National Lego Day, wow. In our storage locker lies a stack of tubs filled with a ton of assembled Lego City, Star Wars Lego, Marvel and DC Lego, Space Lego, Harry Potter Lego kits and two racks of minifigures. The latter being my special minifigs collected at various comic cons and specialty shops. My son has entire tub of minifigs all to his own. I always said taking him to a comic con needed its own budget and time allotment for Lego only.
It all started years ago when my son was interested in building Lego and his mother was terrific at it. I never cared for Lego in my own childhood since it was a far different animal than today. However, I just couldn’t take my kid’s anguish and beleaguering self-defeat. I picked up one of his hardest kits back then, his Joker Steam Roller set. I took that thing and built it from start-to-finish before his eyes, my first time ever building Lego.
I invited him to join in and handed him pieces, telling him where they went, and he did in spurts. Mostly he was is in awe of what I was doing. I struggled a couple times, figured it out, and viola! I had it done, hours later. I told my son, “If an old man like me can put one of these together on the first try, there’s no way you can’t do it as well.”
Thus began our infatuation with Lego. At one point, we started to build our own Lego world, grabbing kit after kit with our gift cards and gift money, thinking on “zones” we wanted to do together. I grew addicted to Lego building as a way of relaxing and checking down. Even better when the boyo and I did it together.
He grew older and less interested as teenagers will. I grew busier and life changed dramatically. I miss building with him, even to the point my last kit gifted to me, a Lego Grogu “Baby Yoda” kit was a personal quest to escape from everything. I took the day off to just build, watch baseball casually and toss a few beers, the ultimate “me” party. Still, it felt off without the kid.
I have some pictures buried deep in my archives of us building together, but the Batman ’66 kit you see here was gifted me by the kid. That Macy’s Parade Lego display was something he and I geeked over in NYC last summer.
Moreover, I smiled last week to find my son not only reverting a little by playing Lego-themed video games but pooling through his bin of minifigs in reminiscence. Lego truly affected our lives. Maybe one day we might resurrect the Lego world we meticulously planned in a future basement. Maybe. If not, so be it, but after this long diatribe, if you’re a Lego fan, go build something, or just snap a few bricks today, ‘cuz everything is awesome!
This will go down as one of the most impactful years of my life, one beginning horridly and later turning magical.
We went through a bit of turmoil in the opening months, forced to move in light of deteriorating and frankly dangerous conditions. We were broken into three times in one week and robbed of possessions and money, the most heartbreaking at the time being our wedding rings. There were more than one teenage thieves, though all were interconnected with each other. Eventually one of the young culprits made a spectacle of himself in the public and social media to the point he was caught, and his family was forced to pay us restitution.
By a miracle of the divine, our stolen rings were recovered and made extra special when fall came and I married my best friend, TJ. We cherish the rings as we do our love, all which felt harder fought for on a downpour of a wedding day. They say rain actually blesses a wedding and it was all we’d hoped for. That night in our honeymoon cottage, the rain continued, and two crickets chirped alllll night long outside our door. Crickets bringing further blessings, so we were informed.
TJ and I began finding success with our writing this year. She killed it in sales at a few book signings for The Healthy Witch and Four Little Witches, while I was thrilled to be at her side, first in a support role, then as a co-seller behind Coming of Rage. A wonderful learning experience at the hip of my true love. It was exquisite and a dream come true.
TJ landed The Healthy Witch, the book and accompanying oracle deck, inside a local Barnes and Noble, an achievement I’m as proud of her for as she is. Meanwhile, my new novel, Revolution Calling, has arrived and is gaining steam in the first couple weeks out with a lot of favorable reviews. I look forward to the new year going all out promoting the book and arranging signing events.
I wrote and submitted 17 short stories this year, 13 in the last four months alone. So far, one acceptance from Eternal Haunted Summer and one turndown. The rest, I remain waiting with bated breath, but any good writer knows it’s best to keep grinding on projects instead of obsessing for an answer over submissions. I feel optimistic for the upcoming year and feel my last three horror stories I wrote were amongst the best I’ve ever written. Hopefully the editors agree.
If one movie captured my heart in 2023 and summarized the knockdown and rise from the ashes theme of our year, it’s Godzilla: Minus One. I keep wanting to call it the greatest Godzilla film ever instead of the best since the original, it really is that passionate in its purpose to bring Godzilla back to his roots as a harbinger of terror instead of a silly kaiju hero of the earth. Better yet, you find yourselves rooting for the humans in Minus One for a change from a beautifully acted, emotionally driven story about survivor’s guilt in the remnants of World War II. Again, arigato, Toho.
I ran a few racing events this year and posted two personal best times, even coming in second amongst males and third overall in the Lock2Lock 10K along the C&O Canal in Maryland. At 53, I consider myself a slow and methodical runner with no worry where I finish in the field. To have such success here and a sixth-place overall finish in a 5K along the Maryland eastern shore, both gave me tremendous gratification.
Though I was forced to replace my car after running it to death with 120,000 miles in the past few years, the consolation prize of being stuck with a car payment I didn’t want means having Sirius XM back in my life. I’m addicted to Liquid Metal, Ozzy’s Boneyard, Hair Nation, Underground Garage, First Wave and Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Radio. Continuing in the theme of music, I got to two concerts only in 2023 Depeche Mode and Voivod, and grateful for those exquisite shows. The Mode marked my first show attended with TJ, even though I still shake my head at myself; while I was in the music industry, I was covering 10-12 shows a month. Sobering to think upon that.
I had the pleasure of making new friends in writing and across the board in my life. A tremendous thrill getting to meet fellow Marylander and horror master whose work I’ve long respected, Richard Chizmar. This was a year I was able to spend more time with family and friends than I have in a very long time, with many wanting to meet my new bride and the results have created stronger bonds. I look forward to more of this in the upcoming year.
For the upcoming year, I have a lot cooking. My mantra for 2024 is “Go balls out,” as I’m the hungriest I’ve ever been in my life to make my writing dreams come true. I have gained a lot of momentum in the past four months, and the story ideas keep rolling in. I have reunited with my collaborative artist partner, Dominic Valecillo, as we take another crack at re-launching our Metalheads comic. I hope to lock in a freelancing spot with renowned magazine I would be honored to be a part of.
Largely, I’ll be pimping the crap out of Revolution Calling with upcoming interviews I’ve been booked for and hopefully the wonderful jump from the gate translates into something special.
2024 is mine. 2024 is also TJ’s. We flipped the script on a disastrous opening to 2023, proving we are a force together. We look forward to seeing you all while making our passions and hopes as writers come alive.
A most happy and prosperous New Year to you all. See you on the flipside.
You probably have one of these in your own town somewhere, at a mall (assuming you have one left to go to), a library or firehouse. I’m seeing them growing in popularity and listening to people recount their delight in the time-honored tradition of train gardens, in particular during the holiday season. In most cases, a free show of throwback enchantment hailing simpler, if more painstakingly crafted modes of entertainment.
In northwest Baltimore City, on the cusp of Pikesville region, a firehouse has been putting on a 12 by 40-foot railroad spectacle every Christmas season, now in its 66th run. Baltimore County Engine 45 on 2700 Glen Avenue in Baltimore draws lookee-loos and families to its clickety-clack treasure trove. Always with a nod to the city’s roots, always with amusing roasts of kid-based pop culture. Akwats something different that hasn’t been there in years prior.
My father in life was a diehard HO scale train aficionado. Having done a handful of professional custom builds for private clients including train buff Rod Stewart, my dad had worked on, for most of his adult life, his own train garden stationed in Cripple Creek, Colorado, circa the Old West. I got to know the term “roundhouse” as intimate as any word I knew in the English lexicon, since he was so proud of his own, which had a shifting track inside.
For most of my own life, my father used to take me, without fail, each December to Engine 45’s garden of goofery, which changes intermittently, every minute or so, between full and dark illumination schemes. Suffice it to say, the lighting schemes are so masterful, each mode is pure wonderment.
My father is now three years passed and before his death, he’d missed out on his beloved Baltimore train garden four years prior, as health and mobility became more of an issue. I’ve kept our tradition going with my own family, now my son and TJ. My kid’s been to Engine 45 each of his 16 years and it tickled me to end this year, he insisted we go to the garden on Christmas Eve at a precise time before beginning our family festivities. Just as I have in years past. I know my dad was thrilled to pieces and he was there in our presence around the garden.
Here’s to you, 45, and here’s to many more holiday visits to come…
Always make it a point to live up to your own standards, not everyone else’s.
By all means, let the success of others inspire to set your own goals, models and aesthetics, but never let that rule your own self worth.
Never let someone else’s success drag you down, point blank. Strive for better, strive to be your best, but take your own path toward your personal holy grail, no matter how long that takes.
Never beat yourself up, figuratively and literally in the pursuit. Always congratulate yourself for having the wherewithal.
After all, it’s always more about the journey than the destination.
So my stepfather, always the treasure hunter, knickknack rescuer and all-out purveyor of “stuff,” dropped me a huge surprise a couple weekends ago from one of his collectible raids.
In 1980, The Empire Strikes Back ruled everything in my 10-year-old world. Much as the original Star Wars did in 1977.
Suffice it to say, I’ve had my own spurts of collecting things throughout my entire life. Lately, it’s down to comic books and the occasional movie soundtrack or score. Thinking back upon on my childhood, I’ll never forget Burger King carrying four drinking glasses sets for all three original Star Wars films, including Return of the Jedi.
I used to have all four from Star Wars: A New Hope as a child, now down to a single with C3P0 and R2D2 on the desert planet, Tatooine. The other three, well, too many moves, too much carelessness in my younger life, always forgetting bubble wrap. So be it.
When The Empire Strikes Back was out, I would harass my father to take me to Burger King every Saturday when a new glass in that cycle arrived. It took us no time to collect the glasses for Lando Calrissian/Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker and Yoda (which I still have) and our droid pals, Artoo and Threepio in a bipolar icy climate on Hoth.
What was the biggest pain back then, was getting the legendary Darth Vader/Boba Fett glass. Given Empire was the debut of everyone’s favorite intergalactic bounty hunter, anything with Fett on it was an instant sell. In Burger King’s case, a instant sell out.
My dad was many things, good and bad, but never let it be said the man didn’t love me, nor would I ever accuse him not going out of his way for me. In this case, I dragged the poor guy to numerous Burger Kings in search of the Vader/Fett glass to no avail.
Every one of them had extras of Lando and Leia the entire run of those glasses. Kinda reminds me of Turbo Man and his pink fuzzball sidekick nobody wanted, Booster. Not that Calrissian, the king of cool in a galaxy far, far away would ever be considered an unwanted kickaround.
In the end, I never got that Vader/Fett glass and I let my dad off the hook after exhausting his patience. As I got older, I thought about that glass, but it became a whatever thing for me, as I pared down and purged most of my collections over time. Sidebar, if you can get your head around it, to snag a glass back then, you only needed to buy a medium Coke for .88 cents!!!
Can you just imagine the shock on my face to find that Vader/Fett glass sitting on my Pop’s bar? The man both did and didn’t have a clue what a magical moment that was for me at 53 years old. Like my cousin, Shawn, scoring those Eddie Murray bobbleheads for us outside the stadium when we got skunked out of them at the gate even showing up an hour early for the Orioles game. Very much like that, only over a more extensive bit of time.
I think my Dad is probably happy and feeling skunked himself from the great beyond that it was Pop who managed to pull it off. But I got my Vader/Fett glass, yo! It’ll be hanging around with me, screw the purges.
From a fitness-themed post I did at Facebook last week:
I see you out there, my friends. Many of you making a transformation, seeking a better you, keepin’ on grindin’ I am proud of each of ya, so always believe in yourself.
Not every day do I feel like Godzilla. Sometimes I feel like garbage. Sometimes I gotta kick my own butt. Sometimes I let the daily do smother me.
I’m 53 and sometimes I have to curb and bow out to pain. Most of the time, I’m the old fart in the room doing my thing.
However, we can all be our best selves with commitment and drive to our best abilities. It’s never easy, but don’t let it deter you. Go be your best you.
Before USB thumb drives, before the Cloud, if you didn’t want to blow the RAM of your word processor stuffing it with countless writing projects, you used a floppy disk.
No, not the true floppy disks from the 1980s, where they were what they sounded like: pliable, flat, square sized code containers less the size of a 45 r.p.m. record. I trust most of my readership to know what I mean, inclusive of a 45 m.p.h. record.
“Floppy” disks eventually became harder and smaller 3.5-inch plastic holders, able to store up to 1.44 megabytes of data on them. Back then, cutting edge tech, but laughable in comparison to the 1 to 4 gig thumb drives which preceded them and already hint at obsoletion. For a writer, being able to hold 19,000 to 77,000 pages of our craft on port key storage today has become a lifeline. A way to avoid system crashes from data overload. Even just to transfer pictures, videos and media off our motherboards and keep the gateway humming.
The annoyance to change, and I’ve always said it’s blatant strategy on the part of corporate manufacturers, is the profit through progress ethos forcing consumers into buying the “latest thing.” By default, sending the prior “thing” into archaism. VHS tapes to DVD to Blu Ray to 4K to streaming. Vinyl records to 8 tracks to cassette tapes to CDs to downloads and streaming. Atari 2600 to Intellivision to Colecovision to Sega to Nintendo to PlayStation and Xbox. You gotta pay to play, and you’re gonna. President Business says so, in Lego form and real-time. I’m still quietly Jonesing I have thousands of digital pictures, a decade’s worth, stashed on CD Rom and I keep a hard drive processor on-hand for access.
Rant over. I was going through a box marked “Office” from my past three moves, and I recall my now wife, TJ, mocking my novelty metal lock box featuring The Little Rascals on it. “What kind of silly lunch box is that?” she teased, suggesting I move on from it while were both downsizing for our first place together.
“Non-negotiable,” I simply told her, flipping open the lid overtop two stymied facades of Spanky and Buckwheat. When she saw the contents inside, she was both wowed and foiled to see a large collection of those 1.44 megabyte data holders, especially when I showed her what the contents were.
Another entire decade-plus of old short stories I’d written. As it turns out, countless of them. Poems, essays, even my debut, long out-of-print novel, Mentor, I’ve never really owned up to anymore due to the shady publisher. I had three separate disks holding the entire novel! I found band interviews, media reviews, the entire beginnings of my entry into the music business. “How are you even going to access all that?” TJ gamely tried me with. “No computer is designed for those anymore.”
There’s this thing I’m sure you’re all familiar with, an online market called Amazon. With the grin of an author reconnecting with a buried past, I ordered a portable USB-plug floppy disk reader from gadget peddlers, Chuanganzhuo. I’d had a similar device years ago, lost to the ether from another move, vanished with my handheld cassette recorder and an entire box of tapes holding hundreds of music and film industry personality interviews. I later used a digital recorder to conduct interviews. Would that I could retrieve those spindling nuggets of gold, sigh… I have some, but not all of the transcripts from those glorious chats with heavy music royalty and then-youngbloods, some of whom made it in the industry and others who faded into the same ether.
You can get this external USB reader for less than twenty bucks if you happen to have some of these disks with your long-hidden work on them. I had a total gas pulling up files of the damned while the reader ground and wheezed machina-speak at me, reminding me how primitive the early days of data storage were. Those nattering pops extracted stories I laughed at myself for writing. The naivete, the amateurishness, the desperation to be heard, no matter the cost. Some of it was so cringeworthy, some of it so explicit, those pieces had a right to be slapped into a digital cargo bay with a snug lock.
Yet, I found many pieces I’ve unearthed and tucked into the latest Word format for future rewrites and cleanups. I have so much more to rediscover, but I snickered in remembrance of back in the day when the disks would spout “exceeding maximum storage” messages at me and how little there is on those disks compared to my thumb drives holding my work. 3 floppies for a single novel, laughing out loud. Almost as ingratiating then as those blood-boiling bomb icons the old Apple MacIntosh processors used to pound in your face during system crashes–and those happened ad nauseum in Apple’s early days. I never bought another Mac again, despite my colleagues’ pressing me to get with the program, no pun intended.
In the esoteric world, scrying is a form of both meditation and divination. Also referred to as “peeping” or the simpler, yet broader view term “seeing,” to scry is to open your third eye to endless possibilities of the metaphysical. Some who scry use crystal balls or mirrors or even water. Some open a self-induced trance. With no real set structure or written order to scrying, it’s an open-ended form of looking into the beyond and reflecting on what you see.
Frequently scrying comes via fire, as TJ and I did on our honeymoon, honoring and raising energy to the divine as a way of thanks for blessing our union. It took a little extra effort and an extra nudge from the fire elementals presided by King Djinn, but we stoked our blaze and took the time to scry and whisper to each other what we believe manifested before our eyes. Fire dancers, salamanders, angelic facades and animal profiles are the most common beings to be found in a bonfire, and we certainly found those, live in within the random shots I snapped.
What do you scry from these pictures, if anything?
Roads Lesser Traveled 