Aliens in the attic

I presented a story to my writing group last week. It was well-received, better than I expected, and I was given lots of constructive feedback, including suggestions to tighten it, expand it, and rewrite it in at least two completely different styles. I might just act upon every suggestion.

The plot of the story was completely preposterous, which is understandable, since it was dictated entirely by a dream I had a while back. To summarize: in a slightly-worse version of our own world, in a time when the economy has completely collapsed, strange things start appearing in the attics of vacant homes. While seldom seen, the unofficial consensus is that they are some sort of alien life form. Their presence is treated with little more regard than if  you were to find out that the vacant house next door was occupied by pigeons or feral cats or a colony of bats. No one is particularly worried, mainly because most people are focused on everything else - the economy, rampant unemployment, getting food, and all the other day-to-day concerns that face us in the real world. So while everyone is busy ignoring what should be a terrifying or at least curiosity-inspiring situation, further developments come into play that may lead to the total breakdown of human society - and maybe the end of humanity itself.

The dream left me with such a feeling of dread, doom, and despair that I really didn't know what to do with it, how to get over it. After a while I thought about the levels of detail involved in the dream, and I realized that this was basically a self-contained story that just needed to be written out.

It wasn't until a few weeks later that I started to realize the allegorical nature of this dream, and the metaphors hidden in it. Aspects of the dream captured many of my deepest fears: the fear that someone might break into and squat in my house; the fear of all the vacant houses in town, and who and what might be living in them; fear that the economy might worsen, that unemployment might increase, that things might go from worse to worst. My mother died in the dream, too, and I wasn't able to do anything to prevent that from happening - so there are those fears as well.

The environment played a role in this dream. There was a sense of oppressive heat - much like what we've been experiencing for real this summer. It's hard to shake that aspect of the dream.

There was a pervasive sense of apathy. No one was especially worried about the sudden appearance of aliens. No one cared enough about what was going on to actually do anything about it. Everyone was focused on other issues, things they believed were more important.  In the end it turned out everyone was wrong, but by then it was absolutely too late to do anything about it. Anything at all.

So what would you do if you found out there were aliens living in the attic of the vacant house across the street? Do you think you would be totally blasé about the issue, ignoring it because it didn't directly affect you?

Because we're doing that very sort of thing.

It's not aliens. They're not living in an attic. But there are slow, preventable, reversible disasters going on that we are collectively choosing to ignore.

You know what they are. You've heard about them, over and over. The gradual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is already well above levels that will eventually lead to a disaster is just one example. But there's another one that's very important, and hits close to home - but will eventually affect everyone.

 Methane is an excellent fuel source. It burns hot, burns clean, and results in lower carbon dioxide emissions when burned than other fossil fuels - contributing less to greenhouse emissions than coal or oil.

But methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas. Released unburned into the atmosphere, it is, according to the EPA, twenty times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. If you want to accelerate the greenhouse effect, it's not a bad strategy to pump methane into the atmosphere.

The Marcellus Shale formation (or "play," in industry parlance) is located in a region that underlies much of Pennsylvania (except the southeast and central regions, containing the major population center of Philadelphia and the capitol, Harrisburg), Upstate New York, Ohio, Maryland, and portions of several other states. Vast stores of methane may be trapped within this formation, and vast amounts of the gas are being liberated and captured using hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking") techniques - particularly new methods that have opened up previously inaccessible deposits.

Sounds great, doesn't it?

The problem is: these new fracking techniques were developed in a totally different region, geologically speaking, than the place where the're being used. Oklahoma, Texas, the Gulf Coast - the rock strata of these regions is completely different from what it is in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

This produces some interesting results.  Fracking drills deep belowground, pumping a witch's brew of chemicals - drilling "mud," mineral oil (to dissolve rocks), water under extremely high pressure - to shatter the rock and liberate the methane in a manner that allows it be recoverable. In theory, anyway.  In practice, Pennsylvania's complex geology - coupled with defective and inadequately-designed wells - has resulted in the uncontrolled liberation of vast quantities of methane.  The Susquehanna has been bubbling with methane for well over a year. More recent incidents have resulted in methane bubbles forming in other creeks and streams. And those are just the places where we can easily see the gas escaping. It takes more sophisticated detecting equipment to spot the plumes  of methane rising up out of the ground.

And it's not just methane that's the problem. Fracking is supposed to avoid contaminating water tables  and ground and surface water. But as the saying goes, where there are trains, there will be train wrecks. And there have been train wrecks, as the fracking technique, coupled with the chemicals used, has produced surprising results - including a large area near a drill site that appears to have undergone liquefaction, a condition that turns solid earth into a supersaturated state that can act like a liquid at the slightest provocation, and then return to a solid state, trapping anything that has sunk into it. (Think quicksand for the 21st century.) And of course there has been the wellwater contamination, and the accidents (and intentional acts) involving trucks and truckers employed by the Marcellus Shale industry, including an incident of intentionally dumping of chemical waste on state game lands, and another that involved a water tanker tipping over onto a nearby vehicle, killing the driver and badly injuring his daughter, who saw her father die in front of her.

"We all know that more drilling is good," quipped a CNN anchor the other day, talking about how a glut of natural gas on the market has resulted in lower prices and less incentive to drill. Indeed they do: every commercial break on CNN features two or more commercials paid for by the fossil fuels industry. Count on CNN - and other media outlets that take money from the fossil fuels industry - to continue to provide the biased coverage they've been paid to provide. Don't expect to hear much at all about the problems - past, future, and ongoing.

But we know there's a problem. Folks like Don Williams at the Susquehanna River Sentinel have been going on about this issue for years. If you aren't educated on this issue, it's not for lack of available information. It's really just much easier to ignore it, especially if you don't live in Marcellus Shale territory, and just go on along with your lives.

In my dream the problem became obvious when a mysterious pink slime begins to emerge from alien-occupied houses, a slime that forms a thin film everywhere. Soon the nature of this slime becomes apparent as steel rusts, aluminum pits, paint peels, tires flatten, engines leak, and roads crumble. In a short time period the aliens go from being an ignorable curiosity to being the harbingers of the unmaking of human society and all its works. By the time people realize there's a crisis it's far too late to do anything about it.

We've got a crisis. We've got a disaster going on right now. But people would rather think about other things, and disregard this crisis. It doesn't affect them, not immediately, and they've got lots of other things on their minds. Yet the impact of the disaster may affect - well, everyone, everywhere. Will enough people take note to actually get anything accomplished? Or will we collectively ignore this ongoing disaster until it's far too late to do anything about it at all?

There are aliens in the attic of the vacant house across the street. What are you going to do about it?

The Vintage Theater's IndieGoGo fundraiser!

Scranton's Vintage Theater, which has hosted numerous events relevant to the NEPA blogging community in the past year, is starting an IndieGoGo fundraiser that runs now through August 18! Go here for more details on the fundraiser, and here for more information about the Vintage Theater!

Why do you blog?

UPDATE, 7/20/12: Leslie Stewart of Darling Stewie and part of the "Fearsome Foursome" who are running September's NEPA BlogCon pointed out that they asked this same question on the NEPA BlogCon blog a few weeks ago. I'll post a link to this post there so everybody can have access to all the answers that are given on both sites!

This is a question for any bloggers reading this: Why do you blog?

I could speculate on reasons why other people blog, talk about the narrow-minded and provincial attitudes of some who assume that everyone blogs for the same reasons that they do, and therefore must follow the same rules that they do (or that they have declared others must follow.) But I really want to know, honestly, why other people blog. I'll give my reasons, and I'd like everyone else to put their reasons in the comments to this blog post. (That will save me the bother of gathering them from assorted other locations and reposting them here.) Also please be sure to leave a link to your blog!

Here are my answers, for all of my blogs. All of them so far, anyway.

Another Monkey: Started May 2004. When I talk about "my blog," this is the one I'm talking about. I've talked about why I started this blog so many times in the past I don't even feel like going over it again. But I will. It's a soapbox, a creative outlet, a place to vent, a way of communicating with friends and strangers that predates the mass popularity of Facebook. It's a place to post photos and stories. It's an autobiography in a million parts. Most importantly - to me, anyway - it's a place to store my memories outside of my own head. Because I've watched too many people go to those places where they no longer have access to their own memories. And then it's too late to try to retrieve them So this way, somehow, this stuff will be out there. This is the blog I care about the most, and most associate myself with.

Til August: Started April 2005. My second blog - I didn't realize that until just now. A few years after the band 3 Brix Shy broke up, some of its members talked about getting together to form a new band. The catch: in August of that year, one of the members would be moving away. So the plan was to create a band that would play through that Spring and Summer and break up in August. The blog would follow their adventures and publicize their shows. Unfortunately, the band never got past the planning stages.

Angry Political Blog: Started April 2005. I didn't want to crap up Another Monkey with lots of political seething, but I really needed a place to vent in the aftermath of the disastrous 2004 election. So I created a blog that would just be about politics and anger. And I realized that what Johnny Lydon said is true: anger is an energy. I wrote one post and found myself getting sucked into a self-perpetuating cycle of rage. I never wrote another post there.

NEPA Blogs: Started January 2006. Next to Another Monkey, this is the Big One. I started it as a sort of get-hits-quick scheme: I had a vision of a network of local bloggers, all linking to each other through a central site, with everyone's Google rank going up through the one-to-many / many-to-one relationship. It never happened, mainly because I never really let people in on the plan when I added them. Many of the bloggers added in those early days still might not know that they've been added, unless they're checking their traffic sources. But things really took off when I brought on Gort and Michelle Hryvnak Davies as co-administrators. I knew Gort had connections to the top political blogs in the region, while Michelle was tied into the region itself, and a technology and social media expert.

I almost gave up on NEPA Blogs a while ago. I've told that story before, too. Finding blogs was hard, they had a tendency to spontaneously shut down, and there was really no return on the effort it took to keep the blog going. Michelle changed all that. She revived it, breathed new life into it, got us on Facebook and Twitter and television and radio and in newspapers and magazines. Because of her efforts, NEPA Blogs is still going stronger than ever.

I have a new outlook on this blog. I now see myself as trying to encourage, popularize, and promote blogging in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Many bloggers think they're blogging in a vacuum, that nobody gives a damn what they have to say. I'm trying to show bloggers that they're not alone, that they're part of a bigger community - and not just the virtual, global community of the Blogosphere, but a local community, too, of people they might want to meet and get to know, might actually already know.

That's why I do stuff with NEPA Blogs. I won't presume that I know why Gort or Michelle stick with it - and frankly, I've never asked them. Until now. I'd love to know the reasons why they blog, and why they stay with running NEPA Blogs.

A Blog of Nanticoke: Started July 2007.
Unknown Failure: Started July 2007.
A Monkey in the Garden: Started July 2007
The Magic of Everyday Life: Started...I don't know, around this same time.

These were four "spin-off" blogs. (I thought there was a fifth, "A Monkey Looks at the Stars," but that might never have gotten past the planning stages.) Each would repost items that had originally appeared on Another Monkey, stories respectively about my hometown of Nanticoke, computers, gardening, ...ummm, stuff, and astronomy. The idea was this: with my broad range of content on Another Monkey, the Google Ads that I added in 2007 were becoming hopelessly muddled and unfocused. By creating spinoff blogs that focused on specific topics, I would get a more focused selection of ads targeted specifically at people interested in those topics.

The Magic of Everyday Life was to have been an exception. I always thought that someday I might open a little shop on Main Street in Nanticoke, a junk store of sorts that also sold books, music, gardening supplies, scientific toys, magic tricks, gag items... It hasn't happened, not yet. But this blog was supposed to be a catch-all for reposting posts that might relate to all this stuff. I grabbed it to secure the name. I've never added any posts.

Of all of these, A Blog of Nanticoke is the only one I've really maintained to any extent. Now I'm more likely to write original posts here and link to them on Another Monkey.

I've recently learned that Blogger takes a dim view of blogs that just repost content from other sites, even sites by the same author. To an extent this is understandable, a sort of anti-scraping policy designed to protect creators of original content from having their content scraped and reposted. For my purposes, though, the policy sort-of sucks.

The Virtual Refrigerator: Started September 2008. My nephews, like so many kids, loved to draw, and their visits to their grandmother often resulted in little masterpieces left around the house, to become folded and dog-eared and faded and maybe even destroyed. I decided to try to capture and preserve some of these images by scanning them into a blog. It was a fun project, and I still think it's a good idea, but it was very labor-intensive and time-consuming.

Hot Notes: Started August 2010. A blog created by request. This was going to be an online newsletter for the recently-displaced employees from my company, including me. Unfortunately the group that was supposed to feed me information for this fell apart shortly after I started it, and I ran out of things to post.

NEPA Solar: Started May 2011. An attempt at establishing a perception of subject matter expertise. I had worked in the solar industry in Delaware from March 1990 through August 1991. After I lost my job in the DVD industry - for the second time - I decided to take a stab at breaking into the solar power industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Being the region's foremost blogger on solar energy would be a shiny item on a résumé targeted at getting a a job in the industry. This is still a work in progress.

Personal branding blog: Started September 2011. Résumés are just brief summaries of who you are and what you've done. With this blog I wanted to flesh out each line item on my résumé to use as a "for more information..." reference. I don't know if this did any good in my job search.

Blogging 101A: Intro to Blogging (restricted access): Started June 2012. Other people with far fewer years of blogging experience than me have declared themselves "blogging experts." Years ago I thought through a syllabus for a community college introductory course in blogging. An opportunity is coming where I may be asked to present just such a course in a two- to three-hour format. This blog would be the course outline, the materials, and the reference links. To preserve the "exclusivity" of this course - it would be offered as a premium in exchange for donations to a specific cause - I've made the blog restricted. I'll open it up to a small group of people I know once I've fleshed it out a bit, to get feedback from real blogging "experts" whose opinions I respect.

Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective: Started June 2012. Connected to the same events as the previous blog. This would be a blog for the writers' group I participate in. We have a Facebook page, with all the usual problems with a Facebook page, including the inability of anyone to access it who isn't 1.on Facebook and 2.a part of the group. I created this to be an open blog, directed at our group but readable by anyone who finds it. It may also work in conjunction with something else that's coming down the pike.

So, that's that.  Fourteen blogs, many different answers to the question "Why do you blog?" So how about you? If you are a blogger, why do you blog?

A response to Jeff Bullas on The 10 Secret Benefits of Blogging

This is a comment I wrote in response to Jeff Bullas's post, What are the 10 Secret Benefits of Blogging? (http://www.jeffbullas.com/2012/07/06/what-are-the-10-secret-benefits-of-blogging/)

Jeff, you're helping to promulgate two of the most popular prejudices of blogsnobbery.


One is that to be a "serious" blogger you have to own your own domain. That's nonsense. There is no "pay to play" requirement for blogging. It's like saying you're not a serious writer unless you're jotting down your thoughts in a Moleskine notebook. The true test of whether a blogger is "serious" or not is in the blogging. That's it. Anything else is bigotry and prejudice. Blogsnobbery.


The other tenet is, of course, that the Blogger/Blogspot platform is unworthy of being mentioned. That's been going on since at least Chris Pirillo's famous 2005 tantrum "Kill Blogspot Already!" It's also nonsense, as much now as it was then. Blogger/Blogspot is the easiest jumping-on point for new bloggers, and an excellent way to develop and customize blogs without a great deal of technical expertise. Perhaps this is the reason why there is so much contempt for this platform: it lets the unwashed masses (like me) into the party.


You do not mention one of the biggest benefits of blogging: community building. It's not just a matter of finding a "tribe." Once you establish a voice for yourself, you may locate other like-minded (or differently-minded) bloggers with whom you may find yourself exchanging comments, trading links, or exploring each other's blogrolls. Starting a blog can open up whole worlds that you never knew existed.


I've spent the past six-and-a-half years promoting and popularizing blogs and blogging throughout Northeastern Pennsylvania. I find the notion that you must own your own domain name to be considered a "serious" blogger, and the snobbish contempt for one of the most popular and accessible blogging platforms available, to be antithetical to my efforts to encourage people to explore established blogs, create blogs of their own, and build and strengthen the local community of bloggers.

http://nepablogs.blogspot.com/
http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/

The trouble with night shift

We live in a world built around day shift. Much of the work world lives a 9-to-5 existence and thinks that's normal, ignoring the fact that many essential services that people use face-to-face, like banks and post offices*, are also only open 9-to-5, making it difficult or impossible for those working day shift to do business with them.

That's one of the advantages of working night shift. But night shift comes with disadvantages, too.

I hesitate to call what I've been working for the last few weeks "night shift." When I was working 6PM to 6AM, on my feet and running for twelve hours with a 40-60 minute commute on either side, that was night shift. Working 3:45PM - 12:15AM at a desk job five miles from my house is more like a "late afternoon" shift.

But in some ways it's more difficult to integrate this shift into my everyday life. When I was working twelve hour shifts with two additional hours spent on the road, it was pretty much understood that I would be useless for anything else those days. By the time I got home at 7:00 in the morning supermarkets were starting to open, so if I needed to grab some groceries I could.  After I got home I might spend an hour or so online, and I would have time to make an after-work snack and a before-work meal. But other than that I was mostly sleeping, getting ready for work, or taking care of stuff that couldn't wait until my off days.


Most supermarkets around here close at midnight, so now if I want to go shopping I have to do so before work, or on weekends when I'm trying to do everything else. My body starts to shut down pretty quickly after I come home. It's easier to power through 2:00 in the morning by working than it is to stay up at that hour when you're winding down after work. I'm usually in bed by 3:00. It would be like someone working a 9-to-5 shift being in bed by 7:45.


...and then I'm expected to be up by 9:00 in the morning. The world is awake, I'm "off," as far as everyone else is concerned, so why shouldn't I be up and doing things? To use the 9-to-5 analogy again, this would be like being up at 1:45 in the morning - and being expected to take care of everything that needs to be taken care of.


For me, in effect, the period of 9:00 to 3:15 is my morning and my afternoon combined into one. I'm expected to be up and at 'em, doing the things a 9-to-5 worker might do on a day off. And I do. But now other stuff is suffering. The stuff a person working a daytime shift might get to do after work is looked upon with disdain. I'm barely blogging anymore, and I haven't written anything for my writing group for weeks. 


This is a shift I chose. I knew what I was getting into, but other things have happened since I chose this shift, things that are putting other time pressures on my daylight hours.  And this is not the worst shift I know of, not by a long shot. I know someone working a shift that starts somewhere in the early morning hours and ends close to mid-day. And the expectations on that person are even greater.

So, give a thought to the night shift worker. Respect their sleep time, and recognize that the fact that they're not working during the day doesn't mean that they're "off."



*I can hear the moaning now: "Who uses banks and post offices anymore? Just old stupid people with AOL email addresses who use phone books to look up phone numbers! Why should we care about them?"

You need a blog: Why Facebook and Twitter are not enough

How are your friends doing? Your Facebook friends, I mean. Have you seen their updates lately? Are you sure? Are you sure you're not just seeing "Top Stories," despite having specified that you want to see all of your friends' updates, over and over again?

How about those groups and organizations you're a fan of? Are you seeing all of the updates?

The answer, in both cases, is probably not. Facebook routinely tinkers with what you see - or what the people you're trying to communicate with get to see.

I've said it over and over again: Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg's playground, he's just letting us play there. And the rules of that playground keep changing. Ask anyone who's been put in "Facebook Jail" for attempting to "Friend" someone who's been recommended to them by Facebook itself. Plus, Facebook reserves the right to censor what you've posted, and then punish you for posting things that Facebook finds offensive. Or objectionable. Or violate today's rules.

I've also said over and over again that Facebook is no substitute for having  a blog to promote your group, organization, band, or whatever. Neither is Twitter. Twitter is like being in a crowded party where everyone is shouting out little snippets of conversation, all given equal importance. You want to say something important, something you really want all your friends to hear? Too bad, it just got buried by three dozen people posting tweets about their lunch, their pets, their commute, and how much they love lamp. Buried, and never to be seen again, because in the next few hours there will be hundreds of additional tweets piled on top of that.

Blogs may seem quaint and old-fashioned to those neophiles who are constantly chasing the banner, for whom what worked yesterday is considered junk because it's...well, just so yesterday. But for those who actually give a damn about things that work, blogs and blogging are immensely valuable tools for getting your message across in a manner that has a high degree of persistence, even permanence.

Consider this: If you are an organization that wants to keep people up-to-date with the latest news, you could opt for the Facebook route, setting up a fan page and attracting subscribers.  If you're lucky, some of your fans will see each post (estimates vary from 16% to 25%, based on your "Edgerank"), though it will almost certainly be lost among posts from their other "friends." (They might have a chance to see it later, if they make the effort to surf over.) Of course, this visibility is only to your "fans," and only to those fans who are on Facebook. (Astonishingly, not everyone in the world is on Facebook.) You can also use Twitter and Tweet your news, but again, this will only go out to your "followers," and will quickly be lost amidst the noise that is 99.999...% of the stuff posted on Twitter.

So how do you make sure your message gets out?

The answer is simple: you need a blog. Not just a website, but an honest-to-goodness blog, with frequent updates, an RSS feed, and an easy setup for people to follow or get posts by email. This takes a little more effort, but the payoff can be much greater. What you post on your blog today will still be there tomorrow, and won't get buried by what other people post on their blogs. Your posts will be visible to the world, not just "fans" or "followers," and not just to members of a site like Facebook or Twitter. They will get indexed by search engines and show up in people's searches. And you can post links to your blog posts on Facebook and Twitter, and have your Twitter updates displayed on your blog!  So it's not an either/or situation. Having a blog is essential to having an online presence, and using it in conjunction with other social media is key to maximizing your visibility. On top of that, it doesn't have to cost you a dime. You can get a blog for free and completely manage it yourself, or you can pay to have the "prestige" of a top-level domain name or even hire someone to design and manage your blog for you.

It's up to you. Facebook is nice. Twitter is nice. But if you're serious about getting your message out, they're not enough. You need a blog to create a real web presence, a place where you can say what you need to say and your friends and fans can always come to hear it.

The Vintage Theater: AWESOMENESS IS COMING

It's a little to early to let the car out of the bag, but let me just say that there are some fundraising events that are coming up on behalf of the new and improved Vintage Theater in Scranton that are just amazing beyond words.  If you live anywhere near Northeastern Pennsylvania, YOU WILL WANT TO BE A PART OF THIS!!!

Details coming July 1!

40 years after the flood

Until last September, if you spoke to anyone in Northeastern Pennsylvania about "the flood" they would know exactly what you meant. Some old-timers might remember the St. Patrick's Day Flood of 1936, but for everyone else "the flood" meant one thing.

Agnes.

Floods don't get names, not like that. Agnes was a Tropical Storm that, in June 1972, blew along the Eastern Seaboard up from the Gulf of Mexico on a meandering, lazy course that took it over land, over the Atlantic, and then back over land - through New York City and then up into upstate New York. Northeastern Pennsylvania got smacked with the outer bands (just like with Irene in 2011, which also hit New York City but then set its sights on New England), but the real damage was done when the remnant of Agnes parked itself over the headwaters of the Susquehanna (just like Lee a week after Irene last year - though Lee also dumped rain on Northeastern Pennsylvania for days, as did Agnes.)

The Susquehanna rose and rose, threatening to overtop the levees that had built in the wake of the flood of '36. A heroic effort was made to augment the dikes with sandbags. Mandatory evacuations were ordered for the flood zone. Many complied. Some refused to leave.

And then, in a horrific moment, the sandbags gave way. The river came through. Photos captured the terror of people who had moments before been fighting to hold back the river with sandbags now running for their lives.

Very few people died in the flood itself, and mostly from heart attacks and things like that. Those who refused to evacuate had to be rescued by boat, sometimes from upper stories, sometimes from rooftops.

I had  a relative who lived in the flood zone - my father's mother's sister's mother-in-law. She didn't think the river would break through the levees. She didn't think she would be affected. She was wrong. She had to be evacuated from a third story window.

I was just four when Agnes hit. Now it would be considered crazy to take a four-year-old into a flood zone, even a month or more after the waters had receded. But things were different back then. And the visit to this relative's house left a memory that has stayed with me forever.

Even at that age I loved books. Comic books, paperbacks, hardbacks, books of all sorts. What I saw broke my heart.

We were in a large empty room. Cleanup had obviously been going on for some time at that point. But some things just couldn't be cleaned. Like the stains on the ceiling.

The room I was in had probably been their living room. Maybe their library, even. It was where their books had been. And when the floodwaters came through, those books were knocked off their shelves, caught up in the water, and floated up to the ceiling.

The water didn't stop at the first floor. It chased my relatives up to their third floor. So the first floor was filled completely. The books rose to the top and were pressed against the ceiling, at least until they absorbed enough water to sink. In the meantime, they had left an impression.

The ceiling of that room was tattooed with the colors of the covers of hundreds of books that had been pressed against it.

It was a strange and beautiful sight, and horrifying at the same time. I knew that all those books that someone had once read and loved enough to buy were now garbage heaped in piles along the streets. Just like everything else that these people had ever owned.

Thirty-nine years later it happened again. Not in Wilkes-Barre or in Kingston, where my relatives had lived. They were protected by a levee-raising project that was completed in response to Agnes. This time it was in West Pittston and Shickshnny and other places. People lost everything because of the power of a flood.

I wonder if in thirty-nine years people will remember Lee the way we remember Agnes?

Bowie is missing

UPDATE, 6/23/12: Bowie reappeared overnight. She must have been hiding somewhere downstairs. She wasn't making any sounds down there or showing herself at all. I left the basement door open and in the middle of the night she showed up in front of the closed upstairs bathroom where she usually spends the night - without her collar. This morning I found her collar in an obvious spot on the kitchen floor, complete with bell. So either it was sitting there all this while and she was without it, or she was wearing it all this while and pulled it over her head when she came upstairs.

Bowie has gone missing.

We're not sure when. This has been a chaotic week. My sister has been up, my mom was in the hospital, and I'm working a 3:45-to-12:15 shift. I haven't actually kept track of all the cats amid the running around. My sister says she saw Bowie yesterday morning or the night before.

Now, there's a good chance Bowie is hiding in the house. She's good at that sort of thing. But she also has had some opportunities to slip out of the house, not that she's ever shown any inclination to do so. Possibly when my mom was coming back home from the hospital yesterday, or possibly when I was getting some help bringing in groceries - the door to the garage was inadvertently left open, and at least one cat found his way in there, and it's possible that the inner door may have been left open at the same time that the garage door was open. So she may have slipped out then, or may be hiding in the garage, or may be hiding anywhere else.

If anyone reading this is in the Nanticoke area, she might be in the area of Kosciuszko street. She's a female brown tabby with irregular stripes, wearing a purple collar with a bell. If you spot her, contact me at databoy142 at hotmail dot com.

An older picture showing her stripe pattern

Note the unique back pattern

Zine Festival report

After my writing group broke up today a few of us decided to hike a few blocks across town to the Scranton Zine Festival before taking our traditional late lunch. I quickly met co-organizer Brian Fanelli and made my way around to local zinesters Rachel Goetzke of Word Fountain and the semi-anonymous author of Progression and Progression: Part Two (and the companion blog, bareing skine.) I also met Kenny Luck of the blog The Luck Report (which appears to be down as of this writing.)

Afterwards, as I enjoyed copious amounts of sushi and assorted other food at a buffet, I realized that I had forgotten to take any pictures! So I made a quick detour on my way home, got back to the Zine Festival minutes before everyone packed their stuff up, and grabbed a few quick photos.

The Scranton Zine Festival featured other things in addition to zines: used books, handcrafted bookmarks, arts and crafts, handmade buttons. It was really a celebration of artistic and creative expression. While the majority of zinesters in attendance were from out of the area - mainly Philadelphia, but there were a few from other places, including Canada - I was glad to see Northeastern Pennsylvania well-represented. And I walked away with a few zines to read, and at least one new blog to add to NEPA Blogs!

Scranton Zine Festival is this Saturday

The Scranton Zine Festival is this Saturday from noon to 6 PM at the New Visions Studio and Gallery at 201 Vine Street in Scranton, with a poetry reading to follow from 7 PM - 9 PM.

What's a "zine," you might ask? Zines are sort-of first cousins to blogs. They share the same pedigree but have diverged in execution: whereas blogs are creations that exist in cyberspace for the most part (until the blog hits the big time and gets published as a book,) zines are ink-on-paper creations that have a real presence in the physical world (except when the zine creator, or "zinester," decides to create an online component to the zine - sometimes in the form of a blog!)

Zines are at once more permanent and more ephemeral than blogs. Permanent in that they have a real physical presence as an object, rather than as a website that exists only on some server somewhere; ephemeral in that zines are always "limited editions," while a blog can exist in any numbers anywhere that the blog site can be accessed.

I first became aware of zines during my college years in the late 1980's, assuming we don't count the comic books that my brother and I hand-drew in limited editions of one. The only zine whose name I can recall was called "Whose Opin-yun?" and exists to this day as a single reference on the internet. (That will change once I publish this post.) But I forgot all about zines for something like twenty years, until a conversation with blogger, hiker, and zinester Erin Delaney reminded me that such things exist.

The Scranton Zine Festival is an opportunity for zinesters from Northeastern Pennsylvania and beyond to meet, mingle, and share their creative work. Well, not literally "share;" if you're going, take along a supply of small bills to purchase zines you find interesting - and help keep the zinesters in paper, toner, and whatever other materials they need to practice their craft. (For a list of zinesters and others taking part in the Scranton Zine Festival, go here.)

I'll be in the area this Saturday anyway - my writing group meets in Scranton every Saturday, so it's just a quick walk to the New Visions location. I'm planning to take a stack of blog cards with me, both for Another Monkey and NEPA Blogs. Who knows what sort of connections I'll be making!

A gift fit for a Queen

I must have accidentally caught too much coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's diamond jubilee on Sunday. Monday morning I dreamt that I was in a panic because I had forgotten to get the Queen a present. So I grabbed the comforter off of my bed, folded it once lengthwise, then rolled it up neatly and secured it with black bands. Then I used a Sharpie to write "HAPPY 60th, QUEEN!" on it and shipped it to her. I woke up all upset because I had given away my comforter.

Transit of Venus TOMORROW, Tuesday, June 5

Tomorrow a rare alignment of the orbits of Earth and Venus will take place, allowing people who happen to be on the right spot on Earth a chance to see Venus pass across, or transit, the face of the sun.

Unless there are some breakthroughs in longevity in the next few decades, this will be the last Transit of Venus in our lifetime. The next one won't take place for over one hundred and five years. The last one actually took place just eight years ago, and the last one before that was in 1882.

For all the details on when, where, and how you can see this event, go here:

Bad Astronomy: Everything you need to know about next week’s Transit of Venus

Scenes from the Arts On Fire Festival, Saturday, June 2 2012

As I left the house to go to the weekly gathering of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective, I realized I had forgotten to grab my camera, just in case we decided to head out to the Arts On Fire Festival in Scranton afterwards. "That's OK," I thought. "I can just use the camera in my phone!"

So. Sorry about the poor quality of these photos.

Some of the vendors and the crowd.

Professor Jared Jaffe of Keystone College and some of his RAKU ceramic creations. On the left are ladybug and chicken whistles, while on the right are "RAKU Rocket" teapots. I thought the blue one in the front row resembled one of Lovecraft's Elder Things, while the green one brought to mind a stirge!

One of the most popular exhibits was an interactive art booth. For a few dollars you could buy a hexagonal blank mold made of soft brick. You could then scratch a design into it with a nail, and then molten iron would be poured into the mold, creating a positive image of the negative you had created. On Sunday, all of the cast iron hexagonal tiles will be assembled together into a collective art project! 

Pouring the molten iron into the molds.

Some of the molds. The one on the right in the second row was made by NEPWC member Laurel.

Pouring molten iron into a larger and more complicated mold.

"Arts On Fire," literally: after the molten iron was poured, impurities continued to burn off the surface of the iron for several minutes. This image captures a small flame on the left edge of the rightmost mold.

Who needs Instagram when you have a low-resolution phone camera with a dirty lens and low-light conditions? This old-timey-looking scene was just across the street from the iron furnace.

The Arts On Fire Festival continues through tomorrow, June 3 2012, and will run from 11:00 - 5:00.

Arts On Fire Festival this weekend in Scranton!

The Arts On Fire Festival in Scranton will be going on this weekend! Festivities kick off Friday, June 1. You can read all about it on their blog and their website.

Next weekend is the Scranton Zine Festival! Stay tuned for more details!

I think Anonymous founded a religion or something

Another member of my writing group, Leslee Clapp, pointed this out a few weeks ago. Inscribed on a wall near the Scranton Courthouse as part of a tribute to our armed forces is this quote: "Greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for a friend." It's attributed to "Anonymous," but it sounds suspiciously like this wandering Jewish fellow I read about in a book somewhere. Specifically, it sounds like Jesus, as quoted in John 15:3. Was it too much trouble to look up the source of the quote? Or was attribution avoided for some other reason?

If we're putting up anonymous quotes around a courthouse, maybe they should consider this one: "Do what thou wilt; that is the whole of the law."

The Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective

This Saturday marked the final gathering of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective at the 119 Penn Avenue location of the Vintage Theater.  Since long before I joined, the members of the NEPWC have been the "writers in residence" at the Vintage Theater. But with the Vintage Theater moving from the 119 Penn Avenue location and relocating to an address yet to be determined, the NEPWC will be holding its meetings in a new - temporary - location, the upper room of the Northern Light Espresso Bar at 536 Spruce Street, Scranton, every Saturday from noon to 2:00 PM.

We are a very diverse group, with a wide range of experiences and influences. Today's meeting, our largest in a long time, featured several poems, two totally unconnected science fiction pieces, a monologue on the private life of Ben Cartwright, the latest chapter in a continuing story, two rousing prose pieces, and the first act of a play written by someone who's never written a play before. In this final meeting at this location we also welcomed two new members, both of whom read for the group.

As I have stated before, the Vintage Theater isn't really closing - it's just going away for a little while, and will come back in another location sometime soon. In the meantime, the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective will also go on - at Northern Light.

Next steps for the Vintage Theater

While it may sound dramatic to declare that "the Vintage Theater in Scranton is closing" (as I did) and to refer to the final First Friday celebration on June 1 as "the Last First Friday" (as I do), the truth, as always, is somewhat more nuanced.

The Vintage Theater is moving out of its current location at 119 Penn Avenue. (This isn't even the original location of the Vintage Theater. I discovered last night that I was correct in believing that it was originally housed in the old Ritz Theater where I used to see dollar movies when I was in college.) But that doesn't mean that the Vintage Theater is going away.

The idea of the Vintage Theater is what's important. It has been a multi-purpose art space where specific events - concerts, art exhibits, poetry readings, plays - brought the people in, and the synergies between the various art forms sharing the same space brought people back. That idea will be maintained, regardless of where the next incarnation of the Vintage Theater sets up shop.

The proprietors of the Vintage Theater are looking for a new home. Something affordable, something within the footprint of Scranton's First Friday celebrations, something accessible, something that is capable of serving the needs of all the different artists who present their creative works within the theater. They have made a list of seventeen different possibilities, and last night an eighteenth was presented - one that no one realized was even on the market.

But they're not rushing into this. They want to do this right. So during the transitional period, we will all have to be patient.

In the meantime, they have needs. Immediate, medium-term, and long-term needs. In the immediate future: they will need to be out of the 119 Penn Avenue location after the June 1 First Friday celebrations. That means that by June 1 they need to be 99% moved out. So in addition to being patient, anyone who really cares about the Vintage Theater should be prepared to lend a hand in some way - now, tomorrow, during the transition period, or in perpetuity.


The immediate needs:

- A plumber capable of doing the disconnection work on a very expensive and delicate European espresso/latte machine. I doubt that my own ham-fisted plumbing skills are up to the task.

- A carpenter with a portable saw to disassemble the very large and heavy countertops.

- An electrician to help with removal of light fixtures.

- General moving help to get stuff off the premises. This includes vehicles for hauling things away.

- Storage space for stuff that's been removed from the premises.

To reduce the tonnage of stuff that needs to be moved there will be a rummage sale on Monday, May 28th starting at noon. Books, chairs, art materials - almost anything that's still around on Monday will be up for sale. (So, FYI, if you're reading this and happen to have stuff that you kind-of left sitting around the Vintage Theater, you might want to reclaim it before Monday.)

After the hard (and frankly, heartbreaking) work of vacating the 119 Penn Avenue location is over, then the next stages will continue in earnest: identifying the needs of the next incarnation of the Vintage Theater, and making it a reality. And after that happens will come the really hard point: doing what needs to be done to keep the theater going.

The Vintage Theater is closing. The Vintage Theater will be back.

End of an era: The Vintage Theater in Scranton is closing

(Note: I originally intended to use this title on a post about the end of my run of weekly appearances on WBRE's PA Live!, presenting the NEPA Blogs Blog of the Week every Tuesday. But that ship sailed long ago, and I haven't gotten around to writing that post yet. So this post gets to claim the title.)

The Vintage Theater in Scranton will be closing after the upcoming First Friday event on Friday, June 1, 2012.

I first heard about the Vintage Theater (I think) shortly after it opened, in an article in the Scranton Times. I skimmed it, and somehow managed to convince myself that the theater that had been rehabbed and refurbished and reopened was the old Ritz Theater, where my friends and I used to catch dollar third-run showings of films like Out of Africa and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? back in college. But I was wrong.

I found out how wrong I was the first time I went to the Vintage Theater. It wasn't that long ago - just last September 15th. I had been invited to take part in a Bloggers' Roundtable being held at the Vintage Theater. It was a Thursday night, which seemed like an odd time. I went into the event knowing very little about what I was getting into and prepared for anything. Well, almost anything. After actually locating the venue, I met with the three other bloggers who would be taking part, and then we sat in a line across a stage (no table involved, round or otherwise) and discussed blogging.

Towards the end of the night I noticed a trickle of people coming into the theater and looking at us on the stage with some surprise. They didn't seem to be there for the Bloggers' Roundtable, but migrated to a smaller room in the back of the theater. Some of them did take seats in the audience, and one even asked a question or two.

As the event came to a close I discovered that we were sharing the Vintage that evening with a poetry reading. I hadn't been to a poetry reading in many years, and decided to stick around and take it in. The group was called the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective, and they presented a wide range of poems and even some prose pieces every third Thursday of the month. I found out that they were a writing group that met every Saturday at the Vintage. I was about to start working again on a very irregular schedule, so I wasn't sure when I'd be able to meet with them, but I was definitely interested.

One person stepped up to do a "commercial" - her name was Kait Burrier, and she would be presenting dramatic readings of her work that coming Sunday at the Vintage. I saw this as an opportunity to get a taste of the cultural offerings of Scranton, a place that was at once familiar and brand-new to me.

Before the Bloggers' Roundtable broke up I was approached by the people who had arranged for it to take place, and I discovered that this was the opening shot of the Scranton Pages & Places Book Festival, which would take place Saturday, October 1 at various locations throughout Scranton - including the Vintage Theater. I was presented with a pass to the festival. It would be my first full day off after working my first rotation of night shift, but I was determined to make it there.

And I did. I took in the workshops on Non-Fiction Writing and Fiction Writing being presented at the Vintage. In between the two, I became re-acquainted with the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective, who were having their weekly meeting in the back of the Vintage. I also met a writer and blogger whose posts I'd been following for several months - a startling and seemingly improbable encounter for both of us, though in retrospect it seems perfectly reasonable that I would encounter her as a part of a writing group.

I began going to the weekly meetings of the writing group at the Vintage just as soon as I could - which, from my old work calendar, looks like it would have been sometime in November. It was around this time that I was asked to take part in another event taking place at the Vintage Theater - the Scranton Bluekey Tweetup, an event designed to raise awareness of the plight of refugees. This event was organized by blogger Mandy Boyle, who I had first met in person at one of the Pages & Places writing workshops at the Vintage! Michelle, my co-administrator at NEPA Blogs, was also there (and had persuaded me to go in the first place), as were other local bloggers.

A little more than a month after the Tweetup Michelle and I were heading back to the Vintage for Pecha Kucha Night, another event that Mandy Boyle helped bring into being. This event was huge. The Vintage was crowded, more crowded than I had ever seen it before. But that would change.

My involvement with the writing group ramped up as the year went on. I had managed to miss all of their Open Mic Poetry Nights since my first chance encounter in September. The March one was going to be something special, focusing on just one of our writers for the second half of the show. I nominated myself to serve as group photographer, and manged to take some halfway decent images. A month later the spotlight turned on another of our writers, and I improved upon my technique somewhat - taking pictures indoors in a low-light situation with a tiny snapshot camera and not using a flash. (A tripod and an understanding of how your camera's Sports mode works are essential for this.)

But before the April Open Mic Night there would be one other event at the Vintage: the Scranton StorySlam.

I hadn't planned to go. It was right after Blog Fest, and the same day as the birthday party of the daughter of some of my friends, and I would be starting out more than eighty miles away. Michelle would be going as one of the judges, so I felt that her presence kept NEPA Blogs involved. Surely we didn't both have to be there! But the organizer had made a point of coming out to Blog Fest. And in a strange, freak coincidence, as soon as I began following the StorySlam on Twitter I found that I was the hundredth (or was it the thousandth?) Twitter follower and had won free admission. So now fate had decreed that I had to go, whether I wanted to or not.

That event was the most crowded I have ever seen the Vintage. It became standing room only long before the start of the show, and at halftime I had to retreat to the safety of the little room in the back where the writing group routinely met just so I could breathe. But overall, the StorySlam was a resounding success.

So we had the April Open Mic, and began making plans for the May one. This was a big one. It once again featured one member of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective - but it was Jennifer Diskin, a member who had passed away in December, after a long and epic battle with cancer. I had never met her; I had only just started coming to meetings when I learned that she was very ill, and then that she had died. I didn't know her, but I knew that this was going to be an event not to be missed.

It was beautiful. The Vintage was crowded again - not like it was for the StorySlam, but in a manner appropriate for a memorial poetry reading. Friends read poems by her, or about her, or inspired by her, or even works that had been her favorites.  Through it all I clicked away with my camera, capturing some of my best pictures yet.

That was Thursday. Today Conor, the proprietor of the Vintage Theater, sat down with our writing group (after a particularly raucous session) and let us know that he would be vacating the premises following the upcoming First Friday event on June 1. He's planning to re-establish himself somewhere else in Scranton, using lessons learned from this venture, re-imagining the venue with a focus on art space and performing space.

We support him in this, of course. But it will take time. And in the meantime, the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective needs to find a new - temporary - home. We appear to have found one, though I'll hold off making the announcement until it's official.

The Vintage Theater. I've had a lot of history with it in just the last eight months. It was a good place, and it served us well. I will be forever grateful to Conor for all the good times we had there.

Unillustrated Instructional 2: How to boil an egg

OK, first a clarification: this isn't really about how to boil an egg. You'll find plenty of advice on that elsewhere. Someone came up with a clever new way of doing this a while ago - bring the eggs to a boil in a pot, then shut off the heat and leave them, covered, for fifteen minutes - and I found that this resulted in an egg with a mostly-uncooked yolk. That's fine if you're into that sort of thing, I suppose. My advice there: cook the eggs long enough to be hard-boiled, but not so long that you start to remove the water from the egg white, resulting in a tough egg white with a waffle-textured surface.

Also, start by gently heating the water with the eggs already in it. Heating the water too quickly, or adding the eggs to already-boiling water, may make the shells crack.

But enough of that. This instructional is meant to address a more serious issue: distinguishing hard-boiled eggs from uncooked eggs.

When we were kids my mom would mark hard-boiled eggs by drawing smiley faces on them. The problem was, if she did this using a marker, the marker ink would bleed through the shell and get onto the egg white. If she did it with a pencil, the markings would be so light that it would be possible to mistake a hard-boiled egg for a raw one - and sometimes the mistake would go the other way.

A few years ago I remembered something I had heard from the nuns back when I was in grade school, about how in the days of the Great Depression people would dye their Easter Eggs with things like coffee grounds or onion skins. It hit me that adding a piece of onion skin to the pot while boiling eggs might cause some of the color to leak onto the shells. And whaddya know, it worked!

(I recently learned that there's a term for these eggs - pace eggs, though these are associated with the Easter season, and appear to be much more darkly dyed than the eggs I make.)

To boil an egg so that it can be easily distinguished from raw eggs in the refrigerator, add a small bit of onion skin to the pot. That's it. I use roughly a 3/4" x 3/4" bit of onion skin, though whatever size you grab will probably be fine. You're looking for the dry outer skin of the onion, the stuff that ends up left over in the bag. The larger the piece the darker the color of the boiled eggs. A small piece will cause them to turn beige, a moderate piece will give a buff color like those fancy expensive eggs at the supermarket (so this is an inexpensive way to fool any snoopy friends who might judge you by the color of your eggs), and a lot of skin will turn the eggs a mottled brown.

One note: this doesn't seem to work with the purple outer skins of red onions. If you're feeling adventurous and want to experiment with marking your eggs red, you might want to add some beet juice to the water when you boil the eggs. This might (or might not) change the taste of the eggs - I have no idea.