coming in October (Patreon)

Another small anthology. Patreon folks will have heard one of these tales before—'A Bitter Pill'—but the others should be new to you.

Art by S. Patrick Brown, https://www.instagram.com/scalawagarts/ 

A few more origin notes while they're fresh in my mind...

pride – Outside of ‘staircase,’ I’ve never gotten as many emails about a story as I did with this one, which I found really surprising. I did have a lot of fun writing the antihero's stream-of-consciousness venom, and I wound up cutting out a fair bit of it so the story, which had gotten crazy long, could actually stay on track. How the hell ‘pride’ ballooned up to 90 minutes I’m not sure, because the central idea felt like it was going to take up about 45. It came to me after hearing a funny/tragic song called "Johnny Mathis' Feet" by the band American Music Club, about a guy at the end of his rope who pleads with the legendary singer to critique his songs. Great lyrics from that song's beginning:

I lay all my songs at Johnny Mathis' feet
I said, "Johnny tell me,
can you tell me how to live?
All my hopes are unraveling, and I just lost my lease
on my house without love, doors, or windows
without peace.

And with a wave of his jewel-encrusted hand
across the glittering Las Vegas scene, he said,
"You gotta learn how to disappear in the silk and amphetamine."

I think that big icky ending was likely inspired by a stretch of re-watching a string of early David Cronenberg movies, the ones that built up to a ghastly display of body horror. In the first two drafts, that final attack took place not in front of a concert crowd but while the band played at the original lead guitarist’s wedding. That just didn’t feel big enough somehow considering the story had so outgrown its original size, so into a real concert venue it went.

The band name Waters Blue and Permanent, which is only mentioned in the show notes, not the story itself, is taken from Louise Gluck’s poem The Drowned Children.

D.N.K. – Last year some dude at the AT&T store pitched me a deal for unlimited phone data. Unlimited phone data! I still think this was too good to be true, but he assured me it was only such-and-such a month as opposed to what I was already paying, and the temptation to strut around town listening to YouTube videos in my headphones was too powerful to resist. I soon discovered that people have uploaded lots of director commentary tracks originally recorded to DVD, and I got into those on long drives. Sometimes it was especially interesting to listen to one if I hadn’t even seen the movie. I got this mental image of a director all alone in the dark leaning forward and taking the audience through a scene, his description so vivid that the visuals wouldn’t even be necessary. It all aligned nicely with the perennial question: “How can an audio story be told in a way beyond the usual?”

My mind having already been clogged with memories of dozens upon dozens of true crime documentaries—including some featuring the unwelcome interjection of an overeager director into their own film—it was a short jump to a monster story. I plucked the central spine of the tale from a film treatment someone asked me to write as a favor about 15 years ago and which was never actually used for anything that I know of. The original treatment I wrote was about, yes, a school shooting. I did my best to strip that vibe away from ‘D.N.K.’ as much as I could, but of course, living in the world we now live in, that specter can’t help but sadly infect the story. Bad enough we have ‘outcast’ floating out there.

cleanse – There I was in the shower, lathering, rinsing, but not repeating, when I began to wonder why certain obligatory rituals don’t simply drive us utterly mad. Taking out the trash, for example, or trimming your toenails. You can look at these endless commitments as the harmless mileposts of daily life… or you can look at them as aggravating mini-prisons that will never, ever let us go, and freak out accordingly. The dark crimson king of them all to me is laundry, an expensive, messy, bulky, time-consuming, and (if you don’t have your own washer/dryer) labor- and travel-intensive task that is impossible to ever escape.

I began to wonder if a seemingly innocuous obligation like that could form the basis of true fixation, and later, maybe, insanity as its metaphors swallow up the mind of someone very disturbed—I’m not much on fancypants symbolism, but I think when Randall looks at the piles of clothes in his bathroom, he’s really looking at all the dirty agonies and indignities that have backed up in his own mind beyond the point of no return. It seemed to me that such a story could be fairly funny in a grim sort of way… until, in the case of ‘cleanse,’ we remember that the narrator is telling his tale not from a world where stained socks are actually killing people, but from a prison cell. Then, to me, it gets a little disturbing.

I won’t soon forget my hour of making audio recordings of a dryer in action, putting various types of loads and then various objects into it to try to get the strangest sound which could then be manipulated on the computer into something really weird and echoey for use as an occasional background track in the story… but in the end, adding that track pushed things too much toward funny and too far away from creepy, so into my PC’s recycle bin it went.

P.S. Someone told me recently that one of the things they’d stopped buying during inflation was fabric softener, something I have never voluntarily used once in my life. I’m working on inventing a similar concept but as a post- brushing-and-flossing treatment. You toss a little piece of dissolvable fabric in your mouth and it makes your teeth and gums feel “soft.” I have the commercials written already. Minimum buy-in to invest is $100,000; who’s in?