When people take over your favorite meditation spot, you go find another one and kick out a four mile schlep through Bear Branch. Making a friend along the way.

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

What an incredible Shore Leave 45 hanging with friends, making new, immediate bonds, sharing stories, ideas and laughs with plenty of shenanigans. The long-running Star Trek, Star Wars and science fiction convention now held at the Wyndham Hotel in Lancaster, Pennsylvania was a total blast with our table neighbors all around us including the hilarious horror and fantasy Novel Guys table (thanks to Christina for keeping me company in line for the complimentary autographs from Starship Troopers’ Casper Van Dien and Dina Meyer) and chatting with Star Trek: Prodigy’s Bonnie Gordon, a total sweetheart and renegade of the con trenches.

We’re grateful the time spent and knowledge gained from all the famed Star Trek, sci-fi, fantasy and mystery writers whom TJ and I are fortunate to call friends. We’re especially thankful to the bookstores we met who agreed to carry both of our books and anyone inadvertently missed. TJ rocked her panels, and I’m pleased to learn I will be a part of Shore Leave’s future panel programming. Also thank you to the vendor passing out free Godzilla 70th anniversary posters courtesy of IDW. Also, mad fun at the Godzilla panel geeking out with tons of King Green contributions from me and many others.

As you can see, the cosplayers came to play!

Art by Star Trek comic artist, JK Woodward

Art by Star Trek comic artist, JK Woodward

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr. and TJ Perkins

The good ol’ days of pulling horror treasures off the walls of the old video rental stores in the 80s. At my last book signing, I told my attendees about being 14 and 15 and having an “in” at our shop who we bribed with snacks to smuggle us the hardcore heavy horror our parents forbade us from seeing. Thus we would come home with Pieces inside a case marked for The Goonies or Cannibal Holocaust stashed inside a case for Tron. Truly. The good ol’ days.

Image courtesy of the public domain

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

With our current president looking at purging the U.S. penny from the American currency system, others seem to be of like mind, as evidenced at Always Ice Cream in Annapolis, Maryland. Repurpose instead of disposal on their minds. Because yes, pennies have become devalued in a climate of high inflation and inflated sales taxes. The word “tariff” become the most cringe term in our lexicon these days.

Each of the ice cream shops on Main Street in the historic town are logjammed with customers, to the point you might find yourself needing a hop out of line to the bathroom as I did in my recent trip to Annapolis with TJ. We’d come out of Middleton Tavern an hour beforehand and strolling the back streets off the main drag, me loaded up with the local ale. Something had to give. Luckily, she held the fort in line, so to speak.

It’s a unisex restroom, so anyone can get a look at it, but there’s something stark and amusing to find an entire floor tiled with wall-to-wall pennies. Squat or stand for your business, you will be captured by the sight and wonder to yourself how much time and effort the owners took to come up with this novel design. Or you might find yourself counting them, trying to approximate a total like one of those candy in a jar guessing games.

Just don’t let your ice cream melt in the process!

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Last night, Visions of Atlantis, the crown jewel of pirate metal, laid down a gem of a show at Lovedraft’s in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

This Austrian band has been around since 2000 and has run through 20 different roster members and 3 touring players. Drummer Thomas Caser remains the only original member. They began as a folk-based, symphonic metal act in the spirit of Nightwish, Epica, Kamelot and Leaves Eyes, featuring a female mezzo-soprano lead vocalist teamed with a male lead. Usually the trope in this sublet style of metal music is the clean vocals are fielded by the female, hard growling by the male. Not so in the case of Visions of Atlantis, where both stationed are thrown operatic clean.

The band’s first female vocalist, Nicole Bogner, sang for five years before departing Visions of Atlantis and tragically dying in 2012. When I was still in the music industry, Visions of Atlantis’ 2007 album Trinity came across my desk and an interview slot with then-vocalist Melissa Ferlaak. What I remember of Melissa back then was she was a sweet person to chat with. I remember rating Trinity a solid eight of ten for whomever assigned it to me, but I never foresaw the juggernaut of catchy, keelhauling, symphonic power metal this band would later become.

In 2013, current female lead, Clémentine Delauney from France joined Visions of Atlantis and behind her in 2018, singer, composer, lyricist, multi-instrumentalist, sound-engineer and producer, Michele Guaitoli. The shift in ideology for Visions of Atlantis became a fantastical pirating motif (no doubt speared by the success of Alestorm and the scores of popular Viking metal bands) as showcased by the band’s spectacular current trio of albums, Wanderer, Pirates and Pirates II: Armada.

Cinematic in scope, Visions of Atlantis have found their heading, pun intended, on these bombastic and gorgeous voyages into what they liken to a “pirate party” when performing live, clad in vintage buccaneer garb you won’t score at your local Renfaire. A pirate party was exactly what we were treated to last night, with fans clad in pirate gear, hopping and jumping around the floor as Visions of Atlantis steamrolled all of us with relentless energy, culling their set from the aforementioned three albums. As epic in a live setting as their latest recordings. Even more so. Clémentine Delauney has become endeared to the metal scene, a darling of this brand of symphonic based escapism who put on as much as a show as her cohorts. The melancholy angel stole the limelight where appropriate, checking herself down as compliment to Michele, who is as stellar as his immediate peer, Roy Khan of Kamelot.

My cell pics could only work so much magic. I find myself longing for my old pro camera and the days I would be in the photo pit reeling off better shots than these, but they should be sufficient enough to convey what me and my old buddy, Mark, whom I haven’t seen in a light year bore witness to: A freaking incredible night of siren-filled cutlassing.

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

TJ and I needed a quick recharge, so for fun, we booked ourselves in an unusual bed and breakfast in the heart of waterfront Annapolis, the Maryland state capital. Home of the United States Naval Academy and some of the best seafood you’ll get anywhere. Planted in the seat of the Capitol Building’s shadow, we took a chance on an hour-away getaway at a hotel planted overtop a local institution delicatessen and crab cake emporium, Chick & Ruth’s.

Crammed into the tourist and Midshipman artery of Annapolis at 165 Main Street, Chick & Ruth’s is an experience, whether you’re a local or an out-of-towner. As lifer Marylanders, TJ and I somehow missed this place in our travels and what a fun drop into yesteryear we had in this joint that’s been in operation since 1965 and painstakingly preserved through six decades. Bars, taverns and restaurants come and go in Annapolis, but Chick & Ruth’s perseveres and as home to the area’s most “legendary” crab cake, they live up to it.

I ended up getting Chick & Ruth’s crab cake after having one elsewhere, just to see if they deserve the claim and after seeing the place mobbed nearly the entire weekend. I’ve had my share of crab cakes around Maryland, and in Annapolis, yes indeed, Chick & Ruth’s owns it. It was so damn good I saved half to bring home.

We’d enjoyed ourselves having an outdoor lunch at Market Place and a scaled back dinner at the famous Middleton Tavern, long reported to be haunted. I found no ghosts, per se, but a picture of us at our table in the Middleton Tavern shows a beam casting down upon us. Make your own judgment. Ghost, the Divine or chance sun casting. We were being blessed, I know it, even as I grossed my wife out doing an oyster shooter which I hadn’t done since my thirties.

We’d tramped all around old town streets and the second day enjoying dinner with TJ’s daughter and her new significant other on the waterfront at Choptank where I had some insane coconut mussels. Yet getting back to Chick & Ruth’s, you never realize what’s possible when you combine something out of the ordinary. This wasn’t your typical B&B inside someone’s restored Victorian or Civil War era home with a home cooked breakfast in company with other couples and families around a centralized table. This was a modernized two-floor hotel with compact rooms. Showering was a hoot, but cred point given to the massage soaker.

Our breakfast was from a selection off Chick & Ruth’s Delly morning menu. We split a large fruit cup and French Toast, and it was terrific stuff but the coffee, dear God, was I in heaven, going so far as to ask our server which blend they used. I had four cups. TJ matched me in as many hot teas. Royal Cup Coffee, check! On the ordering list.

Now, as you can see in these pictures, Chick & Ruth’s unabashedly leaves their 1960s day glo color scheme of yellows and oranges with scores of framed pictures around the entire place showing off visiting celebrities, regional politicians and sports legends. Also of belly busters who dared take on Chick & Ruth’s “Colossal” milkshake and burgers. I’ll let you dig into that and see where your constitution lies. You’ll find old-time spinner stools at the counter with knee-level hangar hooks. The booths are snug, and you will get to know your neighbor, but what’s really cool is the eye level mounted condiment racks you just don’t see anymore. Not even your oldest school Waffle House has such groovy, wayback charm.

It wasn’t just the food and the friendly service that rocks at Chick & Ruth’s (and it’s mighty impressive to see the staff barreling through thinned quarters all around the restaurant like a sweat-oiled machine), it was the sense of pride you couldn’t help but soak up. Pride in the staff, but pride in the people around you. Mostly locals, who outnumbered the tourists. People who’ve lived in Annapolis all their lives, newbie Midshipmen who flooded the place Saturday night on the hunt for those renowned crab cakes. People who recently moved to the area, such as the young army guy sitting in tight quarters next to us, who was having a Daddy-Daughter morning with a sweet little girl. We kicked up a conversation about parenthood I’m not likely to ever forget.

If you’re going to get down into why we really loved Chick & Ruth’s and why we lollygagged for more than an hour pounding hot drinks and enjoying the atmosphere, it’s the restaurant’s daily tradition around 9:30 a.m. of reciting the United States Pledge of Allegiance.

Everything stops, everyone rises and pivots to the ceiling draped American flag, hands planted over hearts and everyone unashamed, even in these turbulent days of our country, to do what most of us haven’t done since our school days. TJ is prior Navy herself, and it had been so long since either of us had the forum to recite it. We did so proudly, for our own moral compass in the America we believe in, pledging our allegiance to a republic, not a regime. Recollecting what is right as a patriot without subscribing to deconstructive fundamentalism.

It was a place where politics were checked to the curb, despite the looming shadow of the Maryland governmental citadel. Where civilians and middies shared space, the latter young men and women offering their services to their country regardless of race and sex. I spied this generation with a smile, knowing my son will soon be army-bound for a country that could use a reminder this land is founded on the principle of liberty and justice for ALL.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

And this still isn’t vintage enough, but the point’s made plenty hard. Mall record stores and megashops were horrendously overpriced even by today’s inflated economical standards, but there wasn’t a single time I didn’t not pop into one of these on a mall outing. For all of you indie record shops still hanging out there, I love you. Keep the faith.

–Meme courtesy of the public domain

Hope you all had a wonderful three-day weekend if that applied. TJ and I had one of best extended weekends in ages, especially getting out on two new trails for us.

Our hike yesterday at gorgeous Cromwell Valley Park turned up some spectacular sights like blossomed mushrooms, unearthed quartz and vibrant moss. Fairy realms, if you’re esoteric.

Also if you’re esoteric, you’ll trip on what TJ spotted at the base of a tree on one of the furthest plotted trails. A keyhole in the moss. This being a suggestive portal toward rooted magick.

Blessed be, Elementals.

–Photo by Ray Van Horn, Jr.

As we were leaving Shore Leave in its new location of Lancaster, Pennsylvania last week, we pulled into a drive-through to snag some cool drinks for the ride home.

I seldom get the luxury of lazing upon my surroundings in the car, but being the passenger this time, I spotted a pushed-off strip center shopping mall that no doubt went up during the 1980s if not the Seventies.

Now strip malls are still very much a thing as opposed to the megacomplexes that were the lifeblood of my generation’s teen scene. Thus, I was a little caught off-guard, despite being a thorough student of economics, to find a completely barren strip center like this one. With a kaleidoscope of barren marquees, no less.

I mean, this sucker was one hundred percent dead.

Nothing leased, only one other car slinking by in passing. At one time, no doubt a major source of local commerce, considering its otherwise prime location planted on the main business artery of Lancaster Route 30.

The problem, I see, and I think it’s becoming more commonplace with failing strip centers, is not so much the syndrome of online e-markets offering far wider choices and pricing landing somewhat closer to the targeted retail cost.

Route 30 in Lancaster, like most American commercial routes, is a lifeblood to the local economy, so much every possible mainstream food and retail operation you’re looking for is almost guaranteed to be there. So much there are three competing steak houses in close quarters, one of which gained our business for being on our side of the street, even with all three being a stone’s throw from the convention.

The difference I saw in the strip centers of Lancaster that were thriving with stuffed parking lots, is having closer access to the main road. The strip mall you see here was pushed off a smidge of a block from Route 30. You had to rely, back in its prime, upon a guidepost sign directing you in. It’s still there, empty of businesses, but who cares about it when you have three fast food emporiums, a coffee peddler and a closer berthed mini strip burying it?

In other words, out of sight, out of mind. Instant kill-off.

A shame, really, but what I told TJ as I snapped off these quick shots was, “If this was a zombie holocaust and this empty shell was our only safe haven between survival and becoming chow for the undead, we’d be royally effed.”

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.