Where I got my titles, and why

All my more recent (post-2002) fiction titles, and either what they mean or why I chose them, or both.

1. The Haunted Ballads: The Weaver & the Factory Maid, The Famous Flower of Serving Men, Matty Groves, Cruel Sister, New-Slain Knight. Nothing hidden about those five title choices; each is a classic Child ballad. The twist came in retelling the story behind the song.

2. The Kinkaid Chronicles: A bit more complex.

a. Rock & Roll Never Forgets. This fit the establishing theme. JP Kinkaid is in his fifties when he begins narrating the series, a muffled pampered enabled rockstar who is kicked by circumstances into growing the hell up, finally. And it applies to his younger (but still middle-aged) sweetie, as well. "Come back baby, rock and roll never forgets..."

b. While My Guitar Gently Weeps. This one's deep into the reality of session work, tailoring your style to fit whoever's hiring you. Guitars - two custom axes, one gorgeous PRS Private Stock blue waterfall custom, and a $100K Zemaitis named Big Mama Pearl - play a big part in the plot. "I look at the world and I notice it's turning while my guitar gently weeps/With every mistake we must surely be learning, still my guitar gently weeps..."

c. London Calling. I knew I wanted this third one to deal with racism, and how music does and doesn't confront and deal with it. So the Clash title was just right. A lot of this one takes place in the south of France, which is seriously racist and where the Le Pen faction (ugly, horrible nationalist wingnuts) are deeply entrenched. "London calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down..."

d. Graceland. This one began as Cleveland Rocks. It deals with JP inducting his idol and major musical influence, an octagenarian blues sessions guy in the South, into the R&R Hall of Fame. Halfway through it, as I realised it was becoming an intimate, wrenching little thing about family and owning your own history, the title began to jar against my nerves. In a way, it's about attaining a kind of grace, and a kind of peace. "I've reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland..."

e. Book of Days. The only Kinkaid with a fictional musical title instead of a real one: it's the name of the double Blacklight CD that hits a universal nerve and goes mega on them and necessitates a 2.5 year tour that has some major consequences. I wrote all the song lyrics on this one.

f. Uncle John's Band. JP's full name is John Peter Kinkaid. Still alive after the near-disaster at the end of the Book of Days tour, he's playing local shows with his longtime Bay Area band, the Fog City Geezers. A book about pitfalls, and silence, and people not knowing each other past the surface. The original Uncle John's Band, of course, was the Dead; Jerry Garcia - Jerome John Garcia - was the Uncle John of the song. The book takes place mostly in Marin County, which was the Dead's stomping ground (and mine) back in the day, so it fit beautifully. "Come hear Uncle John's Band by the riverside, got some things to talk about here beside the rising tide..."

g. Restless. This one's a short story, which will likely be the first of a collection put together over time. It's Kinkaids, but not JP; this is narrated by the series' detective, former DEA, NYPD and SFPD Homicide detective Patrick Ormand. He drives me nuts (I want to smack him) but he isn't boring. "Restless" is the perfect one-word description of him. The story - which links up to the third Kinkaid, "London Calling" - explains why he's so damned restless, what happened to make him that way.

Short story, non Kinkaid:

Ghost, in the Key of B: A woman, a dead musician, a history. She's either being haunted and complicit in that haunting, or she's bonkers with grief, or both.

The Ties That Bind: A vignette, in the O Henry vein, about what poverty does to a relationship in modern America. A twist on a beautiful Richard Thompson song, "Oh I Swear": Cruel poverty is the tie that binds/but we'll get by.

You know that whole post about the thankful/gratitude because things aren't worse?

For the record: yes, it's very nice that I'm not dying of Ebola somewhere. Yes, it's very nice that I'm not holding out a tin cup, begging for alms because I have leprosy. Yes, it's very nice that I'm not a quadruple amputee. Yes, I'm pleased that, so far as I know at this particular moment in time, I don't have cancer.

I am not remotely thankful or grateful that I have multiple sclerosis.

Okay? Just to be clear: there is not one single thing about this disease that inspires any desire to thank anyone or anything. It sucks like a Hoover on speedballs. It hurts. It's unpredictable. It causes depression. The treatments, such as they are, are expensive or painful or both, and ALL the damned treatments, painful or not, also cause depression.

So: not remotely thankful to have this disease.

I am not remotely thankful for the raft of health issues currently making my life miserable, any more than I've ever been inclined toward gratitude for the health issues that have dogged me from birth. Little things, little indignities. My friends who live with serious illness - CP, ongoing crippling migraines, CFS, cancer, you name it - will know what I'm talking about.

I am not remotely thankful for having so many damned things messed up in my autoimmune system that none of my doctors can figure out what's happening where.

I'm not thankful for my life-threatening allergies.

I'm not thankful for whatever's causing me to produce so much saliva that I can't even swallow it all. Yes, the claritin - after four days - has stopped working. We're back to square one. And they still aren't sure what's causing it.

I'm not thankful for the second instance in a month of having my right leg go into simultaneous episodes of myokemia and ataxia (if you don't know what they are, and want to, please google them; my hands hurt and I've got a lot of typing to do this morning).

I have no sense of gratitude whatsoever for the shakes in my hands.

I'm not planning on offering up gratitude for the slow disintegration of my spine, or for the bulging disc in my neck at C-spine C3-C4 that I can't afford the time or the money to get fixed right now. The neck hurts all the time; I do my best to ignore it. The spine is more ominous: little electric shocks and pain. Move a certain way, freeze in place, grind the teeth, wait for it to stop. Whom shall I thank for that?

I am undelighted about an upcoming replay of the mangled biopsy. This one is likely to suck not much less than the mangling did.

I'm not thankful for the throat that keeps wanting to swell shut, or the fact that I keep losing my voice.

And I am REALLY not offering any thanks for the little white lesions on my brain.

I'm tired of physical pain. I'm tired of watching my body disintegrate. I want my health back. I'll take any part of it back.

Give me back my health. I'm not asking for a fountain of youth, I just want my health back. I'm 53, not 83. This is ridiculous.

Give me back some health, and we'll talk about thanks and gratitude and discuss half-full glasses. Right now, the glass is perilously close to empty.

Ruminations on gratitude and friendship

This is all about getting or not getting what you earn, and the essential unfairness and imbalance of being expected to be thankful.

See, here's the thing. I'm seriously fierce when it comes to friendship. If you call yourself my friend, I'm going to assume there's a reason you want to do that. It doesn't have to be object- or logic- or even action-based, but I don't think I've ever heard "I don't know, I just like you and consider myself your friend" from anyone.

So I assume that, if you use the word "friend" in connection with me, you have a damned strong reason to do so. I am a pisspoor choice as a "casual" friend. I'm a pisspoor choice for a "casual" anything.

YMMV, of course, but despite my occasionally authoritative tone, I never - EVER - speak for anyone but myself. Any lurkers who support me in email stay in email. I speak for no one but myself.

Let's look at it from the other side of the fence, which would be me, considering myself your friend. It is likely that, in that case, I will defend you, cover your back, cook for you, worry about you, cheer for you when things go well, mobilise as many people as I can to succour you in an emergency.

Why?

Well - because I define friendship that way. Just as importantly, though, because you've earned it. You've earned my care and my attention and my loyalty by being who you are. You may have made me laugh when I needed it. You may have done something I consider wonderful, usually a something that has nothing to do with me. You may be warm or kind or silly or damaged or genuine or interesting or any number of things. This is my definition of "earning my friendship": I will cover your back and take care of you when needed in any way I can because you are who and what you are.

I don't expect that level of support from my friends - everyone is going to have their own definition of the word, and it's hardly fair to expect mine to fit anyone else. My own expectations from my friends are fairly simple: don't backstab me, don't try to play god in my life, and don't betray or abuse my hospitality or my trust.

So here's the inverse. Why do you consider me your friend, assuming you aren't using that word as a casual catchall? My point (there is one, I swear there is!) is that I belive that, if I have your friendship, I've earned it.

Several people on my friendslist do the "daily thankfulness" thing. It's a nice thing, good to read - but I tend to associate "thankfulness" with "giving thanks", and there's my question: giving thanks to who?

I can be damned happy that I have my friends, and hoo boy, trust me, I am. I can be grateful to my friends, for what they do for me - I never expect it, it's always wonderful, it always blindsides me.

But, on some level, I believe we've all earned our friends. That state, friendship and mutual love and respect, is the result of who we are and what we do.

CW Nevius, today in the San Francisco Chronicle

Remember the whole schemozzle with the coyotes in Golden Gate Park? The schemozzle that led me to write Dark in the Park which, entre nous, my excellent agent adores and will be getting off on editorial submission momentarily?

I had a very nice telephone interview with CW Nevius, San Francisco Chronicle columnist extraordinaire, this past Friday. He was doing a follow-up op-ed piece on the coyote story.

Here's the piece in question. I'm first up.

It's a very good piece indeed. I'd make one correction, one addition, and one observation:

1. The correction: The two coyotes that were shot last year weren't randomly aggressive. They didn't attack a poor helpless little doggy for fun. They came out of their lair to defend their pups (there were two; one was hit by a car, trying to fend for itself after its parents were killed).

And by the way, the dog, which got too close to their lair, was off-leash. Why this dog's owner wasn't cited and fined, I'll never know. If you own a dog, and you take it out of doors in a city with leash laws, keep it on a damned leash. Your dog does not have more rights than the human beings - or the coyotes, or the cats, or the raccoons, or anything else - around it. (And if the Animal Rights types don't like it, tough crap. It's the law, and the way it is.)

2. The addition: The mini-pack we saw crossing JFK Drive weren't just crossing the road. They hit the raceway next to the garage entrance at 10th Avenue and headed out across Fulton Street (four lanes of traffic), and into the avenues. They were streaking for the neighbourhoods, the backyards.

3. The observation: Two opposing comments from the people concerned:

"So, you say, maybe they could trap it. Maybe you'd like to try, they reply."

and a bit later on,

"Ask him what's next, and Merkle begins tap dancing. He says GGNRA authorities are "kind of at a decision point" and "kind of on the fence" but admits they "might have to take an action to remove an animal."

Um, guys? One of these things is not like the other. What's with the extremes? There's a middle ground, called TNR. In the case of the coyotes, The "T" in "trap, neuter, release" would stand for "tranquilise" instead.

Between trying to trap a large, fierce, smart predator in a state of full awareness and putting a bullet in that same animal's head, there's another option: knock it out, spay it, release it. Control the population that way. It works for feral cats.

And I maintain, loud and clear, that if some yippekayay cowboy can point a rifle at an animal's head, he can damned well point a tranq gun at its flank instead.

Cryptic letter to a beloved old friend, who may read this

Here's the thing.

There have never been revolving doors in my life. It's been a hard policy: walk out of my life, the deadbolt snaps shut. Heart and sanity were happier and safer that way.

I made an exception a couple of years ago because the time, what was happening, demanded it. A crack had opened in my life, a hole full of forgotten things, moments, events. I needed to get them back, and see them.

You - above anyone - helped with that. You made it easier than I had any right to expect.

I place a high premium on friendship, and a high premium on loyalty. I work at it. I don't tear my friends down behind their backs, I don't play stupid high school clique tricks, I don't play games. Hell, I didn't even do that in high school; I'm certainly not going to start now.

I have abandonment issues, something you know and know well. So the current situation is a mystery to me, but you know what, you are one of the people I love best and I refuse to make your world harder by nagging.

I won't chase you, though. If we have to be passive-aggressive (and yes, this letter is precisely that - it's what I'm being given to work with, and who am I to blow against the wind?), then at least that much should be clear.

Don't know what the story is, don't know why the current behaviour is happening, but in the end, it doesn't matter. We all do what we need to do.

I'll always be there to cover your back, but the doorbell may need a good hard ring, because the mechanism in the revolving door is about to be disabled, for my own heart, my own sanity.

You, my friend, I will defend
And if we change, well, I'll love you anyway

Here if needed. Peace out.