But it is a nice blog (even though it is way too heavy on the advertising), and the author did point out that the planets were all aligning for our entertainments. So go read Universe Today (just pull the RSS feed like I do and you don’t have to bother with the irritating mass of adspace).

Photograph by Richard McCoy.

It’s the ozone smell of the desert after a summer rainstorm, or the damp magnolia fertility in the air of a New Orleans night. It’s old Puerto Rican men playing dominoes on the sidewalk in Brooklyn, spilled out of their apartments, our public space blended with their private, their women dancing to boombox salsa, their children running for ices, far off police sirens singing chorus.

It’s the atoms in my blood and heart and brain. Atoms that have existed since the dawn of time, and will continue until it never ends. Atoms that have been in the heart of stars, and traveled in comets, and lay in the cold grey dust of the moon. Atoms that have fed great sequoias, and the earthworms underneath them. Atoms that have been breathed by kings and paupers, philosophers and madmen. Atoms that I’m carrying right now, on brief loan, my contribution to their life, and theirs to mine. Pure eternal energy, great and small. It’s being old when young, and young when old, knowing I will die soon, but I’ll never really die.

In order of occurrence:

There was a dark-haired woman and a toddler sitting at a table in McDonald’s eating breakfast. Her arms and legs were crossed and she stared down at her food, but the little boy, with a pacifier in his mouth, watched me as I walked by. When I left, walking back by them to get to the door, I noticed a car right outside the door with New York plates, and I wondered if it belonged to her and the little boy.

A big, tall man with copper-colored long hair was walking along the side of the road with a petite blonde woman wearing short-shorts. The woman was holding the hand of a little girl who might have been five years old, and the little girl had a dolly wrapped in her free arm. All four of them stared straight ahead, without expression or conversation (at least in those ten seconds that I saw them). The man was walking with a deliberate gait, and the other two were just keeping pace as well as they could. Or so it appeared.

A woman wearing a white dress and a black backpack was standing by a patrol car with the police lights spinning, and the officer, a burly macho type with mirrored sunglasses, was standing beside her holding a book or a pamphlet of some type, staring down at it. The woman wasn’t looking at him, but past him, at nothing I could see. There was a church nearby, but the road they were on was a connector route between Centreville and Tuscaloosa. There are a lot of houses along that stretch, but not much else, so it was kind of odd to see a woman walking alone through there.

Another woman, barefoot, wearing a tee shirt that was just long enough to make it look like that was all she was wearing and with a big blonde hairdo of loopy curls, was walking smoothly across the pavement around her car, which was stopped at an intersecting road between Centreville and Montevallo. She wasn’t walking with the “I think I have a flat tire” hop, but as if she was thinking something through, something very distracting. I didn’t stop to help because she got back into her car, and I saw in my rearview that she was pulling onto the main highway, heading back toward Centreville.

All of these people were beautiful, from the burly cop right down to the little dolly. They were all people in my own story’s margin, people whose lives I’ve glimpsed but whose stories I’ll never know, no matter how boring or adventurous or scandalous or petty or eager or psychopathic or horrific or desirable or melodic or distressful or macabre or mischievous. All I know is each one of those stories was interesting, for those few words I was able to read of them. All the planets this morning were spinning out of line–or into a line–and gave me a glimpse into the eyes of ordinary grandeur, everyday wonder. And I liked it.

I love stories where there are invisible worlds set within the world we live in. The idea that someone is right there, standing next to you, but you can’t see them because they’re in this other place. The first time I remember thinking about that was in high school, when we were talking about the Mayan culture that just disappeared off the face of the Earth, without a trace. While everyone else was thinking drought or war or famine, I was thinking that they must have evolved into a higher state, and then transitioned into a separate reality from the physical one we can see.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint…there are a lot of writers who utilize the “world within a world” plot to great effect, but they always seemed to miss one important detail that I always wanted to see expounded upon: how did the invisible world come to be in the first place? Once I began wondering in that direction, the book Modern-Day Mythica wrote itself.

The story evolved from the concept of an energy mass that encircles the globe, that flows across the surface of the Earth like a river, from north to south. That energy is called the Wash. And everywhere that the Wash touches ground it forms pockets of reality within reality, some large and some small, attainable by certain doorways which are difficult to find and even more difficult to access, unless you really know what you’re doing. But to simply go that far with the idea still wouldn’t have satisfied my curiosity of how the Wash itself came to be, in order to form these pockets of reality. And that was the point where the idea became my Big Idea. The complexity of the concept is vast, but it fits perfectly within the scientific laws of the universe, if you can accept that there is one ingredient in the universal stew that remains undetected and unaccounted for: the energy of the Wash itself, which originates from a celestial body once in orbit around the Earth, when the Earth had two moons in the sky.

The implications of this are much more far-reaching than might initially be thought of: the presence of a moon that is unaccounted for, that disappeared some ten thousand years ago and is unrecorded except perhaps in some arcane hieroglyphs drawn on cave walls, could have a devastating impact on how science looks at history. With two moons, Earth’s time line could shorten considerably. Things that might take millions of years today, such as the formation of mountain ranges, might have only taken thousands of years in an environment where there was so much more gravitational pull on the planet’s surface. The tides would have been greater, earthquakes and volcanoes much more frequent…essentially, everything that science has applied to a timeline would have to be compressed into a much tighter margin, because things would have been happening so much faster than we can account for today. This is important because it enables the scenario where the ages of mammals and dinosaurs could have overlapped, and it is entirely feasible in the real world. Indeed, this is a scenario which is entirely possible, one which I do not believe can be proven incorrect. That was the essential Big Idea of the book.

But what happened to the moon, one might ask. Well, this is the point where the story leaves the plane of the real world and delves into fantasy or science fiction. The moon, a crusty, charred satellite with a surface composed primarily of slate, is the source of the energy of the Wash. Some combination of minerals and exotic materials, in an environment of intense heat (such as the core of the moon, which happens to be molten), releases the energy, which is copious enough to encompass both moons as well as Earth. This shared energy is a fuel for magic, making the impossible possible in many ways. For instance, the cocktail of energies allow for the existence of creatures on the moon in question, which could not exist in any world where magic is not possible. And furthermore, the influence of the energies allows for those creatures to migrate to Earth, lending credence to the ancient myth of dragons.

In Modern-Day Mythica, dragons are pivotal characters, striving to reach the cool blue comfort of Earth once again. But they were banished long ago, by means of a spell woven by a man, using the inherent energies of their home moon itself. For thousands of years the dragons have been seeking to undo what was done, and once were able to expose a rift between Earth and the realm to which their moon had been banished. This rift allowed the energies of the moon to once again enter Earth’s atmosphere, forming the Wash, and enabling magic within its borders.

This work is unpublished and unagented, although it is under consideration at this time. Read the first five chapters here.
Crappy cover art was contrived by myself, with a ganked photograph from here (the cover art is crappy, but the photo is pretty cool).

Thanks to the internet connecting all of the great social tribes together we’re re-entering a “storytelling age,” where authenticity, experience and the ability to communicate ideas in a compelling manner matter more than the authoritarian mono-culture sponsored by corporate America. Those of us who can adapt to this new world - the creatives, the visionaries, we who would have been Skalds, Bards and Troubadours a few centuries ago - will thrive, assuming our place by the fire and our rightful position of importance in the new global tribe.

And blogs will be the campfires around which we huddle for stories, warmth and grog. Or ale. Depending.

Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president

And if you read that within the context, understanding that Clark was asked about how Senator McCain’s national security policies might be influenced by his military service, you realize two things:

1. General Wesley Clark is a stooge for the Democratic party.
2. General Wesley Clark is an asshole.

For starters, Clark has an opportunity in this interview to take the high road, but makes it abundantly clear that he is in this game only to smear the McCain camp as much as he can. Especially when you consider that his argument against McCain began with “in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk, it’s a matter of gauging your opponents and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions.” To which an open-minded observer might ask: And Obama has? And that is the point: taking every chance to smear the opponent. Thankfully, the interviewer noted the remark and added, “I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean…” To which Clark has to crawfish, saying, “But Barack is not–he is not running on the fact that he has made these national security pronouncements, he’s running on his other strengths. He’s running on the strengths of character, on the strengths of his communication skills, on the strengths of his judgment, and those are qualities that we seek in our national leadership.”

To Senator Obama’s immense credit, he’s distanced himself from the statement. His campaign spokesman said: “Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain’s service, and of course he rejects yesterday’s statement by General Clark.”

In the end, I can only observe that Clark has done no harm to the McCain camp, and no good for the Obama camp. He’s only proven two things, and I listed those above.

“We’re already in lousy shape,” I replied. “And you can blame that on Bush.”

Surprisingly, he nodded at that. I couldn’t really believe he was agreeing with me, I thought I was traipsing way out on a limb, but evidently it’s more commonly accepted that W has placed a noose around all our necks than I’d thought. Even among my fellow Alabamians.

“But it’ll get worse if Obama is elected,” he said.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“You just watch, if he gets elected, he’s going to give that preacher of his a job in his cabinet. Maybe even Secretary of State.”

Whoa, was he talking about Jeremiah Wright, the controversial reverend who Obama’s publicly disassociated himself with? “But he denounced that preacher,” I said. “Publicly.”

He nodded, knowingly, with his smug expression, as if he had all the answers in the world, and said, “You just wait and see if he doesn’t. He’s going to side with the Muslims.”

At this point everything kind of happened in a blur. I accused him of slander. I reminded him that his beloved Ronald Wilson Reagan was predicted to be the anti-Christ at one point early in his presidency because he had six letters in each of his three names, which made it obvious to some people that he was from the devil. I told him I wasn’t convinced who I was voting for, but it damn sure wasn’t going to be based on the information I’d gathered from the Bubba crowd of ill-wishers who think the country has to be run by a Republican or it’s going to go up in flames, especially when it is, right now, in as bad a shape as it’s been in since the Great Depression, and it was a Republican who drove it into the fire. I also told him that I was convinced that the good ol’ boy network wasn’t going to vote for him because he’s black, and that they’ll do anything to sabotage his campaign, even resorting to petty slander and baseless character defamation when they’ve got nothing solid to use.

At that point my mother told me I needed to calm down a little bit. And I realized I was raving, and I regretted it immensely. This is exactly why I don’t like to talk politics, I thought, but it was too late, I’d already accused my step dad, essentially, of belonging to a racist Bubba faction of conservative politics. Things got really quiet for several long minutes. And then my step dad said, quietly, “You know, I would have voted for Colin Powell if he’d run.” And of course he would have, because Powell would have run on the right ticket. He couldn’t be evil because he isn’t a liberal. I pointed out, politely, that Powell’s politics were a lot less conservative than most Republicans and left it at that.

Down here, people pick their political parties like they pick their trucks, or their favorite sports team: Ford or Chevy, Republican or Democrat, Alabama or Auburn, and they support them no matter what. It’s a marriage of sorts, and it’s intended by God (obviously) to last one’s entire life, no questions asked, right or wrong. Even the Democrats vote blindly for their party, as I’m sure most of the country does, too. And that’s the biggest problem I have with the two-party system. People want their team to win, and even if the other party has a vastly, obviously superior candidate, they’ll still vote in their dumdum, just because they want their party to win. And if they lose, they’ll never be convinced that the president will ever do anything worth doing. They just criticize, non-stop, in hopes of getting their team’s candidate elected the next time. It is for that reason alone that I will not claim a party. I will try my best to look through the party lines, to see where they stand on actual issues that I care about and then vote for them. And I am sick to death of hearing the one side slander Obama and the other side slander McCain. It’s almost impossible to know what any candidate actually believes and stands for, because there’s always going to be one faction who’s convinced that the opposing candidate is the enemy and must be slandered at all cost. I hardly ever hear anyone touting their own favorite candidate, giving me their policies and positions, I just hear people trying to rub dirt onto the candidate they’re not supporting. My policy is simple: If you begin talking politics and say anything negative, I will shut down and not listen to anything you say. Give me the good of any and all sides and I’ll be raptly paying attention, with genuine interest, and I’ll let you know what I think when you’re done. This goes for all you candidates, too: smear campaigns do nothing for me. I won’t listen to them.

Politics suck; God bless America; Roll Tide!

It occurred to me later that, before Lay Dam was built, this spot would have been a hill, not an island, possibly overlooking the river, which would have been narrow and fast in those days, and of course it would have been densely wooded. I wonder what it would be like to step foot on that island. Sure, there’d be a mass of guano probably, but what else? Might there be any mammals living on so small a piece of land? I dread to think it might also be a nesting spot for cottonmouths, which is entirely possible. But what else? Might it have once been a burial ground for the indigenous Creek Indians who lived around this area? I’ve found several spots around that area (which is where I grew up) where arrowheads could be found by the handful. Has anyone else ever decided to try to walk out on that island? I have no idea, I just know it was wonderful, and beautiful, and I want to go back again (and take my camera this time!).

Photo by mikebaird.