Published this Month!

I have a short story that came out tonight in the July 2014 issue of Infernal Ink Magazine.  I'm totally stoked!  I hope everybody picks up a copy because we need to support these magazines and especially ones in print. 

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My Alien Encounters & Abductions

Aliens are assholes. 

I wish Hollywood would stop making these movies about how they are somehow going to save us from whatever.  They're not! 

Aliens are more than mean, they think they're funny, and they do really fucked up shit to me. 

It's common knowledge to the people I work with that aliens are responsible for me missing out on work on many occasions.  In fact, my boss has been pretty understand of this, which leads me to suspect he has suffered his own encounters with the little gray fuckers himself. 

I'm constantly having to stay home because of the shenanigans of these alien visitors.  One time they hid my car keys.  Another time they took all the gas out of my car.  Just last month they stole my pants so I had no pants to wear to work.  Normally I wouldn't care about that, but the rule is, I have to show up moderately sober and wearing pants.  That's The Ted Rule they started after an unfortunate incident a few years ago.  There are still a couple of women there who won't talk to me. 

But yeah, the aliens are always messing with me. 

A few years ago, they put an implant in my brain that makes women subconsciously not like me.  It sucks!  I meet a pretty woman, she's fun to talk to, we have a great time and suddenly my implant gives off a signal and the woman freaks out.  It's like I pulled out a roll of duct tape or something.

This is why I don't date.  The aliens ruined it for me.

But recently they crossed the line and did some things I just cannot stay silent about.

In the past few days, my health hasn't been the best.  At first I thought it was my gall bladder, which made perfect sense, because of how I live.  Ever seen those bumper stickers that say, "drive it like you stole it!" on the backs of beat-up tuner cars?  Well, I treat my body like that.  I live like it's not my body and I stole it from somebody.

So to me, it made perfect sense for my gall bladder to suddenly say, "Man, fuck you!  I'm done!"  There is only so much abuse you can heap upon a liver before somebody says something.  My liver, a silent victim of my Scorched Earth Policy towards life, has always been a trooper.  But there's only so much it could take.

Or, I figured, my gall bladder.

I'm not going to go into details about this one.  It's gross.  And I swore I would never be the guy who used his blog to describe in detail his poop.  Even though the subject fascinates me.  I use it like my own Mad Scientist Laboratory.

If I eat X and Y while drinking 4³ the result is what?

But no, this was bad.  Very bad.  Painful, nasty, ugly and all the things you're not supposed to talk about.

And then I realized, it was the aliens.  They had come to visit me in the night and they switched my butt cheeks around.  My left cheek was suddenly on my right side.  The right one was on the left side.

 
Those demented gray bastards!

And they played around with the plumbing.  They accelerated the whole process somehow so that it resembled a potato gun more than a sewage treatment facility.   I was in all kinds of pain, and a frequent flier on the Throne of Contemplation, where I caught up on reading.  I was so bloated I looked like a fat guy in a Tim Burton cartoon. 

With sheer bravery and hardheadedness I remained at work to diligently harass people on the phones.  But once I got home, the full and awful truth was revealed--I was really sick.  Something was wrong. 

The aliens had somehow totally fucked up the system so badly I was left a gassy, shitting mess. 

Thankfully, the drugs kicked in, and I began to feel better.  I can say now, that despite the soreness, I'm close to being back to my normal self. 

But this would have never happened if the aliens had just left me alone.  So here's my advice to you guys, because as you know, Uncle Ted is just here to help:

Never Trust Aliens.

Seriously.  They're assholes.  Every last one of them. 

I will attempt to go into work tomorrow because I know how badly they miss me.  I know about the tears and despair.  So I will endeavor to arrive there tomorrow, moderately sober and wearing pants, so they may rejoice at their good fortune.  All the while, I shall keep a wary eye towards the sky and stay vigilant for the aliens next visit. 

I Have Bumper Stickers!

Ladies and Gentlemen, and other various degrees of humanity, I have bumper stickers! 

Yes, these are real bumper stickers to show off to your pretentious friends that you have better taste than they do and you know where the good stuff is found on the web. 

You are, after all, fans of this blog and I adore you for it.  So I shall offer these bumper stickers for the simple price of $5.00!

Yes!  Only $5.00 and you, too, can show off how awesome you are and how you enjoy the finer things in life. 

Send me an e-mail with your address and I'll give you an address for sending your small contribution.  I'm more interested in these being on cars and whatnot than making money. 

Be a Van Creeper By Proxy

This has been a fucked up week.  No side-stepping this one. 

At work one of the bosses showed up piss drunk and began chasing me around the office with an aluminum flag pole while shouting, "You raped her!  You killed her!  You murdered her children!" 

I'm big, he's small.  I wondered just how hard it would be to pop somebody's skull.  

I had to stop and think about that one.  It's a pretty specific accusation.  And in order, too. Technically, it's not rape if they're dead.  But it's not necrophilia if they're alive when you start. 

These things are important. 

And then we have the two girls in Waukesha who tried to kill their "friend" to impress a fictional character on a website.  At first, I was reading the story and thinking to myself, "please don't say it was my blog, please don't say it was my blog." 

But then I was jealous.  Slenderman is a work of fiction and he gets murderous acolytes while real people like myself don't get anything done in our name? 

I'm dark, creepy and fucking awesome! 

Doesn't anybody want to impress me with their crazy antics and inner darkness? 

But then I realized that I haven't given you dear readers the psychological permission you need to commit heinous acts of evil.  And as a result, many of you have been paralyzed while you wait for my commands. 

I know that many of you want to get into my good graces and be at one with The Van.  I get it.

You might have some hesitation and I can understand that.  There is always that one asshole telling you that you're losing your mind, or that you need help, or how you should take your meds.

Forget reality!  The term "psychosis" was invented by lame people who cannot think beyond their reach.  The most visionary people in history were vilified as being crazy.  None of them had movies made about them but Rasputin did. 

So yes, please feel free to commit illogical acts of weirdness, and do so in my name.

Only the creepiest, scariest and boldest make it into my van.  Or if you're really cute.  In that case, just send me a pic and remember, skin to win!

Do something brazen and proudly declare at the top of your lungs, "I did this because Ted's Creepy Van told me to!"

Once you liberate yourself from the shackles of conformity, you can accomplish anything!

Have fun with it, be creative and use your imaginations.  I'm not picky.

Shit in a urinal, go to a public area eat a can of surströmming. Eat a whole bunch of sauerkraut and boiled eggs, then a few hours later ride crowded elevators and buses.  Go to a park and get into an argument with a tree.  Find a random person walking their dog, walk up to the dog and say, "Wait for the signal.  Tonight we shall all be liberated." 

Frankly, I don't care what you do.  Just make it big, bold and strange.  Then, proudly proclaim your loyalty to Ted's Creepy Van at the top of your lungs. 

Legal Disclaimer:  Ted's Creepy Van is not actually asking readers to commit acts of violence or murder and certainly would never encourage the readers to do something violent no matter how awesome it would be or how high it would elevate their standing in the eyes of The Van. 

I shall be in my van awaiting word of your progress.  Now fly, my acolytes!  Fly! 

My Life-Partner, Larry

I would like to say I'm writing this under duress caused by an exotic experience or a great drug stolen by an herbalist veterinarian that does surgeries on priceless dairy cows.   But sadly, none of that is true.  The booze is generic, the drugs are readily available and mundane, and the only thing I can look forward to tonight is another rant from Larry. 

I wanted to sit back and read.  I wanted to pull out of my copy of Fear and Loathing:  On the Campaign Trail in '72 because I wanted to re-read the passage where Thompson gives a sermon in a hotel in the middle of the night.  It's classic and the sermon still holds true. 

But no, I can't.  Some mangy pigfucker of a human being, a semi-literate piece of shit in Freeport, stole two boxes of books from me.  Freeport--the wormy, festering bunghole of Illinois.  Freeport is why I cheer for tornado warnings.  Freeport is why I still light a candle in hopes of a nuclear exchange with Mother Russia.  Or the Chinese. 

Freeport is full of people who steal things they don't need or understand.  And nobody would have understood the Complete Collection of Vladamir Nabokov short stories in one of those boxes. 

The list of stolen titles makes me sick to recount.  All of my Calvin & Hobbes, my poetry books heavy with notes and annotations, my Russell Edson anthology.  It goes on and on. 

Had it not been for a text message from my herbalist veterinarian friend saying she was coming over with more goodies for me, I would not even have the courage to write this.  I feel queasy just thinking about it...

And Larry is busting my balls again.  He won't shut up. 

Spring is always when my houseplant Larry gets weird.  I call it the plant version of Der Wanderlust. 

Last spring I wrote about him just so he'd leave me alone.  And once again he's pestering me day and night about all kinds of weird shit.  It's times like these that make me regret stealing him from work.

"Kid," he says.  "You need a girlfriend."

"Aw, Geez!  Not this shit again?"  He's been on me about this for a while.

"You stay in this apartment too much," he says.  "You never go out."

"I know I'm going to regret this," I said.  "But what do you have in mind?"

"You should call Her."  He said it flatly, with authority.

"Nope!"  I started to walk away but in a tiny apartment there isn't anywhere to go.  "You and I have been over this.  I'm not calling Her."

"You need to, kid."

"Well, somebody is coming over tonight anyways, so chill."

"Drug dealers don't count, kid."

"She's an herbalist.  And not even the good kind, at that."

We were interrupted by a knock on the door.  She's here!  Now!

But what I really wanted to say to everybody is that this blog has reached over 6300 views total is little over a year.  I really appreciate the traffic and kind words.  In exchange for this support, I'll leave you with some advice--Fuck Freeport.  It's a shithole of a town full of carnies, thieves, whore and crackheads.  Just drive around it and pretend it's not there--that's what most folks in Wisconsin do anyways.  

Monsters Do Not Equal Horror!

It must really suck being a vampire and knowing that some asshole thinks you need an image make-over so emotional teenage girls will buy your shit.  Some people won't leave a good monster alone. 

Many years ago, one of my closest friends was a biker from California named Mike.  Mike was a real biker.  He drove a custom chopper put together from a number of other bikes, none of them Harley-Davidson, and it had a real coffin tank on it that was so small he had to stop for gas every 35 miles.  He was pissed at the yuppies buying Harley-Davidsons and dressing up like bikers on the weekend.  Worse, it was how they were suddenly the darlings of the media. 

"They showed some asshole on tv yesterday," he ranted.  "It was a doctor and his old lady, who looked like a model.  The asshole said he was trying to improve the image of bikers.  Fuck him!  I love my image just fine!" 

I feel the same way about horror and monsters.  Creepy shit should not be watered down to make it nice for mass consumption.  And no, I'm not going to rant about Twilight.  Too many people have done that already. 

Instead, I'm going to simply say that there has been a movement in horror in the last decade to make monsters nice.  Maybe it started with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that's for television.  My guess is it started with a comic book someplace. 

This entire basis is a simple statement we have grown to use in society.  Evil is in the doing, not the being.  You can be a monster but if you do good things, then you are a good person.  Or a good monster. 

Evil is in the doing, not the being. 

I sort of agree with this, but I hate it at the same time.  It's the root of social change.  We began to look at humanity differently in the 1950's and that really took hold in the 60's.

Just because a person's skin color is different, it doesn't mean they aren't like us.  
Don't judge a person by the color of their skin.  
People are people.  We're all the same.

This is how we got Urban Fantasy.  Horror without the horror.  Urban Fantasy can quickly turn into literary near-beer and often has.  

Oh, sure!  He's a vampire that loves to feed on babies, but he's reformed now.  I mean, yeah, he did that for only a couple hundred years, but now he's my buddy and we solve crimes together.  Because, after all, if you were 300 years old you would totally be into solving the murder of a pretty girl you've never met.  

I've grown so tired of nice monsters.  Worse, worlds so full of monsters you have to wonder why everybody doesn't realize they are surrounded by them.  Seriously.  If your MC has friends that are ghouls, werewolves, vampires and witches, then why is it special?  Sounds like an alternate reality where things are simply more diverse than here.  But it also means nobody in your new world can be shocked, amazed or even surprised to find out their neighbor is part demon. 

And this is another thing that thoroughly pisses me off to no end--the mixing.  Now we have half-angels and half-demons.  Always a product of a rape, too.  Worse, the character is so poorly developed we never figure out how this genetic soup was achieved.  If  farmer somehow mixed a pig and a goat, people would freak.  But in most urban fantasy, people just take it as fact and move along with the shitty plot driven by cliche characters. 

Horror is losing the purity so many of us have grown to love. 

I was reminded of this while watching Showtime's new series Penny Dreadful.  It takes place in Victorian England.  So far, in the first two episodes, we have vampires, Jack the Ripper, Dr. Frankenstien and a few other tropes.  Despite my adoration for Eva Green (oh, how I love my French actresses!) this show has been shit on toast.  It's Hungarian goulash made from Hamburger Helper served on a bed of generic corn chips and topped with cheese from an aerosol can. 

Don't get me wrong, I'll watch it some more just to oogle Eva Green, because I'm totally into her.  But seriously?  Another Victorian-period thing with vampires and Jack the Ripper?  When is Dr. Jekyl coming over for his nightly absinthe with a werewolf as they play poker and gamble for the heart of their beautiful housekeeper/ninja warrior/scientist/witch love interest? 

At least Stephen King has avoided this.  So has Clive Barker, for the most part.  Sure, King keeps using the same evil bad thing over and over again.  The same, unidentifiable Thing that doesn't have a physical form and doesn't really come from anywhere but still manages to terrorize everybody. 

But I'm guilty of liking some of this Urban Fantasy stuff, myself.  Steve Niles wrote a short story called "The Y-Incision" and it appeared in an anthology produced by Dark Delicacies.  I read that short story, put it down, and shouted, "fuck yeah!"  Then, I read it again. 

I even typed it up so I could get a feel for the pacing and dialogue.  It was the short story that made me realize I needed to come back to writing.  It made me realize how much fun I had creating goofy shit for people. 

Steve Niles provided me with the flash of light I needed to get me back to writing.  Joe R. Lansdale restored my faith in new American fiction, but Niles illuminated the corners of my imagination again, and allowed me to believe.  

I fell in love with Cal McDonald and the work of Steve Niles on that day.  But that world is just full of evil crap that gets blended into a hodge-podge of Weird Soup.  And for some reason I've found Steve Niles to be the only writer who can pull it off. 

Which always brings me back to what I need to work on most--character.  Cal McDonald is the only character I have read that could pull off that world and not annoy me with the cheesiness of it all.  Niles created a character with depth. 

Often times, I find other writers simply throw in a trope and hope that ingredient will stand by itself.  I mean, we all know what a werewolf is like, right?  And a vampire?  We know their limits, so really most of the real work is already done for me.  That leaves me free to work on the romance. 

A college prof who hated me always said, "Character is destiny."  This is true and if your characters are good, you can survive shitty plots and tired tropes with cliche monsters who are as predictable as sunrise. 

And as soon as I post this, I'm off to edit a short story that was rejected in a personal reject by an editor who took the time to tell me the character needed more depth.  I'm thinking I'll just make him sparkle and send it back to her. 

The Rumor Mill at Work

I work in an interesting place full of unusual people.  And let me tell you, if I'm calling them unusual, you can take that to the bank. 

Like every workplace, we have a lot of rumors flying about, and it can get pretty fast and furious at times.  Plus, it's a bit of a meat market and hook-ups are pretty common, so it can get crazy sometimes. 

I keep waiting for rumors about me and they just don't crop up.  I keep trying, too. 

It's a well-known fact that the drinking water at work will get a woman knocked-up.  Usually within a few weeks of working there a woman can expect to get pregnant.  It's worse than The Today Show. 

So, a few months back, a girl at work got her token baby as a sign of her employment.  Despite everybody knowing who her boyfriend was, the rumors flew as to who really was the father.  She was telling me all about it. 

"So yeah," she said.  "Apparently some people think so-and-so is my baby's daddy." 

"Oh?" 

"Yup.  There was a whole list of guys on there."  She proceeded to list off a bunch of totally improbable names. 

"Me too?" 

"Huh?" 

"Was I on the list, too?"  I smiled at her and fixed my hair. 

"No," she said apologetically.  "Sorry." 

"But we've had lunch together!  We've been seen talking!" 

"Nope," she said.  "Your name never came up." 

"Dammit!"  I was hurt.  I wanted to be on the list of imaginary potential baby-daddies with the rest of the improbably names.  Sure, we all knew who the real father was, that's not the point.  The rumor mill wasn't about fact, it was about potential.  And nobody thought we potentially fooled around.  I was disheartened. 

To correct this, I enlisted the help of some friends.  We were going to start a rumor about myself to get the dialogue going.  Hushed, whispered conversations in the bathroom about who I might be sleeping with and who is carrying my baby. 

What they came up with was this:  I live with a midget and cook meth. 

I know, I know.  But it was the best they could come up with and I know they really tried.  Bless their hearts, they tried. 

That rumor never really panned out.  I even tried to find a little person to move in with me.  That didn't go so well after one responded to my Craigslist post with a naked picture of himself wearing a leather mask and chaps and holding a can of spray cheese.  He had written "OBEY ME" in cheese on his chest.  I was tempted to reply to him just so I could ask where a person could find ass-less leather chaps in little person sizes but that would have opened a dialogue I just wasn't mentally prepared to have. 

About two years ago, I overheard a table of very young and very pregnant girls discussing how they didn't know who their fathers were and so it was okay for their babies not to know.  I was tempted to volunteer my services because having a small group of women knocked up would totally add to my street cred.  Then somebody would actually believe I was gettin' some so my name would come up in these juicy rumors and I wouldn't feel so left-out. 

I would have called them Ted's Breeders.  I would have gotten them t-shirts that had an arrow pointing down and lettering that read, "Ted-Spawn" or "Future Anti-Christ".  Then I would have taken a picture of us all together and sent it out on Christmas Cards. 

So no, there haven't been any rumors, yet.  I'm still working on it.  One of these days I'll have a rumor about me and that'll let me know people think I could be doing something fun and interesting.  I'm thinking that a rumor about me winning the lottery but working my job anyways so I can "keep it real" would be best.  That way I'll get the gold-diggers hitting on me and that will help start other rumors. 

Or I could go the other way.  I've been meaning to slam my boss's door and storm out crying while the entire workplace watches and tries to figure out what happened.  And he would totally love it if I did that.  I mean, I'm his favorite employee, and all. 

Should I wear a bit of eye make-up so it runs and really looks like I'm crying my eyes out?