(And yes, you’re welcome for injecting that 1975 Van McCoy earworm into your brain.)
Every day, I see dudes in our apartment complex walking through the parking lot and down the hill to the busy commercial street below. They’re wearing knit shirts with restaurant logos and I’m assuming they’re going to work in the kitchens of said eateries.
In these hotter-than-the-hinges-on-the-gates-of-hell summer days, they’re walking to work, maybe because they don’t have cars and, luckily, there are so many places to eat nearby.
Increasingly, they’re turning out for work every day at some risk: getting swept up by state-sanctioned kidnappers.
Whatever the risks and whatever the meager rewards – nobody working in a restaurant kitchen is making more than minimum wage – they’re hustling every day.
They’re an echo of their parents and, honestly, my parents. My dad worked for 30 years in an auto parts factory. The days were hot and dirty and noisy; he was half-deaf by the time he retired. And when he retired, he ran pay-to-fish ponds down the hill and behind our house. Once a week he drove to another city, his old Chevy pickup with a waterproofed wooden tank that he built on the back, to pick up catfish and bluegill to stock the ponds. He’d owned and ran an apartment house years before I was born and sharpened saws after he retired.
My mom’s story was similar, and I tell some of it in my upcoming novel GHOST SHOW. She and her sisters gathered wild-growing plants near their little town in Tennessee – the place that inspired the town in my novel SEVEN ANGELS – to sell to reps of pharmaceutical companies. They collected the plants in burlap sacks and sold them, at the end of the day, for pennies.
My mom ran our 20-acre farm for those 30 years my dad worked in the factory. She cleaned houses and factories, a job I helped with before I started working in the newspaper business.
I have only a portion of the hard work, the sheer hustle, of my parents. Or those guys walking to work in a hot kitchen every day.
And I’m acutely aware of that.
“I need to work more and work longer hours if I’m gonna write all these books,” I said the other day.
“You know, you can take downtime,” the reply came.
And I do take down time. Too much of it. I need to work harder and smarter. I need to hustle.
As I write this, Word – a needy little bitch if ever there was one – is notifying me once again that I should update. Nevermind that I see these pleas when I’ve opened Word on my Macbook Pro and I’m trying to get some work done so no, I don’t plan on updating now.
Not to mention the number of times Google Chrome asks me to update.
I wouldn’t mind the updates if I thought they’d have a good outcome. But too often lately it seems like companies update their products – I’m not even talking about just tech products here – based on bad design.
Example: I had to buy a new Mr. Coffee coffeemaker recently when our old one – about seven years old – began leaking water I’d poured in. I got a new one because I didn’t relish the idea of getting electrocuted before I’d had my coffee.
So I picked out the basic model, which seemed to be the same 12-cup coffeemaker as I’d had and began using it. Immediately I noticed that the water level indicator is tucked away on the side, presumably to make the coffeemaker more narrow and more sleek. (Nevermind that I could only find it in black, which might hide coffee stains better than white but is harder to tell how much water you’ve poured in.) If I want to double-check how much water I’ve poured in, because of the place Mr. Coffee is tucked away in our tiny kitchen, I have to pull it forward on the counter and turn it to peer at it.
More annoying is a recent upgrade to my iphone – I bet you wondered wtf I was going to get to that – changed the way you can turn off notifications like the alarm indicator you see above.
In the past, the phone has offered a single button to tap to end an alarm or notification. Now you have to slide the notification.
No one at Apple thought about how hard this was to do with one hand. I can’t any longer turn off a notification casually with a single tap. Now I have to hold my phone in one hand and “swipe” with the other.
This change seemed to occur right about the time Apple introduced liquid glass, its “unified visual theme for the graphical user interfaces.”
Yes, by all means, you techboy schmucks, make apps and labels on your products transparent and harder to see.
You’d think someone could get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars – maybe millions in stock – to advise these companies on how not to piss off their low-vision or low-dexterity or low-mobility users?
I’m not sure what I’d be doing if I wasn’t writing.
Talking about that possibility with family members in town for a visit yesterday, one of them wondered what I’d be doing if I hadn’t kept writing when I took a buyout from the newspaper business seven years ago. I went on to write three novels, a couple more true crime books, 73 or 74 pieces for CrimeReads, 55 for another site, eight or 10 for another (now defunct) site, a few for a couple of other sites … plus dozens of press releases, short stories and more.
What would I do if I wasn’t writing?
Well, reading, of course. That’s been the oldest constant in my life (other than breathing and eating), from the Marvel Comics a friend gave me in the 1960s to books and stories aimed at young people.
But I can’t imagine a life without writing.
It seems to me that writing is not only the dominant optional privilege in my life but it could be the privilege that anyone can enjoy.
(This thought goes hand in hand with my belief that ir you write, you”re a writer, regardless if you are published or even disseminated in any way.)
The fundamental act of writing changed me. Decades of news writing made me think better and all the qualities that go with it, especially the ability to look at a circumstance critically.
I don’t think I’m a great writer. I think I am, at best, a clever writer and a sympathetic writer. Sometimes. Writing helps make me that.
And the best thing about writing is that you can do it at very little cost. Of course, thinking about writing is writing, in my opinion, and I’ve got this (aging) MacBook that lets me put together words.
But really, if I didn’t have that tool, i could write in a notebook or even scraps of paper.
Writing isn’t precious. Writing doesn’t care how much money you can afford to write.
For me, writing is in some ways the most consistent thread in my life. In many ways, it’s the most satisfying, but it’s certainly the longest-running and the one that feels among the most important.
It’s crazy how much time we spend – okay, how much time I spend – on social media. And even crazier is how influential social media is in our lives. It’s fractured in many ways from what it used to be and while I’m on most of the social platforms, I spend more time on BlueSky than anywhere.
This is, however, a story about two platforms from the detested Meta stable of social media, Facebook and Instagram.
I really don’t like the Meta platforms and I like their owner even less. But they’re where the eyeballs are, unfortunately. Facebook still drives far more traffic to newspaper sites, for example, than any other platform. Many, many times more.
Two examples from my recent postings prove that the platforms have a long reach.
I follow the actress Sarah Herrman on Instagram. She’s funny and posts videos not especially related to her film work, which included the recent film “Chili Finger,” but posts videos of her attempts at baking and cooking. Those videos often feature, off-screen, her mother, who appears to have an acerbic wit.
In a recent video, Herrman tells her mother that she received two requests from followers for pictures of her feet.
“Only two?” her mother replied, with a tinge of “you can do better than that” in her voice.
In the comments, I quoted her mother in a two-word-and-two-word only comment: “Only two?”
So far, 4,296 people have “liked” my comment.
Crazy.
More recently, I found copies from the mid-1970s of the “Star Trek Log” books, in which author Alan Dean Foster adapted the “Star Trek” animated series into short story and novella form.
I posted my picture on the Facebook page “Vintage Paperback Books.” It was my first post, so it’s not like I’m a favorite of the page’s followers.
But those vintage “Star Trek” fans are fans of the books, apparently. As of right now, since Saturday the post has accumulated 503 likes.
Again, crazy.
Those are examples of social media’s reach. There are other, better, more important and relevant examples.
If I’m ever swept away by a tornado, you can blame the authorities in Tennessee.
I appreciate that I can get notifications on my phone. They’re often helpful. I just wish I could choose when I want them to be helpful.
Notifications – letting us know we’ve got a text message or a new email or if bad weather is on the way or a public figure has kicked the bucket – are a way of life for many of us now, and I’m not going to disable all my notifications – which are called “push alerts” by many newspapers, or just a “push” – because they can be useful.
These thoughts are occasioned by a couple of obnoxious instances of push alerts or notifications in the past couple of days, some of these of the health app variety. Yes, thank you, phone, for letting me know my trend in walking has changed lately. Did you happen to notice how rainy it was? And yes, thank you, other health app, for waking me up in the middle of the night to let me know of something that might otherwise have let me croak deep in peaceful slumber.
Part of my hate for pushes is that I’m obsessive enough to not only swipe them off my screen but actually go to my email inbox to delete the email that generated the push or, gasp, read it and even possibly respond.
(Don’t think we don’t understand that the Push Alert Industrial Complex is conspiring with our phone manufacturers to ensure we spend more time on our devices. It’s true. I read about it on the internet.)
Anyway, I’ve gradually over time changed my phone settings to end most push alerts from the authorities, who seem to abuse the tool.
The final push alert that broke the camel’s back was one recently that alerted me of a fatal shooting in Memphis, which is five hours and 47 minutes from me. Needless to say, this 2 or 3 a.m. push alert was not from a news outlet. It was from a state-run agency. I won’t comment on why this push was sent out but not why other fatal shootings are not sent out. You can guess.
So here I am, because the state insists on alerting me to things happening six hours away, perhaps expecting me to run down to the street at 3 a.m. and scan passing vehicles for the suspect, without any means of being woken in case of forest fire or flood or tornado or hurricane.
I’ve noted on social media in recent days that we recently spent a little time in Muncie, Indiana, promoting THAT OCTOBER and getting together with family and friends and looking around the city that was my lifelong home until we moved to Tennessee almost three years ago.
It made perfect sense to promote the book there because 1.) more people know me there than here and B.) the book is set in my version of Muncie as it was in 1984. The novel’s not a documentary, obviously, but it’s got the overall vibe of Muncie more than 40 years ago and the teenage characters do some of the same things my friends and I did in Muncie when we were that age or a little older – going to movies, watching MTV, going to house parties. I never prowled through a junkyard, I admit, but that part of the book was inspired by my late Uncle Si Stewart, who talked about when he took a shortcut home from school through a Muncie junkyard when he was a kid in the 1950s.
We get back to Muncie once or twice a year since we’ve moved down here, and I’m always so grateful that I get to see family and friends there and get to look around the city I knew so well and covered for the newspaper for most of my life.
I always come away with gratitude for the people I get to see, those that I get to meet and the places that are familiar to me.
But I always feel sad when I’m there. I’m nearly swamped with melancholy while I’m there and for a while after.
It’s not just that the city has changed. It has, and not just in the three years we haven’t lived there. It was changing most of the time I lived there too.
I always explain to people who don’t know Muncie as the city where David Letterman went to college, where the first half of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was set, where Garfield the cartoon cat was created and is still produced and where Ball canning jars were made dating back to the 1890s.
It’s the city where four true crime books I co-wrote with Douglas Walker, my frequent collaborator at Muncie’s newspapers, are set. There’s no getting around that Muncie – one of several Midwestern cities that were nicknamed “Little Chicago” – was sometimes a violent and murderous place.
It’s a city that in some ways peaked when I was young, as young as the teenage protagonists of THAT OCTOBER. Its population peaked at just over 76,000 in 1980 and has fallen regularly since to an estimated 64,000 now. Most of the big industrial employers went away, some of the most recent in the 2000s, although luckily there’s some stopping of the bleeding thanks to growth in employment in the education and healthcare fields.
Still, Muncie has struggled and is struggling. The city can’t keep the streets paved. The mall is all but dead. Some, not all, of the government leadership seems determined to wipe out all the welcoming efforts that groups and private individuals have made over the years. And at the same time there’s decades-long efforts to bolster downtown, there’s a proposal to pull the last few hundred government workers out of downtown and put them in an ill-advised government center miles to the south, outside the city limits. (When one of the downtown government buildings was being built in the early 1990s, there was discussion of metal detectors inside the doors. An attorney who oversaw the project said it was insulting to frisk people who were on their way to pay their taxes. Yet here we are, decades later, and metal detectors are a way of life because life is cheap and murder is easy. That said, I think it’s insulting to tell people who pay their taxes that they can’t even pay those taxes or go to court or talk to their representatives without leaving the city, ffs.)
It’s depressing to contrast the city currently with the city as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. I don’t even get into a lot about how thriving the city was in 1984 in THAT OCTOBER, but as strange and upsetting as it was for murder and mystery to envelop the city and the young protagonists of my book, 1984 in the real-life Muncie was a boom time. Life in the city had peaked, in some ways, and in the decades since, it has not struggled its way back.
My friend Tammy told me this morning, as I was ruminating on all this, that my hometown’s struggles reflect this country’s stuggles and she’s right, of course. I take that as personally as I take what’s happened to Muncie.
One of the consistently amusing sights around Muncie is a public art project from a few years ago that prompted artists to decorate traffic light control boxes. The art was contributed by a lot of different artists and ranged from the beautiful to the abstract to the whimsical like the “Stay Weird, Muncie,” message above. I took that picture our first day back and I’ve thought about it a lot.
I’d like to think that my hometown can be weird, interesting, welcoming, fulfilling, progressive but comforting and I like to think it can be a good hometown, either for someone who’s still living there, someone who’s just visiting or someone who’s come home again.
I’d like to think that, and maybe take comfort from that once I shake this profound melancholy I feel. But I’m not sure its possible.
Every once in a while, I’m taken aback when a writer who I kinda thought I knew isn’t actually who I thought they were. I’m not talking about any kind of betrayal here, dire or otherwise. I knew them only as a pen name and didn’t realize that fact.
There are a lot of worse identity crises out there, such as what happens when you deadname someone. But I still get surprised when Facebook suggests I send a friend request to someone and I don’t recognize the name but I know the face.
I realize, stupidly, belatedly, that they publish under a pen name.
I am, unfortunately, 50-some years past the time I could have used a pen name. That’s because in a very small circle of people, I’ve been known since I was in high school. That’s when my first article, under my byline, was published in the newspaper. I haven’t been out of print since 1977.
And when you have an unusual last name like mine, you’re pretty easy to find. Remember the days we were all listed in phone books, no less city directories? (The latter, if you don’t remember them at all, were phone book-style directories that let you look someone up not only by name but by address and, in reverse-directory style, by phone number. And when you looked them up, it told what they did for a living. I’m not sure city directories were any worse than the many ways you can find out about someone now, but they were handy tools for newspaper reporters and probably nightmarish for everyone else.)
(I literally remember using the city directory to find people who, according to court records, might have been victimized by a corrupt judge, some willingly. It made for some awkward conversations when someone came to the door, let me tell you.)
So I’ve never been able to take refuge in anonymity. I know this was frustrating for me and for my family, particularly when someone would call on our home phone – remember those? – to give me grief about something I’d written.
My relative high profile, as compared to people who didn’t work for a newspaper, led to some pretty awkward moments. Sometime I’ll recount one for you over a beer or coffee. You might throw your drink in my face when you hear it, though.
Anyway, it’s too late now for me to adopt an anonymous personna like the superhero the Question, pictured above. Moving to another state has given me some relief from running into people I wrote about, though.
If I get that kind of “hey, it’s that guy” notoriety again, maybe I’ll start wearing a full-face mask and fedora.
I promise I won’t give you a daily countdown, but how could I resist a nice round period of time like one month?
On June 1, my 1984-set crime novel THAT OCTOBER will be available. My editor Jill Blocker and artist Sara McKinley and I have really reached the finish line in this self-publishing journey – don’t all journeys have finish lines? – and all that remains now it to get the word out.
The paperback is available for pre-order on various sites now. Before June 1, we should have the electronic version available also.
I’m doing a couple of talks back in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana – inspiration for the city of Middletown, where THAT OCTOBER takes place – in June. although I don’t expect that to be of interest to many of you unless you’re in the Muncie area or somewhere in the Midwest with a lot of time on your hands.
In the next month, I’ll tell you a little about THAT OCTOBER and the world when it takes place: A time when high school students should have been spending all their time thinking about dates, football, seeing the biggest movies – “The Terminator” was new in October 1984, and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” would come out within a couple of weeks – MTV and Halloween.
Instead, the six high school friends in THAT OCTOBER are thinking about the murder of one of their classmates and the taking of another.
And they don’t understand why the adults in town seem unconcerned or, at best, evasive when the friends urge them to DO SOMETHING to solve their friend David’s murder and bring Lee Ann home.
Jackie and Michael, new siblings in a blended family, and their friends Sammi, Toni, Elmer and William push forward with their own investigation, which follows a trail rooted half-way around the world, in a time before any of them were born.
I’ll share a bit more as we move forward. I hope you come along for the ride.
For decades – heck, centuries – nostalgia has been a strong force in society. When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I loved old Universal horror films and the Marx Brothers. In the 1990s or 2000s, one of my barely-out-of-college fellow reporters surprised me once by mentioning James Dean. When I told her I was surprised she knew who the Hoosier movie icon was, the told me she’d had posters of Dean in her room at college.
So nostalgia has always been with us. Presently, look no further than all the nostalgia channels like MeTV that offer old TV shows, or modern-day series set in the past. We’re currently watching and enjoying “Call the Midwife” on Netflix, a series about, well, midwives in 1950s London (at least early on; the show moves forward in time in subsequent seasons).
Everything from “Happy Days” – which capitalized on 1950s nostalgia in the 1970s – to the History Channel – when it was less about knife-forging competitions and more about history documentaries – appeal to those of us who want to visit the past.
Make no mistake: The past, even the recent past, was not a good time for women, queer people and people of color. (Those times are hardly better now.) I always roll my eyes when people today long for “a simpler time” which usually means a time when people who looked like them were just fine and everybody else was getting the short end of the stick or worse.
So even while I’m enjoying the occasional retreat into the pop culture of the past as well as pop culture that is set in the past, before the Internet and cell phones and various threats to our way of life, I feel guilty about it.
Shouldn’t I be alert and tuned in to all the threats and transgressions we face right now? Is it advisable to dwell in the past when confronted with an uncertain future?
I bet you’re expecting me to say that it’s fine to take the occasional foray into the past for nostalgia’s sake. But I’m honestly conflicted about doing this. Yes, I know our problems will be waiting for us when we return from the depths of nostalgia, so we might as well take a breather once in a while.
But I honestly want to know: Is nostalgia the opiate of the masses, as was once said about religion? Is is deadly? Or is it a welcome relief from the walking feeling of dread of today?
keithroysdon 