Has It REALLY Been That Long?
(Remember how, in the days of standard episodic television before streaming and binging, many dramas and some comedies would give a thumbnail update starting with “Previously on…”, flashing scenes so fast that people starting midway through a season or story were more confused than before? Well, that’s what this newsletter is like. Look at these as regular updates of how the sausage is made, with what, and whether or not the staff washed their hands after they used the toilet. Or, worse, if they only washed their hands before using the toilet.)
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Well. According to the Chinese lunar calendar, we’re firmly in the center of the Year of the Fire Horse, and I’ve been around just long enough to see it come around again. I have no delusions that I’ll see another, but you never can tell. Both Mark Twain and Fritz Leiber lived long enough to see Halley’s Comet come back around toward the inner solar system, and if I stick around until I’m 95, I might get a chance to see it myself. There’s always the chance that some mad god decides to punish me with my worst fear and give me immortality, so I’d best get my affairs in order now before things get weird. (I’ve already made plans for The Singularity and the thought of electronic eternity consisting of listening to Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling talking at each other: two shotgun slugs big enough to make sure not enough brain remains to scan, in a bayou remote enough that the alligators and snapping turtles don’t leave enough DNA for cloning. Of course, I figure that we’ll get three straight years of the Dallas Cowboys winning shutout World Series pennants or five seasons of Firefly before The Singularity happens, so don’t worry about me or the alligators. I’m not planning on going anywhere any time soon.)
That’s the funny part about having a life weirdly lived: it’s not the fear of “how much time do I have left?” but instead “How the hell did I live THIS long?” Honest to Xiombarg, I was absolutely certain that I’d say or write something incendiary enough that I wouldn’t live to see 28. (Someone apparently agreed with me in 1994: I still have the .22 hollowpoints I pulled out of the outside wall of my old garage apartment at the time.) Finding myself somewhere between Elder Statesman and the Sayer of the Law is a weird feeling, but I’ve been prepping and taking notes for the last 35 years, so it comes with the territory. When I do slough off this weak flesh, the hope is that friends and cohorts will corroborate all of the weird tales, including the story of how I know savannah monitor urine looks exactly like crack cocaine, because I’m having problems with keeping them all straight myself.
Were this a Kurt Vonnegut story, this would start at the end and then rush to the beginning, but I’m not even in the same solar system as Vonnegut, so things start where they’re supposed to start. Feel free to leave the vehicle at any time for your mental safety, and don’t forget to tip your neighborhood jenkem vendor.
60 Years Ago
I don’t have too many memories of this time, but which ones I have are of my getting my basic personality traits established, demonstrated mostly by sucking down amniotic fluid like a fish and kicking the hell out of the inside of my mother’s uterus. Eventually, the lack of conversation and reading material led to my leaving that situation, exactly two-thirds of the year through, in what still qualifies as the second-worst decision I ever made: if I’d had more ambition and drive, I would have worked harder to share the exact birthdate and time as Shirley Manson, but you know me and procrastination. As it was, it left me exactly one-third of a century old, to the hour, when the clock rolled over on the Twentieth Century and every date starting with “19-” became history. This was also two weeks before the premiere of Star Trek and just before LSD became illegal in the US: make of that what you will. Even then, I was demonstrating skills that served me well in later years, particularly inarticulate screaming and crapping myself.
50 Years Ago
Up to this point, the story read like that of any midwestern suburban kid in the mid-1970s: chasing June bugs in the back yard, going to school and learning all the wrong things for an effective life in the future, and vaguely making plans for a future we kids were told repeatedly wouldn’t happen when the nukes started flying. (Back then, no matter how hard my father worked to break me of that disgusting habit, my dream was to study vertebrate paleontology until I was 120, preferably the ones found around the Viking 1 landing site on Mars.) Things switched into high gear at the beginning of the year when my father, a packaging engineer specializing in plastics and corrugated cardboard, took a job offer in upstate New York. Pack up everything, leave everything I knew up to that point, move to a new town right about the time school ended so there was no point in enrolling until the next school year began, move to a house far enough out that access to libraries, parks, bookstores, or any other source of information besides the television was impossible, and spending the summer desperately craving contact with anyone approximating my own age. In any other time or place, I probably would have been hospitalized with severe depression, but this just “built character.” Kids, really, REALLY don’t try this at home.
40 Years Ago
Hit fast-forward: moves to Chicago and Flower Mound, Texas before relocating again to Neenah, Wisconsin. Graduated from high school, very short time in the US Army, discovered midnight movies and cyberpunk science fiction, started off 1986 switching from journalism to stage makeup illusions, and chafing severely at life in a town orbiting the local bar. It was my fault: I followed my family to Wisconsin with no real plans or schemes but with a severe homesickness for white birch trees, and promptly discovering that the greater Appleton/Neenah/Menasha area had and still has a higher per-capita alcohol consumption than any place on the planet other than several small towns in Siberia. Since I can’t drink, and the only options for anybody in the area under the age of 40 was to work a crap job, get drunk, get drunk, get drunk, get blackout drunk, get drunk, get drunk, get stoned, get drunk, and freak out over anything new or different like tarsiers given a fighter jet, the greater Appleton area’s only draws were the used bookstores (well-stocked thanks to temporarily inconvenienced billionaires selling Grandma’s library to pay for the weekend’s bender) and some truly incredible pet shops, some of which were family-run operations and not fronts for Wisconsin drug rings. By the end of April, I had learned what so many of Appleton’s misspent youths had been trying to tell me: get out of the area by the time you turn 21 or die there. When that opportunity presented itself, thanks to my best friend calling to ask if I could get to Dallas when he got leave from the Navy, and with the help of two dear Appleton friends with whom I’m still in touch to this day, I sold off nearly everything I had, packed up the rest, bought a bus ticket to Dallas, and spent the next two days trekking back.
Naturally, that sound outside the bus window was Tezcatlipoca, Kali, and Loki preparing to vomit in my face: I came back just in time for the Great Texas Oil Bust, when a barrel of West Texas Intermediate went from nearly $100 to about $10 and innumerable Dallas businesses and organizations knowingly or unknowingly dependent upon the former price of oil fell down and went boom. The Dallas I left nine months earlier was pretty much completely gone: venues and activities shut down, people moved away, and others just crawled into their navels. I was still itching to do something, anything, but by September when I got my first solo apartment, I was completely on my own. It’s amazing how strong the memories are of hanging on by fingernails and trying to get through the year, and how as horrible as some of those times were, they just set me up for the places I needed to go next.
Don’t cry for me, dear reader. Mentally rewinding the clock and surmising what would have happened if I hadn’t been stuck on a groundskeeping job that paid enough for rent or food but not both, you, I, and everybody else wouldn’t have liked the person I would have become. (Not that you particularly like me now, but at least you’re honest.) As it was, desperate destitution led me to ransack the local library, giving me exposure to a whole load of resources and reading materials I wouldn’t have had exposure to before. Since I couldn’t convince people I knew pre-move to get away from their computers and do anything, I hopped on my bike and tore around everywhere, eventually exploring everything from north Carrollton to downtown because I had nowhere else I had to be. A chance encounter exposed me to Dallas’s community radio station KNON, and I biked into downtown to ride in a parade protesting the First Baptist Church of Dallas attempting to steal KNON’s frequency for itself. (It was the best sort of protest parade: everyone expected 100 participants, we got over 5000, and the news coverage got FBoD to negotiate to switch frequencies with its own radio station.) Best of all, because of that whole “butts in front of the computer” thing, I gave up on calling cohorts and went off to visit local record shops and ephemera stores, where I came across that most wonderful of mid-1980s weirdness, the “zine.” If this were a James Burke special, this would be where he pops up to note the turning moment where life completely changed, arguably for the better.
30 Years Ago
Okay, be sure to mark the way out and prep your signal flares, because here’s where things get weird. The high points of 1996 happened close to each other: the first was walking into a job interview in San Jose and being told by the hiring manager that he’d read about an April Fool’s Day story I wrote for a Dallas weekly in Entertainment Weekly, only it had been reported “straight.” (I have yet to find any mention of this in the magazine archives, but considering that the company with which I was interviewing went under about six months later, it’s not worth fussing about.) A month later, I was in the front lobby of Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, in front of the “New Releases” shelf, laughing myself sick at the new Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology edited by Gardner Dozois. Gardner, still pissed at my responding to his creeping on an attendee at a convention in Austin with “As you know, I refer to my penis as ‘Mel Gibson'” with “You mean ‘Mel BROOKS’,” took umbrage at a column I’d written for a magazine dedicated to reviewing short science fiction, whining about my being “a Hunter Thompson wannabe of sorts” and vaguely threatening that it would be a real shame if the magazine went under because it got sued for something I wrote. When a pisher like Dozois had to dedicate a whole page of his Year in Review to smarming about me, I knew I had ARRIVED.
Let’s rewind a bit for context. Hyperburst in three…two…one…
Started writing for various zines and pro magazines, including the aforementioned weekly newspaper. Lots of self-destructive and just plain destructive behavior, partly from imposter syndrome and partly “for writing experiences.” Multiple relationships, culminating with meeting my first wife Liz at the bookstore at where she worked and marrying the year before. Learned basic HTML and took a job with a prepress shop trying to turn itself into a Web design studio, taking the considerably higher income and moving Liz, three cats, and a savannah monitor to a new apartment in downtown Dallas just in time for the fratbro running the studio to decide he wanted to pivot. After two months of jobhunting, got a job offer to move to Portland with another Web design studio, packed up wife, cats, lizard, and worldly goods into a rental truck, and hied thee hence to the Pacific Northwest, literally running out of gas and money 30 miles east. Managed to get to Portland anyway, and hit Powell’s the day after arriving. With me so far?
Three decades later, I can now say good things about Portland, mostly due to the cool people I met after I escaped. At the time, though, Portland was rapidly transforming from a scrappy little art town that got its reputation because everyone left in the 1980s to the trustafarian haven it would become. As I’ve related elsewhere, within six months months of moving there, watching the film The Whole Wide World and watching wild sunflowers and hearing cicadas made me homesick for Texas. Six months after that, watching the “Cannes Cut” of Dawn of the Dead made me painfully homesick for Dallas. Six months after that, catching Starship Troopers and watching neo-Nazis blowing up giant bugs made me homesick for Houston. I swore that if I watched Deliverance and found myself homesick for Lewisville, I was going to hop off one of Portland’s many bridges and let the caiman the local police claimed was lurking in the Willamette River feed well that night. Your mileage may vary.
Even so, Portland gave me plenty of time to write, including setting up a Web site to hold the ever-increasing pile of articles and columns commissioned but never published. The Web design company went dotcom and promptly imploded, which gave me a great opportunity to meet a wonderful collective of oddballs at Intel’s Research and Development facility in Hillsboro, and I discovered what still qualifies as the best damn reptile shop I’ve ever encountered anywhere. Oh, and Powell’s will probably remain in business for the next 50 years off everything I bought from the magazine rack. Nobody knew at the time how badly both book and magazine publishing would be kneecapped by the advancing internet, but I took advantage of the riches without expecting that the writing salad days would last forever. They’d end soon enough.
20 Years Ago
(Pulse update: Barely survived dotcom crash. Quit pro writing in 2002 after realizing that the ongoing publishing mantra of “We’ll be able to pay you when we’re profitable” never mentioned the number of publishers that made sure they never became profitable if it meant getting work for free. Divorced Liz, a decision for which I deserve all the grief I took for my assholishness, and for which I will never expect nor receive forgiveness. Made The Biggest Mistake of My Life. Moved to Tallahassee on the recommendation of the one and only Jeff VanderMeer, became addicted to the local carnivorous plants, and moved back to Dallas when the company that brought me there decided to pivot post-bankruptcy. Wasted entirely too much time writing a science blog on LiveJournal, and started collecting the notes of what later became the Annals of St. Remedius Medical College. Oh, and developed an equal addiction to sculpting, which only didn’t expand because of the plant addiction.)
2006 was one hell of a year. It started in the call center for a long-digested company that processed electronic payments for utility companies. The job itself was as terrible as you can imagine: this was when prepaid cell phones became a thing, so one client was responsible for three-quarters of the calls, either asking why the client’s name was showing up on their credit card statements or screaming about their phones being turned off after the credit card holder requested the payment be reversed for fraud. In between the Idiocracy cosplayers, I managed to both sell two books of previous articles and columns and break at least one rib in a bicycle accident on the same day: considering that the publisher in question was too busy writing “Hot Editors I’d Like To Pork” interviews for his vanity magazine to get contracted books out, I had to threaten to sue to get my manuscripts back three years later, so the singular pain of broken rib or ribs was the superior experience. Social media was just starting, LiveJournal was still a year or so away from the toxic mess it transferred to Facebook, it was still possible to find a decent selection of magazines in a chain bookstore, and as soon as the ribs healed, I was back on the bike.
Toward the end of the year, things changed gears rapidly. I found a new technical writer job with an audiovisual hardware company that not only paid considerably more but kept me from the usual pattern nightmares of being on the phone line being asked “Cain’t Ah make muh paymunt wit YEW?” for 11 hours a day. Most importantly, I had the greatest boss in the world, the one and only Larry Carey, and our science discussions during his smoke breaks were seven-and-a-half years of trying to keep up with his manifold curiosities. If this St. Remedius gibberish ever goes anywhere, I’ll owe Larry royalties for the rest of my existence.
10 Years Ago
Well, the carnivorous plants done blowed up. The Texas Triffid Ranch became a thing in 2008, starting as a lark selling carnivores at craft shows and science fiction conventions and rapidly getting bigger all the time. in 2015, I rented a former clothing store space at Valley View Center, a dying shopping mall turned art gallery incubator in North Dallas and moved the Triffid Ranch inside. 1500 square feet of shopping mall for $500 a month, and all I had to do was convince the people of Dallas that despite the constant rumors that the mall was going to be demolished, it wasn’t going to be demolished with them inside. Yeah, about that.
2016 got really interesting quickly. The gallery took a while to get established, mostly due to the day job that paid for everything, but things started amping up by May, where a show at Texas Frightmare Weekend demonstrated the value of the gallery because I had enough plants for what was then the biggest Frightmare of the Triffid Ranch’s existence. 2016 was also the first year for shows outside of Dallas, including the Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays in Austin. 2016 was also the last year the Triffid Ranch was at Valley View, as we all got the notice at the beginning of 2017 that the mall was going to be demolished in 60 days and we all had to get out. (The last of the mall finally came down in 2023, and the empty lot adds quite the postapocalyptic vibe to the general area.) Until then, I did my utmost to turn it into a real business and not a clubhouse for local fandom to get free wine and food, and sometimes I succeeded.
Today
The Texas Triffid Ranch is gone, shutting down in 2023 and just in the nick of time considering economic developments. The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College turns 2 years old in May: the very next installment marks 250 since the start and 50 since the beginning of 2026. (The expectation is to hit 300 by the end of the year and the dream is to hit 400, and the inspirations for new installments and stories keep coming.) Within the next five years, I’ll have outlived most of my childhood heroes and inspirations, and the survivor guilt gets extremely strong over the good and dear friends I’ve already lost, so I cherish the ones still on this side of the veil. At this point, based on family history, I know I have anywhere between 20 and 35 years left (two grandparents lived into their eighties and a grandmother into her nineties, and I have the advantage of neither smoking nor drinking), so I’ve got to get moving. After all, the nice thing about being a writer, as my ex Liz put it, is that you can live to 70 and still die “tragically young.”
10 Years From Now
(Content only available to paid subscribers)
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St. Remedius News
For those who receiving this via newsletter and not regularly visiting the site, things keep going. Besides lots and lots of snide commentary, the site now includes printable St. Remedius flyers, including the latest on the Texas bluebonnet boa, and lots more of the Mandatory Parker saga. In addition, for those who occasionally visit St. Remedius Radio, the installments there have been going on long enough to justify a YouTube playlist. Engage with it at your peril.
Other Reading
Here’s another development: partly as an opportunity to collect influences, friends, and interesting bystanders in one place and one as a blatant attempt to monetize the Annals (I get a percentage of any sales made here), I set up a Bookshop.org storefront for St. Remedius. Expect it to be updated incessantly, especially as I keep getting reminders of writers and subjects needing sharing, and it’s already grown pretty impressively over the beginning of the year. In addition, the site’s Research page contains links to this and publishers and booksellers in need of inclusion: I don’t get a thing by recommending the publishers and booksellers, other than relief that they’re doing what they’re doing. Either way, feel free to browse, peruse, and purchase, and know that every purchase makes Andy Jassy at Amazon cry.
Events
Things are in flux right now for obvious reasons, with shows and events being preempted and cancelled, but the Campus and Off-Campus Activities section needs serious expansion now that Dallas’s weather is getting better. In addition, for those who can’t get to Dallas for reasons, I’m working out the details on a regular monster movie show on Twitch: I could never do justice to either Joe Bob Briggs or Ghoulardi or Ned the Dead, but I’m really missing getting friends together for dinner and a movie on Friday nights, and this will work as an alternative for everybody who couldn’t make it to the house.
Final Words
If you think this was indulgent, just imagine how the next bookmark birthday is going to be. Do you really want me hanging around until I’m 70?
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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