A Visit From The Goon Squad

 Listening to ADHD, Kendrick Lamar

I've decided to write a book about how to write the perfect story, how to develop a great plot and move it along with brilliant characters who propel the narrative with their perspicacious dialog. Once my book sells seven billion copies, everyone will be a famous writer and the market will be flooded with everyone in the world having published their story.

Ted Talk, hell! I'm looking to get booked for a speaker's slot at the next writers' conference. $150 will get you a seat to hear me explain what I wrote in my write-a-perfect-story book, which, if you read the book (and of course you have), says you'll have a slot to speak at next year's conference, to talk about how to write a perfect story.

Frankly, I start with a premise then focus on my characters so they can tell my story through their voices. It's not that simple--for all 193k words of my novel, I probably have just as much written in backstory, character sketches, words that will never see the light of day. Chapters that I wrote then scrapped. 

Several months ago, I shifted my focus from "Resistance Twitter" (more on that in a moment) to "Writers Twitter" and started getting all these "perfect story" and "perfect plot" questions on my TL. Folks who want to sell books but can't figure out how to write something to sell. 

Don't write to sell, write to tell. 

My hands are open wide with that awful Ted Talk headset wrapping my my thinning hair into some goofy boof of wings and crazy wispy flips.

"Resistance Twitter" is dead to me. Yeah, we would be better off if Hillary had won in 2016 and Biden is much, much better than Trump, but it's all words. The people we elected aren't getting it done. 2022 is in three days and the clock is ticking. If nothing gets done by the midterms, Democrats get trounced and we're on a quick ride to facism.

End the filibuster NOW. Pass voting rights NOW. Put people to work with green energy infrastucture NOW. 

NOW, here's a bit more Pwerball, something I just workshopped:

The tub filled with silence as the group blissfully soaked, stoned and reluctant to speak more to their future plans.

“Where we goin from here?” Billy snapped the tab of a beer and took a deep swallow.

Emma rose, her pendulous breasts raining drops into the pool. “It’s only Monday night. We have until Thursday to get to West Virginia.”

 “Thursday? We were gonna stop them on the way! And now we’re waiting until they get to Bugleboy’s place?” Gooch stared Emma down, his hands outraised. “Someone hand me a beer? Please?” Shaking, he insisted on the delivery of a beverage. “This is bullshit, we should be stopping these motherfuckers before they go another mile.”

Billy pleaded with Gooch, handing him a beer. “Bro, chill. I agree with everybody else. We should wait, come up with a flawless plan and not go cowboy on this. Especially if we’re gonna get your sister back.”

“Fuck that, you heard what Leo said, that stopping the skinheads was more important than getting my sister.”

“I never said that. I said stopping the skinheads should be our main objective. We stand a much better chance of getting Kris if we neutralize the Colonel and his boys first.” Stolid, Leo didn’t reflect Gooch’s urgency. “You know I love your sister. I probably understand her better than any of you. Rescuing her safely is my primary concern. We need to be strategic about this.”

Gooch twisted from where he soaked. “Yeah, but we’re making this a one-shot deal. We should execute a well-thought out plan, but if that fails? Get a second stab at it.”

“Are you fuckin crazy? If we fail first, we’ll all be dead! There won’t be a second stab, as you so aptly called it.” Sage jumped out of the pool and wrapped herself in a plush towel. “The cops will be involved at that point, tryna figure out what the fuck happened. And we’ll be dead. Fuck you.”

The rest followed Sage out of the tub, gathering up clothes and silently walking back to their campsites in sloppy wet shoes, everyone too tired to talk anymore.

With Leo’s truck leading the way, the caravan was back on the road by seven, the gang gung-ho to get out of the desert. In the back of Casey Jones, passengers drank coffee and chatted about where they might be headed next, maps splayed over a table, the first joint of the day being passed. As the group argued over the merits of this place or that, Emma pushed the button on the intercom. “You’re the globetrotter, sistah. Where do you think we should stop for the night?”

“I think we need to stop in Branson,” Ra-Ra’s voice snapped back. “Not in Branson, exactly. That place will be thick with hicks this time a year. But about thirty miles out? It’s gorgeous, ya’ll gonna think yer back in Colorado.”

With humidity like a sopping blanket and the constant whine of cicadas, no one thought it was like Colorado. And although the campground was empty when they pulled in at three, it quickly filled up around five, every spot occupied and blaring their own kind of noise. By eight, the crew was tired, reclined uncomfortably in their camp chairs and impatient for Gooch and Sage to finish grilling beef, vegetables, and tofu.

“I never got the screaming eagle and flag stuff on your bus.” Emma slurped a sliver of roasted, red bell pepper into her mouth. “What’s up with that?”

“Brah.” Ra-Ra pushed her plate to her knees and spent a minute to chew her tofu and greens. “When I used to tour in my vee-dub bus? All psychedelic, cool paint job? Used to get pulled over constantly, for the stupidest shit, too. Cops sayin I got a tail light out when I know they just busted it themselves. Show em I’m right but then they’re sayin that they might as well investigate some other shit since they have me pulled over.” Nods went around, all of them familiar with having been pulled over for merely being freaks. Ra-Ra’s nods were the most expressive. “With my eagle and American flag and mountains and whatnot on this beast? Cops just fuckin smile and salute when I drive by. Ain’t never been pulled over. This ride ain’t never been tainted by pork.”

“So, this is what I’m thinkin.” Sage swayed, massively stoned and seemingly prone to letting random ideas bolt out the gates of her mind. “If we get pulled over? We’re a church group, former homosexuals on our way to meet another Jesus group like us. Some revival thing, a convention for born-again gay folk.”

Gooch looked to the other men and, not recognizing any indication of what they might be thinking, punted a flub. “So, pretend we’re religious ex-homos?”

Billy and Leo looked at each other, shrugged. “Story sounds plausible to me,” Leo grinned. “Beats tellin cops we’re freaks chasing down skinheads, holding the most powerful drug ever.”

Flames licked at everyone’s toes as the group sat with what Leo had implied. Emma poked a branch into the logs that they’d brought from the R&D office’s porch. “You keep talking about how Powerball is a weapon, Leo. You don’t explain how it works, though.”

Billy laughed as he combed his fingers through thick, shoulder-length hair. “Been wonderin the same damn thing, brah. After no guns, you tell us we got Powerball. How’s that sposed to work? So what if it’s the most powerful drug ever?”

Ra-Ra rose and pointed fingers around—blam, blam, blam, blam. “It is the most powerful drug ever. And I done pretty much everything. Ain’t never experienced anything like I did on that shit. But we’re gonna get the skinheads how with it?”

“From what Emma and Sage tell me, there’s four guards we need to overtake.” Leo also stood, raised his beer to the apex above him. “We get them stoned on Powerball.”

Sage stood as well, pointed to the cigarette between Indian Leo’s fingers. “You wanna roll me one a those? Please? Cuz I’ll smoke it and then I’ll tell you, we’re on the same page with that plan.”

Leo broke out a paper, filled it with tobacco, then rolled it home, handing it off to Sage. “We roll a Powerball joint, let em smoke it, and those guards will be neutralized in minutes.”

Taking a puff off her rollie, Sage held the smoke for a while, then exhaled with a burst of coughed smoke. “They’ll smoke Powerball because we say so?”

“They’re skinheads. Squirt glue in a bag and they’ll huff it.” Shuffling over to a camp table, Gooch scraped his plate clean then placed it in a wash bin.

Ra-Ra gathered up everyone’s plates and joined Gooch. “We still got another couple a days before we got to be where we need to be.”

“If we ain’t figured it by then, we’re fucked,” Billy snarled.

“We’ll get em, one way or another,” Ra-Ra reassured. “Karma, pure and simple.”

Emma spat into the fire and tipped her head back in disdain. “Karma? You wanna talk about karma? What goes around comes around? Because it’s bullshit, sister, there’s no such thing. There’s no cosmic force that determines retribution, so wipe that silly-assed concept from your mind because it’s nothing but a fucking fairy tale.”

“I thought you believed in karma, we’ve talked about this before.” With her hands twirling by her side, Ra-Ra howled with exasperation. “You’re your mom’s daughter! Or, at least until now. What happened?”

Sage snickered. “Powerball. Powerball changes everything.”

Ra-Ra nodded, grabbed Sage’s hand. “Everyone says that. Powerball changes everything. No one’s sure what that fuckin means.”

“And was Powerball karma? Or chaos?” Stepping back and taking to prowling around their fire, Emma’s fuse was short and sputtering. “Look at Hitler. He ended up in a fancy fucking bunker where he killed his squeeze then put a bullet in his own head. Like, the place was stocked—wine, gourmet food, nice furniture—and his so-called retribution, for doing mass murder on the scale of millions? Got to do what thousands of poor sad motherfuckers do every fuckin day. Offed himself with Eva, got a last lay before blowing his brains out. Boom. One bullet to the brain and then, nothing. How does karma apply there? Because that’s one fucked up balance sheet if you ask me. And it’s not like Hitler was having a real hard time of it up to that point. Until everything went to shit for him? He was livin it up.”

“But he gets returned as something lower. I dunno,” Ra-Ra pleaded, pacing around the fire, counter to Emma. “Like, maybe he comes back as a fly.”

“How does that compare to what even one person endured for one day in a Nazi concentration camp? Hitler comes back as a fly? Does he know he’s a fly? Because if he doesn’t know, I don’t see the point. It’s not like he’s buzzing into someone’s face screaming, “Kill me! I’m Hitler fly!” and hoping he’ll get swatted. Really, flies don’t think anything, not even a reincarnated Hitler fly. Flies just follow whatever programming requires making more flies. It’s not like Hitler fly whines, ‘This sucks. Eating shit and fucking other flies. I used to be the chancellor of Germany!’”

Sage turned away from Emma to light the rollie that had gone cold, her wind-block hand trembling. “I’ve seen karma in action, man. Experienced it. Felt the sting of the Goddess’s hand on my backside. It’s real, it works. I’ve known people who messed up their karma and then had to deal with the shit they brought on themselves.”

“Works for everybody looking for a spiritual stamp of approval. Give a bum a quarter, win the Powerball. Whatever dude.” Emma’s words untethered, she turned away and withdrew even further, unable to reel back the sting of her barb. 

Ra-Ra doused the fire, sending gray clouds billowing over her RV. “We’re in West Virginia day-after tomorrow. I’m tired. Me n Leo do all the drivin. Puttin my good karma to bed, freaks.”

Next morning, with the Widespread Panic that accompanied everyone’s coffee, Gooch offered up squares of lime-green blotter paper stamped with fat, yellow lightning bolts. “Let’s trip. We’re at each other’s throats and we still haven’t figured out how to rescue my sister. Maybe if we clear the cobwebs out, we’ll be in a better space.”

About forty-five minutes after dosing, the group was either cackling hilariously or staring dead-faced out the window, Gooch jibed over the intercom, “You could join us, y’know? I still got like, five hits of this.”

“I’m good, bro, dosed when I was drivin yesterday. Got us to Branson and that clusterfuck, but I don’t know the roads leading into West Virginia. I need to be tip-top, dawg.”

 

 

Chapter Thirty-Six

Randal’s theories did not mollify the DEA agents. “Bunny? The president of the Bandaleeros, this town’s mayor?” With Randal backed against the sheer stone walls of the jail’s office, Lattimore stared deeply into his eyes, drew up his fists like a boxer, then turned away and shook his head. “What makes you think he’s in on Powerball?”

Delgado leaned into Randal, switching from sweet and seductive to badass. “Despite all our intel about Byrne, Cappuci, and Yamaguchi? You’re saying your mayor is our primary suspect? For the manufacture and distribution of Powerball?”

“Positive.” Randal took a deep breath and bit his lip. “But look, there’s somethin even bigger going on. I know you’re DEA but you gotta do somethin. Now. The guy I’m rentin my land to? The Colonel? I think he’s about to do somethin really bad. He has all these skinheads and…”

“You’re sure?” Lattimore turned and pounded the desk with his fist.

“Absolutely. The Colonel and his skinheads are gonna be doin somethin terrible.”

“Not him, shit for brains!” Snatching Randal back up in his beefy hands, Lattimore once again slammed the cop into the office’s stone walls. “I meant about the mayor. You’re positive?”

Randal squirmed and drooled, his eyes bouncing back and forth. “Yeah. Bunny! You need to look at him! Those hippies are low-level morons. If you want to lop off the snake’s head, the mayor’s where ya need to be lookin.”

 “Fuck!” Lattimore dropped Randal so he could punch his hand to show how wrong he’d been. “The mayor! Where’s he growing it? Or getting it? What do you know?”

Freed from Lattimore’s grip, Randal nevertheless floundered for an answer he couldn’t articulate. “I know. I just gotta figure some things out so we can bust him for this Powerball yer lookin for. But I’m tellin you, the Colonel and his skinheads really need to be stopped!”

“And we intend to,” Delgado smirked, dragging well-manicured nails down Lattimore’s pressed sleeve, then dropped her voice to whisper, “Get a few new agents in here. Because some asshole fucked up what we’ve been investigating.”  Then smiling to Randal, “Yeah, we’re gonna stop this Bunny dude, bust his ass hard.”

“No. I mean the Colonel and the skinheads! They have to be stopped! I think… based on information I’ve… They have guns and explosives and they kidnapped Christmas Yamaguchi! Kidnapping is a federal crime, right? A felony?”

“What does he have to do with Powerball?” Lattimore snatched up Randal again and raged at the little martinet. “First the mayor and now you’re bringin up this Colonel person, you little weasel dick. Who the fuck is the Colonel?”

“If you let me go, I’ll tell you!” Randal pleaded, his eyes wide and imploring. 

Lattimore released Randal. “Tell us what you know about drugs in this town.”

“Summa these hippie faggots grow weed up in these mountains but ya can’t catch em. I’m not sayin we don’t have a drug problem in this town. We do. But they’re a sneaky bunch and I got bigger fish to fry. And that’s what I think you feds need to really look into. Much bigger than your so-called Powerball drug.”

“What? Meth? Coke? Heroin? Ecstasy?” Delgado appeared cool and disinterested. “Maybe you forgot we’re looking for Powerball?” Pointing a long, slender index finger at Randal, Delgado hissed, “You stay in here. I need to talk to Agent Lattimore,” then closed the office door firmly after the two stepped out to where the jail cells were located.

Lunch debris littered the floor of Cosmic Charlie’s cell as the filthy hippie drunk appeared to slumber on the thin pad of his metal cot. Lattimore chucked a dismissive chin at the bum then mumbled, “The intel we have is solid. Officer Ossifer is an idiot, doesn’t know jack shit. Bunny? And who the fuck is this Colonel guy he’s talking about?”

“If we have to start interviewing people in this shithole town, our cover’s blown. And we don’t even know where to start with the mayor. And now this other guy? Colonel Sanders or whatever the fuck?”

“Are we giving up on the leads we have? Do you trust this numb nuts?” Lattimore nodded to the office door. “We’re spinning our wheels. We need to get back on track with our objective and let that guy write traffic tickets.”

 “Yeah, I don’t trust that idiot’s information.” Delgado gently squeaked the soles of her expensive running shoes on the jail’s concrete floor, her long, brown legs idly stirring from beneath the cuffs of her white shorts. “But we need him to get us to Gooch, Flynn, and Leo then make a buy. Unfortunately, Oh-Cypher is probably our best bet to get us there.”

In his cell, Cosmic Charlie lifted an eyelid and slurped back a little drool as he took in the vision and scent of the stunning Latina not fifteen feet from him.

“Agreed. Let’s pretend to deputize him as a DEA agent, let him stroke our badges again.” Lattimore opened the door to the office and gestured for Delgado to enter.

There, Randal had his boots back up on the desk. 

Christmas Time Is Here

 Listening to Pinch, Can

Scored on the white elephant game, the potent bourbon punch, and the chili. 

The chili was full of protein--beef and beans so not proper chili--and took the edge off my hypoglycemic anxiety. I downed a glass of punch before I grabbed some chili, so I was primed (a couple of gummies ingested a half-hour before didn't hurt) and scarfed that shit. 

For the white elephant game, I drew number eight. A few days ago I learned that the number eight is considered lucky in Chinese. Seemed like a good omen.

My contribution to the game was a clearance mini Crock Pot that I picked up while grocery shopping. No one wanted to steal it from the nine-year-old girl who picked it. After the other seven people went, I stole the Crock Pot from her. She ended up with a couple stained glass pieces, one that resembled a bird and another that, I swear, looked like a corona virus. Good times.

Nicole ended up with my Crock Pot and a tiny Le Creuset-like dish she captured on a second steal. Eight seemed to work out well.

Happy Holidays. This excerpt is from Book 3.

Twinkling on every line that defined him, Flynn rode the surf of the voices that broke on all sides. “Do things—even elementary particles—contain some kind of program or DNA that directs them to those equations, to behave in that way? Are those numbers embedded in the system?”

“Whaddya mean, embedded in the system? Like, is the government behind this?” Ra-Ra rambled on shaky wheels, not staying on track at all.

Smiling and still waving her hand in front of herself, Emma replied, “The Illuminati. They’ve harnessed the power to manipulate matter and energy. It started with fluoride in the water.”

Ra-Ra jumped up and twirled around the room. “I knew it!”

Chapter Eight

Flynn was digging what Emma was saying, adding thoughts into it, improvising a view of the Universe in his moment with mushrooms. “So, you brought up quantum physics, string theory, none of which I know very well. What I do know is that, at any given moment, we can determine how a particle is charged or its relative position, but we can’t know both. Yet, that particle is both. Position and potentiality, both of which describe the Universe, at least that minute part of it. Quantifiability. If something isn’t quantifiable, why measure it? But we do, whatever it is, just to confirm our own suspicions about how something… anything works.”

“Ha! Yes!” Emma was feeling sweetly rolled with concepts and questions, tingling all around by what she was hearing. “Something’s missing. Always.”

“And, if something’s not considered, it doesn’t exist to us.” Flynn's smile revealed a perfect set of teeth.

“The world is all that is the case. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Wittgenstein.” Emma’s heart raced slightly within the tightening bubble of their mutual attraction.

There was something to Emma that reminded Flynn of his mother, something wild and dangerous; something that told him that he’d have to get his own breakfast in the morning. He suddenly wanted to be taken to her bosom and smothered, to be reminded that he mattered; that he was wanted. To feed from a nipple and grasp the skin of she who held him. He felt himself wanting to wrap himself around Emma and get lost inside her.

A desultory Wom! rushed through the room and vibrated into the corners, settling in as Hello, It’s Me created an eddy of swaying bodies in the room. Smiling as it happened, Emma’s voice pierced through. “Everything can be known but not known at the same time. Or vice-versa. Or something.”

“Yeah, dude, but what we do know is that the universe behaves just like we thought it would, based on the initial equation. So isn’t that weird? It’s like everything, from snails to galaxies, follow the same pattern. If everything was just random chance… I mean, it is but it seems like it isn’t. Like God really is in the numbers.”

Ra-Ra leapt up and gyrated around the room, “That’s fuckin rad! Whoo! Whoo! Emma and our friend Flynn just used science to explain God! Quantum particles and shit! Yo! Ya’ll hear that?”

From the ether where he floated, Dave shouted, “Heresies! We must have an inquisition! Iron Maidens and flaming nipple clamps! Whipped cream for everyone! Whippets!”

Whisper rose and glared at Flynn. “Too deep for me. I’m goin to the kitchen cuz I got things to do rather than say,” then marched away with something stuffed high up her ass.

Wanting to jump on Emma, stick his tongue down her throat, dry hump and grope her and hope she’d be convinced to get naked, Flynn looked at the people around him and decided against impulse. Ra-Ra and LA Tina and the Robert Plant-looking guy—who’d since moved from floor-gazing into curling up with Delilah and moaning his dog language into her ear—Flynn saw it was probably not a great audience for hormones sizzled on a griddle.

“Flynn, you rock brah!” Ra-Ra rose and twisted again, as though she needed to screw herself into the sky or was a Dervish in search of some rhythm to spin to. “I gotta help Whisper. But yo, I’m glad you found us,” then flitted into the kitchen on wings of patchouli and shredded denim, leaving the two alone again.

The flow of numbers through this 3-D experience interrupted Flynn’s tenuous grasp on controlling his libido. “I like these numbers,” he whispered seductively. “One and one…”

Emma nodded slyly, “And Dez, over there on the floor, having a discussion with Delilah.”

 Whisper bellowed from the kitchen, “Cake and ice cream, everybody! And sing Happy Birthday! Emma! Get your big ass in here, girl!”

Emma tilted her chin and smirked to indicate that Flynn should come, that a nice, sweet piece would be waiting for him if he did. Someone suggested that The Don put the Beatles’ “Birthday” on for the occasion but Emma told him, “I want China/Rider. You pick the show.”

By the time he was served, Flynn had heard various partiers talk about the ounce-or-so of bud that went into Whisper’s cake and icing. Even with a glop of vanilla ice cream soaking in, the grassy marijuana taste was overwhelming and omnipresent. After washing dessert down with homebrew, he returned to the living room where The Don worked on a Guinea pig-sized piece of cake and ice cream. “Awesome place, awesome party, bro.” Flynn shoved his hands in his pockets and balled up his fists, “You gonna put your mix back on after this?”

“You don’t like the Dead?” The Don asked as he gobbled down his pot cake.

“I love the Dead! A Dead show is like… no other experience in life. And I love the music, it gets stuck in my head all the time. But I wouldn’t say I was a Deadhead, per se,” air-quoting Deadhead without a hint of irony. “But, I love other bands too. If they toured 200 days a year, I’d be a Beatles-head. I’m just not one of those All-Dead-all-the-time Deadheads.”

The Don was still digging into his plate of sugary slop. “I don’t know any Deadheads like that. All the heads I know listen to all kinds of shit. We’re diverse in our tastes, more so than most other people, I think. Look at all the different musicians that the Dead have toured with, played with. Diversity is in our DNA, man.”

Flynn shifted from glib to awkward, as though he’d inadvertently revealed some racist corner of himself. “You have to admit there’s some Heads who are… a little too… militant? In their desire to hear the Dead all the time? Like, almost always. Like… Allison. I try to put on something different, Björk or Son Volt or Oasis and she’s like, ‘Can we hear that Red Rocks show again? Or some Steve Miller?’ I mean, along with Janis and Santana and Airplane and all those other Bay Bands, it’s like this kind of Deadhead who thinks Heaven was invented by Jerry and the boys in that house in Haight-Ashbury and San Francisco was the result.”

“Yeah.” His finger in the air, The Don nodded as he finished his mouthful of cake. “I know what you’re talking about. ‘Go Niners-slash-Giants, I sure could use some salt-water taffy.’ Not nearly as obnoxious as the Cubby Deadheads, though. Inside Baseball, indeed. So what’s your point?”

“Your mix is superb, bro! Dude, I’ve heard nothing but great cuts since I arrived.”

After taking Flynn into his head for a moment, The Don grumbled, “You should talk to Gooch. He mixed the music for this party. You two might hit it off. He’s definitely not a Deadhead.” Pointing Flynn the way, The Don appeared as if a hairless Frank Zappa had his own Saturday morning cartoon from the early 1970s.

Stumbling back to the kitchen, Flynn was blocked by a jittery and sketchy Casper. “Bro, man… I know you came here with Allison but she’s like, really comin on to me, bro. I mean, man.” Casper looked earnest and apologetic, begging for an OK.

“Go for it, man.” Happy to dump the responsibility of keeping her entertained off on someone else, Flynn sealed his approval with a bro shake. “She’s all right. Just a little crazy.”

Gooch caught that and snorted, “Who isn’t? You don’t know where you landed!”

“The Don tells me you’re not a Deadhead? What?!? And they didn’t drum you out of town?”

“They sure as shit try with their damned drum circles every summer. I take it you’re not a Deadhead, either. So what do you think of all this, the 3-D Ranch, our little town?”

“Methinks yon city boy doth not want long to be in this shire,” Dave raged from his darkened corner. “Like them who said,” Dave switching to a falsetto voice, ‘Oh, tis a grand place to ‘ave a ‘ome.’ And then shat everywhere. And, when the knaves couldn’t handle winters here, left us. Roofs caved in from snow load, the town worse off than when the bastards arrived.”

Gooch waved Flynn to the porch after tilting his billboard-sized forehead in the direction of Dave’s voice. “Dave and The Don can get a bit overboard,” filling his beer, keeping his voice down. “Especially with their libertarian-slash-rugged-individualist shit. ‘True mountain people’ I call them, that mindset. ‘I got mine, fuck off.’ That attitude has never worked in this town, by the way. Yeah they’re hippies, total Deadheads, but off-the-grid crazy with their leave-me-the-fuck-alone ethos.”

 “Gotcha. And our twin brothers are also really into that Tolkien-esque, medieval-speak thing? Methinks tis a bit much.” Flynn suddenly became aware that all night he’d said things he wished had stayed in his throat.

“LARPers, SCA stuff, Society for Creative Anachronism? The kingdom of Atenvelt crest is right over the kitchen door.” Flickers of Flynn’s cynicism made the visitor more agreeable to Gooch.

“Ah, that makes sense. Do they do Ren Faire? LARPers back home are huge into that. Every summer for like, six weeks.”

“Shit yeah. Dave and The Don, a few other people who live up here. They work all winter so they can have summers free to get their Ren Faire on. The twins mind their parents’ store while mom and dad snowbird down in Arizona.” With a tip of his pint, Gooch indicated the two should return to the warmth of the kitchen. “Most people around here spend their winters plowing the pass or working up in Chi-Chi, raking in good money to be out in sub-zero weather and 60 miles-per-hour winds at two in the morning. Work-and-freeze their asses off all winter so they can spend their summers hitting each other with rattan sticks while wearing clothes weaved on looms and spinning wheels. And leather cured from whatever deer they poached last winter, taken off the king’s land.”

“That’s wild. I mean, cool. I mean, I want that kinda freedom.” Flynn paused with mushrooms jangling his thoughts. “Do you hunt?”

“No. I used to with my dad and granddad, but I never had a flavor for it. Spotting something beautiful and then taking its life? Just didn’t seem like a good use of my time, especially since we could always buy meat at the store.” Gooch dripped tobacco juice into a plastic cup. “But about everyone up here hunts. In fact, you just missed the season. For weeks the town was full of Texans and other morons. We do good business up here. For a few weeks, everyone up here’s either a butcher, a taxidermist—or a stupid fuckin Texan. If you see a white plate, give it some hate. But they pay the bills.”

Flynn considered admitting his Texas roots but decided against it. His entire life he never felt like calling himself a Texan, never felt like calling himself anything, fine with reinventing himself as he went along, free from allegiance to an arbitrary identity endowed by an accident of birth.

“I was listening from the kitchen and heard some of what you were saying,” Gooch was looking at his shoes, watching laces become roots and set themselves into the kitchen floor. “Interesting, from what I heard. And understood. Algorithms built into things, ‘programming’ you called it. Then, I think you implied there must also be a master programmer.”

As he watched the kitchen’s floral-patterned wallpaper ripple in rhythm to Fat Man in the Bathtub, Flynn allowed his mind a moment to formulate an answer. His mother had been a C&E Methodist at best, and although she’d signed him up for the church bus, he knew she’d forget within a few weeks and he’d be back to playing alone in his room. Throughout childhood, God was just someone who never answered his prayers. Not an atheist in any sense, he just always had other things on his mind. It wasn’t until spring break of his senior year in high school—the first time he did mushrooms—that God came tumbling back into his mind like a jolly jester, uproariously laughing and singing and dancing and warmly embracing and filling the world with colors and shapes and numbers. In the midst of that trip, he made peace with something that he’d never understood and knew he never would. “Like Cantor dust? Flynn was still watching the wallpaper move, hoping that he wasn’t just babbling incoherently. “See what I’m sayin? Halve a line, then halve those lines and so on. Each resulting level is an infinity but smaller than the previous infinity by one. Yet, an infinity nonetheless. A universe of infinities, but still just numbers.”

Gooch’s expressions switched from curiosity to skepticism, swinging in the crest between his brow and his beard. “Your point? It seems you like when math works for you—in some weird magic way—but also, chaos is key. I don’t get it.”

“Don’t you see, man? Within those infinities are sets of numbers that determine how things will become. Why is that? I dunno but it seems like that order in the midst of chaos is pretty cool. And yeah, I believe there’s some kind of force behind it and to it, that certain things matter because… cosmic rules?”

“Cosmic rules? Certain sets of numbers or patterns, algorithms… yeah,” suddenly zoning out, the kitchen door blasting out colors in waves of rainbow. “Chaos Theory, General Systems Theory. Reiterative functions, how complex systems behave and become. Nondeterministic and deterministic at the same time. Wow. I’d never think of that. But it’s nonlinear differential calculus not the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. There’s no magic in it.”

“I think there is magic in it and it’s part of a larger, unknowable mystery.” Flynn gleamed with the creepy self-assuredness of someone holding a battered Bible.

“Unfortunately, ‘magic’ and ‘unknowable mystery’ don’t give us much information about reality,” Gooch settled his beer as he sat on the counter. At the front door, Emma, Whisper, Indian Leo, Toothless Don and LA Tina were stomping off snow and shedding coats. As soon as she entered the kitchen, Emma wrapped herself around Flynn.

“You shoulda gone, Sweetpea,” Emma purred as she pulled Flynn into her big legs. “We were talking to the ghosts up on Monument Hill, our town graveyard. Froze our tits off.”

“So…” Ra-Ra pulled Flynn away from Emma and began poking his chest accusatorily. “Mistah Numbaz.”

“Numbaz! Noom-bahs! Room-bahs! Zoom-bahs!” Toothless Don scatted from his seat on the counter, his elven beard shimmying as he played bongos on his thighs.

“All these numbers you got tripping around in your head. I heard the Powerball jackpot is up to over $300 million. A record jackpot, broski. We should pick some numbers and play em.”

“Um. We don’t have Powerball in Colorado,” Dave spoke up, drawn out from the world where he resided. “Remember. This is a state where you can’t buy alcohol or cars on Sunday.”

“Yeah, but Flynn says he’s going to Delaware and they have Powerball, brah.” Ra-Ra snapped her dreadlocks back and forth as though she’d puree the room with her head. “We could all kick in and buy like, a hundred tickets, and he could get em for us.”

“Yeah…” Flynn wasn’t sure what was being asked of him, if she wanted him to pick numbers or buy everyone’s tickets. “I mean, I’m flying out early on Wednesday, and I don’t have to be at work until Thursday. So, I guess I’d have the time but… keeping track of everyone’s numbers…?”

“No. Dude. We come up with some numbers for fun, y’know? If we win, no matter what number gets picked, we all split the jackpot. Like that.” Ra-Ra clutched Flynn in her gaze, assuring him that everything would work out. “All for one, one for all? Diggity, brah, that’s why you’re here. With us. Right? This convergence. God and numbers and all this.”

All at once, Flynn’s mind was full of his car, the 3-D Ranch, mushrooms, beer, weed smoked and eaten, the people surrounding him with love—everything that had led him to the moment he was in. “I love it. It’s so this place.”

“Dank!” and Ra-Ra was dancing where she stood, rocking the kitchen floor with her stomping. “Who’s in?”

“How much?” LA Tina called out while fingering through her clutch. “All I have is twenty.”

“That’s ten tickets, if you pick a Powerball number and really, why wouldn’t you? Everyone who wants to do it has to throw in twenty,” Ra-Ra reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a book of fives then slapped LA Tina’s twenty into the palm of her hand for the start of the pot. “Two of us. Flynn, you’re in, right?”

“Fuck yeah! OK, so we have thirty tickets…”

 The Don pulled a small salad of bills from his pocket and found a twenty. “I’m in.”

“Forsooth, my brother! You always said it was a waste of coin!” Dave’s voice still seemed to come from the walls.

“Tis, but tis only for fun. Why not have some fun, my brother?”

“No thank-ee. I prefer odds that aren’t similar to that of a soft landing on the surface of the sun.”

“Eh,” The Don shrugged as he slapped the bill into Ra-Ra’s hand, “if I win, he automatically gets half, anyway. And if I don’t win, I get to hear about it the rest of my life.”

  

Shoot Out The Lights

 Listening to Prison Song, System of a Down

Another workshop, another excerpt put to bed. 

I wouldn't have this novel written were it not for the workshop process. Other eyes on my work not only made me a tighter, cleaner writer, it gave me the confidence to push forward with my vision. 

Traditionally published writers in my groups told me to pursue the traditional route and that's what I'll do until there's nowhere else to go but self-publishing. I'm not trying to punch down on self-publishing but it's not where I think my book's future is. 

The piece I ran by Sunday's group got another gander tonight. When I ran the "pitch it as upmarket urban fantasy because it's got ghosts and magical realism" idea by them, they not only agreed with me but helped me refine this pitch:

POWERBALL is 193k of upmarket urban fantasy that weaves over a century of tales regarding fortunes made, stolen, and lost. Struggling, Pogo Springs, Colorado—an old silver-mining town with a tawdry past and a troubled future—is suddenly blessed when several  residents win a Powerball jackpot. The stage is set during the summer of 1997, when Emma and Gooch smoke a radically hallucinogenic strain of marijuana grown by lottery winners, one that engenders portals to alternate dimensions and universes. Gooch watches Emma leap from a canyon’s cliff into the abyss of one of the myriad mysteries burrowed within the novel.

Enticed into joining Emma and Gooch’s trip, readers are introduced to mountain folk and counterculture types: Hippies and Deadheads, a biker gang, skateboarders and snowboarders, New Agers, white supremacists and Nazi skinheads. Additionally, the story introduces the town’s silver-baron founder, his cagey nemesis, and various other ghosts. As past and present stories unfold, it’s apparent that lottery winners have various agendas for their fortunes—funding a brewpub and marijuana growing operation, the construction of a casino, a terrorist attack on Washington D.C.—all planned and carried out as the mountains tumble down.

Parallels with the past intertwine with threads from the present, the trip skewing from expected trajectories toward elements of magical realism. While the book’s focus is the core group of lottery winners, the narrative swings back and forth from the 1880s to the story’s present, like a pendulum spiraling out into ever-widening arcs.

Quite by accident, POWERBALL is a zeitgeist novel that includes themes such as: the transformational potential of psychedelics; right-wing terrorism; numerology and Pythagorean magic; craft beer; the nature of consciousness; 1990s computer hacking and other cultural tidbits; skiing, snowboarding, and skateboarding; the Grateful Dead and hippie/jam band scene; quantum physics; and a firm commitment to the Oxford comma.

Kind of a lazy way to query, if you think anyone's gonna read your damn blog.

A buddy said my work reminded him of The Monkey Wrench Gang meets Fear And Loathing. Nope, not even close. My friend Paul said Ken Kesey (Cuckoo's Nest not Electric Kool-Aid) and someone in tonight's group said the same thing, also referenced Naked Lunch.

No. Thank y'all but, no. Paul said he was just searching and I haven't heard back form tonight's workshop commenter. 

An excerpt from Book Two, Chapter Five:

Each day after school, he’d make his way to the library and the sound of Miz Purdy Byrd’s perseverating squawk, “You need to be out by five. So I can eat my dinner. Doors are locked at five o’clock sharp.”

Five was also five minutes before Purdy put a large splash of Kentucky bourbon into her sweetened tea. Gooch learned about her habit one evening after he’d gone unnoticed when she did her quick check of the stacks, returning to his reading once her thin shadow passed the nook where he’d huddled. The book that engrossed him was an account of the Astor Expedition, explorers and Indians, Spanish traders, trappers, mountain men, with a portion describing country he knew. By the time he realized he was going to be in serious trouble with his parents, Purdy was potted.

When he showed up at her desk to be let out, she interrogated him on why he’d been such a sneak and what it was that had held his attention so intensely. After showing her the book, she immediately knew where his head was and began a drunken rant about the town’s history.

The granddaughter of Thomas L. Oldham—Pogo’s official biographer, publisher and editor of the county’s oldest newspaper, The Swinger Advertiser—Purdy had been librarian longer than anyone could remember. For reasons known only to her, she opened up and shared with Gooch things she believed people probably wanted to hear but didn’t need to know. With the youngest Yamaguchi, and several fingers of bourbon under her belt, she recognized the only other mind who gave a shit about stuff that happened in the past. With him, she felt comfortable enough sharing stories she’d held close all her life. Over the years, when Gooch took the time to stay late, he heard tales from notes she said were turned into ashes the day after her grandfather died.

“Snavely Pogo didn’t come from nothing, that’s for sure,” Purdy roared on a snowy night some weeks after Gooch’s grandfather died, one of her eyes closed so there’d be only one of him to look at. “His people were wealthy merchants in England and he was giving them a bad name, so they shipped him off to America with enough money to get him gone. He’d pretty much squandered everything by the time he got to Silver Chalice. That’s what they called this town before he made everyone name it after him. When he got here, he decided he’d make his fortune by cheating people. Found a game and figured out how to rig it. Just an all-around prick.”

In the following few years, Miz Purdy Byrd’s words were verified in scribbles found on ledgers and letters discovered after Gooch’s father signed the deed to the resort.

“We moved the family in!” His mother announced in the hotel’s lobby. “The Family Inn, Ha! Isn’t that funny?” her cornball humor not lost on, but buried by, the rest of the family. Months of packing culminated in Yamaguchis occupying the resort’s Presidential Suite, moving in only after the plumbing was fixed. Goats and chickens were all that remained on the ancestral farmland they’d left. After showing the resort’s four floors and introducing children to a few permanent residents, Mom led her brood through the restaurant’s kitchen and down stone steps into what had been Pogo’s wine cellar, chatting up everyone the entire way.

April, the oldest and everyone’s boss, stopped midway before beginning her tantrum. “Ohmygawd! This place is gross! I’m going back upstairs! Ohmygawd!”

Their mother stopped, shot April a glance to suggest her princess could return above ground. Then, she folded her meaty arms over breasts that had no more hold over time than she did. “No one’s to come downstairs unless it’s with me or your father. Got it? Augie, you and Christmas stay out until we say. Or unless you’re with one of us.” Leaning in, her large cow eyes bounded back and forth between the two she knew would not heed her words. “Haruki?” using her husband’s Japanese name, she let him know that his complete attention was expected. “You tell them!”

Herman Yamaguchi was shining his flashlight into the bunghole of an old beer barrel. Rising from a crouch, his commanding voice gave the impression that his slight frame was much larger. “I think we should do a short tour back there, show em it’s nuthin but junk.”

That was the last thing May wanted to hear. “No! Those two… they’ll just want to keep coming back and getting into things, junk or not. They’re the cats Curiosity didn’t kill. Yet.”

“May, you know they’ll come down here no matter what we say. Might as well show em now that there’s nothin but a junkyard in those caves.”

Their mother retreated up the stairs in a snit, miffed her husband had twisted an admonishment into an excuse for adventure. “Have your fun. But don’t blame me if those two wind up lost or eaten by bats. I have things to do.”

Gooch and Kris bounced in their shoes as they waited for their mother to finish her ascent. As soon as the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut, their father shot his children a look that told them he’d mastered the art of waiting out their mother. Hitting a switch, he lit up the passage beyond the wine cellar and waved his children to follow.

The first stop was a room just inside the passageway, three sides of sheer rock closed off with a brick wall about eight-yards long and more than a foot deep, the door torn out long ago—the Crypt. Having served as the sanctuary and hideaway for previous owners of the hotel, it was packed with what could have been props from a movie: trunks with straps and skeleton-key locks, labels marked with the spidery characters of cultured penmanship; a huge stuffed barn owl atop a bookcase, tattered wings spread to disturbing effect; various iron safes, open to anyone aware that all lock combinations were listed on the front desk’s blotter pad; and, a sports car-sized maple desk from where the rest of the room’s clutter appeared to radiate.

“I’m not looking forward to going through all this crap, but I can see this being a very nice space. Once it’s cleaned out.” Herman Yamaguchi’s gaze darted around the room. “So… let’s see the rest of this junkyard!”

Outside the Crypt, the passageway grew warmer as it wound its way to the next cave, a much larger room encrusted with calcium and lime, guano-like green and white drips covering everything. Gooch’s eyes widened at the series of ovate vats in the room, pumps he imagined as gigantic fossilized dinosaur eggs. Pipes large and small crisscrossed the ceiling, chattering and clanking with life, needle-like stalactites birthed where mineral water had dripped.

“The town’s geothermal heating system runs through this contraption. Old timers say Pogo used to cut the heat when he was mad, which I’m told was pretty often. If he did, it happened here.”

Next, an expansive room revealed what had been the employee cafeteria during Pogo’s reign. “Lights don’t work from hereon in,” their father muttered as everyone’s flashlight beams scissored madly through the darkness. “Folks took about every piece of scrap metal outta here, ripped copper wiring out of the walls. After Pogo, the later owners didn’t appear to have much use for this room or anything beyond this point. Gramps will tell ya, people got so desperate during the Great Depression that they sold about everything they had just to get by. None of it worth fixing up for anything. Kinda scary, after here.”

Just across the hallway from the cafeteria, an open expanse revealed where laundry chutes fed to several tubs of bubbling spring water. Beyond that, the trio stepped cautiously past several caves that appeared to have once been residences—curtains for walls, places where bare bulbs once dangled on wires, cots and broken furniture strewn about, piles of mildewed clothing and bedding rotting on the floor. After entering a cave the size of a one-car garage, Kris whooped when she discovered crates of plumbing supplies, electrical equipment, and other implements of construction—buckets and boxes stuffed with pieces fused together by rust and calcium. The tour ended in a long room where heavy timber and rebar held back mountain from tumbling into the hotel’s basement.

“This is where it ends.” Their father threw his hands up to show that it was time to go back. “I told you there wasn’t much to see. Just junk, but I know you kids thought it was interesting junk,” his pupils turned up to point above. “I’m with you. It is interesting. Old junk from even before Papa-san’s time.” Before making their way back to the wine cellar, they stopped in the cafeteria to consider what remained. A cracked and torn parquet floor was littered with piles of plaster and pieces of shredded conduit, the copper and scrap metal raiders not tidy with their work. Walls that separated the dining room and cafeteria line from the kitchen, dish pit, and pantry, were battered open where wiring and plumbing had been ripped out, wounds exposing bent chicken wire and the bones of framing. “We’re going to get this place back up and running,” their father boasted as he led them back past the damage. “I want our dining room for paying customers only, not people eating from bags. Full-time residents will come down here, socialize, eat well. Their elevator opens up over there,” pointing his beam to where scrap wood had been tacked together to create a barrier. “Someone probably put that up to keep guests from wandering around down here.”

As they made their way back toward the wine-cellar steps, Kris’s hands were knotted up, pounding out a savage rhythm on her thighs. “Dad, there’s a dumbwaiter in the kitchen. I saw doors. On every floor when Mom took us upstairs. Augie is small enough to fit in it. All I have to do is lower him into the kitchen and he can open the door for me.”

“I saw em, too. Yeah, you can’t keep us from coming down here!” Electrified, Gooch ran in place as possibilities flooded his attention. “And laundry chutes. I saw those!”

“Augie,” lifting his son by the arm, Gooch’s father shook him to absolute awareness. “You tumble down those chutes and I’ll put your butt on KP for the rest of your days!”

Walking up the steps in silence, the children hoped their father would drop his ire with Gooch’s elbow. “Let me talk to your mother about you kids playing down here,” their father winked as he turned the cellar-door handle. “I could use your help, anyway. Going through all that stuff and figuring out what’s garbage and what’s worth keeping.”

In the weeks that followed, while their mother remained buried beneath yards of fabric that the chittering tooth of her sewing machine turned into curtains, bed spreads, pillow cases, or covers for any salvageable stick of furniture, Gooch and Kris spent countless hours sifting through the things in the basement with hopes of finding some rare gem or nugget of gold. As Kris inspected buckets of U-joints, C-clamps, E-boxes, and other things not identified by the alphabet, Gooch and his father scrutinized letters from another century.

After several hours of shuffling papers, reading their contents and then determining their worth, their father gasped, “Man, this guy Pogo was a real prick,” crinkled sheaves of fine stationery appeared to drip from his pinched fingers. “He tried to bully town council. People he bought and paid for. Wanted em to let him tear up graves so he could build on Monument Hill. Offered em good money but they weren’t havin it. Then his lawyers threaten to shut em down, whatever they do, but they don’t care, they got people buried up there and they’re not gonna to move em, not for anything.”

From what Gooch read, Pogo’s attorneys nearly always responded to demands of payment with, “The amount listed above and not one dollar more!” Without a doubt, Pogo was prone to paying pennies on the dollar, some cavil used to undercut the price initially agreed upon. When laborers and contractors went after wages they’d been assured they’d be paid, Denver lawyers replied with the kind of legalese that local sheriffs were obliged to tell friends and neighbors, “Looks like you’ve been fucked, well and truly.”  Gooch told his father that “total prick” was one of many ways to describe Pogo.

Interminable and redundant legends spun from the hotel’s oldest residents also helped the Yamaguchis further gather a story of Pogo Springs, one that was probably more accurate than what was presented in the lobby of the visitor center. There, in what had been Mrs. Pogo’s itinerant residence, an oleaginous account was presented on typed pages arranged next to the creepy portraits of Pogo—one that most visitors confused with “Lurch” from The Addams Family—and his plain wife and daughter. Other stories and pictures were pressed beneath plexiglass on various daises, black and white photographs that made it look as though it always rained or snowed in town, amenities to the visitor center council sprung for when the mayor and his town council were shitfaced drunk. The presented text alongside the photos had been taken almost exclusively from the musty pages of Oldham’s “Snavely C. Pogo: Being a Frontier Philanthropist and Titan of Economics, His Story One of Inspiration for All Young Men Seeking to Make Their Way in the World.” A book confined to an extremely small circle of readers.

By all accounts, Pogo had come to the Silver Chalice mining camp in the spring of 1883. Legend maintained he’d hawked Spanish knives, exploding pistols, bull whips, French pornography, and nostrums infused with dangerous amounts of laudanum.  While Oldham’s biography merely mentioned that Pogo had, “generously provisioned mine workers with the sundry requirements of their trade,” accounts from the hotel’s oldest residents hinted Pogo did substantial trade in whatever miners couldn’t find from the camp’s stores, including whores and cocaine. In less than a year after arriving in Silver Chalice, Pogo secured the deed for one of the most profitable mines in Colorado, his silver stream adding to an already flooded market. Pogo’s luck was remarkable to no one but Oldham, who wrote,

“What providence! O! Fortuna’s wheel did lift him to Olympus in mere months, in a manner and with munificence befitting gods of industry, capitalism and beneficence of the Invisible Hand, most certainly directed by our Lord!”

 

His fortune made, and the town his barony, Pogo bullied other business owners into scrapping the camp’s Silver Chalice name, after a local pastor pointed out the name’s suggestive connotations, then made his eponymous demand while adding Springs as a way to promote his resort and the heated waters that bled from the mountain’s heart. As Oldham put it with typical oaken prose,

“Snavely Pogo endeavored to attract the cream of the Republic’s eastern aristocracy to the salubrious environs of the Vino de Magdalena Mountains, where they might partake in the palliative properties of the area’s God-gifted springs. Built during the seasons of benefice in the glorious year of 1889, the hotel was the largest jewel in Pogo’s silver crown, an apotheosis of Victorian opulence and a testament to his self-made plenteousness.”

 

“We sure have a lot of these books.” Kris dropped copies on the floor for the popping sound.

“We’re keeping those,” Old Gooch said, “stop doing that. We’re giving those away in the VIP baskets.” He also said to save the ones every guest left behind, like a Gideon Bible, to go into the next set of VIP baskets.

In time, father and son joined the handful who’d read Oldham’s vaunted tome. After agreeing that the book was terrible, Gooch confided, “Miz Purdy Byrd said her grampa wrote it that way cuz he didn’t want anyone to read it, that he knew it was all lies and things only Pogo wanted to tell. And she said Pogo didn’t know bad writing, thought all those big words made him look more important.” Ten when he slogged through Pogo’s biography, it was the year he and his father spent nearly an entire ski season discussing the book between runs.

“If that craphead realized the real money is on these slopes, he might not have died so lonely and miserable,” his father squeezed past lips stiffened by frigid winds blasting the lift, the chair rocking with each gust. Gooch idly digested his father’s take on Pogo while looking at the sheer drop beneath the tips of his skis, imagining what the land below looked like in the days of miners and Indians. The history of Snavely Pogo, the town, and the hotel became a constant topic of conversation between Gooch and his father, especially when the two of them shared a day alone on Chi-Chi’s double-black diamonds, or Forest Service fire breaks. After stripping away gloves and goggles, they’d puzzle over facts and evidence. Mostly just the two of them. Mother was a blue slope skier at best and had lost affection for snow and cold with each passing year; Kris was overly-cautious, always overthinking the terrain ahead; and, getting April onto the slopes was like trying to put a sweater on a cat. Gramps usually stayed in the lodge, playing gin with the other shuttle drivers. When his father wasn’t making extra money as a ski instructor, Gooch and his dad were left to themselves on the slopes, the old man blasting down the mountain with moves that made other skiers stop and watch. Both talking town history in moments shared on the lift, while shedding gear, or after one of them spilled out and needed time to gather nerves back into a tight frame. Sometimes, his father talked about his childhood, his time in the Army, and his days on the family farm.

“Your Papa-san used to say, ‘I don’t know what’s fun about sticks on your feet in that snow.’ He and your uncles didn’t understand what I felt in these mountains. For them, it was all about work and getting the most out of country that’s pretty particular about what gets to grow. And we all worked our butts off, but there’s not much to do but ski after snow got everything covered. My brothers Hero and Rye were into school sports, so neither of em cared much for skiing or the cold and snow.”