Hello folks! It’s been nearly a month since the last transmission from the Dow Bunker. Time to do a check in and make sure no one has been taken by any assimilating, shape-shifting aliens.

The last time I posted, there were 738 cases in my state and 41 in my county. Now, as of yesterday’s data, there are 3,496 cases in my state and 110 in my county. Now seems like the perfect time for everything to reopen. Let’s all grab a drink at a bar! Don’t forget to lick a stranger! Cough into each other’s mouths! We can never die!

I have been wearing my mask if I’ve had to go into public — which we did a handful of times within the past month — and otherwise we’ve been staying the fuck inside. I have asthma and my wife is very immuno-compromised. This is not something I want to fuck around with. Thankfully, my job still has a work from home policy until June, but after that, I’m not sure what the plan is. I know they mentioned discussing plans to get us back into the office in phases… I’m hoping they’ll postpone further as our cases continue to climb.

Honestly, besides the continued mantra of “stay inside, wash your hands,” we’ve been in pretty much maintenance mode as far as the virus is concerned.

I was worried about that second wave hitting around August, but if May goes as poorly as I expect it will, we’ll probably see that spike in June or July, and I’m afraid it’s going to be much worse than it would have been if we’d stuck to the original plan of social distancing until a vaccine.

One last thing on it: the thing I find infuriating is the folks that have presented this situation as “stay at home and destroy the economy, or go back to work and let the sickly and old die.” See, there’s the thing: IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. If we had a functioning federal government, they would have been acting as the control tower, funneling medical supplies to the hot zones, they would have passed a UBI and suspended mortgages, rent, and utilities until this was over, and we all would have hunkered down and maintained until we saw a significant decrease in infections nationwide, or a vaccination, whichever came first. That is what the federal government’s role is. We are not a loose conglomerate of individual nations. We have a federal government for situations exactly like this. But we’re also run by opportunistic ghouls whose entire purpose for decades has been to defund government plans, and then point out how poorly they’re performing so that they can then eliminate the project completely. It’s fucking craven and cruel.

Ugh, whatever, let’s talk about something else.

What I’ve Been Writing

I wrote a short story a while back. It was done quick and dirty — all in one sitting and with little regard for what I was putting down. It was not good, but it was the first thing I’d written in a long time, so I was proud. I now have a revised outline so I can re-draft it into something more resembling a story.

I also have half of a story that I originally came up with for an anthology. I missed the deadline for the anthology, but the story still tugged at me. It’s related to spring time, so the weather recently has given me a fair amount of inspiration. It, too, is pretty rough. But I’m trying to give myself permission to write terribly — I can fix it in post.

That’s been my biggest block lately. I sit down with the best intentions to write, but then I’m frozen because all I can hear is What if it sucks? What if I can’t write? What if I’m doomed to only a handful of poorly written short stories for eternity? The thing is…I can look back at some of the older short stories I’ve written, and I’m pretty pleased with them. Sure, there are places where I want to edit or adjust things, places where I feel like I’ve improved, but I can also remember how bad they started out. I’m an editor more than a drafter — at least with short fiction. I write, and then restructure it, redraft it, revise it, polish it until it’s something I can be proud of. I know this about myself, and yet it’s been such a roadblock, especially lately.

I’m working on a writing related project that’s honestly just for me. I want to write more, and I think this will give me the motivation to do so. More on that later.

What I’ve Been Reading

I finished Nicky Drayden’s The Prey of Gods last month. It was really enjoyable, and I definitely want to check out more of her work.

In the meantime, I’ve been plugging away at a few books. I’m really close to finishing some up.

• I’m 69% through The Bone Houses, which I really like. It’s a neat genre blend of fantasy and horror — a secondary world fantasy in which the dead rise in the evenings and attack the village. It seems that the dead that were once confined to the forest are no longer confined to those boundaries, and the main character is on a quest to rid the land of them once and for all. It’s not a scary book, but it is a fun book — a fair amount of zombie killing, but with a mix of some light quest-fantasy. I really like it.
• I’m 60% through The Kill Club by Wendy Heard. Jazz wants to save her brother Joaquin from their terrible foster mother, but the state and the police aren’t motivated nor interested in helping. When their foster mother starts withholding Joaquin’s insulin, Jazz is approached by a mysterious caller that offers her the chance to have her foster mother dealt with…if she’s willing to do the same for someone else first. It’s a twisty, turny thriller, and exactly the kind of thing I’ve been in the mood for lately.
• I’m 60% through My Sister, the Serial Killer. It’s been a really interesting read — about a young woman whose sister tears through boyfriends almost literally. Every man she comes in contact with seems to meet his end — of course, she swears this is never her fault. She walks a fine line between sociopathic and narcissistic, and the poor main character is torn between protecting her family…and protecting the rest of the public from her family. The prose style is very poetic — in ways it reminds me of a less abstract White is for Witching. The chapters are all very short, and usually headlined with a single word that is important either thematically or as a subject matter in the chapter. It’s a super fast read — I’ve only actually read on it a few days, and I’m already more than halfway through. It’s also the first book I’ve read in print in months, possibly a year or more.
• I’m 74% through Cottonmouths by Kelly J. Ford. It’s an interesting crime drama about a woman that comes home to her small Arkansas town after college chewed her up and spit her out. When she finds out her old high-school crush is up to some shady business, she quickly gets in over her head. Ford is from Arkansas, and actually lived around the area I grew up, and I can tell from the way she describes the area. The details and dialog sound just like back home. 

What I’ve Been Watching

I watched a few movies last week, but I want to specifically mention Vivarium as a stand out for sure: Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots are a couple house-hunting that get trapped in a nightmarish suburb from which they can’t escape. The way it plays with domesticity, traditional gender roles in cis-het marriages, and parenthood make it an incredibly interesting and gripping watch.

Their child, which is literally dropped off at their door step, is disturbing as hell, but not in the ways kids usually are — this isn’t the girl from The Ring or Macaulay Culkin from The Good Son. You will see kids you recognize in this kid’s behavior — maybe even your own. But it’s the way horror pushes those traits just a step or two past reality that makes things the most effectively unsettling. I want to write about this more some time — I have a lot to say.

Beyond that? I’ve just been watching RuPaul’s Drag Race at the insistence of my brother and my wife. I’m enjoying it with caveats and asterisks that I don’t care enough about to write about here. It’s just trashy TV junk food, and it’s been something we can watch with dinner and turn our brains off.

I will say that my brother and I are gearing up to start recording some actual new episodes of our podcast, so I will be watching stuff for that soon. You may even be able to get a hint at future episodes if you check out my watchlist on Letterboxd.

What I’ve Been Doing

Writing — when I can force myself to — and watching junk TV have taken up most of the time not dedicated to my day job. We’ve been working on some home improvement stuff — no remodeling or anything since we can’t do that with our apartment, but looking at replacing some furniture possibly. Mind you, this is all “post-Corona” stuff, but you have to plan for something, right?

Actually, I would really like to go camping. It’s something we can do with social distancing, and we recently bought a tent and an air mattress for camping indoors. But to be able to really camp in the woods sounds fucking great. So we may do that sometime in the near future.

I’ve also been working to tweak and release the classic episodes of our podcast. Episode 4 dropped on Monday, and if you haven’t listened to it, I hope you’ll give it a listen. I’m proud of every episode, but I truly believe we got better as we went along. This week’s episode talks about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Gremlins 2. Brandon chose those movies because they are both movies that parody the original film, and both were directed by the original director. That alone is fascinating, but we have a really great discussion about musical genres, score, the nature of sequels, and 80s and 90s cultural movements.

The next episode — dropping 5/18 — it was my turn to pick. I chose to match up Carrie (1976) and Frankenstein (1931) because both movies are about misunderstood monsters.

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One last thing before I go: I want to give a quick shout out to Pseudopod. Not for any particular reason, I just really love this podcast. I’ve talked them up before, and I will continue to do so because they always bring the absolute best in horror, and I love the way Alasdair hosts the show. His commentary is always interesting and insightful. It’s my dream to someday write something good enough to be featured on it because then I will know that I’ve made it.

I want to mention one story in particular that blew my socks off and I’m still thinking about it almost a week later: “I Hate All That is Mine.” It’s by Leigh Harlen (whom I will be looking up more work by because holy hell) and performed amazingly by Heather Thomas. It’s about a film maker premiering her latest short film, and it’s exactly my kind of disturbing, brutal, and surreal. Art is ambiguous and open to interpretation. You bring as much to each piece as the author, and your experience is an odd tango of exchanges of perception, understanding, bias, and belief. I loved this one so much. 

That’s all of the updates from the bunker for now. We’ll continue holding it down in the Dow Bunker, and you keep holding it down in your own bunker, and we’ll all get through this together. How has week eight been treating y’all? I know a ton of folks have been baking bread — any other neat ways you’ve come up with passing quarantine? Watched or read anything you want to chat about? Hit me up if you’d like. Or, if you’d prefer, you can drop me an email or holler at me on Twitter. I’d love to hear from y’all.

‘Til next time!