Dispatches from the Underground: The Parable of the Conflict Avoidance S*****
I miss these.
I’m gonna skip right over the part where I make the mistake I always make, when I promise “these are gonna be a regular thing again”. That’ll be great if it happens, but I’m not gonna kid myself (or you) about just how full my hands actually are. Besides, either way (and whether you like it or not) you’re gonna hear more out of me this year than you can probably handle. I realize that sounds like the exact misguided promise I just said I was going to avoid, but it’s pretty much a done deal. The fact that we just finished running my psychedelic religious space opera as a serial (“The Trapping of the Ceteroquin”, which originally appeared in our sci-fi anthology Demiurges and Demigods in Space, Vol. 1 and then ran twice a week for nearly the entire year to date) is just the tip of the iceberg. Coming right up behind it, I’ve got a whole book of tempestuous reflections from last spring to drop on everyone.
That’ll do it just on its own, but there will be even more after that. Stay tuned.
It’s the only way to find out if I’m lying.
In any case, I really do love these Dispatches and it’s simply been too long - I had no choice but to drop by with a few self-deprecating anecdotes.
Happy Birthday to the Owl Issue!
We’re hashtag blessed to be able to start off this unsteady, unheralded return on a celebratory note: it was exactly one year ago that we released our unforgettable Late Winter 2020 issue, our second glossy print offering.
Even at a full year’s distance, it’s difficult to fully convey the intensity of my feelings for this special little magazine. I cringe to use such cliched phrases like “labor of love,” but I don’t know how else to describe it. We really poured ourselves into this thing. A glance at the authors list reveals a who’s who of all the first-year Monadnock Underground heavy hitters, and I’m still honored by the quality of their contributions found here.
The look and feel of the physical object still blows me away. We worked closely with then-art director Chloe Wojewoda to craft not merely a pleasant, professional design but to turn a themeless collection of unrelated pieces into a continuous whole, a singular collaborative piece of art. The capstone of this artwork, of course, is the gorgeous original owl Hannah Ellingwood designed for us using her unique paper cut-out method.
Hopefully you’re lucky enough to have secured a copy. We were sold out by summer sometime and as it’s much more difficult (and costly) to do a second run of the glossy magazines than it is for our paperbacks, it’s unlikely that more will be printed. A true collector’s item.
My memories of this issue cannot be separated from the timing of the release. This rumored pandemic was already very much in our consciousness and we all felt at the time that we were running on borrowed time. We were. We held our big release party at the Peterborough Town Library on March the 6th (I’ll never forget the date). It was a phenomenal event, dynamic and energizing. John Palmucci and his now-wife Mina came all the way up from New Jersey and a million of us went out to Harlow’s and then Cooper’s afterwards. It was a real Time - and it was basically the last one before the drawbridges all got raised and everything got shut down.
That was it. It was almost certainly the last evening event, in fact, the PTL would ever host in that library; following the COVID closures, the library proceeded with its planned closure for dramatic, wholesale renovations. It’s almost complete. The only room in the building they didn’t knock down is the one in which we actually held the release party. Coincidence? You do the math.
So happy birthday to our beautiful Last Hurrah Issue - and we raise a glass to everyone involved.
What Did You Add for Lent?
That’s only a half-serious question, but it’s worth remembering - regardless of your attendant persuasions - that we’re now more than two Sundays deep into the 2021 Lent Season. I think it was Father Albrecht of Glastonbury Abbey, on Ash Wednesday or thereabouts, who said in a homily that since all of 2020 was basically a big long period of sacrifice and penance, there’s no point in giving up anything extra this year for Lent.
I agree, but I come at it from the bias of being incredibly undisciplined when it comes to the notion of “sacrifice.” I’m downright defiant, really, especially as pertains to matters of diet, and though this is my third consecutive year of intensely observing Lent, that never includes giving anything up. Instead of giving things up for Lent, I prefer to add them.
This notion started off a while back as a joke I would tell each year on Facebook (to mixed reactions, unfortunately), but then when it was time to actually get serious about my spiritual practice that’s really what I ended up doing. It works. I set up a ritual calendar for the 40(+) days between Ash Wednesday and Easter and I usually attempt to dedicate the time to matters of the spirit by engaging with several different paths or areas of focus at once.
I never do everything I set out to do, but it still works - I’d call it the single most important spiritual endeavor I conducted in both of the last two years. The intent, and result, is to dedicate this big chunk toward the beginning of the year to fertilizing my inner soil, to set myself up for the rest of the cycle to come. I don’t mean to make that sound like some kind of performance-optimizing, affirmation-oriented, self-help exercise - even without the sacrifice it’s actually a lot more difficult and complicated than that. This is an intense journey, honestly something that borders on an ordeal, something that you have to go through in order to come out clean and elevated on the other end.
I highly recommend it - again, regardless of your persuasion. And if you need recommendations, reach out anytime - diloreto@monadnockunderground.com.
The Parable of the Conflict Avoidance Shits
Funny story.
So as part of all of this, I’ve resumed my regular divinatory exercises. Every week or two, I inquire as to what complications I’m likely to face in the coming week and how I can best respond, then conduct a very elaborate sequence to obtain an often complex answer that I then distill into something that makes sense. Since I’ve been doing this (off and on) for nearly thirteen years now, I have a whole unwritten set of associations and meanings in my head that sometimes make the answer I received very easy to figure out.
Such was the case back on 2/15, when my reading included probably my least favorite hexagram. It’s called “Splitting Apart” and it means what it sounds like. Actually, it’s worse. It means the bad guys win and there’s nothing you can do about it. Fighting it is only going to make things worse, so all you can do is shut up and deal with it and wait for the wheel to keep turning, for the time to pass.
Not only does it sound bad, but it’s a hexagram I’ve gotten prior to several of the most difficult events of the last thirteen years, so I get a little nervous any time it rears its head.
Of course, the point of this exercise is to make adjustments so as to avoid major pitfalls and, when possible, turn any adverse circumstances into triumphant results. Naturally, my reaction in this case is to watch out for conflict. And I did. Like a hawk. At work, at home, with all family members, with friends - at all times, I was hypervigilant about making sure I didn’t get into a goddamn war with someone.
I let myself yell at people on Facebook, but that was a calculated decision, a built-in release valve I knew I could keep under control. And aside from that, I succeeded. I won. I didn’t get into any problems with anyone in any area of my life. Bullet dodged.
Fast forward to Sunday morning when, out of nowhere, I awaken with a crippling digestive ailment that positively kneecapped me for half the day. The oracle doesn’t lie. The “bad guys,” it turns out, were inside me. Creepy!
It just goes to show, you can diligently maintain peaceful relations with everyone in your entire life and still end up with the shits. That’s how fate be sometimes.
It’s Terrible to be Biological
As if that weren’t enough, I spent the last week convinced I was dying - or worse, that I might have kidney stones. You think I’m kidding but that’s been my worst fear since I was in fifth grade...and I always knew this day would come. I just didn’t want it to be now.
Turns out I might actually be fine. We’ll see, I guess. I did go to the doctor and they did tell me for sure that I am not dying, but that I could have a little bitty stone or three. Or it could be nothing.
What’s funny, though, is that either way it seems likely that I caused my disturbing symptoms by engaging in the risky behaviors of drinking excess water and starting an exercise regimen. See what happens?!