I spent my morning trying to help my wife understand why people do not live up to the promises.

She worked for a married couple for thirty years, managing their business. Back then, she could ask for help with minor home improvement projects and get all the help she needed as one of the business owners was also a contractor by trade.

That was then.

Now, though he promised to come by the house once again, he has failed to show or even call.

My wife cannot understand this. I had to explain the truth to her, “You’re no longer of use to them, so they have written you off.”

I have a lot of experience at being written off.

During this past week, as we lived through heavy bouts of thick wildfire smoke in Northern Nevada, I watched people wearing masks choke on the odor. Their masking-up did them no good, physically.

Logic suggests that if they could smell the smoke, they were breathing in and choking on particulates. Now, the average size of a wildfire smoke particulate is about 0.3 microns.

Meanwhile, the larger Coronaviruses are around 0.2 microns, while most are less than 0.05 microns, smaller than the smoke particulate. So, it would appear that wearing a face mask is useless against both smoke particulates and the COVID-19 virus.

Science…

It has been very hard to sit and write today. My mind is elsewhere, unfortunately.

So I am falling back on an old process I used back in the day, writing whatever comes to mind in five minutes. And I don’t worry about grammar, spelling, or punctuation.

I won’t be going that long.

Anyway, I find myself unhappy as we’re returning to wearing masks every place we go. My brain screams, “Fuck that!” while my mouth drones, “Yes, dear.”

Yeah, my wife and I don’t see eye-to-eye on the subject because she has to wear one anyway as she works for the school district. It’s best to go along to get along some days.

Along with the whole face diaper thing, I am struggling with work. Mistakes on my part have me down in the shitter, and I’m angry with myself because of it.

Plus, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. And while I don’t mind my own company, I wonder why there are so few people I can associate with, either professionally or personally.

I know — boo-hoo and cry me a frigging river.

That’s enough. At least I got something written for a post which ain’t saying much.

Independence weekend began with a plume of smoke. A wildfire that the forest service called the Beckwourth Complex.

Soon the Tamarack and the Dixie Fires followed. Each new blaze brought even more smoke into the valley.

Eventually, the haze grew so thick that he could no longer see the homes across the street. Not even his dog was willing to stay outside for any length of time, save to care for its business.

Soon a couple of days grew into a week and then nearly an entire month. The metallic hum began in that final week.

Day and night, it came and went until it never stopped. It was replaced periodically by a crying or a low guttural growl.

Unable to identify the sound, he ventured out onto his front porch to listen. He took a cup of hot coffee and his dog with him.

Together they quietly listened to the hum become a cry, become a growl. Then a new sound issued from somewhere deep within the smoke: a grinding.

The dog stepped back and settled near the front door waiting for its human to open it so they could go indoors. But that never happened.

Instead, the man stepped off the porch and into the black-brown hazy, ignoring the warning whine coming from the dog. Quickly he was enveloped by the stuff and could no longer be seen.

Panicked, the dog barked, howled, and scratched at the door until the man’s wife opened it. The dog darted inside and ran under the dining table for safety.

That was three days ago, and the dog still sits at the door whimpering for the man it will never see again.

My Cousin Elmo says, “My high school was so poor that they taught sex education and drivers-ed in the same car.”

She pulled into the parking spot and sent me inside the store to buy some condoms. I could not believe my luck on this full-moon night.

I looked back at her to make sure she was real.

As I passed through the doorway, I felt a sudden wave of nausea overcome me. Perhaps I was much more excited than I thought.

Quickly, I walked beyond the register, looking up at the signs above each aisle. I recall being a bit surprised by how big the store was.

It looked so tiny from the outside. The more I walked towards the back of the building, the farther it seems to be.

Was it my imagination, or was the building growing larger?

I turned to look back at the doorway.

I couldn’t see it anymore.

A sense of panic rushed through me as I stood still, trying to think what I should do now.

“Hello?” I called.

Nothing.

Frightened, I began jogging towards where the doors should have been. I could not see them, nor could I find the register.

Lost, I turned to my right along an aisle that ran lengthwise of the building. Then I saw it, a door with an adhesive sign across it, reading: “Door armed.”

As I reached out to push it open, a hand grabbed onto my right forearm. I struggled to pull myself free and open the door.

I pushed on the handle with my left hand, and the door swung open.

An alarm blared overhead as I ripped myself from whatever had a hold of me.

Beyond the door frame was darkness, and yet I still stepped out into it. The door slammed behind me, and I discovered I had entered an endless parking lot made of gray asphalt and white stripes.

Sex that night was out of the question. It would take me longer to understand how effed I was in the long run.

Children were born, grew up, and moved away. When they returned to visit, they often exclaimed how the old man had not seemed to age since their long-ago childhoods.

One morning, some early risers, out for a walk, discovered him lying in his front yard. Soon the police arrived, and we watched as they carried him away in a black body bag.

Since he had no wife or known family, it fell to me, as the head of the community’s neighborhood watch, to begin the work of securing his home until the proper authorities could being their work of clearing out the house.

The following day, I decided to take a look in the backyard. I had no idea what I might find.

To my surprise, I discovered a beautiful garden. Well-tended and filled with both flowers and vegetables of all sorts.

I wandered along the narrow rows and marveled at the man’s skill.

It was near the back of the plot where I saw a set of strange green eldritch pods. Each one was larger than the next, with the biggest being the size of a grown man.

I touched it.

The pod jerked as if alive, and I took a couple of steps back from it. Then it disengaged from the stalk it grew from and began twisting, turning, and crawling like a worm.

“What in the…” I started to cry.

But before I could finish my sentence, the thing stopped and turned towards me. I stepped back even further as the greenish pod squirmed in my direction.

Suddenly it began to split open at a seam that I had not seen before, but I did not stay around to see what spilled from the thing. I raced from the yard and to my house across the street.

The following morning I looked out of my living room window only to see the old man, seemingly younger than ever, working in his yard.

Yes, I know about the podcast Tanis, and no, I do not know what it is about and nor do I intend to listen to find out. Because of the podcast, I had to double-check whether Where is Tanis? was written by someone else or not.

So far, Jack Parson does appear to be the author.

Now, for the second person in my most recent bit of research: Edgar Rice Burroughs. Aside from being in the U.S. Army, stationed in Arizona, and later owning part of a small mining operation in Idaho, there seems to be no direct connection between him and Parsons.

Nor is there a direct connection to Dr. W. H. Ballou, save for what Ryan Harvey, writes in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Pellucidar Saga: Tarzan at the Earth’s Core:

“The dyor, [is] a Stegosaurus that can glide through the air by flattening its backplates. This isn’t entirely Burroughs’s whacked-out creation: Dr. W. H. Ballou floated the idea in a Utah newspaper article in 1920. Burroughs clipped unusual news stories for ideas, and he probably pulled this from his dinosaur file one day and went with it.”

Pellucidar is a fictional Hollow Earth invented by Burroughs.

So, let’s look once again at Parsons and other people that spent time at his mansion in Pasadena.

Enter sci-fi writer Robert A. Heinlein, who lived at Parsons home for a time. It is Heinlein who connects us to Burroughs.

He did not complete the first draft of The Number of the Beast, as Alan Brown points out in Long-Lost Treasure: The Pursuit of the Pankera vs. The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein:

“No one knows exactly why Heinlein abandoned the original version of his book, although that version draws heavily on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. “Doc” Smith, and there may have been difficulties in gaining the rights to use those settings.”

A lesser-known science fiction writer Smith lived in Idaho as a child and young man. Following his retirement as a chemical engineer, he split his time between Florida and Seaside, Oregon.

It is Seaside that my Uncle Orville first retired to before he and Aunt Francis moved to Salem. It gets even stranger.

In several interviews, Charles Manson said many of his ideas came from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger In A Strange Land. Mansion even claimed to be a combination of the characters Valentine Michael Smith and Jubal Harshaw.

Jubal means father of all, a role Manson assumed. He also named his son Valentine Michael.

Manson also found influence in Dianetics and something called the Process, founded by Robert and Maryanne DeGrimston in London in 1963 as an offshoot of Scientology.

Rabbit hole my ass…

My Cousin Elmo says, “I jus’ figured out that ghosts are people who died while trying to fold a fitted sheet.”

Finn and I were celebrating our final night of summer freedom at the line shack. Earlier in the day, we had helped count and load all the cattle the two of us had gathered over the last two and a half months.

“George,” Finn said, “I’m glad you held back on the good stuff.”

He lifted his cup, half full of whiskey, in salute. He then downed it in a single gulp. I poured him some more.

“Wonder what happened to old Nameless,” I said as I tipped my glass back.

Nameless was a large black bull, well known for his nasty temper. We couldn’t find him anywhere in our searching for the nearly wild cows that we’d driven into our stock pens in the many weeks we’d been working together.

“Probably got kilt by a mountain lion or something,” Fin answered. “After all he was pretty old as I understand it.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “More than likely he is a ghost out roaming around looking for someone to run over or something.”

“Now, don’t you go telling any spook-stories to me,” Finn demanded. “You remember that last one you told me. Nearly had a heart attack when you howled like a dog while I was in the outhouse.”

We laughed as we enjoyed another splash of whiskey.

“Won’t be trying to scare you tonight,” I said. “Not with old Nameless unaccounted for.”

“Stop it, damn you,” Finn shouted. “Not another word about ghosts, spirits or spooks or anything of the sort.”

“Okay,” I answered, “Want another snort of spirit?”

Finn laughed so hard he nearly fell out of his chair. I poured him another couple of ounces.

Once finished with that, he got up and went outside, announcing, “You only rent whiskey.”

I stayed seated, worried that the room might spin too fast for my balance should I stand up.

That’s when I heard a particular sound, heavy breathing, and a solid thump. I got up despite my possible intoxication and went to the cabin door.

Intoxicated or not, I recognized Nameless right away as he stood horns pointed at me. I quickly slammed the door.

No sooner had I closed it than the door and frame shattered as if in an explosion. Nameless had entered, and I sought my escape through the glass window above our washbasin.

As Nameless trashed the cabin, I sprinted around the front and downhill to the outhouse. As I tried to open the door, I heard Nameless racing behind me.

“Open the damned door,” I cried.

“Find your own spot to hide,” Finn returned.

The bull was nearly on me as I ran around the outhouse twice before deciding to climb on top of it. I watched in relative safety as Nameless disappeared into the darkness.

As I contemplated getting down and running up to the shack, I heard the brute come racing back. I had hardly focused on its black silhouette charging from the dark before slamming into the side of the outhouse, scattering boards, magazines, and I supposed, Finn.

The sun was coming up when I finally felt brave enough to lift my head and look around. I was stiff and sore from my tumble, and it was made worse from having played dead on the ground all night.

I could see neither Nameless nor Finn, so I crawled to my knees.

“Finn?” I called.

“Here,” he hollered back.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Do dandy,” he said. “You?”

“I’m still put together,” I answered. “Where are you?”

“In the shitter,” he said.

“No, you’re not, its spread all to hell and back,” I returned.

“Nope,” Finn said, “I’m definately in the shitter.”

Crawling, I made my way to the floor of what had been the outhouse. I looked in the privy hole and saw Finn looking back at me.

“How in the hell did you end up there?” I asked.

“When that freight train hit,” he explained, “It threw me in the air, and when I came down, I landed straight-legged in this here shit.”

As I started to laugh, I heard a sound from behind me that left my blood cold then I felt the ground tremble through my hands. Without hesitation, I jumped in the hole next to Finn.

Soon a face peered over the edge of the privy hole. It was McDaniels who had come back to help us pack out.

He pushed his lid back and scratched his forehead before exclaiming, “Boys, I don’t even want to know how badly you two tied it on last night.”