Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a British-born Mexican artist, a surrealist painter, novelist and short story writer. and founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s. She was an esoteric explorer of the inner worlds.
 
The Carrington Event was the most intense recorded geomagnetic storm so far in our known history. It peaked on September 1st and 2nd in 1859. It was triggered by a massive solar flare and subsequent coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun. The waves of solar energy from this storm went straight into the Earth's magnetosphere in just under 18 hours, which is very fast, even for that kind of energy. The event was named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first person to ever observe and record a solar flare. One of the effects of the Carrington event was impressive displays of Aurora Borealis across the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, the phenomenon moving far beyond its normal range. Another effect was the way it broke the early electronic communications system of the telegraph. The geomagnetically induced current from the electromagnetic field caused the telegraphs to fail, even giving shocks to some operators, and causing sparks to fly off the wires, poles and other equipment. In some cases though, messages could be sent even when the telegraphs were unplugged: there was enough juice running through the system from the geomagnetic disturbance to power the wires. It has been thought by some that if an equivalent type of mass coronal ejection occurred in our times, it would lead to the destruction of satellites, telecommunications infrastructure, and widespread power outages.

This story is set in a not-too-distant future when electrical systems are already on the fritz, black outs and brown outs common, with sunspots and solar flares very active at the peak of an intense solar cycle.
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DAVE

Dave had grown bored with listening to the space weather on shortwave. It was always the same thing, over and over again. Solar storms, more solar storms, fast solar winds, X-flares, dark holes and more dark holes. It did affect the remnants of the communication grid at times, but not enough to match the newscasters overblown hype.

The weatherwoman read out her report in exaggerated tones meant to maximize hype and terrify people into staying home. Weather forecasters always thought the end was nigh. Her voice crackled through the swish and static of the shortwave. “Geomagnetic storm conditions continue to get worse over the next twelve hours, and may cause major disturbances to the Earth’s magnetic field. With storms hitting an unprecedented G7 strength, there is a high likelihood that this will cause issues with the remains of the power grid due to voltage fluctuations. If you are near electrical equipment, be careful because there is a real danger of shocks during this storm. On the plus side Aurora Borealis will be seen all the way down into the south. People who’ve headed to the beaches of Tennessee this summer to swim in the expanded Gulf of Mississippi, are likely to see extreme displays of green and mauve color. It is likely to be so strange and strong this particular storm has been dubbed the Leonora Carrington after the famous surrealist painter.”

Blah, blah, blah. He’d lived through dozens of geomagnetic storms and they didn’t much impact his day-to-day life. They hadn’t even wipe out all the satellites in orbit around the earth. Some were still working, not that regular folk got to use them ever. If it was a tornado coming his way he’d worry, but until then he was too tired to worry. As it was, he was dead tired and his fingers were sore from a marathon sole sewing session at Monty’s Mountain of Shoes where he worked in the back, rehabbing forgotten footwear back into shape for the secondhand market. He worked as part of a team of twelve others, mostly relatives of Monty’s who all liked to join in busting his balls with one wisecrack at his expense after another. The ribbing he got was almost more annoying than pricking himself in the finger with the needle over and over again.

What he really needed some more sleep, and the sun was well down with all its blasted solar radiation, so why not go to bed?

After Dave blew out his oil lamp he triple-checked to make sure it was fully doused. He’d become a little paranoid about the lamps and candles and stove ever since Edwin’s place down the road caught on fire after their Fourth of July party two years before. The fire department hadn’t been able to determine if it had been caused by fireworks or by one of his many oil lamps and candle nubs. Dave’s older friend Maxie had taken to calling him “oh-see-dee” whatever the flying lizard that meant. Something to do with checking things over and over again.

He turned off the radio, unplugged it from the battery, double checked to make sure he had unplugged it again, made sure the battery was safe, then laid down, got back up, checked the lamp, checked the battery, checked the radio, the laid back down. Maybe he was “oh-see-dee,” but if he weren’t worried he wouldn’t have been checking.
 
Then he said his prayers to the Milk Mother and tried to go to sleep, but Granny Inglebert’s coonhound was barking a baleful tune up at the hazy wisp of the crescent moon as it shone down through his cracked windows. The dog had just shut up and he had just started to dream about Amy Addison in the daisy dukes he’d seen her in late last summer when she was stringing up the beans from her garden, when the blasted dog let out another bale of mournful sound. His eyes flickered open and that’s when he saw the green midnight glow refracted through the dust-tinged pane of his busted-up window.

Aurora borealis. He’d never seen it before. Maybe that G7 geomagnetic storm really was going to be as disastrous as all the chattering yakkety-yakkers on the radio said it was going to be. Maybe it really would be a Carrington event and the entire electrical grid would become toast. Yet for as long as people had talked about the Carrington event, it hadn’t ever happened in his lifetime. Maybe it would and people would give up talking about the damn thing.

Strangely, the barking dog wasn’t a dog anymore, but a cow, mooing. If it had been a goat bleating he wouldn’t have worried. Plenty of city folk had goats after all. But a cow? That a was a bit exotic for city folk. Only those out in the burbs had cows. Then the cow was jumping over the moon and the sound of a trumpet was echoing, echoing, echoing. Soon he found himself going inside a home that was a shoe and meeting the old woman there. He was just glad she hadn’t started asking for repairs. He did not know, after all, whether he could spare any more of his sole.

MRS. INGLEBERT

Mrs. Inglebert’s day had already gone awry when the green midnight glow came and infected everything withs its dolorous echo. Now that echo rattled around inside her head and everything was looking the color of moon cheese. She wondered where her daughter Candy had been. It had been a long time since she’d seen Candy. There had been that other woman coming around to check on her who said she was Candy, but who wasn’t Candy. She was someone else. She was potentially even something else.

But maybe that was just the voice of the worm that had gotten inside of her after her husband Fred had died. Maybe it had been Candy after all. The control worm tried to steer her off course, but she couldn’t let it do so. She had to get the thing out of her somehow.

She hadn’t wanted to leave the house anyway. She hadn’t for some time. Even things like going down to the river to fish for carp didn’t give her the same kind of pleasure it had all those years ago. She used to meet her friend Amber down there and they would fish together. This was after both of their husbands had died. They’d both gone down to fish with them in the mornings, or in the evenings in the summer. The Florida Fever had taken their men away as it surged up from the swamps of the flooded south ten odd years ago, and for awhile afterwards she’d each kept up the fishing habit with Amber. Then she was taken in by her son, who lived in Cincinnati on the other side, and it became rather inconvenient for them to get together. She’d stopped going fishing and stopped doing a lot of other things after that, and most of her time was spent alone, listening to the radio.

Every now and again the woman who called herself by her daughter’s name came over to check on her, make sure she had enough food, that she was washing herself, and her clothes. This lady was very nice, she did seem concerned, she did want to help her, but she didn’t want to be helped. She wondered where her real daughter had gone off to, and why this lady called herself that. Damn impersonators, there were more of them now than ever. Now that Fred was gone, everything was different.

The green light was making her see Fred as if he was there. She heard his voice coming in off the and street down the telephone lines. She was one of the houses who still had telephone service, so she decided to pick up the phone and see if Fred was there. The black phone hung on the wall made of old thick hard plastic. It came from another time, part of the wave of repurposing she had lived through as a girl.

“Hello…” she said with a tentativeness that reminded her of what courting Fred had been like a lifetime ago.

“Hey darling, I wanted to let you know I caught a really big fish, and I got this feeling there is gonna be another one. Why don’t you get the rods and reels, and dig up some worms out of the compost, I know there’s plenty in there. Come on down to the river, and get yourself a real big big fish with me. It might be the biggest one you ever catch I promise.”

“Oh, Fred, I don’t know if I can. I need to wait here. I’m afraid of going out on the street. There is a big green light painted across the sky and it’s covering up all the stars. The moon has disappeared and I don’t know what to think of anything. There is a girl who comes to our house, and she say’s her name is Candy, but I don’t know if it is. I don’t know if it is her or if it’s the worm inside me telling me its not her. But I don’t know how it could be her. She doesn’t act like Candy used to. But maybe it is, I’m so confused.”

“There’s no worm in her darling, it’s just cause she’s taken up with that bad man. You know the one, Harvey. He isn’t any good to her. She needs to get away from him, take you with her. Get out of dodge. I think if you go down to the river and catch that fish, it’ll help you get her back on your side, get her away from that man and all the stuff he makes her do for him. Can you do that for me darling? Can you go down there and catch that fish? We can even use the worm inside you as bait, and get it out of you in the process”

“You know I can. Anything for you. If you really think it will be alright, I’ll go. I don’t know how it’s going to help, but if you say it will help, I trust you. I know you never lied to me.”

“You’ll figure out what you need to do when you get there,” he said to her. “I gotta go now.”

And then the line was clear, back to its hovering tone, and his voice could no longer be discerned from the static.

She went out to the back yard and into the outhouse, where she kept the fishing rods. They stood up nicely there. Then she got a small pot from the table she had outside where she used to work on her plants and scooped up some mud from the compost, fresh with writhing worms. Maybe it wasn’t a worm inside her daughter’s brain. Maybe it was just the voice of that man named Harvey.
 
HARVEY
 
Harvey was jolted out of sleep by a dream he was having of the stock market crashing. But day trading hadn’t started yet, it was only 1 AM. He was wondering if he could get a message down to his stock man and relay something to the main exchange in Chicago before it all fell to shit. He’d been a teenager during the second great depression and he had hated anything termed “finance” with a passion, even as he was a whiz at math. Little did he imagine he’d end up getting addicted to gambling on the horse races, moving across the river to Newport, Kentucky, and setting himself up as bookie. He didn’t know if that counted as finance.

It had proved to be a profitable pastime, even when most folk were flat fucking broke; there were always some who still found a way to place a few bets. When he’d become flush, he’d found himself looking for new things to bet on. As they country rebuilt itself, after shedding some of its excess weight in a series of semi-peaceful successions, the economy bounced back. Things weren’t what they had been before the crash. That had been a racket just as much as the one he was running. He’d just bought stock in a new analog computer company. He was hoping to pick up one of their mechanical calculators for his own personal use, until he’d had the dream of the stock market plunge. Now he saw the machines for what they were. Number eating demons.

Then he saw the light from the window, glowing green and mauve, bathing everything in his back room in the magic of the Northern Lights -maybe they should start calling it the Midwest Lights, it had come down to the area more and more often with all the geomagnetic activity. Then he felt the reassuring presence of the gun under his pillow but it was one of the only tangible things he could feel at the moment. He got up to look at the numbers in his books on the desk wear he’d left his bourbon and cigar, and they meant nothing to him anymore. The green light dissolved math. He couldn’t read the numbers. They were now nothing except a collection of squiggly lines. Where once had been the inflow and outflow of cash, glorious cash, now there was just an overflow of what could have been a sequence of randomized digits written across the page. Where there had once been the order of the mathematical realm, now there was just Dada. He suddenly felt as if he should call up Dr. Benjamin from the Covington Point Mental Hospital, maybe get his head examined. That quack psychiatrist had loved to place bets, and he’d paid him off handsomely to take in his wife Meredith when she started giving him trouble, when she started getting mouthy and threatening to go to the police. Maybe he’d eaten a bad piece of pizza down at Guidi’s-by-the-Slice. He pulled over the trash can and peperoni inflected bile poured from his mouth.

The dream was now alive and looking at him, as sweat poured down his face, manifesting out of the mauve light. Numbers swirled through the belly of a machine without rest or repose, and he laid down to sleep inside his dream, and the numbers bled out of his ear onto the pillow, in inky pools, fives, sixes, sevens. All they invoked now were alien geometries skewed at odd angles that he could only interpret as gibberish.
His on-again-off-again girlfriend Candy was looking at him in the dream whispering, waiting, hoping he would come over to comfort her. She had showed him the chart where the stock market had crashed. That much he did understand. The jagged plunge of the line. She was giving him the numbers, telling him his bank statement, trying to show him, but any time she mouthed a figure it came out as silence and he could not hear her normal, high pitched, smoky satin voice that was kind of rough from growing up hard around the tracks, the stages, all the glitz and nightlife of Newport as the few lawmen who roamed its streets looked the other way.

He’d always been a numbers man, a betting man, a booking man, and now what was he going to be that all those things, all those scratches had proven to be the inchoate ravings of a mad man?
 
CANDY
 
Candy Inglebert was absolutely sure her mother had gone insane. It wasn’t just your run old age and the head tweaking problems that came from untreated urinary tract infections. She’d dealt with that, and this wasn’t that, she’d had her mom teted down at the clinic and it wasn’t a UTI. This was certified loony bin material. Harvey had told her to call up Dr. Benjamin and have his cronies come, slap a strait jacket on her, and have her committed. That was just him being selfish, she realized, not wanting to have her have to deal with anything that might keep her away from him, under his thumb, where he wanted her to stay.

She didn’t want to get rid of her, now she wanted to get rid of him. She just needed some help taking care of her, and there wasn’t any help. As it was, she was stuck with her, for better or worse, and it was much, much worse than her marriage to Tim had been, and that was saying something. He’d been addicted to nepenthe and it had swiss cheesed his brain. She didn’t know how she was going to handle the situation.

Harvey had come on to her strong when she was having a wild night out at the Newport Supper Club. The Big Diamond Revival Band was playing all the Swing Bop classics and he’d sidled over to her. The smell of bourbon, cigars, and his strong cologne made her feel dreamy and they’d danced. She hadn’t intended on becoming the girlfriend of a bookie, it was just something that kind of happened, and he started out treating her well enough, unlike her last beau Bob, who liked to get slappy. Still, no one had been as bad as Tim.

She had just left her mom’s place, had finally gotten her settled down and was headed home. She stayed over at Harvey’s most nights, but liked to keep her efficiency above the Derby Dogs Chili parlor. It always smelled like boiled meat and chopped onions above the joint but it was a small price to pay to have moments of freedom away from mom, away from Harvey. He wanted her to get rid of the place, move in with him, but she had refused. After the latest thing he had said about her mom, she was glad she hadn’t kept up with the rent. Someone who worked for him had told her what he’d done to his wife, and that had really scared her.

She wanted to cut him out of her life, but he was much powerful than her, the mob more powerful than the cops.

 She had just turned onto her street when the telephone lines started to sizzle. Phone systems had been tricky to maintain after the Derp, but not impossible, and for the most part only worked on local exchanges, because the national system had become so fragile, on top of an electric grid in shambles. Sparks erupted off the poles, and she could hear voices emanating from the lines. It would have been one thing if what they were saying was an ordinary conversation, but it wasn’t.

She was certain the voices originated from the peculiar colors of the aurora that that blanketed the greater Cincinnati region in a green midnight glow. She didn’t know how she knew but she knew, a gut instinct that bypassed the rational mind. The conversations she heard were like the one she had with her mom and they made her shudder. Difficult conversations that bordered on the unreal.

That unreality now followed her down the street in a babel of meaningless utterance, like an evangelical falling prey to a fit of tongue speaking. The only thing missing was the froth and the spittle. A crowd of staring people had spilled out of the Anchors Away Bar. They gesticulated like little insects, their skinny little fingers made antennae that pointed up at the sky, waiting for a signal. She felt for sure those antennae were on the receiving end of something. What they were receiving, she could not be sure. Was it malevolent, benevolent, or just a temporary psychotic break? She was at least relieved that it wasn’t just her. The crowd also heard the sizzle of electric talk as it passed down the lines.

All she knew was, she wasn’t ready to go crazy just yet.
 
DR. BENJAMIN
 
At Dr. Benjamin’s madhouse the residents had gone suddenly quiet. He hadn’t even flicked anyone with Thorazine. Nobody had gone sleepy on Seraquel. It was like they had been dosed up on their own. Their incessant crooning had stopped. He didn’t like it when it got too quiet in his hospital. It felt wrong. Maybe it was the cocaine.

He hadn’t expected his little snort of cocaine to have such a deafening effect on him, he was sure that’s what it was. It had to be. He worked such long hours, he needed to get through. He thought he ought to cut back some day, but how could he when their were so may patients to see, so many experiments to run? Maybe the experiments could wait. Maybe he should spend more time at home tending to the needs of his wife and the wants of his kids.

Dr. Benjamin’s hadn’t intended for his hospital to become a prison for men who hated their wives. Yet that was what had happened, at least in part, a side effect of being too indulgent with himself, and certain habits putting him under the thumb of the town’s real bosses -the Newport mob. There really were people who were certifiably insane in his ward. There were plenty of those. Nepenthe heads who had damaged themselves so bad on drugs that they couldn’t be told apart from your natural born paranoid schizophrenic, who were also locked up.

Harvey’s wife hadn’t been the first. He was with Candy now because Dolores hadn’t been enough for him. She’d been too much in fact. When she started questioning some of the men he was associating with, when he was getting deeper into league with the Newport mob. She’d been fine with the book keeping of course, but when he’d had to knock off a few rivals she started having panic attacks. Now she was here, in permanent detention. The anxiety attacks had of course been very real. Every time an orderly came into her room, she panicked.

She was down below now. That’s where he liked to keep the most hysterical of patients. The most hysterical of them were all woman of course, though a few pansies had gone down into the third subbasement. BDSM types would have called it a dungeon, but he preferred the term “down below”. It was a kind of subconscious hell for them, but it was where they belonged. It was where he did his experiments.
 
DOLORES
 
Dolores knew she shouldn’t be where she was. That didn’t change the fact that she was there. Cast aside for some low-town hussy. She’d been good to Harvey. She’d kept her side of the marriage vows, only to end up caged and enraged.

She’d of course been faking the swallowing of her pills as long and as often as she could. The injections were harder to fake. But the orderlies hadn’t come, and neither had Dr. Benjamin, who she knew fantasized about having his way with her, she could just see it on his lecherous face, but for some reason he never acted. She guessed it had something to do with Harvey. Instructions from him, that even though he’d had her committed, she wasn’t to be touched by anyone else. He never visited except when he was in a cruel mood. Crueler mood, anyway. If she’d known as much about him as she did now when she first courted him, she would have kept her distance. He had only showed his charming side then, the side that was a big spender, the side with grand plans and ambitions. He was still ambitious, but it had taken a darker turn when he started courting power for powers sake. When he started hoarding money just to have more. When the bookkeeping changed from just a few bets with friends, to the whole block, to the whole neighborhood, to the whole town. Then, when he was rolling in the dough, he didn’t know what to do with himself, and couldn’t keep his shit together.

            When he started in on the cocaine, that’s when things really took a turn, and it exacerbated his know-it-all, can-do-it-all attitude. Downward spiral after downward spiral after that, only he thought he was going up. It was only a matter of time before it was him on the wrong side of a bullet from a gun thug.

She hadn’t kept her mouth shut about how unhappy she was either, about how she wanted him to stop. Her periodic bouts of depression didn’t help and she ended up in Dr. Benjamin’s lair of psychological sadism.

            In this dank cell, this padded room, she’d been kept in a state of uncomfortable numbness. Her mind was coated in a gauze that kept thoughts and emotions at bay, as if they were distant points of light down some sinister hall. This late evening she’d awaken from another sleep void of dreams. It was the best kind of sleep, as the dreams only tortured her, nightmares of worse times yet to come, or nightmares of a life she never got to live because she’d placed her faith in the wrong kind of man. In any one other than herself, really. The chemical suffusion that so clouded her sense of self was strangely absent. It was one kind of freedom anyway. That was when Larry the orderly came to her door.
 
LARRY
           
The place was strangely quiet, except for a voice that seemed to emanate from the green glow he caught in the sky as he made his rounds on the upper floors, cleaning up the mess of excrement and vomit caused by Dr. Benjamin’s experiments. The glow made what little electric light they had inside flicker with a ferocity he hadn’t elsewise known, it was almost dangerous, and there were myriad voices coming down the wires. “Open up all the doors”, one of them said as a commanding whisper inside his mind, “set my people free”.

At that moment Larry was seized with a fierce vitriol. He would let them free. They were just like him in a way, kicked to the curb one too many times, underdogs. And he knew for a fact many of them weren’t insane at all, especially when he compared them to some of the people he knew on the outside, the people in charge, the people running things. He remembered how Dr. Benjamin had insulted him when he caught him reading an old horror manga comic in the janitors closet where he would sometimes hide between duties. He’d picked that one up at the 9th street flea market last Saturday. Syd always had the good stuff at his table, and he hadn’t been disappointed when he’d gotten a copy of Fumitada Batoh’s much overlooked masterpiece Neverending Underworld. Benjamin called it mind rotting filth, and had told him to go scrub out the toilets, and when he was done with that, to give Ralph a coffee enema. Ralph was a patient who had been constipated, and Benjamin said Ralph couldn’t get stuck at the anal-territorial stage. Larry had grown to resent enema duty. It had seemed alright when he first got on the job, but he’d grown to realize that the doctor and his staff saw him just as much a patient as the weirdos they’d locked up. The mind games they played on him were getting to be too much, and he was going to do something about it.

This was the time to do it too, working the graveyard shift. He was surprised Dr. Benjamin was still here, but he was a sadist, and had strange experiments and relations with his patients. Most of the other orderlies were gone, and those who were there, were as weird as Dr. Benjamin. Larry now wished he’d never taken the job, but they didn’t ask too many questions asked about his past, and since he started the work, he’d been too afraid to quit. Not tonight. His last night.

            The voices told him to start at the bottom and work his way up. Get the queen bee out first. Harvey’s wife. As the spouse of someone high up in the mob, it made the most sense, or so the green glow told him. Other things had stopped making sense, and he felt an increasing dreamlike quality had been grafted onto his mind and time seemed stretched.

            Normally time was like a loop. He’d head home after work when the sun was coming up, maybe stop at Derby Dogs Chili for a couple coneys and two or three beers. They were always open early and catered to those who worked third shift, and to those who worked first who needed a drink and some sustenance in the morning. Then he’d go into his little apartment up on the third floor above Squallie’s Corner Store and Deli, feed his cat Buster half a can of sardines, he’d eat the other half, then maybe drink another beer, look at a dirty magazine, and pass out on the couch. He’d get up, flick off the bed bugs, read some horror comics for an hour or two while he drank weak coffee. He stretched it as far as he could, running water through the same grounds in his French press three or four times. It got him going and he’d stumble down the steps to hang out on the bench with the old timers and shoot the shit while he smoked a cheap cigar. He’d hung out with them more and more since his old lady Darlene walked out on him. She’d grown tired of his comic books and nudie rags, and his laziness. Without her bringing home the bread, mayo, and bacon he’d been forced to get a regular job. As much as he talked about bringing home money from his pool hustling, most of it was always spent on beer.

            He hoped Darlene was happy with that guy who owned the vegetable cart. He seemed like a decent fellow. He hated his guts of course, but he seemed upright and not the hurting type. He didn’t want to see Darlene hurt. He knew that he’d neglected her, but at least he’d taught himself to read. He wanted to be smarter. That’s why he read nudie mags and comic books.

            This time was weird. It wasn’t like his daily routine. It was all stretched out like a bit of chewed on taffy.

            Maybe Dolores herself would run off with him, he thought, as he opened the door to her cell. That’s when the sparks flew and the electric went out in the whole place. 
 
DOLORES
           
This was the moment Dolores needed to seize. She had never thought to escape from the padded, piss smelling room. Opportunity had come in an unlikely ally. Larry seemed to be caught in a trance as he fumbled the lock.

            “Quick, to the others” she whispered and so they went. Some were in straight-jackets. Others were in the straight-jacket of depression and psychiatric drugs. A few stayed behind, silent in catatonia. Others joined and soon were in the stairwell liberating the next level up. Ambling zombies had nothing on the bedraggled wards who now seethed out, eager to reach the mauve zone they could see outside the window, a land swimming with dreams.

            “What if we get caught. What if we don’t make it?”

            “What if we do?”

            This seemed to rally them, like the call of a distant bell or trumpet. A clarion was ringing from the Holy Sophia Parish a few blocks away and the sound bloomed into the fragrance of a hundred roses. The scent was intoxicating, the smell of alien worlds releasing their scent onto Earth. Then it seemed a giant bumble bee, as large and boisterous as a goat, circled down from the stars to the field of roses that glittered in the auroral light, to collect pollen for the nectar of the gods.

            Everyone could see the glow. The walls that had become translucent. One more floor of mind prisoners released, their manacles broken.
 
DR. BENJAMIN
           
This was what he had feared. Larry and Dolores were leading them, and they were all in his office. They had him in their frenzied clutch, dragging him over to a padded cell, putting him a straight-jacket. Then his pants were being pulled down. Larry had the works, he saw. The coffee enema works. The tube was up his butt, and with no lube. The caffeine hit his mind just as he thought that last snort of cocaine was wearing off.

            The jolt was not totally unpleasant. Neither was the tube. He didn’t like being the bottom, but he supposed he deserved being the bottom. All the stuff that had been locked up inside him was now leaking from his bottom and it was the memory of getting picked on in the alleyways of Covington, the memory of being made to do things he didn’t want to do, at gunpoint by his best friend Teddy, who’d they all later learned had been the one poisoning the cats. Later Teddy’s mother had been found dead, and Teddy had disappeared into the hollers, never to be heard from again.

            He missed Teddy, but now those long gone cats from the alleys meowed and prowled around him like spectral holographs waiting to have their own revenge.

            Dolores punched him in the head before dragging him down into the puddle of his own liquid shit. And he stayed there until nurse Bill Larson came in the next day and sprayed him off with the same hose he used for cold water hydrotherapy.

            Perhaps it was finally time to retire to the same dark hollers where Teddy had gone.
 
HARVEY
           
Harvey banged his head against the wall, but it didn’t help him wake up out of the nightmare. Then he heard the banging on his door. It was a male voice, one he didn’t know or recognize. One of his gun thugs should have been there to answer it, but his protection had all been drawn like deer in headlights out into the streets where many were being dazzled by the celestial lightshow and the hallucinatory effects it was having. The door swung open and there they were. His wife Dolores and some unshaved idiot with a griststache who looked like he’d just crawled out of a flophouse on River Rat Row. Dolores had a gun, and the man, Larry, he had a two-wheel dolly and a straight-jacket.

            “My friend Larry here, he wants to take you to visit your old friend, Dr. Benjamin. Then he might have something he wants to show you.”

            “Don’t do it, Dolores! I didn’t mean it! I thought he was only going to keep you for a few days, until you got better.”

            “Maybe he will only keep you for a few days until you get better. You seem kind of nuts to me!”

            “How did you know? Can you see the numbers?”

            He was staring at what looked like a grid of numerical chaos superimposed over reality, and the calculations driving it were changing all the time.

            “What numbers? I guess you really are going nuts.”

            “No, I see them too,” Larry said, his voice trembling. Larry’s vision showed the essential harmony of the universe as a divine Pythagorean equation. He saw every number as a beacon of a particular quality emanating its force out into the world. Harvey’s math had descended to a madness that wasn’t divine. It was all quantity, and for him that quantity was never enough. Even seeing it in all its vastness, made him feel like he had fallen down into the red of negative numbers, instead of the vast connection flowing between them in eternal balance as Larry had just perceived beyond the veil.

            “All you ever thought about was numbers,” Dolores said. “I don’t see what the big problem is now. Maybe now you are just a dumb broken calculator”

            She held her husband under the hammer of the gun, and got him tied up to the two-wheeler. It wasn’t easy to get him down the front steps onto the street. He fell, and then dragged him up and then kept on pushing. There were several more falls along the road, and with each one his skull rattled.
 
CANDY

            Candy was mesmerized by the light show in the sky. It looked like a scene from out of a fairy tale. The green and mauve lights dancing in the sky became pointillistic, then stretched into the clarity of blistering jewel burning with its own internal light, and transformed into a scene that looked like a group of older women and strange animal, maybe alien, beings had gathered together around a table to have some tea in a strange garden. There was a table and woman was sitting on it, and a stairway went up with another being moving towards a portal in the beyond. In another part of the sky a group of three were levitating a body above a checkerboard floor. Birds and humanimals frolicked and conversed and she could hear them, but their language was music and whispers and symbols and light.

Then it faded back, flickered out and dissolved as if were a film that had gotten overcooked by a hot projector bulb. A woman on a white rocking horse appeared from the skys green grass and was speaking right to her.
“You’re mom has gone fishing, go and be with her. Harvey is going into the old desk drawer with the other broken calculators. You won’t be seeing him again.”

 She wondered if everyone else was seeing the same thing? If they could hear it too?

But there was a peace that came from the woman on the rocking horse, and she was gifted with a memory of herself on a rocking horse as a kid with her mom, on one of those happy days when there was a shepherds pie in the oven and apples simmering in cinnamon and sugar on the stove.

She knew the old fishing spot down on the river. Her dad had spent so much time there, smoking his pipe, and she thought she could smell the scent of that amaretto and cavendish he favored drifting along the hot summer night. She followed it along.
 
MRS. INGLEBERT

            Down at the river Mrs. Inglbert was witness to a religious conversion. People were getting baptized in the mauve and green cast waters. People were dancing on the shore. It wasn’t a good scene for fishing, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to get religion. Not after the way her parents went nuts in the Church of the Mall Messiah, a prosperity-based cargo cult that taught the reopening of the malls would happen any day now. Now she believed in something, she just wasn’t sure what all it was. It was getting harder now too, now that telephone poles were talking, now that Fred was back with her so much of the time.

            She’d brought her worms from the compost. They were wriggling something fierce, squirming in the mush. One looked like the sickness that was inside her and she struck it with a hook. Perhaps she’d get that worm out of her after all. Maybe a big fish would come and gulp it up.

            Past a small driftwood fire where a few teenagers were drinking tallboys she made her way down the path under the bridge. Fred would be waiting there. She wished her daughter would come along. Maybe they could have one more night with their father, like in the old times.

DAVE

The next day the madness the world started to ebb. It had been enveloped inside some kind of psychic alien incursion. Dave thought it had emanated from a distant universe on the other side of the aurora. As the sun came up and the day progressed, there was a release of pressure, but all kinds of strangeness had happened all around according to his neighbor.

Dave wanted to find out more, so he plugged in the shortwave radio and tuned around until he found the weather channel again. He waited and waded through all the usual dreck of rising sea levels, floods, high winds, and droughts in the drying west, until the space weather lady came on the air.

“The coronal mass ejections that started just two days ago causing outbreaks of geomagnetic storms last night here on earth seem to have ripped a hole in rationality. We’ve been witnessing massive waves of dream outbreaks. Some might think all of this is fodder for fairy tales, and that’s part of the issue. Renegade psychologist and host of the Archetype Hour on our sister station, WMOO, Desmond Burke, has called it an upwelling of the collective unconscious, when things that were normally repressed resurface and come into the light. Others think that somehow, intelligences from a distant world were carried over the solar waves. Scientists have been left scratching their heads as to how this geomagnetic activity could affect people’s minds. Most scientists in fact reject there was any connection at all, saying it was just a coincidence, that this outbreak of what they call mass hysteria, coincided with the arrival of the solar storm energy on earth. At the same time, there have been numerous reports of patients breaking out from mental health institutions and psyche wards. It seems, that for some people who live with psychosis, the storms actually have had a pacifying effect. Further study is warranted. And while scientists may continue to hedge and hem and haw, regular citizens are less reticent about their peculiar experiences.

 “ ‘We know what we saw and what we have felt’ Jimmy Greenwall of the Greenwall Grocery Wagon’s Firm has said. ‘It’s going to be hard selling turnips now, knowing what they said to me.’ An urban farmer in Detroit noted ‘Some people are calling this a collective hallucination, and who knows, but if it was, it was a pretty real collective hallucination, whatever the heck that means.’ Meanwhile scientists remain worried that this event will only add to the number of people talking about dreams, taking up practical metaphysics, and believing in strange beings that exist in the non-physical realm.”

Dave was no art head, but it seemed that calling this particular storm the Leonora Carrington Event had been right after all. He was just happy that his house no longer resemebled a shoe and the cow was done jumping over the moon. He had a pile of boots to fix for a group of barge workers, and he was eager to get back to work repairing people’s soles.


--Justin Patrick Moore
 May 2024/ July 2025
Cincinnati, Ohio

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Roads in America have long symbolized the ideal of freedom. Just like the pilgrims who came here to escape religious persecution, and the pioneers who wanted to homestead their own way in life, the idea of traveling down the road to get away from one place and go to elsewhere, the notion of liberty has always traveled along with the people who take to the roads to find their way.

When the roads became paved, and when you could travel down them with speed, it added the idea of velocity to the metaphor of freedom. If you could afford a car, anyway. When cars first appeared, motoring was a novelty for the wealthy. Cars also became one of the epitomes of the Faustian machine age, rearing generations of motorheads into states of enraptured ecstasy by the spell of purring engines, enervating sensitive types with the cacophonous noise of their splutter.

As the antihuman forces of front line assembly systems riveted the steel beasts into ascendance, the price dropped to the point to where they came into the purview of the middle class, but not all the middle class. First it was just the white middle class. The oil fields had been tapped and gasoline was flowing, cheap and plentiful for a time. People looked to the car as another means of escaping enforced limitations, and eventually African-American’s of the middle class could also afford cars. Yet even when African Americans could start taking to the road in combustible vehicles, the road wasn’t always a safe place to be, especially in the years of Jim Crow.

After the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, Jim Crow was in effect in the Southern states. It was legal for Americans to be segregated by their race and the full power of the law was behind that segregation. Rules, regulations, and systemic racism had the net effect of ensnaring Black people in nets of harassment, and much worse. Human rights were denied and access to what the rest of the country thought as basic was curtailed through severe prejudice.

Yet the road still called, it beckoned as place to roam, out of the drought of oppression and into a world of verdant green where life could be enjoyed.

A man named Victor Hugo Green helped his fellow African American’s get on the road and find hospitable places, people and businesses. Green was a New Yorker through and through, born in 1892. His parents named him after the famous French author whose work championed the outcast, the poor, and the dispossessed. He was the eldest son of William H. Green and Alice (Holmes) and grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey with his two siblings. In 1913 he started working as a postman in New Jersey, but became a worldly entrepreneur, though he remained with the postal service for his entire career, even after becoming a publisher during the Harlem Renaissance where was a participant and witness the proliferation and blossoming of Black culture.

GREAT MIGRATION’S AND THE FEAR OF THE RED

The Great Migration was great because it was one of the largest movements of people finding new places to live in the recorded and remembered history of North America. Jim Crow was in effect, and it was the driver for the approximately six million Black people who left the American South for the North, the Midwest and the West. Though the boundaries of time are fuzzy, the Great Migration lasted from about 1910 until the 1970s. Even in places where segregation laws did not exist, segregation by custom was ubiquitous. Even as the laws changed during the Civil Rights era, with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the legacy and aftereffects have continued to ripple through time, and the social and economic factors driving the movement of African Americans across the country continued.

Looking at it now, the Great Migration can be seen as having had two distinct phases. As with so much else in the United States and the world, the upheaval unleased by World War I and II mark the period of the two phases. The first phase happened roughly between 1910 and 1940. In this time period Black southerners made their way to Indianapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New York. A war always needs a body, and for this, able bodied men were sent off to be machine gun fodder in the trenches as the efforts to fight were escalated in 1917 and people got sent off to Europe. With industrial jobs vacant by those who’d gone off to kill and get killed, jobs opened up for African Americans to fill those spots.

Americas internal migrants had found better jobs after fleeing from a South mired under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid, but other difficulties awaited. Injustice and prejudice wasn’t confined to one part of the continent and country. It is estimated that around 2 million Blacks left the south during the first phase from World War I to World War II. The social shake up to the norms wasn’t easy for people who felt their privileges were being infringed upon. The perceived threat of Communism was another cloud hanging over the minds and livelihoods of capitalist businessmen who were fine with the way things were.

The Russian Revolution was on everyone’s mind, erupting into paranoia. Politicians, government workers, and capitalists especially feared an imminent commie uprising. African-American commies they were even more afraid of; Black people were already advocating racial equality. Throwing in labor rights made the situation feel even more threatening for those with vested interests in the same-old, same-old.
​
In March 1919, President Woodrow Wilson said that “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” This was the opening statement of fear that exploded in yet another wave of white violence against African Americans who had relocated in the search of making a living and a better life, in the search for just a small slice of the American dream. The Red Summer of 1919 saw race riots explode across the land starting in the April, from Georgia to Maine, to South Carolina, Indiana, Texas and Arizona. Four days of mob violence formed an early peak in Washington D.C. in July, followed by more mob attacks in Norfolk, Virginia on Black veterans coming home from the war.

The Chicago riots of late July into August marked another peak. Hundreds of Black homes and businesses on the South Side of the Windy City were destroyed in the riots that followed the cruel drowning of Eugene Williams, guilty only of swimming in the wrong place. More rioting happened in Omaha, Nebraska, and from the end of September and into November of the year a massacre occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, sparked by fears of socialism as sharecroppers began the work of getting organized into a union.

Charles Hillman Brough, the governor of Arkansas, appointed a Committee of Seven, made up of good old boy businessmen to investigate the business of the Sharecropper’s Union. They came to the conclusion that it was a socialist enterprise made “for the purpose of banding negroes together for the killing of white people.” Articles about this in the newspapers stoked the flames of hatred and agitation, leading directly to further violence. All of it amounted to an anti-Black pogrom with a hefty dose of anti-communist Red Scare mixed in to whip up people into an irrational frenzy of bloodlust and belligerence.

The second phase of began as World War II brought the war industry (called elsewhere the “defense industry”) into expansion. This continued on into the 1970’s when America’s loss of morale in Vietnam put a cap on the number of jobs for war related manufacturing. In this time frame African Americans continued to move North, and further west into the major cities of California and up into the big cities of the Pacific Northwest. In just twenty odd years after World War II another 3 million Black people had migrated to these and various other points in the United States.

In the meantime, the Civil Rights era had ended Jim Crow but redlining and other systemic forms of racism were still in operation, along with usual overt kind. Neighborhoods might not have been segregated by clear and visible laws, but discrimination in housing and restrictive covenants kept many disparities in place across the United States. These scars on the collective landscape continue to reveal layers of psychohistory, and the effect of this psychogeography on the people who dwell in each area continues to be felt.

It was in this time period of the Great Migration that Victor Hugo Green’s travel book offered a roadmap for navigating such a harshly stratified society.

IN THE HARLEM GREEN

Harlem was one of the hot spot destinations of choice in the early phases of the Great Migration. Alma S. Duke had come up from Richmond, Virginia as part of that movement of people. In general, people moving up from Virginia often went to Harlem and New York City, while people moving away from Mississippi often went to Chicago. People were moving away from plenty of other places in the South as well, and there was variation, but these were two of the prevalent patterns. Alma was one who had come up from Virginia.

In 1917 she married Victor Hugo Green. The happy couple moved to Harlem to be in the happening place. They settled in the Sugar Hill community. They made it just in time for the Harlem Renaissance.

African-American music, theater, painting and visual art, and of course, literature, was going through an incredible fertile period as artists took back “the Negro” from the stereotypical tropes of whites. An identity and consciousness apart from middle class bourgeois values of the white Victorian era was crafted. The Victorian reality tunnel looked out on the world through colonialist, imperialist and racist belief systems. This renaissance of artistic activity was happening in other parts of the U.S., but the main concentration of energy was in Harlem.

At the same time as Blacks were making Harlem a hotspot of American cultural life, some were also getting on the road as people entered the middle class and had the ability and opportunity to afford a set of wheels. But the road can be harsh, and even motoring along, there were many gas stations that wouldn’t fill a tank, mechanics who wouldn’t work on a Black owned car, places that wouldn’t serve African Americans a meal. This treatment wasn’t limited to the South, as the events of the Red Summer showed (and many other events afterwards). Northerners were just as cruel and racist. It made staying put in a safe place with known elements less risky than traveling the country to visit family, especially when traversing places where White Supremacist groups were active.
​
Yet it wasn’t all hatred. African Americans businesses were also springing up, and gradually there were businesses where acceptance of everyone’s humanity was the key. Green had the idea that he could list such places in a book to help Black people get around the country and enjoy the freedom of traveling, the freedom of being free. The result was “The Negro Motorists Green Book.”

He first published his guide in 1936. The first edition was only ten pages and focused on New York City. The prevalence of “Whites Only” restaurants and “Sundown Towns” -places where African Americans weren’t welcome after dark- meant that going somewhere new was a dangerous business when violence and hostility could be expected. With a list of places where it was safe to go, new possibilities for real freedom opened up, and Green’s book came into high demand. He continued to publish new edition each year, expanding the range of cities and towns covered with each new version.

His job at the postal office was a key to this enterprise as he was able to use it for networking with other postmen and connect with Black business people along their mail routes. Once contact was made, he asked them if they’d like to advertise in the Green Book. These same businesses listed in the book then became venues where the book itself could be sold and bought. It was an underground or parallel system operating outside of the mainstream. With the book in hand African American citizens had another way of making and forming connections to people offering needed services, of finding dance halls, cafes, shops and other places that were safe. Places to just chill out and relax.

All of this nurtured community and the networking was one of the things that helped set a stage for growth of the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement in turn depended on financial independence. The Black businesses that made up the book were the foundation of success.

Of the many African Americans who used the Green Book, many did so for the purpose of earning a living. Salespeople, traveling musicians, entertainers, athletes and others who had to take to the road for work in one capacity or another were among those whose lives were made easier through the travel guide. Blacks in the middle class and above working as trained professionals in fields such as medicine, law, insurance and engineering were also looking to spend some of their income and treat their families to leisure time. Relaxation and recreation at the standard resorts was often barred from Blacks due to segregation, so as new options and opportunities became available, these got listed in the guide. Idlewild in Michigan was one of the leading resorts during the Jim Crow era and it had reached the height of its popularity by the 1960s.  

Off the back of the Green Book, Green started another enterprise in 1947. This was a Vacation Reservation Service and travel-agency, again specializing in Black owned businesses. By the end of the 1940s, his guide had gone outside the confines of the U.S., showing how to get around in places like Mexico and Bermuda. He did all this while still maintaining his day job, from which he retired in 1952. That was the same year he changed the name of his publication to the Negro Travelers’ Green Book. It wasn’t just about motoring anymore, but about experiencing life out in the world and all it had to offer.

HAVE OIL, WILL TRAVEL

Without gasoline and oil, a car is just a heap of metal and parts. These days it might just be fiberglass, metal and parts. Without a place to fill up, getting on the road means nothing. Without oil and petroleum products the American conception of roads and cars as the keys to freedom would be a dream. During the time period of the Great Migration, Shell stations had been known to refuse Black customer’s service. Not so with Esso Standard Oil, a company who became another key to the continued success of the Green Book. They had enlightened policies, and franchised gas stations to African Americans.

These days the company that was Esso is better known as ExxonMobil. The name “Esso” came from the way a person would say the letters S and O, for Standard Oil, the immediate predecessor of the company. Strange how these corporations live longer than humans, but with genealogies just as tangled.

Standard Oil was based in New Jersey and had started marketing products under the Esso brand in 1926. During those Jim Crow years, they hired Black intellectuals in a time when African Americans with higher education and training under their belt had a difficult time finding employment. In 1934 one of the people they hired was James Albert “Billboard” Jackson. He wrote a column called Jackson’s Page for Billboard, the famous music and entertainment magazine, where he wrote about Black performers in New York, Chicago, and other big cities. His column was very popular and Black newspapers in the North syndicated his work under the byline “Billboard” Jackson.

Writing about music and cultural life in the 1920s put him into direct contact with many of the greats from the Harlem Renaissance, and his work as a critic was crucial in getting their work out to a wider audience. Like Green, he was another pioneer in Black business and entrepreneurship: he was an advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce on that very subject between 1927 and 1933. In 1934 he was asked to come and work for Esso Standard Oil Company in the role of public relations and marketing specialist, the first African American to hold that role. He also became the first African American member of the American Marketing Association in in 1940. All in all, he had worked for Esso for twenty-one years. Jackson was very active in African American fraternal groups and business associations, and was a member of some thirty-seven different voluntary groups. He had developed quite the network of influence.

While Jackson was working at Esso in the marketing division, he convinced the company to sponsor the Green Book so their Black customers could “go further with less anxiety.” By the 1940’s a little less than half of all Esso dealers were Black making this coordination effort a natural fit. 

The 1949 edition of the Green Book included the following Esso endorsement message:

“As representatives of the Esso Standard Oil Co., we are pleased to recommend the Green Book for your travel convenience. Keep one on hand each year and when you are planning your trips, let Esso Touring Service supply you with maps and complete routings, and for real 'Happy Motoring' – use Esso Products and Esso Service wherever you find the Esso sign.”

Alma Green, who had worked on the Green Book as an editor at various times continued publishing the book after her husband died on October 16, 1960. She continued to serve and publish as an editor until 1966, the last year the annual book was published.

When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 it marked the end of legal racial segregation. Sundown towns may have been blocked legally, but racial profiling by local police and sheriff's departments, harassment by everyday racists, and other aggravations continued and continue. Driving while Black remains dangerous. The influence of that reality has left a deep mark on the psychology of collective America, and the memory of that is permeated across the land.
 
RE/SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance by Alvin Hall

Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin

​Overground railroad: the Green Book and the roots of Black travel in America by Candacy Taylor

Driving While Black (2015 feature film directed by Paul Sapiano)

Driving While Black (2021 Documentary directed by )

The Green Book (2018 feature film directed by Peter Farrelly)

“There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of a ten miles radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.” -Henry David Thoreau

​There is a very prevalent attitude within the culture of creativity, for those that want to make it big, a person needs to leave their smaller city or small town, and go to the big city. I guess making it big has always had the underlying assumption, also super prevalent and at large in the greater culture, that bigger is better. Big cities represent places with more opportunities for expansion in whatever field of endeavor one wishes to make it big inside. There is often more there in these places: LA, Chicago, New York City, Seattle. Some of what there is definitely more of is competition. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber vying for their slice of the pie. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber working as baristas and waiters and cooks. That’s no slight against the service industry. A person has got to eat and my wife and many friends and family are veterans who have served in the trenches of the restaurant biz. I’ve assisted in numerous caterings myself and spent my share of time as a dishwasher. I’m not afraid of getting dirty and wet.

The question remains, however, of why a person would want to travel to a big city to compete not only for work in the creative industries, but also for good day jobs, when they could stay in a smaller pond where there is more potential to become a bigger fish. Yet not just the kind of big fish a fisherman would like to catch from the deep, but part of a school of fish: in other words, a community. Not just a community of elite artists presenting their work to the world in galleries, at readings, and from the stage, but a community of people and beings to be embedded within and serve.

At the end of the day, art in any medium is a service. In its debased forms, it can be a service to the artist looking to glorify themselves. I won’t pretend its ever an egoless endeavor. Yet, when that becomes the sole purpose of art, for the artiste to extol their own creative ability, something essential gets lost, the act of making things that nurture and feed the creative and spiritual part of other beings.

I say other beings, because art may not even just be for humans. If St. Francis could preach to the animals, why couldn’t an artist also make a sculpture for the enjoyment of the trees, or for the birds, snakes and turtles? Why not tell a story to a bee or sing a song to the wind and sun and stars? These too are part of our community, or rather, we are part of their community.

Yet we also do want our human connections, and to be seen for what we do and are capable of doing by our fellows. There is nothing wrong in that desire to be seen, heard, known. It’s something we’ve done since time immemorial. We aspire to be like trees and have our work be around for a long time, yet even their centuries pale to the aeons of life and light given off by the stars.
​
As the 17th century English poet John Hall wrote in his poem “The Hourglass”:

How senseless are our wishes, yet how great!
With what toil we pursue them, and with what sweat!
Yet most times for our hurts, so small we seem
Like Children crying for some Mercury. …
​
Desires of wealth anothers wishes hold
And yet how many have been choked with Gold?
This only hunts for honour, yet who shall
Ascend the higher, shall more wretched fall?

(The poem was set to music by David Tibet in the above harrowing Current 93 song.)

Some of the fruits of human art are more robust than others, and the seed planted from one poem into the heart of another, can turn up and grow in some other area of life. Storytelling, poetry, song are all for the community. To grow, they need their own strong roots so as to generate future seeds.

As culture returns to a preindustrial level of homeostasis and world travel becomes less common and more adventurous, the globetrotting artist will become increasingly rare. Even those writers and musicians and actors who gain larger renown, will likely live somewhere. Sure, there will always be nomadic types and people who live in different locations at different times in their lives, but the urge to grow roots and remain in place will also loom large. An artist who is devoted to the place where they live and breathe will be a boon to the local pond where they swim.

BIG TIME CITY GLITCH

Novelist and writing guru Steven Pressfield wrote a book called Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be. In one of the blogposts that became part of his book, he contended that aspiring screenwriters and people wanting to work in the movies should move to places like Los Angeles to be around the scene where much of the work of screenwriting is done.

He wrote, “Sometimes people will write to me. ‘I want to work in the movies. Do I have to move to Los Angeles?’ Or, ‘My dream job is in fashion design. Do I need to be in Manhattan?’
The answer is yes and yes.”

It sounds logical. Yet art doesn’t always work on logic. Sometimes it works best by being counter-intuitive, so I say the answer is no and no.

I like much of what Pressfield has written to help creative people in the world, so I’m not knocking him as a whole, but I want to push back on what he says about moving to the big cities. I think that is a glitch and stops people from pursuing their dreams in the soil where they were raised. When they move away, that same soil gets depleted instead of getting enriched, while overloading and putting a strain on the place they are moving.
Louisville and Lexington, Cincinnati and Columbus are just as in need of screenwriters (or likely playwrights in deindustrial times) as anywhere else. A motivated playwright is much more likely to get a work made and produced under their own gumption away from places where there is a lot of direct competition against them.

In Stevens Point, Wisconsin the In the Pines Studio has set up their operations. Founded by Winter Williams and Matthew A. Brown, they bucked the traditional notion of centering their creative endeavors in film in California and instead focused on the Midwest. If more film students, producers, writers and directors got together to do things on their own, the allure of the big time wouldn’t be as strong. They could make it small time.

In an article titled “The Paradox of Skill” on Dying Breed, Brett McKay wrote about the role of luck in achieving dreams he gets into the idea of more opportunities being available when the pool is smaller.

“If you’re a talented videographer, don’t move to LA for a career. Talented videographers are a dime a dozen there. You’re going to be relying mostly on luck to get a break. Look for a smaller market where the pool of talent is shallower, and skill is the deciding factor. I know a talented videographer in OKC who has made a successful career for himself overseeing commercials, documentaries, and corporate videos in Oklahoma. Is it as glamorous as LA? Probably not. But he’s thriving in a career he enjoys. Also, OKC ain’t that bad. The cost of living can’t be beat, it’s got a World Champion NBA team, and a great onion burger restaurant to boot. You can always take a direct flight to LA from Will Rogers World Airport if you need a weekend of LA glitz and glamour.”

Such a business as the one described above could also be pivoted from making commercial work to making artistic during the downtime. The success of the one could pay for the possibility of the other.

The glitz of the big cities may just be glitches. I am an urban dude. I like to visit a big city. I live in a small city though, and the size is just right. People say that, in Cincinnati, there is only one degree of separation between folks, rather than the usual two degrees of separation you often hear people talk about. In a place where the social connections separating you from another person are less, it’s easier to develop a reputation (of any kind) and have an audience for your art or craft.

The struggle to gain confidence and build an audience in any art form is real. The person who seeks to do so on a global stage has a lot to overcome, many barriers and obstacles in their way. The person who wishes to perform for their friends, to make music on the porch, to read poetry at a café, to submit to a local zine or quarterly, has more of a chance to start putting themselves out there and working on their craft. There are still obstacles also the possibility of making connections.

The other thing, here too, is doing your art for the community. I think the whole thing of being very polished in performance or an art is what keeps people from doing things like this for the people in their life, but I think as a whole our society needs to embrace the way someone with a skill or talent, even if not “the best” can add to our experience together and inspiring each other to improve, and not just leave things to so-called professional entertainers and the like. In your own home town, you can make it small and still have an outsized impact.

Much good can be had by staying put. Tiny forces and small movements can make big waves.

A process of internal migration is already underway now, where people are migrating away from the bicoastal mindset of LA and NYC dominating the cultural life in the United States, with folks coming back home to the heartland, or moving to the former flyover country for the first time.

Much of that is economic. People are starting to realize they can have a cheaper life, work a decent job, and do their creative thing with more ease, less stress, and more success in places where the cost of living is lower but where the artistic life is just as vibrant.

​These aren’t slights against the big cities themselves. I have very much enjoyed my visits to Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. If these are your local, they are your local. Then you might want to go more micro inside such big ponds and make it small in the neighborhood rather than the city at large.

​GOOD ENOUGH

Normal never was, and sometimes good enough is good enough. Going big presupposes polish. You need to have your act together and you need to make it look professional and sound professional. Again, I have nothing against being a professional. At the same time, how much potential gets stopped in its tracks, because a person witnesses the work of a virtuoso and instead of getting inspired by them, they say, “I will never be that good” instead of thinking, “if I commit to a practice, I could do that.” People feel degraded by the simulacra of big time entertainment. There is a failure to realize we can all entertain ourselves and our family and friends, same as it ever was.

I think in a large art that is because performance has become spectacle. Music was enjoyed for much of its history, socially. Sure, there were always people who were talented and reached for perfection in their art, but there were also the everyday practitioners of the art who sang for the practical enjoyment of singing and for the simple joy doing it gave them. Isn’t that good enough?

For me, this is part of the appeal of punk rock. It was focused more on the energy of the sound, and the ability for anyone with the gumption to put a band together. It is why I like the genre of vaporwave and sound collage: have the tools? Put something together with them. It doesn’t need to be perfect to be fun. It doesn’t need to be perfect for somebody else to get something out of it. It doesn’t need to be perfect for it to help you along your own path. If you stick with it, the confidence and the greater ability to do what you envision with the medium will come.

For a long time some, friends of ours held an annual Winter Solstice potluck with performance. They usually rented out a small hall in the neighborhood. People put money in a pot to cover the cost and the food was all brought in by everyone. Homebrewed beer and wine... The amazing part was the variety show.... music, skits, jokes, poetry, tap dancing and more every year, put on by the people in the extended friends group. They were about a half generation older than my wife and I... of hippie stock and really believed in the philosophy that a community could provide its own entertainment for itself.

The same is true of so many great shows I have been to in VFW halls, community spaces, and scummy basements. Conditions do not need to be ideal. It’s better to play through a shitty PA then no PA. Working outside of ideal conditions leads to grit, resolve, and strengthening of will and courage in face of obstacles.
This essay doesn’t need to be in ideal form, either, before I share it with readers. I like to revise. Sometimes I like to revise more than I like to write the new thing. It allows me to keep fiddling. With that in mind, I am resisting endless revision here. Hence, minimal polish. Unfinished ideas. There will be time circle back to all the things I intended to write in this piece and didn’t really get to, because I went on off on some tangent. That will just be fodder for the next one.

[ Josh Datko has a great essay on the grain of soul found in art when you go on and do a thing without worrying about being totally polished.]

AS THE FIELD EXPANDS, THE SCOPE OF SUCCESS MUST BE LIMITED

Being local and staying small can also relate to finding a niche and working from the freedom of the fringe.
Working in an area that is overcrowded and overhyped, the luck needed to get work out into the world becomes greater. Where there is a lot of skill and a lot of people doing great things great with that skill, something else is needed to set one apart. Part of what is needed is a bit of luck. Part of what is needed is a unique, iconoclastic flavor.

Electronic music was in the past, a specialized field of activity, a niche area of music making. Now all kinds of people have modular setups, or are just producing music on computers at home using readily available software, or even just using programs like Suno to take the song idea from their head and make it so it can be heard. In a way, this makes that kind of production a folk art in its own right, just as collage has become since Dada and Surrealism opened that practice up to the wider public and anyone with some scissors and glue. One of the things about folk art is that there isn’t as much variation between artists. It can still be really good, and the virtuosos become known and appreciated for their skill and rise to the top of their craft. Something within their ability sets them apart from all the other people singing those same songs or making those same vaporwave beats.

The same is true of poetry. As literacy has increased, the number of writers has increased. Before, there were a few stand out poets who rose to the top in every generation. Now there are dozens. It’s much easier to get to know who the “best” poets are in a local area or scene, than it is to know the “best” in the nation, because there are so many more people writing poetry and getting it published in chapbooks, online and going to readings.

This is also why a field of creativity such as contemporary poetry and electronic music is impossible to know with the breadth that a person once could know it several decades ago.

Standing out in an overcrowded field becomes part of the game. Instead of making it big, pivoting to making it small is a way to sidestep internal creative pressure. Within the boundaries and limitations imposed by working in a smaller area and at a smaller scale, new possibilities emerge.

Another way to approach the issue is to embrace microcultures. In music, microcultures can be seen as the proliferation of genres. Your band might not be the best metal band. But they might be the best blackened sludge thrashcore. You might not be the best producer of ambient music. But you might be one of the best maker of ambient-emo, or of chiptune emo, or get known for your “hardplaza” skateboard beat productions.
In the poetry world, where free verse has flourished for decades, a poet can set themselves apart by mastering a form such as the ghazal, or as Marilyn Hacker did, the sonnet, sestina and villanelles.

Radio is another area where a person can stand apart from the podcast party. The tricky there thing is getting access to a radio station, but if you have a community station in your community, that is the place to go to build the community. With so many forgettable podcasts, it’s really something special, if you are transmitting into the aether. Plus you reach more random listeners than a focused podcast might. Some of those randos might turn in to your regular listeners.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

Another reason to celebrate the local is to become a repository of local knowledge. This is what I wanted to write the most about in this essay, actually, except I went off on a rant against LA and NYC. I plan to revisit and enlarge on this theme in a separate article now that I’ve gotten some more of the bicoastal bile out of my system.

In any place, time stretches back to untold vistas, and to know even some of the history of the land and its people, and those other people, the people we call plants and animals, gives a new sense of appreciation for the land. When we stay close to the land, connected to it, do not move far away from where we are born, we begin to sense and appreciate its longer cycles within the much smaller wheels and cycles of our own lifetime.

In this way, when we listen to what the land has to say, we in turn can become speakers for the land. Our art can be embedded with materials from the place where we live, whether those materials be wood, stone, or mineral.

Those materials might be knowledge about the quarreling between two different families and the feuds that have ensued over generations. Such a tale might get turned into a novel or a ballad. The material might be a song passed on from one person working the coal barges and the riverboats of the Ohio and Mississippi, sang to another and then another. That song gets worked into a set played at a local festival or down at the bar, and in turn inspires the people who hear it to know something more of the many stories that have flowed along those rivers.

No matter where you are, it’s possible to get into a creative flow state, to make and find opportunities for a being a local artist, poet, maker.

The great philosopher Robert Anton Wilson had an experiment in one of his books. It was about perception and how we put filters on our perception and either allow information in or block it out, depending on what he called our reality tunnel, or the filters we see the world through. His experiment was to look for quarters when out and about. If the mindset of looking for quarters and finding them was adopted, the person doing the experiment tended to find more quarters than the person who didn’t bother to look at all. It can be so when we look at the place, we call our own local. From that solid ground our work as writers, poets, musicians and artists can take root and shape.

Do we see opportunities for enrichment of our art? Do we see opportunities for the way our art can enrich the community? Do we see ways we can incorporate the history and specific knowledge unique to a place into what we do, so we can become memory keepers and sharers of knowledge to those who come after us? This is just part of the work of the local artist who has made it small.

.:. .:. .:.
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