Clints

I was singing a Yorkshire folk song, On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At, and thought of this piece. (Though technically, Ilkley Moor is mainly sandstone and gritstone.)
***

I am indigenous to Yorkshire, England. A hilly, wild place where the limestone bones of the earth form ridges on the land, the ribs of the world. You can see these ribs and feel the earth below them breathing; they’re placed at the surface so you can wonder at the immensity of it all. How similar the limestone peaks and stony cracked clints are to our own bones and how full they are of the bonified remains of alien creatures a billion years before our time – the crinoids and the seashells and crushed sea floors raised up to hikers’ heights.

The earth bones reflect our bones. Our bones are who we are, how we are created from the ground, the dust of the earth. Archaeologists can divine the native land of buried autochthons by grinding their skeletons and dissolving them, running them through their machines. If a man was born in Anatolia and walked the earth to dwell in Germany, the trace elements in his teeth and bones, the trace radioactivity of his bony remains, each give out a clear signal of his origin and travels. We are made from the land. We carry our bones within us (as the shelled creatures carry their bones without) and yet we are made of the bones in the ground where we were born, glossed with where we grew our wheat and corn. In turn, our bones ultimately return to the ground to create the possibilities of new bones, of new life. New corn springs from the ribs of the world, and we consume it, making it part of us, unknowingly or knowingly, with prayer.

We invite the earth’s bones inside us with rhythm Music comes from our bones and our bones come from the ground. We make drumsticks with our bones, and our flutes are made of bones. The bone bridges of guitars a link to the bone age origin of our music. Every beat and tone is created from the native bones, the outer sound resonating the bones within us. Our tiny earbones ring with beats that swell below and among us. The rhythm translated into our hasty mortal speed, the rugose and crenellated stones of Yorkshire limestone, its peaks and lakes the creations of deep time, millions of years in the making, the rising and the sinking of the earth’s very bones, speak to us and call for our attention. Many times I’ve looked for music that speaks to these bones, and found Neo Folk, the songs of the land.

The limestone scars around me are called Feizor, and Moughton, Pen-y-ghent and Ingleborough. Crummackdale, Askrigg, Clapdale and Malham. The Ribble runs between them, trout-frequented and glacially cold even in the Anthropocene. In the center, like a lesion of the skin eating down to the bone, Arcow Quarry has blasted an impressive abyss into the world, carting off the tortured crushed stones to make road surfaces. In the depths of the quarry a cerulean blue lake has formed, gorgeous and poisonous. A thousand feet above the dynamite holes where the rock is forced down into the grinders, curlews sing and rabbits run in the heather between the limestone clints.

(Originally written for my writing group, March 2020)

Deefferented

There is a medical condition called the Locked-In Syndrome. The patient is conscious but is unable to move any muscle of his body, excepting sometimes an eye. He is unable to make his wishes known; he is unable to make a mark on the world. If he is fortunate, a doctor, or more likely a family member, will catch a glimpse of an eye movement, and then will begin the dance to interpret the movements of his eyes, the windows to his soul (as the proverb has it), to determine the depth of his understanding of how his condition overcame him, and hear his desires of how to be treated, and taught, and interacted with in future.  

We are all Locked-In today. We have no physical presence in the outside world – the world we assumed was THE world only three weeks ago.  If we are to have an effect, we must find the window and make our tiny, weak eyeball efforts to shift the course of the larger universe from the inside.  

From my lock-in, I’m looking at a window. A Window. A Word Window in Windows. At the top, a Title Bar (26March.docx), and below it a Menu Bar (File, Home, Menu, Insert, Design – you know the drill). Vertically at the side, there’s the Scroll Bar. No-one can see my eyes; this is the only Microsoft Window to my soul.  It’s up to me to make that work and persuade the others on the outside of my Lock-In to understand my needs and to hear what I have to offer.

Behind me, facing my screen, is a window. A glass pane, the word ‘window’ coming from the Old Norse Vindr, meaning wind and Auga, meaning eye. (It’s not known why it is not called a fenester, which most other European languages use.) Behind it, the wind still moves. The wind eye behind me reflects on the glass of the screen so that as I write, I see the outside world behind me as if it were in front of me. There are broadleafed trees, now bare but in bud, an avenue of asymmetrical Queen Palms, a car dusted with yellow spring pollen and a series of purple sprinkler valve covers. There is no-one there, in the window reflected in my window. The people are all indoors, locked inside.

(Written for my creative writing group)

Colci Rebellion (fiction)

This is the final piece I wrote for my creative writing class - there are some 8 weeks more to go, but it looks like coronavirus has scuttled the entire college, not just the emeritus program and our class meetings. Our teacher has created a blog for us to post pieces and keep in contact with each other but I'm not convinced it will hold together. Currently, most of us are out in the trenches, fighting for toilet paper. It is literally incredible how much things have changed since the day I signed up for that class and today, three months later.

Anyway.
It's more of a rewrite than a new piece, and yes, I do know how the story continues after this first chapter. It's designed to be about novella length (say 40,000 words), but it is not written, not even outlined, except inasmuch as it was outlined by Tacitus, from whom I have ripped it off.  The working title is Colci or Colci Rebellion, but as you can see, it from the point of view of the Imperial Admiral, so that has to change. This first chapter is about 1700 words, and features more of a space navy than the soldiers Tacitus was more familiar with.

***

Admiral Zander left White Stadium as soon as it was decorous to do so. He walked rapidly into the cold night, hands behind his back, wishing that he could swing the vast bronze doors shut behind him to lock away the peculiar electric smell of spectacle.

A few others were leaving early with him, mostly naval veterans like himself. Perhaps, he thought, there's something about living a lifetime on a spaceship which vaccinates against the excitement that air shows and weapons displays invariably brought out in others. Certainly the mob seemed to like them well enough. They were in there still cheering the post flash-bang climax dregs – the parade of the Queen's Own 37th Auxiliary Crack Astrobicycle Blowpipe Team, or whatever it was. He found it remarkable that the Emperor had the spare capacity to fly these people in to show them off. Wasn’t there a war on? The settlers, the old soldiers, were in there cheering too. That thought precipitated a change of mood. They were presumably remembering old battle brothers. It reminded them of their service. It just looked like they were cheering a living river of killers.

The tall, dark-haired man in front of him slowed his steps to drop back and walk beside him. With some annoyance Zander realized that this was Athernati, a Magisterial General who had retired on this outpost planet. That wasn't unusual – there were more than three thousand veterans living on Occupied Colci. But Athernati was indigenous, a Colci native. It was unheard of for a high-ranking officer to accept land from the Emperor on his own, native planet. Something not quite honorable about that.

Zander stifled his annoyance and rearranged his features in their natural earnest, rather put-upon, configuration. The general slapped him heartily on the back, boosting Zander's displeasure level to maximum. When he looked up at the general's face, though, the irritation ebbed. It was difficult to be angry with a Colcian. Tall and well-featured as only those growing up on a lower-gee world could be, the men were lean, runner-muscled, ageless knights, and their women hour-glass damsels with haunting eyes. Even the taller Magisterials from one-gee core worlds looked like trolls beside them. Trolls with dwarf wives – except for Zander, who had (rather cleverly, now he came to think of it this way) never married during his service and so had married his own doe-eyed damsel when he settled on Colci. If the girls here liked anything better than tall, muscular, dark-haired knights, it was a Magisterial uniform. Which unpleasantly jerked him back to the here and now; Athernati combined both.



Athernati was speaking to him. " . . . everything the Emperor gave us to start out our lives here," he was saying. "Where the White Stadium now stands, there was a just grove of sugar trees on a plain near a muddy river. Now we have the stadium, and the city, the dam, and land under cultivation for hundreds of miles in either direction."

Zander's well-trained mind dug up a few hail-emperor platitudes. He reeled them off, but underneath, he was thinking, the grove of sugar trees was a holy place; the Empire always builds something showy on the local holy place. I know that, Athernati knows that. His father probably worshiped there. Either he's trying to clumsily affirm his loyalty to the Empire, having mistaken me for someone who cares–or he's as dumb as a post.

Athernati was not telepathic. He continued, "The courtiers have started a death vigil for King Tigus, I hear."

Zander was vaguely aware that the local civilian client society had ranks, but he had never troubled himself to learn them. "King . . . of Colci?"

Athernati shot him a grey-eyed glance that had more than a hint of the steel for which the general was celebrated. "King of the local cluster. Half of Consul Veran's sector."

"If this Tigus dies, will Veran bring us under direct rule of the Emperor?"

"Hardly. King Tigus has willed half his wealth to the Emperor. Tigus has two daughters who will succeed as client Queenlings. Why would the Emperor disturb a sector where he gets half of the output for nothing?"

Zander vaguely remembered that the local king had daughters. So, twelve-year old twin girls were to inherit half his wealth? He wondered why Athernati thought Veran would be satisfied with a mere half. Then again, Consul Veran was a sluggish individual who never moved until you poked him. Hopefully it would be enough to fund his continued inaction. He said nothing.

It was getting cold out here, away from the crowd. The stars were out, but they were partly obscured by the smoke from the thunder-flashes inside the stadium. The thin smell of burned fuses mingled with the almost-animal smell of jet fuel. He shivered.

Where the hell's my car?

One of those local tree-dwelling spirits must have been the patron of minor social miracles. Though the sacred grove was buried under six meters of landfill and topped with thick laser-cut marble, Zander's car arrived as soon as the thought was out. He heard it smoothly decelerate beside him. His lieutenant, Garvey, leaned over and pushed up the gull-wing passenger door. Zander was so relieved to see the car that he invited Athernati in for a ride, but the old general refused. Shame, really. Garvey could have told him a few jokes and lightened the atmosphere a little. Lieutenant Garvey was on active duty, his tour of Colci just a brief respite from a career of policing trouble spots. He seemed to know a story about every whorehouse in the galaxy, and if that wasn't to someone's taste, he had a thousand tales of places he'd lived that were so odd the people called their washing powder BURP, or their candy bars Spongy Joy.

The car sped silently down the jade-stone streets of the town, towards Zander's estate. Garvey recounted a long, filthy and anatomically improbable story about a borrowed orbital lifter and two girlfriends of his who'd always wanted to try zero-gee. It made Zander realize, for the first time, that youth really was wasted on the young. In the dark of the car he secretly pinched the skin on the back of his left hand and was astounded at the lack of elasticity. I'm only fifty-seven! he thought. Then he remembered he was wearing gloves.



He reached Villa Zander just before midnight. He swung his legs out. “Join us for cocktails?” he said, his words punctuated by the crunch of his boots on gravel.

The lieutenant nodded and drove away. Zander's walk to the entrance was overwhelmed by the shriek of cicadas. The lights blazing across the lawn kept them awake every summer night. The rose-red sandstone of the first pylon glowed as if lit from within. He looked up, instinctively, to see what traffic there might be above Colci and its valuable planetary neighbors, but he saw little; the beauty of his house was displayed at the cost of a riot of light pollution. He could make out a few ragged stars and the rapidly setting disc of Pasor, the distant gas giant. The haze didn't, strictly speaking, matter. One could get a thousand times more information from the informationweb. But something in the admiral's mind preferred the direct assessment of spatial distances. It had saved his life before, on the battleship Prometheus. It was easier, instinctual.

Tirisa had waited up for him. He found her in the reflecting room, sitting with a piece of needlework on her lap, watching the aurora play over the distant mountains. The villa was ray-shielded, so the stern vista of ice and glaciers gave only a brief mental feeling of chill.

Tirisa put the embroidery to one side and got up to greet him. She gave him a soft hug and a kiss full of promise, and then ruined his mood with her first sentence. "What was the rally like?"

He sighed, clicked his fingers and sat down. A small bot, cued by the signal, arrived with his cocktail and a matching one for Tirisa. "Tanks, technicals, lots of men looking determined and proud. Thunder-flashes." He took a drink of the sweet, woody liquor. "Dreadful stuff, but you should have gone, really. It looks bad when I'm unaccompanied. This 'I can't go because I have a women's impurity' excuse won't last forever. And anyway, the Magisterium doesn't care. It's a local custom, shutting up women on their impure days." He took another drink, and remembered something else, something altogether more pleasant. "Oh - There was a choir. A choir of little angels. Boys with the purest voices. We should have a son."

She came to sit beside him. "So that he can sing for the Glory of the Empire?"

"No, we should just have a son."

He was about to kiss her again when Lieutenant Garvey walked in and saluted.

"General Ragni's coming over," he said as he sat down. "He said he needed to talk."

Zander couldn't imagine the taciturn old soldier needing to talk. "It's midnight," he pointed out.

"It's always midnight somewhere, sir," said Garvey, and clicked for a drink.

Zander hoped the general hadn't discovered some sort of night-dwelling fish. When Zander had first arrived, as a gesture of friendship Ara Ragni had taken him out fishing on one of Colci's liquid oceans in some small local craft that seemed about as safe, and as maneuverable, as a rawhide coracle. The trip combined the nauseating pressure of planetary gravity hauling on every tissue of his body with the unpredictable rise and fall of the boat on the choppy swell. It had not been a happy combination for Zander. He had spent the day pale and silent, his eyes fixed on the chaotically bobbing horizon, while Ragni stalked around the deck, drank a lot, cursed continually, and eventually caught a fish. This was apparently the signal to go home, and Zander still remembered The Catch as one of the most cheering moments of his entire life.

General Ragni arrived momentarily, causing Garvey to jump to attention.

"I’m here about Consul Veran," Ragni began as he sat down and accepted a glass of wine from the bot.

"He's coming here?" Zander asked in alarm. Damn, that would mean shoring up the collection of hail-emperor junk. Impressing the Emperor’s personal envoy was no simple matter. He'd have to buy statues, maybe even tapestries. At current Colci prices that could empty the entire bank balance.

"No!" Ragni said. "Veran's dead. Happened yesterday."

***

The Convalescent Home song

My mother used to sing me a song she'd learned as an in-patient in what was called a Convalescent Home - a residential children's home for youngsters recovering from the more debilitating diseases of childhood abroad in those days. In my mother's case, 'those days' were the 1920s and early 30s.  As far as I can recall, my mother was recovering from Scarlet Fever, a type of Strep that does not stop at the throat and causes the skin to break out in bright red sandpapery spots. Although it can come with a high fever, it's not considered particularly dangerous in the 21st century, with our rapidly-waning antibiotics, but at the time it was a serious childhood disease that could take weeks of recovery with attention from trained nurses.
Many children in Convalescent Homes were recovering from other diseases of the age, including the dreaded Diphtheria, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, which coats the lungs with a thick, grey biofilm and attacks other organs, and polio, a childhood viral paralysis which in the worst cases could prevent the child being able to breathe on their own, and for which they would sleep in 'iron lungs', a metal tube which enclosed the whole body, leaving the head outside, so that the inside could be used as a pump to operate the lungs. There were the other childhood diseases as well, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and some others.
Convalescent Homes were for children who were past the acute phase of the disease and had to be classified as non-contagious before they were admitted. Some would be there for months.
For some reason, all the Convalescent Homes had a version of the same song my mother sang. Sometimes the disease changed (rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria) and sometimes the names of the nurses or doctors changes (Dr Annister, Dr Aniston, Dr Canister) but all had the same plaintive chorus -
Mummy, Daddy, take me home
From this Convalescent Home

I've looked for it on Youtube, to no avail, although there are people all over the interwebs recalling the song from their childhood, from the 20s to the 60s, with many saying they sang it or know someone who sang it to them.  One said it was to the tune of The Laughing Policeman, which the verse is, but my mother sang the chorus differently (obviously as it would just be screams of laughter).
The song came into my head the other day - before the Coronavirus hit, in case you're wondering - and I looked up the song and wrote a story based on it for my writing class. I'll put the story in a separate post. Here's the version my mother sang, with a couple of bits filled in by me. (For example, I can't for the life of me remember the name of the home.) If you ask Google (tm) you can find other versions.


I had that scarlet fever, 

I had it very bad
They wrapped me up in blankets 

And put me in the van
The van was very bumpy, 

 nearly tumbled out, 

And when I got to Tadworth Court 

I heard a patient shout,

Mummy, Daddy, take me home, 

From this convalescent home.
I’ve been here a year or two, 

Now I want to be with you.

In comes Dr. Annister, 

Sliding down the banister.
"Are you better, are you worse? 

Oh my goodness, where’s that nurse?"
In comes nurse with a red hot poultice, 

Slaps it on and takes no notice. 

"Oh, said the patient, that’s too hot.
“Oh, says the nurse. I’m sure it’s not."

Goodbye all the patients, goodbye all the nurses,
Goodbye all the doctors, and jolly old matron too.

I don't know of anyone who thought of the matron as "jolly" - most recall a certain amount of lack of patience on the part of the nurses, if not outright physical punishment. Everyone, including my mother, was very glad to get home. 

The House Opposite may not light up at dawn to signal spring in future

A couple of times, I've posted here about The House Opposite and how it lights up at dawn in blaze in early March, signalling the start of spring.

The House Opposite is an even better indicator of warm weather than the buds on my tangelo tree. It didn't put on much of a display this year (unlike the tangelo tree) and so we trekked up the Hill Opposite to see what was happening.

Here's The House Opposite lighting up at dawn in March 2015, and what it looks like as the sun hits the stucco a little later.

The House Opposite at dawn, March 2015

The House Opposite, in early morning sun March 2015

Getting up there meant driving to the end of San Juan Capistrano's trail system and then walking beside Trabuco Creek. At one point, feeling adventurous, we scrambled down the bank and walked *in* Trabuco Creek. Verdict: it is very muddy. Scrambling back up the bank through a thicket of young trees, that stuff that is very like bamboo and old yarrow stalks was much harder and we decided we probably wouldn't do that again. 

Then back on the trail and up the hill.  The mustard plants are only about knee high at the moment but are already flowering and the thistles (another invasive plant) are beginning to show themselves.  The trail skirts a gated community with a few keep out signs, then leads up the hill beneath the House Opposite. 

The House Opposite from the trail, March 2020

Although the other houses on that street are gated, there is no gate on The House Opposite. It is, however, completely boarded up and has evidently been unoccupied for years, probably since the dump truck in the 2015 pictures finished whatever it was doing later that year.

Evidence suggests The House Opposite will not light up at dawn to signal the spring for much longer. The windows are being broken. There are some strong boards behind them, but there's nothing to stop vandals from getting at the glass.

It's not a particularly well-designed house. It looks a little hastily-put-together. The houses behind it are typical Southern California mini-mansions, with castle turrets, swimming pools, the lot. But there's no apparent reason for it to be abandoned. It isn't high on the ridgeline. It hasn't been tagged as unsafe.

As you can imagine, from the House Opposite's point of view, my house is the house opposite.  This is San Juan Capistrano from its foundation. You can see the Mission Basilica (the big white church) and the beige monolith of the new SDG&E eyesore (under the power lines) and Palm Tree Hill (the hill with the palms on it). My house is between those. Good luck finding it. 

SDG&E eyesore (under the powerlines, middle left), Palm Tree Hill

Mission Basilica, center

It's all very green, isn't it? It's been raining for weeks. It always rains approx. 48 hours after the doomsayers have pronounced it a 'very dry winter' with 'little snowpack'. Never fails. 

Hope you find new owners soon, or RIP, House Opposite. 

Paid to Play, Part II

Part one, the actual story, is on the blog here.

One piece of feedback I got from my writing class on Paid to Play was that is was not fair that Bob didn't get punished for making a pact with the devil. Hence, this illo.  Style is obviously cribbed from the title card ending of American Graffiti. The faces were generated by the AI This Person Does Not Exist.

Paid to Play (fiction, 1500 words)

Paid to Play

The promoter, Lloyd, paid the band the full twenty-five hundred, although Craig, the singer, knew there’d been fewer than 200 people in the bar all night. The windmill-shaped Dutch Bar and Grill was new and yet already settling into unloved status. It had begun to smell of stale beer and exhaustion.

“No cover charge, either,” Craig said to Bob, the guitarist. “They can’t have taken in more than a couple of thousand, gross.”

Coiling one of Andy’s cables, Bob said, “I signed a contract, though. We get paid.”

“Look at that guy –” Craig inclined his head towards Lloyd. “He’s a fuckin’ shark if I ever saw one. We didn’t manage to sell half our share of the tickets and I would have sworn he’d take it out of our fee.”

“My dad told me a promoter once hung him out of a fourth-floor window by his ankles until he agreed to waive payment for a gig,” Andy said.

“That sounds like something Lloyd would do,” Craig said darkly.

Bob looked over at the promoter. He was mostly indistinguishable from the rock bands he booked. Tall, lanky, mid-length hair in a man-bun, Misfits t-shirt, jeans and boots. Whatever triggered Craig’s suspicions wasn’t apparent to Bob. Lloyd had paid up. Everyone always paid Bob’s band.

Yeti, the drummer, was piling his equipment into the van, singing noisily.

“Get the gear loaded,” Andy said to the others. “It’s two in the fucking morning.”

“We should leave it here,” Craig said. “We’re playing here tomorrow night, after all.”

“Tonight,” Bob corrected him. “And, no way. The gear would be stolen, sold and out of the state by sunrise.”

Craig picked up Bob’s Lake Placid Blue Telecaster and pulled out the jack plug. He hadn’t gotten the guitar half-way to its case before Bob caught up with him, shoved him hard against the wall and pulled the guitar neck out of his hand. “Don’t touch my fucking guitar, Craig,” he grated. “I’ve told you before. Nobody touches the fucking Tele.” He ran his thumb over the strings, checking it was still in tune. Satisfied, he placed it in its case. Craig brushed himself down and glared at Bob. Bob knew he wouldn’t continue the fight. Craig appreciated the guitarist’s uncanny money-charming abilities.

Yeti was standing by the loading dock door as they carted their cases out. Bob’s strum, the tinking noise of the unamplified strings, prompted him to ask a question. “You never use standard tuning, do you, Bob? It’s always that weird one.”

“DADGAD,” Bob said, mollified by Yeti’s interest in his technique.

“I’m surprised you can play, like, blues standards, if you never change tuning,” Yeti said.

“I’ve used it for years. I can play anything. You know, it’s a tuning Jimmy Page used on a lot of Zeppelin songs.”

“Yeah!  Led Zep!” said Yeti, punching the night air. In the distance a dog howled, the sound muffled by the swish of a windmill sail coming down above them.

“Isn’t Page a black magician?” Andy said, conversationally.

Bob flinched. Nobody noticed. In a parody of a pastor’s quiet sermonizing tone, he steepled his hands and said, “Aren’t all guitarists, in our own small way, black magicians?” The others laughed and Bob picked up his bottle and drank the last of his beer.  The dog howled again, then shut up with a yelp. Bob flung the bottle against the windmill where it broke with a disappointing tinkle. “Let’s go,” he said.

Word of mouth must have spread, because that night barely anybody turned up. A few people wandered in, heard the live music and went right back out. After the second set, Lloyd turned up, and with his jaw clenched tight, handed over a wad of cash.  All four musicians kept their eyes on him and their arms free at their sides, subconsciously prepared for a fight. But Lloyd’s expressionless face didn’t display aggression. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “At Wainwright’s in Long Beach, right?”

“Right,” Yeti said, watching him as he walked away. “I’d forgotten Wainwright’s was one of his venues. Buck up, Bob. You look like you felt someone walk over your grave. If Lloyd starts anything, we’ve got your back.”

“It’s not that,” Bob said. He was listening to a low growl in the distance. It sounded like a very big dog. A humongous dog, only a few blocks away now.

Yeti unlocked the loaded van and the others rushed to climb in.  He pushed the starter button, took his foot off the brake, then stopped before the van had moved more than a few yards. He pointed at a yellow blinking light. Low tire pressure.  Bob got out and searched around his door panels for the lug wrench and passed it to Craig who laboriously wound the spare tire out of its hidey-hole under the cargo bay.  It, too, was flat.

 “Fuck it,” Yeti said. “I’ll lock the van and leave it here tonight. I’ll get an Uber tomorrow with a new tire.” He sighed, then belched. “I’m not coming back tonight. Those coyotes sound hungry.”

 “You can hear that howling?” Bob said. “It’s a fucking dog.”

“Of course I can hear it. Sounds like a pack of coyotes to me.”

Craig and the rhythm section got an Uber northwards, and Bob called his own.  That goddamned dog, he thought as the Hyundai pulled up outside the windmill.  The Hell Hound was most definitely on his trail. Nine more months of life.

Bob had met the Devil almost twenty years ago, at a crossroads in La Brea. It was by prior arrangement, but he was still surprised when the horned man waded out of a tar pit and took his guitar in his claw. “You want me to tune the Tele?” the Devil had asked in a polite tone.

Bob nodded. 

“Usual 20-year term?” said the Prince of Darkness.

Being young, hungover, starving and arrogant, it hadn’t occurred to Bob to come up with a watertight contract. He mumbled something about how he wanted to be a great guitar player and be, like, a successful musician.

The Devil tuned his guitar—making sure not to use standard tuning, handicapping Bob for evermore. (Well, for twenty years.)  “Don’t let anyone touch your guitar,” the Devil said. “It’ll stay in tune. If anyone retunes it, the contract’s up immediately. One soul, to be collected by black dog. Guard it with your life.” He licked his lips, showing Bob his flickering, forked tongue.

Bob really should have put more language in that deal.  Nowadays everyone said, “Oh, Bob’s a great guitarist,” but it was meaningless. In terms of world-class greatness, he was short of the mark. And though he became successful in business terms—he made between three- and four-times scale everywhere he played—he had not sold a million records or even a million downloads. He had never signed with a major. No groupies or supermodels or videos helmed by Quentin Tarantino. He didn’t even have a coke-fueled breakdown to bleakly undergo and wearily recover from. Just the basics of his hasty deal: Great guitar player; always gets paid; will be dragged down to Hell (at the latest) in December 2020 by a black dog the size of a bison.  

And now he had left his guitar in an unguarded van.

“Turn around, man,” he said to the Uber driver.  “Don’t argue. Look, here’s a hundred bucks. Turn around!”

He was too late. The van doors had been jimmied and the guitars and a Fender Twin Reverb amp had been taken. The drums in their cases were rolling in the parking lot. The windmill sail above Bob swooped down, hissing like the pendulum blade in the pit. Poor Bob fell down on his knees, but no supernatural dog appeared.

He arrived at Wainwright’s that evening with a borrowed Mosrite guitar. Andy had found a bass and they played a rousing set, fueled by residual anger and victimhood. There was an audience, of sorts.

They didn’t get paid.

The bar owner shrugged. “That guy Lloyd handles the money,” he said. “Or handled, past tense. Pack of wild coyotes got him. Would ya credit it?”

A cop returned Bob’s Telecaster the next day. Lloyd had been attempting to sell it at Spike’s Guns and Pawn in Huntington Beach, when he’d taken it out of its case and tried to retune it by ear. “Never seen anything like it before,” the cop said. “Blood everywhere. Didn’t see it coming. Damn thing just appeared. The pawnshop guy says it was a dog, but Forensics swears it was a bear.”

Bob sat down and played some chords. “All these years I was wrong,” he whispered to the guitar. “Retuning you voided the contract. The Devil came for the soul he was owed. He didn’t ever say it would be my soul.” He laughed until the tears came.

He never got paid to play again.
***

A tongue-in-cheek sequel will be on my blog tomorrow here.

Creative writing class

I've been taking a creative writing class with bunch of very interesting people recently. Some of them are professional writers or editors, some experienced writers and some at a more elementary stage. All of them have something to say, something of interest to others.

I use the 'have been taking', as with the uncertainty over Covid-19, I'm not sure I want to go to a meeting of 15 people, all of whom are, like me, over 50.  If anything happens, we'd go down like ninepins. And Monday this week? No class. The teacher cancelled, because she's sick.

Up until last week we all shared a peripatetic hand microphone. I think the teacher saw me run out of the class and get hand sanitizer as soon as I passed it on after my reading last Monday, because after that she said we should "project" our voices and she put the mic away. 

Good idea. I can project. I don't really want to put a piece of mesh that a dozen people have breathed into against my lips.

Am I over-reacting? I don't know. I worked 30 years in medical testing - including several years in infectious disease testing - and I don't want to share a mic. Make of that what you will.

Anyway, that's not what I originally sat down to say. I wanted to say I'd be sharing some of the pieces I've written for the class. If it ever convenes again. (Next week is spring break and I expect the college to have decided on a policy by the week after that.)

Onward and upward.