Decade in Review: 2011

January 2011:  After some deliberations, I decided to write on a train from Eugene to Portland.  So I dressed up as a Pegasus Ranger!   The train ride was fun.   I discovered the Crumpacker Family Library (The Temple of Books!) and I had a lovely pizza dinner with Jay Lake.  The summary of my Adventures of a Pegasus Ranger follows:

In the manuscript of Pegasus Ranger in Portland, I see someone using artifice as a tool to search for an axis mundi. He dons a costume and begins his search with a train ride; he discovers that the meridians and parallels of the world are blurred. He thinks he's discovered an axis mundi in a temple of art, but his vision of artistic logos overwhelms him and he retreats. A fellow writer, a kind of shadow-shelf of the searcher, turns his attention to Death. Each of the searcher's encounters contrasts and compares chaos and order; control and surrender; expectations, fantasy, and reality. At the end, he tries to connect the dots into a paradigm, but they don't mesh perfectly. The story ends with the searcher almost home, passing a shadowed milestone.  As he recalls life, art and Georges-Pierre Seurat, who painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the Pegasus Ranger concludes that the Geometry of Life is always Deconstructed by Entropy.  But Life -- which includes its terminus, Death -- is not about seeing, it's about how one looks. The act of observation not only changes the observed, it changes the observer. Look well.  Bring outfits.  Look good.

February 2011:  The grey days of Winter were officially getting to me.  To combat them I would  use a halogen torchiere and fill the house with Summer-like light.  The Winter Light never used to bother me (that I'd been aware) and I attributed my sluggishness and despair to (undiagnosed) seasonal depression.   But some days not eve the torchiere would help, and I'd have to take a picture of myself wearing a turban made out of a starry polar fleece blanket.


March 2011:  We went skiing, where I had the pleasure of admiring a stranger's skiing moves, and discovered I was looking at Mark.  Going home, we got trapped on the highway about twenty miles out of Eugene by a a windstorm which blew a tree over a road and knocked electricity out of the McKenzie River corridor.   Mark drove us to Belnap Hotsprings and discovered a lovely outdoor temple folly.  I was glad I was with him, because I would have pulled the car over at the side of the highway and froze.


April 2011:  I officially began fiddling around with zellij tile design and launched a fascination with producing ten five-pointed stars whirling around each other.  I'd already played with Penrose Tiles, so it was an easy jump.  I find that constructing geometric forms calms me down and is rewarding; I'm not sure if it's the process, of using a compass or the pleasure of creating an ordered design, or the challenge of fitting different things together.

On the writing front, I tried to create an e-book and got stalled.


May 2011:  After watching University of Oregon want ads for about a year and applying for a few jobs, a writer friend from the Wordos clued me in to an IT job opening in the UO Psychology Department.   I got hired as a temporary part-time worker.    This was a good thing; and the extra income made a lot of things a whole lot easier.


June 2011:  We visited Mark's family on the east coast.  It's always fun to visit them because they are New York Direct, which is a refreshing change from Corvallis Nice.  We usually do some site-seeing, and I often visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- this visit included a reminder to finish projects.  One day, Mark and I made a pilgrimage to Olana -- we dressed up, and got to be fabulous gays touring an architectural palace (with sketching and a picnic afterward).


September 2011:  My micro fiction, "The Book Deal" was purchased for "Twisted Tales," a micro fiction anthology by Delving Press.  "The Book Deal" was a fun, 66 word horror story.  Alethea Kontis and Damon Kaswell were also in it.


Through the late summer and throughout autumn, I worked on writer craft.  I read Dracula, and I couldn't understand what was so horrible about the vampire until someone explained to me at OryCon that the count was operating outside the circle of Christian Grace.  I read some dreadful steampunk genre stories (one kept flipping back and forth between a romance and something else), and apparently zombies (er, revenants) must be included.  I wrote my first steampunk story, and then another, to mixed reactions at the Wordos table.

And I thought about masculinity, and gay male desire, and story, and what is it that I want to explore as a man who is gay and who is a writer.

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If there was a theme for 2011, it was the geometry of life cycles.  I wanted things to be pretty and ordered, but it seems that having a pretty and ordered life takes a lot of practice -- and in the end, the geometry is left open by Death.

The Geometry of Life

I recently read some advice connected with the Clarion West Writers' Workshop:  Practice writing endings so you get as good at writing them as you do beginnings. So I worked on the ending for this story and I wrote and wrote into the night. I came up with a bunch of stuff that sounded preachy.

Then it was time for sleep.

Words crashed around in my head like waves against cliffs as I slid between the cold sheets of bed. Images and phrases surfaced in the whirlpool of thoughts and I sat up and jotted a few down on the pad next to the nightstand. I thought, "If I don't do something, I'm going to be kept up half the night." I've learned that the best way to quiet my lexical mind is to use my iconic one. So I drew: A quartered globe. Two dots connected by a line. A telescope and a microscope; an Eye of Horus. A branching tree. A drafting compass; a paint brush. A book. A throne; a seat. A mask.

I was still thinking about the ending of my trip, but at least my mind was quiet enough to sleep.

The next morning, I tried to use story critique as a tool to figure out this story's ending:

In the manuscript of Pegasus Ranger in Portland, I see someone using artifice as a tool to search for an axis mundi. He dons a costume and begins his search with a train ride; he discovers that the meridians and parallels of the world are blurred. He thinks he's discovered an axis mundi in a temple of art, but his vision of artistic logos overwhelms him and he retreats. A fellow writer, a kind of shadow-shelf of the searcher, turns his attention to Death. Each of the searcher's encounters contrasts and compares chaos and order; control and surrender; expectations, fantasy, and reality. At the end, he tries to connect the dots into a paradigm, but they don't mesh perfectly. The story ends with the searcher almost home, passing a shadowed milestone.

I thought about the critique. Endings are supposed to be where you connect the dots. And as a writer I'm expected to connect them with a flourish and a twist. But then I thought about Georges-Pierre Seurat, who painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte -- he didn't connect the dots. And so I think I've found the ending to this story.

The Geometry of Life is always Deconstructed by Entropy.  But Life -- which includes its terminus, Death -- is not about seeing, it's about how one looks. The act of observation not only changes the observed, it changes the observer. Look well.  Bring outfits.  Look good.

Homeward Bound

Jay gave me a lift to the train station in his GENRE-mobile. We hugged good-bye as well as possible from the front seat of a car, and I thanked him for the visit and ride.

As I entered the Union Station Amtrak Depot, a voice made some sort of announcement over the station's speakers. I had a feeling I didn't want to know what the announcement was about, as the only words I heard clearly were "delayed over four hours." I sauntered to the boarding podium hoping that if I believed hard enough I could hop onto the homeward-bound train. But denial isn't a Pegasus Ranger tool, or at least it doesn't work with Amtrak, and I had a choice between waiting for a much later train or taking a bus back home. If the restaurant attached to the station had been open and if it hadn't meant getting home around 1 AM, I would have waited.

Most of the passengers in line to board had a resigned look, but no one appeared to be especially cranky. The Amtrak bus wasn't so bad, but it didn't have a table to work on and it didn't have a whole lot of space in which to stretch. Still, everyone found seats. The bus was not as crowded as I feared it would be, and I had the luxury of storing my heavy bag on the seat next to me.

The bus launched into Interstate traffic. In front of us, a river of red lights. On the driver's side, a river of white lights. It was dark, and I wasn't expecting to see much anyway, but the trip on the interstate seemed more ordinary than the morning's interstitial journey along feral yards, pastures, and building posteriors.

The bus driver announced the reason we were "riding wheels of rubber instead of steel" was that someone in Seattle had been struck by a freight train and the authorities had shut down the rails. I hoped the person was okay and wondered how many people's lives had taken a different branch as a result of one person's encounter with one coal train.

I pulled out my blank sketch book, compass, and straight edge. I wanted to inaugurate the book during the trip, and how better than to construct a pentagon using Euclid's Method. The dim light inside the bus made accurate placement of the compass difficult. Also, I made my initial circle too wide, and when I tried to bisect it, the top point for the bisecting line was off the page; so I had to use the hole in the circle's center from where the compass point had poked through the paper instead. Because of the missing referent, little errors added up. The resulting pentagon was a little off -- the bottom points in its base were too close to each other, and the inscribed pentagram was skewed a bit to the right.

I consoled myself with the knowledge that I've used the method successfully before. And maybe Art could rescue Craft. It wasn't something that a little color and some creative pencil use couldn't mask: I constructed a Penrose Dart and Kite using the pentagon, shaded them with red and blue colored pencils, and labeled one of the ratios for one to phi.


The bus pulled in front of the Salem Train station. I noticed two white, humongous, Beaux-Arts globes suspended from the ceiling and illuminating the station's interior. The spheres were sectored into meridians and latitudes by a metal frame. I couldn't tell if they were made up of little flat rectangles of white glass, or if the glass was curved. Outside, flanking the station's entrance, were two electric, low-energy fluorescent bulbs; the glass globes around these lights were one piece, sandblasted to mimic the grids on the larger lights inside. I wondered if the outside lights used to be miniature versions of the larger globes within -- they seemed to be a retrofit, and I sensed a story.

I wished there had been time to get out and snap photos as the bus pulled out of the parking lot; but traveling by bus was slower than by train, and getting out at every stop would have made the journey about an hour longer.

At last I saw the familiar lights of Eugene, the most prominent being a red neon 5 inside a circle by the fifth street market. The bus made a few zig-zags around a mostly empty downtown, through a dark restaurant parking lot (the restaurant features meals served in decommissioned railway dining cars) and stopped in front of the Eugene Station.

We dispersed. Some of us walked up Willamette Street and were lost in shadows. Some of us climbed aboard taxis. I walked through a round-about and past its milliarium, an octagonal stack of spiraling black and white tiles. It's too dark to clearly see the curled bars of the directional vane on top of the column, which looks like a sleeping cast-iron flower.

I was almost home.

Optics of Thánatos

As I left the museum and library, it began to rain. This was probably a good thing, as it kept me from stopping every five seconds to photograph random building details.

I made my way to 6th street. As I neared the corner, I noticed a MAX train. It was yellow. If I missed it, I'd have to wait about 15 minutes for the next one. I ran. I think the engineer saw me. In any case, just as I neared, I saw the amber lights by the doors flash. I jumped through them as they began to slide closed and landed in the relatively empty coach. Yay! Pegasus Rangers Ride the Rails Again!

Karma-girl was not on this train. Nor were there knots of disheveled youth looking like they were creeping home before it got too light. No, behind me was a clean cut young man having a cell phone discussion about two strung-out friends, and across the way was a scruffier looking guy who decided he needed to comb his wavy dark hair with a brush that was attached to a ring of keys. He seemed agitated, and whisked the brush over his head with a jingly rattle.

It turned out we were exiting the train at the same stop. I made sure to give him enough personal space, as he continued to jingle-rattle-brush his hair. He was impatient for the doors to open even though the train was still in motion, and he beat on them with the handle of his comb like a rat deprived of food pellets in an extinction phase of a random reinforcement experiment.

I stepped out at 6th and Davis. Although it was only something like ten to five in the afternoon, I scanned the parking lots and sidewalks around me, half-expecting to see roving gangs of strung-out Xanax abusers searching for easy prey. I squared my shoulders; asked myself, "What would a Pegasus Ranger do?" and heaved a huge sigh of relief when I noticed various touristy types clambering into their SUVs.


I met Jay Lake for pizza. Jay and I are the same age. We are both writers. I haven't had time much to see Jay since he (understandably) stopped making the commute from Portland to visit the Wordos table in Eugene. We did real-life catching up. I think the images from our visit which stick with me the most are the stream of people coming up out of the pizza parlor's basement on a haunted underground tour; how large children transform into small adults in sudden, startling ways; and how Jay is sitting with Death hovering over his shoulder.

He has stage IV colon cancer, and has come through a chemotherapy session. His oncologist recently "upgraded" his chances for survival to 50 percent over the next five years (which is good news). Jay's hair has recovered from the chemo and is longer than mine; he doesn't look frail or sick. But how he looks and feels in this moment is only for this moment. Blood-work or some other medical screening may signal the beginning of another ride on the cancer roller-coaster. Or not.

Sometimes we look at Death with a magnifying glass; other times, opera glasses; sometimes a telescope. Mostly I think we don't look. Jay is certainly looking. I wanted to say something helpful, but I wasn't sure what or how. My head was too full of images from art history. Maybe those French and medieval miniatures of Death and the Dance Macabre did have a useful social role. Maybe the Greeks had something going when they made Eros, Thánatos and Hypnos so alike.

[Editor's note:  Jay Lake died June 1, 2014.  I only saw him once or twice after this.]

Crumpacker Family Library

11:40 AM Sunday.  Portland. I'll let you in on a secret. I'm not the world's most assertive person. Even less so when I'm traveling on my own to a city larger than the one I live in. To get around this I rely on costume to either distract myself or fool myself into being more direct. Hence, the Pegasus Ranger outfit. Yes, I like dressing up; yes, Boys Don't Cry was singing "I Wanna Be a Cowboy" in my head; and yes, there were a couple of moments when I squared my shoulders, shifted my body language, and thought, "Don't mess with me, I'm a Pegasus Ranger." And then I smiled; Pegasus Ranger is right up there with Laser Unicorns in terms of seriousness.

I walked a short distance and then found a yellow-line MAX. The disadvantage to having a laptop and a camera in my bag was the weight. And, alas, I'm getting old. Mark would tell me that I should walk more to build up endurance, but I kind of didn't want the balls of my feet to be sore from walking sixteen blocks. And besides, the Museum was opening real soon now and MAX would be faster.

The MAX train pulled into the stop and I boarded. Just before the doors closed, a young woman with a cardboard sign hopped on. "Whoo," she said, "I almost didn't make it." A few minutes later she strolled through the train, saying in a much tireder-sounding voice, "Spare change?" Her sign said something about karma.

"Hey, Joe," she said to a young bearded man who smelled strongly of urine and amonia. "How you doing? I heard you and your old lady broke up." Joe related his woes: a story involving abandoned dogs, Xanax abuse, and wanting to avoid cops. Karma-girl and Joe got off at Pioneer Square; she was giving him advice about lawyers.

I got off two stops later and walked a few blocks to the Portland Art Museum. The great coat received adulation from the check-clerk. But it turned out that my coat spent more time in the Museum than I did, because the Crumpacker Family Library -- although sharing some space with the Museum in the Mark Building next door -- was a seperate entity with its own entrance. So, abandoning my coat to PAM, I toted my bag next door. Past a curt security guard, past a plaster reproduction of two naked Greek wrestlers, through a book security grid, and into... Paradise!

I'll say it again, in my best imitation of Brenda Vaccaro climbing the ladder to George Hamilton's bedroom in "Zorro, the Gay Blade." Paradise!

Imagine the art history room at Powell's books. Add burgundy carpeting to the bare concrete. Now make the bookshelves 1920's library shelves. Add a stage, high vaulted ceilings and carved, wooden beams; an Euro-ecclectic vibe with pillars and red drapes. Now imagine being told by the librarian that the room was once a Masonic Temple. Realize the four thrones arranged in a circle in the middle of this gigantic, vaulted, lofty, sumptuous, quiet, book-filled room are very likely the ceremonial thrones for the masters of the cardinal directions. Restrain yourself from squealing at the top of your lungs like a five-year-old at 4:30 AM Christmas day and running a victory lap around the stacks before collapsing in an ecstatic heap!! It was like being Scrooge McDuck in a bathtub of gold coins. It was like being a cat on catnip. It was like being St. Agnes pierced by arrows. I was in bibliophile heaven.


I'd seen a picture of the thrones on the library's web page, and they were everything I hoped they could be. Sitting in one was a comfortable pleasure, with excellent lumbar support; although I did wish I wasn't looking at a reproduction of a small boy picking a thorn out of his foot. I walked, or rather, skipped, in a daze and found a gigantic, full color illustrated, coffee-table book of paleolithic art. Translated from the French. (gasp) Critiquing the methodology of Abbé Henri Breui. (gasp) With sub-headings like, "The Ideal Paleolithic Sanctuary." (gasp) And that was before I found the old electric magic lantern. (gasp) In the little niche room. (gasp) Hidden behind a half-curtain.

I set out to immerse myself in Every Single Tome in this TEMPLE. A short time later, I was back at a throne, reading a catalog of "The Stuff of Dreams," a Portland Art Museum show Mark and I visited many years ago. I made some photocopies. I learned that squinch is a real term describing multiple layers of arches holding up a dome.

Several books on Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelites, woodcuts, angels, and a book called "The Quest for Odysseus" later, I had a Mr. Spock in the City on the Edge of Forever moment. "I am a fool!" I thought. "They've got to have something on the Cult Wagon of Strettweg!" They didn't, or more precisely there wasn't monogram focusing solely on the Cult Wagon. The Librarian pointed me to a survey of world history, and pointed out how the shelves were arranged chronologically.

And this is where I nearly wept on my hands and knees as I searched: Because I found a book on Islamic Art, and another book on Roman art, and then another on Greek art, and shelves and shelves of Egyptian art. Being in the library was like being the proverbial moth consumed by the flame, the guest at the worldly feast or other metaphors from C.S. Lewis's  The Discarded Image: The problem was that I couldn't sit down and just read a book -- every book led to at least three others and I had to read all the other books. In less than four hours. Even if I had four days, or four years, or four decades -- well, maybe four decades -- there would be no way I could read all the books enshrined around me.

And I very much wanted to read them all.

I'd been wrong; I wasn't in Heaven, exactly. I was in a retelling of the Greek myth of Tantalus. I was Moses, stranded on Mount Pisgah, gazing at the Holy Land in the distance -- a Holy Land I would never reach.

After only three and a half hours, I was simply overwhelmed by all the books.  I didn't have a clear research plan (I hadn't been able to connect to the on-line catalog earlier in the week).  And being a Pegasus Ranger -- while probably charming the librarian -- wasn't going to help me. I packed up my photocopies and camera, thanked the librarian for all of her help, and strolled back to PAM, where I looked at actual works of art (silver chocolate pots, and tea sets mostly).

Notes from the Train

Sunday. 9:03 AM The train has pulled out of the Eugene station under gray skies. The car is quiet with the exception of one small infant. The the wheel axles' whine raises from a low growl to a medium one and then it drops out of my awareness. Arrhythmic creaking takes its place, and we glide past roads and the backsides of Eugene.

I look out of my cabin window and into the lumber-, scrap- and backyards. The only clear boundary is what is what's on my side of the window, and what's on the other. Between the chain link fences, and the silver-brown posts holding up sagging tin roofs are brown mid-winter weeds. The tall grass is drab-olive; the short grass -- and moss, probably -- is emerald green. It's Sunday morning, so there's little to no activity; just evidence of industry.

On the other side of the cabin, flatcars, tankers and boxcars rest on sidings. In a trick of perspective, the trains on the near siding seem to be overtaking the farther ones. I wish that I had brought my Hazmat Bingo book, it would tell me what the numbers on the sides of the cars mean.

I see an RV graveyard. I see a sewage processing plant. I see people's backyards and porches. Briars are pushing down an old wood fence. There's a yellow lab howling outside the side door of a house as the train passes. Soon we are on the backside of a tree farm. I'm guessing they're poplars or maples or some other small ornamental tree. The vanishing point is lost in a twiggy blur of bare branches.
The tracks follow 99E out into pasture land. Sheep scatter from the train, galloping away from the tracks and into the rising mists. A little later the train passes the Alforth Cemetery.

9:38 Writing. I'm pleased that I'm sitting at a table with a power outlet. The only difficulty is that the keyboard is a little far from me. I'm not looking at the screen so I will not get motion sickness or a headache from bending my neck down. One of my friends, who is only a few years younger than I am, reminded me recently that as we get age, posture really does matter.

Looked out the window and saw a large dump truck: its bed up and an enormous pile of large orange-painted boulders behind it. The inside of the bed is orange, too -- a gradient of orange scraped onto rust-red metal; so that means that this is a regular job for the truck. What I want to know is, where do they paint large builders orange, and how do they do it?

Passing by a mound of something. I'm guessing it is some kind of very small land fill, and I wonder what stories could be told about the elf mounds of the future, filled with the waste of previous centuries. This is the fourth very large mound of dirt, steaming compost, or compost we've passed.

9:48 Albany. The train will be making a stop. The whine of axels falls back into my awareness as a low growl, and the creaking slows into swaying regularity. The growl reminds me of generators, and this gives me an image of a thunderstorm bent into and constrained by a circle -- circles we nonetheless only coast upon, as the passenger car provide no locomotive force.

Now we pass tanker trucks - I don't see any hazmat numbers, so I'll have to assume there's a 1203 on them. 1987 -- not sure what that means. Ooh! One car reads "Sulfuric Acid." I'm pretty sure we're supposed to evacuate a half-mile up-wind if one of those should catch on fire.

The train halts. I like the obelisk at the Albany station. It's a clock tower, actually -- more Italian Renaissance than Egyptian revival. In some ways it's a pity the train doesn't linger at the stations. Some of them have interesting Art Deco architecture from the 1920's and 1930's, and it would be fun to photograph the buildings' details.

The train starts again, and once again the elemental whine revs through my awareness. Presently we're passing by manufactured homes. One of them is painted orange and black, and has a very large black banner with bold orange letters proclaiming, "I AM ORANGE." I am not sure if this is supposed to be a football team rally cry disguised as a zen koan or not, and my mind instantly jumps to an image of Helen Reddy singing, "I am orange, hear me roar..."

10:17 White heron standing in a large puddle. A few moments later a red-tailed hawk sails over the green pastures with a mouse in its beak. It parallels the train's motion for a few seconds and then we've pulled ahead of it.

10:52 Between Salem and Portland. Completed a scene and am closing up for an early lunch.

Notes and Photos

In Eugene.

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In Canby. Just saw another redtail on the wires. I've seen more wildlife on this trip. Had a lunch and am sipping Pepsi.

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Squeee! I'm sitting on a throne! In a library! In it. Dressed as a Pegasus Ranger! O Bliss! O Rapture Unbounded!

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! I've found a coffee table book with headings like "The Ideal Paleolithic Sanctuary" !

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OMG! The Librarian just told me this was an Old Masonic Temple! I'm going to go sit on the thrones & read art history of angels books!

Changing Journals

Another one of those times has slouched closer: There are only four more blank pages left in the seven-and-a-half inch by five inch black sketchbook I am currently filling with words and pictures and plans. A new blank replacement, its virgin pages pressed together in solidarity, has already been purchased.

The first, once-white page in my old book has a date: October 9, 2007. Underneath are the following words: "If you find me / do not place me on the shelf / of forgotten dreams." Next to these words is a circle of dots around an arrow pointing at a star. The rest of page is scuffed but blank. Yes, it's high drama.

Before a friend gave me a new book with a leather, reusable slipcover, my previous sketch books would get beat-up -- sometimes falling apart before I could fill them. The black covers would separate from the spines. Or the magazines would hang on by threads; packs of pages waiting to come free with further handling. Now, the used books have battered -- but mostly whole -- spines, and the bindings still manage to keep the pages in bound in order.

I love the slipcover for what it does, but also for how it looks. It is thick brown leather embossed with a renaissance wood-cut of a sage peering underneath the heavens in order to glimpse the celestial mechanics beyond. Actually, that's not quite right -- when I paused to look, I re-discovered the sage is on the back cover. The front cover is a huge radiant sun rising over a sloping countryside; its rays seem to be pushing a moon and stars away. A button and lace act as a clasp to keep the book closed.

I open the book and turn through the pages; there's a map on page two for a story I wrote. There's a map of our back yard a little farther in. There are pages of fantastic alien temples, labyrinths, and notes from alternate histories. Geometry: Euclid's method for constructing a pentagon within a circle; a method for using a number of divisions of a circle's diameter to draw a polygon with the same number of sides; a reproduction of a small stellated dodecahedron from the Bascilla of St. Mark in Venice, attributed to Uccelo (1420). A detail of a faun from an old Roman sculpture from the MET. Steampunk spider diving bells. Robots. Fey women. Halloween costumes. Mostly in red, purple, or green ink; sometimes in colored pencils.

I wonder what Mark's sketch book would look like. He's better at freehand drawing than I am, and he likes to draw when he goes on vacation to help him remember details. So I imagine that his sketchbook would be filled with buildings and people he's actually seen, as opposed to mine, which is filled with things I've imagined.

My very first books were lined, spiral notebooks, and I'm pretty sure they were continuations of middle- and high-school classes. I switched to unlined journals because I wanted to have pictures without horizontal bars running through them. Over the years the content moved from journal entries to story imaginings. Quick pictures of fictional characters and maps to imaginary places help me to write about how the character moves, what they might think, and how they navigate through the story. Sometimes I'll imagine I hear the character saying things to me. This is good because it helps me to get into a character's head. It's also bad because it turns the story more easily into a talking heads story.

I flip through more pages and see when I got the patio furniture for Café John, and also what short story I was working on at the time. When I look at some of the dates I worry a little. Some of the characters have been waiting a while for me to tell their stories. I am reminded of a detailed maze for our yard -- never realized -- along with the calculations of how many linear feet of brick would be needed. That's a problem with making things up: sometimes what is imagined stays imagined.

I take the book out of the slipcover. Out falls a green plastic template for drawing straight lines, triangles, squares, circles and hexagons. I mostly use it for measuring and the straight lines. The other object that falls out of the book is a map. Judging by the train schedule written along the top, it's a map of New York City I made to navigate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I smile and fold the map into the old book.

Then I place the slipcover over the new book. I will inaugurate it with a train ride to a museum's library, filled with books on art which do not circulate. I wonder what, if any, forgotten dreams I will find there.

Pegasus Ranger!

Well, ma'am... I was going to wear the Square Pegasus Pin on the outside of the wool great coat. But between all those buttons, there really wasn't a place to put it without looking... um... guady. And the pin is nickle-plated and the buttons are brass, so there's that mixed metals thing going on.

Luckily, I just happen to have a vest and bolo tie and a metal belt...

And green-and-silver rectangular glasses.


And did I mention the Silver Alien Detector?