Difficult Simple

I’ve been a fan of the Halloween series for quite some time. My first exposure to John Carpenter’s original was when it ran on television back in 1980. Yes, there was a time when one couldn’t just watch a movie at home without commercials and re-cuts and all that jazz. As it happens, the original film isn’t all that explicit in its violence, which makes it even more significant, given the number of splatter-tastic movies that followed in its wake and called it an inspiration.

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Back in 1984 a particularly intriguing movie surfaced at my local video store. It had a great box, but my parents weren’t all that keen on renting lame-o exploitation flicks for me, so many years passed before I ever got a chance to see The Warrior and the Sorceress. And you know what? It has a great box.

The movie is, without putting too fine a point on it, complete shit. It looks bad, sounds bad and even manages to rip off A Fistful of Dollars, one of the best movies ever made, badly. Yeah, there’s a warrior in it — a considerably less studly David Carradine than pictured — but there’s no sorceress, four-breasted or otherwise. Yeah, a woman wearing a pair of completely fake-looking boobs under her own pair (which appear natural) shows up, but she’s just window dressing.

The era of the sword ‘n’ sorcery movie has long passed and we’re unlikely to get anything fresh again. The Scorpion King was a nice throwback, but even it couldn’t come close to reaching the inspiring heights of Conan the Barbarian. Sure, it was better than Conan the Destroyer, but that’s neither here nor there.

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Today is my son’s seventh birthday. It’s kind of hard to wrap my brain around that, because it really does (cliché aside) feel like just yesterday he was just a tiny baby who did nothing except eat and poop.

Because Nemo has autism, his growing-up years are a little different than they would be if he were an ordinary kid. This is both good and bad. Good in that he has a lightness of spirit and an honesty that’s missing from many children his age, and bad in that he has trouble connecting with people even though it’s clear he wants to.

We’d planned to take him to the local dog park today for some running around with Allie, our beagle, but it’s rainy and cold and icky and so that’s not possible. There’s an indoor playground Nemo likes — not a McDonald’s kind of thing, but a dedicated playground — and we may do that instead. I’m sure he won’t mind.

Seven years. He’s come so far and done so much already. What will the next seven years, or the next year alone, bring?

Boxing gets short shrift in contemporary fiction. The last time any author of prominence wrote about the sweet science was in 1987. In the meanwhile, fans of reading and boxing had to content themselves with occasional forays into the squared circle by James Ellroy or others. Like the sport itself, literary examination of boxing became a sideshow.

F.X. Toole appeared on the scene in 2000, an authentic voice with years of experience with the sport as a cutman and trainer. His collection, Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner, seemed to herald if not a broad resurrection of boxing in fiction, at least a chance to see it treated well and directly.

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I’ve been a member of the Western Writers of America for a couple of years now. Because of some surgical work I had done, I missed the convention this summer, but I had intended to go. I considered the trip worthwhile for personal and professional reasons. Now I’m not so sure it would have been. In fact, I’m not sure I’m even going to renew my membership when it comes up next year. I suspect the WWA isn’t all that relevant. Even less so than the genre they represent.

The impression I get of fully nine-tenths of WWA membership is of very old, very bitter authors whose preferred genre has faded and their fortunes with it. Reduced to writing for the die-hards only, these folks spend their time making excuses about why westerns don’t sell anymore. Said excuses can be as prosaic as unattractive cover designs or as baroque as conspiracy theories involving East Coast editors who hate the West. I’ve seen and read both sorts at length.

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Because I earn my living making up stuff — I’m a writer, not a con artist, though more on that in a minute — I’m always on the lookout for some new idea that’ll be interesting and/or fulfilling to write while still earning a paycheck. Though it seems to be a mystery to some people how we do it, writers are constantly coming up with ideas. The problem arises when we have to sort out the worthwhile from everything else that oozes its way up from our subconscious.

I’m something of a UFO buff. I’ve never actually seen one, though for a while in my 20s I was convinced I’d been abducted by aliens (don’t ask). And while I find the vast majority of ufologists to be sad, deluded and perhaps even first-class slingers of BS, I also admire the ability of some to make piles and piles of cash talking about stuff that probably never happened as if it had.

A prime example is the supposed UFO crash that happened in 1952 near El Indio, Texas. I say supposed, because the first time anyone even mentioned this incident was in a proven forgery, and yet now UFO luminaries (no pun intended) like Dr. Bruce Maccabee give lectures on the event as if it actually occurred, including “witness” testimony. Bullshit begets bullshit. And dollars.

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