Namaste, readers, and thank you as always for taking a few minutes of your day to pop in here at Roads Lesser Traveled. I bow to you with my unending gratitude. Wherever you are in the world, may today be special.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done a Five Things Friday, and I had to cut out a few extra things actively popping inside my hyperactive mind. Perhaps those will appear in another installment, but for now, here’s what’s at the forefront:

One: I want to thank everyone who has been spreading the word about my new horror collection, Bringing in the Creeps and accepting ARCs for reviews, contest submissions and future signing events. Of course, a hearty thank you to my good friend Mia Dalia for this nifty ad helping my cause. I had the pleasure of being one of a cool gang of guests this week for the virtual re-release party of Mia’s fantastic horror collection, Smile So Red. I own the original edition and I’ll be the first to tell you Mia is a rising star in the genre. Get in on ground level with Bringing in the Creeps and Smile So Red now! Your support all-around is deeply appreciated. Rockers, all of you!

Two: I came out of the gym yesterday revved up, happy for a grinding workout, happy to have come out on the good side of a health scare, happy to have a new regimen for the future, happy to have been given good news about a story submission and happy to hear from a bunch of friends, old and new. I know conventional wisdom advises there’s no way for this to work perfectly, but I will do my best every morning from here on out silently saying a new mantra: May today be great and tomorrow even better.

Three: I was invited to submit a story based on a certain theme that has me reuniting with some old friends, Clive Barker’s game-changing Books of Blood. I read the first book in my teens during the late Eighties and saw what everyone else did, the future of horror. Someone who could actually give Stephen King a run for his money. Eventually I got the other two installments and remember being giddy when the film adaptation of Rawhead Rex came out in 1986, literally after I’d read the story from Volume 3. Not precisely what Barker had intended, and I understand the man disowns the film version, but a gory bit of fun if you take it for what it’s worth. I read the Books of Blood trilogy again in the Nineties, but it’s been all that time since I’ve pulled them out. So happy I did.

I started writing a full page of a new story after re-reading Book 1, feeling energized and giddily grossed out in the same way I had reading “The Meat Murder Train,” “The Yattering and Jack” and “In the Hills, the Cities.” Alas, what I’d written was a pale shade and I hit an immediate rut. I sent it to the digital trash can. You can’t force that which doesn’t serve. So on to Book 2! For certain, Barker’s eloquent voice continues to raise the bar for all horror scribes, all these decades later.

Four: My baseball team may not be doing so hot in MLB this year, but the sport has hit a new golden age and a higher level of play. If This Week in Baseball was still a thing, it might consider going full hour just to contain the daily highs of highlights. There are very few pedestrian ballgames these days, despite many naysayer complaints of baseball being a slow sport. Whether you consider them heroes or the enemy, if you’re a fan of the diamond, let’s be grateful for Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge alone, even when they’re sinking, mashing or striking out our hometown heroes. These locked-in Hall of Famers are two major components why MLB still matters greatly.

Five: It’s Independence Day for Americans, a holiday which was spent annually in the company of my aunt, uncle and cousins in a decades-standing family 4th of July picnic tradition at the Carroll County Farm Museum in Westminster, Maryland. It went on from when my cousins and I were all youth through the time all of my cousins’ own respective broods grew up. Fried chicken, potato and macaroni salads, sweets of all kinds. Marathon convocations in the blazing heat under a pavilion from mid-morning to dusk and the reason for the season, a reliably stout fireworks display.

The picnic meant the most to my mother and my late aunt, and we all dutifully showed for the gathering surrounded by live country and folk music, clog dancers and, depending on the year, elbow-to-elbow maneuvering with other attendees trying to play touch football, frisbee and simple rounds of catch with the baseball. We showed until one year we didn’t and that was the linchpin to finality. Eventually my cousins and their offspring spread out across the country and even across the pond.

I breathe all this nostalgia, not out of some aching desire to return to those ways. Everyone’s had enough as we’ve gotten older, and that’s more than fair. I mention it because this is the America I know and love, patriots at heart who knew one another’s political allegiances and in general, kept that business kicked to the curb. We were Americans celebrating our country under the bask of punishing sunrays, but our loyalty to country and family was why we did it. That spirit is gone for me, not because of the family splitting off and starting their own traditions amongst themselves. It’s only natural. Our tradition had a good run. For me, the spirit is gone because the America we gathered to celebrate, wearing the year’s latest 4th of July tee from Old Navy is no longer a bipartisan experience. I’ll leave it rest there.

Nonetheless, may your Independence Day instill your heart with pride and the wherewithal to be.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.