Double Troubles Part 1



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 observed 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 marks the third time I’ve run into someone who thought I was someone else. (Fourth, if you count the first guy twice.) 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 asserts that I am someone whom he knows, and sees on a regular basis.

The first one on my list was a 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, then 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 the man 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, a short, scrawny fellow 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 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 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.

See Double Troubles Part 2: The Impostor
Double Troubles Part 3
Memoriae Obscura

Doppelganger Field Guide

Dream Hangover

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"

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

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

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

By the way, Zazzle, my original photography has been published since 1969; I have work in and/or on more than 40 books and over 100 magazine editions.

Finally found a home for this one:

 

Balloon Synchronicity

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.

Elsie

Elsie and daughter Helen

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/66133114/elsie-towne

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/48907805/helen-p-kenney

"Thanks for the Meteor Shit!"

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 –  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?

 

Infrared Macro 1/21/2018