My “check engine” light came on last Thursday, but it wasn’t like I was surprised. A few months ago I heard a report on NPR that the 3 months/3,000 miles mantra for changing your oil no longer applied to cars that had been made in the last 5 to 7 years. Apparently, cars are built now to need oil changes every 10,000 to 16,000 miles. Good news for most; bad news for me. That’s how long I usually waited to get my oil changed when I was following the  3,000-mile rule. With the new guidelines, I’ve created my own mathematical equivalent. Up until a few days ago, I thought I’d be able to make it to at least 30,000 miles before I would have to change my oil again.

Um….I was incorrect.

So, I’ll take care of this in the days ahead, probably even Monday or Wednesday. I know that, once I get a fresh few pints of oil running through my car’s veins, every little thing’s gonna be all right.

My own internal “check muse” light came on a few days ago, as it had been too long since I took the time to stop by the Bean Hollow in historic Ellicott City and share good coffee and even better words with a good friend. We’ve been meeting on a monthly basis, for the most part, and sharing our own work as well as what we’ve experienced in attending conferences and readings as well as entering competitions.

A month is a good span of time where each of us is fueled by the discussion, but for reasons mostly beyond our control, we’ve had to cancel several of our monthly meetings. In fact, I believe the last time we met was at the end of the school year last June. Far too long to deprive the muse of such nourishment.

We met for only 90 minutes or so yesterday. He talked of his recent successes with his playwriting, not to mention the completion of his first novel; I talked of my shift in focus from giving to taking, so that I may give a little differently in the months and years to come. After two glasses of iced tea, one mug of black Hollow Blend coffee, and a bagel with hummus (let’s not forget the yummy vegan chocolate espresso chip cookie, too), we both left filled in a different way, motivated to carry on another month with our writing, our vehicle that gets us creatively from one place to another, perhaps a little more safely than we realize.

Personally, it’s more than all that it ever seems to be on the surface when we are there and right after we leave. In the bigger picture, it’s the muse maintenance I need to keep going with the belief that there is a genuine, inherent importance in what I am doing. It’s not about fame, or success, or recognition or even acceptance; it’s about moving on to the next piece that needs to be born, shared, experienced, so that the next idea, the next work, can have its time, too.

First and foremost, I’m really creeped out that the dude who made the ouija board in the first place was from Baltimore. Did anybody else know that?

Second and a little less than foremost, I went to a school with a Fuld.

Third and most foremost, I’m really digging here in the old memory bank to see if I ever said or did or wished anything negative toward good ol’ Nancy. If I did, may this serve as the apology to trump all apologies. Nancy, please don’t ouija me. Please. I am a beggin’ ya. Down on my hands and knees I am. I promise I’ll undo the mean, hateful middle-school things stupid boys do to girls. Promise like I’ve never promised before….

Ok. The real deal is, I heard this little line out of one of Sheryl Crow’s songs (shock! I know!)–you know, the song that says a change’ll do ya good, and it got me thinking about Carl’s challenge, the serendipity of the blogosphere and love and all that good stuff, and how we’re all connecting on a level that we once thought to be truly mysterious and outright terrifying.

Do you remember the first time you tried out the ouija board? Sister’s room, with her friends, and I was the little tagalong. They had lights out, maybe a candle or some nightlight making everything all spooky, and they’d ask the board a question, and there it’d go. That little pointer thing would zip around that board so fast with the answers nobody knew what to think. We were too young to think of things like power of suggestion or the sheer will or desire to create a little drama in the dark. To us, that ouija board was connecting us with somebody we knew nothing about in a world we’d never visited.

Kinda the way I feel about a lot of you out there. Here I am, blogging away, chatting with so many of you as if you’re across the street–no, even more intimately–and yet there’s a mysteriousness to it all. There’s a stir of the dark (in the sense of the unknown) side that, until now, I never realized.

Isn’t it true, though? Online, we become a little closer to our true selves, we reach out to each other and the responses we get are often deep, startling, genuine. When we were kids we longed to ask the deep, dark questions about life and have them answered. Now that we’re older, we get to do it all over again, but this time, we don’t seem as surprised when we get a response. We embrace it. We reciprocate with more questions, more genuine words that capture the soul of who we truly are–often surprising ourselves because we’ve been in a machinistic, plastic way for so long. We’ve learned to put on the layers to protect ourselves. We’re afraid to say what we really think about others, about the world, about ourselves. And so we become cordial clones of an image of what the world believes we should be to promote a peaceful and gentle people.

Huh.

I say we all get on our ouija blogs and continue to step out. I embrace individuality, not cloning. I wanna continue to hear the you in your words and not what everybody else wants you to say. We do enough of that in our day-to-day business.

I want to think that, if I were to ask ol’ ouija right now if there’s a genuine connection between us all that transcends that rather traditional How-Do-You-Do, I’d get a quick shot up to Mr. Sun in that top left corner, where Y.E.S. awaits.

And while you’re at it on the board, ask if Nancy and I are ok. I just can’t muster up the courage to put that one to ol’ ouija right now. . . .

A few years ago, I picked up this book (Staying Healthy with the Seasons, by Elson M. Haas, M.D., Celestial Arts Press, 1981) as a companion work to a few Taoist books on health and balance. When it comes to the seasons, I am quite sensitive to their intense peaks as well as their transitions. Unfortunately, for most of my life I have found myself drifting from the opportunities of balance during the most critical times. Instead of embracing the changes of the season and allowing my body to flow with those changes, I have worked against them, often putting my system into a counterproductive position where my actions (or inactions, in many cases), were antithetical to the natural changes around me.
Haas’ book does a good job of understanding how important it is that your body and mind are in sync with the seasonal peaks and transitions; by taking the initiative to care for yourself in various ways at different times of the year (including the food you eat, the activities you do, and the parts of your body that you cleanse), you and your environment become natural partners to handle both the extremes and the changes with complete adaptation.

Haas writes:

Change is an inherent process in our lives and possibly the only “truth” in the universe. If you adapt yourself to the changes that come with the seasons, you will maintain health. You must gain control of your internal climates (emotions) and stay protected from the external climates. Maintaining a healthy state depends especially on a balance of outward activities and regular, inward-directed activities. (126)

Haas predictably breaks the book into seasonal sections with several appendices for personal evaluation and growth. In each section, he provides an overview of how our bodies are changing with the upcoming season and where our focus needs to be in preparing for that change.

In the section “Autumn,” Haas focuses on the natural and familiar aspects of the fall season, where we all prepare for the upcoming winter.

It’s time to clear away finished projects and open up to the inner wisdom that you can experience in activities like contemplation, writing, reading, and nurturing your family as part of your preparation for the depths of winter. You will then feel a lot better and this potentially difficult transition will be easier. . . .Through a daily discipline of inner attention and physical exercise, you can create a more open, resilient, and supple body; a mentally and physically relaxed state; and a stronger resistance to disease. (126)

Haas identifies “Metal” as the primary element to focus on in autumn, and he emphasizes the need for cleansing of both the lungs and the large intestine in the early days of this season. This allows you to prepare fully for the winter, where we find ourselves more susceptible to disease due to spending more time in smaller, enclosed environments where the spreading of germs is more likely.

Much of this book is common sense, really, if you follow the natural patterns of the seasons in your area. As I read through the book, I didn’t experience any life-changing epiphanies; instead, I found myself constantly nodding, agreeing with Haas, and recognizing the simplicity in taking care of ourselves if we align our own transitions with the changing of the seasons.

Short Story Sunday Peril no. 1: “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”

Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Date of Publication: 1845 (Illustration by Harry Clarke, 1919)

I have to be honest. I chose this story as my first Sunday Peril read because the title character’s name sounded so much like Voldemort. I was curious to see if there were any similarities from the story that J.K. Rowling might have pulled from Poe’s work to create Voldemort’s character. There are virtually no similarities to write of, unfortunately, with the exception that both characters seem to be in that thin space between life and death, where death is suspended through a variety of means.

But enough of Voldemort. Let me get to this story.

Poe uses such precise and often scientifically accurate language to tell this story that, for some time following its simultaneous publication in 1845 in American Review: A Whig Journal and Broadway Journal, many people believed the story to be true. When he revealed that, indeed, it was a work of pure fiction, it immediately received the label of “hoax.” The story has been published subsequently in various anthologies, the first being The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which is the same text where I read this story.

The main character, a mesmerist who has a strong desire to do what he says nobody has ever claimed to do–put a person at death’s door in a mesmerized state to suspend the transition from life to death–finds the perfect candidate (Valdemar), and succeeds in placing him in the trance just before he dies. What happens then, Poe describes, is something that he believes, reaches “a point of this narrative at which every reader will be startled into positive disbelief.”

In many ways, we are. But Poe establishes this not by some grandiose parade of near-dead people rising from Valdemar’s body on his death bed. Such overstatement would push this story into the world of make-believe. Instead, Poe, a master at the art of specificity, brings the terror to life with the smallest of details signifying the most terrifying possibilities that each of us may imagine when being with loved ones on the brink of death.

It is no wonder that this story was taken as fact when it was first published. Poe uses scientific jargon in describing the state of Valdemar:

The left lung had been for eighteen months in a semi-osseous or cartilaginous state, and was, of course, entirely useless for all purposes of vitality. The right, in its upper portion, was also partially, if not thoroughly, ossified, while the lower region was merely a mass of purulent tubercles, running one into another. Several extensive perforations existed; and, at one point, permanent adhesion to the ribs had taken place.

Clearly, Poe earns credibility with such a factual approach (in fact, the entire piece is written as a means of setting the record straight to put supposed rumors to rest).

I read stories like this one and I yearn to find similar short works that demand credibility, that are not so laden with emotion and inaction. I’ve been told that such stories are no longer publishable. If we’re not publishing such quality fiction as what Poe wrote 150 years ago, it suggests we have become a very lazy mass of readers with little or no expectations for quality or accuracy.

In all fairness, though, I have to go to Borders or Barnes & Noble today and pick up a copy of Glimmer Train or some other reputable pub of short fiction and see what they’re printing these days….Maybe I’m wrong on all of this, and if I am, then all the better. I’ll be the first to write about it in the days to come.

For the second year, Carl is holding his R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) reading challenge, running from September 1 through October 31. Last year, I skimmed over the post and thought it a great idea, but I never did much more than that. I might have read a few books that qualified for the challenge, but I never read any other reviews or offered my own take on the books I had read.

Now, I find it rather serendipitous that, just yesterday, I picked up Stephen King’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes and read a few of his short stories. I have been rather smitten with the short story lately, and I’ve been reading Jon Franklin’s book, Writing For Story, and thinking a lot about the history and the craft of writing such short works. Naturally, my thoughts gravitated toward Hemingway, Poe, Hawthorne, and others. The timing of Carl’s challenge is perfect.

So this year, thanks also to Janet and Heather and my new look, I feel quite inspired to take the plunge and participate fully in Carl’s R.I.P. II Challenge. I encourage you strongly to follow the link above to Carl’s post and consider joining the autumnal fun.

Ok. On to my chosen Perils and my list of books.

PERILS

PERIL THE FIRST:

The challenge here is to read four books in any subgenre of scary stories. I am blending the old with the new (and two of these are “obese” books, which is the requirement of PERIL THE SECOND). It was important for me to not read any books that I’ve read before, simply because there are so, so many books out there that I’ve never read (including many that keep the dust off the bottoms of my bookshelves). With that in mind, I have chosen the following:

1. IT, by Stephen King. I got this book when it first came out, but I never really cracked the spine (an aversion to clowns, maybe?). I didn’t see the TV movie, either. Didn’t talk to IT-heads about the storyline…So I’m in the dark, here (yikes…). IT weighs in at 1,126 pages, thusly qualifying it for a PERIL II book.

2. Black House, by Stephen King and Peter Straub. I’ve never read it, I don’t even know if a movie’s ever been based on it. It has been sitting in my library for six years, though, and it’s time I gave it a whirl. Black House is a measly 564 pages. Piece of ghostly wedding cake.

3. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Last year, I assigned this book to my seniors, but we never read it because of time constraints. I’ve always wanted to read this book, especially after reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula several years ago. It always seemed like the perfect “companion piece” to Stoker’s book. I’ve never seen the real movie, though I’m a fan of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein! At 336 pages, this is a good Saturday read (of course, that’s sans kids, sans yard work, sans phone calls….er–on second thought, a good three-day read, then!).

4. Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. This is one of Carl’s recommended books, and I bought it a few years ago with every intention to read it. Our basement flooded out, though, and the book floated downstream and out my basement door, along with a few other recently purchased books. I was driven toward this book after buying and loving the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical soundtrack by the same name (The 2004 original London cast included Michael Crawford of Phantom fame, so I was immediately drawn to it). Woman in White is 720 pages, just fat enough to qualify for a Peril II book, I believe!

PERIL THE THIRD

Carl’s third Peril is to read the shorter books between the monster obese works. Done.

SHORT STORY SUNDAY PERIL

Finally, Carl recommends reading a short story on the weekends and posting reviews. I’m going to dip from my much-loved Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination anthology. For so many reasons related to Baltimore, Poe is very close to my heart.

So, on with the challenge! Today, I begin reading IT, the slice of Whole Wheat Terror on top of my R.I.P. II Hoagie!