The Legend of Eagle Grandpa

A couple of years ago, I told the story of when I learned not to be “That Guy”.

The short version is that I was standing at an ATM when someone was hit by a car, and being EMT certified at the time, I was going to finish up my transaction and go attend to the gentleman – basically hold him still and ask questions while someone called 9-1-1. In the couple of seconds it took for me to retrieve my card and turn around, there was already another fella doing exactly that, in as calm a manner as I could have or better. So, looking around to see a light crowd already forming, I figured it was best to leave rather than further congest the scene. However, there was one dude, who was hellbent on involving himself. He had long hair, sandals, and a loose backpack, and he was throwing himself at cars on the insistence that traffic in the area needed to stop. He even tried chasing one down the road in those dorky-ass sandals to get his point across.

Moral of the story: If there’s no meaningful way you can contribute to the resolution of a situation, then the best thing you can do is not get in the way. But whatever you do, don’t be that guy.

Well, a couple of months ago, I mean a new Guy.

We were in Texas visiting my fiancee’s parents, and one of our days there was spent going to her cousin’s college basketball game. Now, I’d been to basketball games before – heck I’d been in a couple – but they had all been high school level or lower. I didn’t really see any reason why a collegiate basketball game would be any different.

Boy howdy, was I ever wrong, sorta.

It was a home game for Amanda’s cousin, and as the visiting team is getting introduced, it’s a pretty ho-hum affair. “Introducing first, Point Guard for the Wherever They’re From Raptors or Something, #5, Jimmy What’s-his-Butt.” You got a weak smattering of applause from what sparse crowd there was, and this repeated for the other four starting players. But when they started introducing the Home team…

Damn.

The lights when down, spotlights began tracing the arena, music blared, and the announcer turned their mic way the hell up. It was like we got teleported straight to the middle of an NBA scrimmage game or something, and the announcer’s bias was…well, he wasn’t hiding it.

“Now, welcome to the court – he’s lean, he’s mean, he’s a divine blend of American steel and sex appeal, hung like a horse and has got a bright future – your Point Guard of the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor Cruuuuusaaaaadeeeers, #11! Johnny “God-Given” Griffin!!”

It was nuts.

The game was pretty great, too. Fast, competitive. A fun affair all around.

But the whole time the teams battled back and forth, I couldn’t help notice one guy. He was a spectator like us, older, and was sitting courtside beside one of the hoops in a fold-out chair with a straight posture and his arms crossed in front of him the whole time. He must have been someone’s grandpa or coach or something. Maybe he had a lot of money riding on the game, I don’t know, but he was less watching the game for fun and more examining the game with the intensity of a diving eagle.

Good thing he was, too, because while the offense was on his side of the court, a pass went wide and rocketed his way. And when I say “rocketed”, I do mean that this basketball crossed space with the speed of a bullet, and it flew straight at Coach Intense Eagle Grandpa.

This guy…doesn’t even flinch.

And he probably does kung fu.

This basketball flies at his face with enough speed to challenge the sound barrier, and in the half-moment it takes for the ball to reach him, his hands are out in front of him catching it a few inches from his nose. It was like when the hero in a cheesy martial arts movie catches the sword between their palms. It was rad. He does this, holds it for a quarter-second, and bounce passes it back onto the court like nothing happened.

THAT’S the guy you want on your team, giving you advice, or setting an example when the shit hits the fan. When a situation arises, don’t be a Loose Backpack. Be an Eagle Grandpa.

Epic Dreams of Dirt (+ Announcement)

I eat a lot of hot sauce. I used to put it on everything and get the really spicy ones so that I could be that guy, but I’ve calmed it down a little in recent years. I also used to specifically eat something spicy right before bed, because I noticed doing so gave me really vivid, really strange and surreal dreams.

Now I’ve stopped doing that entirely, but I guess I conditioned my brain enough to think it’s alright to give me strange dreams most nights. One such was just the other night…

Oh! I should put here that I’ve been playing a lot of Deep Rock Galactic recently, and I only say that because it’ll soon become obvious the ways that game influenced the dream. (If you haven’t heard of it and you don’t feel like following the link, in short, it’s a game where you play as a space dwarf mining crystals and minerals out of a giant asteroid-planet-thing.)

Anyway, the other night…

Like most dreams, I don’t remember how I got to the start, but I knew I was being hunted by the Italian mafia. Somehow, at the beginning of the dream, that meant I GUESS that I was in a motel outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico while on the run from them. Of course, one of their hitmen finds me and I’m sure you can guess who it is.

That’s right, Danny Trejo.

So Danny Trejo shows up going full Machete on me, showering the motel in bullets while I run, duck, and dodge behind cover.

^In case you wondered, this is what “going full Machete” looks like.
It’s a fun movie.

Eventually, he runs out of ammo and hops in an old car, trying to run me down. Now my memory gets kind of spotty around this point in the story, but the end point is that I successfully kill him in self-defense. (I think I trick him into crashing the car, or something. Let’s just assume it was something clever.)

That dramatic scene winds up placing me in Witness Protection. I remember they handed me a special form to fill out for, like, my preferences of what kind of Witness Protection I would prefer, and in the special comments section I just wrote “No Italians, please.” Which is several shades of stupid, but made sense in the moment since I was on the run from the Italian mafia.

It doesn’t wind up working.

So Witness Protection places me in a sort of special boarding house that looks like an old Victorian manor out in New England. (Heh, I just noticed the dream keeps taking place in “New” places. New Mexico to New England. Weird.) The boarding house is run by a kindly old woman with red hair and she shows me to my room toward the back of the manor. My paranoia sets in, and on one of the first nights, I remove a couple panels from the floor and I start digging.

The logic at work is that I’m going to construct a series of tunnels to really live in, or at least have as a getaway in case the mob ever finds me. I think I distantly remember reading about or hearing about an either Roman or Chinese emperor who did the same thing with their palace, filling it with a hundred rooms and sleeping in a different one every night to confuse would-be assassins.

Which is basically what I did.

I dug a whole bunch of tunnels into the ground beneath the mansion, and I filled those tunnels with a bunch of dummy routes, dead ends, tunnels that looped back in on themselves. I dug enough dirt to last eleven lifetimes to make sure the mob would never find me.

Along the way, I met another resident of the house, a young girl named Alyssa, who found my series of tunnels and asked to help me dig more because she thought it was cool. At first I said no, wary of outsiders and not wanting to share my masterpiece with another, but ultimately relented.

I also found this awesome, green, furry mole-ferret creature while digging. I never really thought of a name for him, but he was adorable, helped me dig, and loved to snuggle while making this soft purring noise. He was great.

At this point, there’s a bit of a time skip, or a fast-forwarding. I met Alyssa, found my giant ferret creature, at one point we struck ground water and essentially dug out a massive underground grotto or lake. We brought in bamboo from the Overworld (just the regular world, but we’d become underground people) to build scaffolding and walking pathways around this body of water. It was a good time.

But nothing good lasts forever.

One day while I’m hanging out on the big wrap-around porch of the house, I see a car with tinted windows drive slowly by. The window rolls down and a bald man with a scar on his cheek stares me down for a moment, before rolling the window back up and driving away. (No idea why, but I name him Spencer.

My God. I’ve been found.

I have a discussion with the headmaster lady of the house, and she gives me a sort of “Ah, alas. I feared this day would come” sort of monologue, and says she’ll prep the house for battle – or something of the sort. Eventually, it falls to dusk, and a train of twelve cars pulls up in front of the place. Out of each one, a uniquely dressed, themed, and deadly hitman steps out with an intent to kill. They charge the house, and I kung-fu fight with about four or five of them around the house, killing or incapacitating them mightily before I begin to tire and worry for the worse. All around the house, the headmaster lady and other residents are doing their own righteous battle with these (apparently still supposed to be Italian mafia) hitmen.

I’m wounded, and the headmaster lady tells me to fall back, and that they have it from here. So I do, and retreat into my tunnel system. While down there, Alyssa finds me and tells me that our ferret isn’t doing so good, she thinks he’s sick. So I pick up the little guy, he purrs against my chest and neck while I carry him down one of the tunnels, across our underground lake (taking up the bamboo walkways behind us), and into the deepest tunnel that is my Sanctuary. For extra security, I lay a couple of satchel charges in the dirt (which I apparently have) and lie in wait with my ferret creature.

The End

I woke up at that point, but I assume that Spencer the Hitman followed my trail down the tunnels and would have fallen upon me and my ferret, but got blown up by my booby traps. That’s my head canon and I’m sticking to it.

Anyway, if you’ve stuck with it this far or just skipped down until you saw “The End”, either way: The News!

I’ve stopped announcing these sorts of things with any regularity, both because life is busy and because I’m not sure who’s listening with bated breath on this, my tiny, eensy weensy slice of the internet, but we’ve got another publication in the books! (lol Pun.)

Flame Tree Publishing is coming out with their Gothic Fantasy ‘Alternate History’ anthology early next year and are including a reprint of one of my first ever stories, “The Sixth-Gun Conspiracy Letters”, wherein we learn the tragic, twisted truth behind the cloak-and-dagger game which shadowed the American Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

It’s an oldie, but a goodie, and I’m extra stoked about this one because Flame Tree is based out of London, UK, which means ya boi has gone international! And I think that’s worth a nod. -cheers- (<– the polite gesture at a dinner party, not a crowd erupting with applause)

Anyhoo, that’s all for now. Thanks for sticking around. Ciao, everybody.

Highland Falls, NY

One trope I had at one point or another felt was a lazy narrative device was the what I called “unexplained calling.” You know the one. The call to adventure wherein a character’s motivation to go to a place or do a thing doesn’t come from interpersonal conflict or an aspect of their past, but just a feeling they get. They set about their adventure because they feel called upon to do so. You don’t need to substantiate it or justify it. They just feel that way.

A little bit of life experience has told me that that kind of sh*t sometimes totally just happens, though.

Now, I can – like with any example of the above gripe – do a psychological deep-dive on the in’s and out’s of maybe why the motivation manifests the way it does, and with the confession I’m about to make, I will.

When I was a kid, we moved around a lot for the sake of my dad’s health some, but mostly my mom’s job mobility. Born in Oregon, spent some time in California, moved out to Kentucky, up to New York, and back to the west coast. In New York, we were in a tiny little hamlet called Highland Falls. A quick check to Google Maps will show you it’s along the Hudson River, and about forty minutes’ north of New York City. It’s tiny, a drive-through town. We lived there for about two years while I was six and seven years old before we moved out to California where I really did my growing up.

So even though California has become my home state and where I’ve spent most of my life, part of my brain has remained doggedly rooted to Highland Falls, and I’ve been what I can only describe as “viciously nostalgic” for that little village ever since moving away. Now, I’m no psychologist beyond the garden ‘armchair’ variety, but I have a hunch as to why I’m that way. When we moved out here and I turned eight, it began a long series of life events and landmarks, from 9/11, my dad passing away, and a series of new schools as we continued to bounce around, to the tumultuous nature of teenager years with all the first’s that come with them and every struggle that’s followed since in my twenties. If I had to guess – and I do, citing my aforementioned lack of credentials as well as not being an all-knowing genie – my psyche sort of sees that quiet little town as The Good Ol’ Days, and the move out to California as when The Trouble Began (“Trouble” being just what growing up is). So it latches onto my foggy memories of that time with the rose-tintiest of rose-tinted glasses.

Even accepting that as true enough and explaining somewhat rationally where the impulse comes from, it doesn’t really stop me from really wanting to visit the place again. Which, to put that into perspective, would mean taking time off of work, organizing flights, rental cars, hotel stays, and more, all totalling to a couple grand of travel costs…to see drive-through town that can’t possibly resemble the one I knew growing up.

For…what?

Like, really. For what? To see a childhood home I lived in for two years that’s probably been repainted? Is that really worth the time and the price tag? No. Of course not. The obvious work around is to just look up my old address on Google Maps and take a Street View tour of the town, if the nostalgia means so much to me, right? Well, guess what smart guy? I already did that. Here’s the thing: The street I grew up on is the ONLY ONE that the Google car DIDN’T map out. So what we have now is an implacable calling to a small New England town in the middle of nowhere, to see a house that shouldn’t hold any value to me sentimental or otherwise, and a global mapping service that has said house strangely blurred out, only fueling this feeling of mystery.

The way I see it, this can only go one of two ways.

One: I fly out there, rent a car, the Whole Nine, and I make it to my childhood house to find the town even smaller than I remember and the house with new owners who would be understandably perplexed to see a thirty-year-old staring at their front door with his sole explanation that he lived there more than twenty years ago. The town is just a town. My childhood is well and truly gone. The house is just a house. There is no calling. I just wasted a couple thousand to see a regular old town like any thousands of others and should reexamine some things in my life.

Two: I fly out there and all the rest, uncover some real eldritch, funky Stephen King sh*t, and am never heard from again by my friends and family.

I guess, if for positively no other reason than posterity, let this post stand for the record when, in a year or two, I decide to make the pilgrimage, announce it on here, and this blog abruptly ceases being updated forever. Like, I know I take breaks here and there, but if I say “Hey, I’m off to Highland Falls. I’ll update you,” and y’all never hear from me again, it’s some weird It stuff. Aliens. Monsters. Men in Black, some kind of funky stuff, and this meager slice of the internet can stand as dubious proof of that.

So…I guess…’til then, right?

Ciao.

Happy New Year, y’all!

I was gonna title it “Happy New Year, Motherf***ers!” to really just get the point across up at the top, but instead I’m saying it just below the title as a loophole to an etiquette rule I guess I made up.

That said…that’s it. Happy New Year, y’all. Get out there, do some stuff, enjoy yourselves, and hit life with the tenacity it takes to bite the ass off a bear.

Good luck, and I’m rooting for you.

Quick n’ Dirty Promo

Just like goodbyes at parties, I’m bad at these. So let’s be quick and sloppy about it.

We did it again! Got another couple of folks to say yes to the squiggles I write up!

Had a couple of publications this year, but these latest have definitely been the luckiest. Wrote a romp about some time traveling hijinks and someone said, “Hell yeah.” Then, wrote up a tale about knights and monsters and ACTUALLY convinced someone to say “Hell yeah!” to that too! lol Y’all, technically now I’m a bona fide sci-fi AND /high/ fantasy author now. Which is rad. Kade over at The Common Tongue Magazine is a wickedly sharp editor, and Jessica with JayHenge Publishing was one of the coolest to work and correspond with. Plus, the collections are dope and my contributions are a couple of my babies. (A COUPLE of them…I should have more news…like this…y’know…on the way. I been busy.)

PLUS, Common Tongue gave me a friggin’ Writer Page found here. I feel like a pirate ship that finally got its flag. So check out CTM’s Issue #3 and look out for my story, “The Bells of Kraeden,” here. And if you’re too busy or lazy to read, they honored me deeply by also adapting it into a podcast episode!

Lastly, go look’it Jessica’s “The Chorochronos Archives” collection with my piece, “30,000 B.C.” here.

With both and/or either, please feel encouraged to leave them a comment or some sort of review like this: “AhmyGodthiswassogoodbutdefinitelyEvan’swasthebestusemoreofhisstuffyeswooooow!”

Okay. <phew> As you were…

Pocket Story Series #1

Good…God.

Well’p, we made it. We’ve made it to a point where we might be able to start watching the dust settle rather than whip around in a heinous maelstrom of bad news and general caca. I’m all for fresh starts. In fact, just behind Thanksgiving here in the States, New Year’s Day is my favorite holiday. I appreciate Christmas and Halloween for the things they do, but I just prefer silver to gold, the lieutenant to the captain, the…crow’s nest to the…figurehead- I dunno. This is starting to fall apart, but you get my point: The Underdog.

And in an effort to embrace that, I’m starting this up: the Pocket Story Series.

A little bit ago at a yard sale, I picked up a little book called the “Amazing Story Generator,” and I think our goal here will be to do our best to disprove that.

The gist: The book gives a circumstance, a character, and an action, then I’ll whip up a little diddy here for us to enjoy, marvel at, laugh at, or whatever else, then I’ll show what the elements were that I had to work with.

Cool? Cool.

Oh! Also, quick plug: I’m gonna have a few published stories come out this year that are already in the pipeline, so expect to be bombarded with news about those when they approach and/or come out.

Cool again? Cool again. Without further adieu…

Working Late

Geoffry Hanson set down his cup of coffee, folded his finger over his belly, and enjoyed a contented sigh. The outdoor cafe was nice, and it had been a long while since he’d been in Amsterdam. When he was here last, must have been, what, ’93? And that was for work, so he hadn’t really been able to enjoy the city.

Funny enough, as the thought hit him, the job site had been close to where he was now. Very close, in fact. He paid for his coffee, got up, and left to go for a stroll. He walked along the canals and paused at a house by one of the embankments. There it was. He looked on at the gabled facade, a remnant of the seventeenth century Golden Age, and smiled.

That was where he and his team had busted a trade between a couple of Turkish gun runners and their Soviet partners. Across the street was where they’d surveilled a Chinese-national informant to verify what she’d had to say before taking her asylum. Aaah, and just down the canal there was where they’d saved the city from a terrorist plot involving a threat to its water treatment. Geoff smiled.

A life working for MI6 had been a rewarding one.

He ambled down along the waterside, reminiscing on the good he and his team had done. As he strolled, something caught his trained eye. A briefcase, sitting alone next to a discarded beer can underneath a nearby bridge. It’s nothing, he told himself. Definitely nothing.

This was his first vacation in his 25-year long career, and he wasn’t going to let work spoil it…

…much.

Despite himself, and mostly to convince himself of what he was telling himself, he meandered over to the discarded case. He gestured to an invisible crowd of onlookers the futility of the observation and tested its weight as a means of showing his instincts were misplaced. To his dismay, the case was heavy. Very heavy. Too heavy to house simple papers.

He pinched his nose and heaved a great sigh.

Geoff clicked the briefcase slowly open and revealed its inner working: wires, nodes, and a digital reader showing a countdown. It was a bomb, and a very big one at that. Disgruntled, Geoff clicked the heel of his left shoe, detached the sole to retrieve the bomb disposal kit hidden therein, and set to work saving the world yet another time.

Retirement couldn’t come soon enough for Geoffry Hansom; but, he supposed, perhaps for the sake of the world, it could.

END

Aaah, that was dorky.

Okay, so the pages turned up, as you may have guessed: “On vacation for the first time in years / a world-weary intelligence agent / finds a buried atomic bomb.”

We missed the “buried” bit, and let go of the “world-weariness” as well, but it came together adorably enough. This being just a warm-up, keep an eye out for more of these and again for news on bigger stories I’ve got coming our way.

Til then, take it easy, y’all.

War Paint

When cries are cut by the sounds of gas,
When voices beg into the pavement before they pass;
When two can kneel, one on a field, the other on a neck,
And it’s given no mind at the sanctity of a check-

We shed tears.

When illness takes hold and truth disappears,
When the house sunders and folds divided,
bullets, bombs, and curfews replaces parks and dinner plates,
In these harder to say truly ‘United’ States,

We shed tears.

But soon we’ll look up from the dirt,
and those mud-scribed tears become our war paint,
it will dry and crack with roars
that will penetrate any House, any Tower – a voice for all ears.

We are Here.

(Inspired by the words of Amanda Nicholson.)

A Moment of Clarity

Hmm, nope.

I won’t lie, I had a thought that I felt was pretty transcendent, but by the time I opened up this window to record whatever it was, the train of thought left the station.

So…Hi, I guess.

Hope you’re doing well. Enjoying your week, and all the rest.

Uh, yeah. Nothing else for now, it seems.

Alright.

Um, bye now.

The Watchdogs of Osaka

(Yuuuup, it’s a re-post. Feel like we’ve been doing these more than usual, recently; but it’s for a good cause. 1] This little dream-story is heartfelt. 2] I’m writing a book and am a bit bogged down. It’ll be worth it…in like ten years when I’ve eventually finished it, edited it, and brow-beaten some poor publisher into publishing it. For now, enjoy!)

There’s a man standing in the children’s ward. His suit is brown, tattered, and dirty, his hair is dropping from the rain. His head hangs low and his voice only mutters, but in the quiet of the hospital at night we can hear what he says. “She has nothing,” he repeats. “She is so small. So new. And all she has in this world is me,” he says.

He turns to us now, and the knife in his hand gleams against the sterile light of the room’s lone lamp. “All she has is me, and I am nothing. Why should she deserve this? She shouldn’t know this, while so small and with nothing.”

I shout again for him to drop his weapon, to step away from the baby girl. He sees my military uniform, but rejects its meaning; sees my gun pointed at his chest, but dismisses its authority. His foot shifts and his hand twitches, and I command he be still! A pause, a still moment in time, slows the air…

And seconds later, he’s dead.

Then the sirens wake, blaring their warning of American bombs. Like an ocean wave, people roar through the hospital. A woman, the baby girl’s sponsor, comes up to me. She says, “there are others. She has siblings. I can give you names. There are others, I will give you names.”

An answer catches in my throat, but the woman’s eyes look into my own with a pleading intensity that squeezes the air in my chest. I timidly nod and place a hand on her shoulder. I see my hand is dirty, worn, and is the culprit of many things, things that no longer have the same meaning.

“I will watch her,” I say. “Go.”

“But there are others,” she repeats. “I-I can give you names.”

“She will be fine, I will watch her. I will watch her.”

In that moment, my heart crumbled and was gravel within my chest. I was lying to her, and all parties know it. She is aware, I am aware, yet the words repeat.

“I can give you names.”

“She will be fine. Go.”

Like one cast adrift, the tide of people carries her away. I turn to look at the child in her crib, to the dead man at my feet. The sirens continue to wail as I lean over and pick her up.

She’s…so soft. She unmarred, unfettered by this life – perfect. She’s warm, and so small. And within her tiny chest, an unknowing heart beats.

“I will watch her.”

“She has only me, she has nothing.”

“There are more. I can give you names.”

“She will be fine. I will watch her.”

“She has nothing.”

“There are more.”

“I will watch her.”

The room flashes. In the distance, booms shake the Earth and flames glass its surface. I hold the infant tight, a shield for her ignorance, a lost purpose given to fire and steel.

The Watchdogs of Osaka

And seconds later, he’s dead.

“I will watch her,” I say. “Go.”

“But there are others,” she repeats. “I-I can give you names.”

“She will be fine, I will watch her. I will watch her.”

In that moment, my heart crumbled and was gravel within my chest. I was lying to her, and all parties know it. She is aware, I am aware, yet the words repeat.

“I can give you names.”

“She will be fine. Go.”

Like one cast adrift, the tide of people carries her away. I turn to look at the child in her crib, to the dead man at my feet. The sirens continue to wail as I lean over and pick her up.

She’s…so soft. She unmarred, unfettered by this life – perfect. She’s warm, and so small. And within her tiny chest, an unknowing heart beats.

“I will watch her.”

“She has only me, she has nothing.”

“There are more. I can give you names.”

“She will be fine. I will watch her.”

“She has nothing.”

“There are more.”

“I will watch her.”

The room flashes. In the distance, booms shake the Earth and flames glass its surface. I hold the infant tight, a shield for her ignorance, a lost purpose given to fire and steel.