Month: September 2023

A Magnificent 10K Race Along the C&O Canal in Williamsport, MD

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 11 Comments

September has been good to me with my running, first at the Talbot Thrive 5K race I ran two weeks ago in the beautiful waterfront town of St. Michael’s, Talbot County, Maryland, in which I posted seventh with a finish time of 26:38. Then this past Saturday, I took down a 10K race running alongside a portion of the 184.5 mile C&O Canal, Maryland, finishing 2nd amongst the men in the field and third overall at 56:27. You gotta understand, I run quite a bit, always have since my teens, but I’m 53 and I’ve slowed down. I usually place middle of the field these days and am content with it.

This section of the C&O Canal in Williamsport for the Lock2Lock Marathon/Half Marathon/10K event offered a chance to run alongside the re-watered towpath preserving for posterity more than practicality a form of aquatic commerce and travel of long ago. The channels of the Conococheague Creek Aqueduct spool through the Cushwa Basin in Williamsport where fishermen idle and a field is allocated for organized youth sports. Then it thins downstream into the preserved locks once loaded to the gills with cargo boats. Lock 44, for our purposes on this running event. All eventually merging into the grand Potomac River, which swells from western Maryland down into the nation’s capital, Washington, DC.

I was stunned, actually, to be handed this 2nd place for males key (the race is called Lock2Lock, get it?), considering I’d been unaware of a few people who’d been competing with me, as they’d told me in friendly camaraderie over post-race bananas and water. I honestly felt bad for the woman well in front of me for most of the race who tanked with half a mile of the 6.2 to go. I smirked when she suddenly bolted away upon seeing my approach from behind, then running out of gas altogether shy of the finish line. “You got me,” she’d told me with a half-smile and half frown. I tried to give her a fist bump, but I could also sense her personal disappointment. I get it, though I’ve long only competed with myself in fitness events.

Honestly, I never care where I finish in a race; my motto is always to finish and finish strong. I run my race and pull over toward the right whenever I sense someone faster than me is coming up hard or at least can take the pass. Life doesn’t need to get so serious, especially at age 53. The win is just crossing the line with your pride as your trophy. Completing three grueling Spartan and a DEKA event taught me that. I wasn’t beating anyone who wasn’t walking half the time in those sports. Getting those finisher medals and shirts are amongst my proudest achievement totems. You have to finish to earn even the shirts and you learn what grit means then, AROO!

One of the most remarkable structures I found while exploring this canal town after picking up my race packet and shirt (unlike Spartan and DEKA, everyone else gets their event shirt before starting, usually in the interest of promotion and photo ops) was one the few remaining Bollman Iron Truss Bridges left in the United States. Naturally I took two treks across the Bollman as well as the standard bridge where I met a local woman in the dark upon arrival to Williamsport at 6:25 a.m. who was walking her dog. We chatted all the way across to the Cushwa Basin before parting ways. An iron truss “River Rat” in her own right, the senior woman told me she’d just been in the hospital the week prior with kidney stones. You’d never know it by the way she kept pace with me and kept her excitable, barking four-legged pal in check. A Spartan AROO! cheer goes to that old gal.

After socializing with a couple other runners signed up for the 26.2-mile marathon with crickets and locusts greeting us into the marshy realm before sun-up, we parted ways at the Lock 44 lockhouse with wishes for luck and I tramped all around the basin shooting these pictures at the dawn. Consider them my other trophies of the day.

On the hour fifteen drive out to Williamsport, I pulled over at a rest stop at nearby Hagerstown and I’d run across a group of Amish men. They’d been traveling in a pickup truck, not a traditional horse and buggy, and they were all sporting identical white button-down shirts, black suspenders and matching straw hats. Only the long chin wag of the elder differentiated his status. I gave the elder a nod and a “Good morning,” and I’m still chuckling at his thunderstruck expression I’d taken the time to acknowledge him as I would anyone else. Not all of us English are ill-mannered oafs looking for no-no selfies. It doesn’t hurt part of my lineage is German-Dutch who lived deep inside the Pennsylvania Amish heartland.

Sidebar to a most excellent 10K outing was scooching up Doubleday Hill, where Williamsport citizens in 1861 found themselves on the cusp between newly entrenched Yankee and Rebel turf as Virginia declared itself seceded from the Union as a sister Confederate state. Major Abner Doubleday, a hero at the beginnings of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, was assigned to Williamsport, where he ordered the station of three siege gun cannons once skirmishes over the town’s resources and rights to the canal erupted. While the view is overgrown today, I put myself in the moment, thinking what our ancestors saw from that spot overlooking the river and the town. Doubleday only had a short stint in Williamsport after being transferred to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, but the hill retains his namesake today.

As ever, it’s more about the journey than the destination, this thought posed on a 10K trail more shaded inside the woods than out, but the Lock2Lock was one of my absolute favorite races I’ve ever done. Coming across the finish line to a crowd of supporters and a DJ welcoming all finishers with the splendor of Lock 44 to the right, the towering electric plant to the right was sheer gratification. How I finished was irrelevant by comparison.

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

That Inevitable Question on a Day Like Today: “Where Were You When 9/11 Happened?”

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 16 Comments

Baltimore is my native turf, though many of you reading this blog have already surmised a part of my heart belongs to New York. Upstate along with the Big Apple. I have a ton of friends in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Yonkers and Staten Island, largely through the music industry. The other part of it is I just can’t get enough of both the rural and the urban splendor found all across New York state and city. Everything is just bigger and grander because it has a bigger and grander standard to live to up.

Most of the time, though not always, there’s a charm to the random arrogance and self-entitlement of New Yorkers, and yet, if you spend enough time up there, you’ll see an understated mutual bond seldom found anywhere else in the United States. Though I suppose anywhere, any country, when the chips are truly down and a society is pushed to the brink of survival, everyone rises in the face of life-threatening adversity.

There’s nothing I can say about 9/11 the event that hasn’t been said globally. Heinous, mortifying, a kick in the pants to a superpower with the intent of delivering a message no empire is wholly invulnerable to infiltration. A ferocious tug on the beard of Uncle Sam, a rude upskirt blow to Lady Liberty, all at the highest cost imaginable.

What I can talk about, since we all have our stories of where we were when the 9/11/01 attacks happened, is never forgetting heading off to work on a still warm and bright September morning. I remember pulling the sun visor down in my car and squinting, not yet clinging to a spiritual revisionism to give the mighty Ra a hearty good morning alongside Jesus Christ. The gods wouldn’t have heard me anyway. They were elsewhere. They were needed. So badly needed.

I’d gotten out a couple miles on Route 140 of my former hometown of Westminster, Maryland, and I recall grunting at myself for inadvertently leaving my day’s music behind. A CD copy of Husker Du’s Zen Arcade. It was laying like a taunt next to my coffeepot, which I’d rinsed and left in the drain, but left the daggone Husker Du album behind. I can remember such fine details like this, even the lunch I’d made: a turkey sandwich with an orange and a fun size pack of peanut M&Ms. Fun, yeah, okay. That lunch would end up becoming an uneasy dinner much, much later into the evening. I, like everyone else in the world, became transfixed upon the news reports that just wouldn’t stop, playing a smoke-infested horror show making Stephen King’s The Mist mamby pamby by comparison.

I remember fuming inside my car being subjected to FM radio, which I couldn’t stand most days since it was always then as it is today, cherry-picked repeat singles played ad nauseum at the mandate of a program director made a bitch from record label payola.

September 11, 2001, those first few minutes on the road, I heard, like the prophecy I didn’t take for what it was then, Soundgarden’s bitter pill “Fell on Black Days” from their big hit Superunknown album. The song had overstayed its welcome with me, on that day already released seven years prior. I remember grumbling to myself how I wish radio had the stones to play Soundgarden’s earlier work from Ultramega OK and Louder Than Love. I wanted to hear their rowdy “Big Dumb Sex.” The safer but grindy “Hands All Over,” at the least.

Like I should’ve been whining about something so trivial.

Soundgarden became an afterthought as I pulled up to a stop light and nudged the channel selector. I heard somber voices, shocked voices, from a trio of local morning show hosts paid to laugh every other second at their own innuendo. Not a raspy chuckle to be heard. Instead, it was the sound of death enunciating through reporters, emcees and jockeys. The World Trade Center had already been attacked by a suicide bomber plane. By the time I turned the channel, I heard those same DJs exclaim in fright, as if Orson Wells himself came back to say it wasn’t a put-on this time.

The second building of the WTC had met the same fate as the first. The green light came at the busiest intersection in Westminster, and nobody moved. Absolute truth. Everyone gridlocked, not a single angry horn wailing to move the line.

I had no choice but to turn to my left and look outside, to see if what I was hearing was true. I will never forget the horrified look of a woman staring back at me from her own car, her wavy brown hair tumbling into her face as she asked me between closed vehicle windows “Do you hear this?” You didn’t need to be a lip reader specialist. We all connected that day.

I got to work slower than usual, driving in a daze. 9/11 got even more real with reports of further terrorist attacks in Shanksville, Pennsylvania and an hour fifteen below us at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. We were wedged between these hit sites and pissing ourselves we were next. It was Terrorgeddon.

Not a soul dared speed for change and Maryland has the most selfish, reckless drivers in the country. I was three minutes late for work, and I’d given myself a five-minute edge for arrival. Nobody at my job had been on time.

In fact, we all sat there at our desks, stupefied and reeling as if we’d seen it firsthand ourselves. We had a handful of real estate closings scheduled, but nobody lifted a finger. The phones, which were usually incessant upon starting time of 9:00 a.m. hardly rung all day. A t.v. was brought in to our office and Lord knows where it came from. It reminded me of school days long ago and what joy we took when the teachers opted for a video lesson or, better, a break from the mundane by putting something mindless and entertaining on.

This was hardly mindless, nowhere near entertaining, and nobody could take their eyes off the repeated sight of those dagger thrusting planes and the miasma of hell the victims were going through. We gasped at the televised sight of people having no choice but to jump to their deaths from crumbling towers of power in downtown Manhattan. We teared up, we mumbled our reactions, we canceled all of our closings but one. Turns out the lone customer insisting we close his refinance in the midst of a national tragedy worked as a cameraman for a local news station and was on the clock to hustle up to New York for coverage.

The nation bled, the nation wept, the nation wanted revenge. I ended up tape recording six hours of straight-on footage by the time I got home. It just felt right at the time. It was something you wanted to forget but could never. A year after 9/11 happened, I pulled out that tape at my ex’s request and we played it. We couldn’t get through fifteen minutes before taking it back out of the VCR. Yeah, VCRs were still a thing in the early 2000s. I’d recorded a gazillion football and hockey games on tape, all scooched into the trash down the road when home locations and technology changed. I gave the 9/11 tape to a senior center and the woman sighed at me, then nodded and thanked me, saying it would remain with them. I couldn’t just throw it out. It felt wrong.

By the time I got to visit the 9/11 Memorial myself many years later, 2018 or 2019, with my buddy, we’d hoofed 13 miles all around lower Manhattan and parts of Midtown and Chinatown. We weren’t a bit tired, and we both looked at one another in silence at Ground Zero, measuring the gravity of the moment, taking in the gush of the cascade fountain. People were silent and reverential. Children who weren’t alive to understand they were in presence of phantasmagoria were scolded for their nattering and screaming, as children will.

I’d been to Ground Zero years before, two after the devastation. One of the neighboring towers which had miraculously survived its wounds had an aqueduct in the main lobby from which a series of single droplets fell, one-by-one into a pool. Symbolic tears for the thousands lost on that dreadful day.

As my friend and I marveled at the new 104-story infrastructure at One World Trade Center, gleaming a puncturing missile into the Manhattan sky, I said to him, “That, dude, is New York City’s thumb bite back. That’s what New York and America is all about.”

Photo by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Preceding photos from the public domain.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Five Things Friday – 9/8/23 – Video Jukebox 3

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 4 Comments

No preamble this week, other than I’ve finished a new baseball setting horror story this week and the office is kicking my butt. Here are some of the tunes flying behind it all…

One: Reverend Horton Heat – “Big Sky” and “Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’ ” Live in Phoenix, AZ 1994

The soul of the Twang Thang, Duane Eddy, never wholly left us. In fact, he splits-time his reincarnation through Brian Setzer and the Reverend Horton Heat, two holdout greaser punks who’ve long kept the torch for 1950s rock ‘n roll and in Setzer’s case, Big Band. The Reverend Horton Heat, real name, James C. Heath singlehandedly invented the underground punk movement called “psychobilly,” as in playing Fifties three chord nirvana at hyperspeed. Emphasis on swirling twang and inhuman rapidity on the slap bass, Jimbo Wallace in this band running a three-way tie for king with Lee Rocker and Kim Nekroman of the Nekromantix.

Psychobilly really took off in the late 1990s and 2000’s and still clings to life, rebranded through the horror leagues with a gawdy but fun cosplay of whiffle cuts and Bettie Page sculpts our parents and grandparents made fashionable. Today, sleeve tattoos and nasal piercings meet poodle skirts meets cigarette packs rolled up in Fruit of the Loom plain white tees. Some of the giddy creatures Reverend Horton Heat hath wrought are Nekromantix (whom you can count on showing up here on a future FTF segment), Koffin Kats, The Meteors, The Chop Tops, Tiger Army, The Young Werewolves, Swamptrash and HorrorPops.

I’ve seen Reverend Horton Heat play twice and had my mouth creaked open both times their entire set. Once with slick willy cowpunks Southern Culture on the Skids. RHH was only a click slower both times than the mayhem in this rowdy live clip from 1994. You won’t need your morning coffee to kick your day off with this stuff in-hand.

Two: Peter Murphy – “Cuts You Up”

This is one of my favorite voices in music, the baritone British Goth icon who fronted dark art neveau alt legends Bauhaus before staking an esteemed solo career. Peter Murphy sang in the background of many writing and lovemaking sessions throughout my life. I owe my old friend, Jason, and a one-time Goth girlfriend, Angie, for turning me on to Murphy. I was mesmerized me upon first greeting, especially with the exquisite “Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem” and later, Murphy’s clever pep ditty making a song about the va-jay-jay sound like literati, “The Scarlet Thing in You.”

Though the bowstring being pulled across the bass to simulate violin sweeps from “Cuts You Up” is cringeworthy in this clip, the song is an infectious toe-tapper which stuffed my ears as readily as The Cure, Depeche Mode, Faith No More and Soundgarden in sophomore year of college during 1989. His later works are far more eccentric, much in the way he started with Bauhaus, but Peter Murphy’s voice remains endearing as ever. Prayers and well-wishes to Murphy, who has been bowing out in rehab stints to attend to his health.

Three: Ultravox – “All Stood Still”

UK new wave legends Ultravox at their sizzling, skritchy, zappy best, the sound of No Future London at The Heat Death of the Universe. Morphing from Tiger Lily to Ultravox! to Midge Ure’s revisionism, these guys went for broke from 1979 to the mid-Eighties and lit the new wave scene afire, ironically scoring their biggest hit with the lower-key exotica of “Vienna.”

Catch the brilliant ska strumming toward the final stanza of the bouncing elasticity of “All Stood Still.” See what I did there, lol? Even though bands on the long-ago British music show Top of the Pops seldom allowed their guests to play live, Ultravox’s energy makes you believe they’re having a real go instead of synching.

Four: The Flamingos – “I Only Have Eyes for You”

Back to the Fabulous Fifties and the greatest love jam of them all. Silky, lusty, moody, dreamy, subtly haunting, breathy, romantic beyond all the words given and implied in this doo-wop masterpiece. I reiterate; the greatest love jam of them all. Change my mind, I triple dog dare you.

Five: Latour – “Blue”

My first gig writing in the music scene was actually in electronic and Goth. I was already into 1990s techno as I’d begun exploring any and all genres outside of my core interest of metal, punk and rock. I remember seeing Basic Instinct in the theater and feeling jealous as eff Michael Douglas was getting shagged on and off the dance floor by Sharon Stone’s character, Catherine Tramell, and the way Tramell’s jilted lesbian lover was throwing Douglas eye daggers made it seem so unnervingly authentic.

This song spools behind the entire drama and I fell in love with “Blue,” unaware it was that same Latour goof who made people twitchy with his hysterical rave number getting mainstream play for a blip, “People Are Still Having Sex.” Latour’s self-titled album may sound dated compared to all that followed in the electronic scene and EDM partiers today might consider this trite. However, “Blue” absolutely pumps and when I’m in a Basic Instinct listening mood, I always pair off Jerry Goldsmith’s erotic tapestries (a repetitive score, yes, but so damned alluring) with Latour’s “Blue.” All part of the journey.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

A Simpler, Harder, Weirder Time

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 6 Comments

No doubt golfers and history aficionados are familiar with this hilarious photo from the Roaring 1920s (can’t believe we have to distinguish Twenties now from the new millennium) depicting a goofy experiment in New York City which fell on its steam-pressed duff.

I saw this print yet again in a local tailor/dry cleaner’s and now have a craving for old Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton silent movies. What a time our ancestors must’ve had a decade ago, good, bad and um...yeah.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

It’s Still the Real Thing Somewhere

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / 13 Comments

I’m not sure what message from the divine I’m supposed to take from this, if anything, but in my travels over the weekend, I tripped across this already vintage Coke machine down a random turn in St. Michael’s Maryland, waiting to run a 5K race in town.

Considering vending machines are a bit fewer these days and most accept swipes preferable to duckets, and there are those tap-baiting hundred flavor Coke product dispensers more en vogue for today’s choosier soft drink connoisseurs, I couldn’t resist chuckling and snapping this shot.

Only to see the same daggone ancient machine in Predator 2 last night.

Coke always did declare themselves “the one,” “the real thing” and “Coke is it!”

I’m not sure what cracked me up more, the machine or the “Sweetie Parking” sign next to it.

–Photo by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Five Things Friday – 9/1/23

/ Ray Van Horn, Jr. / Leave a comment

Cheers, gang, hope your week’s been good to yas. Been exceptionally busy in the office on our way toward the three-day weekend upcoming, so the blog production has been sluggish. However, lots of things were happening, so here’s what’s been on my mind…

First: We had a blue supermoon on Wednesday. Life was moving at such a crazy pace this week we forgot all about it, smh. It was the closest orbit of the full moon we’ve had this year at 222,043 miles away. Saturn happened to joining in the party, creating a cast so impactful the entire world was enthralled. Blessed be Isis, Khonsu and Anubis.

I saw many stunning photos from friends and the national press. This one taken at an equestrian statue of Damdin Sukhbaatar on Sukhbaatar Square in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia just blew me away. Truly magickal. Speaking of magickal, the day TJ and I tie the knot, the universe will bless us with an annular solar eclipse.

Two: I had the pleasure of meeting horror author and mastermind behind the legendary Cemetery Dance press, Richard Chizmar, at the Shock-o-Con in Havre de Grace, Maryland. As a fellow Marylander horror-homie, I’ve enjoyed some fun, distant chats with Richard over the past year and meeting him in person, the dude is a righteous cat with a very nice family. His son, W.H. Chizmar, is also a sharp scribe in his own right as I found out by reading his novella, Mr. Purple this week.

Richard is author of the New York Times bestselling Chasing the Boogeyman and collaborator with Stephen King on their “Gwendy” trilogy. Chizmar is set to drop his highly anticipated sequel, Becoming the Boogeyman, in October. As the first one had so many locations I related to and tramped around myself, I can’t wait for Becoming.

Three: You might’ve read a recent post of mine about a horror comic book miniseries, Metalheads, which I began with my artist buddy from Kiel, Germany, Dominic Valecillo. Welp, fate has taken a kind turn, as I received a call from Dom last weekend, who has wrapped up on his current projects. The band will be getting back together for a reboot of Metalheads with fresh art, revised sections to the opening issue and a brand-new direction for the story overall as we will begin pitching it around to comic imprints. Fingers crossed on one hand, horns-up from the other!

Four: Ahsoka is thus far up to the hype. Rosario Dawson is everything we want from a grown-up Jedi on the lam and after some in-your-face action sequences tying threads to the end of the animated series, Star Wars: Rebels, the story is now getting real. One of the few survivors of the nefarious Jedi-cide that was Order 66, Ahsoka Tano is knee-deep investigating a new threat to a brief period of peace following the fall of the Empire.

You can’t keep a nasty Sith vein wholly severed, though. We have fellow Order 66 survivor Baylan Skoll, who has turned to the dark side with his apprentice, Shin Hati. We have Rebels renegades Sabine Wren and Hera Syndulla woven into the plot. For deep Star Wars nerds who revel in Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire” novel trilogy, there’s that Thrawn guy who keeps getting mentioned. Squeeeee!

Five: With our wedding coming up in a month-and-a-half, I always smile at this picture, our more than humbling beginnings, nearly 2.5 years ago. It was March, two months having moved into my place and we had just started dating. Because of COVID and 90-to-120-day shipping delays, I was still waiting on my sofa, living room chair and bedroom furniture and sleeping upon my mattress on the floor. I was grateful to get my kid’s furniture and a coffeetable within a few weeks.

Even more grateful for this, the first weekend TJ crashed at my place all weekend, trooping through the lawn chair living room days. We ate terrible, oversalted chicken and okra but compensated with peanut M&Ms and lots of wine from a vineyard outing, plus binging and laughing like idiots at Metalocalypse. She purposefully left behind an extra toothbrush and a pair of cuddle duds, scratching and spraying her territory that fast. THAT, my friends, is what you call true love.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.