This Winter Sucks Less

I'm having a much easier time this winter than I usually do, knock wood. While my symptoms of depression are fairly acute -- loss of appetite and weight (a bit of a mixed curse), insomnia, lack of ability to function, and so on and so forth, it's not actually bothering me that much.

Here's why.

I'm eschewing a great deal of typical self-destructive behavior now that I'm coming to value myself. And I'm coming to value myself because the world is validating me relentlessly.

It is difficult to walk around feeling like a loser when every few days a person beloved, admired, respected, makes a point of telling me how fucking brilliant I am. It will take a long time for me to get tired of that.

I've crossed a threshold, gathered a certain amount of critical mass -- even if I fall into a state of semi-collapse, folks want me to be with them and they want me to do art for and with them. The world has started to notice me, and it's saying, "Hey! I want to play!"

Almost better? If I ask myself, "What did you do today?" and answer, "Looked at musical instruments online, fucked up the vegetables for lunch and then spent six hours staring into a corner while feeling sad," I then congratulate myself on a job well-done, and go tell the missus how wonderful she's being with me.

See, I'm a registered, official crazy person now -- so when I display clear signs of mental illness, I'm not going to shit all over myself. I wouldn't do it to someone else. Doesn't make sense to do it to myself.

My counselor pointed out to me how much I'd actually done this fall. "Winter is a time to lie fallow. To rest. Maybe you're just hibernating."

And that's easy for me to accept -- I can look back at four years worth of blogs now, and see the shape of my year delineated as if it were outlined on graph paper. There is no reason for me to expect that discipline can overcome neurochemistry.

I get more done in the fall than a lot of people get done in a year, and then I do it again in the spring. I do what I do because I do it, and viciously accusing myself of lack of discipline and praiseworthy zeal strenuously exerted just uses up energy that I'd otherwise devote to my work. Wish I'd figured that one out earlier.

So I'm getting a lot more done than I usually do this time of year, with a lot less accompanying drama. I'm down to about six vertical inches of line-edits, from a high of nine. Things are coming along. When I look at the novel, see how excited the readers are? Again, it's hard to feel like a loser.

And when I remember, I've finally found a creative activity that I can engage in when emotionally distraught. Music, of course. I don't discuss it on the blog to any great degree, but I love playing music. A friend showed me some scales and made me practice them -- which I now know I did very, very poorly -- but aside from that, I'm pretty much self-taught. Bass, ukulele and baritone ukulele, now I'm starting to mess with open tunings on guitars. Drum programming, synthesizer music, singing... I'm not good, but I enjoy myself.

It's the ukulele and the baritone uke that are saving me. Unlike the bass, I can play them in bed, on the couch, in my recliner. And unlike the bass, when I play by myself it sounds like fucking music. I'm starting to be able to pick up chord progressions and hooks by ear, I'm getting some calluses.

And when I play music? It's like running a comb through my thoughts. Definitely soothing. A serious stress reliever. Playing music creates extremely complex patterns of neurological activity, requiring much of the brain to interact harmoniously. It's got serious and solidly-proven health benefits. And I play well enough to reap those benefits. To actually have a little fun and wring a little expression out of the fretboard.

Finally, the missus has been wonderfully supportive. We've had a few spats, but for the most part things have gone smoothly. She's going to visit her family in Ohio soon. I'll miss her, but I'll survive.

I don't have swine flu. I'm not vomiting blood.

This might be my best winter ever!

A Cover for Ghost Rock

Yes, this looks like a stoned fourteen-year old did it in study. They're called roughs for a reason...

First, it needs colors that spang across the room. So primaries for the most part -- yellow for the background, then the big lettering in red, white, and blue with black outlines, and a full-color, painterly illustration in the center.

The center image will be given a decorative frame based on those found around guitar soundholes; it's also intended to bring to mind such obsolete, rock-age music media such as CDs and LPs.



I'm looking forward to the next stage of the project -- the lettering. I've done hand-lettering for cartoon and comic work before, but this will be my first shot at decorative lettering. For the title, I'll be using sixties/seventies psychedelic posters and album covers as a jumping-off point -- I want something that's both legible and a little hard to read.

Bright colors grab the eye, while a small fully-rendered image and elaborate lettering request further inspection. Pick it up and take a closer look...

Anyway. I'll be rendering the title lettering in pencil on tracing vellum, using a print of the above template as a design, then importing it into Illustrator and autotracing it to get a scalable version. The goal is to have the separate elements of the cover ready to resize and reconfigure to easily, tastefully, legibly inhabit various sizes and formats of cover.

The letters themselves will be eccentrically shaped, full of color and detail. Ugly as sin, in an appealing way.

The lettering for my name and the subtitle will be done in brush pen. I'll do ten or fifteen versions of each letter to be used, select the most attractive and harmonious, and then autotrace and arrange them in Illustrator, making whatever adjustments to size and weight are necessary to make them read properly.

Why does my name go on top? Well. Name on top indicates that the author is more important than the work. But usually, name-on-top authors are a draw for readers -- your Kings and Tans and Krantzes and Koontses. So their names are in big fat easily visible slabs of non-serif solid-color type. This time? I ain't a name. So my name is in modest type. But I'm designing the damned cover, and I wrote the damned book. So my name goes on top.

As for An American Folktale. One of the major subtexts in the book is the integration of personal, national, world, and archetypal mythology. I regard popular fiction, and especially the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, as being in many instances a naive or folk form, and I've tried to bring as many of those virtues to the work as I can -- I think that if someone comes to this book wanting nothing more than a good slam-bang adventure, they will be perfectly satisfied at the end of the book.

But I've put a lot more effort into undermining and examining the assumptions behind those kinds of stories, not so much out of an intent to subvert as an attempt to see if anything of worth can be reclaimed from what seems to be cultural detritus. If anything can be profitably applied to real life.

And while not overtly political, and not historical fiction -- it is set very much in a Never-Never Narnia version of the US -- it does speak of history and our national origins and how these still define our lives in a very subtle way.

Look, it's a little puffed-up and douchey to have a subtitle like that. It says, 'There is more here than meets the eye.' But in this case it's fucking true, and I think a lot of readers will get more out of the book if they go in wondering, "Well, what makes this shit an American folktale anyway?"

So why the fuck am I doing the cover, you may well ask? Writers don't do their own covers! They don't even have much say in the covers, right? And don't you have better things to do? Like Swill and the book itself?

Well.

Here's the thing.

I'm inching along. And breaking up my work with something like this helps me inch.

I'm going to give copies of the novel to a number of friends and cohorts, and I want a nice cover for that. And the bit about how publishers aren't into author input on covers? I might be wasting my time, but I suspect it applies more to people who aren't actual designers than to me, he said arrogantly.

If there's a strong cover attached to the project from the beginning? Even if it doesn't get used in the end, it's still a useful way of drawing attention. And my time with Swill -- which also has a cover in the works -- has taught me that there's a certain emotional response I get when a project gets to the point where you do the cover. "Yep, that's it, it's almost out of my hands now." I want that feeling with the damned novel.

Plus, you know. I've never done anything like this before, and it's got my Stanley Mouse/Roger Dean vibe on the rise. Hand lettering! That's going to be fun.

I Am A Proud Patriot!

This is Violet Oakley's painting of George Fox, from The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual frieze cycle in the Governor's Reception Room, Pennsylvania State Capitol, 1902-06. Taken from The Rose Red Girls, by Alice A. Carter, published 2000 by Harry N. Abrams.

You can keep old George Washington; that vicious grifter did my kind no favors. Give me a lunatic idealist like George Fox any day of the week!

And when a gay Christian Scientist paints a Quaker? That's my America, right there.

So when I do a post complaining about US cultural, social, or political mores, I always come away with the little couplet from the Mikado dancing through my mind -- "And the idiot who praises in enthusiastic tones/every century but this and every country but his own." Makes me feel kind of shitty.

Well. My family has been on this fucking continent for twice as long as the US has been here, and while some of us have been ardent patriots, there have always been a few who have no damned use for nations. We hated it in Olduvai, then we hated it in Scandinavia, then we hated it in France, then we spent so much time bitching in England that they shipped our preachy asses overseas.

When we got to America? We hit the ground running, trying to get the fuck away from the assholes. One branch of my family has been in California for more than two hundred years, and the only reason I don't live in the goddamned Pacific is I'm too broke to afford a fucking inner tube.

My Quaker ancestors helped with the underground railroad -- fuck the law, thank you very kindly -- and militated for Native American rights when that cause was very unpopular indeed. My dad is one of the founders of the letter carrier's union, and as a child I nailed picket signs together.

So when I bitch about America, I do so from a certain fucking position. I am as American as you can get, and hating the government and the robber barons that employ it is part of that tradition.

As an institution? I hate America.

But this is my place, and these are my people, and I am sick of having my sense of connection determined by how offended I am at our national excesses -- or to put it another way, it doesn't look good to run around screaming, "I hate America!" at the top of my lungs every so often. Just because I track the history of our nation from the first smallpox virus through Michele Bachman doesn't mean I shouldn't avail myself of the privileges attendant to patriotism.

Of course I'm a proud patriot. It just took me a while to figure out how everybody else does it -- they inspect the history of the US, take what they like, figure out how much of the shitty stuff they can stand thinking about, choke down as many lies as they can believe, and then put together an imaginary nation they can worship wholeheartedly.

I write fantasy and science fiction. I can do that. I can do that easy.

First off, I'm going to have to pick some sides. The two biggest teams in America (apologies to my fancy international friends, but as a patriot I'm afraid I must refer to my nation of birth as America rather than the US or the USA -- according to playground rules, I have to stick with the nickname) are the Utopians and the Grifters. The Utopians are, for the most part, fuzzy-minded losers entirely too prone to getting all hopped up on Jesus, but the Grifters are the vilest, most pernicious pack of predators the planet has ever seen -- the air we breath is thick with the stink of their venomous words and deeds, and we labor and suffer under their yoke, our skins blistered by the radiance of their self-satisfied grins.

So I'm a Utopian!

Patriots worship the Constitution. For a lot of folks, it's a secular Bible. I can dig it -- there is some very stirring rhetoric there. My two favorite passages 0f writing are the Preamble -- thanks to Schoolhouse rock, I have the damned thing memorized -- and Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham jail. And the Bill of Rights is solid.

The rest of it is pretty much concerned with creating and maintaining the privileges of the monied classes, and you can insert the Declaration of Independence into the founding father of your choice (mine's Hamilton -- I hate everything I know about that bastard, and would like to bring him back to life so I could shoot him myself). That piece of shit was basically a bunch of rich guys writing a check they cashed with poor guy's asses. Shall we discuss the issue of scrip?

Right, right. Patriotic and proud, let's stay on fucking target, you lout.

I'll claim a bunch of cultural stuff. I am aligned with the great American tradition of outsider artists from Walt Whitman and Emily 'Doo-Da' Dickinson through Harry Partch to Henry Darger, and also with that great refuge of outsiders, popular culture.

Let's go for a bit of genuine pride -- while their America is oppressing people? The resistance is listening to my America's music. Ask the Soviet bloc countries if rock and roll has power, if it can change the world. Go look at the fucking statue of Zappa in Lithuania -- he meant freedom to someone.

My America gave them that.

Let's go further. The civil rights and egalitarianism that we see as essentially American -- and this is in fact the case in my fucking America -- were not handed down to us by a cabal of Deist sots in periwigs. That creep Jefferson had enough grandeur in his soul to give us the words, but it was resistance on the part of the populace that made those words come to life. The people who gave us the right to vote? The right to protest? The right to strike?

Those rights were never given. Those rights were taken by my Americans, one protest and one rebellion at a time. And it appears that America is still willing to protest and rebel.

I've mentioned that my thoughts on the Occupy movement have been shifting. I've spent my whole fucking life bitching about the need for a populist movement to come along, and when one does? I send it back because it isn't the kind I like. Fuck that; the Occupy movement is part of my America, and hopefully, more functional movements will grow out of it.

There we go. That's a start. It's rough, but it's enough to work with.

I suppose I should learn to like sports next. Or cars or telephones.

Church might be interesting...

Fear And Loathing In A Pupating Police State

I am making this post because I am frightened and angry, and if I do not speak in public because of my vulnerability, I will feel like a coward.

The defense budget currently in legislation is one with provisions that would make the US into a police state -- civil courts would remain in existence, sure, but at the discretion of the authorities, any individual could be placed into the military justice system, and civil rights would no longer apply.

Look this up. Do a web search. You will find it much, much easier to find this covered in the international press. I am frightened and angry -- is the American media failing us accidentally or intentionally?

Right now the US has the highest percentage of its population imprisoned of any culture in the history of the world. This is true. America has long since abandoned any right to describe itself as the land of the free. So they decide that the problem is that we need more ways to get people behind bars.

Warrentless wiretapping -- and now this.

They are justifying their position by describing our nation as a battlefield. We have not had any active conflict with the terrorists on our soil for quite some time -- but it seems as if there is a conflict brewing at home.

The conjunction of this with the occupy movement makes me feel paranoid. Nutty.

Terrified.

I will say this much. If this bill makes it all the way through, if President Obama signs it? I will no longer be able to take pride in having voted for him -- and I just might lose faith in the process entirely.

I am seeing America as a literal police state, run by corporate interests, with universal wiretapping taken for granted, and the right to imprison without cause. This is not fiction. This is actually happening.

Every person who supports this bill is actively and effectively militating against liberty and democracy, plain and simple. They have declared themselves the enemies of all that is decent in our national soul, and intend to turn this country into something far closer to Maoist China, the USSR of Stalin, or Nazi Germany than I had ever imagined. The monstrous arrogance on display here has robbed me of the capacity for hyperbole.

I do not say that lightly, and I would say it to any of their faces.

Fear and loathing have come full upon me.

November: The Gateway Month

One of the interesting side-benefits of the blog is that I have a sort of fossil record of my behavior and mental states to which I can refer. When I boarded the bummer train a few weeks back, I told my dad that it felt as though my winter depression had started.

"Isn't it a little early for that?" he asked. "It isn't even Thanksgiving."

On Thanksgiving, his question resurfaced in my head, and I realized that there was a way to research the issue.

So I went back and looked up what I was posting around that time for the last three years. Well. It turns out that I suffered a catastrophic failure during the first two weeks of November for at least four years in a row.

Last year it was a trip to the hospital after a stress-induced three-day bout of blood puking. The year before? A shattering fight with the missus followed by a swine-flu enhanced trip to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had me destroyed all winter. The year before that? Exactly the kind of flat semi-unmiserable yet thoroughly non-functional depression I was bitching about a few posts ago.

I don't think these four years are aberrant. I think I need to start planning for November. It seems as if I'm vulnerable then.

And that means that I need to buckle down and find better ways of accommodating my seasonal depression. Now that I can look at the record and say that yes, for about a third of the year I am of extremely limited utility. How do I get the best use out of myself under these conditions?

Or perhaps I should look at it another way. When I was experiencing my fall hypomania, once I recognized what it was, I decided to treat it as an endogenous drug experience rather than a dangerous mental state. Set and setting, as they say. By doing so, I was able to re-invent my writing style and rewrite the novel in less than two months, in addition to two short stories, spoken word pieces, art, a fairly heavy web presence, etc, etc.

Essentially, I said, "Free endogenous cocaine? Well, for the next while I'm going to sleep less, eat less, talk too much, work compulsively, be brilliant, be obnoxiously aware of my brilliance, and exhibit a curiously exhilarating magnetism that suggests my state is communicable."

So. How can I make depression less of a bummer? I am experiencing it, I will experience it, but there are degrees and qualities, you know? Right now, the missus and dogs are snuggled warm in the bed downstairs, it's foggy out and the last few leaves are wet and drooping from the fig tree outside my window, and an old friend has come back into my life with his life in glorious turmoil, and it is all mist and shadows, we dance like flames and then vanish...

This is pretty good, so far as depression goes. I've always scorned the whole romantic Goth ("Okay, from sacking Rome to skinny nudes to the Castle of Otranto to the Sisters of Mercy to Hot Topic -- make the connection.") relish for the weeping soul, but fuck it. If it's a biological condition, why not have fun with it? Style might not be a bad approach -- a different persona for different seasons. Now I enter my October Country/Adam's Family persona, stark, grim, poetic, and yet not devoid of a sense of fun. Maybe -- just maybe -- I'll consider becoming an all-black clothing person during the cool months. "I'm not evangelical about depression, but sometimes gloom suits me."

Not a bad start, if I do say so. Take one of my standard prejudices, invert it, turn it into a joke, and there you go. A playful approach to the situation, one which defuses some of the threat. I'll need a couple of pairs of black pants, maybe a non-T-shirt or two. I do have the hat for it.

Okay, that's good. I can use that.

Winter hibernation isn't a bad one either. Last year, when Karen was gone, I simply gave up on everything but laying around with the dogs reading and watching monster movies. As a creative type, it is important for me to absorb information and the creative works of others; perhaps this is also a receptive season.

I believe I shall set out a program of study -- Nabakov's Lectures on Literature and the novels he covers are calling to me from across the waves, and actually reading an entire dictionary of literary terms would do me no serious harm.

And speaking of study. I need to work more on music. It is good for the brain, good for the mood.

Mostly, I need to focus more on taking care of the details. Eating. Sleeping. Exercise. The missus suggested keeping a diary. I think I should. Not a blog, just a simple journal that would let me track my moods and behavior over time. It would seem shrewd to put the observation of my habits on a scientific basis.

Thankfully, this year I have the greatest Christmas present a depressed writer could ask for -- a manuscript line-edited by five different people to worry into shape. It is a task vast, rapid, and immensely gratifying, and it has to be done in bed.

And finally. Finally! There will be a payoff when I'm done. It will be time to start nudzhing agents and editors, and I'm actually looking forward to that.

So despite my complaints, I've actually been having a much better time of it than I did during the last two Novembers, and circumstances favor me for the remainder of the season. The missus and I are getting along fine, despite my irritability and odd sensitivity. Is not so bad.

Bear up, Oafboy. Never say die.

And get back to work on Swill!

Of Course I'm Thankful

I'm working on a bit of line-editing for a friend right now, and I've gotten enough of it done so that even if I get no further, I've made a legitimate contribution. So I'm taking a quick break to make a post. That's right, posting on the blog is my idea of recreation. I'm lame that way.

So what I'm I thankful for? Loads and oodles of things.

Number one would be the missus. Of course. She's gone again, culting it up with Ama the Huggin' Guru. I miss her, but I've got the project and let me be honest. She always comes back from the cult filled with positive love vibrations, and that makes her a hell of a lot easier to live with.

I'm also grateful for the other components of our household, the dogs. Roxie and Laszlo are good pals and good company. Even if Laszlo has taken to sleeping with his face mashed against me so I can feel it when he grinds his teeth and Roxie won't shut the fuck up.

And last night's puke -- look, when you break an involuntary stress-fast with wine and gravy the results are predictable -- was easy, delicious, and blood-free, and when it was over? It was over. No extended nausea, no 'do you need to go to the hospital' -- it was beautiful. Like a dream.

I'm thankful for my mental illnesses. You call it mixed-state bipolar, I call it an artistic nature. You call it post-traumatic stress syndrome, I call it common sense and keen observation. You call it obsessive compulsive disorder, I call it stick-to-it-iveness and attention to detail. You call it fetal alcohol syndrome, but I call it ADVENTURE!

(For the uninitiated? There is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between an impaired ability to make appropriate decisions and ADVENTURE!)

I'm thankful that the keys of C and G are interchangable on the ukulele and baritone ukulele -- if you play a ukulele G-chord on a baritone, it's a C, vice versa, and that goes for the other chords in the keys as well. So it's easy to drop the key of ukulele songs to fit my voice, sort of an anti-capo, and once you learn a song on one instrument, you've got it on the other. Since I don't have an intuitive grasp of fretboard math, this actually scares me a little. But I like it! I like it! Learning about music is really helping me through this round of depression.

(Just learned Only a Paper Moon, which is perfect depression music -- sad enough not to repel, not so sad that it makes things worse. Maybe I should do some Dylan, who occupies a similar emotional space and is so fucking musically backass that even I have an easy time figuring his shit out.)

Being good at stuff. I can do things that are important to me, and do them very well indeed. This is a recent development, and a welcome one. These days, when I work on writing or art my competence is a tangible, welcome, positive presence. I can feel it, and I think this feeling is that pride thing people have been giving me shit about my entire life.

I'm grateful that my old man has finally started coughing up some wisdom and guidance. The last few months he's been laying one piece of solid, useful information on me just about every time we get together. "You may not know this, but just about everything people do is based on hierarchy." I did not know that! What an eye-opener! "You don't want to impress people who are impressed by scars." That's totally correct! Those people suck!

I'm grateful that Andrewsarchus might be an entelodont. I mean, that would so totally rock. First off, it would make it possible for me to fake an Andrewsarchus reconstruction. But more than that, it would mean that the largest mammalian predator was an entelodont, which would mean four points for my side. 'My side' being weird, ugly, obscure predators.

(Again, for the uninitiated. Andrewsarchus is regarded as the largest fossilized predatory mammal. It's only known from one skull, so it's a frustrating mystery. Entelodonts were piglike predators, something like giant carnivorous peccaries with legs like racehorses. I have an inordinate fondness for them. They give every evidence of having been awful.)

I'm grateful that I'm a cheap pet. The song goes, "No kids, no car, no money -- shit!" But if you don't have kids or a car, you need a fuck of a lot less money. There is a certain pleasure in shaving one's life to the bone. If everyone thought the way I do, the whole world would grind to a pleasant halt.

Of course, I am a grubby materialist at heart. I'm grateful for my Thai mortar-and-pestle, my fifty-year-old umbrella with a reinforced stainless-steel frame, my musical instruments, Breaking Free! featuring Genuinely Vicious Anarchist Tintin, shelf after shelf of high-end books, and all the other goodies that university-town yardsales have dropped at my feet.

And fuck it. My attitude toward the Occupy movement has been adjusting. If I don't make any further statements on the subject? My attitude until now has been influenced by defensiveness, jealousy, and guilt. It is ridiculous to spend decades bitching about class consciousness in America, and then turn up my nose at the first populist movement that comes along. I stand by my prior statements, but I am now officially thankful for the Occupy movement. It is to be devoutly hoped that some purposeful, functional movements find their roots here.

I'm grateful that I don't have a fucking turkey carcass sitting in the refrigerator. The problem with turkey is that I don't like it, but I don't dislike it. That means that if there's an obligation to eat it, I don't really feel I have the right to say no to it. Which sucks. Fuck a bunch of turkey, you know?

But most of all, I'm grateful for the simple pleasure of not being doomed. A seriously mentally ill person with a bad back does not have as many options in life as most people do; thankfully, my options are the ones I would have chosen for myself if given the chance. These days, when I feel that there is no place in the world for me, that life is a game I lost a long time ago, that the possibility of joy is banned to me, that I am a person of no value or consequence, I have to examine the evidence and say, "Dude, you are full of shit."

Believe me. I'm grateful.

The Stars Are Right For Kindle

The anthology Future Lovecraft is now available for discount pre-order!

It's also on the Kindle format from Amazon -- here is the link, god damn it. It is loaded with with the work of edgy writers, including my pal Nick Mamatas. If you use the fucking Kindle, give Amazon some money and help strip-mine the culture.

Because then you get to read my story Deep Blue Dreams. It is typical of my work in that it is weird, dense, bleak, and tricky -- and since its premise is based on the demise of Amazon, you can have a lovely lick of schadenfreude at no extra cost!

Plus, there are drugs and it's kind of gross and dirty. How can you go wrong?

And if you're buying Kindle stuff, why not cough up a buck for my story Tourists? Unless you'd rather read it for free.

For concerned parties; my state is unpleasant, but does not warrant concern -- there are no physical issues, and I am capable some basic functions including hope. The primary issues are paralysis and irritability, both harder on the missus (who is being swell) than me.