Wonderoom

I had this paramedic partner once, quite some time ago. I was his intermediate driver. Let’s call him Captain Jack. He was just about the first partner I ever had. I was still quite green, still shaking when I started lines. He made it quickly clear that he was not thrilled to be nursing a newbie. I was rather afraid of him. Read more »

I have this thing about masks. One time I visited my friend L’s house, and she showed me how to make a face mask. She played some eerie music and spread vasoline all over my face. After the first few strips of plaster tape, I was unable to talk. Made me realize how I always tried to fill silences. I had a problem with silence.

So there I was. Wet plaster and vasoline between me and free expression. Read more »

When I was young and barefoot in the Appalachians, I used to play in the laurel. Even a single laurel bush is a thick cup of branches, capable of swallowing a child’s imagination and shading it as well.

A wild laurel thicket, called a hell, can cover most of a mountainside. In the entanglement of it’s branches light is obscured, direction made meaningless, nothing else can grow. It was in the laurel hells that I first sensed the realm of possibility-that terrifying, tantalizing place where anything can happen: danger, the unknown. I knew, though, that two seconds beyond the darkest recess of branches were bright pools of remembering and magic. I could feel them. I also knew, because I had been told, that to walk too far into the laurel one might never return. That the laurel had swallowed human beings, lost in darkness and misdirection. Read more »

It takes roughly six days to drive from North Carolina to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State if you are on your own and have to stop to sleep occasionally at random rest stops. You sleep only fitfully because you are overloaded on coffee and thus paranoid, laying in the back of your van curled around an oversized torque wrench in case any of the many psychotic killers who lurk at your average rest stop were to try anything. It takes six days because the van only goes 60 mph unless you are going down a very steep hill out of gear. This is a van that needs frequent breaks in the mountains, a van that is burning oil, a van that you have tuned and lubricated and hammered and cursed and caressed and bled on plenty, banging knuckles and slicing open thumbs. This van shares your blood. Read more »

I’ve been a comic book, science fiction, fantasy, action fan my entire life. I like heroes who engage in adventures in the liminal realm: the fantastic, the extraordinary. I’m also a big fan of the Campbell heroic journey. Philosophically, I have a problem with the Jungian/Campbell collective unconscious concept because the premise is that all people in all cultures share certain archetypes. This universality is a dangerous premise because any time you start analyzing the beliefs, myths and story lines of other cultures through a Western European lens, there’s going to be a cultural bias in the way. So, while I remain cautious about believing in universal archetypes, I still like stories that have the heroic journey as a theme. I am not alone in this. People love these kinds of stories. Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, and so many others are classic Campbell style heroes who have entered deeply and powerfully into the imaginations of millions and millions of people.

So here’s the deal. Where is the female heroic journey? Read more »

Some reflections inspired by the NBC show, which I happen to like a lot. A sometimes cheesy show, but sometimes in a swirl of cheese whiz, fundamental assumptions are laid bare.
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I don’t remember when I first got a notion to be an astronaut. Probably when I received a telescope for my eighth birthday. I was very excited about my first fuzzy images of Venus. It wasn’t much, just tiny, blurry circle in the air, but it was a closer look at another planet. Another world. I wanted, like so many others, to touch another world. Read more »

There’s a part of me that wants to be a believer. Isn’t that part of the recipe for being human? My inner scientist has been in a Gracie style motionless grapple with my inner believer for quite some time. Let’s take the New Age, for instance. It seems like a nice idea on paper. Take whatever disparate religious memes and douse them in your own special sauce. When I was eighteen, my mother started dating a serious New Ager who believed that at some indeterminate time in the future the world would tilt on it’s side, just kind of fall over. I never got an explanation of this that made any sense at all. While visiting with them, I ended up in the home of a crystal healer who would lay you out on a table surrounded by dozens of large crystals, mainly quartz, and bathe you in a kind of crystal healing vortex. I opted for a long bike ride instead. Read more »

Haunted houses have always fascinated me. When I was six, I hung scary pictures in the hallway of my trailer, making my very first haunted house. Or haunted trailer hallway anyway. One of the pictures was my version of a scene from Night Stalker where a shadowy figure walks from the woods towards a house. Unfortunately, I was unable to keep the pictures up for even one night. I couldn’t handle it. There was too much of a chance the figures would break free from their weak paper boundaries and attack me in my sleep. Read more »