Hey all you cool cats and kittens, we’re coming to you alive from the Dow Bunker. We’re in our third week of lockdown as I write this, and it happens to be my birthday on top of other things! I’m sure I’m having a lot of fun as you read this!

Regarding the above picture… My wife has had a really hard time trying to cope with the slow-motion disaster that we’re seeing outside, so she’s taken to watching a lot of TikTok. This was apparently a prank one wife played on her husband: call for her husband and tell him the toilet is smoking. And then…well…you see the results, ha ha.

As far as actual coronavirus news, we now have 31 cases in my county as of this writing. It feels like being on a roller coaster slowly beginning its ascent, but instead of seated and preparing for a fun thrill ride, we’re duck taped to the front of the cars and also the track at the bottom of the hill is gone. What I mean is, I am fully expecting that number to balloon suddenly, and given the reports of symptoms I’ve seen from folks, it’s got me really nervous. I have asthma, so it’s not just gonna kick my ass. It could be really, really bad for me. So we’re staying the course of quarantine! We’ll just have to continue being careful, being smart, and staying in place.

As for what I’ve been up to…

What I’ve Been Writing

I mentioned last week that I’ve been reading Story Genius by Lisa Cron. I took an accidental week or so break off of reading — my head felt like it was full of bees because…well…*gestures at the world.* But I’ve been in Mur Lafferty’s Patreon Discord, and it’s been encouraging me to try to get back on the ball.

I’m about 40% of the way through the book, and I’ve started going back to the places where I marked the exercises, and I’m trying them out. Her approach seems to be to start with a very wide approach, and steady get more and more specific, narrowing your scope. I’ve always felt I was decent at characters, but not great at plot. so far, this seems like the perfect way to bridge the two.

As for how I’m doing that? I’ve scrapped most of the work I did for Cracked Men so far, and I’m trying to approach it completely fresh the way she describes. It’s been pretty helpful so far, and I’m curious to see how well things pan out. I really hope I’m able to come out of this with either a finished working draft, or at the very least the solid bones to start one and get off to the races. I haven’t properly written prose in far too long.

What I’ve Been Reading

Besides Story Genius, I haven’t read much. I’ve continued dipping into The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden and Cottonmouths by Kelly J. Ford. I like both of them a lot, I just haven’t had the brain to do any proper reading. Rather than reading (or listening to audiobooks), I’ve been listening to podcasts because it feels like they require less on my part.

With that said, I’ve recommended them before and I’ll recommend them again: The Faculty of Horror podcast is one of the best podcasts about horror movies out there. It’s not a review show, and it’s not a show where the hosts just recap the movie and make jokes. It’s a show where two women use academic sources to dig into and really analyze the movies. Sometimes that’s just one movie, sometimes it’s a few movies to discuss a theme, genre, or franchise. It’s always amazing, though.

What I’ve Been Watching

I’ve been on a bit of a movie kick recently. I revisited the first Brendan Frasier Mummy film a while back, which was fun. We watched Always Be My Maybe, which was very sweet. I liked it a great deal — I love a good rom-com. We watched Brightburn, which I fucking loved. I have a post about that going up sometime this week — it may already be up by the time this is published. I watched a handful of other horror movies, all pretty good — The Ritual, Backcountry, Satanic Panic. But the big thing we watched is the thing everyone has been talking about: Tiger King.

Tiger King, as you’ve probably heard by now, is absolutely goddamned nuts. It’s a documentary series that features a gay, redneck cowboy that owns hundreds of tigers and runs a private zoo that gets into a multi-year legal battle with the owner of a tiger “sanctuary” that operates an awful lot like the private zoos that she hates so much. There are multiple murder plots, suicide and animal maulings, country music, politics, a sex cult, and so much more. It starts wild, and it escalates right up through the last episode.

It’s easy to watch it and get caught up in the all the salacious drama and big personalities, but if you stop and reflect on it, it’s actually an incredibly sad show. These tigers are being abused, exploited, and held captive. Even the woman that runs the so-called tiger sanctuary doesn’t see to be trying to rehabilitate the tigers to release them in the wild. She just wants to keep them as pets.

There’s a character who is said to have been the inspiration for Tony Montana from Scarface. He was a Cuban drug runner who got into some seriously dark shit. And somehow, of the main tiger-owning personalities featured in the show, he is the most grounded, sympathetic, and self-aware, which is…absolutely unbelievable, and yet, I found it to be true. Basically everyone featured deserves to be in jail for at least one thing, if not a goddamned scroll.

It is absolutely worth a watch. You are not prepared for how unhinged things get.

What I’ve Been Doing

I’ve been working on tweaking and scheduling our Podcast Classic episodes. I find it oddly calming to work on. It doesn’t require a lot of creative thought, so I can lose myself in the sound and editing. It doesn’t take long as there’s not much I can do short of just re-editing the episode, which I won’t do. I’ve adjusted the sound in a few spots in some episodes, or made some further cuts to make things flow a bit better. I’ve adjusted the music volumes to try to get the levels a little better. But the biggest thing I’ve done is just add a bumper to the front of the episodes explaining that they’re old, so the references may be slightly out of date. The discussions won’t be, but we may reference, say, the Blumhouse Halloween coming out soon, which has obviously been out for a couple of years now.

Beyond that, I’ve been on call with my day job, so I haven’t been able to do much. My wife bought a puzzle for us to do with the intent of framing it once we get it finished — it’s a Tales from the Crypt comic cover, so it’ll fit our aesthetic pretty well. We also bought Jackbox Party Pack 3 so we can stream some party games with our friends. And I’m working on bringing our D&D game back over Google Hangouts or somethings — we may have to experiment with combat a bit to get used to things.

This week is my birthday, and next week is my TEN YEAR anniversary with my wife, so the next couple of weeks will be a pretty big deal for a few reasons. I really want to clean up our apartment and finish re-organizing my office, but it’s been hard to find the motivation.

I’ve also been having a hard time with the isolation. I haven’t really had anyone to talk to almost at all besides my wife, and it’s starting to get to me. My friends all kinda have their own lives that they’re busy with, so I’ve been trying to be more personable online, talk with folks, engage in conversations, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s working. I mostly feel like I’m butting in where I’m not really wanted. Hopefully I can do something to turn that around, but in the meantime I’m trying to just be kind to myself and remind myself this is a stressful time for everyone.

______________________________________________________

One last thing before I wrap this up. I want to share something that happened this week that filled me with a lot of hope and positivity for the first time in a while, and I hope it brings you something good, too:

I was doing some cleaning when I heard horns blaring outside. Repeated, insistent honking from multiple cars. My wife called for me from the other room and said, “There’s some sort of parade happening outside?” I rushed to the window and sure enough, there was a parade happening. Folks were driving through our apartment complex, their vehicles decorated with signs and glittery ribbons and at one point even one of those wacky, inflatable tube figures poking out of someone’s sunroof.

We went outside to get a better look at the signs. It was the teachers from a local pre-K. They decorated their cars with encouraging signs saying “Mrs. So-and-so misses you!” and “We love you!” and even stuff like “Email me if you need to talk.” They were apparently driving to all of the places where they knew students lived to give them a little bit of encouragement and remind them that their teachers hadn’t forgotten about them. Quite a few kids were out with their parents, watching and waving back as the teachers drove by.

It was a nice little moment of unexpected kindness for some kids that I’m sure are scared and don’t understand what’s going on right now. As a former teacher, I got pretty choked up.

And that’s it for updates from the bunker for now. We’re going to do everything we can to keep ourselves healthy and safe, and I hope that you will, too. How has the quarantine been for you? Watched or read anything you want to chat about? Picked up any hobbies you want to geek out about? Comment below! Or, if you’d prefer, you can drop me an email or hit me up on Twitter. I’d love to hear from y’all.

‘Til next time!