Updates

I haven’t been here in a few weeks. The year gets stupid busy once we hit November. But also, I’ve been writing elsewhere. I’ve had two things going. I’ve been writing a story based on the “Achilles Heel” story note, which goes like this: “A man is threatened by a detailed 7" action figure of a slasher movie killer he purchased for his collection.”

The story has changed slightly from there, but not much. I made up a fake slasher movie franchise—called, generically, The Slasher franchise, because the killer is named “Simon Lasher,” AKA S Lasher, a detail from the fake franchise (“Slasher Basher Dude”) I invented when I was a teenager—and wrote quick summaries of each movie and came up with funny names for them. I am going to post my notes separately. But a young black man is the protagonist, inspired by a young man I knew briefly when we lived at the apartment on Shoreline. The action figure (another interim name for the story, which is now called “The Simon” but may change again) ended up going after the man’s enemies, in a perverse way, but unbeknownst to him. Anyway, in my morning pages today (I’ve been writing three long-hand pages first thing in the morning, at, like 6:30) I more or less worked out how the rest of the story will go—the point being it’s not done yet.

I wrote a different story yesterday, a quick sketch of a story I called “Lot 117” in my notes but which I’m now calling “Blackberry Lane.” Finally, I wrote another actually short story—the first draft came in around 1600 words—and I think it will get shorter still as I edit. It’s overwritten and doesn’t read well. The kids liked it, though. It’s my first attempt at a story about what I’ve started calling the Rift. In the world of my Alameda stories—including both of these and several others already written—I’ve decided there is a liminal rift in the area; that is, an overlapping dimensional fold that weakens the wall between dimensions and allows things in and out, sometimes. My thought is that this rift has always been present here—as long as humans have lived here, that is, as it was caused at an earlier geologic time—but has become more pronounced in the last century, for a few reasons.

The natives who lived on this land—the Chochenyo tribe of the so-called Ohlone confederation—knew of an evil place, where they would not go, on the eastern edge of the western marshland. They believed evil spirits could enter our world from there—and they were more or less correct, but since they knew better than to poke it, there were few problems, just legends. However, once white men started settling the peninsula—and more once they opened more of the rift by dredging the estuary and forming the island, and more once they demolished the indian burial mounds and used the bones in the gravel used to build up the island, and even more once the government built out the airfield and later Naval base at the point—the whole island became a nexus for weird events. In fact, the properties of interdimensional liminality—the overlapping junction between infinitely many worlds—explain the many hauntings claimed for the city, as well as strange possessions and inhabitations, because of the power of this “nexus point.” There’s a kind of flow of indeterminacy at such places, that can spill out and around, and animate the spirits of the land, those which might normally be “at rest.”

I don’t quite have the erudition to understand the strange physics of the place myself; even the government scientists who secretly worked out of a classified hangar at the Naval base to study what they called “the anomaly,” could make little sense of it according to the laws of physics we know. After the war (WW2), the secret lab was shut down and even sealed off—the scientists had opened more of the rift and barely avoided a catastrophic inter-dimensional event in 1944—and no one on the island knew about it.

Anyway, this is what I’m working with as a catalyst for my strange events. I feel like with this Rift I can basically ascribe any weirdness to it, it’s the explanation at the back of any of the things that happen. In other words, the city isn’t haunted because it’s an “Indian burial ground,” it’s haunted because the burial ground was violently destroyed AND it lies along the path of the Rift. And the ancestral spirits already present in any place inhabited for thousands of years are strengthened and influenced by the power of the Rift such that they can become present in our world again.

I don’t have it all worked out, but it’s humorous to me to come up with an “explanation” to unify all these stories, even if I don’t ever connect all the dots in the writing.

I have not been idle.