season of dead air
8/2/2005 @ 5:34 am Comments Off..if you’ve ever spent any length of time on the radio, you soon learned to fear the grim black void known as DEAD AIR. the bottomless pit that opens up beneath you when your mouth is half open, your mind empty as a cloudless Texas sky.. in such a moment you have not only lost the power of speech, you’ve suffered a sudden unnoticed brain trauma and you’re in a vegetative state, sucking protein jelly through a tube as gravity has cast you out and you’re freefalling, suffocating, and worst of all, time has crawled wheezing to a complete stop and there’s a terminally hopped up punk cowboy with spiky black hair and rings in his orifice staring at you from across a miles wide desk, bored and amused as a kid with a magnifying glass torturing bugs. anyway, I imagine you get my point.. for the past year and a half, I’ve been at worst borderline terrified at best damned uneasy at the thought of breathing my own dead air here or in the Velvet..
for the past thirty days I’ve been lost in the supermarket, peacefully baffled by bright colors and simple packaging, and while I can’t say I gave it two seconds of thought or planning, July became my season of dead air. It wasn’t so much the torched nerve endings and destroyed brain matter, more the perfect storm brought to a churning head by taking on a script project with my old KMJ screenwriting partner mister anderson about a singularly talented and dangerous serial killer and the likewise talented and afflicted cop hunting him, with a drop dead delivery date of july 29, plus some ever more consuming sidework on Godspeed and compounded by the arrival in late June of my young son Elias, 9, named for Elijah, who was fed by ravens in the wilderness until he saw God and who wants to talk scholarly about all things anime and Manga and whip my ass at various video games and stay up til midnght if he can get away with it.. and this summer I had the pleasure never known and never foretold by the oracle of watching the boy plaster Phineas Poe and Velvet stickers onto his skateboard helmet. I felt an ordinary human smile stagger me like wings when I went to check on him and the baby past midnight and caught him grasshoppered in bed with his mag flashlight and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.. and for about two minutes one saturday afternoon I was immortal upon listening to him read Goodnight, Moon to his baby sister in a zombie voice meant to be scary, and might have been, except he kept laughing.
now, how freakin’ cool is that…
all apologies for my long absence, I’ll try to warn you next time I go under. trust though when I say it was well worth it. my great regrets, too, that I couldn’t make it to san diego for comic con. the fates conspired heavily against me that weekend, cruel sisters they be. meanwhile, I have gifts. for the past year I’ve been polishing and retooling the stories from the butterfly collection, and last week tunneled into one of my favorites, a sort of coming-of-age road story called Waco, One Mile and nearly got lost in it.. this one comes at you in four parts, to be posted in the Velvet at random intervals, only promise being that the first three shall not be expired until the fourth has been given its due for at least a week.
the first is SULFUR, around the bend is Corpus Christi..
godspeed,
-wcb
ps.. in the coming week or so check back for a brief under the skin behind the scenes tour of Clevenger’s latest excercise in sweet torture, Dermaphoria.. I read the final cut last week, at three thousand feet, on long delirious red eye, and since Craig is sick of looking at, thinking of, and waking up in a cold sweat over it, I’ve got the run of the place.
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