Noise in the Attic

A couple of weeks ago, my father, one of my brothers, and I drove up to Pennington Gap, in Southwest Virginia. The nearest town of any size is Big Stone Gap, which may give you an idea about just how far back in the mountains Pennington Gap is.

We moved to Pennington Gap when I was three months old and left four years later, almost to the day. My father was the preacher at First Christian Church there. They invited him back to preach at their 100th Anniversary service. That’s quite an honor, and I am glad I got to share that with him.

Everyone tells me that a person does not remember much, if anything, about their first four years. That may be so. I don’t have many conscious memories and the few that I do have are really fuzzy. What I do have is a big hole in my soul.

Having no conscious memories of a place does not mean that it never existed for you. The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing that retains a lot more information than just what is on the surface. I may remember little and indistinctly, but I feel the lack of a place I can really truly call home.

That may seem strange, considering that I have lived here for some 48 years now, but there is just something missing that keeps me feeling like a stranger in my hometown. Rootless. Two weeks ago, I found out what.

A four-year-old is not supposed to remember, but he does. He remembers the feeling of being ripped from the only home he has ever known and thrown in among strangers. He remembers feeling like an outsider in his own home town. He remembers feeling left out and alone among his friends and family. I remember — now more than ever.

I remember mountains that block out the sky. I remember wild places and towering trees. I remember coal trains and snowy afternoons. I remember people tough as nails that would give you their coat on a frigid day, if you needed one. I remember sheep on green hillsides and weathered shacks that had been home to generations.

I know now what I have always missed, where my roots were, where they are still. Those mountains, those people, that place, cry out to me on a visceral level. They belong in my heart, where I have kept them hidden so many years. I miss them. I want them back.

Yet there remains much doubt in my mind.

That part of Appalachia is a hard and unforgiving place, a place that cares nothing about people and their works. It is a place where people scratch to survive. It is a good place to be born in, to grow up in, to move away from. Life is hard in those mountains and money does not flow easily.

Could I make the transition from relative comfort to relative poverty? Could I live with snow and ice and sudden thunderstorms so violent they threaten to blow houses right off the mountainside? Could I live so far from my family and friends? Do I dare disturb the Universe?

My heart looks to what was for comfort and peace. My mind looks to what is. Reasons, excuses to stay are easy to find. Reasons to move are hard. Nebulous. Difficult to explain. I am uncomfortable here, a stranger in a strange land. Yet, how far am I willing to go on a hunch, a whim, a feeling? Would I be more comfortable far from everything and everybody I have known for so long?

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Mr. Lincoln said. I am divided. I am at war with myself. How long can I stand?

Hi, y’all!

I am so sorry about the long silence. It’s far too easy to get into the habit of not doing something and to let it slide for far, far too long.

I have some things to post about in the next few days. The thing that finally got me up off my ass, though, is what happened this morning at work.

I think I mentioned some time back (and I’m too lazy to go find that post) that I was working on developing a Disaster Response and Recovery Plan for the library where I work. Well, the Director and I finally got it finished (and posted on the Web, if anyone cares to look: follow this link, and it is the fourth entry from the top of the list). This morning, at our quarterly Professional Development Day, the Vice President of Academic Affairs had some VERY nice things to say about it.

Even more exciting, the Chair of our Emergency Management program forwarded the plan to a Major Government Institution (I’m not sure if I should really say who in public), and they told her they were interested in using our plan as a template for developing a disaster plan for their own internal library. Very cool!

Occasionally, hard work does get recognized.

Next on the agenda, as far as posting goes, is a few thoughts about a recent trip my father, one of my brothers, and I took to Virginia. A very interesting trip that sparked a lot of thoughts. It may take me a few days to get back into the habit, but I’m trying.

Got my new dumbputer set up and operational. I was using an old Pentium II 300 with 128 megs RAM and Windows98. The “new” one is a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz with 512 megs RAM and Windows XP Pro. I feel like I’m really cruising now.

It’s a factory refurb I got for around $150 at Overstock.com. No warranty, of course, but I’m not too worried. I have enough experience to be able to handle most problems myself.

The only problem I’ve had so far came after I got all my software installed and upgraded. It turns out that Internet Exploder 8 does not like either me or my system. Thank God for Firefox.

The other major consideration is that I’m going to have to be a lot more aware of and careful about viruses, Trojans, and malware of all sorts. This had become a non-issue with my Win98, because the operating system was just too old, and nobody thought it was worth their while to write bugs that would attack it. XP is still a big target. With my anti-virus upgraded and two firewalls in place, I feel pretty secure.

On the writing front, things are moving along nicely. I have drafted a new short story that is now in its cooling-off period before rewrite starts. It is loosely based on a brief clip I did for the Story-a-Day Challenge at Forward Motion last May. I am currently calling it “When the Bough Breaks”. The title ties into the story in a couple of different ways.

On a health note, I am currently in physical therapy for a torn rotator cuff. Ouch! My therapist is evil and sadistic, of course. I think it goes with the territory. Just kidding, of course (just in case she’s reading this). She is actually quite concerned and capable. I am feeling the benefits already.

That’s about it from here right now. I will try to post a little more often as time goes on.

P.S. My AlphaSmart NEO celebrates its first birthday sometime around now. I am still loving it. I am also still on my first set of AA batteries. Talk about energy-efficient!

Sorry to have been away so long. That appears to be becoming a habit.

The truth is, there is nothing much going on around here that’s noteworthy. I am working on a couple of projects that I am not ready to talk about yet. Writing with the door closed, as Stephen King puts it in On Writing.

Today, I am considering buying a new computer. Well, not a new one, that is way out of my reach. A refurb is more like it. Thank God for Overstock.com. Great prices, but you get what you pay for. This old computer has done its job and got me through, but it is almost 10 years old and has started behaving oddly, in a flaky-hardware sort of way. I think it’s time.

That’s pretty much it for me. If anything happens, I’ll let you know.

I have spent most of the weekend taking care of business. The way I see it, writing is made up of three parts: composing, revision, and submitting. Composing and revision are the creative parts, submitting is the business part.

Submitting my work is hard on me. It takes a lot of courage for me to put myself out there in front of the world that way. I would much rather keep revising and revising and revising and try to get things perfect. The problem is that that way lies no publication. I can’t get puclished if I don’t submit my stories to editors for their consideration. If I imagine I hear hysterical laughter from them, that’s just part of the dues I have to pay.

Market research is a real pain. Ralan’s Webstravaganza and duotrope make life a lot easier in that regard by gathering marketing information into one place, but it still takes a lot of time to evaluate the various markets and to try to find a good fit for a story. I tend to put that off and not submit anything for weeks or months at a time. That’s not good.

I have to keep telling myself: I can’t win if I don’t try.

P.S. We had snow last Tuesday. Today, I’m wearing shorts and a T-shirt and sweating. That’s life in the Deep South.

Snow blind — as in blind crazy. We had our quasi-annual snow yesterday. As you can see, we had a minimal accumulation. This has, of course, thrown everything into utter chaos and panic.

Here in central Georgia, even this little tad of snow means schools and businesses have closed. Those who have ventured out onto the (dry) roads are driving like their heads are on fire and their asses are catching. The theory is that if you hit ice, it’s better to be going as fast as possible.

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

From a commercial for Proactiv:

“I put it on at night, and when I wake up in the morning, you don’t have acne any more.”

Now that’s some powerful medicine! This guy can use it and it heals someone else’s acne!

The idea that any English speaker would make such a mistake is discouraging. The fact that this is so common that it made it into a nationally (or even internationally) televised commercial is infuriating.

Language is one of the very few things that separates us from the beasts. We should take enough pride in ourselves to at least make the attempt to use it properly. To do any less exposes a lack of pride, a lack of any sense of self-worth, that is troubling, to say the least.

Our culture has become far too much based on an attitude of “whatever you do is right and good”. That is dangerous and destructive. There are, in fact, concrete rights and wrongs. This kind of slip-shod speaking is only a symptom of a much more wide-spread phenomenon.

Don’t you hope your airplane mechanic takes more pride in his or her work than this?

My horror story “Garlic Chicken” is up at Alien Skin Magazine. Be advised that this is a real horror story and not for the easily upset.

My wife and I share an addiction: we watch “Ghost Hunters” on SciFi religiously. If you’re not familiar with this show, it comes on Wednesday nights and features a group of ghost hunters (duh!).

This group is different from most of those haunting the airwaves these days. These guys (they call themselves TAPS for The Atlantic Paranormal Society) go into an investigation with a skeptical attitude and a lot of high-tech toys. They try to weed out anything that might be explainable by conventional means and see what’s left.

I like their attitude. I think that is the only way to investigate paranormal activity. Going in with the attitude that you’re going to believe everything you see and/or feel just leaves the door open to anybody with a lick of sense that might want to debunk your findings. Being skeptical is the only way to get close to the truth.

I am a firm believer in ghosts. I have witnessed a haunting, though never a full-bodied apparition. My brother lived in a haunted house for a while, and we sat up one night listening to footsteps going up and down the back stairs and a phantom rocking chair by the French doors upstairs. Yeah, I’m a believer.

When it comes to hard proof, however, there is no room for what you might have heard or seen, unless it is caught on tape or camera and cannot be explained by conventional means. What you see is not necessarily the reality you think it is.

TAPS has done some investigations that really stand out in this regard. In one, they caught some unidentified person trying to pull a fast one on them. Knowledgeable eyes reviewing the evidence in the cold light of skepticism caught the attempt and quickly threw out that “evidence”. In another, the noises the occupant of a house heard turned out to be their neighbors having…uh…fun.

On the other hand, they have caught some compelling evidence in favor of the paranormal. When they invesitigqted Eastern State Hospital in Washington State, they caught something on their infrared camera that looked suspiciously like a person where no person was.

In an investigation of a children’s store in California, they caught some EVPs that can only be called chilling. The store was supposedly haunted by a former long-time employee. I don’t remember her name now, but will call her Lila. One of the voices on the digital recorder said “there is no Lila here” in response to a team member’s request for a response from the ghost. Most chilling, though, was a very clear voice at one point saying “just leave us alone”. That made my blood run cold when I heard it. The most telling word was (and still is) “us”.

Other investigations have turned up other evidence of the paranormal, though the vast majority of them wind up with nothing. That’s OK with me. I realize that paranormal activity is, by definition, outside the normal view of reality and cannot always be made to perform on demand.

What are your views on paranormal phenomena? Do you want to believe? What evidence would it take for you to believe?

While I try to jump-start my refried brain, here is a flash fiction intended for your enjoyment. I hope you do.

This story is copyrighted by me. Please don’t use it without my permission.

—–

Intimate Strangers

What madness drove me to it? What madness could drive a man to murder someone they didn’t even know? The barest madness of all: the madness of being human, the madness of inattention and disregard for common sense, the simple madness of everyday life.

It was the madness of one more beer after work because the sky was dreary and the drizzling rain chilled my bones, because my boss is a jerk, just because. It was the madness of driving too fast because I was late and supper would be cold and she would be pissed. It was the madness of being too self-absorbed to see that the light was red until it soared overhead like some gaunt bird with eyes of rage, screaming futility and death like tires on wet pavement.

Then you were there, rising from the mist like my personal white whale, as I, your Ahab, sailed across the slick asphalt sea to our first and final meeting, foot driving the brake pedal helplessly toward the floor, driven by my madness to encompass your doom.

You looked at me, deep into my eyes, deep into my soul, and you knew me in that moment. And I knew you. I knew your love for your family and your hopes and dreams for the future. And I loved you, then. I loved you helplessly and hopelessly, even as I killed you in a final thump, a last shriek, an ultimate shatter, even as I sacrificed you on the altar of my own stupidity.

I learned your name afterward: Joan Fleming. What a small, pale thing, a name, but I keep it alive. I saw you in your husband’s eyes and your children’s, and I know they keep you alive in their hearts and in their minds. All I have is your name and your face and your blood on my hands and the love we shared for that merest instant.

THE END