The Cosmic Treadmill

Catching up on lots of stuff, since my 21 Days of Night when I saw the moon, Venus, and Regulus in the at the bus stop each morning like the Three Evil Stooges. I'm posting several of the foreign edition covers I have been in. I now have Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.2 but I can only download it into French or Dutch, so again, The Computer Remains My Nemesis. Got the final FINAL proofs in for the Midnight Library edition of THE HOLY TERROR. I guess I didn't have much to say after all.

Days Gone By

My blog is like my fiction writing, I'm all over it on a daily basis for almost a week, and then radio silence The work schedule, blessedly over, is behind me, but I was caught in the mother of all rainstorms waiting in that dude with the dolphin mailbox's driveway fully expecting to be hit by lightning and with my pants slipping on my hips from the sheer weight of the water. Everybody was asking about Walking Jim, even Kate, which shows that, initially, the crime didn't even warrant the north suburban news. The police thought it was an SUV from the sheer power of the impact, but the truth was, it was a regular old Ford, but the reason the cops didn't think of a smaller car was because the asshat that killed the guy drove away with his body in the damn car. Vollmer Road is one of those diagonal cuts we have in our mostly gridlike sprawl in the city an near south suburbs, like Lincoln Avenue out by the Red Lion or Archer Avenue from downtown to out near where I live. One can assume the driver--who was driving his sister's boyfriend's car to pick her up from her job at a McDonalds--kept going down Vollmer until he recognized exactly how deserted 123rd Street can be, because there are three cemeteries pixelated between the industrial parks. Hence, the place where Walking Jim became, at least for awhile, a Hallowe'en prank. How did the driver, the sister, and the boyfriend get caught? After Jim was left to be found and matched to his leg and feet, Blue Island police got the call of a burning vehicle. The boyfriend torched his car and--in a case where blood simple becomes blood stupid--never took the license plates off. If you go to any Urban Legends site, there will always be one classified True, wether it be a hanged person or a body on the road. Dismissed, at first, as a prank, a spirit of the season. These three will not be gone from the streets for long, back in Oct 0f 97, a drunk driver severed a car in two and killed three high school girls, is now out of prison with his license permanently revoked. Having broken parole by being discovered driving, he has been sentenced back to jail for a year, although he is allowed out during the week to go to his job. In other driving news, a depressed model/stripper is on trial with pretty much everybody saying she is/was insane, because back in July of 05 she wanted to commit suicide an so drove through three stop lights in Skokie and rear-ended a car while going 90 MPH. Both cars flipped over, the three guys on their lunch break in the one car dead, and the depressed model with a broken ankle in the other. Crazy week for hit and run news and I'm just waiting for the time when, as might have happened with all the idiots driving in rush hour rainy Thursday, the next news item might catch up with me...Wayne

Walking Jim

That's what they called him, the guy who was found without his feet. He was 60, had dementia, and its almost like I wish it was a senseless murder, instead of what it was. A damn hit and run on Vollmer Road, where the feet were found. He was hit by an SUV going 50 MPH per the Medical Examiner, making it hard to define the initial severing of the flesh and bone. The SUV driver somehow grabbed Walking Jim's upper body and took him to the dead end, which is seen in the top photo. Even more sad, people driving and/or walking down Lavergne Avenue to work or lunch saw him and thought he was a Hallowe'en prank, an overturned scarecrow. He had been there three days. Darci (oh, are we still using code names?) commented that it was on the news as a car killer (my phrase). The ID was made because Jim walked down Vollmer Road most of each day, talking to himself and smoking cigarettes. I am also posting photos of others, as I did yesterday. The woman on the bench is an alcoholic, and the grey-haired woman will punch at you if she is awake and feels like lashing out at random. There's a guy in Las Vegas and one in the doorway of Toys R Us on a Sunday morning. Complete unknowns who walk the streets every day and night. At least people knew Walking Jim enough to have police looking for him, just not in the right suburb, so it took a few days...Wayne

We Interrupt This Ramble

I was going to post about other books I have been in overseas, also bring up the fact that, for the life of me, I can't figure out why "doing a Dutchie" is police slang for suicide. I see it in slang dictionaries, but with no explanation. It's like looking up "urinate"--not that I did, it was, ah, someone else--and finding the phrase "teach a Chinaman how to tap dance." But circumstances beyond my control compel me to tell you all of a tale of two severed feet. With socks on. They were found Saturday night in Matteson, somewhere south of me, the suburbs just kind of roll into each other like drunken clowns in bumper cars. But you see...last night the rest of the body was found. Within a few blocks of where I work, in yet another industrial park strip that starts over dere by the motel. On clear nights, I can see the rim of the bright pink sign as I walk that winding street towards 127th. Past the motel is a deserted strip that goes past the Onion Field restaurant, long closed, and the failing Condessa Del Mar. 123rd and Lavergne. I talked with Bart over by the DocuColor 8000 and we tried to consider the scenario of a person hoping to hide the identity of a murder victim by cutting off only his feet and taking his shoes. The person might be homeless, as you can see by my other photos (going back to 1990), there are many out of luck in the land of the free, and certainly some are complete meltdowns, but most are being fucked over by the American Dream. It is hard to understand, if the killer was startled, why did he start with the feet in the first place? It wasn't an industrial accident, and there were no railroad tracks; Bart suggested the guy might have been a train-hopper and has his feet severed and finally bled out and fell off the train in Alsip. There's a story somewhere in this tragedy. When people ask why I write what I do, I want to say "do you ever watch the farken news?" The sad thing is, this event barely made the news. A young kid was buried today, a John Doe, unidentified for two years. One in the ground, another one found. Chicago, the city that rhymes...Wayne

We Interrupt This Idiot

De Beste Horror, Wayne In Dutch

Kees Buis is one cool guy. I came across Dutch editions of Year's Best Horror while Googling images one night, and after waiting a few days to contact Kees, not certain if he was a collector or bookseller, I emailed him about the two books above and he found them in his inventory. I received them in the mail on Thursday, it was kind of neat getting mail from The Netherlands. I put together a box of signed books for Kees to mail during the coming week. I have other books I am in, French, German, and quite oddly, Danish. It is strange seeing familiar words and names. These books, the table of contents in particular, make me melancholy, as they are editions from very early in my career, 1987 and 1988. The stories were "Bleeding Between The Lines" and "The Touch." I see names of people recently dead, several gone for over a decade. Thinking about how young I was when these stories came out almost twenty years ago. Anyone who can pick up a copy of ANY edition of Year's Best Horror (published in the US by DAW) can expect to find some of the finest writing of the late twentieth century. And time goes on, keyboards clacking away, those of us who still can and still have stories to tell...Wayne