Tuesday's Burly Rant or I Was Born to Love Latinas

So, what is everybody going to do when the Earth sh*ts the bed, a great big hole opens in the sky, and we're living on a cinder?

Here in Virginia, we've been experiencing over 100 degree temperatures pretty much daily, until just today. 100 degrees with an index of 116. Does it really matter whether it's 112 or 116? I'm a man, I don't even use AC in my vehicle. I use it sparingly, because I feel it's a challenge to the whole human race hiding indoors with their AC units cranked up, blowing their hot fumes into the environmental carnival tent and causing untold damage to my heart. I don't necessarily blame people I suppose, though it'd be nice if they gave a sh*t about anything except "not being hot." In another fifty years, when your grandkids are outside playing in environmentally-controlled space suits because the air quality is about the same as a Viet Cong rat hole doused in Agent Orange, and your clean water supplies and all evidence of it have to be hidden so your neighbors won't potentially kill you and steal it, you can pat yourselves on the back for a job well done. Nobody has lived through this kind of heat before, because People of the Past didn't have the ecological nightmare of carbon monoxide mixed with acidic humidity from charbroilled clouds or seeping up from a crumbcake Earth.

The recent trend is to "Go Green." It's nice to see. People are changing out their 100 watt bulbs for energy-saving ones, and recycling. All that saved money goes right into their SUV's gas tank.

I recycle. I'm not "environmental." That would suggest I want there to be a planet for people to inhabit. The only people I like are in Ray Bradbury stories. They are good, fundamentally, dreamers with adventure in their hearts and a romantic interest in the passage of time. I still believe all people living west of Elvis Presley's house and north of the Red River and southeast in a diagonal line from Portland, Oregon are just like the people in Ray Bradbury's books. Those people have been to Mars and have strange stories told to them by an Illustrated Man on a lonely country road. Those people have never heard of the Black Lagoon of the Gulf BP Oil spill. Those people think American Idol is what the best college football player in Iowa wins. Older adults whittle sticks with pocket knives, creating little rockets they give to kids to play with. Porn hasn't been invented. It's just love between a girl and a boy looking up at the stars.

I saw a Ray Bradbury person today, or at least someone who would have inspired Bradbury. She was a beautiful Latina with her dark hair tied back, in a sleeveless brown dress with those folded layers over the legs like Carmen Miranda used to wear. She lifted the skirt part so she could walk fast, showing off good strong legs. She was a mature woman on a city street trotting barefoot across hot tarmac. I nodded to her while driving past and in the rearview she smiled with her face tilted back as if she was actually happy. It was a moment that made the very atomically-small Bradbury portion of my brain wonder if I'd somehow contributed to her happiness. I'm just a thick-armed creep in a work van, but maybe she sensed I thought she was beautiful in that moment. Maybe she knew I was born to love women like her. It pleased her to know this. She continued jogging toward some destination, low-striding like she was about to be joined by two lines of shirtless dancing boys for an impromptu paean to the Bronze Gods of Heaven and Earth.

It strikes me that only Ray Bradbury people can make me care about the Earth. We all know tigers are being slaughtered and unique plant/insect species are being eradicated every single day. This leads to a black bear chewing the intestines out of some hunter in Alaska and the fearful platitudes of a culture praying to be assured Nature is not coming for revenge.

But when we come to the proper conclusion, we find that human beings are the worst thing that ever happened to Earth. Agent Smith is right: humanity is a virus. The Cosmos, or God/Jack Kirby's Celestials/Lovecraft's Cthulu, would probably let us alone for millions more years. At least until the next five-mile wide meteor devolves the planet into a roiling mass of lava and disposable diapers. The Cosmos has no real interest in Man's fate, so Man has decided to apply an endgame to His Own legend. Every great hero needs a great end. Mankind has decided to writ large using vast ecological disasters to drive home the point: there is no future. Every child born into this world is on the verge of becoming Soylent Green in a boiling raw-sewage sh*tpond in what used to be Denver, Colorado. And if that's so, what becomes of the Ray Bradbury people? The obvious? They burn, just like everyone else? At fahrenheit 451? Or fahrenheit 600?

And once it gets that hot, does it really matter if it's 451 or 600?

Three for Thursday: Burly Dames

Angie Dickinson. And melon. What God hath wrought, let no man put asunder.

Tuesday's Burly Rant or I Love You Harlan Ellison

I'm thinking of trying to maintain a purely misanthropic theme by forcing myself to raise hell over something.

It's hard to be angry and not be petty. But I'm angry most of the time. I have no real reason to be angry, other than that I haven't acheived my career goals. And people suck, along with the culture of f*cking stupidity they have wrought.

Is this the best time, or the worst time, to be alive? Well, it smells infinitely better than it did a thousand years ago, I'm sure. At least when you had a bunch of people together who didn't have the benefit of being slathered in fine oils because they were born into royalty. Human beings are foul because we're walking germ infestations. I won't touch anything in a public restroom. Yet I'll eat the ass out of a woman with no compunction whatsoever. That's called "Getting Your Groove On." Does the music sound as sweet on a dusty record? Well, once you've blown it off, it does. I can't verify the smell thing, by the way. Considering the stench of carbon monoxide and Axe cologne, it might be a close race with a thousand years ago.

I was trying to think of why I've had such a hard time finishing projects in recent times. I mean, a real apathy like when you know you have to wipe out the bathtub. I was trying to figure out why I'm writing. Writing anything. These days, any coffee-cake hair mom can sit at a computer and knock out an article or novel. It's not like back when people had to scribble on paper with blocky lead pencils then transcribe their own f*cked up handwriting, or sit at a manual typewriter in a crappy room full of cigarette smoke ramming those keys down. God forbid you have to break out the carbon paper. Jack Kerouac used paper rolls he fed into the typewriter which allowed him to keep typing non-stop with the manuscript coiling up on the floor like a snake. F*ck hitting SAVE before you lose a day's work. His work was a real thing at his feet.

So to figure out writing, and you're not a poet with his index finger up his ass, you have to figure you're writing for an audience. The audience can be like one in a movie theatre. Or it can be your wife. Or your College Preparatory English teacher in high school. Or the faceless masses you imagine lining up with your novel or book in hand, who hand it to you facing themselves but upside-down for you, so you have to turn the book around to sign it, and this is the 40,000th time you've had to do that, and you've become annoyed that you have to small talk with a reader who can't even hand you a book turned around right, to make your life easier.

This faceless reader asks, "Where do you get your ideas?"

And all I can think is, "I fundamentally hate that question you just asked. Because you know where I get my ideas. I steal them from more brilliant people, dumb them down so I can understand them, put a title to it and get some limited thinker like yourself to wonder how I came up with it. I must be a genius! And I don't like your face."

Everyone should admit they steal. It's the most sincere form of love. The originality stems from how to display that love of those ideas--not your own ideas, because everything is played out sorry to tell you--so that everyone who reads your book understands your love. The only true love story is between a writer and his inspirations. That's a fact.

Coming back to Audience, I realized that I really started writing because I was influenced by Stephen King, first, and then writers like Harlan Ellison. I wanted their approval, their respect, just as King had earned from Ellison. The brotherhood of the writer is Freemasonry. You want to be entertained from within, and keep the riffraff out. King may be the most down-to-earth writer who ever lived, a family man with a sharp sense of humor and natural story-telling ability. Ellison, in contrast, is the fiery lone wolf in the forest banging models in Hollywood in the 1960s. One man was beloved by millions of readers. The other received death threats on a regular basis while working for the Los Angeles Free Press. Nobody wanted to kill Stephen King because they hated him, like they hated Ellison. No, the schizoids wanted to kill Stephen King because they loved him too much.

I think people in general are a harsh disease. Too much of them is doom. I'd sign books under duress, but I wouldn't belittle people for loving the work. As long as they can distinguish between the work and my humanity. Because I'm not looking for friends. Readers, yes.

But I mostly have to admit I just want to read or hear somewhere, even in a blurb, that Harlan Ellison said my novels were like getting mauled by a half-bear, half-orca that smelled like Raquel Welch after a good workout. He's saying he loves my work, and I loved his work, and by god that's good recycling right there.

Three For Thursday: Burly Dames

Three for Thursday! Burly Dames!

Hardman and Parker and the Green Goliath

I can say with authority that I hate every Marvel comic produced today except ATLAS, which is hands-down my favorite ongoing series.

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/07/it-may-not-be-official-but-parker-and-hardman-are-the-new-hulk-team/

Gabriel Hardman is a "new" favorite artist of mine. He's done nothing but impress since he began with short jabs on filler-type material for ATLAS, graduated to the main artist, and handled the Hulk in a very old-school way during writer Jeff Parker's Avengers crossover. I never thought Hardman's Hulk would ever be the kind of Hulk the awful Suits at Marvel would gravitate toward. I can only assume that hot-ticket Parker convinced somebody up at the top of Hardman's acumen.

And now, I can say I'm actually excited about who's working on probably my favorite Marvel character ever. As you can see by Hardman's sketch, instead of drawing the Hulk like a steroidal psychopath, he goes back to the Kirby roots of density as the core of strength. This actually looks like the Hulk to me.

So I guess the fact is, in this world, if you live long enough, something good is bound to happen. And I thought the return of the 3D Man was great. This is balls-deep news, folks.

Three for Thursday! Burly Dames!