coming in July (Patreon)

Let's go old-school in July, with a first-person account of something that simply cannot be. This story was inspired very suddenly by my umpteenth rewatch of Fitzcarraldo, at the end of which the main character says:

"I'll tell you a story. At the time when North America was hardly explored, one of those early French trappers went westward from Montreal... and he was the first white man to set eyes on Niagara Falls. When he returned, he told of waterfalls more vast and immense than people had ever dreamed of. But no one believed him. They thought he was a madman or a liar. They asked him, 'What's your proof?' And he answered:  'My proof is... I've seen them.'" 

For more eartime fun... Playwright Sharon Yablon recently had me play a role in a piece called 1:58 A.M. for her original audio drama collection A Garden of Terrible Blooms (www.terribleblooms.net). These are noir stories of confession, alienation, and grim humor set among the isolated and the desperate of Los Angeles. There’s more going on with sound and music and twisted psychology in each of these 15- or 20-minute dramas than in about four hours of anything else! (Especially when things get a bit spooky, and murder and madness creep in around the edges...)

On a thoroughly unrelated note: Walking around the city the other day, I encountered not one but two of the phenomena that I always find creepier than I should. The first, as I think I’ve mentioned before, was a sidewalk that took me under an overpass. It was a big one too. Everything suddenly got kind of dark and echoey and I could hear the traffic high above going THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA and I tried not to look left and right at those sloping cement borders on either side, the ones that led up to tall pillars in the shadows behind which ANYTHING could have been lurking. ANY… THING.

I made it through okay (if emotionally scarred for life), but then later on, getting toward dusk, came creepy thing #2, in an industrial part of town. You know how you’re sometimes walking behind some big nondescript building, maybe a grocery store or a lumber yard, and there’s a square cement notch cut out specifically to contain the place’s dumpsters? Usually bordered tightly on three sides? Yeah, I do not like those little… oh, let’s call them terror chambers. I mean, that fourth side is open so you could conceivably just walk up and toss your Slurpee cup in—how convenient!—but how do I know what might be hiding in the 24-inch space between the back of the dumpster and that cheap plywood wall, nice and cozy (and probably furry) in its little enclave? The sun was starting to set over the adjoining building and… no, no, no thank you. I happened to be holding the remains of an iced mocha in my hand when I went past this one, and I just kept on cruising. I carried it all the way back to my apartment because I was not about the throw that trash away inside Savage Death Space! Do I look like an idiot?!

Oh, and OK, here’s what else. Here’s what else. I live on the fifth floor, which is the top floor of the building, and there exists this Staircase of Horror that leads up to the roof. Just look at the slope on this monster:

I don’t care how bad things get; there’s no way I am climbing this to safety. Note how it's even positioned above a treacherous plummet down into the regular stairwell. Every five or ten years I have a nightmare where I’m heading to my seat at some stadium sporting event and the ascent up the aisle in the upper deck is so sharp I get absolutely terrified. This is that nightmare come to life. I am not having it!

Plainly, the older I get, the more terrified of everything I become.

Like… I sometimes wonder about… geese.

Geese.

What they’re thinking.

What they’re planning.

You know?