Oops!

Current projections for Fay indicate that it will pass over the center of Florida, swing out over the Atlantic to wash the central Florida mung from its mouth, and then dash itself against us here somewhere northish of St. Augustine.

I've lived in Florida a significant portion of my life and endured four hurricanes. Most just flooded the streets and knocked out power, and I'm sure this one will do the same--if it even hits.

Good old Riverside, shaded by historic and rotten trees, is usually among the first to go dark when some ancient limb tears through the gossamer power lines. We'll see what happens this time.

We're well-stocked with water, IBC root beer, and books in any case.

I'll keep you posted!

It is also hilarious, packed so solidly with awesome linguistic jokes and cross-references that it could be its own MLA conference. The plot elements and gags interlock so neatly that the writers are either brilliant for planning it that way or brilliant for improvising it that way, one or the other.

We just watched the last episode on DVD and the entire three-season package fits together like a Swiss watch.

Don't expect that from Battlestar Galactica, folks.

Boo! It's thirty pages.

I'm guessing that isn't what most agents and editors have in mind.

Now I'm off to write a synopsis of the synopsis.

• A number of fans of the video game franchise Diablo have seen new screenshots of Diablo III and, unsatisfied with their appearance, doctored them up to be as they "should" be.
• Thousands of angry teenage girls are rioting over the ending of Stephanie Meyers's Twilight series for not ending as they think it "should."

We somehow have embraced the idea that all opinions are sacrosanct and, worse still, that they should have impact in the real world.

Maybe it has something to do with being a democratic society, based on the idea that opinions can rule a nation. Maybe it also involves the Internet, that aching hole of want where everybody's yelling and crying but nobody's listening.

Whatever the cause, I'm perplexed that so many people expect their opinions to matter. Or, more importantly, that others should do something to make them matter.

Opinions themselves are fine; this blog couldn't exist without a lot of ill-considered ones. Go ahead and hate the new screens of Diablo. Go ahead and be disappointed with the last Twilight book. Don't buy either of them.

But don't expect the world to change solely by the power of your indignation.

Maybe there's such a thing as too much communication, especially when so little of it is listening.

I read these very credulously, too; I mean, I was the only kid in my neighborhood actively looking for gnomes under trees. I also thought I caught a Nessie-like creature in a local pond but it turned out to be a huge snapping turtle.

When the Montauk Monster washed up in New York recently, looking all bloated and pale and toothy like a feral Oompa Loompa, I got excited: here comes the weird animal invasion I'd always dreamed of!

But, alas, it turns out to be just a raccoon.

Sigh.

The good news it that I now have a nickname if I ever become a pro wrestler: the Montauk Monster.

Yet now that I'm back, I'm not getting back into the writing like I should. I'm more tired these last ten days than I've been in a long time, and certainly more addled and disorganized, too.

It might have something to do with the stage I'm at with the novel: rewriting the thing. I thought I'd lost my critical faculty when I first read the beginning chapters because they didn't look bad, but the first chapter needs a lot more work.

It's funny how I tend to spend more time recovering from a vacation than enjoying one.

Maybe that's because I try very hard to live my whole life like most people want to on vacation: relatively free, introspective, perceptive, and involved. Indeed, a vacation tends to be the reverse of those things for me because of the crowds and inconveniences.

No more "vacations."

If you've never heard of it, Frontier House is a PBS reality show (though far more classy than most) in which three modern families battle the elements and their neuroses in a simulated 1883 Montana homestead. They chop wood, they raise crops, they build their own cabins. It's a fascinating show, all the more so because you get to see how the families react AFTER they return to the present day.

It occurred to me while watching it that we need Apocalypse House.

You find a modern ghost town somewhere remote, a place with plenty of abandoned stores and crumbling houses--everything you'd have when society collapses. The exact reason for the collapse, be it plague or zombie invasion or rapture, doesn't really matter; all the participants need to know is that the shit has hit the fan.

You take three average families and you let them live among the ruins, scrounging for food and fighting to survive. Maybe you hire some actors to drive through on motorcycles with big spiked mohawks and swinging chains. Maybe you have a cordon of zombies throwing rocks at the windows all night. You could also make weird lights glow in the sky or play eerie screeching noises. Whatever it takes to make the situation truly apocalyptic.

Then you sit back and watch. Do the families cooperate? Do they improvise weapons? Do they try to start a farm, or do they rely on the fermenting canned food in the local burned-out supermarket? Do they try to start civilization again, organizing town hall meetings? Or do they go feral, eating their weak and injured?

It's ratings gold, I tell you.

As far as I'm concerned, there are only two ways to really know someone: ask them if they believe in ghosts, and survive an apocalypse with them.

The Salem Witch Museum has two halves to its exhibit: the cool dramatic retelling of the accusations and trials, and the bland glass cases afterward showing how negative witch stereotypes have poisoned us against folk magic.

That's pretty typical of most exhibits we saw: "Hanging witches is bad. Not because hanging people on trumped up charges is bad, but because it is intolerant."

It wasn't systematic intolerance that killed those twenty innocent people. At best, it was a failure of critical thinking and a subservience to a group mindset. At worst, it was individual malice, opportunism, ambition, and vindictiveness.

What are we supposed to carry away from Salem? That we should be tolerant of those kooky Wiccans, none of whom were around in Salem to be executed? Or that we shouldn't make up crazy shit about our enemies as a pretext to hang them?

The latter seems a bit more poignant and useful these days.

• Lizzie Borden's House
• Lovecraft's Grave
• Thoreau's Crib
• Wayside and Orchard House
• Sleepy Hollow
• Salem

First, Massachusetts--where beautiful history and ugly modernity collide. I'm not sure how you elected M.C. Escher as the head of your department of transportation, but the tangle of one-lane, one-way, unlabeled roads he's built for you just aren't working. Decide if you're a modern place or a historic one and stick with that, will you?

Also, I've never been cut off, snarled at, scowled over, and flipped off so often as when in Massachusetts, both on foot and in the car. You make New Yorkers look like Care Bears. If you truly hate people who come visit the historic ruins you infest, just let us know that up front and we'll leave you alone.

"New England" pretty much died when the last shovel of dirt landed on Lovecraft's coffin. Innsmouth conquered all.

Second, Delta. I called you on Wednesday night to move my flight to an earlier time--the one I originally paid for that you changed. For a mere three hundred dollars, you gave me the earlier flight again. Then you bumped me back to the later one again after delays, essentially stealing my three hundred dollars. Fortunately, it only took forty-five minutes on hold and some slow explaining to get that money back.

I hate traveling. Have I said that enough? I hate it. My rules of travel are simple:

• You go to one place and one place only.
• You go wherever people are NOT.

I broke both rules this week, though there were some highlights of the trip, usually enjoyed after my heart rate slowed again:

• The Lizzie Borden House was very interesting, more so because we were the only ones on the tour after a surly lady and her family got kicked out.
• Lovecraft's grave is always inspiring. Perhaps I too will have crumpled business cards and cheap pens left on my final resting place. One note to H.P.L. misspelled Cthulhu.
• Sleepy Hollow Cemetery was wonderful, even in the rain--maybe especially in the rain.
• Salem was a mixed bag to be sure, but the Burying Point was nice and the witch memorial very poignant and tasteful. 50% of the Salem Witch Museum was cool, the part with the life-size dioramas and dramatic narrator. The second half, with the politically-correct exhibit that says "ooh, we don't mean you cool, trendy Wiccans," was not.

I'll have pictures to post soon!

I'm not sure whence the true source of horror in this vacation comes--from the sites we're going to see or from the useless jumbled directions we've gotten to "help" find them.

Every system from Google to Mapquest to the National Park Service seems completely unable to describe the non-Euclidean geography of New England, especially with most of it now under repair.

It doesn't help either that the people of Massachusetts view "lanes" as purely mythological, jostling each other on the roads like the Three Stooges shoving together through a door.

I hate traveling. I like arriving places. The best vacations are just exotic places to read.

Indeed, I've deleted lots of archived posts from yesteryear, keeping only the ones in Movable Type. Why? Because who wants to read what I thought in 2002? I certainly don't.

I hope you enjoy the new format and find it easy to use.

(LiveJournalers can see the site at www.will-ludwigsen.com.)

The dealer's room is amazing, though my recent resolution to buy only books I plan to read very soon or plan to keep because they're hard to find has reduced my buying. I found a great Ash Tree Press edition of Russell Kirk's ghost stories, though.

When I haven't been kibitzing upstairs (we're actually staying on the floor below the lobby), I've been working on a Sekrit Projekt that I'll unveil soon.

If you don't hear from me in a week, assume I've made the error of staying a night at Innsmouth's Gilman House.