Tag: New Orleans

I’m A Ramblin’ Man

And here we are, heading back into a Monday and a brand new work week. My supervisor is currently enjoying herself in London for the next two weeks, which makes me the go-to guy for all things testing related and for my program. It may be stressful and exhausting, or it could be totally smooth sailing. I’m also meeting Dad this weekend in Alabama. I’ll have to pick out a horror novel to listen to in the car….I suppose I could continue listening to the podcast I’m thoroughly enjoying, My Dad Wrote a Porno, but probably will go with a book. I’m going to take a week off later in the month and go up to Kentucky–which means more books to listen to.

It was, in some ways, a rejuvenating kind of weekend; I rested a lot Friday evening and Saturday, and as such, felt good yesterday. It was also a lovely day in New Orleans; I walked around the neighborhood to take pictures of the aftermath of a fire the other night just past the corner of Magazine and Hastings1 (she was renting one of the places for Mardi Gras, and had to find another place, obviously), then walked back home, got in the car because I needed gas, and after fueling her up I went to the Fresh Market. Paul was working with his trainer, and once he got back from the gym we watched two movies–The Fall Guy, which we really enjoyed and was a rather fun, charming movie (you can never go wrong with Emily Blunt, and Ryan Gosling was goofily adorable the way he always is) that had a truly terrific supporting cast as well, including Hannah Waddingham, and a true crime documentary that wasn’t good. I slept really well last night, too, and feel pretty good already this morning. I didn’t do much work on the book this weekend, but I did finish marking up the Scotty books, so that’s done. I also had another idea about structure with this book, which is going to be tricky from hereon out to pull off, but I think I can do it, and that’s a very good thing. I also managed to finally finish my blog entry review of Alison Gaylin’s We Are Watching, but you should have know that already if you stop by regularly. I also didn’t read much this weekend, either; it was more about recovery and rest this past weekend than anything else.

I am, by the way, loving the weather. It’s been so beautiful lately, other than the soggy mess that was Friday, which kicked my sinuses into gear, which was partly why I didn’t get anything done. I need to be more careful of my time, though. I’ve gotten so used to spending the weekend recovering from the week and losing track of time (because I feel like I have so much of it every week when Friday rolls around), so should probably start trying to structure the weekends more so I can get things done. I’d forgotten that when you have more free time you need to structure it a little better–but it’s kind of fun just doing what I want when I want to, I must say. I have to get used to this free time thing, and what a horrible problem for me to have, right? There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious, after all–as long as you don’t let your failure to meet goals (from being lazy and having too much free time) affect your self-worth and stop belittling/demeaning myself. I’ve done pretty well for myself as a writer, overall, and considering I did it all mostly on my own–that’s saying something.

I think one of the most important things for me going forward is to cure myself of Imposter Syndrome; I know I’ve talked about how I was raised and how I was taught to be about work–keep your ego out of it2 and let others see the work you do and let them appreciate it. The problem is people never like to let a writer know they enjoyed something–but they do know how to register an outraged opinion. I do the best I can with everything I write, and if I am a better writer than I was twenty-five years ago, good. (I must confess, revisiting Scotty to do the Bible was a pleasant surprise, as the books are actually good.) I also know that there’s nothing I can’t do or achieve if I set my mind to it and plan and stick to it. I did think a lot about writing this weekend–and what are the things I want to write and do over the next few years. It’s so lovely being clear-headed, seriously–you have no idea. The fog is clearing! I feel like GREG again for the first time in nearly a decade. And I’m kind of excited about it, if that makes sense? For example, I saw a news story the other day that gave me not only an insight but a clue to how to fix “Festival of the Redeemer”; that will be fun to rewrite and fix. I also had some thoughts and ideas for Never Kiss a Stranger, Muscles, Chlorine, and the next Scotty–French Quarter Flambeaux, another Mardi Gras novel. I had hoped to revise a short story for a submission call that’s due on the 15th, but I don’t think I’ll have the time to get something ready for it. I do have a story that might fit and needs resolution in a revision, though. There’s still time, of course, but I am not writing as fast as I used to be able to do. Maybe once the muscles get more warmed up? One never knows, does one?

I just saw the Milton forecast, which has me worried and concerned for my central Florida peeps. Take care and be safe, everyone!

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great day–may be back later!

  1. If you’re a local and don’t know where Hastings is, you’re not alone. I didn’t, either, until she stayed there on a visit sometime in the last few years. It’s one of those little streets in the lower Garden District that only exist for a block or so. It also joins into the intersection at Magazine and Felicity; there are two lanes that veer off to the right to stay on Magazine, and if you veer left you can go down the one block of Hastings. It creates a pie-shaped block that comes to a point at the intersection, and there’s a small park there, and Gris-Gris restaurant is on both Hastings on one side and Magazine on the other. ↩︎
  2. I have a very strong and powerful ego, don’t ever be fooled into thinking I don’t. Knowing how bad it can be is why I go to such an opposite extreme; I don’t like egomaniacal authors who think everything they write is deathless prose that will live for a thousand years–um, you ain’t Homer, dude. ↩︎

I Overlooked an Orchid

Wednesday and we’ve almost made it over the hump preparatory to sliding into the weekend. I was fatigued last night after I got home from work, so didn’t do a whole lot of anything. I picked up my new desk chair from Office Depot, than got really irritated trying to assemble it and gave up for the night. (I also realized I didn’t take my medications yesterday morning when I found them in my backpack, because of course I forgot to take them.) It’s also really amazing that I can tell that I haven’t taken anxiety medication. I didn’t want to watch the debate last night because I despise the Couchfucker so much I can’t even stand the sound of his voice. It’s been nice shielding myself from the election and all the insanity, dabbling in whenever I feel I can stand it (and I never can, for very long; can we sue the legacy media for malpractice?). How anxious and stressed about the election would I be were I not on these marvelous new medications? I don’t even want to think about it, honestly. Paul didn’t get home until after I went to bed–board meeting–and so I didn’t do a lot of anything last night other than play with Sparky and fall asleep in my easy chair–which was interesting, because I woke up several times during the night but feel strangely rested this morning? My new shoes will arrive tomorrow, and some other things I ordered will be arriving over the next few days (including the new Lev Rosen!!!) Such an exciting life, isn’t it?

But tonight when I get home from work I hope to get going on the next chapter of the Scotty, and maybe start marking up those last two Scotty books for the Bible. I’m almost done with it; three more books to add to it, and then I just need to do the synopses of each book and it’ll be finished. I want to release a Scotty every year until the series runs out of steam; I know there are going to be at least two more beyond this one.

The dockworkers in New Orleans are part of the bigger strike. When I was driving home from work the other night and stopped at the grocery store, on my way home I had to drive past their headquarters (corner of Louisiana and Tchoupitoulas) and they were out in force; the street was clogged with parked cars and dockworkers walking to the building. Sigh. Prepare for the cost of bananas and coffee to skyrocket. New Orleans used to be the country’s biggest port; 60% of imports and exports came through the port of New Orleans. It’s not that huge of a port in the overall scheme of things now, but it’s still an important one, which is why New Orleans has to exist. Losing New Orleans to a hurricane and not rebuilding would close the entire Mississippi River waterways to shipping. New Orleans is the city that has to be. I don’t know why that’s so hard for people to understand, but I for one will never forget nor forgive the Republican Party for trying so hard to not help the city rebuild after Katrina–or some of the things the trash had to say, including the only Speaker of the House to go to jail for raping children, Dennis Hastert.1

I do feel pretty good this morning; surprisingly, given the off-and-on sleep I had last night. The one nice thing about it was I did discover that Sparky does indeed sleep at the foot of the bed, down near our feet and in between mine and Paul’s. That’s also the spot on the bed where he sleeps if he gets in the bed during the daytime, so I have to assume that, in his kitty brain, is his spot. He does have his own peculiarities, as do all cats, and he certainly loves to ride on my shoulders. Just mine–not Paul’s.

So, tonight I hope to have energy when I get home. I am going to run by the post office on the way home tonight–and once I get home, I need to do a load of laundry and another sink full of dishes, and hopefully write for a bit and/or read; we also have some shows to catch up on, and I believe a new Agatha All Along drops today? I also should do some picking up and cleaning around the house, too–the old “let it go until the weekend” mentality needs to be broken once and for all. I’m usually not tired when I get home from work–yesterday was an outlier–and so I need to play with Sparky a little bit but he needs to wait for cuddle time until I have gotten some things done. Heavy sigh. I also have to go out to Metairie Saturday morning for an eye appointment; wish me luck, and I’ll probably hit a fast food drive thru on my way home.

Yikes, what a bore I am today! And that’s a lovely segue into heading into the spice mines for the rest of the day. May your day be special and bright, Constant Reader., and I’ll be back with another exciting dose of Gregalicious at some point!

  1. Never forget, they were garbage LONG before Trump. He’s simply the end result of their rotted souls and desire for power at any cost–and with our short attention span as a country, it’s easy to bemoan Trump and MAGA as the “decline” of the GOP, but the rise of a “populist” Fascist was the inevitable result of everything they started with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. They were the people who laughed about AIDS killing the right people, so why should we fund research or a cure or a preventative? Let them die, let them die, let them die! If the only candidates to vote for were Republicans, I wouldn’t vote. ↩︎

I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Only when I’m dancing do I feel this free…

I love to dance.

Really, how was there ever any doubt about my sexuality?

Well, there probably wasn’t, but I still live with the illusion that people didn’t know. It makes me happy, okay? Allow me my delusions, thank you.

I think the first time I ever danced was at a school dance when I was a sophomore. I don’t remember what the dance was for, but that was it. A friend of mine asked me to dance, and I replied, “I don’t know how” (which was true), and she laughed at me, saying, “all you have to do is move” and showed me a basic back and forth step with swinging arms that was pretty simple. “Just stay on the beat,” she advised, and I found myself losing myself on the dance floor, getting into the music, and improvising…and for the first time in my life got compliments for something. This happened again when we moved to Kansas and at my first dance there–girls couldn’t believe what a good dancer I was, and they all wanted to dance with me.

Granted, most guys were not fun to dance with, usually doing some kind of weird shuffling kind of movement that was always off-beat and looked almost painful to do. But I basically figured out the trick–moving your hips and shoulders on different beats of the music instead of together. And the more I did it, the more I loved it. Guys were also not supposed to enjoy dancing, as it wasn’t ‘manly’ or something; I don’t know, there was a lot of idiotic bullshit like that for boys when I was one. My love of dancing continued on through my twenties–there weren’t any really good clubs for dancing, gay or straight, back then–and it really wasn’t until I moved to Tampa and started going to a gay bar in Ybor City called Tracks that I really found my place in the community.

Oh, not right away. I would dance when I’d go out, but not much; I was very self-conscious, and dancing made me sweat–a lot. My hair (what was left anyway) would plaster to my scalp with sweat, my socks and shirt would be soaked through, and I really really believed I was unattractive. But when I was out on the dance floor, I didn’t really care about how I looked or if anyone was looking at me or anything other than the driving beat and cutting loose on the dance floor. I never felt tired or sore the next morning either–I always felt good after dancing all night…

….and then I lost weight and discovered the gay bars in New Orleans.

I also discovered Ecstasy, but that’s probably best handled at a different time.

Oh, how I loved coming to New Orleans to dance the night away! That was the one thing I always hated, everywhere else that I lived or visited; the night always ended with last call, sometime after midnight and always no later than three. In New Orleans, the evening ended when you were too tired and sweaty and exhausted to dance any more. I used to go dancing at least three nights per week when I lived in Tampa (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), which also continued in New Orleans. I also spent a lot of evenings in gay neighborhood bars while in Tampa–didn’t really do much of that after moving here.

There’s something about being in an altered state (of whatever kind) out on the dance floor in a sea of shirtless gay men, all dancing and having a great time, while killer music plays through the speakers, the constant thumping of the bass getting into your nervous system. There would also be a light show during the dancing, and mist sprayed down into the crowd (in the older days before I lived here, I used to think they put poppers in the mist because you could smell it…although now I’m not sure that wasn’t just from how many people were using them on the dance floor), whistles and bells and there was always some older gay hippie, shirtless with long gray hair, shaking a tambourine out there. Everyone was friendly on the dance floor, smiling and grinning and flirting and grind-dancing, and the loud music just got into your soul, making it an almost out of body experience.

I always hated that the mixes you heard in clubs were so hard to find in record shops.

And the divas we sang along to–Deborah Cox and Madonna and Celine Dion and Martha Wash and Whitney Houston and Mariah Cary, among many nameless others–I was always lip syncing when I danced, really doing drag without the make-up and costumes and wigs–music I could just get lost in for hours. On the dance floor, everything was okay and everything was going to be better and this insular all-gay world was a place where I was at peace, where I was happy, and where nothing could ever bother me.

I miss dancing, but I also am older and can’t stay up late enough to go out dancing, let alone dance for even a few hours. But dancing has always been an integral part of my gay identity, even if I don’t do it anymore. I still listen to the music I can find on Spotify or Youtube, and believe me, there’s nothing like blasting gay dance music for cleaning the house. I used to have deejays make me tapes for my aerobics classes–and the attendees always loved the music.

Are gay bars still community hubs? I honestly don’t know–but all the young gay men I work with go out to clubs, so I guess so. Maybe not as integral as when going to one actually put you at risk of being arrested, but still important.

Dancing with Myself

We interrupt your regular Gregalicious morning blog post, but your host would like to pull a title out of the air and sermonize on why he loves parade season–especially after bitching about it for the last month or so endlessly.

It’s gloomy out there this morning, and I believe there’s rain in the forecast for later today. I saw some posts yesterday on social media about contingency plans for Bacchus tonight, let me check. Okay, pleasant temps all day, rain for the next hour, and then rain again tonight around ten…when Bacchus would still be rolling. Let me check my parade app. Hmm, they show Bacchus rolling at the usual time, post Thoth. I am not going out there today–yesterday’s Iris excursion, while absolutely delightful, exhausted me to the point where I rested in my chair for the rest of the day, fatigued and aching. My stamina is down, of course, and the PT is tough and exhausting. I have PT again tomorrow morning, so I am resting today because tomorrow night is the last of my favorite parades: Orpheus. After which I will spend Fat Tuesday resting and recovering and healing from the one-two punch of parade and PT. Laissez le bon temps rouler!

Yesterday was yet another reminder of why I love Carnival, why I love parade season, and why it never gets old (though I have). It was stunningly beautiful out there at the corner, and even though I was out by myself–which almost tempted me to not go–I wasn’t really by myself. It was in the low seventies with a low cool breeze, which was lovely. I wound up being absorbed into a group of friendly young people by proximity and throw catching, and I had a lovely time. At first I primarily people-watched, and then as dance groups and marching bands started passing, I started dancing by myself…and I realized that was the cool thing about Carnival. You can dance by yourself. You can put on a costume that might reveal another layer of your true self that you usually hide from others, or one that you wear to make everyone else smile and to be fun and silly and goofy. There’s no judgement during Carnival–or there shouldn’t be, anyway–and where else in the country can you drink (I didn’t) and get a nice buzz and dance in the streets by yourself…but you’re never really by yourself because everyone else is dancing and there are no strangers during Carnival.

My first beads caught at Iris were definitely a good augury of the parade. I caught the krewe’s signature medallion beads!

My first catch were the krewe medallion beads, which was a very good omen.

It was right about this time that I started talking to a lovely older African-American couple and their differently abled son, who was very sweet. There were also some couples with small children around, which brings me to a very important rule about catching throws as a grown man out on the parade route who doesn’t have kids: if you catch anything plushie or toy-like, you always should give it to a kid. (Plus, I don’t need more of that in the house.) Also, if you and someone else catch beads at the same time, you always yield them to the person standing more forward, and if you’re standing side-by-side, I always yield to the right. If the other person yields before you attempt, then you can keep them.

Another casual observation from the route? Mom jeans, and Daisy Duke cut-off Mom jeans. are definitely back.

I had also forgotten how nice it is to just be outside during the day, dancing in the street and having fun with total strangers, while drinking and maintaining a slight buzz. I didn’t drink yesterday because it’s too rough on me now.

Another casual observation from the route: there were an awful lot of women out there in full “glam”. Many of them were young and pretty, some were older and pretty, and some had made interesting choices in clothing and make-up and hair options. I finally realized, to my delight, that they were simply costuming as The Real Housewives of Metairie.1

Despite how fatigued everything in my body feels this morning, and how late I slept, I am definitely glad I went to Iris. Scotty’s sister is in Iris, and I remembered while I was out there how Mardi Gras Mambo originally had to do with Iris, which was why the parade opens the book. Maybe the next one will be built around Iris? You never know.

And now back to our originally scheduled blog post.

  1. Society women, or even those on the edges of New Orleans society, would never stoop to a reality show. The ones in Metairie definitely would. ↩︎

Vincent

Here we are on Iris Saturday and I feel fine.

PT was hard yesterday–it keeps getting harder every time–but I got through it, did very well with it, and then walked outside, my endorphins pumping through my veins and it was simply a beautiful, sunny day in New Orleans. I picked up my prescription before PT, and got the mail afterwards before driving home down Prytania Street. I did have trouble finding a place to park on the way there, so was a few minutes late–it’s close to Napoleon and people were already camping out on the parade route for the night parades–so I was certain I wouldn’t find parking when I got home. My spot was there Thursday night when I got home, so what were the odds I’d have parade parking luck two days in a row? But lo and behold, my spot was waiting for me when I got home.

Needless to say, that also dramatically picked up my spirits! And now the car won’t move again until Monday…which begs the question, will I have parking when I get home after PT Monday morning?

I spent most of my time out on the corner Thursday night just marveling at it, the way I always do at first–so many people, so many costumes, so much partying and so much joy; how dark it is here at night, so it’s like the dark is reaching down from the sky to absorb the lights from the parade and flames of the flambeaux, and everyone is a good mood. It’s so lovely to just go out and hang with friends and neighbors and strangers. You always end up talking to total strangers and having a good time, relaxed and a slightly buzzed (some people do overdo it and become Carnival tragedies) and watchings kids tossing footballs around on the street when there’s a break between parades (or a breakdown in the parade) and of course, the marching bands are fucking amazing. I am going to write about Mardi Gras again soon, so it’s good to drink it all in again and remember fun times of past seasons.

I was too fatigued from the PT yesterday to go out there last night, so we watched LSU Gymnastics beat Georgia last night and then just relaxed for the rest of the night. I did watch the first episode of Abbott Elementary, which I really enjoyed, so we’ll continue watching that, I think. Despite a great night’s sleep, I am still feeling fatigued this morning, which means I’ll be dead tired after Iris today. We’ll see how I feel about Tucks after Iris is over. Sunday is always insane down there at the corner, so we generally skip Sundays, and then it’s Orpheus Monday.

I did get some chores done yesterday, too. I worked on the laundry room and swept the living room, got all the bedding laundered, and rested after getting my work-at-home duties completed. I think since it’s Iris Saturday, all I will do today is read and watch television or some movies or something. I did finish reading Deliberate Cruelty, so I am going to try not to start another one until all the ones I am in the middle of are complete. I also need to make a series of to-do lists: one for the apartment, one for my career, and one for my every day life. I need to snap out of the lethargy, and I really need to dive headfirst into writing again. I want to get these stories finished and I want to get back to work on the book I’m in the midst of and has been stalled for quite some time.

And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and ready for Iris to roll. See you later, Constant Reader, and may your Saturday be everything you desire in one.

Tainted Love

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment and there are six parades today (I was wrong yesterday; I substituted Alla in for Druids for last night’s parades. I told you I don’t have the schedule memorized!), which can make for a long day and of course means I can’t really go anywhere at all today as I am trapped inside the parade route. They did move them all up so they roll during the morning and afternoon (threat of heavy rains in the evening) and if I am not mistaken they have done the same tomorrow? I was too tired and was almost asleep by the time the parades got to the neighborhood last night–and slept for just over ten hours, so clearly–Gregalicious was exhausted yesterday, and then some.

I had a doctor’s appointment that went swimmingly well yesterday morning (establishing primary care with a new doctor, whom I really liked on first meeting; he had a good manner, didn’t seem distracted, and asked probing follow-up questions to things I talked about–genetic predispositions to things and so forth, and genuinely seemed interested and had suggestions and answers for me about other things. His office building also has free parking, with is also lovely. That appointment took a very long time, so I didn’t have to wait terribly long before yesterday morning’s PT…in which my therapist Jacob introduced a weight bar to the therapy, so yes, we’ve moved on from dumbbells to that, and he even found a way to make planks more painful and tiring. So after making a quick grocery run (and still forgot a few things) I managed to come home for work-at-home duties. After that was completed, I tried reading for a little while to no avail, and finally watched the LSU-Arkansas Gymnastics meet, in which LSU got back to business and scored the highest team score in LSU Gymnastics History, which was pretty awesome. After that we tried to watch an episode of Lupin but we both fell asleep, which was a shame because it looked like a really good episode.

Today I am going to do more chores and try to get some more writing and reading done. There are six (!!!) parades, all starting at about a half-hour or so of each other (9, 9:30, 10, etc.) so they should all be past by the early evening –so if I want to run an errand or we needed something, I could easily (in theory) get out of the box tonight. I don’t think we will, really–we are low on crunchy salty snacks but that’s not a tragedy or anything to really be worried or concerned about. I do want to get the dishes and kitchen done, and establish some kind of order to the house (not easy with Mr. Wants To Get In Everything running around looking for play). Yesterday afternoon Sparky managed to get to the sink counter, from there to the top of the refrigerator, and then climbed up on top of the cabinets. In my imagination I saw everything stored up there some crashing down (and there were dishes soaking in the sink, so yes, it could have proved catastrophic) but it only took about ten minutes for him to get bored up there and realize it’s a long way down and start whimpering, so I had to get the little ladder out and climb up on the counter myself so I could reach and grab him so I could get hime down. He didn’t like that, either–he was clawing and terrified until I was able to put him down on the counter so he could jump to the floor and scramble off to safety, Sigh, the adventures of Big Kitten Energy are certainly something to experience.

I don’t think I’ll skip parades entirely today–I might go out every now and then just to take some pictures, watch the marching bands, and get a sense of the crowd and the energy of this Carnival. I don’t really remember the last Carnival I attended, which was actually the 2022 one (I was gone for 2023, 2021 was cancelled and was the year of the house floats, which was so amazing and so New Orleans); but I’ve no recollection of that year’s festivities at all. Maybe I should go back and look at my blog entries for then? Maybe I don’t need to really remember it much, either. Most of my Carnival memories are those of long ago, when we also used to go out all the time and truly celebrate the season before we got too old to walk to the Quarter and come home in the cold gray foggy mornings to rest up for a while before starting all over again. Carnival really is a magical time, and all it takes it to walk down to the corner on a beautiful day and once I catch that first throw I am right back into the spirit of things.

But still too old to walk to the Quarter.

I did finally take a walk around the neighborhood last night once I was finished with work for the day. I walked for about forty minutes, just around the neighborhood and down streets I rarely, if ever, venture down. It was indeed a beautiful day, in the low seventies and sunny, and that was still the case when I went on my walk as the cops were putting up barricades and closing streets, parking spaces disappearing throughout the neighborhood as people parked and walked over to the Avenue in their festive garb with coolers and rolling carts filled with food and ice and alcohol, boas were everywhere and goofy hats and those rugby striped shirts in the Carnival colors of purple, gold and green. But the end result of that unexpected exercise is tired legs and a sore lower back this morning (which could also have been from the PT as well) so I am going to just relax for a bit this morning and do some reading as I finish my coffee. There’s always FOMO involved in skipping parades–and the neighborhood did smell like grease and peppers and onions last night; that particular Carnival smell that becomes hardly noticeable by the second weekend, as the trees along the Avenue become festooned with sparking strings of beads in every color imaginable. Fences, porches and railings spring beads like crepe myrtles erupt with blossoms every spring.

There’s a winsome magic about Carnival, so that as it progresses you grow less frustrated with the parade traffic and the difficulty finding a place to park at home and the crowds of people and the trash growing exponentially on your street. Even just now typing all of this I’ve started thinking oh you can spend the afternoon out there which is, in and itself, the mentality that leads to pure exhaustion.

And on that note, I am going to my easy chair to read and swill coffee for a moment or two. Have a lovely Saturday wherever you are, and remember–it’s Carnival in New Orleans, so celebrate a bit for us. You’re allowed.

If Anyone Falls

I finished reading the new Megan Abbott novel, Beware the Woman, this morning during a marvelous, raging thunderstorm that filled the gutters and streets of New Orleans with dirty swirling water, cutting the temperature to something bearable for once this summer and cooling the interior of my apartment to the point I needed to put on a sweatshirt and a knit cap on my head. Curled under a blanket with a good book while a thunderstorm rages with a warm cup of coffee on the side table, tendrils of steam rising in curly-cues of white from the creamer-lightened pool of soft brown, is perhaps my happiest of places.

Hell, reading anything new by Megan Abbott is my happiest of places.

My first Megan Abbott novel was Bury Me Deep, which stunned me with its craftsmanship, its voice, its literate choices of words and sentences structures that are short yet lyrical, minimalist strokes painting a broad canvas of human frailty and contradiction, crime and desire that comes from a primal place within, almost inexplicable and unexplainable yet so easily understandable and recognizable. I went on from there to Dare Me and the rest of her all-too-short canon; admiring, loving, respecting and enjoying each book with its magical spell woven by a true master of the literary form, astonishing in its humanity and an exploration of what lengths her characters will go to in order to get the thing (or things) they want, need, desire and hunger for.

Some of the earlier reviews I saw for Beware the Woman painted some parallels between the book and what is perhaps my favorite novel of all time, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier…which had me intrigued and interested even more than usual.

But more on that later.

“We should go back,” he said suddenly, shaking me out of sleep.

“What?” I whispered, huddled under the thin bedspread at the motor inn, the air conditioner stuck on HI. “What did you say?”

“We should turn around and go back.”

“Go back?” I was trying to see his face in the narrow band of light through the stiff crackling curtains, the gap between every motel curtain ever. “We’re only a few hours away.”

“We should go back and just explain it wasn’t a good time. Not with the baby coming.”

His voice was funny, strained from the AC, the detergent haze of the room.

I propped myself up on my elbows, shaking off the bleary weirdness.

We’d driven all day. In my head, in my chest, we were still driving, the road buzzing beneath us, my feet shaking, cramped, over the gas.

Our main character here is Jacy Ashe, a pregnant wife in her early thirties, married to a neon sign artist, Jed, and working as an elementary school teacher. They are en route when the story opens to the remote upper peninsula of Michigan (primarily known to me from Steve Hamilton’s novels) to visit Jed’s retired doctor father, who lives up there in what used to be the family summer place, with his housekeeper, Mrs. Brandt. This is one of the classic set-ups of one of my favorite subgenres of crime fiction–the Gothic–as well as placing it strongly into another category I love, domestic suspense. This novel has echoes of du Maurier, Phyllis A. Whitney, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Margaret Millar…blended seamlessly together into a classic yet modern novel that updates and reinvigorates both subgenres, bringing them into the modern era and proving they are still just as relevant and important as they have ever been.

(Aside: I do not know where Abbott came up with the name “Jacy,” but it’s one I’ve always liked and wanted to use in my own work since first reading Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show and seeing the Bogdonovich film based on it; I smiled and wondered if that was where Abbott got the unusual name from.)

The Gothic set-up is there, and I can also see the slight echoes from Rebecca: the brooding remote house in the country where tragedy has occurred in the past; the mysterious housekeeper who doesn’t seem to like our heroine very much; the slow-burn of slow revelations of secrets from the past; and the creeping paranoia and potential gaslighting of Jacy…often explained away as her pregnancy hormones or a reaction to the medications after she has a pregnancy complication. One of the strengths of Gothics, for me, is that question of paranoia vs. reality; the gaslighting that is always a hallmark of a Gothic novel. After all, what reason could either Jacy’s father-in-law or husband have for wanting to drive her mad and risking her baby’s health and well-being? She feels her husband slipping away from her and no one seems to believe her…this is probably one of the best depictions of a paranoid pregnant woman in literature since at least Rosemary’s Baby.

Someone once said the Gothic and domestic suspense novels were “women’s noir,” because the danger to them always arose from them being women and doing women’s things; a reaction to the terror of getting married and placing (until very recently) all of your agency into the hands of your husband–and what if you chose poorly?

Abbott takes the best elements of noir and combines them with the foundations of domestic suspense and Gothic to explore what it is like to be a woman, how it is to be a woman, and the trap of societal and cultural expectations for women.

And there’s a reason why the cops always look at the husband first when a woman is killed.

This is a brilliant novel, with many layers to unpack and unravel through its deceptively simple voice and brevity of language. Megan Abbott is a sorceress, a Scheherazade of crime fiction to whom you simply cannot stop listening. Read it, cherish it, love it.

Absolutely Fabulous

I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend Nancy Garden lately.

Nancy was seventy-six when she passed in 2014, and I’m still not used to living in a world without Nancy in it. She was wonderful, and one of the most kind people I’ve ever known. She was a small woman with an enormous heart, and she wrote books for children and young adults. Much to my own shame, I didn’t know anything about Nancy until I reviewed her book The Year They Burned the Books for Impact News here in New Orleans. It was a riveting account of censorious parents gone wild, demanding books be removed from schools and libraries; led by a zealot, they even burned the books in a bonfire, The book was told from the perspective of a group of teenaged friends, some of whom were questioning their sexualities (and gender identities) who were outraged and fought back. The kids triumphed in the end, and the book was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

But the thing that came out of this read that was transformational for me was reading in the press release that the book was based on real events…and then I wanted to know more.

What happened was Nancy had written a young adult novel in 1982 called Annie on My Mind, which was one of the first young adult romance novels to focus on two teenaged girls falling in love. Intrigued, I got a copy and read it…and loved it. It’s such a beautiful, heartfelt and emotional story, so gorgeously written…the thought that anyone could have objected to this book was, frankly, offensive to me. I started digging around to find out more. It was a suburban Kansas City school district that banned Annie for obscenity; and yes, the angry parents’ group burned the books. In 1992. (Thirty years later and here we are again.) The students and the ACLU sued to get the book back, and it went to trial. Annie and the First Amendment won that fight, but listening to Nancy tell the story about the trial, and being cross-examined–and the scope the judge allowed in her cross–was horrifying to me. Nancy met and fell in love with her partner when they were in college. They were still together when Nancy passed. A long-term, completely monogamous and loving same sex marriage any straight couple would envy…and she had to answer questions about her morality; her sex life; how many partners had she had during the course of her life; what they did in bed together–intimate, private details that had nothing to do with whether the book was obscene but effectively dehumanized Nancy, her partner, and their relationship for the court record.

I read from Annie on My Mind when I participated in my first ever Banned Books Reading, at the House of Blues in 2006. They’d invited me because I had been banned a few years earlier (hello, Virginia!), and I decided to honor Nancy by reading from her book that was actually burned because the one person and the one thing that kept me sane during that entire Virginia situation was Nancy. When it first happened, Nancy called me immediately as soon as she knew. Being the self-absorbed person that I am (that most authors are), I was freaking out for any number of reasons, but it was personal. Talking to Nancy on the phone made me realize that the principle at stake here wasn’t me or my career, but the kids at the school and the queer kids in the area. I had to remove myself and my personal feelings from the situation and look at it in a more broader sense; ignoring it or doing nothing was cowardly. I never wanted to be an activist, really, but there are times…when you don’t have a choice. (I will write more about that incident at another time.)

And whenever I went to the dark side while all of that was going on, all I ever had to do was email or call Nancy. What she went through was so much worse than what I did; I cannot imagine the horror of seeing your own books being burned by zealots, nor being forced to testify in court about the private, most intimate moments of my life.

And maybe, just maybe, for Pride you might want to give Annie on my Mind a look-see? You can order it here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/annie-on-my-mind-nancy-garden/10375680?ean=9780374400118.

Thanks, Nancy. I wish you were still with us to provide wise counsel and advice to us as we battle the latest wave of homophobic banners and censors. But I’m also glad you didn’t live to see have to fight this tiresome battle yet again. Thanks for everything, my friend. I miss you.

I Don’t Know Why

Wednesday Pay-the-Bills Day has rolled around again, and my goodness, do I have a lot of bills to pay, YIKES. But with another six thousand word push yesterday, the draft is done. All I need to do now is pull it all together into one document, write the explanatory apologetic email about the mess and how I am going to fix it, and send it off and all is finished–for now. But I know it’s going to be a great book once I tie up all the threads, add in the back story and character development it needs, and I think it’s going to be super awesome when it’s done. Yay! I love creating, I really do, and I actually enjoy the writing.

Well, until I hear back from my editor, at any rate.

I finally started listening to Taylor Swift’s latest album, Midnights, and I have to say, I really like it. I’d always liked her–some of the songs I knew I liked, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention to her or her music. Spotify changed that, and I really have been impressed not only with the quality of her music but how different it all is; not to mention the evolution from teen country star to major world pop superstar. (“Red” is still my favorite song of hers, probably always will be.) I find that putting her albums on continual play on Spotify is really great when it comes to cleaning things or doing the dishes and things like that. (Back when I first started writing I always would put three Madonna CD’s in the CD changer and hit shuffle and would start writing. I should go back to that, really.) I had a lot of chores to get done last night around my writing–unloading the dishwasher and doing another load; cleaning the counters and organizing the office area, etc.–but I do like having those opportunities to take a break from the writing to clear my head and see what comes to me while my hands are focused on something mindless and music streams through my ear buds.

I really do like writing, y’all.

I still have a lot of work to do on the manuscripts I’ve written the last couple of months, but it’s nice to have workable, fixable drafts in place; that’s always the hardest part for me, and the ability to focus on the writing without having to worry about anything else outside of my job and whether the books are selling is kind of nice, actually. I think it’s part of the reason why I’m calmer every day, don’t get my anxiety going, and don’t get stressed. I was irritated when I got home Monday–because I knew I had writing to get done, and I had errands to run which seemed to take much longer than anything had any need to take (don’t even get me started on the hell making groceries has turned into since the pandemic started) but once I was home and had everything under control and could sit down and pound away at the keyboard for a while, after which I was finally completely and totally relaxed for the evening. And of course, last night after a very productive day at work in which I got all of my day job responsibilities finished and caught up (huzzah!), I came home and wrote while doing those odious seeming chores that I always wind up enjoying. And Paul didn’t come home until after I’d gone to bed, so there were no distractions for me, but I would have loved to have watched another episode of The Recruit. I don’t like it when Paul comes home that late because I don’t see him for that day (I leave long before he gets up in the morning; which is another reason I hate working these shifts; I like when Paul and I work basically the same schedule.

It’s going to be warm and rainy today, which means I’ll be wearing a sweatshirt to work underneath my Crescent Care T-shirt; it was freezing in the office yesterday; last week the heat was on, but the weather changed, and they finally turned on the air conditioning I guess on Friday (it had been insanely warm in the office all week) and so yesterday it felt like the frozen tundra of the great white north in the office, which of course meant I was pretty much miserable the entire day there. But I was productive and got all my work caught up; today of course is the first which means all kinds of things for me to do this morning; pulling logs and forms for the month, putting out new ones for the new month and so forth, and of course seeing my clients.

After talking about them negatively yesterday, I do feel I need to thank the Horror Writers’ Association, which quickly moved to ban the incredibly insulting member from all their events and kicked him out of the organization. I had mentioned that I had left the organization a while back because one I’m not really a horror writer, and second because I felt that the organization had a ways to go as far as being welcoming to the non-white non-straight part of the community–I had been made to not feel welcome when I actually chaired World Horror Con in New Orleans, and while I didn’t have quite the same experience when I went to Las Vegas…there were enough little things to make me decide that my money and time were better spent in the mystery community, and that’s what I’ve done. I returned in December for some reason or another–I think they sent me a really nice “we want you back” email–and to be honest, this whole mess over the last week or so kind of had me thinking I’d made the wrong decision in coming back. But the swift movement of the HWA board of trustees over this matter was heartening, and while I have no intention of volunteering for anything any time soon for anyone or anywhere, I do not regret my decision. (I am also remembering that the community is also cantankerous and there are all kinds of feuds and things–long-time long-held grudges and so forth, which isn’t fun to navigate in trying to remember who doesn’t like who and so on; I usually don’t care or pay attention to such things and generally remain neutral because I don’t know the people well enough to have an opinion one way or the other.)

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday Pay-the-Bills Day, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow morning.

Black and White

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I saw Robert Wise’s film The Haunting; all I do remember was it was late at night–in Chicago, one (maybe more) of the local affiliates always ran films after the news at 10:30; they also ran afternoon movies at 3:30 Monday thru Friday–which is where I got most of my education in classic Hollywood movies. But The Haunting was probably the most terrifying movie I’d ever seen; it wasn’t until a rewatch later in my life that I realized that perhaps the most terrifying and unsettling thing about the movie was you never saw whatever it was that was creating the happenings at Hill House–and they were never really explained, either. I had nightmares after watching it the first time, and those nightmares became recurring. To this day I am not comfortable climbing a metal spiral staircase…

One afternoon when we were at Zayre’s for whatever reason–we went there almost weekly, although I am not sure why–I found a copy of Hell House by Richard Matheson on the paperback racks. It sounded, from reading the back, similar to the movie that had scared me so when I was younger, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the movie was taken from the book? I bought it and read it–loved it, in fact–but while it was similar to the story of The Haunting, it was also different enough for me to be certain they weren’t the same. (Hell House was filmed actually as The Legend of Hell House, which was also a terrifying film–more on that later). It wasn’t until years later, when I was in a used bookstore in Emporia, that I stumbled across this:

It was only a quarter, and looking at the back I recognized the characters–Nell, Theo, Dr. Montague, Luke–and of course, the name of the haunted house–Hill House. I bought it and a couple of others, and I started reading at the first opportunity, and was completely mesmerized. It quickly became one of my favorite novels of all time–I already knew Jackson’s story “The Lottery”, because at some point in school I’d been shown the film (why was this appropriate school viewing? Imagine trying to show it to students today!) and in a Drama class we’d actually read the stage adaptation and even put it on for the school (I think I had one line in our production?). Reading Stephen King’s Danse Macabre also told me more about both Jackson’s writing and the Robert Wise directed film, which was my first exposure to Julie Harris; I also remembered that the opening of Jackson’s novel was used by King as an epigram in ‘salem’s Lot; he also dedicated a book to her “because she never had to raise her voice,” which is a very poetic way to describe the softly macabre writing style and voice she used in her works. I lost my original copy at some point during moves over the years, and I acquired another copy after we returned to New Orleans in 2001 from our brief, preferably forgotten interlude in Washington DC–and have made a point to reread it every year since.

And no matter how many times I reread it, I never tire of its haunting, terrifying beauty.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Dr. John Montague was a doctor of philosophy; he had taken his degree in anthropology, feeling obscurely that in this field he might come closest to his truest vocation, the analysis of supernatural manifestations. He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education. It had cost him a good deal, in money and pride, since he was not a begging man, to rent Hill House for three months, but he expected to be compensated for his pains by the sensation following upon the publication of his definitive work on the causes and effects of psychic disturbances in a house commonly known as “haunted.” He had been looking for an honestly haunted house all his life. When he heard of Hill House he had been at first doubtful, then hopeful, then indefatigable; he was not the man to let go of Hill House once he had found it.

Dr. Montague’s intentions with regard to Hill House derived from the methods of the intrepid nineteenth-century ghost hunters; he was going to go and live in Hill House and see what happened there. It was his intention, at first, to follow the example of the anonymous Lady who went to stay at Ballechin House and ran a summer-long house party for skeptics and believers, with croquet and ghost-watching as the outstanding attractions, but skeptics, believers, and good croquet players are harder to come by today; Dr. Montague was forced to engage assistants. Perhaps the leisurely ways of Victorian life lent themselves more agreeably to the devices of psychic investigation, or perhaps the painstaking documentation of phenomena had largely gone out as a means of determining actuality; at any rate, Dr. Montague had not only to engage assistants but to search for them.

That opening paragraph alone is a masterpiece.

I parodied it for the beginning of one of my Scotty books–it gave me great pleasure to write the words New Orleans, not sane, stood by itself within its levees–and of course, this book was a pretty heavy influence on Bury Me in Shadows. The book reads almost like a fever dream, with its rhythms and poetries of language, and the story itself is as mysterious as one could possibly hope. The genius of Jackson is knowing that the biggest fear of all is the unknown; so we never know what is actually going on at Hill House–is the house actually bad, or just unlucky? The house’s history is bad and tragic from the very beginning, as we are told in Jackson’s spellbinding voice; who precisely was Hugh Crain, who built the house for his wife and family but never knew any kind of peace within its walls? What went wrong? Jackson never lets us know anything other than that the house is bad. Her primary point of view character is perhaps the must untrustworthy and unreliable of narrators, Eleanor Vance, Nell. Dr. Montague invited Nell because of a strange occurrence that happened when she was a small child; stones rained down on their house out of clear blue sky; her mother darkly blamed it on the neighbors (this also happened to Carrie White’s house when she was a little girl in Stephen King’s Carrie–in the newspaper write-up included in the book Mrs. White also blamed it on “the neighbors”), but other than that, Nell is pretty ordinary and small. She’s wasted most of her adult life taking care of her invalid mother; she’s now in her early thirties and living with her sister’s family, sleeping on the couch. She’s meek but capable of anger–she has a lot of anger and rage buried deep inside of herself–anger at the world, at the injustice of her wasted life, at the lack of a viable future; she has no prospects, no job, no friends, no nothing. The invitation to Hill House awakens a joy in her that she’s never known–she’s wanted somewhere. Her sister and brother-in-law refuse to let her take their mutual car; she gets up early and rebelliously takes the car anyway and heads to Hill House. As she drives she daydreams and observes everything along the road, making up a lovely fantasy for herself about living in a house with stone lions at the foot of the driveway; she stops for lunch and observes a little girl who refuses to drink her milk because she doesn’t have her special cup with stars on the bottom she can she as she drinks. Mentally, Nell urges the little girl not to give in, to not surrender to the injustice of not having her proper cup–as it will be the first of many surrenders of herself she’ll end up making throughout her life until she, like Nell, becomes invisible.

And then, hopeful and happy and excited, she arrives and gets her first look at Hill House:

The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.

Which then gives Jackson the opportunity, as the next chapter opens, to describe Hill House:

No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil. This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until was destroyed.

Nell’s sanity, never the strongest, is affected deeply by the house–she both hates and loves it, separate parts of her nature begging her to flee while the other telling her she’s come home, to stay. The other three in the party–Dr. Montague, Theo the lesbian with some psychic ability, and Luke, due to inherit the house one day–become aware very quickly that the house is having an odd effect on her; they also hate and fear the house, but that welcoming feeling Nell experiences, that desire to never leave, is for her and her only. The rest of the book is quietly terrifying–the noises in the night, the realization that whatever is going on in the house has a sly intelligence of a sort–and the scene where Nell is terrified in the night and holds Theo’s hand…until Theo turns on the lights and Nell realizes she was across the room so whose hand was I holding? is one of the most horrifying moments in horror fiction. And then, the chilling, tragic end.

I also always see the house the way it was shown in the movie.

I also rewatched the movie while I was rereading the novel–not the execrable remake but the original–and it holds up just as terrifying and unsettling as it was the first time. Julie Harris is fantastic as Nell, fragile and frayed and slowly unraveling; in the movie isn’t not quite as left to the viewer as it is to the reader the notion that Nell herself is the one haunting Hill House; the house gains its power through her. (This was done beautifully in the Netflix adaptation, The Haunting of Hill House, which is loosely based on the book but updated and adapted and changed significantly; I thought the series was fucking fantastic and an excellent homage to both the book and the original film. You can’t improve on what came before, so why not reinterpret it? I know Jackson purists were outraged, but having seen the dreadful 1999 remake…yeah, this wasn’t that, for sure.)

Also, because of the movie, whenever I read the book I see it in my mind in black and white. The film wouldn’t work in color, either.

If you’ve not read the book, you really should. It’s a masterpiece on every level.