Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 10/18/24

Pre-Birthday Shenanigans Edition

By the time this weekly briefing reaches you, a Field Excursion is underway, to the rubble-strewn ultraviolet vistas of Central Texas and the enclave of Waco, home of green bears and black and white silos. Bunker Ops will be a part of Walking Tales: Bringing Historic Stories to Life in Oakwood Cemetery on Saturday, October 19th from 10 AM to 1 PM. Admission is free and if you follow the link to the information page, you can see Bunker Ops doing her thing last year (she’s in the top hat), talking about Mollie Adams. If you’ve never been to Oakwood to see some of the luminaries buried there, it’s worth a visit, especially on this day, as the stories of these people come to life.

I will be along for the ride, mostly serving as a sherpa in this regard, but I have it on good authority that we will be having a family celebration of my birthday (and all of the other October birthdays, as well). Hilarity will ensue. Photos may not.

The Toughest Week

The gauntlet of remembrances, well wishes, kind thoughts, and check-ins that happens between October 15th and October 24th is helpful, and also really appreciated, and I’m sorry that I can’t be more “in the spirit of Halloween” than I already am. I want to say something about grief and the mourning process that I think everyone knows, but it bears a bit of repeating anyways: we’re not meant to keep our wounds open. The natural and healthy thing to do is to let them close and heal and scar over and then we can take the bandage off and go back to living.

I try to do that. It’s gotten easier over the years, because, well, that’s just how it works. Our brains don’t want us to dwell on things, either. I don’t know if we should call it self-compartmentalization or what, but that’s how it’s always been. It gets easier with time.

I think some people keep those wounds open intentionally, in order to keep a memory alive, or to let the tragedy be a part of their personality, of who they are. It’s a category, isn’t it? “I’m a widower” is a thing you can say that will separate you from other people, into a group of like-minded fellows with whom you have at least one thing in common.

I’ve always had a problem with belonging to groups, having heard that famous quote attributed to Groucho Marx about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member at an early age and adopting it as a central tenet of my personality for years. This mostly springs from the stigmatism being a geek in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when it was still not cool to like Star Trek and comic books. You don’t realize how hard Shatner’s SNL “Get a Life” skit landed during that time, but that admonition became a widely-used dismissal of anyone who was a Trekkie, a Whovian, a LARPer...any fan group that was deemed “nerdier” than you. I took great pains to say, often, “I’m NOT a Trekkie! I just like the show!” At the time, it felt like an important distinction to make.

What I objected to, then and now, is the idea of reducing me or anyone else into a single, omnipresent category that would color and shape how everyone saw and reacted to me. Again, I took great pains to impress upon others that I liked all kinds of things, not just Star Wars. Granted, I got over it. Getting paid to write funny articles for Playboy.com and comic book scripts for small press companies got me over that hump. Call me what you like, while I’m cashing the check.

Still, old habits die hard. I also really didn’t like picking up that tag of ‘widower,” no matter how factually accurate it might be. I don’t mind that it’s applied to me, but I don’t want to apply it myself. I don’t want to be reduced to a collection of stats. That kind-eyed wince whenever I or anyone else brings up Cathy or Sonya within earshot. I can talk about them without bursting into tears now. I expect that trend to continue upward as the years go on. And I don’t want to go back to that. Keeping that wound open, that “never forget” bumper sticker homily that feels like performative grief rather than a real expression of loss, feels like intentionally stepping backwards rather than forwards.

Most of you did that with me the first time. 2020, as painful as it was, would not have been survivable without all of you lifting me up, calling, checking in, and giving giving giving of your time, your money, your love and support. There was something beautiful amidst all of the tragedy and hurt. But I have no desire to relive it. I don’t have to say out loud, “never forget,” because I won’t. I can still close my eyes and in seconds transport myself back to the hospice center. It’s irritatingly easy. And if I read even a single blog post from that time, I know where I was, what I was doing, how I felt. How is it that anyone could think I might forget that?

I need the distance. We all do. It’s natural and normal to heal, to let time pad those memories so that when you come across them again, most likely unexpectedly, the sharp edges have been dulled and the corners blunted so that even if you trip over your grief, it’s not as painful as before. Next year, it’ll be even less. It will never go away, but that ache is supposed to fade. I’m not going to reopen old wounds for Socia Media.

Thank God for Janice, who not only embraces me and my gorilloid-like cranium and all of the flotsam and jetsam it contains, but she gives me the space to have a bad day. We talk about it. I tell her a story about a thing that we did twelve years ago. Sometimes it’s funny and we laugh. And then we keep on with whatever we were doing to live in the here and now. Her patience for dealing with me is astonishing.

I don’t know if you’re going to see a bunch of pictures of Sonya next week. I know I will, because Facebook was created by nascent serial killers on the Autism Spectrum who have no means of understanding emotional intelligence, empathy, or wisdom. You can trust me when I tell you that, even if I don’t feel like posting pictures of my sweet dog, I’ll be thinking about her, all day. Even if you don’t see it.

L to R: Sonya, Cathy. Better days.

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My Birthday is Next Thursday

For those of you not getting the context clues, above, I’ll be officially middle-aged next week: the big Five-Five. Now, I mentioned this because I don’t want you to buy me anything for my birthday. Instead, buy something for yourself! Celebrate my origin story with one of the many fine books and/or stories I’ve written over the years. If you already have one or more of said books, then why not write a review for it on the platform of origin? You can find them at the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, Amazon, DriveThruRPG and other fine outlets. Just use the search engine that makes you the least angry and be sure to put my name in quotes or you will get twenty thousand pages of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, a fine piece of American literature that I did NOT write.

Click me! I’m a Link!

If you’re a sword and sorcery fan, may I suggest Blood & Thunder, now in a handy epub format? If you’re currently playing role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, how about Gobsmack! or Tools of the Trade? If you want something a little spooky (and romantic), try Empty Hearts. My point is, there’s a lot to choose from. You can get exactly what you want, in the size that fits, and at a price you can live with. I can’t be any more giving on the day of my birth than that!

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: Our focus group here at the DMR is looking earnestly for someone with book designing skills, someone who can work with an art director’s brief and create InDesign templates for cover and interior pages. This will require coming up with dummy text and photography layouts, but will not include actually laying out the manuscript into book form. If you or anyone you know might be interested in working with an art-savvy author with a small-scale but graphically intensive project, please reply in comments or by private message and include any relevant portfolio links. Thanks for your consideration. And now, here’s two things that we actually liked, perfect for the season.

Caddo Lake (HBO)

Two strangers living on mysterious Caddo Lake in East Texas are drawn into a web of mystery and strange goings on. I can’t say anything else about it without tipping the story’s hand.

This is going to be one of those movies where you only want to watch about the first minute or so of the trailer. That should be enough to help you decide if this is the kind of suspense thriller you like. I don’t think watching the whole trailer will ruin anything for you, but this is one of those movies where the journey of discovery is a big part of what makes it so good.

Genre aficionados will surely figure out the story before the third act is up, but I suspect it will take at least the third act before you start to put it together. We are normally pretty good about guessing ahead, owing to having written so many twisty stories and also having consumed so many, as well. That we didn’t get the ending of the movie in the first twenty minutes is a testament to the efficacy of the filmmaking.

I do want to point out that while it may seem to be a horror movie, it’s not, or rather, it’s not full of jump scares and gore. It’s more of an idea movie, the kind that you think about afterwards. I’m really surprised; HBO hasn’t been putting out great original films for a while now. Maybe they’ve turned the Pandemic/Strike corner and are back to curating their content.

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From (MGM+)

Harold Perrineau stars as the sheriff of a small community struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy in the face of horrible monsters that come for them at night.

Of all the various projects that make up the LOST Apology Tour, this has to be the most satisfying entry. There’s a lot of bits and pieces from other things in this series, but it’s been combined in a really interesting way. Yeah, it seems as if they are borrowing from some of Stephen King’s favorite set pieces, but it doesn’t feel like a pastiche. That seems to come with the territory of telling a story of this scale and scope.

I’m not sure what to call this; pre-apocalypse horror? Survival horror? It’s hard to pin down and it doesn’t fit neatly when you do. But it’s got a great hook in the first three episodes and there’s enough to get you involved and watching.

The cast is great, even if Perrineau IS playing a dad again—for about five minutes, I kept thinking maybe his grown-up son in From was Walt. The time period matches up pretty good. In particular, the kids are fantastic. Everyone is a familiar “type” but no one seems to be a cardstock cliché. There’s some good character development in the first season. You will quickly pick a few favorites to follow.

There’s a scene in season one where a couple of characters try to codify what they know about this weird place that they can’t seem to leave. They start writing on the wall, and at one point, you see a character write “did we survive the crash?” and I thought to myself, “here’s a show made by people who must have hated how LOST handled this.” I was pleasantly surprised to find some characters acting like they were real people and not puppets in service to the plot. A little meta, with the wall of theories? Yeah, maybe, but also well within the things they set up to establish about the people and the place early on. This is mystery suspense done right.

My biggest complaint is...MGM Plus? Really? What even IS that? I know, I know, it’s EPIX rebranded. Maybe it’s a good thing, but I’m tired of the rewriting. You’ll notice I said Caddo Lake was on HBO, not MAX. It’s still Twitter, too. We do not have to agree to their silliness.

I had to get it through Amazon Prime, so who knows where it’ll be on your device. There’s a seven-day free trial you can get. Use it to check out From. The monsters are creepy and terrifying and we still don’t know what the hell they are.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”