Hot Cop
protects the Pentagon.
She’s the Lovely Blue Line, people.
You sure can’t call it
“Homely Security.”
If glances were misdemeanors
I’d be a suspect.
Monthly Archives: March 2016
Pete’s Perspective: “A message to all the people on the planet who carry out terrorist attacks.”
Blog Correspondent Pete Harrison weighs in tonight on the subject of terrorism. As always, Pete’s good sense matches his encyclopedic knowledge of the horror genre.
“A message to all the people on the planet who carry out terrorist attacks on innocent men, women, and children:
“There is no Giant Invisible Man in the Sky who wants you to kill other people.
“In fact, the reality that we all exist in right now, all of us, at the same time, may well be the only one we’re ever going to exist in.
“So, for the sake of argument, let’s accept that this life is the only one we will ever have.
“And further, even if you don’t believe that, why don’t we all just let everyone else believe what they want to, and they let us believe what we want to.
“Keeping this in mind, let’s just all celebrate our time on this Big Blue and Green Happy Funball Called Earth by being grateful for every breath we take, and just make it our mission to be kind and respect everyone, help people when we can, and just generally all get along and not kill and maim one another.
“I understand that it’s easy to forget how good it is to be alive, and start to take it for granted.
“I did that all the time myself, up until December 12, 2006, when I was told I had cancer.
“That’s when I realized that I was really ALIVE, and wanted to stay that way.
“It’s so precious, man, and it’s so easy to get lost in all the noise and forget how fucking precious it is.
“Try not to.”
UFO Gigolo features my trio of poems, “Three Dreamers”
I was honored today to see my first poems published at UFO Gigolo. Stephen Jarrell Williams, who is also Editor of Dead Snakes, kindly featured “Three Dreamers” there.
Check out UFO Gigolo. It’s damned fun. It focuses specifically on poetry in the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror. I am currently enjoying three poems there by contributor Alan Catlin.
If you’d like to peruse “Three Dreamers,” and you didn’t see them yesterday over at Dead Snakes, you can find the set of three poems here:
“Three Dreamers,” at UFO Gigolo
Publication notice: Dead Snakes features “Three Dreamers”
I’m honored to share here that Dead Snakes published “Three Dreamers” today. This is a set of three related poems that was first featured by Dagda Publishing, in the United Kingdom, in January 2013 — the poems’ individual titles are “The Writer,” “The Secretary,” and “The Bureaucrat.” Dagda subsequently featured these poems in print format in its 2013 poetry anthology, “Threads.” Finally, these poems were published in 2014 by Illumen, a quarterly print-only poetry journal here in the United States.
Editor Stephen Jarrell Williams also kindly informed me the he would feature the poems on another site for which he serves as editor — UFO Gigolo. This online publication focuses on poetry in the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. I’m new to the site, but it looks like great fun, perhaps especially for the sci-fi and horror fans with whom I’ve become acquainted here at my blog.
You can find “Three Dreamers” at Dead Snakes right here:
“Three Dreamers,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Photo credit: By IDS.photos from Tiverton, UK (Dark corridor Uploaded by russavia) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
Riverside Park, Virginia (photos)
A friend and I went to Riverside Park this Saturday, searching for eagles along the Potomac River; if our bird-search was in vain, it was still a nice walk. We actually did spot a ginormous nest — that thing was larger than my first apartment.
A friendly inveterate birder along the walk also pointed out a treetop where one bird habitually roosted — it gave the eagle a vantage point of the river and its abundance of tasty fish. You can pick out the roost easily among the highest branches of the treetop, because its bark and foliage have been scraped away entirely by the eagle’s claws.
That building on the opposite shore in the second-to-last photo is Fort Washington in Maryland.
A dam fine Easter weekend.
I know this might be hard to believe, but do you see those piles of debris? Those are the remnants of beaver dams. Beavers are itinerant, as it turns out, and will abandon dams for subsequent strongholds upstream.
That was one a few damn cool things that I got to see during my weekend in Mount Vernon; a great friend of mine generously invited me out to meet her family and spend the Easter holiday around George Washington’s home. (That’s it in the last picture.) The third photo you see is an apple tree in her yard — the metal skirt around its base is to fend off beavers. If you peek through it, you can see the damage it sustained when the little buggers tried to chew through its base and carry it right off.
People in Virginia always look at me funny when I say this, but we absolutely do not have stuff like this on Long Island!
Mount Vernon is beautiful. I spotted a … black-winged condor, I think? There is also a wailing nocturnal fox that frequents my friend’s property, as well, but she didn’t put in an appearance.
Anyway, there are also photos halfway down of what is probably the scariest looking tree I’ve ever seen. It’s more than 150 years old, and it looks dead, even if it isn’t. To me, that coarse, gray, clutching swarm of equally dead-looking vines looks like an otherworldly, witch-summoned spiderweb.
I commented that it would be a genesis for a horror story idea. One of my hosts, who is only fourteen years old, spun a tale on the spot that would be far better than anything I could come up with.
I have a possessed skull plasma lamp, and I’m f$%&ing thrilled with it.
I have entered into a period of my life at which fiscal responsibility is of paramount importance. So of course I bought a $35 skull-shaped interactive lightning-shooting plasma lamp with no warranty last night from Spencer’s.
This is possibly the best decision I have ever made in my life. Aside from the massive coolness evident in the pictures below, it has the added feature of actually being possessed. Consider the following:
- It is impossible to photograph. Those photos you see below? They were yielded from a Google image search. Something goes wrong every single time I try to snap a shot of my product in action — you cannot see the sublimely excellent rainbow lightning shooting from its base to the inner circumference of the glass skull. It just shows a whitish, otherworldly flare! Like angel fire! Or the wrath of Abbadon! Or anything, ever, in a J.J. Abrams movie!
- The MOMENT after I attempted these photos, the battery light on my digital camera flashed and the entire device went dead. COINCIDENCE?
- EVERY time I turn it on, my computer malfunctions. I SWEAR I am not making this up. Whenever the lamp is activated, I lose all control of my cursor, which simply leaps and twitches and shudders around my screen like a terrified jitterbug. (That is a real species, right?)
Anyway, I cannot articulate how wicked this thing is. It’s a damn fine product. Like any plasma lamp, when you touch it, the caged lightning shoots to the point where your hands make contact with its surface. [EDIT: “wicked” is early 80’s slang for something that is very, very good, and very, very impressive.]
This product will be an outstanding muse for a horror writer who hasn’t published or posted anything in a very long time. (I know you people have been totally cool about that. Would you believe I have a bunch of handwritten short stories that I just need to typeset and submit? There’s a really cool time travel story!)
It also has an “audio” function which is kind of a mystery to me … apparently this is a function in which only sound activates the lightning? I switched that on, then clapped a few times, but nothing happened. I was perplexed. (The third photo below illustrates me being perplexed.) Then I just began shouting random words at it. I started with “NATE WADE!!!” I have no idea why; apparently there’s some free association thing going on there that I can’t explain.
Still no luck. I consulted the packaging but found its instructions sparse. They reminded me that this product indeed has a “Sound Responsive Mode,” but says little of help beyond that. Then the box exhorts me repeatedly to “GET THE PARTY STARTED,” but those are redundant instructions, because, Christ, I do that every time I breathe.
Tonight I am going to blast Slipknot’s “Psychosocial” to find out if that will do the trick. I figure that’s just the song to placate an angry ghost. I’ll also replace the batteries in my camera, and this time try to shoot video.
Unless my camera now is just too demonically damaged. We’ll see.
I almost typed “a short haiku,” but I figure that would be a redundancy.
The good folks over at Dead Snakes were kind enough yesterday to feature a haiku I penned. Click the link for “Sideburns Haiku” by Ye Olde Nolan:
“Sideburns Haiku,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Anyway, every time I think of the word “sideburns,” I think of the Tony Travis song of the same name, performed in 1953’s “The Beatniks.” Only Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans will know what I am talking about.
Photo credit: “John Raphael Smith by Francis Chantrey (with thanks to the V&A for allowing photography)” by Jonathan Cardy – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29629944
Walter Langley’s “Never Morning Wore To Evening But Some Heart Did Break,” 1894
Oil on canvas.
Pietro Fragiacomo’s “Tristezza,” 1895
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 