However I am more than a little disappointed that there was no such uprising a couple weeks ago when it was time to defend actual individual freedom from the NDAA. I guess when they come to take me away, at least I’ll have the comfort of knowing Google is still out there fighting the good fight. Great.

If I’d given myself a little more time to plan this out you’d see here one of those empty Anonymous suits with a skull floating on top.

Ahh, hell.

I’ve already done all the debunking of the Mayan apocalypse I’m going to do on this blog, at great length and with much windbaggery, in posts such as Circular Time and No Apocalypse. I also have a little sidebar essay about it (as applied fancifully to the plight of the working writer) in A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2012, available from Small Beer Press in print-on-demand and ebook form.

Instead I want to talk about how great it would be if there actually was an apocalypse.

The world is f’ed. Global warming is happening and nobody cares because they’re all too worried about how their stock portfolios will look and the declining abstract value of all those shiny things they don’t need and which posturing reactionary a-hole we decide to run against the quiet, uselessly liberal totalitarian we’ve already got in office and who none of them can possibly expect to beat. The only place I can look to for hope are a bunch of petulant teenage hackers with a woeful lack of understanding about how the world really works and another bunch of best-intentioned, beatific idealists who, depending on the government they’ve pitted themselves against, either will achieve nothing because they aren’t rich and don’t represent corporations or will achieve their immediate goals of government overthrow only to have it replaced with something exactly as bad if not worse. We’re bogged down by possessions, infrastructure and fear of change. God forbid we make any real effort to improve anything because what if it has some miniscule, short-term negative effect on our already utterly shitty economy? Let’s spend all our money on campaign ads and vast, faceless organizations entirely devoted to preventing other vast, faceless organizations from accomplishing an iota of meaningful action. I don’t have statistics on this (and I’m glad I don’t because they would just depress me further), but the state of everything I look at leaves me with the strong impression that the majority of humanity’s collective intellectual, economic and energetic capacity is focused on preventing anything from getting any better.

So sue me if I’m starting to think a fiery wave of destruction that came along on December 21st, 2012, obliterated 90% of our infrastructure and hell, even our population, might not turn out to be not such a bad thing once the dust had settled and we’d all gotten over our grief and our attachment to sparkly things that make cute sounds and distract us from the awfulness with which we would otherwise be forced to engage. No, on second thought, don’t sue me. Don’t sue anyone. That would just be tacking on another enormous waste of everyone’s time and money.

Thought experiments and hypothetical emergency planning for the zombie apocalypse have become a popular thing. Which weapon would you prefer to use to lop off the frontal lobes of your neighbors, co-workers and family? Or would you rather just curl up into a ball and die to avoid having to make any effort on your own behalf against the mindless, ravening horde? Me, I’d go with a katana: quiet, doesn’t run out of ammo, easily maintained, builds upper body strength. First I’d use it to mercy-kill any of my immediate dependents who’d rather not try. Then I’d pack up and head for some warm, fertile country with no people in it, to live out a life of sublime simple pleasures: fulfilling physical work and never having to look at reality tv or youtube again.

Sadly, the apocalypse will not be a zombie apocalypse. Zombies don’t exist. Maybe it’ll be Kurzweil’s technological/psychic transcendence. Maybe it’ll be global class war. Or global water war. These things are not nearly so easy to plan for, not nearly as likely to lead to me living out my ideal existence. Frankly, I don’t care what kind of apocalypse it is as long as it results in a significant reduction in the human population and a serious shaking-loose of lazy, stupid, arrogant, previously held convictions about what is and is not required to make life fulfilling.

And I hope it kills off as few trees as possible.

Rather than leave you on that unhappy note, here are some fun infographics and insane opinions I have come across on the glorious internet pertaining (vaguely) to the irrational fears concerning 2012:

• 2012: The End of the World? – Information is Beautiful infographic exhaustively comparing the opinions of the sanguine and the skeptical.
• Map of travel distances for religious dance performance costume rentals in Guatemala – found somewhere on Harvard.edu. As good a map as any of the real area of influence of legitimate indigenous Mayan beliefs.
• Mayans practiced Islam – Allah knows best – An elaborately mis-researched theological discussion board treatise struggling valiantly to involve innocent Mayans in the war between Islam and Judaism.
• Ruins in Georgia mountains show evidence of Maya connection – Some dubiously-reasoned amateur archaeological speculation that Mayans crossed the Gulf of Mexico in force in the 9th century to found an El Dorado in the Georgia hills.
• Cahokia – A real, actual precolombian city in North America, founded on the Mississippi River in the 8th century near present-day St. Louis.

Happy 2012, everybody.

Some underworld deities cavorting on the south face of Stela D at Quiriguá, 766 AD.

I’ve been tweeting some, that’s got to count for something. Maybe I should port my tweets over here so the skull doesn’t look so dusty.

Anyhow, I have not been idle in the interim. Weightless Books is tearing right along; this month we’re running an Apex subscription drive, 25% off, plus some freebies for participants and a game of Nook Tablet roulette. The Homeless Moon put out a special edition best-of chapbook for World Fantasy, which you didn’t hear a thing about unless you were there; it was all very hush-hush. We used the space octopus cover castoff from chapbook 4, I thought it came out quite nice.

And, the real reason for this update, Small Beer intern and audiophile Julie Day has started a podcast series, the current episode of which features me, yes me, talking a bit about Weightless, a bit about beer, then reading aloud “The Hour of the Fireflies” by Karen Chacek, one of the stories I translated for the forthcoming SBP anthology Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic. Which is a lovely story, a brief, crisp confection with a darkly bitter center, into the translation of which I put much effort, just so that you, non-Spanish-speaker, could enjoy it. So please go listen. Then in a week or so, I believe there may be another podcast episode wherein Gavin, Julie and I sit around on a late Thursday morning drinking beer and rambling about beer on tape. Fun!

And that’s about it from me. I have another of my own stories upcoming on Pseudopod—I’ll let you know when it happens. In the meantime, be well. Don’t lick any toads you haven’t first positively identified.

Pseudopod, should you have been unaware, is a weekly horror fiction podcast, sister to Escape Pod and Podcastle, a triumvirate I have been struggling to break my way into for quite some time. I love reading fiction aloud, and hearing fiction read aloud, and “the Pods”, as they are affectionately known, are some of the best places to do that. For a reader, I am lucky enough to have netted Laurice White. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet—will do so on my ride home—but I expect it will be great.

Pink Lady’s Slipper orchid, Cypripedium acaule, mixed deciduous woods, Bull Hill, Sunderland, MA
(AKA/e.g., the replenishing pitcher flower of legend.)

I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this. Amanda Hocking and Konrath have been made much of (and have made much out of themselves) as the poster/tentpole children of a brave, new, exponentially expanding market for self-published ebooks, raking it in hand over fist, generating buzz and dreams and misconceptions wherever they pass. But they appeared on this stage fully formed. They were already successful, hugely so, before most of us heard anything about them. We can go back and read about how they did it (as much as they’re willing to share), but we won’t be getting the whole story, and what we do get will be all distorted by the rah-rah haze of success. (So, nephew/son/grandson/husband/cousin/brother, when you going to write the next Harry Potter? Bleh!) And by now it’s completely unclear whether what they did will work for anyone else, because the market they’re selling through is so new and changing so rapidly. Nor does it make any sense to compare them to grassroots print self-publishing successes like Christopher Paolini (and certainly not to Rowling), because there was barely any market in place for them to target/advertise to/gladhand.

All of which makes me very excited indeed to watch Jay’s epublishing debut, because it gives me (and you, too!) the great advantage of observing from the ground up, from the inside. Yes, of course, I’m rooting for him because he’s my pal and I’m already vested in the whole ebook thing. But I also know (because I read all that stuff about Hocking and Konrath ad nauseum) he’s got a lot going for him. I know how much thought Jay has put into this. He’s a brilliant, lovable guy who keeps an entertaining blog and knows everybody. He’s incredibly prolific. He knows how to spin a yarn. I know how much heart he puts into his writing, and it shows. I guarantee Death Match will be fast-paced and gritty with a gripping emotional core. Frankly, he’s a better writer than Hocking and Konrath put together. Which may or may not mean a thing in this context. But it will be fascinating to watch. I can’t wait to see what happens–not just in the next couple of weeks, but when he puts out the next book and the one after that.

Should you care to watch him too, Jay’s blog, where I hope he will regale us with further news of his forays, is at ridlerville.wordpress.com.

These days the actual forests have barb-wire fences around them and the skulls are decidedly un-mossy, so I dwell in forests of the mind. Justin has recently introduced me to the concept of psychogeography, which I gather basically demarcates any attempt to interpret urban landscape as the product, or the manifestation, of the internal landscapes of its inhabitants. I’m going to bend that a little to fit my own purposes. Or maybe completely ignore it, just fall back on the usual influences—Castaneda, Borges, Freud and Thoreau—under a different auspice.

Outside my office window there is an auto-body shop. It’s ugly. It makes high-pitched metallic noises repetitively. I have undertaken the mental exercise of replacing it with various monolithic elements of natural landscape lifted from my experience: a lichened granite ledge shaped by glacial processes, a kettlehole pond, a field of wildflowers, a hemlock glade, a Yucatan thicket, a colossal zoomorph of the Classic Maya. It works, to a point. There are some landscapes to which that space just won’t lend itself, even in my imagination: the mazelike warrens of thirty-foot boulders populated by owls and deer and Polyporous berkleyii in the woods of Satans Kingdom surrounding the neighborhood where I grew up. Or, you know, any mountainside I’ve ever fallen down.

But it keeps the bats out, if you get me.

—Ian Anderson

Here’s a cover we decided not to go with:

Space Octopus!

Readercon, by the way, is next week, and I have a ton of stuff going on. My schedule looks like this:

11:00 AM Friday – What Writing Workshops Do and Don’t Offer.
2:00 PM Saturday – Three Messages and a Warning group reading. This is Small Beer’s Mexican SF anthology, which I hyped up at last year’s Readercon. I translated two stories for it and have read a bunch of others, all fascinating, very different, surprising stuff.
2:30 PM Saturday – Beneath Ceaseless Skies group reading.
3:30 PM Saturday – My solo reading, wherein I shall read my Apex #23 story, “The Eater”.

I’ll also be at the Small Beer table in the dealer’s room quite a bit, and hopefully at Kelly and Gavin’s Kaffeklatsch, where awesome not-so-very-secret things will occur. This summer marks Small Beer’s tenth anniversary. I think there are t-shirts to celebrate the occasion. I have also brewed a beer. O it is an exciting beer I am having to struggle very hard not to crack open and drink. I wrote a Literary Beer entry about it.

And then—even then, after Readercon, it still is not done, because then I’ll be at another reading on Thursday the 21st at the NEIA Library in Brookline for the new LCRW #27, which also happens to be coming out at Readercon.

And then that same day I move.

Instead, I spent the moments surrounding midnight wandering the side streets east of a walled-off Boston Common, looking up past the evocative rootlike patterns of plinths and facades at the starless sky, smelling the smells of stir-fry and subway exhalations, marveling at the thirty kinds of not-English I heard from passersby.

Here’s this new blog Justin led me to, Next Nature, that deals with the unpredictable “natural” phenomena which arise from human culture. Fascinating stuff. I love this:

Our technological environment
becomes so complex
we start to relate to it
as a nature of its own

Gray Catbird, Dumetella carolinensis, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, MA

Happy Solstice, wherever you are.

O I am so neglectful of posting…these are from the end of May, nearly a month ago. I’d say I promise to get better, but it’s busy times. No dancing in fairy rings for me, not these days. Not that I’d do that. It would hurt the mushrooms.

Someone has drained the colour from my wings
Broken my fairy circle ring
And shamed the king in all his pride
Changed the winds and wronged the tides
Mother mercury
Look what they’ve done to me
I cannot run I cannot hide

—Freddie Mercury, “My Fairy King”