A Flash of Spring in the Long Winter

It’s been awhile.

Let’s see. What can I tell you?

I can tell you that 2017 was not the best year of my life, but that’s hardly unique to me.

2018 has gone a little better, so far. I know we’re only three weeks in, but still. I’ve got a list of things to accomplish this year: a full-length album, a novel, radio plays, short stories, two screenplays, a whole slew of comic book projects.

A movie.

(Yes. That movie.)

Maybe I should tell you about the movie. Marlon.

Here’s what I have to tell: I am working on it. The work is going incredibly slowly, and every avenue I have examined to speed the process up, to just finish the damn thing already, to GET IT THE FUCK DONE...are all expensive. I’m not talking even a thousand dollars. I would spend a thousand dollars in a heartbeat, and worry about the bill later.

The money to finish it up quickly and well would bankrupt me. So I’m grinding on, slow and steady, in fits and starts, chipping, chiseling, etcetera.

I haven’t forgotten, I haven’t given up. Someday I’ll surprise you all.

“What? What’s this?” you’ll say. “A horror movie? I remember hearing about this somewhere, a long time ago.”

“It’s Marlon,” I’ll say.

“No shit?” You’ll reply, and clap me on the back, and watch it. Then you’ll go, “Right on. That was pretty groovy. A bit fucked-up, but I dug it.”

And I’ll say, “Thanks, glad you dug it,” and I will return to the screenplay I was working on, and all will be right with the world.

I’m going to be honest, because the writing I care about is honest, and above all, I want to write things that people care about. (Well, perhaps I write to Entertain first and foremost, but caring is close on the heels of the glitter and glam.)

I’ve been kind of depressed lately. For the last week or so, noticeably, palpably, paralyzingly depressed. It’s no mystery to me; I’ve had ups and downs all my life, and every single time it gets bad, it’s because I’m not writing.

I kid you not: just typing this right now is helping.

Skipping over the glum, gray details, it’s getting better. I wrote yesterday; a missing chunk of a novel I hacked out of one month of early mornings in 2014. It felt great. And I’m writing today: this journal is a sort of warm-up to shake me out of the colorless, tasteless smudge I’ve been in all morning. When I’m done with this, there’s more writing waiting.

My wife is right: “Time management,” she told me this morning, with a smile and a kiss and the kind of hug that drags me up toward the sun.

It really is a beautiful day. Clean. Clear. The snow is running in rivulets and freshets down the double glass of the window by my desk. The room smells of the ghost of strong espresso and the fresh scent of new hardbacks I’ve been meaning to read forever.

I just finished The Book Thief, which was easily one of the best books I’ve read in the last five years. I plan to really write about it soon.

Currently, I’m reading Sleeping Beauties, by Stephen and Owen King. It’s exactly the book I need right now, as Stephen King’s books so often are.

(And there’s a great dig at Donald Trump in the first forty pages, so that’s a plus.)

I have a lot to do this year.

I have a lot to do today.

It feels good to know that doing it will help me heal, and in healing, find my voice, and myself, again.

--Max Peterson

Wagner the Wehr-Wolf

I did something on my birthday that I swore I would never do. Something I've been morally opposed to since I learned about it in college. Something so naughty, so personally transgressive, so divisive, that I'm sure one half of my friends will recoil in disgust, the other half applaud wickedly, welcoming me to their debauched rank.

 Frankly, I'm surprised my wife has stayed as long as she has, though I expect the lawyers to arrive with papers any day now.

I bought a Kindle. 

God, it feels so good just to say it. 

Actually, it was a matter of practicality: the house Bird and I moved into this past April seemed spacious enough...until I started unpacking my library. We filled a bookcase at the top of the stairs, and a half bookcase in our bedroom, and a full bookcase next to my desk. Our art books went on the bookcase near the house's living room studio. Harry Potter went on the top of a bookshelf. My 1960s editions of the Sherlock Holmes books, my Chronicles of Narnia boxed set, my battered Silmarillion and dog-eared Ring trilogy and my childhood copy of The Hobbit are all precarious upon the top of the bedroom bookcase.

There are still ten boxes of books to be unpacked. A box of my father's old science fiction paperbacks from the 60s and 70s is sitting in the living room, under my guitars. There are no more bookcases to be had, or room for them if there were.

So I bought a digital bookshelf. 

I'm reading a book called Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, by George W.M. Reynolds on it right now. It was written in 1865, in a style I can only describe as delightfully, hilariously gothic: it is loquacious and lividly purple stuff, and I am enjoying it immensely. People are dying of grief, and there are secret love affairs discussed at length in semi-public places, there's a very clever, scheming woman who is deaf and dumb (or presents herself as such). and everyone is "perfect in their long-limbed, symmetrical beauty, though somewhat haughty and given to condescension, but not without a subtle, prideful kindness." Many things in the novel are "ineffable," but that doesn't stop Mr. Reynolds trying anyway. That sort of thing.

Oh. And there's a werewolf. (Who is pretending to be the brother of his granddaughter to hide the fact that he is, in actual fact, her aged and piteous grandfather made young and vital once more by a moment of Faustian weakness some ten winters afore.) This book is so much fun. It's the sort of thing I would recommend to the nerdiest of my bookish friends. Clara would love it, for example (she gets a real bang out of Chaucer, and medieval literature in general, which always delights me when I remember). Katie Hubbard-Haines has probably already read it. Probably by a dying fire, with a glass of rich and tawny wine, and her marvelous black coat. I do not know if Amber Rose would like it or not, but I would love to talk to her and hear her opinions on the women in the novel. She is one of the smartest, fiercest feminists I know, with the scholar's sense of literary context.

Best of all, Wagner the Wehr-Wolf was free. I was surprised at just how many books I've been meaning to read are available for free on the Amazon Kindle store: Zanoni, and Bleak House, to name two. The Country of the Blind, by H.P. Lovecraft, and The Georgics, to name two more. And Falling Angel, and Jurgen, by the inimitable James Branch Cabell, and Great Expectations and Men Without Bones and The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and The Sound of His Horn and...

You see what I'm saying.

It's not the same as feeling the pages and smelling the binding of a thrift-store copy, but I like my new little bookshelf.

Before I post this, in the spirit of mysterious goings-on and obvious foreshadowing: I am currently in the process of calibrating my HD TV to Rec.709...perhaps to finally fix a color grade, done over a year ago, so that a Director's Cut sound mix can commence, so that, this year, finally, finally...

But no. I've said too much. Suffice it to say: the Marlon hard drives are back in my possession for the first time in over a year, and there are mysterious stirrings on the moors, and an ardent (if somewhat haughty) glint in my eye...

In Which I Write

This is the second time I've sat down to write this blog today. I wrote one earlier in the day, looked it over, nodded my head with satisfaction, hit "publish", and watched as the blog not only failed to post, but was vanished out of existence by what I can only imagine to be wicked little demons in the mothercode of Squarespace.

(Or it could be that their blogging app is still buggy crap, which it was the last time I tried to use it to blog on my phone as well, and which I am slightly grumpy about.)

I haven't been on here in a long time. To be fair, I haven't been anywhere much but my two jobs since the move from Maine to Michigan. I went from working a glorious 15-20 hours a week to 50-60 hours a week, and I'm still tightening and loosening the bolts of my life to accommodate the new stresses and strains. Still, I'm told that this is what the Real World looks like, and that businesses don't invest in themselves.

(For those of you who haven't heard, Bird is currently in the process of opening an art supply store here in Traverse City with her brother and sister-in-law: a joint venture between the three of them. It's called Hue Art + Supply, and you can read more about it here. Or you could follow them on Instagram. Just lately, their Instagram page has featured celebratory wooden dolls and vaguely psychedelic backgrounds done in watercolor by my wife. I sincerely hope things continue in the odd, fun vein they are in.)

The increase in hours has meant that I've had to reassess and re-prioritize my time and creative energy. Maine was great: I was able to write a hardboiled detective novelette, record two EPs (one noise rock, one country), finish a screenplay that I've been tinkering with for years, master my Red Beans and Rice recipe, and still have time left over to binge-watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Bird.

Time is still moving it's same, steady pace. I just have much less of it to spend, these days. So I've had to consider what I want to do. What I really want to do. Not just with my afternoon, or tomorrow, or for the next couple of weeks. Time has become dearer to me than that, in the past few months.

And it comes back to the words. It always comes back to the words.

I'm a writer. (A writer with a legion of time-consuming and creative hobbies, but a writer, nonetheless.) Refocusing on the words, and the work, and the stories, has shown me unequivocally, that I'm meant to be at this keyboard, at this desk, with my books and my pens and my tired eyes. In the past month, I've edited and sent out the detective story I wrote in Maine, and submitted the first screenplay I ever wrote to three of the biggest film festivals in the country. I finally finished a science fiction short story that I wrote for my father (and also, I realized when it was finished, for my grandfather, who passed away earlier this year) and sent that off to a magazine as well.

I'm writing an odd little fantasy story, now, that is secretly a science fiction story, while (also secretly) managing to be a ghost story as well. There's a strange little girl in it, and a vast, empty wood in the south of England.

It's an astonishingly beautiful summer day, bright and hot, and without a trace of autumn on the air. I have ink on my fingers again. I am drinking strong tea that tastes of cardamom and cinnamon and lemon peel, and Trinity is sleeping just beyond a splash of sunlight on the floor. Cicadas crackle like static in the hot air outside, below the trilling of little birds in the trees.

I'm writing a ghost story. I'm writing. And I am so ridiculously happy.

I Am Not Dead (Steve Albini is God)

I’m sitting in my underwear at the top of a hot old house in Traverse City. The windows are open, and I can see the leaves of the lilac tree in the backyard turning down against the tide of cold air sweeping down the further hills, announcing rain. I’m listening to Shellac’s Excellent Italian Greyhound; I’ve been on a real Steve Albini kick lately. Maybe Bird and I will talk about it on Chat-Man and Robin (which, if my night goes according to plan, will drop on time tomorrow), or maybe, more likely, given the newfound depths of my obsessive tendencies, I’ll write a blog.

Steve Albini has reached into my brain and changed the way I think about music, just lately. And he’s a curmudgeon with a dirty mouth, so I like him that much more.

So. I vanished for a month. Last I think anybody really heard from me, Bird and I were packing up our life into the Subaru again and heading home to Michigan. I posted a few pictures of us in incredible tie-dye shirts my cousin Tim made for us, and then, for all any of you know, I dropped off the face of the fucking earth.

Here’s what happened.

We drove twenty-five hours to Traverse City. We pulled up to our new house and turned off the car. Smoke poured out from under the hood.

(That’s not hyperbole: our overloaded, overtaxed car was smoking when we got here. Next day, it started fine, ran fine, still running, no problems. Buy Subaru, everybody. You won’t be disappointed.)

Erin and Alan (erstwhile CM&R guests Hardly Quinn and the Toker) helped us unload the car, and we went to sleep for half a day.

Then I got sick.

I got really, really sick. Maybe it started with exhaustion from the journey, or the garbage that I ate and drank to stay awake for a full day of driving. Maybe it started with the flu, which I got a couple days after we got here.

I’ve written horror movies, but I’ll spare you here. Suffice to say, I was sick for almost twenty days. So sick that I did doctors and lab tests without medical insurance and a single meager income (Bird has since found a job, but at the time it was just me and me retail thing). I couldn’t write, or think, or really do anything but lay in bed and watch movies I couldn’t remember watching after. I was confused most of the day, every day, and weak, and dizzy. I took a lot of over-the-counter medications well beyond the “Do Not Take for More Than” recommendations.

Then I was better. My tests came back clean and, slowly, I started to feel like myself again.

The time between then and now has been me getting back to normal. I’m eating a regular diet again. Bird and I got a gym membership, and I picked up a second job. Things are gradually getting back to normal, and on top of all that, I’m starting to figure out the rhythms of this new life we’re building in Traverse City. I haven’t gotten it all figured out quite yet, but I’m getting there. I don’t have the free time I used to, but it’s making the time I do have that much more urgent, and precious.

I’ve started reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. I wrote today: a thousand words of a new screenplay I plotted in the week after I started getting better. It feels like learning how to walk again; I’m stumbling and leaning on things a lot, but the last hundred words felt stronger than the first hundred, and every word is a word in the right direction.

I did an episode of a 90s radio show, and it was insanely fun. You can listen to it here; come back on Friday if you liked it and want to hear another. Chat-Man and Robin should be starting up again this week, and if not this week, then definitely the next.

I’ve started writing (when nobody else is in the house, and I can be noisy and strange) a post-hardcore dance album called Loran Reed: Lunch Meat and Speed, based on Loran Iris’ Instagram feed. She’s one of the most interesting people I’ve met in years, and the strange, nauseous beauty of her particular form of artistic expression has inspired some unusual art of my own.

I’ll keep you all posted as all this comes along. Mostly, I wanted to write this to let you know why I’ve been gone for so long, and to say: here I am, alive and well, and, slowly but surely, making art again: Art of all kinds and types and shapes and sounds and sizes, and, now that I’m relatively sure I’m not going to die in the next few days, I hope you’ll let me share it all with you again.

Now. Where were we?

--Max Peterson
At his first desk in a year

A Perfect Day

It’s a shockingly beautiful day, here in Maine. It’s been in the forties since I woke up, at eight o’clock, and while there are still stubborn globs of snow slopped on the street corners and the edges of the parking lots, the remnants of the nor’easter that effectively shut the city down for two days are running down the street and dripping from the eaves, the songbirds returned to sing the sluice away down the drains.

The last snowstorm was a bad one. I haven’t seen anything like it since my childhood in the Keweenaw: nearly 24 inches in a single night, with winds whipping, sometimes, into the 50s. Bird and I were down in Connecticut with our friends John and Kasey Scheibe when it came sweeping in up the coast: they rented a charming little cabin in the woods for a late-winter weekend getaway for the four of us. We don’t see enough of each other, not nearly; I hadn’t seen them since I married them, last October.

We drank excellent bourbon and strong craft sours. We are Red Beans and Rice and cooked garlicky soups and garlicky breakfast potatoes, stacks of pancakes and pizzas heavy enough with chicken and bacon to bend in your hand. We fried a whole loaf of bread into grilled cheese. Trinity barked at horses, we failed to see either a lunar eclipse or its miraculous, accompanying comet, and laughed more than any near neighbors could have appreciated. We sweated the whiskey out in a midnight sauna. We played Cards Against Humanity (the last time I played Cards with Kasey, we drank vodka until I couldn’t keep playing, because I had lost to ability to read, and, a little later, to think to the end of a sentence) and a strategy board game called Catan, which we enjoyed so much that, rushing through the slush of New Hampshire for the safety of our little apartment, fat, wet sleet clotting under our wipers, Bird called our local comic shop and made them hold us a copy of the game, which we picked up half an hour before Biddeford was buried. We played Catan and ate Ben and Jerry’s through the night as windows rattled in their panes and cars collided in the intersection under our window.

It was an amazing vacation, with amazing people.

Now I’m back in Biddeford, slowly getting ready to move back to Michigan. I haven’t really written in a while, but I have today off. The window by the kitchen table is open and the smell of the melt and the newborn earth mingles with the touch of cream and honey in my tea. (Earl Grey, hot, in honor of Captain Picard. Bird and I have been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I haven’t seen since I was young; in this current climate of anti-intellectualism, it’s wonderful to watch a show about scientists and explorers, a show which espouses the virtues in wonder and knowledge and discovery. All that aside, it’s great science fiction, and it’s on Netflix.)

Tom Waits is crooning like smooth, cancerous thunder from the record player in the corner of the apartment. Earlier this morning, I spun Earth 2. Listening to the fuzzy, polyphonic drone, Bird turned to me and said, “You know, I think you might be the strangest person I know.”

“Why’s that?”

She shrugged. “Just your musical tastes. It’s all so weird. I like it, though. It’s something I love about you. And I like this album. It’s just...” She kissed me. “It’s just weird.”

It made me feel better than I’ve felt in days. Eventually, she always helps me back into my head.

When Tom Waits (Real Gone, one of the first vinyl records in my collection) is done, I’m going to spin Sleep’s Dopesmoker. However Bird enjoys the oddity of my musical tastes, our new roommates do not, so I’m getting it out of my system today. (And there’s always headphones.)

Now. I have a podcast to cut and post, and writing to do.

I miss you, whoever you are, reading this, and hope your day is as lovely as the one I’ve found myself in today.