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On the first day of this month a Learjet 60 crossing Florida on its way to the Bahamas suffered a catastrophic loss of control and plunged in a matter of seconds from over thirty thousand feet directly into the ground, killing all nine people aboard. By the most amazing turn of luck, despite the crash taking place in the city of West Palm Beach, Florida, and on its streets during the day, apparently no one on the ground was killed in the accident. The horrific event was, in part, captured on video from a driver’s dashboard camera with one frame showing a heavily motion-blurred image of the doomed aircraft nose down just above the street where it crashed. That image, the barely discernible outline of the sleek jet frozen in its final moment before impact, haunts my mind.

The seven passengers and two crew of the aircraft occupy my thoughts and my imagination. It is all too easy, so easy in fact that the process spontaneously occurs, for me to envision the terror that they suffered in their final moments alive. The fright as the jet encountered thunderstorm-generated turbulence, the screams as it not just fell but dove from high above Florida, the g-forces that pushed and pulled on them, all this comes easily to my mind and fills my heart with deep, deep sorrow.

There are people, vile, petty, and heartless, who have already seized on the gender of the crew, using this tragedy for their small-minded political purposes. I pity these poor, damaged specimens of humanity that appear to lack the basic empathy to have any consideration for others or anything beyond their own narrow objectives.

I do not know, nor do I pretend to know, what caused this terrible event. That is for the experts to determine, and that process is not a quick or easy endeavor. What I know is how I feel about the people, the family aboard, their friends traveling with them to a sunny beach, the nanny working her job, and the absolute and all-consuming fear that defined the end of their lives. I feel this because my mind, my riotous imagination, refuses to let the pictures of what may have transpired in their doomed cabin leave my thoughts. This happens very often with these very public tragedies and the too-frequent scenes of mass murder that take place in our deeply damaged nation. It is these visualizations that can disrupt my sleep, bringing about sorrow and depression.

But it is not without its blessing.

The same unrequested talent that envisions what it may be like to be caught up in such terrible events is the same process that brings to me characters, settings, and concepts that I explore in fiction. The pain I feel when I think about what reality has visited upon real persons I can transfer to the people who only exist in my mind. When I write about characters in danger of losing their lives, this empathy and ability to put myself so completely in another’s point of view becomes an asset and not just something to endure. This empathic viewpoint extends far beyond just fear and pain: it allows me to walk in the shoes of a woman in love with her man, of a gay man seeing the joy in discovering another who reflects his attraction, and to feel the thrill of skydiving, though that is a hobby I am far from engaging in. The benefits extend far beyond the artistic: when issues of political policy come to the fore, it is far easier to imagine what something might do to lives that are not my own.

I would not trade away that imagination that allows me to create whole worlds and peoples for the poor peace of being soulless and unfeeling in the face of tragedies. Nothing good comes for free, and the price of the best and worst things in life is very rarely in cash; it is in what they do to you as a person.

I desperately hope that something can be learned from this terrible crash in Florida that makes the world a little safer for flight, and I will continue to bear the emotional weight of this cursed and blessed mind.

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November, and in particular this November, is a strange time of change and transition. Spooky season has passed, and for most people the fascination with all things horror has passed as well, leaving the macabre, the grotesque, the gruesome, and the frightening to us true believers. The annual changing of the clocks returns, this time turning the hands back one hour so that the night follows the end of work so much more closely that many of us return to our homes in darkness. How much more fitting for those of who keep the spirit of spooky season year-round.
In the United States this is the end of our prolonged and endurance-testing election season, which more and more is not a season but a nearly endless state of affairs. For our English cousins it is a time of bonfires and fireworks as they celebrate an unsuccessful coup so many centuries past.
For writers, November used to be the time of community, when scribblers of all sorts of talent and competence entered into the contest to compose a novel of at least 50,000 words by the 30th of the month, but sadly controversy has ended that community and no collective has yet replaced it. I tried once, many years ago, to participate, but that grueling pace was one I could not sustain.
For me personally, November is a time when the workload at my day job begins to expand exponentially. My division deals with members enrolling onto our Medicare Advantage plan. During most of the year the work is steady and sometimes even quite slow, but each year the enrollments for the following calendar year begin to arrive in a tsunami of work. Overtime becomes available and often right on through first month of the new year there is lots and lots of work to be had. I make quite a bit of cash, but it is taxing, and November is the start of that marathon.
This is also the month when I revisit the Estonian folk horror film, Rainer Sarnet’s November, a dazzling and hypnotic black-and-white work of art that is more vibes than plot, more atmosphere than story, and endlessly fascinating.
The days are growing shorter, the nights are growing longer, the air cools, and in this time that so many find bleak I find a renewed vitality: welcome, November.

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So, Tuesday I reported to the county courthouse in El Cajon for jury duty. In my decades of living in San Diego County I have been summoned to jury duty a number of times, more than half a dozen, perhaps more than ten; I truly do not have an accurate count. In all those instances I have never served on a jury panel, often never making it as far as being questioned by one or more of the lawyers before being excused.

Yesterday I was in the second pool of prospective jurors called to a courtroom along with more than forty others. Voir dire took up the entire day and continues today. I have been neither empaneled nor excused. Because the case is still “live” and I may still serve on its jury, I cannot reveal anything about the parties involved or the nature of the trial, but if the past holds any predictive power, I think I am likely to be cut free a few hours into today.

As it is, that leaves little time for writing thoughtful blog posts, so I may be absent from this space for the next several days.

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From ages 10 through 19 I lived in the hot, humid, mosquito-infested state of Florida. During those nine years, I experienced one hurricane, David, that passed directly over my town. The eye passed over my house, so I got the full show of winds from one direction, a fast and sudden lull to calm and clear, then the wall of wind returning from the opposite direction. David had been a lethal storm, but by the time it reached my home it had become a baby of a hurricane, barely reaching Category 2, but it was sufficient enough that I felt no curiosity to see a stronger storm for myself. After a brief stint in the United States Navy, a career that I was not suited for at all, I moved to San Diego, California, which has been my home ever since.

California boasts its own set of natural disasters to frighten and terrify its population with, chiefly earthquakes and wildfires, both of which I have had some experience with. I commented yesterday about watching the wall of a Denny’s ripple with waves that were like wind-driven water. In the early ’90s a wildfire in the eastern reaches of the county grew so large and so destructive that the sky turned red with smoke and ash, prompting a friend to comment that he suspected that was what it was like living in Mordor.

But do you know what I did not expect at all from Southern California?

A hurricane.

Currently off the western coast of Mexico, Hurricane Rachel spins harmlessly out over the waters of the Pacific. This is the time of the year when tropical storms, cyclones, and hurricanes form over the usually peaceful Pacific Ocean. Jet streams and coriolis forces bend the tracks of these eastern Pacific storms to the west so that they expend their energies usually far from shore, though occasionally Hawaii feels the forces of such a storm. If the storm develops further south, the coasts of Central and South America are in the path of these systems, but more often it is the Atlantic storms that threaten.

Rachel, a smallish hurricane, is currently west of the tip of Baja California. Due to a strange, unlikely, and bizarre set of weather conditions, partially driven by this year’s enormous El Niño, the storm is expected to turn North and East, driving towards the West Coast. As it crosses the relatively cooler waters closer to land, the experts expect it to degrade from a hurricane, sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or more, to a tropical storm, winds of 39 miles per hour or greater.

The projected cone of the storm’s track indicates that its landfall could be south, in Baja California, or as far north as Orange County or San Diego. If it takes this more northerly track, Rachel is expected to make landfall late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning.

My friends, San Diego is not built for hurricanes or tropical storms, or even a lesser tropical depression. In San Diego, the trifling little rains that Floridians experience nearly every afternoon during the summer closes roads and knocks out traffic lights. There are roads near my home here in Mission Valley that have gates installed because mild California storms cause the San Diego River to escape its banks and flood out the streets, forcing their closure. This town is not prepared for sustained high winds and heavy rainfall.

Fortunately, I reside atop a high hill overlooking the Eastern end of Mission Valley, and as such my home, is not subject to flooding, but everything below me is going to have a rough time of it if Rachel comes.

I had a friend, a San Diego native, as rare as that beast is, who expressed more than once that he would have loved to have seen a hurricane come to this city. He passed away far too young two years ago, but if there is an afterlife, and I do not believe that there is, he’s watching with amusement.

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Before I can get to the song and its lying lyricist, I have to take you on a little side trip down the genre of adult contemporary music of the 1970s.

In 1977 Debby Boone daughter, of Pat Boone, (kids, you’ll need to skip your parents and go straight to your grandparents to ask about him) released the chart-topping song You Light Up My Life, written by Joe Brooks. The song held for 10 weeks at number one on the charts helping propel Debby Boone to a Grammy for Best New Artist. The next year she followed up her tremendous success with the song California, also by Brooks. This time the tune languished, never rising above 50 on Billboard’s Hot 100, relegating Miss Boone to being the subject of Trivial Pursuit questions; but hang on to that second swing for the top of the charts because it utters the lie that has stayed with me since my move to California 44 years ago.

For the past several days Southern California, including San Diego, has suffered terribly high, unseasonable temperatures, breaking records as we have reached triple digits in early October. What has brought the baking environment is a weather condition which popular myth erroneously asserts is named after the famed Mexican military commander Santa Anna, but is really more tied to the name of the mountain range, a Santa Ana.

Driven by high pressure out Nevada way, Santa Ana wind come over the inland mountains to the east, drops from high altitudes to sea level and blows hard toward the ocean. Following the ideal gas law, the air, as it compresses to sea level pressures, rapidly rises in temperature, creating the hot, very dry, and strong winds of the Santa Ana, which are not unlike having a blast furnace blowing directly into your face.

Now, we come back to Joe Brooks, a New York native who apparently never lived in the subject of his song, California. In 1978, living in the soggy wet heat of Florida, I listened to Debby Boone singing about that distant and near-mythical state of California. (Yes, as a teenager in the 70s, I listened to Adult Contemporary radio; there is a reason I never went to a prom.) She possessed a pleasant voice, used it well, and if one set aside her overt evangelistic religiosity her music suited me just fine. Now, almost 50 years later, fragments of the melody for California remain in my head, but one line, the lie written by Joe Brooks and voiced by Debby Boone, echoes in my skull.

Where the winds called Santa Ana make you feel like you belong …

Belong? Belong where? Hell? Dante’s Inferno?

For over 40 years I have lived in San Diego, experiencing winter storms that tore away large piers, earthquakes that made the wall of a Denny’s ripple like wind-driven water, and blindingly bright and hot summers, but never once during a Santa Ana did I feel like I belonged. I have a quite intense memory of riding my motorcycle east on I-8, directly into Santa Ana winds, with the sensation that my face was being cooked off of my skull. The past week has been a more tolerable Santa Ana, not because the weather condition is any more pleasant but because I now live and work in air-conditioned comfort.

Mr. Brooks, the phrase may have solved meter issues you struggled with in the song California, but it is also a near-Platonic ideal of the expression that one should ‘know what you write.’

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Anyone who suffers from migraines knows that they have a set of stimuli that can, but not always, ignite a dreaded migraine. These triggers can be visual, flashing lights or patterns, taste, consuming the wrong sort of food, tactile, a sensation that sparks the terrible pain, olfactory, a powerful scent can trigger one for some people (marijuana prompts one for me), or auditory, a particular sound, set of sounds, or sometimes sounds in the just wrong frequency.

Sounds are my bane; for me the noise created by chewing or speaking with one’s mouth open can start a migraine. As a child, without a diagnosis for my condition, one of my criteria for true wealth was having a place to eat where I never would hear anyone else chewing. Along with the food noises, sounds at the high frequencies can also be trouble for me.

The trouble with migraine triggers, or at least mine, is that they are terribly inconsistent in causing the headaches. What might set one off on Monday is utterly benign on Tuesday. I can say that sounds at the treble end of the stereo might start a migraine but that is not always the case. Which means while avoiding the triggers is preferable, even when I can’t, that doesn’t mean exposure is a pain sentence.

Last Friday I got some more experience in that department.

At the day job we were having our ‘All Hands’ meeting on Zoom where achievements were celebrated and the plans for the next very busy quarter were disclosed to everyone in the Medicare department. These large meetings can span two and a half hours or more, but having them on Zoom has been much better than the pre-pandemic routine of crowding into a massive hall for them. So, there I was, at my desk, headset on listening to the presentations when a new presenter came on and BOOM, migraine trigger.

This presenter’s mic clipped to just the wrong part of the treble frequencies. My head began pounding almost immediately.  Their presentation wasn’t very long but the length no longer mattered. I held on for another 30 minutes or so, hoping, vainly, that once the trigger passed, I might slowly wind down from the migraine, but the inflammation in my brain refused to cooperate. I did not last to the end of the meeting before I had to crawl back home, double dose on my prescription medication, and suffer for another eight and a half hours before the cycle broke.

It is the inconsistency of the trigger that I find so maddening. If it always caused a headache, I could always avoid or take steps, such as taking my meds ahead of time, to stay safe. This works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t. Still, I know I can count myself as more fortunate than many. My migraine do not come with visual distortions or powerful waves of nausea that many suffer, but still, the sensation of having my head split open and lava poured in is a less than pleasant one.

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For well more than a decade I have been utilizing CPAP therapy to treat my severe sleep apnea. While most people take a couple of weeks or even more to adjust to sleeping with a mask that forces air into the passage throughout the night in order to keep those airways open, I found relief from the terrible effects of sleep apnea from the very first night. In all those years that I have strapped a mask to my face I have only gone without it a couple of times, when the machine or power had failed. CPAP had made a radical improvement in my life from the night in the sleep lab when I was first exposed to the therapy.

But it has not been without its own issues.

I am what is called an ‘active sleeper’ in that I toss and turn constantly throughout the night. I am asleep but I am quite active. Once when I was something like seven or eight, I awoke not having been roused by my mother for school and with a black eye that I had given myself by some unfortunate combination of thrashing and falling from the bed. Because I also tend to breathe through my mouth in my sleep my CPAP therapy requires the use of a full-face mask that goes over the bridge of my nose and down across my chin with the air hose connecting directly below my nose. Using the full-face mask as an active sleeper has always been challenging. Having a hose stand that functions much like an IV stand has helped, dropping the hose directly down to my head and helping avoid, but not entirely, getting the hose tangled as I toss and turn. Maintaining a good seal across the nose was another trouble spot. When the seal wasn’t good there the pressurized air often blew directly into one of my eyes, causing me to wake the next day with seriously dry eye.

A few months ago, I came across a new, at least new to me, design for a full-face CPAP mask. Instead of going over the bridge of the nose, the mask fits under the nose with either ports or plugs that feed air directly to the nostrils and a much smaller portion that covers the mouth. Tubing connects this smaller mask design around the face to a port at the top of the patient’s head where the supply hose connects by way of a rotating connection.

Two weeks ago, when the schedule allowed, I called my durable medical equipment provider and requested to switch to the Resmed F30i and they sent me this new mask design with a 30-day trial period that would allow me to switch back should the new mask fail to meet my needs.

I have gotten all the benefits I expected from the F30i, no leaks because this one no longer tries to go over the bridge of my larger than average nose, and complete freedom to toss, turn, and rotate in the night without ever getting the supply hose wrapped around something.

There have been some downsides, but they were part of the adjustment period. The most acute was that after the first night of having plugs in my nostrils, the next morning my nostrils felt as if they had been set aflame. My nostrils have a large number of nerve endings and having a foreign object in them for 7 or 8 hours certainly irritates them. However, two weeks on and my nostrils seem to have nearly fully adjusted, with only minor touchiness that seems less each morning.

All in all, the Resmed F30i has proven to be the upgrade to my therapy that I had hoped it would be.

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In 2010 I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. The severe part of that diagnosis really surprised me. To treat the condition where you stop breathing due to obstructions in your airway while you sleep, I was prescribed CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) therapy, where, by wearing a mask over your nose and sometimes your mouth as well, air is forced into your airways, keeping the flaccid tissues from closing off your breathing. I am told that many people can take weeks to adjust to the therapy, but I took to it from the first night in the sleep lab where I stayed overnight as they monitored and adjusted the machine.

Before CPAP I struggled to be wakeful and fully alert throughout the day with many a Sunday requiring that I retreat to the bedroom for a 60 or 90 minute nap, a situation that vanished literally overnight.

Over the now many years I have been on this treatment I have learned a number of ways to make it more comfortable and successful, using a holder that supports the hose from the machine to my mask allowing an active sleeper like myself to toss and turn and change positions with less trouble, using a full-face mask that covers both my nose and my mouth because I am such a mouth breather at night that not even a chinstrap can stop it. I also learned that any interruption in the therapy is felt instantly the next morning.

Which is why August 31st is going to be a trial for me.

We have been alerted by San Diego Gas and Electric that on that evening from about 10 pm until about 3 am, our entire complex will be without electric power while vital and overloaded equipment is replaced.

This has happened once before and on that night, I decamped from our condo and spent the evening in a local hotel proceeding directly to work from there the next morning but this is not really a great option this time around. WorldCon, the World Science Fiction Convention, will have just ended and it would be best to limit expenses following the hefty ones the convention will incur. On the bright side, I will have September 1st off so there is no need to be at my most alert the following morning.

I think the best that I can hope for is that I can go out to a movie that evening, come back around or just after midnight and hope that the work has been completed earlier than expected, a situation that my sweetie-wife’s co-worker reported happened with them when this same sort of repair took place in their neighborhood. And if not, well, I can put my mask on, go to bed as usual and when the power is restored the machine will detect my breathing and turn itself on.

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After some recent beta read feedback, I decided a few weeks ago to revisit my first horror novel The Wolves of Wallace Point for some minor revisions, edits, and corrections. The beta reader had enjoyed the novel but commented on some aspects that I thought were worth at least considering and since it has been a few years since I wrote the thing the only way to fairly evaluate this feedback was by reading the entire manuscript from front to back.

Plot, setting, and the mechanics of a story are pretty much the easiest things for me to craft, I work a little bit more on dialog, though this beta reader had praised that in this novel, and struggle the most with the apparently simple elements of titles and character names. I often joke that there is a blood-stain spot on the wall next to my desk where I routinely bash my head in search of those things. As such none of my novels have ever had titles for the chapters. Coming up with 20 or 30 titles was simply something hardly worth the effort.

While revisiting this book, which is written in the 1st person point of view, the character’s voice in chapter one leapt out with a title for it, A Priest at an Orgy. Once my fevered brain latched onto that concept I couldn’t shake it, but you can’t title only one chapter, either they all have titles or none of them do. So the process began that while I re-read the manuscript, making tiny adjustments here and there to the prose, I tried to keep my senses tuned for sardonic and ironic things that protagonist said or thought, like the orgy commentary, that might serve as a title for the chapters.

And now, 27 chapters later, I have titles for each and every one in the book. Most I am satisfied with, some I think I need to revisit again and see if something better doesn’t hide within the text, and a couple, like Fuck David Lynch and Camp Crystal Lake I am very happy with even if their applicability tickles only me.

Now, I have a new epilog to write, with a new ending sentence and mood that came to me last night and after that some serious thought about self-publishing the thing.