note where the bill was received, nor inquisitive enough to follow the links to our web site.

Still, a few are out of the commonplace enough to keep me interested. One $1 bill left Steak & Shake here in Indianapolis, and was registered in California a couple of months later, having been picked up by said Californian on the island of Bonaire, in the Netherlands Antilles.

One left Steak & Shake only to return to South Bend Indiana when received in gambling winnings in Las Vegas. One was found on a sidewalk in Bloomington, IN. One was received in change at a fast-food restaurant in KY moments before the fellow was nearly killed by a drive-by shooter.

More prolific “Georgers” than I have astounding stories to tell, including receiving the same bill back in change months or years later; one bill I saw was re-entered by a cop who had found it on a dead body.

My fishing expedition for synchronicity paid off in pleasant strangeness only a few months after I’d begun. One evening, while too tired to accomplish anything particularly useful, I got out a box where I’d stashed the occasional silver certificate, two-dollar bill or other odd currency to enter into the online George database – one dollar that I’d received in change perhaps 10 years ago, was stamped

WARNING THIS "NOTE" IS NOT LAWFUL MONEY, THEREFORE IT IS NOT LEGALLY TAXABLE NOR IS IT REDEEMABLE IN LAWFUL MONEY, PER ARTICLE 1, SECTION 10, U.S. CONSTITUTION.

-not wanting to accidentally pass it on, I had tossed it into the oddity box, and it was promptly forgotten.

Out of curiosity, to see if other bills with the same serial number had been entered into the “Where’s George?” database, I entered the serial number and series info. Another bill of the same exact serial number, but different series (different year), had been entered, and less than two weeks before.

The fellow who entered that bill was unique, himself:

“Skozey Fetisch, the musical project of Mark C. Jackman, started out in Salt Lake City, Utah, and relocated to the Bay Area in 1992. Jackman is also a visual artist who is as comfortable working with oils and canvas as he is with computers and software to actualize his artistic vision.Jackman began his musical career playing in gothic bands in the early 1980's. Tiring of this, Jackman went on to do everything from composing film scores to composing and dancing to modern dance music for the Ririe-Woodbury International dance tour. Skozey Fetisch does what an artist does best: challenges and stimulates the observer. Momma:Key is for those who can accept that challenge.”

That brought me to purchasing a couple of “Skozey” CDs; the above quoted review is quite apropos. They are great soundtracks to listen to while writing.

(http://www.myspace.com/skozeyfetisch)

So, this little foray into proactive synchronicity paid off, if in ways that perhaps are interesting only to me.

Some other “Georgers” appreciate the synchronicity factor, if only in quest of a sort of god.

Still, without any provocation such as “Georging,” life manages to churn out the oblique coincidence, the synchronistic pun, the ominous innuendo… and the deadly retrospective.

I have perhaps more than my fair, if not mathematically probable, share of those; something to touch upon again, in the near future.