Pale Blue Dot

First off, the perigee moon that I expected not to see last night because of our cloud cover and 36 STRAIGHT HOURS OF SNOW. Twitter is great, first I met ad men, now I'm meeting astronomers. I asked Tavi Greiner--whose new website I have as a link on the left--to send a photo from Houston with a stick figure of me looking at it, but she did one better, putting my photo in the window. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN posted the version of the photo without me in it, otherwise on might think the moon was rising over an asylum. I did see the moon after all, when I took my border collie out at 2:30 AM, the snow had stopped an I could see the moon behind the clouds. Two years back, when I was working until 2 AM at the printing plant (the parking lot led to the woods which led to the Cal Sag Channel), I saw a deer at the edge of the tree line under a full moon. I'll always remember that instant.

OK, now. The Pale Blue Dot. This photo is from Astronomy Photo of The Day (APOD), the sun behind Saturn courtesy of the Cassini spacecraft. At the edge of the ring on the upper left, Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot," the Earth. Sagan had a wonderful quote that Sid Williams emailed me after 9/11 and I saw it again today when I hit one of the links on the APOD site. Here goes:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Puts everything into perspective, you know. We aren't going anyplace for awhile, if we don't go all Planet of The Apes or Soylent Green first. I may post about Earth-14 or Earth-22 (don't get me started that Marvel has about 60,000 multiversal Earths, with DC sticking with 52 for now, and yes, Bob, Mort Weisinger was the idiot savant of National Periodicals, DC's old name.) But I'm here with all you guys, friends, fans, foes, FoxNews=fatalism, Frank Miller, Finger Alley, and I have no idea why I'm stuck on the F's unless I'm maybe leading up to Full Throttle & Fuck It, which is the title of Steve Malley's blog. Yea, 6.2 billion people in a pretty small place. Carl Sagan was one cool cat.

Numbers Stations AKA What's The Frequency, Kenneth?

Well, I have been promising a post about Number Stations. The melodrama about my face falling onto a George Pelecanos novel I received from Steve Malley in New Zealand will have to wait. My postings have been erratic of late because of my book project for that publisher in New Delhi. Well, that and reading a crapload of Martian Manhunter comics. Anyways. On the television show LOST, mentioned in the last post because of my niece commenting on how I resemble the character of John Locke--as much as I resemble Colin Mochrie on WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAYS?, if you really want to take it that far--there were/are several allusions to a series of numbers and listening posts in the Pacific. I've often gone back to the numbers, as many viewers do, and I've tried to do thought experiments dealing with each individual number as a specific person on the show, like that. My thought experiments are usually directed towards my writings, i.e., the masochistic vampire who is pissed because he can't feel pain, the bulemic zombie, the hentai penguins (don't ask, don't tell), the list goes on. But back to the numbers. I was fascinated by the numbers being broadcast to listening stations and so I looked up rainbow codes, the NATO phonetic alphabet, acrophony codes, and then discovered the Conet Project. You can look this up on the Internet, but I printed out a copy at the plant and had bindery slap it together. There are hundreds of listening posts or "Shortwave Numbers Stations" around the world, but only ONE has been identified by point of origin, it's in the Czech Republic. Random examples: from Romania, 0101001010 POZOR POZOR 986, repeated in a loop. From German: Delta Foxtrot Charlie Drei Seben DFC37 repeat loop. Some numbers stations pick up music, such as a popular Hungarian song in the 60s called "Prisoner of Love." According to the book, one of the newer Numbers Stations (as of 1997) is a Magnetic Fields Station from a suspected CIA location in England or Scotland. It is related to the Hungarian station, and plays on frequencies 11290 and 6645khz. The interval signal is Jeanne Michelle Jarre's "Les Chants Magnetiques." Some numbers stations are used primarily for blocking other stations, i.e., Iran and Iraq being their usual wacky selves. Years ago, Dan Rather was bitch-slapped by a couple of guys who kept asking him what the frequency was and calling him Kenneth. Sounds like a scene out of John Keel's THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES. And there's my posting. I suspicion that many of those looped transmissions had their posts abandoned at the end of the Cold War, though I'm pretty sure that the wall radio in my bathroom is a direct feed to Donald Rumsfeld's secret hideway in the Amazon rainforest. I drive him nuts by singing "Candy Bars For Elvis" while I brush my teeth at 6 AM just to disrupt his day, particularly when I recite a string of numbers and then say spit, repeat, and continue brushing. Gotta do something to get the day going wghile the coffee is still brewing, am I right?....Wayne

My Dachsund, My Lover

Rich Chwedyk knows all too well about my vision quest for the book with that title, the one I saw in the dinky joint that sold porn novels with b&w covers and minimal art, black posters, and had a pinball arcade in back on Randolph Street back in the day. I did happen to find this odd book cover that perhaps was inspiration for Mr. Porno Writer. I also found a couple of George Orwell books with cover themes I had never been aware of, and just to prove that I wasn't Googling bestiality pulp fiction, there's that science-fiction book which, well, looks like naked ladies ashamed of doing it with the Gieko lizard family. Its almost funny--not funny ha ha, rather funny psychotic--because I am not taking my bipolar meds for three days now. I'm involved with Mike Fountain in a writing project which involves a character who is bipolar. This is a comic now in page/panel format, so I need to get it right, falling house of cards and all. So that damn cover with the dog heads look real to me, too damn real. Fuck them, though. Wait, that's how the damn subject heading came about, though I doubt weiner doggies slobber much. Ah, the meds, right. Getting back to those, it explains why I've been away visiting Earth-14 and not blogging away about hashish and blood. In the recent future, expect me to discuss determinism, hanging upside down from a fence and then falling face first onto a George Pelecanos novel that was sent to me from Steve Malley in New Zealand, the massive rainstorm I was walking in for about 90 minutes (and getting tossed around more than if I was an innocent bystander in a fight between The Flash and The Rainbow Raider), the lovely blonde pharmacist Erica who was worried that I had not picked up my Lamictal yet, and mysterious Numbers Stations and the more mysterious Conet Project...looks like I have a lot to catch you guys up on...Wayne

New Year's Ghosts of Block 37, circa 1988

I've learned long ago that I'm happier to be by myself, at least in the sense that I am not as tormented inside as I am when I'm around others. And, through this diabolical and dastardly computer, I have made friends in all corners of the world, Etain in Johannesburg, Steve in Christchurch,Kees in The Netherlands, Jaime in Tasmania (he's the guy who found a copy of my novel in a used bookstore in Sydney), and have ended the year with a comic book deal through a publisher in New Delhi. I even traveled outside of the United States for the first time in my life, going to a convention in Toronto in April. That said, as much as I'd like to visit any and all of my new friends and witness their cities and towns through their eyes and not their text, I fear that I shall always be anchored to Chicago. One block in particular, the one I centered on in the novel that Jaime bought. Block 37 is bustling these days, the Oriental building across the street displaying signs for WICKED, the studios for our CBS afilliate Channel 2 being built on the northern side of Randolph Street, where the Treasure Chest and the Burger King and my make-believe Marclinn Rainey Home For The Handicapped stood in the center of the block, where that abandoned building appears in the photos and the homeless slept atop steam vents in the winter months. The entire block was torn down in the summer of 1989 and remained empty for almost twenty years. I've yet to come up with a dedication page for the anniversary edition of THE HOLY TERROR, but I think that I'll likely have to dedicate the book to The Ghosts of Block 37.

Not Quite Midnight...

at the old printing plant in woods by the Cal Sag Channel. But I'm still somewhat fascinated by the randomness of Google Images. I did become specific this time, typing in the words "space elvis," if only because I want to one day start a sentence that reads: "Back when I was working with the Space Elvis band...". Steve posted from sunny NZ that the Google Imaging is as addictive as Mindsweeper or YouTube. Well, regarding the first, as with any game that requires hand-eye coordination, I just go holy batshit on it and I ended up clearing the screen in three seconds, something I'm certain is not possible to top, except perhaps by Bobby the Mitch...I'd actually be writing fiction if it wasn't for the machinery and the cold air and the smell of ink and three types of drunken bachelor ass...Wayne

Midnight Confessions At The Rendering Plant

Bubbly Creek, the finale of "Shank of The Night", blips of methane forever rising from carcasses of animals (and mob victims) long dead, the former throwaways from the Stockyards, long gone. But the ghosts still ripple in the waters beneath the Ashland Avenue bridge. Several times, I have taken the el here, climbed the fence illegally, and tossed my own detritus into the waters, on the many boards lining the rocky shores, seeing if the currents of the South Branch of the Chicago River would move north, south, or simply leave the tossed items doing pirouettes, like a drowned ballerina. I am cleansing my past, using two scans of items I rediscovered as I continue the decimation of my belongings. The metal object came from a Greyhound bus bathroom door; I had been traveling to Louisville to get picked up by Cousin Slick, and spent much of the latter half of the ride talking to a Cherokee fellow who was going to visit his father, a neurosurgeon, in Elizabethtown. E-town, if you are a local. We were in the aisle seats just in front of the bathroom, I opened the door and the handle fell off. We both made the appropriately shocked looks and I pocketed my interesting new item. I parted ways with the Indian, John Cloud, and went to Shelbyville to watch Katrina destroy New Orleans. I also found a Dick book I had thought borrowed and gone. Philip K. Dick was one of the finest writers alive, even though he was fucking crazy. In a good way, though, except maybe towards the end when he thought a sentient spaceship named Valis was circling the Earth and monitoring him. The first time I felt that suicide would be simple was when I read THE DARK-HAIRED GIRL, which in part included letters from the Oregon Mental Hospital he had been admitted to voluntarily. In MARTIAN TIME-SLIP, he describes his theory for autism in a throwaway fashion, and THE CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON (circling Alpha Centauri, not of my hemisphere, Etain and Steve and Jamie Turner down in Tasmania), where each city is self-contained studies in mental disorders, the Obsessive-Compulsives, the Bipolars, the hapless and the sad, the manic futurists and those with eyes mirroring the empty void. The title story in I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON is an incredible short story about a man who cannot be "put under" for the ten year trip to his new home on a planet circling the star LD4, and so the ship's computer, with limited access, creates ten years of images into Victor Kemmings' brain, from his own past. But in true PK Dick guilt, the memories keep getting bobbled by memories of helping a cat eat a bird when he was four, the ownership of a signed Fabulous Freak Brothers poster, and images of his first wife, Martine. The trip ends, Martine has been contacted in the Sirius star system and is there to meet him, but in true PKD fashion, Kettering continues to think the reality is computer-induced, he thinks his hands go through a wall, or a TV is hollow, or a bee-sting is visible on his arm, a bee he once saved from a spiders web. PKD was a master of solipsism, the idea being that the universe is only what you can directly perceive; in my case right now, I am aware of my keyboard, a lamp, my Oceanic Airlines coffee mug on a stone coaster from Johannesburg, and my Psycho-Pirate action figure. The rest of the universe, even though I hear wind outside a window I am not looking at, is only an assumption. So...what did I confess to the happy dead of Bubbly Creek? In my late teens, I was walking along Cicero Avenue with my friend Dan, I saw an orange cat and spooked it, it ran into traffic and I watched the rear tire of a burnt sienna town car bing off its head. I went to get the cat, feeling guilty as all hell, and held it in my arms. He was able to walk, but I knew he had a concussion. (There were no veterinarians open at that time of night). I walked with him, talking to him for two hours, he looked at me with knowing eyes, fell asleep, and died. I cry when I think of this despicable moment in my life that occurred one summer Friday night 26 years ago. Like PKD and the weight of memory's madness.