Too early to tackle the tree?

PANAMA CITY BEACH — Say what you will about people who play Christmas music “too early” or put up their trees and other decorations before Thanksgiving. I’ve probably said something similar, myself, in the past.

But our Christmas tree was up last Sunday, which is early, even for us. Earlier, still, in context to the trees of my youth.

Once upon a time, my sister and I would accompany our parents to a tree farm somewhere outside of Century, Fla. , to walk rows of cedar and pick out a likely candidate. Once we got it chopped down, loaded onto the car, and lugged back home, Dad would trim low branches and prep the base for bringing it indoors.

Invariably, our cat or dog would drink from the water in the base. (These days, we only worry about a cat chewing an electric cord while climbing the metal limbs.) I remember Dad wrapped the lights, and Mom was in charge of icicles. I was in charge of dropping the fragile glass ornaments and then stepping on the slivers. It was a holiday tradition.

Once, I went with my uncle to pick up a pre-cut tree from one of many stores that had them leaning outside the entrance. On the drive home, he saw another store that had nicer trees, and stopped in to swap his out. Still trying to figure out how that worked.

These trees, already well on the way to dying by the time they came in the door, didn’t have a long window for use. At most, with a gas heater running 10 feet away, they’d last about a week. And even then, the last few days before Christmas would require wearing shoes in the living room to avoid getting prickly pine needles in your feet.

My pragmatic Grandma Simmons had an aluminum Christmas tree that she used for — I don’t know — decades? So I didn’t sneer at the advent (see what I did there?) of fake plastic trees some years later; it was just a tree of a different color.

Since establishing our own home(s), we have had several of these artificial firs over the years. We purchased our most recent tree from a friend’s garage sale. It’s about 7 feet tall and has built-in lights.

We put it together last Sunday, in part because we wanted to test the lights, but mostly because it will make our Thanksgiving Day (if we can wait that long) decorating party that much more fun — no wasting valuable decorating time having to lug the box out of the garage and putting it together when we’re ready.

Plus, we get to enjoy the lights a little longer.

Since moving into our current home, we’ve put up two Christmas trees each season. The one downstairs carries our collections of pop culture ornaments, and I have put up Grandma Simmons’ old tree in our bonus room at the top of the stairs, loading it with little handmade ornaments our kids brought home from school over the years.

This year, the upstairs will house our older fake plastic tree (the one that used to stand downstairs). We’ll decorate it with pink ornaments in memory of my sister-in-law, who died Sept. 12 of complications while under treatment for leukemia. My wife picked out the ornaments, and it was her idea to put up the second tree.

Our trees have always held objects of deep emotion and memory, from the faded plastic reindeer that Grandma Simmons gave me as a child (and that my father enjoyed as a child), to the Scarlet O’Hara ornaments we bought for Grandma Massey’s tree (and inherited upon her passing), to the “Joy” ornaments we hang in memory of our child-in-spirit, who died too young.

That’s the importance of these things, after all. Not when they go up or come down, but what you do with them while they’re here. The memories made by the light of the tree, the people recalled, the love never lost.

But then, that’s the important part of anything, isn’t it?

Peace.

Seeing, believing more closely related than you know

PANAMA CITY BEACH — I wasn’t winking at you, if that’s what you thought as we passed in the store this week. Honest.

I was just testing my vision. I thought something was wrong with my right eye.

It happened when I was helping my son locate the correct windshield wipers for his car, and pulled my glasses from my jacket pocket so I could read the guidebook attached to the store shelf. With my glasses on, nothing came into focus — in fact, my sight was worse with them on.

I closed my left eye, and my right seemed useless, just a blur. I closed my right eye — and suddenly I could see clearly with my left one. With both eyes open, though, everything once more became a blur.

“Something’s wrong with my eye,” I said, and I must admit to a kernel of worry; I read and write for a living and for fun, and the prospect of a vision issue unsettled me.

I closed the right eye and used the left one, aided by the glasses, to find the windshield wipers Nathan needed. Then I told him we should find his mom, who was wandering around elsewhere in the store, so I could tell her about my vision problem.

As we walked through the aisles, I kept putting on my glasses — all a blur — and taking them off again, trying to focus with and without them, closing one eye and then the other. Winking, blinking, and nodding. Yep, my right eye was definitely messed up.

Here’s the Zen question that occurred to me then: If seeing is believing, then what is not-seeing?

I found my wife and told her the story I just told you, and she gave me a blank look, like she suspected I was punking her. I put on the glasses to demonstrate, and did the right-eye-shut test again, and again, only my left eye could focus.

“I think I see the problem,” my wife said as she poked her finger through the empty frame where a lens should have been and touched the lid of my closed right eye.

Immediately, I reached into my jacket pocket and found the missing lens.

“You’re lucky I’m a medical professional,” she said. “I can say with some confidence that you are not having a stroke.”

She laughed, and added that she couldn’t wait to tell this story to everybody she works with. I won’t tell you which body part her sister laughed off when she heard the story.

In my defense, our son didn’t notice the missing lens either. But that’s just because I suspect he’s as oblivious as I am. Besides, just how was I supposed to know there was something wrong with my glasses if I couldn’t see them?

That’s got to be at least as understandable as the guy who thought his family was giving him the silent treatment when, in fact, his hearing aid battery had died. (For the record, that was not me.)

From this perspective, seeing and believing became synonymous. And believing I couldn’t see made me blinder than ever.

I’m pretty sure there’s a useful life lesson in there somewhere, but it’s probably so obvious that I’m overlooking it.

Peace.

TBT: Something From The Nightside

(This originally ran in The News Herald on Sunday, Nov. 28, 2004) 

WHAT WE'RE READING: The Nightside novels

In Something from the Nightside, private detective John Taylor returned to the dark, magical heart of London where he was born to find a teenage girl who had been eaten by a house that was not really a house.

The 2003 Ace book introduced Taylor, his preternatural gift for finding things, and the strange segment of the city where it's always 3 a.m., the moon is always full and things are never what they seem.

In the second book (late 2003) of Simon R. Green's projected six-part Nightside series, Agents of Light and Darkness, Taylor found himself fighting angels from both Above and Below after he was hired by a rogue priest to recover the Unholy Grail — the cup from which Judas drank at the Last Supper. Seems both sides thought it would give them the edge they needed to win their eternal war; needless to say, Taylor didn't like the odds of the Nightside surviving Judgment Day.

Now the third book, The Nightingale's Lament (2004), finds Taylor trying to figure out why fans are dying at their own hands after listening to the songs of the Nightside's latest singing sensation, Rossingnol — and what unearthly power her spiderlike managers hold over her.

(In March 2005, Ace is scheduled to release the fourth book, Hex and the City.)

Green is perhaps best known for his science fiction and fantasy series — the Deathstalker books chief among them. But the Nightside novels promise to supplant these, both in depth and scope.

Taylor runs the razor's edge, trusting neither the light nor the darkness — and trusted by neither side. He's an anti-hero for the ages, one who can reference both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Merlin the Magician, for instance. One who is as at ease jousting with knights as with biker chicks hopped up on demonic steroids.

The books are quick reads, mixing pulp detective yarns with Lovecraft all wrapped in wicked British humor. They also tend to follow a pattern that sets their protagonist and his few surviving friends against overwhelming odds — to which they respond with a shrug, a pull on a cigarette, and begin rolling up their sleeves.

You know this is liable to hurt later, but it's better to just get to it.

Now, that's the guy I want at my back when the traffic gets hungry and the spiders come out of the rotted woodwork and the angels turn people to salt at the fast-food joint and the nightingale's song makes death seem like a good idea. Someone to watch over you — to whack you upside the head and kick you in the behind and cast a protective spell and find the hidden path out of this mess.

Someone from the Nightside.

Rebel, rebel: The artist as agent of chaos

PANAMA CITY — I spent some time last Friday drawing on a wall at Floriopolis, the Beck Avenue gallery operated by artist Heather Parker. I had her permission — in fact, she invited me to do so — but something about applying a pen to the white wall (even though it was inside an art gallery) seemed like an act of rebellion.

Maybe that says something about my comfort level as a rebel.

The day prior, I interviewed Olga Guy, an artist based at CityArts Cooperative, who told me a story about painting her bedroom walls and doors as a teenager, much to her mother’s chagrin. (See this story to learn how that worked out for her.)

Drawing on Heather’s wall didn’t feel like graffiti. I didn’t have a statement to make. And while convention was being flouted, authority was not. Still, I think that’s what art is, at least the way my mind interprets it: A fundamental act of rebellion.

Against the mundane, the routine. Against the merciless march of time. Sometimes afflicting the comfortable, sometimes comforting the afflicted.

Follow me, here, because art can be a lot of things. An attempt to express divinity. To faithfully capture and reproduce a moment. To reveal emotion or provoke social change. To find patterns and draw order out of chaos, or to express chaos. It can even be as simple as a “pretty picture.”

And yet, all of this is rebellious. The act of creation presupposes that transitory creatures like us — who live and die in such a short span — have something of lasting meaning to contribute. That we defy the universe and the mortal constrictions it places on us.

We leave a message — a thought, a sound, an image, a performance — to be read, or listened to, or viewed by a stranger in another place and time, interpreted and remembered. We break the laws of physics every time we make something — or maybe we prove the theories of quantum entanglement by having an impact across space and time.

It’s a conundrum.

Art can be the product of experimentation, the result of inspiration (and, in turn, it can be inspiring to others). It is forward thinking — I will not be here tomorrow, but this is what I had to offer today — and thus it becomes disruptive, transformative for the creator as well as the viewer.

It’s also like the definition of sound: Unless someone sees it, reads it, hears it, then it’s not really communication. For artists, who most often labor in private, the patron’s eye (or ear) keeps them from feeling like a tree falling in a forest when no one’s around.

In coming weeks, you’ll meet a parade of local artists — painters, jewelers, dancers, musicians, writers and more — on these pages and at PanamaCity.com, as we begin an ongoing series we’re calling “Artist’s Touch.” I hope you’ll join me us we get to know the area’s creative spirits, examine the forms their work takes, and celebrate the rebels in our midst.

Peace.

Memories of haunted Halloweens gone by

1991 vintage Flash mask

PANAMA CITY — When my son was 3, I took him to a kid-friendly haunted maze at a Kmart store’s garden center. His sister was a newborn down the street at Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola, and our first photographs of them together show him in his Flash costume.

She turns 23 today, our little Halloween treat. But a visit to the Panama City Jaycees Haunted House under construction earlier this month set my mind on a minor event of that momentous day in 1991, and from there the Halloween memories began to tumble.

Apparently, the red-and-yellow plastic coveralls with the lightning logo conferred upon her brother the super-speed powers of the comic book hero whose adventures he had viewed on television. At least, one would think so, to see him running everywhere he went.

The mask and costume also rendered him fearless. Near the end of the haunted maze, a man in some kind of scarecrow/clown outfit squatted down and made spooky noises at the boy, who drew back his right arm and promptly punched the man in the nose of his mask.

I apologized, the man laughed, and Flash propped his fists on his hips in a heroic pose, having vanquished evil.

Jessi and Nathan

The Flash’s greatest adventure was on my mind when I walked the unfinished maze above Panama City Marine Institute, which has sheltered the Jaycees Haunted House for 11 years. (You can view a video tour through the haunted house at PanamaCity.com, and see the schedule on pages 10-11 for times and details on the event.)

Will Hancock, who has supervised the Haunted House project for the Jaycees for several years, told me last week that the event is “very alive” and doing robust business.

“I am pleased with all the hard work and dedication put in so far,” Will said. “The ‘13 Ghosts’ room and the ‘Oculus’ room have been the most consistent (frights) so far, but that can change tonight. We are adding more sound and lighting as we speak.”

The scares, while safe for adults and teens, are not appropriate for little children. I just hope no one gets punched in the nose.

No frightful creatures jumped out at me during my tour — which was lucky, since I had no hero handy to leap to my defense. But suddenly, 1991 seemed like only yesterday. When I wondered where the years had gone, I could feel them piled up like a bottleneck, heavy and thick with sweet memory.

Jessi playing with makeup.

... Sitting with the kids at a fire in a friend’s Cove area front yard, reading “The Raven” and handing out candy.

.... Wrapping the kids like toilet paper mummies during a contest at another friend’s Halloween party at Pine Log.

... Walking the sidewalks of North Shore neighborhoods to gather massive hauls of candy.

... Playing “pin the fangs on the monster” at one of Jessi’s earliest birthday parties in Century.

... Dressing in costumes to grab supper at Golden Corral on yet another Halloween.

So many autumn evenings, pumpkins carved, yards decorated, homemade costumes, movie nights with the house full of her friends, and outfits I can’t even begin to recall.

In that moment, picturing the boy in the Flash uniform holding a newborn little girl in a hospital room, I wondered if ghosts of the past truly haunt houses, or if they only haunt old men whose children have grown up.

Peace. 

---

This is my Undercurrents column this week for PanamaCity.com and The News Herald.

Free Zombie Stories!

TALES OF THE AWAKENING DEAD is free for Kindle devices and apps for Halloween weekend, Oct. 31-Nov.2.

That's ten solid short stories that explore all kinds of zombies, including the first chapter of my upcoming novel, This Mortal Flesh.

Don't have a Kindle? No problem.

If you're using a computer, just download the FREE app for your operating system.

There are also free apps for smartphones.

And if you like the book, leave a review. Check out my other stuff. And share the disease.

Meanwhile, here's the book trailer:

Life among the living dead

Chris Oneisom and Jennifer Creamer pose in zombie makeup before taking the stage for “Night of the Living Dead.”

LYNN HAVEN — They may have been coming to get Barbara, if you recall the old movie line, but the living dead I hung out with last Friday were mostly just ... walking.

Oh, they hissed and moaned. They growled from time to time, and pounded on the walls. And if a couple fought off smiles as they shuffled and limped behind the windows of the set, that might be expected.

I was invited to perform among the legion of the living dead as a “celebrity guest zombie” at the opening night of Kaleidoscope Theatre’s presentation of “Night of the Living Dead.” Before the double feature started, I signed some of my books for unsuspecting readers in the lobby, but as soon as “Hecate Hill” began — the first play of  the night’s show — I headed for the makeup room.

(The plays continue each weekend through Oct. 26, and I will be signing books before each Friday show.)

I was excited to participate. I’ve done one other community play in my adult life — Shakespeare By The Bay’s “Othello” in 2006 — and for the first time had a role that might not exceed my acting ability, which is best described as lifeless and monotone.

Daniel and his clown.

Daniel Gehrken, who also designed the promotional posters for the plays, spent about an hour finger-painting my face in shades of gray, blue and purple, before dripping blood from my eyes and smearing bloody handprints on my T-shirt. He said there was no extra charge for the face massage.

Some of the other zombies in the mob had neat prosthetic appliances that gave them the look of terrible injuries. Others had specific costumes — a cheerleader, a Girl Scout, a prom queen — and some, like Jennifer Creamer’s “bride” character, had both.

Daniel pronounced me an evil clown zombie, which made fellow zombie Madison Leighann Googe order me not to look at her. She had no difficulty stalking about with a zombie baby tearing its way through her abdomen, but she drew the line at evil clowns.

Zombie Master Chris Oneisom (or as I like to think of him, “He Who Walks Behind The Sets”) paired me with a zombie buddy, Juliet, who showed me how to shamble and indicated that there would be various times during the play when we would be expected to be louder, or quieter, depending on what else was happening on stage.

Juliet, at right.

When she sat and hid, I sat and hid. When she pounded on the walls, I pounded on the walls. When she got out of the way of starring performers running through, I got confused and almost run over.

Twice, while lurking in the background, zombies whispered to me that I could take a break by dragging myself off-stage for some water and air if I needed it. I took that to mean my makeup was impressive enough to fool the other zombies into thinking I was in a state of advanced decomposition — or at least, I looked like death warmed over.

None of this could help me in the closing dance routine, however. The best I could manage was to look befuddled, which is how I tend to look whenever anyone suggests dancing.

(Rest in) Peace. 

Ramona Hagan, left, won the grab-bag giveaway at Kaleidoscope Theatre in Lynn Haven last Friday. A season-ticket patron, she was sitting in the seat number randomly chosen by the author, shown in his zombie makeup. She received a graphic novel, DVD, comic book, paperback, and a copy of my collection of zombie short stories, “Tales of the Awakening Dead.”

(This was my Undercurrents column for this week at PanamaCity.com and in The News Herald.)