In September 2019, I met a lovely woman named Susan. She was the leader of the U.S. Street Team for Poets of the Fall, and their biggest fan in the western hemisphere. We were friends online at first, and then met in person at Prog Power in Atlanta when we saw the band perform live. At the time, she gave several others and me three bracelets each that glowed in the dark, red, white, and blue to wear as a way of welcoming the band to the U.S. The blue one burst, which gave my black t-shirt quite a fancy look, but these two made it through both the concert and the Atlanta airport and have been on my bedpost ever since.
Susan and I kept in touch through the pandemic, and made plans to go to Poland in 2022 to see the band, but alas, that trip didn’t happen because cancer barged in on Susan’s life. Yet a year later, just last September, she had the strength to go, and so we met in Warsaw for an amazing weekend of music and friends old and new.
How grateful I am that we had that time together, for last night Susan passed away.
My friend lived such a rich life, filled with love, friends, pets, travel, music, laughter, and adventure. I remember telling her, and her agreeing, that she was lucky to have found her true love so young, and to have such a great family. We didn’t always agree on ideology or things in the news–in many ways we were polar opposites–but what we had in common made us friends, and that’s what mattered most. The first time I saw Poets and the last time she saw Poets, we were there together, and that will always be dear to me. True to her favorite song, she was, and will remain, cradled in love.
I know more folks do Holidailies than Horrordailies, so perhaps I should just give a little run-down of 2023 so far. This way we can get it over with and move on to better things because friends, unfortunately, this year has been hands-down the most painful year of my life. To review:
Also in March I was nearly killed by a drunk driver.
In April I popped three discs in my back and was incapacitated to the point of needing a walker, a steroid shot in my back, and a couple of months of physical therapy.
In October I had a massive heart attack, which meant I had to cancel two trips in November, one to England and one to Finland.
And just this week they cut 21 positions at my workplace.
The one amazingly bright moment in the year was a trip to Warsaw with a friend, where I met more friends and got to see my favorite band, Poets of the Fall. The trips to England and Finland would have been more of that friendly and musical goodness, but yeah, no, not just a few weeks out from a heart attack.
But other than that, 2023 was horrible, so I’m ready to kick it right on out the door. Thank goodness for friends and birds.
Speaking of birds, I have a rocking Birdie Balcony Café going on. Birds come and go all day long, from dawn past sundown. I can never seem to get decent photos of them because they get spooked if they see me, but here are a few Mourning Doves, AKA MoDos. They didn’t have a reservation for the table, but okay. Things here are first come, first served.
Three little birds: Every little thing gonna be all right.
There are usually anywhere from three to eight MoDos sitting on the windowsill, table, and balcony railing when I wake up in the morning. They eat with a flock of Sparrows that come for breakfast, then everyone flies off until about 10:30.
And lemme tellya, they all stalk me.
When I went out on the balcony this morning, Sparrows, Northern Mockingbirds and a male Northern Cardinal were in the tree outside my living room window waiting for their mid-morning feeding. They usually come back again around 2:00, bringing the MoDos with them. The Sparrows and MoDos come back around 4:30, and then the MoDos come alone around 6:00, after it gets dark, for dinner. Sometimes the Cardinal also comes by during twilight.
They’re ravenous, too. I just bought a five-pound bag of birdseed last week and it’s almost half gone. Same for a 1.5-pound bag of peanuts. I put crushed, shelled peanuts on the windowsill and the Mockingbirds know that if the Peanut Lady isn’t in her living room, they can tap on the metal part of the windowsill and she’ll appear. While they’re simultaneously eyeballing me and chowing down, I throw whole peanuts in the shell down for the Blue Jays, Crows, and squirrels. It’s like a second job for me, heh.
They keep me company, and for that I’m grateful. I have a huge apartment and it’s kind of cavernous without Inigo. I miss the little guy tremendously, but he has left his imprint on this place and although he has moved on to other things, occasionally I do still feel his presence here. He comes to visit at random times, just to say hello and leave a warm spot on his little bed in his house, which is still in the living room with the door open. When I’m super low, he comes to comfort, landing on my back and spreading his wings over my shoulders in a hug. Sometimes Jimmy the Green Cheek comes with him and lands on my shoulder. Sounds crazy, but I don’t care.
I remember thinking last Christmas that it would be Inigo’s last one. Now this is really strange, but last night the thought came into my head that had he not hurt his leg and needed release from pain, that the day of my heart attack would have been his own day to pass. I don’t know where that thought came from.
Have you ever seen the German TV series Dark? It involves time travel, but not in a hokey Back the the Future kind of way. (You know, because it’s dark.) It’s all about the nature of time, destiny, whether actions are free will or ordained to happen because there is more than one reality and you take the same actions over and over again in each one. There might be minor differences between timelines and realities, but your general story arc produces the same results.
Maybe watching that series had something to do with my thoughts. I don’t really understand quantum physics, time-bending, or things like Schrödinger’s cat, but if there is more than one reality, maybe that heart attack was the pain of Inigo’s passing in an another one. Heaven knows when we said goodbye in this reality, it physically felt like a kick in the chest.
Really, they ought to drum me out of science writing, with theories like that. But who knows? I don’t believe in any gods, but plenty of prominent scientists talk about things like time, other universes, and other realities. If there is science to the concept of multiple realities, I’m all for it.
It’s Saturday night in October, which for me can mean only one thing: watching something spooky. Today is also my mother’s birthday, although she passed away in 2000. I have her to thank for my love of horror movies and TV shows. She used to let me stay up late to watch Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a series about a reporter who often ends up writing investigative pieces about homicides that involve the supernatural, none of which ever get published because his editor thinks he’s off his rocker. It was a great little series, and NBC made it available to watch online, so I’ll be indulging in that in her honor starting tonight.
I’ll bet that typewriter is a Royal. (Image: NBC)
Ya know, I’ve always credited my choice of journalism as a career to watching too many episodes of Lou Grant as a kid, but now that I think of it, maybe Carl Kolchak had something to do with it.
Another of my mother’s favorites was was Trilogy of Terror. One night we watched it while we were on the phone, she on Long Island, me in Virginia. That’s one of my favorite memories of her, actually. We would both yell at our TVs at the same time, “Don’t open the door!”
Peace was never an option. (Image: ABC)
I wonder what my mother would think of today’s horror. It’s so much more graphic than it was when I was growing up, and the most popular shows, like American Horror Story(AHS), have an element of dark psychological suspense that can be triggering or traumatizing for some folks. She probably would have loved AHS, actually, although maybe not the seasons with Jessica Lange. My mother couldn’t stand her. She thought Lange “always had the same face, putting a puss on.” But my mother definitely would have loved the seasons with Kathy Bates, who became one of her heroes because of Fried Green Tomatoes.
My mother loved mysteries, as well, and would have loved shows that blended mystery with genres like southern gothic, like the first season of True Detectives—which I find to be some of the most terrifying TV ever made simply because it’s entirely possible that somewhere in the rural South, some dude is right this second walking around wearing tighty-whities and a gasmask and wielding a machete.
I don’t know how my mother would have felt about some of the darker movies, though. She might have liked the Conjuring series,but maybe the Sinister series would have been a little too dark. On the other hand, she probably would have found anything by Ari Aster as ridiculous as I do. Indeed, Florence Pugh very nearly became my Jessica Lange as the first time I saw her was her performance in Midsommar, where she ugly-cried through the whole thing. If I hadn’t decided to ignore my initial reaction to seeing her name as the lead in Don’t Worry Darling and consequently enjoyed the movie, I might still be avoiding her. However, only my deep and abiding adoration of Joaquin Phoenix will compel me to watch Aster’s latest effort, Beau is Afraid, and I’m hoping that Phoenix’s talent will override Aster’s penchant for downright stupid climaxes and flat endings.
What have you been watching this month? And are you a year-rounder like me?
zenzalei 