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Stephen King: Regional Novelist
Oct. 26th, 2023 10:36 amThe problem with breaking any kind of fast—media, chocolate chip cookies, The Real Housewives—is that if you do it one day, you’re inclined to do it the next.
How can it hurt? you reason. I’ll stop tomorrow. Etc, etc, etc.
Thus this morning, I found myself reading all about the latest mass shooting. Twenty-two dead. As many as 60 injured.
That’s a lot. Even for a mass shooting.
###
Happens that it took place in a part of Maine I kinda/sorta know: Ben’s brother, The Spy Who Stayed Out In the Cold, was the harbor master in Rockland during one of his periodic attempts to warm up, and TSWSOINC had a girlfriend who lived in Lewiston. We stayed with her once.
(After they broke up, the girlfriend actually read this journal for a while. But I digress.)
I vividly remember that afternoon we drove to her house and somehow stumbled upon Bates College, this bonsai Ivy League university rising up out of the jungle that is the Maine countryside in deep summer.
Maine has a deeply weird terroir.
I haven’t visited all the states, but of the ones I’ve visited, Maine and New Mexico are the weirdest.
Not necessarily a bad thing, this: New Mexico actually lives up to its license plate motto (Land of Enchantment), and Maine in the summertime can stagger your heart with its sheer physical beauty.
But let’s just say Stephen King isn’t a horror novelist; he’s a regional novelist.
###
The shooter appears to be a schizophrenic Army Reservist (ulp). Who loved Donald Trump.
I use Stephen King-ish tropes when I play out the scene—from the shooter’s POV—inside my head. Those kids in that bowling alley? sez the voice of Donald Trump inside the shooter’s head. They’re gonna grow up to do some very, very bad things. They’re gonna get abortions. They’re gonna try to change their sex. They believe the Bible says it’s Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve.
POW!!!!!!
POW!!!!!!
POW!!!!!!
Doesn’t help that Maine has the laxest gun control laws in the nation.
I mean, I think they don’t even do background checks for mental illness or prior felonies.
###
Oh, and that thing in the Middle East?
Still happening.
That thing in Sudan, too.
Plus, a Category 5 hurricane took out a big chunk of western Mexico.
In good news, Choupette (Karl Lagerfeld’s cat) did her best to take out Kim Kardashian.
Meanwhile, I did as little as possible yesterday.
Finished the Remunerative Project, did laundry, did grocery shopping, but did not work in the garden and one mile out on my tromp, thought, Fuck this, went home, ate Terry’s chocolate orange slices and watched Bodies on Netflix, which is actually a halfway decent science fiction/time travel story, though its central paradox is big enough to drive a fully armored IDF tank through.
I do love time travel stories!
Though given the opportunity to travel through time myself, I’d turn it down.
With all its shortcomings, 21st-century America is clearly the best time and place there’s been so far on this planet to be a woman.
How can it hurt? you reason. I’ll stop tomorrow. Etc, etc, etc.
Thus this morning, I found myself reading all about the latest mass shooting. Twenty-two dead. As many as 60 injured.
That’s a lot. Even for a mass shooting.
###
Happens that it took place in a part of Maine I kinda/sorta know: Ben’s brother, The Spy Who Stayed Out In the Cold, was the harbor master in Rockland during one of his periodic attempts to warm up, and TSWSOINC had a girlfriend who lived in Lewiston. We stayed with her once.
(After they broke up, the girlfriend actually read this journal for a while. But I digress.)
I vividly remember that afternoon we drove to her house and somehow stumbled upon Bates College, this bonsai Ivy League university rising up out of the jungle that is the Maine countryside in deep summer.
Maine has a deeply weird terroir.
I haven’t visited all the states, but of the ones I’ve visited, Maine and New Mexico are the weirdest.
Not necessarily a bad thing, this: New Mexico actually lives up to its license plate motto (Land of Enchantment), and Maine in the summertime can stagger your heart with its sheer physical beauty.
But let’s just say Stephen King isn’t a horror novelist; he’s a regional novelist.
###
The shooter appears to be a schizophrenic Army Reservist (ulp). Who loved Donald Trump.
I use Stephen King-ish tropes when I play out the scene—from the shooter’s POV—inside my head. Those kids in that bowling alley? sez the voice of Donald Trump inside the shooter’s head. They’re gonna grow up to do some very, very bad things. They’re gonna get abortions. They’re gonna try to change their sex. They believe the Bible says it’s Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve.
POW!!!!!!
POW!!!!!!
POW!!!!!!
Doesn’t help that Maine has the laxest gun control laws in the nation.
I mean, I think they don’t even do background checks for mental illness or prior felonies.
###
Oh, and that thing in the Middle East?
Still happening.
That thing in Sudan, too.
Plus, a Category 5 hurricane took out a big chunk of western Mexico.
In good news, Choupette (Karl Lagerfeld’s cat) did her best to take out Kim Kardashian.
Meanwhile, I did as little as possible yesterday.
Finished the Remunerative Project, did laundry, did grocery shopping, but did not work in the garden and one mile out on my tromp, thought, Fuck this, went home, ate Terry’s chocolate orange slices and watched Bodies on Netflix, which is actually a halfway decent science fiction/time travel story, though its central paradox is big enough to drive a fully armored IDF tank through.
I do love time travel stories!
Though given the opportunity to travel through time myself, I’d turn it down.
With all its shortcomings, 21st-century America is clearly the best time and place there’s been so far on this planet to be a woman.
