(For those coming in late, this is an ongoing installment on attempting to become a commuter cyclist in the Dallas area. If you want to get up to speed, please feel free to get caught up on Part 1. If you don’t, there’s all sorts of other stuff on this here Web site, so dig through the archives for a while. Nobody’s going anywhere right away.)

Get The Necessary Accessories

So you found your chosen bike, new or used, and you’re now planning your first serious trip. It could be to your day job, it could be to the grocery store, and it could be just up the road to a park where you can take in everything. Now if you haven’t built up accessories over the decades the way a longtimer like me has, you may spend as much money on the stuff for you as the stuff for your bike. The bad news is that these are costs you really can’t avoid if you’re serious about this. The good news is that if you select high-quality gear, you won’t have to buy replacements anywhere near as often as if you were only worried about cost. As the saying goes, cheap is expensive. At the same time, bike shops, equipment sites, and other venues are just loaded with all sorts of things that sound like a really good idea and look really cool, and are manufactured and promoted for people looking for shinies rather than gear that will take care of them. Another saying, this time from motorcyclists: Chrome won’t get you home.

The classic auto guide How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by John Muir, Tosh Gregg, and Peter Ashwanden has an extensive guide to tool kits for Volkswagen maintenance and upgrading, with one kit of essentials that you want to keep in your car because you WILL need it, one kit for more significant repairs that doesn’t need to be in the vehicle but needs to be accessible, and one kit that’s really only necessary for major operations such as engine overhauls and brake replacements but isn’t a bad idea to have. That’s how the following items run. The first set are things that you could, should, and must have before you start your first ride, because you’re going to regret not having them if something happens. The second set are items that you can choose to carry with you, but you might not use that often, but having them will save you lots of grief if you can’t get to or can’t afford to go to a bike repair shop. The sets include:

Essentials

These are the items for safety that you’d best have with you on that first ride if you want to keep your head unmushed, your hands unscraped, and your feet unworn. Get these before anything else, and if you’re not sure as to particular brands or styles, ask friends who bicycle for their recommendations. Also, unless you know for a fact that they were purchased recently and unused or used for only a week or so, these are items much better purchased new than used: you do NOT want a helmet that Some Guy On Facebook Marketplace says was “brand new” but had been stored in an unheated and uncooled garage long enough that it falls apart the first time it’s supposed to keep your brain in your skull and not all over the hood of an SUV.

• Helmet - Do NOT skimp on this. Get a helmet that actually fits your head, that can be adjusted to keep it on your head, and doesn’t obstruct your vision or your hearing. (There’s a reason besides weight why bicycle helmets don’t cover your head all the way like motorcycle helmets, mostly so you can hear horns, engines, loose and stray dogs, and the occasional psychopath.) This is a purchase best done at a reputable bike shop rather than online, especially with the problems with Amazon and other resellers not knowing and/or not caring about bootlegs of famed brands being sold as the real thing. Don’t decide to “test” it by hitting, bashing, or bouncing it beforehand, because then it’ll likely fail when it encounters something that may do horrible things to your unprotected skull.
  (True story: my youngest brother spent three weeks in a coma after a dolt decided to make a right turn from a lefthand turn lane right in front of him, and the driver then was caught by multiple witnesses trying to drag his body to a new position to make police think the accident was his fault. The only reason he lived was because his helmet was buried in the side of the car from the impact: as it was, his initial odds of surviving were about 10 percent and less than 5 that he would ever wake up, and he woke up just before he was to be fitted with a tracheotomy tube. Don’t skimp on helmets: after his accident, I’d sooner ride without pants than ride without a helmet.)

• Gloves - If you fall off your bike, and you will eventually fall off your bike, either from hitting a bump and losing control or attempting to get off and losing balance, a good pair of bike gloves are going to make the difference between your hands being slightly bruised but otherwise intact and your hands being full of chunks of gravel, broken glass, and bits of metal. Again, these are something best purchased at a reputable bike shop, because you’re going to want to try them on. Never mind the officially listed sizes and never mind what size you wore when you were a teenager: go with gloves that fit your hands as of right now. Most are displayed attached to a card so they can be hung up on a rack, but you’ll still be able to try them one one hand at a time. Get a pair where you can make a fist without anything binding, where you don’t have anything scratchy or poky on the inside or the outside (pantomime wiping sweat out of your eyes to check on this, because you’re better off knowing this now rather than discovering that some extra stitch or unremoved piece of packaging is leaving ugly welts across your face every time you rub your eyes), and where you can spread your fingers as far as they can go. Many have little terrycloth pads on the thumbs to catch sweat from your eyes and face: I personally recommend these from long experience. Many have exotic materials in the palm pads promising additional protection: in my own experience, those tend to break down, leak, or otherwise fail at the worst possible times, so they’re completely up to you.

• Front and Real Lights - For a very long time, bike lights were, to be honest, jokes. Either they burned through batteries in a single trip, or they were horribly underpowered, or both. The idea of front lights is both to let oncoming traffic, motor and pedestrian, know you’re coming and to give you advance warning as to objects, people, road and sidewalk failures, and occasional critters in your path. (True story: I was once nearly knocked off my bike by an armadillo I didn’t see until I was right on it, and it responded by jumping up and hitting the underside of my frame before running off.) The idea of rear lights is to give vehicles and fellow cyclists warning that they’re about to ride up your butt at any moment, so they know to pass, stop, or evade.
  Thanks to the number of idiots on the road, both motorized and self-propelled, who cannot put down their phones while moving (True story: I’ve had several near-misses with bicyclists determined to watch videos while riding, and I once had the experience of watching the same SMU brat on the same bike run into the same telephone pole on two separate Saturdays because she was too busy on her phone to pay attention to where she was going...and then looked around after each crash to blame everyone in the vicinity for letting the crash happen), there’s a reason why fire trucks and ambulances in the Dallas area have additional green and blue lights flashing, and it’s to get drivers off their phones and moving out of the way. You don’t need big bright flashing strobes to annoy drivers and pedestrians (again, this is Dallas, not Portland), but if you’re going to be riding anywhere near dawn or dusk, get ones strong enough that people will see you. (Fun fact: most bike lights these days have lithium batteries with USB charging, so if you’re riding to and from work, set up a spot in your work area where you can charge them during the workday. You’d rather have them go out after you get home in the dark than, say, halfway there.)

• Additional Reflectors - Again, consider the idiots on the road who think that texting while driving is a perfectly acceptable hobby. Also consider that even if you don’t need to be on a road for any duration of your trek, you’ll eventually come across driveways or crossings where you’ll want to let people know you’re in the middle before they turn in. You don’t need to wrap yourself in mylar for every trip, but reflective strips on your helmet, front and back, on the rear and sides of your bike frame, and additional reflectors in your bike spokes are a cost-effective way to signal your position and sometimes your intent.

• Tire Repair Kit - No matter what you do and no matter where you bike, you’re eventually going to run into something that punctures one or both of your tires and lets all of the air out. It could be improperly swept debris from a collision, it could be broken glass, it could be tree thorns, and it could be from the painting crew who use traffic light stops to sweep out drywall screws and roofing nails out of the back of their pickup truck and out onto the street behind them. (True story: I actively avoid one stretch of bike trail in Plano because of Osage orange trees (Maclura pomifera) along the trail. More specifically, I avoid it because of a character also using the trail who takes issue to the long and strong thorns on their branches, especially with suckers growing off the roots or trunk, clips off branches potentially overhanging the trail, and drops the cuttings directly in the path for others to ride or walk over. I call it “John Galt gardening.”)
  No matter how great the various additives and sealers in your tires, you WILL encounter something that leaves a large enough hole to let all the air out. This means that unless you have tubeless tires, you’ll need a means to separate the tire from the wheel rim, a means to seal the hole or replace the whole tube, and a means to inflate it when you reassemble tire and rim. You may choose to carry a hand pump, sealed carbon dioxide cartridges that refill the tube to the preferred pressure, or be happy to walk your bike to the air pump at your neighborhood gas station...if the station air pump is working and has a working valve. I personally have a repair kit consisting of a set of nylon tire levers to get the tire off the rim, both a tube patch kit and two spare tubes in case the damage is more extensive (Handy Tip: never keep a patching kit for more than a year because the adhesives tend to fail after a year or so, and I very highly recommend getting a new one after the beginning of the new year just to make it a habit), and carbon dioxide cartridges and an adaptor valve for multiple types of tube valves. This way, I’m never down for more than about 10 to 15 minutes, and if I really want to repair a blown tube, I can patch it at my leisure.
  (Handy Tip: learn what type of tube valves you have and the diameter of your tires. Most tubes have either Presta valves or Schrader valves: Schrader valves are flat-ended and squat, like car tire valves, while Prestas are thinner with a little metal finger-screw to tighten the valve after inflation. They are NOT interchangeable, and Prestas usually have a little round bolt at the bottom to lock the base of the valve to the wheel. This knowledge comes in very handy when choosing both replacement tubes and inflation methods. Knowing the diameter is just as important if you use inflation cartridges: buy the wrong size cartridge and either your ride will be miserable because your tire is underinflated, or you get the singular experience of a tube rupturing mid-inflation. While you’re at it, learn the recommended tire pressure for your tires and memorize it, because it WILL be on the test.)

• Bike Lock - If you’re incredibly lucky, you will never get a bicycle stolen or damaged in a theft attempt. The temptation is strong if your bike has no means of securing it: if your bike is expensive, there will always be someone out there wanting to add it to their Facebook Marketplace list, and if your bike isn’t, there will always be someone who tosses it into the back of a truck and sells it for scrap. No bike lock will ever stop someone really determined to get your bike, but the idea is to make a thief have to work for it, and locking up your bike in a public locale minimizes the chances that someone will have the time or inclination to put in the work. Not every lock is perfect: some expensive locks are famous for being broken or picked in moments, and cheap locks also stick and break at the worst possible opportunities. I myself have two locks for my bike: a thick chain to secure the frame to metal posts and a long thick cable to wrap through the front and rear wheels and keep them from being separated. They aren’t absolute, but they make potential thieves think “Is this worth the effort?”, and that’s the real deterrent.

• Lubricant - One thing nobody tells you when you start commuter cycling in Dallas is how dusty Dallas is. Dusty, dusty, dusty. So dusty, dirty, grimy that in the middle of summer, it’s best to walk without rhythm so as not to attract sandworms. Most oils and greases are great at picking up dust, sand, dirt, and other detritus and keeping them in close contact with your bicycle chain. Casual riders usually end up replacing their bike chains every few decades or so, but we commuters can expect chains to wear out every couple of years, depending upon how far we ride and under what conditions. Your mileage may vary, literally, upon your choice of chain lubricants (I personally swear by White Lightning Clean Ride ahd have done so for 20 years), but not only will your ride be so much smoother and less strenuous if you relube your chain every week or so, but you’ll be less likely to have your chain break from severe wear at the worst possible time (in the middle of a rainstorm, for instance) and have to hoof it to the nearest repair shop. I say this from experience.
  (Fun Facts Instilled Upon Me By Reputable Bike Shop Managers: clean your bike regularly, but in the name of Tsathoggua, Xiombarg, GG Allin, and Some Guy, do NOT take your bike to a self-service car wash and scrub your bike down. The high-pressure spray wands just blast right past gaskets in bike wheels and crankshafts and fill both full of water, guaranteeing that they’ll rust out and fail sooner. Likewise, while WD-40 is a miracle solvent for unseizing seized metal parts, it is NOT a lubricant, no matter how many people want to tell you otherwise. If you want your bicycle chain to last for more than six months, clean it properly without WD-40, and never let WD-40 near your chain unless it’s completely rusted solid and you’re prepped to clean and relube your chain immediately afterwards.)

• Pack or Saddlebags - Many cycling experts oppose backpacks for riding and argue that all cargo weight should rest in saddlebags attached to the frame. I’m personally in favor of backpacks, mostly because if you need to get off your bike, they’re easier to haul around than saddlebags. It’s your personal choice, but you will eventually need something to store and transport your repair gear, your work gear, your work clothes (including shoes), and only the stuff you need. Whatever you get, get something that’s going to be water-resistant or at least easy to cover with a poncho or bag during sudden rains (for decades, I used a Vietnam-era US Army ALICE pack for hauling home groceries because it was ridiculously water-resistant), and check it regularly for rips, tears, worn seams, and fraying straps.

Not Necessary But A Really Good Idea

Next up, it’s time to discuss the items that won’t ground you if you don’t have them on you at right that second, but you’ll wonder how you got by without it after the first week. These include:

• Rear-View Mirrors - Whether you get one that affixes to your helmet or to your handlebars, rear-view mirrors are a literal lifesaver. They’re handy for tracking drivers and other cyclists when you want to switch lanes, tracking that thunderstorm on your 6 that may or may not overtake you before you get home, and especially for getting advance warning of an idiot in a Lexus (but I repeat myself) and gauging precisely when the reversed “’L’ Is For ‘Loser’” is close enough that you want to get off the sidewalk and let them pass. I honestly prefer helmet-mounted mirrors because they’re less likely to be lost or messed with when you aren’t with your bike, and I’ve used Tiger Eye mirrors for a solid quarter-century without complaints. I’ve lost a couple, particularly when an aforementioned idiot in a Lexus blasted through a driveway into traffic without looking and I almost went under the wheels, and I’ve had to replace a few that became so old and battered that the silvering on the mirror started corroding off, but I’ve never regretted having one on my helmet.

• Sunscreen - This is Dallas. The big yellow hurty thing in the sky is doing its utmost to kill you, either with immediate immolation (as recreated in the best documentary about being goth in a Dallas summer ever made) or by slow radiation poisoning. Even if you think you’re only going to travel at night (I cast no aspersions: if I’m not back in my coffin by sunrise, I turn back into a pumpkin), carry a bottle of the strongest sunscreen you can get, and use it early and often. Don’t mess around with this, either: it’s getting depressing as to the number of bike enthusiasts I knew in the 1980s who either died of cancer or had really bad melanoma scares, and lots of sunscreen means that you’re not bathing in the blood of virgins to keep eternal youth.

• Sleeves - Sunscreen isn’t eternal, and it tends to flow, very slowly, off your arms as you’re exerting yourself. One of the best ideas from gardening and golf circles to move over to cycling is the concept of protective sleeves: they allow sweat to pass through and keep up a cooling effect, and they offer just a little more protection from the sun than just sunscreen alone. Best of all, they come in all sorts of colors and styles, so feel free to go wild: many cyclists choose bright neon colors for the same reason arrow poison frogs and coral snakes do.

• Good shoes - This may tick off a few people, but traditional bicycle attire (the Lycra shorts in particular) make sense for racers, where the bikes have been shaved down to the absolute minimum weight necessary and the next trick is to make the rider as aerodynamically efficient as possible. You, my friends, you’re going to be on Dallas streets, where the combination of drivers and road conditions are as close to “post-apocalyptic” as you can get. (That said, as tempting as it is, don’t go for the “buttless chaps and Mohawks” look, either: don’t ask me how I know that leather, studs, and bicycling don’t go together that well.) Most of the shoes sold for cycling are intended to lock into the pedals and allow more force applied on the up-stroke of a pedal as the down-stroke. Locking your shoes into those pedals, or going with toeclips for that matter, just means that when you hit something and have the chance of losing control of your bike, you can’t get your feet underneath you and possibly swerve or bounce out of a potentially dangerous crash. Again, your personal mileage may vary, but a good durable set of tennis or hiking shoes work just as well and will save you a lot of trouble.

• Towel - Nothing special, but a good basic towel to wipe off sweat, dirt, blood, oil, and sunscreen when you stop for a break or you get to your destination is awfully handy. In fact, get a set of them, so you can rotate through them over the workweek. By mid-June, you’ll learn that your Saturday afternoon clothes washing is less about removing dirt and more about debrining (on especially hot and dry days, you can get crusted salt between your shoulderblades like Godzilla fins after even a moderate ride), so wash those towels often unless you and your coworkers like the stench of fermented armpit sweat.

• Bike Pump - I’m sincerely hoping that you’re carrying at least one form of tire inflation with you at all times, but having a spare pump at home and/or work is a good idea for topping up pressure through the week, especially when the temperatures get up there. Make sure you get a pump with a valve that will work on your bike’s tube valve style, and preferably one with a gauge to show air pressure: you THINK you can gauge your tire pressure by squeezing it, and your sense of touch will lie to you about exactly how much air is really inside. The steadier the pressure toward the recommended pressure for your tires, the longer the tires will last and the better and the less unnecessarily strenuous the ride will be.

• Tire Replacements - After a few weeks of riding, you’ll discover how well your bike’s tires suit the trip. Big knobby tires are great for mountain bikes where you’ll have to ride through mud, sand, and the ashes of your enemies, but those knobs wear out fast, transfer a lot of vibration into your elbows and knees, and don’t give as much traction on wet or otherwise slick roads. Likewise, slick racing tires mean that when you hit patches of mud on paths and roads after a rain (for those not in Dallas, our main soil type is clay, to the point where bike paths are slowly taken over by silt washed off medians and yards that’s as slick and fine as porcelain slip), the tires just expedite the bike going underneath you as you’re crashing. What medium you choose is your call, but an increasing number of bicycle tire manufacturers make tires with knobs on the sides and smooth treads in the center to get the best of both worlds. I’d also very highly recommend tires with additional augmentation such as Kevlar to protect against punctures: they’re more expensive, but the next time that jerk with the pickup thinks that dumping spare roofing nails on the road is funny, you stand a better chance of not using one of the spare tubes you have socked away.

• Fenders - A little secret about bike tires is that at a nominal speed, water and mud stick to the wheel before being flung free by centrifugal force, and they usually tend to get flung free so they splash all over your back and butt. Ride through a mud patch, and people will make jokes. Not to kinkshame, but you don’t want jokes, especially if you don’t have a separate change of clothes waiting for you at your destination. Way back in the olden days of the Twentieth Century, many bikes came with fenders for both front and rear wheels to keep splash and spray to a minimum, but one of the big draws of ten-speeds in the 1970s was a minimum of weight, so bike fenders eventually became as popular as UnCandles. A standard bike off the rack rarely has fenders, but a lot of manufacturers offer solutions, and I have a detachable fender that clips onto the bike seat stem.
  (Fun fact: if you get so into bike commuting that you bike through snow or slush, that fender may not be enough. Several times at one job, I had no choice but to bike to work after an extreme-for-Dallas snowfall, and that’s when I discovered that slush detaches from a bike tire at the point where it bypasses the fender, and I got to work with my entire pack and butt covered with rapidly-freezing slush. It’s never a good look when the CEO looks at you coming in, notices the ten kilos of slush you just sloughed off, and asks “What the hell is wrong with you?”)

Now, to get away from acquisition and directly into commuter biking theory, stay tuned for Part 3, coming very soon. You’ll want to check back, if only to hear more about “butt calluses” and why a lack of one is the biggest reason why most beginning cyclists never continue. You’ll want to be here for this.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Every spring, it’s the same thing, and I can’t blame anybody for it. For those of you who have never been to Dallas, our lives are dinner theater adaptations of the Ray Bradbury novella “Frost and Fire,” where we tragically short-lived people skitter outside in the few hours where the night cold doesn’t freeze us solid and the rising sun doesn’t turn us into charcoal. The people in Bradbury’s story only live a total of seven days, but the analogy still works: rush out and do whatever you can in the few weeks or months between brutal heat and cloying cold, and one of the things everyone thinks they can do here is bicycle. Compared to where it was back in the 1980s, this is a very reasonable assumption, to an extent. The question that should be asked before “how do I start” is “when do I start?”

Right now, with the price of gasoline, that call of spring is particularly eloquent and insistent. When fuel prices hit this level, bicycles go from being solely the province of pre-teens and masochists to being a potentially attainable goal. Even people who otherwise would never leave their mobile metal wombs now think “You know, getting out on the road with nothing between me and the outside air but a T-shirt sounds like a lot of fun,” which it can be and it is. The trick, of course, is whether or not they’re willing to be prepared.

Now, I come to relative expertise in Dallas bicycling via a long, hard road. In some cases, literally. I’ve been biking in the area since 1980, originally because this was the only way to escape the suburban hell in which I was trapped through high school, and later because bikes were much cheaper forms of transport than cars or motorcycles, a vital consideration through the 1980s where most jobs in the wake of the famed Texas oil bust of 1986 paid just enough to cover rent or insurance but not both. In as autocentric a society as Dallas was back then, biking to work and events was also a major act of rebellion: bikes were okay for those too young for a driver’s license, but once passing the magic age of 16, anyone still on a bicycle was either a mutant or a hippie, and local motorists took great pains to run them off the road, run them down, fire shotguns over their heads, and pull up alongside and bop the cyclist with baseball bats. Sometimes, very occasionally, the people doing this weren’t small-town cops and other fortysomething delinquents, either.

Well, that’s changed, to the point where I barely recognize portions of Dallas and cheer the new attitudes. If I get cars pulling alongside, it’s not to scream “GET OFF THE ROAD” before peeling off. (Oh, that happens occasionally in certain areas, with drivers who get very offended when they yell in broad daylight “I can’t see you on the road” and I yell back “Maybe if you took your grandson’s penis out of your mouth…” In those areas, a crack like that tends to hit a very tender nerve, especially with the gentlemen.) Whenever gas goes above $3 a gallon, it’s more either to ask about where I purchased my bike or to give me a phone number. (I’m very flattered, but I’m very dedicated to my fiance Sarah, Zarozinia to my Elric, so I turn those down…and promptly send them to nearby bike shops.) In return, the drivers here are more likely to see cyclists who pay attention to traffic laws, who don’t go whipping the wrong way in one-way traffic and flip off the frantically swerving drivers, who avoid crowded sidewalks and move over to allow faster-moving traffic a chance to get by. That makes sense: we’re Dallas, not Portland.

Anyway, what that means is that compared to 40 years ago, Dallas isn’t necessarily a bicyclist nirvana, but it’s now possible to look at cycling as an option for transportation. Oh, there are still the cyclists going around White Rock Lake to show off their latest conspicuous consumption acquisitions, ride a few hundred meters, strap their bikes to the backs of their cars, and go home after demonstrating their utter contempt for anybody and everybody on the roads, but they’re an increasingly irrelevant part of the cycling ecosystem here. Most established cyclists plant butt on seat and feet on pedals to go somewhere, and for a lot of us, it’s to go to work. For others, it’s to avoid the usual car-and-parking mess: a dear friend of Sarah’s bike commutes to music events just so she can get in and out without dealing with the usual “3200 attendees flooding a parking lot intended for 700” gibberish. Some, it’s to get grounded on the way to work. Others, it’s to take advantage of the perspective, whether birdwatching, rock collecting, or simply catching the scents and the noises that drivers would never experience. I know a few whose especial appreciation of cycling involves seeing new cats and dogs along the route, and I’m regularly watching for everything from armadillos to turtles to coyotes and opossums on my own travels. The reasons keep expanding, and so do the number of cyclists joining us.

This doesn’t mean that starting off commuter cycling is going to be easy. For most beginners, they haven’t been on a bike since their early teen years, and they discover very rapidly that things have changed a lot since then. Not just with the bikes themselves or with the routes: just simply that their bodies usually aren’t prepared for the new task, and getting it prepared is going to take time. A lot of those beginners try it for a week, decide that the aches and pains aren’t worth it, and consign that bike to a garage or storage shed, never to be touched again. The discussion here is to give enough advice that beginners WILL want to keep at it, do a great job at it, and keep at it for years. This advice isn’t absolute, it isn’t complete, and it definitely isn’t elitist. However, the hope is that while I’m out catching a quick photo of a pond turtle in a creek or pond beside the road, I might catch one or more of you and share the wealth as it were.

Because discussing commuter cycling is a long and detailed subject, this guide will be broken up into multiple installments for clarity and for reading ease. But to answer the question “How do I get started?”, we’re going to start with “when,” because “when” might save your life later.

First, Start NOW

I get the concerns about weather. Dallas is notorious for thunderstorms boiling up with no warning, with rains coming down so hard that you have to keep a hand over your mouth to keep from suffocating. (And no, I am NOT exaggerating.) Through March and April, the south winds start up with a fury, regularly hitting as much as 40mph/64kph, strong enough to stop a cyclist going downhill. (And for those laughing at the idea of Dallas having hills, trust me: you find every last hill in this place when you’re on a bicycle, and some have a grade so gradual that you don’t realize how hard you’re working until you hit the crest.) You don’t want to risk cold snaps and heat waves, and you want to start when things are perfect. Please let me assure you that a lot of words apply to Dallas weather, including words in languages that still exist only for their particular nuances in profanity, but “perfect” will never, ever apply. Wait for perfect spring weather, and you’ll still be waiting when the roads are literally hot enough to scorch your tires and any flesh that comes in contact with them. Wait for perfect fall weather, and you’ll be dealing with holiday traffic and sunsets at 5:30 in the evening. Unless you like suffering from heat exhaustion, get going right now while the weather is still tolerable, because you want to be able to function in summer heat by the time it hits, and the best way to do that is to acclimate before it arrives.

Another aspect is distance. Right now, I’m less than six months away from my 60th birthday, and I get on a bike with memories of how hard and how far I biked in my early twenties. I returned to my bike in 2024 after a two-year gap, to a nightmare job on a route where biking was a surefire method of quick and painful death (even in a car, the commute was a horror, especially the Monday after a Dallas Cowboys game, where everyone on the road combined a nearly lethal hangover with watching videos of the previous night’s game while driving), assuming “Oh, I can still do the old work commute.” Oh, I wasn’t even remotely in shape, and not just because I was still recovering from surgery for a burst appendix. Even with three and four days a week of training, it was still a solid month before I was able to recreate what was a quick jaunt down the street when I was 21, and I acknowledge that the sort of long trips I could do back in 1987 may be beyond me forever. Most bike commuters have stories of coworkers who thought they could make the same commute on the first day: we call them “drivers.”

(Personal story: about a decade ago, I made friends with an assistant manager at the flagship Half Price Books here in Dallas, mostly because I was regularly biking there for my book addiction and she wanted to know more. One day at the end of April, she told me that she had accepted a position with Half Price in Austin, and looked forward to living somewhere where she could bicycle to work every day, on the gross and delusional assumption that Austin was a safer city for cyclists than Dallas. I celebrated her transfer, but begged her to start biking right then so she’d be in shape in time for the move, but she told me she’d be okay. A few months later, a coworker passed on the news: she made her move at the beginning of June and figured that the first days of consistent blood temperatures would be fine for her first trip. Not only that, but she hadn’t prepared for Austin’s considerably hillier topography, and what was a reasonable bike trip as the turkey buzzard flew was instead practically three times the distance when figuring climbing hills and frantic braking when descending hills. The coworker related that she passed out from the heat on the way to work, and spent her first day ostensibly on the job in the hospital. I bring this up not to mock my friend, but to beg each and every one of you to be careful out there. You may think you’re strong enough and fit enough to make a massive bike trip on your first day, and I’d prefer not to get the word that you’re in the hospital or the morgue because your body said “Oh REALLY?”)

The best time for starting, to be perfectly honest, is in March and April. After St. Patrick’s Day, the odds of cold fronts that require actual cold weather gear go to just about nothing until after the end of November, so you won’t need winter gloves. Until the beginning of May, generally bring a light jacket or a longsleeve shirt just in case: they don’t weigh much, they can be taken off and put away as you heat up on your ride, and you’ll definitely appreciate having it if the starting morning weather is significantly colder than predicted. That jacket or shirt will also give a much-appreciated layer between you and the ground, you and the road, or you and some nimtwit blasting out of a driveway without checking for oncoming traffic if something should happen. Either way, it’s also cool enough even at midday that sunstroke or heat exhaustion are unlikely, but as anyone living here knows firsthand, that won’t last for long, and you want to be acclimated enough to rising temperatures, day by day, that a truly hot day won’t necessarily kill you.

Use Due Diligence When Buying Your Bike

Walking into a bike shop or perusing selections online, and you’re taken in by the sheer variety of options. Do you want a touring bike, a racing bike, or a mountain bike? Do you want shock absorbers or an E-bike assist? Standard aluminum or carbon fiber frame? Titanium gears, hydraulic brakes, and electronic shifting? Tubeless tires? Do you know the difference between Presta and Schrader inner tube valves? What about a recumbent bike, or one with a trailer, or extra-wide tires for offroad work?

Tell you what. Right now, you may know what you want, but you don’t know what you need, and if you’re going to be commuting, you need something dependable. That means “boring,” with as few bells, whistles, sirens, and klaxons as you can manage. When you’re ready to move to a new bike, you’ll have an idea of what you’ll want, but every last nonessential and complex item you get on your bike is one more thing that will blow out at the worst possible time when you need to get to or from work. Shock absorbers go out, and your trip is going to be a drudgery. Electronic shifting goes out, and you’re going to be aggravated. Hydraulic brakes go out, and you could be dead. Go for something basic for your first bike, with features that either you can fix and adjust yourself or that a typical bike shop can fix without the bike being laid up for two weeks or more while they order parts that may or may not arrive. Remember: this is to get you around, not to impress all of the bike trail hangers-on who spend more time polishing their paint than meeting rubber to road. There’s nothing wrong with researching and considering options, but for this first bike, try to go basic.

Next comes where you get your first bike. First and foremost, in the names of Arioch, Issek, Elvis, and Some Guy, don’t buy the first thing you come across, whether it’s from Walmart or Facebook Marketplace. (A dirty little secret: most of the new bikes you see on Facebook Marketplace are from resellers who buy them in bulk from manufacturers or from local bike shops, so you’re usually not saving any money. The plan is to sell these to the people doomscrolling Marketplace at 3 in the morning, drunk and/or bored out of their minds, who see a generic bike photo and figure “You know, I need a bike for exercise.” Odds are really good that they’ll come back for sale on Marketplace six months later after it’s been rotting in a garage for a while, so there’s that.) Many of the bikes sold by Walmart and sports supply shops aren’t intended to be ridden all that often: as the joke goes, “cheap is expensive,” especially when you have to keep buying that cheap bike because every one wears out on you after a couple of months. If you can, find a reputable bicycle shop or reseller where you can examine it beforehand and find out if it actually fits you. If your only option is to buy a used bike, try to bring a friend along who knows something about bikes, who knows how to look for broken welds and brake pads worn to the metal. Many bike shops carry sets of preowned bikes where the shops have refurbished old bikes with new tires and brakes and given them a thorough tuneup and relubing, usually at a significant savings off new prices, and they’ll generally be a lot safer than the one you bought off Some Guy’s front porch in the middle of the night.

You and your friend need to look for bent frames and wheels, cracks in welds, and rotting and/or worn tires, and decide between yourselves whether the savings made by buying from Some Guy is worth the cost of repair. Tires and tubes are going to be expensive, but they’re manageable. Older bikes may have completely obsolete gear that may or may not be replaceable: that bike that’s been collecting dust in an uncooled garage since 1987 may have wheels larger than the easily available tires and tubes, and odds are that brake and shift cables have rusted to uselessness by now. For liability reasons, most bike shops and most welding shops in general won’t touch bike frame rewelding: if you can weld your own, more power to you, but that’s a lot of trouble to invest in a bike when you can just buy one that doesn’t need fixing. The same goes for wheels with broken spokes, missing or broken reflectors and guards, and bent handlebars. You’d be amazed at the number of alleged adults who get hold of a bike for the first time in years, immediately start hopping curbs and jumping ramps, and then quietly put the bike up for sale once they’ve bent and beaten it into unusability.

(Another thing to watch out for: it’s absolutely amazing how many dubious bike shops promise “free repairs for life” that can’t be bothered to do those repairs when needed. I’ve personally had encounters with shops like this that sat on a bike for a week or longer, swore that repairs had been done, and then handed it back with absolutely nothing fixed and expecting to get paid for doing nothing. Your mileage may vary on this, but I learned 20 years ago that if you walk into a bike shop to the smell of various burned and vaporized cannabinoids, don’t bother expecting your bike to be ready when you insist “I really need to get this back because I need it to get to work.” I can’t smoke, but I don’t have issues with those who imbibe, but I also figure that there’s a time and a place, and bike shops where the staff is too busy hitting the bong to hide the smell are usually bike shops that don’t last long. Likewise, several manufacturers promise free replacement of frames if they break, but only if you bought them directly from the manufacturer and not from a bike shop. If you got it from Oat Willie’s Discount Bike and Ganj Shop, the manufacturer will tell you “too bad, so sad, bring it up with the guys you bought it from and don’t bother us again.”)

After you’ve looked at it, now ask to ride it around. Not much: just around a block, to make sure that the chain isn’t rusted solid, the wheel and crank bearings haven’t seized up, and the derailleur shifts through gears without sticking or throwing the chain. Make sure that the tires aren’t rubbing against the inside of the frame and the wheels aren’t wonky, and check for broken spokes that weren’t immediately noticeable during the first inspection. Check the seat and make sure that you can adjust it to fit your needs and not the needs of the previous buyer, and that the padding hasn’t disintegrated to powder and the cover isn’t torn or worn. For the most part, the bike should run smoothly and without any odd noises, and if the seller wants to argue about the noises or otherwise tries to justify anything that gives you concern, back off and find another seller. Again, if you want a project, knock yourself out, but if you’re just wanting to go to work and the grocery store, that bargain won’t be a bargain when you have to spend four and five times the bike’s price just to make it safe to ride.

One last thing to consider. Most bike shops recognize at a moment’s notice the difference between the bikes only ridden on occasional weekend runs around the lake and the ones ridden for commuting, mostly because wear adds up after a while. Many serious commuter cyclists end up buying a new bike every couple of years because it’s cheaper than the repairs and replacements for an older bike. Just be prepared for this: if you selected a good bike in the first place, you won’t be happy when it finally wears out, but at least you’ll have warning after a long, long time.

This section is getting too long, so check back for PHASE TWO, already in progress. I’m only getting started.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

START TRANSMISSION

Well. According to the Chinese lunar calendar, we’re firmly in the center of the Year of the Fire Horse, and I’ve been around just long enough to see it come around again. I have no delusions that I’ll see another, but you never can tell. Both Mark Twain and Fritz Leiber lived long enough to see Halley’s Comet come back around toward the inner solar system, and if I stick around until I’m 95, I might get a chance to see it myself. There’s always the chance that some mad god decides to punish me with my worst fear and give me immortality, so I’d best get my affairs in order now before things get weird. (I’ve already made plans for The Singularity and the thought of electronic eternity consisting of listening to Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling talking at each other: two shotgun slugs big enough to make sure not enough brain remains to scan, in a bayou remote enough that the alligators and snapping turtles don’t leave enough DNA for cloning. Of course, I figure that we’ll get three straight years of the Dallas Cowboys winning shutout World Series pennants or five seasons of Firefly before The Singularity happens, so don’t worry about me or the alligators. I’m not planning on going anywhere any time soon.)

That’s the funny part about having a life weirdly lived: it’s not the fear of “how much time do I have left?” but instead “How the hell did I live THIS long?” Honest to Xiombarg, I was absolutely certain that I’d say or write something incendiary enough that I wouldn’t live to see 28. (Someone apparently agreed with me in 1994: I still have the .22 hollowpoints I pulled out of the outside wall of my old garage apartment at the time.) Finding myself somewhere between Elder Statesman and the Sayer of the Law is a weird feeling, but I’ve been prepping and taking notes for the last 35 years, so it comes with the territory. When I do slough off this weak flesh, the hope is that friends and cohorts will corroborate all of the weird tales, including the story of how I know savannah monitor urine looks exactly like crack cocaine, because I’m having problems with keeping them all straight myself.

Were this a Kurt Vonnegut story, this would start at the end and then rush to the beginning, but I’m not even in the same solar system as Vonnegut, so things start where they’re supposed to start. Feel free to leave the vehicle at any time for your mental safety, and don’t forget to tip your neighborhood jenkem vendor.

60 Years Ago

I don’t have too many memories of this time, but which ones I have are of my getting my basic personality traits established, demonstrated mostly by sucking down amniotic fluid like a fish and kicking the hell out of the inside of my mother’s uterus. Eventually, the lack of conversation and reading material led to my leaving that situation, exactly two-thirds of the year through, in what still qualifies as the second-worst decision I ever made: if I’d had more ambition and drive, I would have worked harder to share the exact birthdate and time as Shirley Manson, but you know me and procrastination. As it was, it left me exactly one-third of a century old, to the hour, when the clock rolled over on the Twentieth Century and every date starting with “19-” became history. This was also two weeks before the premiere of Star Trek and just before LSD became illegal in the US: make of that what you will. Even then, I was demonstrating skills that served me well in later years, particularly inarticulate screaming and crapping myself.

50 Years Ago

Up to this point, the story read like that of any midwestern suburban kid in the mid-1970s: chasing June bugs in the back yard, going to school and learning all the wrong things for an effective life in the future, and vaguely making plans for a future we kids were told repeatedly wouldn’t happen when the nukes started flying. (Back then, no matter how hard my father worked to break me of that disgusting habit, my dream was to study vertebrate paleontology until I was 120, preferably the ones found around the Viking 1 landing site on Mars.) Things switched into high gear at the beginning of the year when my father, a packaging engineer specializing in plastics and corrugated cardboard, took a job offer in upstate New York. Pack up everything, leave everything I knew up to that point, move to a new town right about the time school ended so there was no point in enrolling until the next school year began, move to a house far enough out that access to libraries, parks, bookstores, or any other source of information besides the television was impossible, and spending the summer desperately craving contact with anyone approximating my own age. In any other time or place, I probably would have been hospitalized with severe depression, but this just “built character.” Kids, really, REALLY don’t try this at home.

40 Years Ago

Hit fast-forward: moves to Chicago and Flower Mound, Texas before relocating again to Neenah, Wisconsin. Graduated from high school, very short time in the US Army, discovered midnight movies and cyberpunk science fiction, started off 1986 switching from journalism to stage makeup illusions, and chafing severely at life in a town orbiting the local bar. It was my fault: I followed my family to Wisconsin with no real plans or schemes but with a severe homesickness for white birch trees, and promptly discovering that the greater Appleton/Neenah/Menasha area had and still has a higher per-capita alcohol consumption than any place on the planet other than several small towns in Siberia. Since I can’t drink, and the only options for anybody in the area under the age of 40 was to work a crap job, get drunk, get drunk, get drunk, get blackout drunk, get drunk, get drunk, get stoned, get drunk, and freak out over anything new or different like tarsiers given a fighter jet, the greater Appleton area’s only draws were the used bookstores (well-stocked thanks to temporarily inconvenienced billionaires selling Grandma’s library to pay for the weekend’s bender) and some truly incredible pet shops, some of which were family-run operations and not fronts for Wisconsin drug rings. By the end of April, I had learned what so many of Appleton’s misspent youths had been trying to tell me: get out of the area by the time you turn 21 or die there. When that opportunity presented itself, thanks to my best friend calling to ask if I could get to Dallas when he got leave from the Navy, and with the help of two dear Appleton friends with whom I’m still in touch to this day, I sold off nearly everything I had, packed up the rest, bought a bus ticket to Dallas, and spent the next two days trekking back.

Naturally, that sound outside the bus window was Tezcatlipoca, Kali, and Loki preparing to vomit in my face: I came back just in time for the Great Texas Oil Bust, when a barrel of West Texas Intermediate went from nearly $100 to about $10 and innumerable Dallas businesses and organizations knowingly or unknowingly dependent upon the former price of oil fell down and went boom. The Dallas I left nine months earlier was pretty much completely gone: venues and activities shut down, people moved away, and others just crawled into their navels. I was still itching to do something, anything, but by September when I got my first solo apartment, I was completely on my own. It’s amazing how strong the memories are of hanging on by fingernails and trying to get through the year, and how as horrible as some of those times were, they just set me up for the places I needed to go next.

Don’t cry for me, dear reader. Mentally rewinding the clock and surmising what would have happened if I hadn’t been stuck on a groundskeeping job that paid enough for rent or food but not both, you, I, and everybody else wouldn’t have liked the person I would have become. (Not that you particularly like me now, but at least you’re honest.) As it was, desperate destitution led me to ransack the local library, giving me exposure to a whole load of resources and reading materials I wouldn’t have had exposure to before. Since I couldn’t convince people I knew pre-move to get away from their computers and do anything, I hopped on my bike and tore around everywhere, eventually exploring everything from north Carrollton to downtown because I had nowhere else I had to be. A chance encounter exposed me to Dallas’s community radio station KNON, and I biked into downtown to ride in a parade protesting the First Baptist Church of Dallas attempting to steal KNON’s frequency for itself. (It was the best sort of protest parade: everyone expected 100 participants, we got over 5000, and the news coverage got FBoD to negotiate to switch frequencies with its own radio station.) Best of all, because of that whole “butts in front of the computer” thing, I gave up on calling cohorts and went off to visit local record shops and ephemera stores, where I came across that most wonderful of mid-1980s weirdness, the “zine.” If this were a James Burke special, this would be where he pops up to note the turning moment where life completely changed, arguably for the better.

30 Years Ago

Okay, be sure to mark the way out and prep your signal flares, because here’s where things get weird. The high points of 1996 happened close to each other: the first was walking into a job interview in San Jose and being told by the hiring manager that he’d read about an April Fool’s Day story I wrote for a Dallas weekly in Entertainment Weekly, only it had been reported “straight.” (I have yet to find any mention of this in the magazine archives, but considering that the company with which I was interviewing went under about six months later, it’s not worth fussing about.) A month later, I was in the front lobby of Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, in front of the “New Releases” shelf, laughing myself sick at the new Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology edited by Gardner Dozois. Gardner, still pissed at my responding to his creeping on an attendee at a convention in Austin with “As you know, I refer to my penis as ‘Mel Gibson’” with “You mean ‘Mel BROOKS’,” took umbrage at a column I’d written for a magazine dedicated to reviewing short science fiction, whining about my being “a Hunter Thompson wannabe of sorts” and vaguely threatening that it would be a real shame if the magazine went under because it got sued for something I wrote. When a pisher like Dozois had to dedicate a whole page of his Year in Review to smarming about me, I knew I had ARRIVED.

Let’s rewind a bit for context. Hyperburst in three...two...one...

Started writing for various zines and pro magazines, including the aforementioned weekly newspaper. Lots of self-destructive and just plain destructive behavior, partly from imposter syndrome and partly “for writing experiences.” Multiple relationships, culminating with meeting my first wife Liz at the bookstore at where she worked and marrying the year before. Learned basic HTML and took a job with a prepress shop trying to turn itself into a Web design studio, taking the considerably higher income and moving Liz, three cats, and a savannah monitor to a new apartment in downtown Dallas just in time for the fratbro running the studio to decide he wanted to pivot. After two months of jobhunting, got a job offer to move to Portland with another Web design studio, packed up wife, cats, lizard, and worldly goods into a rental truck, and hied thee hence to the Pacific Northwest, literally running out of gas and money 30 miles east. Managed to get to Portland anyway, and hit Powell’s the day after arriving. With me so far?

Three decades later, I can now say good things about Portland, mostly due to the cool people I met after I escaped. At the time, though, Portland was rapidly transforming from a scrappy little art town that got its reputation because everyone left in the 1980s to the trustafarian haven it would become. As I’ve related elsewhere, within six months months of moving there, watching the film The Whole Wide World and watching wild sunflowers and hearing cicadas made me homesick for Texas. Six months after that, watching the “Cannes Cut” of Dawn of the Dead made me painfully homesick for Dallas. Six months after that, catching Starship Troopers and watching neo-Nazis blowing up giant bugs made me homesick for Houston. I swore that if I watched Deliverance and found myself homesick for Lewisville, I was going to hop off one of Portland’s many bridges and let the caiman the local police claimed was lurking in the Willamette River feed well that night. Your mileage may vary.

Even so, Portland gave me plenty of time to write, including setting up a Web site to hold the ever-increasing pile of articles and columns commissioned but never published. The Web design company went dotcom and promptly imploded, which gave me a great opportunity to meet a wonderful collective of oddballs at Intel’s Research and Development facility in Hillsboro, and I discovered what still qualifies as the best damn reptile shop I’ve ever encountered anywhere. Oh, and Powell’s will probably remain in business for the next 50 years off everything I bought from the magazine rack. Nobody knew at the time how badly both book and magazine publishing would be kneecapped by the advancing internet, but I took advantage of the riches without expecting that the writing salad days would last forever. They’d end soon enough.

20 Years Ago

(Pulse update: Barely survived dotcom crash. Quit pro writing in 2002 after realizing that the ongoing publishing mantra of “We’ll be able to pay you when we’re profitable” never mentioned the number of publishers that made sure they never became profitable if it meant getting work for free. Divorced Liz, a decision for which I deserve all the grief I took for my assholishness, and for which I will never expect nor receive forgiveness. Made The Biggest Mistake of My Life. Moved to Tallahassee on the recommendation of the one and only Jeff VanderMeer, became addicted to the local carnivorous plants, and moved back to Dallas when the company that brought me there decided to pivot post-bankruptcy. Wasted entirely too much time writing a science blog on LiveJournal, and started collecting the notes of what later became the Annals of St. Remedius Medical College. Oh, and developed an equal addiction to sculpting, which only didn’t expand because of the plant addiction.)

2006 was one hell of a year. It started in the call center for a long-digested company that processed electronic payments for utility companies. The job itself was as terrible as you can imagine: this was when prepaid cell phones became a thing, so one client was responsible for three-quarters of the calls, either asking why the client’s name was showing up on their credit card statements or screaming about their phones being turned off after the credit card holder requested the payment be reversed for fraud. In between the Idiocracy cosplayers, I managed to both sell two books of previous articles and columns and break at least one rib in a bicycle accident on the same day: considering that the publisher in question was too busy writing “Hot Editors I’d Like To Pork” interviews for his vanity magazine to get contracted books out, I had to threaten to sue to get my manuscripts back three years later, so the singular pain of broken rib or ribs was the superior experience. Social media was just starting, LiveJournal was still a year or so away from the toxic mess it transferred to Facebook, it was still possible to find a decent selection of magazines in a chain bookstore, and as soon as the ribs healed, I was back on the bike.

Toward the end of the year, things changed gears rapidly. I found a new technical writer job with an audiovisual hardware company that not only paid considerably more but kept me from the usual pattern nightmares of being on the phone line being asked “Cain’t Ah make muh paymunt wit YEW?” for 11 hours a day. Most importantly, I had the greatest boss in the world, the one and only Larry Carey, and our science discussions during his smoke breaks were seven-and-a-half years of trying to keep up with his manifold curiosities. If this St. Remedius gibberish ever goes anywhere, I’ll owe Larry royalties for the rest of my existence.

10 Years Ago

Well, the carnivorous plants done blowed up. The Texas Triffid Ranch became a thing in 2008, starting as a lark selling carnivores at craft shows and science fiction conventions and rapidly getting bigger all the time. in 2015, I rented a former clothing store space at Valley View Center, a dying shopping mall turned art gallery incubator in North Dallas and moved the Triffid Ranch inside. 1500 square feet of shopping mall for $500 a month, and all I had to do was convince the people of Dallas that despite the constant rumors that the mall was going to be demolished, it wasn’t going to be demolished with them inside. Yeah, about that.

2016 got really interesting quickly. The gallery took a while to get established, mostly due to the day job that paid for everything, but things started amping up by May, where a show at Texas Frightmare Weekend demonstrated the value of the gallery because I had enough plants for what was then the biggest Frightmare of the Triffid Ranch’s existence. 2016 was also the first year for shows outside of Dallas, including the Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays in Austin. 2016 was also the last year the Triffid Ranch was at Valley View, as we all got the notice at the beginning of 2017 that the mall was going to be demolished in 60 days and we all had to get out. (The last of the mall finally came down in 2023, and the empty lot adds quite the postapocalyptic vibe to the general area.) Until then, I did my utmost to turn it into a real business and not a clubhouse for local fandom to get free wine and food, and sometimes I succeeded.

Today

The Texas Triffid Ranch is gone, shutting down in 2023 and just in the nick of time considering economic developments. The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College turns 2 years old in May: the very next installment marks 250 since the start and 50 since the beginning of 2026. (The expectation is to hit 300 by the end of the year and the dream is to hit 400, and the inspirations for new installments and stories keep coming.) Within the next five years, I’ll have outlived most of my childhood heroes and inspirations, and the survivor guilt gets extremely strong over the good and dear friends I’ve already lost, so I cherish the ones still on this side of the veil. At this point, based on family history, I know I have anywhere between 20 and 35 years left (two grandparents lived into their eighties and a grandmother into her nineties, and I have the advantage of neither smoking nor drinking), so I’ve got to get moving. After all, the nice thing about being a writer, as my ex Liz put it, is that you can live to 70 and still die “tragically young.”

10 Years From Now

(Content only available to paid subscribers)

END TRANSMISSION

St. Remedius News

For those who receiving this via newsletter and not regularly visiting the site, things keep going. Besides lots and lots of snide commentary, the site now includes printable St. Remedius flyers, including the latest on the Texas bluebonnet boa, and lots more of the Mandatory Parker saga. In addition, for those who occasionally visit St. Remedius Radio, the installments there have been going on long enough to justify a YouTube playlist. Engage with it at your peril.

Other Reading

Here’s another development: partly as an opportunity to collect influences, friends, and interesting bystanders in one place and one as a blatant attempt to monetize the Annals (I get a percentage of any sales made here), I set up a Bookshop.org storefront for St. Remedius. Expect it to be updated incessantly, especially as I keep getting reminders of writers and subjects needing sharing, and it’s already grown pretty impressively over the beginning of the year. In addition, the site’s Research page contains links to this and publishers and booksellers in need of inclusion: I don’t get a thing by recommending the publishers and booksellers, other than relief that they’re doing what they’re doing. Either way, feel free to browse, peruse, and purchase, and know that every purchase makes Andy Jassy at Amazon cry.

Events

Things are in flux right now for obvious reasons, with shows and events being preempted and cancelled, but the Campus and Off-Campus Activities section needs serious expansion now that Dallas’s weather is getting better. In addition, for those who can’t get to Dallas for reasons, I’m working out the details on a regular monster movie show on Twitch: I could never do justice to either Joe Bob Briggs or Ghoulardi or Ned the Dead, but I’m really missing getting friends together for dinner and a movie on Friday nights, and this will work as an alternative for everybody who couldn’t make it to the house.

Final Words

If you think this was indulgent, just imagine how the next bookmark birthday is going to be. Do you really want me hanging around until I’m 70?Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

For those coming in late, the current discussion involved Your Humble Chronicler noting the current contraction of literary events and conventions, especially those involving science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror. We return to the discussion, already in progress.

Okay, the plan was to go directly into suggesting ways to make literary conventions of all types more fun and more effective for attendees, guests, and staff, but we’ve got to take a little sideroute first. This affects science fiction/fantasy/horror litcons more than, say, Western or romance or mystery litcons, but considering the crossover and overlap, it’s worth discussing because if S/F/H litcons went away tomorrow, the focus of this little essay will just move over there, if they haven’t already. If this isn’t applicable to your genre of fiction, feel free to move on: I’m not offended and I’m not upset.

After spending the majority of the previous winter holiday contemplating possibilities of making literary conventions more useful for writers and general attendees alike, one individual kept looming over every aspect. Where to hold them, when to hold them, the focus, the programming, the frequency...it all came down to one archetype: Cat Piss Man. Cat Piss Man goes by many names: fanboy, grognard, slan, Sad Puppy. Cat Piss Man has been recreated over and over in popular fiction and given new names: Comic Shop Guy, Iggins, the Eltingville Club. So much as a mention of Cat Piss Man brings out the worst sorts of denials that Cat Piss Man exists, usually from the worst proofs that Cat Piss Man does indeed exist. By any standard, the term refers to the absolute worst sort of fan, the sort of fan who drives off others from a particular genre or hobby due to a combination of foul odor and even fouler personality. Table-flipping upon losing, random shoplifting and gatekeeping, a territorial call of “Well, ACTUALLY...”, a carefully curated set of personality traits or lack thereof that scream “This person is BROKEN”...one would think these are traits that would be selected against in polite society, and they are. However, inexplicably, nauseatingly, not only do they remain the popular image of “science fiction fan,” but so many businesses, from comic shop to game shop to bookstore, act as if keeping their business is vital.

Two things stand out about this. The first is that most fans LOATHE Cat Piss Man. We’re not talking just about a minor dislike. We’re not talking just about crossing the road to get away from one: we’re talking about crossing a continent. Have a discussion of bad fans, ones whose behavior is consistently awful and with no redeeming value, and the discussions of the guy whose hobby is to use acquaintances’ bathrooms and pee all over the place, on purpose, bust the dam. The guy who makes creepy and dumb double entendre comments to teenagers, especially after being told to knock it off. The guy who crashes parties, makes a beeline to the food and the wine, and doesn’t leave either until both are completely gone, and then sets up a bedroll to camp on the floor for the night. If the victim is lucky, he leaves the next day; if not, well, that person has a new roommate who won’t pay rent, always has an excuse as to why he can’t get a job or move somewhere else, and usually only leaves if the house is sold out from underneath him, and he’ll try to convince the new owner to let him stay anyway. Even people with the most peripheral connection to fandom understand: drop any other nickname for That Guy and they’ll raise eyebrows and ask for elaboration. Drop “Cat Piss Man,” and the universal response is “UGH. Yeah, I know this guy...” As I put it 25 years ago, the term is olfactory onamotopoeia.

The second thing that stands out is that while fans may wish for Cat Piss Man to jump into a tree mulcher, too many people in higher levels of fandom either tolerate or encourage him. Cat Piss Man never buys anything: he’s the guy who sleeps in video rooms and under benches in a convention hotel so he doesn’t have to expend any money on accommodations. Either he nurses one glass of water in a convention restaurant for six hours or he dines-and-dashes after telling the waitstaff “Oh, I’m with the (points to table on the other end of the room)” and leaves them with the check. The only time he enters the convention proper is in the last half-hour or so when convention security lets him in because nobody else is paying at that point. That’s when CPM strolls in, grabbing as many freebies as he can get in a greasy fist, insulting vendors, preventing others from breaking down their tables so they can GO HOME, and bugging everybody he can about post-convention parties, the next con he can crash, and whether anyone will give him a ride home...and he lives at least a two-hour drive away. (Oh, you’ve never lived until you get accosted by a CPM as a convention is closing who wants to know if anyone just happens to be going to Kansas City or Chicago, and of course he doesn’t have any money to chip in for gas.) If CPM gets so obnoxious that he starts interfering with the convention or the surrounding facility, the facility security may kick him out, but he’ll just find other ways to get in. If his depredations get so bad that the con staff has to do something, it’s almost always a sotto voce request to try to be a better person one of these days instead of a determined “GET THE HELL OUT OR WE CALL THE COPS.” In fact, CPM is so used to being tolerated at fannish events and venues that he’s always shocked and stunned when non-fan events and venues go to that level: don’t the mundanes understand to whom they’re talking? And in the few cases where CPM’s behavior is so egregious and intolerable that he’s finally kicked out of an event or organization (repeatedly being caught shoplifting or sexually harassing attendees, for instance), there’s always at least one person who gets vocal about “giving second chances” (never mind that CPM is probably on his 30th chance that year alone) and “Well, I’ve never seen this behavior” and “Well, I’ve known him for years...” Because of this, Cat Piss Man never really goes away: even if he’s hit with a lifetime ban, there are always more places to defile. Run a show long enough with one Cat Piss Man, and before you know it, nobody’s there who isn’t a Cat Piss Man.

Okay, so Cat Piss Man is loathed by most other fans. He’s not welcomed by most vendors (although listening to diatribes of how other vendors are stealing money right out of their pockets solely by dint of money not going solely to them, you realize how many old-school vendors are Cat Piss Men), or programming directors, or much of anybody else. Yet. somehow, he’s also the template for “fan” among people without connections to fandom or who might be considering joining. Mention “fandom” among exactly the sort of people we should be encouraging to join the ranks, and Cat Piss Man is the guy they think about. Problem is, you can’t change Cat Piss Man. Most people get smacked in the head for social faux pas, and they either change their behavior or avoid the situation entirely. CPM knows he’s obnoxious, knows he’s annoying, and knows he smells like an open grave, but he doesn’t care. It’s up to us to accept him as he is, to tolerate his behavior because he’s obviously so much better than the rest of us, and not to say anything about it because that’s somehow being unfair to the deliberately obtuse. Some Cat Piss Men can change: it’s absolutely possible, if rare. Most, though, without a massively life-changing experience that causes them to get their acts in order, usually involving someone’s severed foot jammed a meter up their rectum, would rather mumble into their Spaghetti-Os about how “they just don’t understand” and “oh, I’ll show THEM.”

So here’s a suggestion: advertise a show that’s proudly Cat Piss Man-free...and enforce it.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know: old-school fandom won’t stand for it. That guy who gropes the teenagers as he goes by is a long-running fixture, and you can’t buck tradition. Why, you’re just asking for the show to fail if you don’t allow every trog in a moth-eaten Star Trek uniform to come in and terrorize everyone else, by action or by odor. This just isn’t done, you understand! If we start excluding one Cat Piss Man, then we’re just as bad as the high school jocks and cheerleaders for which they blame their excuses for personalities!

To quote an inveterate bully who loved picking fights at every opportunity, you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

Since this discussion is purely hypothetical, and I know that we’ll actually see something done about the Cat Piss Man problem about the time the Dallas Cowboys win a shutout World Series pennant (and I know at least one Cat Piss Man already whining “Well ACTUALLY...” at this comparison, and trying to explain the concept of humor is beyond him, so let’s press on), let’s discuss what to do if we could have a CPM-free litcon.

Give everyone a first chance, but no second chances. The Alamo Drafthouse movie theater chain has a world-famous reputation of kicking out attendees who will not stop talking or using electronic devices while the movie is running, no exceptions and no refunds. Everyone gets one warning to shut up and put away the phone or tablet: cross that, and the offender is dragged out and told not to come back. (A recent change to the policy allows cell phone use in Alamo Drafthouses to order food and drink, but let’s stick to the reputation.) Let’s try this with our hypothetical litcon. Obvious harassment, sexual or otherwise, is an automatic eviction right at that moment, but if someone accidentally offended, give them one warning. This will require organization with event venue and event security, with no exceptions because “Oh, he’s harmless” or “I’ve known him for years.” No looking the other way. Go beyond the basic warnings about Con Crud and start handing out bars of soap with written instructions and pictograms on each bar to everyone seemingly unfamiliar with its use. Don’t just hand out the bars, either: insist that the individuals receiving them come back only when they’ve washed. Yes, it’s being exclusionary...to health hazards. And if they try to sneak in anyway, out they go, and keep throwing them out until they get the hint.

Accept the boycott threats. “But...but...but if you ban Cat Piss Man, then others will boycott your event!” To which we can all say “GOOD.” Again, you might convince CPM to pay for admission, but you’re still losing more money from attendee dissatisfaction, security issues, event locale aggravation, and shoplifting. It’s a point I keep bringing up to the “by the fans for the fans” contingent that throws collective tantrums over how any decision on upcoming movies or TV shows based on a previous book or comic has to be done exactly the way they think it should, or else “the fans” will abandon it. Dudes, when it comes to obsessive fans versus those outside of fandom who would love to engage if they didn’t have The Wall of Funk standing in the way, you’re a rounding error. Not only are the totality of you a rounding error, but you’re precisely the biggest reason why people look in the tent flap of fandom, close the flap, and rush off shuddering. You don’t want to come to a party where you’re expected to behave yourselves? Oh, WOE. Then you’ll just have to go to the big media and anime conventions running all over the planet and be THEIR problem. At least, until they start cracking heads and kicking butts or until they go under, whichever comes first.

Amp up security. I know that most conventions, litcon and otherwise, are dependent upon volunteers, especially when it involves security. In this case, get security volunteers you can trust, and not just the dorks willing to put in a couple of hours watching the doors in exchange for a free pass. Offer pay if you must, but get people who are willing to enforce convention policy and kick out the Cat Piss Men as they appear. At the very least, make sure that you have people in convention security that encourage attendees to come to them with issues, instead of avoiding attending the convention because they know Security won’t do a thing. Let’s start a golden standard for security that causes everyone to whistle in appreciation: Texas Frightmare Weekend has that kind of reputation with its security for one of the biggest horror conventions on the planet, so it’s not impossible for a litcon, either.

For Elvis’s sake, don’t let Cat Piss Man move into convention staff or the dealer’s room. Again, most conventions are dependent upon volunteers, and some can’t be picky if they need to fill available slots. Naturally, whether it’s access to areas not available to the general public, the desperate need to feel important without working for it, or the need to smirk at the mere attendees who don’t have that special badge tag, Cat Piss Men are obsessed with getting in. This goes double for successful shows. If they’re in small positions, no matter how bad a job they’re doing, they’ll stay until kicked out, and oh so many wait, year after year, until another staffer leaves and offers to take over a position where they can cause some real damage. Resist the temptation, no matter the whining. If you don’t, there’s an eventual time where all of the original convention crew are dead or retired, all of their replacements are exactly the people that drove off anybody new, and they’ll keep electroshocking that dead horse for as long as they can. Who cares if nobody’s there but them and a once-successful convention is a national or international joke? At least they’re still in charge, if only because nobody else wants the job.

It should stand to reason, but this applies to vendor spaces, information booths, or any other mercantile outpost. Vendors absolutely should get security backup to fend off shoplifting or the dweebs who assume that they’re duly bonded law enforcement officers and assume they can tell vendors what they can and cannot sell. At the same time, Cat Piss Man vendors need to be cleared out, too. (We’re going to discuss vendors in a future essay, so don’t worry.) The fannish Statler and Waldorf who rag on the reading tastes of anybody under the age of 60 when younger fans start looking through their wares, or who make crude comments about “special discounts”? One warning, and then they can pack up and go right then. The twerps throwing tantrums because they’ve been there A WHOLE THREE HOURS and nobody’s bought anything from them yet? Out. The git who expects the convention to watch his booth while he takes off to smoke/get stoned/hit on attendees for hours at a time? He comes back and finds his table shoved to the back with two security guards to escort him out. And the senile delinquents who show up at the last second, assume they’ll just be given a table because they’ve been in fandom for 60 years, and try to run their booth out of a hotel room because they didn’t plan? Out out out, and tell them not to bother coming back. And if one wants to complain that some other vendor is somehow taking all of their deserved money by having something customers are willing to pay for? Better secure that, right then and there.

As can be expected, this effort may be a tall order. However, I suspect that the positive response from people who otherwise would never go to a litcon, writers and readers both, would drastically eclipse the whimpering of those who have been indulged for far too long. And the best part? If the Cat Piss Men don’t like it, they can always start their own convention, and see how long it runs and how many pay to attend. We’re now over a quarter of the way through the 21st Century: it’s time to start acting like it.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

These are the days of Angry Candy, and the funerals keep coming and will only stop when it’s my turn. If I had one friend who planned to interrupt his own funeral by lurching out of the coffin, ripping the minister’s throat out with his teeth, and then lumbering out to hang at the closest shopping mall, it would have been Rod Woodruff. Actually, that’s unfair: Rod would have had us all going, and then looked over his shoulder and chuckled “Gotcha,” and it’s hard to accept that he isn’t the last one standing. After all, as far as I was concerned, he was the first.

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It’s hard to describe the vibe of 1980s midnight movies in Dallas without you being there, but they were catnip for those of us either just a little too young to be able to get into bars (the legal drinking age in Texas went from 19 to 21 in September of 1986, four days after I turned 20) or had no interest in doing so. For the most part, with the exception of clubs and the occasional bowling alley, Dallas rolled up the few sidewalks we had (back then, “pedestrian” was just code for “too poor to afford the valet”) at about 9:00, and there was NOTHING to do that didn’t involve copious amounts of alcohol after about 11 pm. If you couldn’t or wouldn’t drink, you didn’t want to stay home and watch reruns after the news, and you were a little too gonzo to want to stand in a vacant lot or field with 30 of your high school buddies and pass around a stolen bottle of vodka until you crapped yourself, the only nights worse than Friday and Saturday nights were the rest of the week. Lots of theaters and theater chains were perfectly happy to run at midnight either first-run films or films that had already been played to death on cable, but AMC, in conjunction with the local rock radio station Q102, stumbled into a winning strategy: each theater ran a rotating list of midnight movies on each of its screens, but had one anchor movie as the perpetual draw each weekend. The Forum 6 in Arlington ran Alien and Blade Runner. The Prestonwood 5 in North Dallas ran The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Pink Floyd The Wall. The Northtown 6 had The Song Remains the Same and Phantasm. And the long-gone and much missed Northwood Hills 4 on the border of Richardson and Dallas ran the holiest of holies, an audience participation show of Dawn of the Dead. Line up outside the theater around 11 waiting for the last screening of whatever movies were playing, flash the Q102 promo card (called “Q Cards”; we weren’t overly imaginative back then) for a dollar off admission and a free coupon for a small cup of Country Time lemonade so loaded with citric acid and sugar that it guaranteed trips to the concession stand for popcorn and soda, wander down the center aisle looking for seats that weren’t broken or befouled by previous patrons, try not to get caught in the cinemuck on the floor that threatened to turn the theater into a recreation of the La Brea tar pits, bump into old friends or new cohorts and get caught up on what’s happened last, and listen for the satisfying kathumps coming from the projection booth that signaled that the old movie was out of the projector and the new one ready to start. With previews, we were looking at nearly three hours of making the pain of living in 1980s Dallas go away, and with the Dawn shows, we had the added fun of a film that directly mocked everything that city leaders held dear.

With this fond reminiscence should come reminders that it wasn’t anywhere near as perfect as it may sound 40 years later. Most of the AMC theaters participating in midnight shows were dollar theaters, where the staff might remember to sweep out the theaters once per week, the sound system consisted of a couple of speakers swiped out of the back of a Ford Pinto left abandoned in a vacant field, the screen had so much food and drink thrown at it that the screens resonated in spots from petrified gummy bears thrown against it years before, and there was a 50/50 chance that the seat you so carefully picked out would collapse under your own weight halfway through the movie. As with everything else in the 1980s, the casual racism, sexism, and homophobia in the audience participation lines would get your ass kicked up around your collarbones today, even if the most viciously racist, sexist, and homophobic lines were yelled the loudest by the very people the lines were slurring. Most of the rest of the lines are so old that screenings today would require captions to explain the jokes, which it shared with Rocky Horror screenings today. (C’mon: does anybody born after 1975 even know what “the Starship Honeycomb” was without a trip to Google?) At that time and place, though, it was community, a community of utter weirdos, but a community nonetheless, and one still fondly remembered by those with permanent scars from collapsing theater seats.

And so these went on one July Saturday night, I was talking with a crew of fellow Dawn enthusiasts about the impending release of George Romero’s sequel Day of the Dead (one of my great regrets in life was that I missed out on being a zombie extra in Day because I got word of the need for extras a whole day too late). One of the crew was a very enthusiastic if underplayed fellow with a distinctive Albertan accent, and we yakked for a few minutes before my ride insisted we had to start our nearly 90-minute drive back to the wilds of north North Texas. This fellow and I introduced each other, exchanged names, and told each other “See you next time.” So we thought.

Life intruded. My father took a packaging engineering job in northeast Wisconsin that summer, and since my options at the time were limited and I thought I was homesick for white birch, I followed along. Nine months worth of minus-40 weather, contemporaries with no interest in anything other than getting blackout drunk, and even worse career prospects, I sold nearly everything I had and moved back to Texas in May 1986, only to discover that the old Northwood Hills IV had both stopped its Dawn of the Dead showings and midnight movies in general. Other adventures presented themselves, including multiple hair and attire changes, and one included meeting friends at the November Dallas Fantasy Fair, a local triannual comics and media convention that was pretty much the only thing to do on Thanksgiving weekend in Dallas at the time that didn’t involve football or shopping, in 1987. The November Fantasy Fair was being held at a dingy but adequate hotel not far from the old Northwood Hills theater, and when I caught up with those friends the Friday night of the convention, they were all jammed in a booth in the hotel restaurant, discussing the con’s regular midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When I grumbled “Man, I wish the old Dawn of the Dead midnight shows were still going,” a head popped up over the booth partition and asked “YOU were at the Dawn shows?” A familiar face. And so began my renewed acquaintance with Rod Woodruff.

For those with the whole of the internet a keyboard away, it’s hard to grasp exactly how much culture was considered “underground” in the 1980s solely because it wasn’t immediately accessible in the local malls. Zine culture was just starting up, and that required finding sources such as the 1988 book High Weirdness By Mail that themselves required referrals and recommendations from people in the know. Outre movies and TV shows, particularly British or Japanese ones, were usually only available on tenth-generation videotape dubs where the picture swayed like a palm tree in a hurricane and the only colors visible on screen were green and purple. Esoteric magazines and comics were more likely to be found in head shops and indie record shops than in local bookstores and comic shops, and a regular quandary of “Sounds of the Eighties” music collections and playlists is that almost none of the selections therein ever got airplay in the US outside of big cities except on college or community radio, and even then usually on Sunday nights when there was no chance of freaking out advertisers. The culture was out there, but you had to hunt for it, and often the only way you had a chance of expanding your horizons was by knowing people who were already immersed. Rod Woodruff was the perfect guide in so many fields, moreso because he was always looking for new possibilities and thrived best when receiving as much as he was giving.

Through the late 1980s, Rod and I had one particular advantage: we both worked nights in a city that shut down early. At the time, I was a fabricator at a Texas Instruments site north of Dallas, and after he graduated from the University of North Texas with a degree in photography, he went to the night shift at a big commercial photography processing and reproduction company, and the both of us usually worked on Saturday nights as well. Dallas on Sunday nights was even more bereft of distracting activity than the rest of the week, but we found pockets and fragments all over town, and at least once every couple of weeks, we got together to share and compare. He later got an apartment in North Dallas that became a base of operations: if I wasn’t hanging at his apt going through comics and music, he was over at mine digging through books and magazines. If we weren’t there, we were driving all over, matching addresses we’d read with actual locations for music venues, bookstores, and even metaphysical shops with plans to hit them up when they were actually open. Rod adopted a neighbor’s cat with a big white moustache that he named “Colonel K“ (the neighbors moved out as he was moving in, leaving their cat behind, so we never learned his original name), and when I asked for elaboration, I got a deep dive into British animation starting with Dangermouse. I reciprocated when he expressed an interest in the punk/goth band The Damned, and I noted “I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Young Ones, but...” and shoved a tape into the VCR. He introduced me to The Prisoner at exactly the right time, and I returned the favor with The Comic Strip Presents. He introduced me to Kate Bush and Brian Eno, and I reciprocated with Hawkwind. We even planned vacation days around events normally occurring during our working hours: we got to be some of the first people to see the first Texas dinosaur in a Texas museum when the Dallas Museum of Natural History unveiled its Tenontosaurus skeleton in the end of 1988, and when I first started writing film reviews for a long-lost science fiction zine at the end of the decade, we went to so, so many movie previews and opening nights. When I finally became enough of a deal to be invited to be a guest at one of the Dallas Fantasy Fairs, Rod was my plus-one, making sure to smack me in the head if I got too full of myself, and I still have the dent in the back of my skull.

It’s no exaggeration that my life would have been so bereft had Rod not been in it, because so many of the things he introduced to me became springboards for later endeavors, including a 20-year sidetrack. Back at that time, comics were leaving the convenience store spinner rack with various attempts at more mature titles and themes, and Rod had become completely enamored with an up-and-coming writer by the name of Alan Moore. One night, he came by with about three or four issues of a new DC comic he’d just discovered, and just told me “Sit down and read these.” Thus began my introduction to the series V For Vendetta. For the next eight months, he’d come by after getting the latest issue just to watch my expressions as I delved deeper into the saga of Code Name V and Evey Hammond. When it was done, I asked “What else?”, and that’s when he dropped off the entire run of Watchmen and nearly every issue of Moore’s run on The Saga of the Swamp Thing he could get his hands on. Rod loved little in-jokes and very obscure references, and he was watching not just to see if I caught the references he got, but also if I had further elaboration for things he’d missed. (Decades later, I got a late start on the series The Walking Dead, and I delighted him to no end by spotting something he’d missed from multiple viewings: the character Darryl Dixon pulls out a bag of various drugs belonging to his brother Merle, and I asked Rod “Did anybody notice the blue meth in the bag alongside the antibiotics?”) Me, I was inspired by the comics in a drastically different way thanks to writer Moore and artist Stephen Bissette, with one Swamp Thing story leading to my picking up several batches of vegetable seeds at the next-door grocery store for a laugh and starting basic gardening on my apartment back porch. (Also decades later, when Rod came to the soft opening of my old carnivorous plant gallery, I told him “I wouldn’t have gotten here without you,” pointing to the Steve Bissette commission of Jason Woodrue hanging up on the wall.)

(Rod got much more involved in costuming than me, thanks to his getting a beautiful leather dragon mask at the end of 1988, and that led to two different incidents that summed up his and my friendship. Since Halloween 1988 fell on a Sunday, we both made plans to hit several Halloween costume contests in the area, realizing at one that with a $1000 cash prize for the best outfit, our absolute best was nowhere in the league of the serious contenders. On Halloween night proper, we hit another at the famed Video Bar in Dallas’s Deep Ellum district, with Rod already making plans for their $200 cash prize to buy a ball python, only to have the whole event flooded out with a torrential downpour and the owner declaring Rod the winner but mumbling “Since nobody else is here, we’ll just give you a bar tab.” Since Rod was the driver and I couldn’t drink, getting half-drowned for $10 in Dr. Pepper was a point that made us both salty for years. Months later, that same outfit nearly killed him under similar circumstances: Rod wanted to come out in full regalia for the opening day of Scarborough Faire, now Scarborough Renaissance Festival, only to have the event closed early because of a massive hailstorm coming through the area. Rod later ruefully laughed about a comment in one of the issues of Watchmen about the dangers of capes because of his own experience, where we frantically ran to get to his car before we and my then-girlfriend were nearly beaten to death by hail, only for the winds dragging his cape further and further behind him. There we were, running the absolutely fastest we could, with my grabbing his cape in torrential rains so he wasn’t blown back to Oz, only to nearly become fossils in the muddy field that passed for a parking lot. If it sounds ridiculous and a bit terrifying in the telling, know that we had to stop and laugh for a full five minutes once we got into the car.)

If The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College ever become more than a vanity project, it’s Rod’s contributions to its DNA that will make that happen. Our regular drives to downtown Dallas on Sunday nights, back when Dallas’s Central Expressway was a two-lane nightmare second only to the Autobahn in the Guinness Book of World Records as “World’s Most Dangerous Highway,” were always the strangest in January and February, when the cloud cover was low enough to obscure the tops of the office buildings along Central and concealing half of the downtown skyline. With that panorama of half-seen mysteries, we rolled through all sorts of strangeness, starting with the idea of a paranormal investigation organization headquartered in Dallas specifically because the city was too new and too sedate to have a dangerous background. Earwax vampires, time traveler balls, the reasons why Dealey Plaza is so desperately dull...all of this and more were grist for our conversations, and so many of those conversations became seed crystals for St. Remedius installments. Nearly 40 years later, those late-night discussions became the bones of the current project, as well as inspiration for new ones.

Oh, and we almost started a film production company. At the time, a slew of books by or about gonzo filmmakers started making the rounds, with several on George Romero and friends starting their Pittsburgh company The Latent Image before moving to feature filmmaking, and the local Half Price Books were all full of illustrated screenplay books full of deleted scenes and backstories. Rod had experimented with stop-action movies while in high school in Canada, and we both thought “So what’s keeping us from making our own movies?” We then went to town, researching everything from the price of used 16 and 35 mm movie cameras to what permits were necessary to shoot in Dallas, amassing an absolute pile of reference material on everything from basic screenwriting to makeup sources, and I even started work on a short film script intended to “get us on the map.” We ultimately stopped only because we ran into one major roadblock: distribution. The direct-to-video boom started about two years later, and YouTube a decade after that, but we probably made the correct decision stopping when we did. We even found a long-empty storefront on Elm Street that would have made a perfect office/studio if we’d just had the money and resources, and I still smile when driving by its location from time to time.

Unfortunately, the good times couldn’t go forever. I moved to the morning shift at Texas Instruments, and he moved to a dayshift spot himself. We both got involved in serious relationships, him with his beloved wife Kirsten, and we drifted apart with the promise that we’d stay in touch. When we got together again, though, it was just like the old days, only with even more to catch up on. Rod went on to start a family: I went on to start a pointless writing career. He definitely made the better decision.

(One of our last big escapades before life intruded involved his first professional photographic credit, when we both became correspondents covering the USA Film Festival in 1991 for the long-defunct magazine Film Threat Video Guide at the equally defunct AMC Glen Lakes movie theater. At the time, the USA had a justified reputation as “Dallas’s rich people thinking they can be part of Hollywood,” and the Video Guide’s parent zine had established its reputation by crashing the Toronto Film Festival with an assemblage of juvenile pranks and stunts, so neither had any delusions about the other. The big draw at the USA that year was the guest of honor Oliver Stone, then currently terrorizing the Dallas City Council and Film Board with incessant ridiculous demands for verisimilitude during the filming of JFK, including being allowed to use the artifacts in the Sixth Floor Museum as props without compensation, and while Rod was taking photos of attendees and festival participants, he got a look at a side of Oliver Stone that few others wanted to see. Namely, Stone had a thing about heading to the theater restroom, occupying a stall, and apparently “forgetting” to close and lock the stall door while doing his business. You can imagine the shudders when Rod came out of the restroom exclaiming “I almost got a shot of Oliver Stone on the toilet!” Today, nobody would think twice about whipping out a phone and getting a selfie: back then, it was an unconscionable breach of privacy, so Rod didn’t hit the shutter release after all. That said, we both regretted it when we realized that this was a regular occurrence through the USA, and we joked for years about how we would have titled the photo either “Proof that not all of Oliver Stone’s shit ends up on screen” or “Ollie inhales deeply, trying to convince himself that he smells lilac and jasmine.” Sophomoric, sure, but consider the subject matter.)

And the years went on, with our increasingly staying in touch via social media, but we still got together when we could for lunch or to hit reptile shows. The last time we saw each other in person was just before COVID, when he became enamored with Kenyan sand boas. We met at the big NARBC reptile show then in Arlington, and we poked around through the huge assemblage of lizards, snakes, and turtles on display, reminiscing on his 1980s corn snake Basil and my first savannah monitor Gwangi. It was a return to form, and we told each other “Next time, right?”

Right.

I got the call from Rod’s wife Kirsten right after the beginning of the new year: she woke up to find him on the bathroom floor, no sign of whatever took him. She didn’t know I’d dropped off most social media a full year earlier, and called me because I hadn’t responded to her postings. His funeral was a tasteful affair, full of family and friends, with so, so many photos from a life well-lived. I was doing well until I saw that someone brought out a tissue dispenser for mourners: a Godzilla tissue dispenser where the tissues pulled out of Godzilla’s mouth. Everyone seeing this chuckled and sobbed “That’s Rod.” His interests in music just continued through the rest of his life, with his favorite guitar, one of his most prized artifacts, alongside his coffin. The whole way through the funeral, I kept expecting him to pop up, grab the guitar, and yell “Gotcha!”, but it never happened. If I started laughing while weeping, it was because one of our odd discoveries involved the 1982 pseudo-concert movie Get Crazy, and how hard he laughed at the line “God, this is my man, and you’d better take care of him, or I’m gonna wax your ass.“ I was laughing then and laughing and crying now, and I meant every word.

At his wake, Rod’s son put on the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon, which was one of his favorites when I knew him and for the rest of his life, and I suddenly remembered one of our late-night runs. The release of the Pink Floyd concert film Delicate Sound of Thunder, following the tour for the album A Momentary Lapse of Reason, ran for about one screening in Dallas during its theatrical debut, and I can’t remember what we were watching late one Sunday night in early 1989 when it suddenly started playing on a cable channel. Rod was just transfixed and I could understand: this was my first-ever live concert movie, and I had no idea of what went into something like this before it started playing. It finally ended at about 2 in the morning, only for Rod to exclaim that he’d completely forgotten to tape it. I laughed and said “It’s okay. We’ll catch it next time.”

See you next time, my friend. One way or another, I promise. I owe you that.

BEGIN SIGNAL

One of the better things about access to cheap and effective time travel is that memory becomes fluid and somewhat goopy. This makes things rather contentious and somewhat problematic, especially when trying to avoid telling friends about personal paradoxes. Just how do you explain to a friend of thirty years that you met them based on their tomb on Pluto’s moon Charon, carved from the absolutely purest ice and painted with powdered carbon monoxide, in which they were reinterred 500 years after their world-changing developments? Yes, Martin: you ARE remembered a million years from now. Now get to work so this happens.

That’s why sitting here at the End of Time and watching everyone else celebrate New Year’s Eve is rally quite entertaining. From here, you can see every beginning of every calendar, lateral and circular and helix, and know all of the people telling themselves “Here’s to next year being better than last year.” You see the people who had no idea how spectacular the subsequent orbit around the sun would turn out, the people who regret their request by mid-year, and the people who didn’t know how good they had it. You see the enthusiasm, the regret, and the mourning of those who couldn’t join the festivities. Holding a glass to all of them will wear out your arm after a while, so in that last femtosecond before the last star goes out, the last black hole collides, and the only warmth anywhere is from the inherent background radiation spreading through the universe from its formation, it’s a matter of holding a glass of your favorite festivity drink (in my case, a frosty mug of 1976-era Vernors ginger ale, back when it came exclusively from steel cans), wave it through the continuum, and hope everyone gets a quick whiff of ginger carbonation no matter where or when they are.

Eventually, I have to return to my expected place in the timestream, Anno Domini 2026 in the Gregorian Calendar. No non-augmented dinosaurs, no land radiodonts, no nebula sculpting or dark matter cryptograms or flint-knapping on the foothills of the Ojo Mountains near present-Day Mineral Wells, Texas. No going forward except one day at a time, no going back at all except in the imagination, and no going sideways unless I do something particularly dumb. It’s my fate, and the tesseract that brought me here has to be back to the rental shop or else I lose my deposit, but I’m going to sit here with my mug of Vernors and salute you all. Thanks to everyone reading these missives, or at least half-reading them: you are and always will be appreciated.

So what’s next? Well, after continuing the traditional New Year’s house cleanup (my girlfriend Sarah, Sonoshee McLaren to my JP, gets both to watch a man clean house and binge-watch the first season of the original Life on Mars while he’s doing so), it’s time to get back to work. The stories keep flowing, and the inspirations keep piling up, and there’s apparently a never-ending appetite for earwax vampires. Here’s a mug in tribute, and if the ginger bubbles tickle your nose, imagine how those readers without noses feel.

END SIGNAL

St. Remedius News

And the Annals of St. Remedius Medical College now hits 200 installments, and expect an additional St. Remedius Radio playlist selection to ring in the new year. This, of course, is just the beginning, as the current schedule is to try for 400 by the end of 2026. Is this possible or even sane? That’s a good question. Let’s find out.

(As a sidenote, many of you may remember original plans to shut down the old SubStack page at the end of 2025. Cohort and fellow appreciator of countryside interdimensional portals Tom Cox brought up a major issue when he shifted away from SubStack: same material, same writer, and nobody wanted to subscribe or even read his non-SubStack installments. With full solidarity to Tom, who is a wonderful fellow I either want to meet in the UK or convince to travel to Texas just so we can talk about cats for the next week, the Personal Interlude installments will continue to appear both on the main site and on SubStack, but everything else stays on the site. If you’re on the SubStack list and want to stay there, knock yourself out. If you want to move to the site and get newsletter injections of every new installment, feel free to subscribe over here.

In other additions, it’s time to go retro into the 21st Century. Last summer’s line of St. Remedius flyers were extremely popular, to everything but the wallet, and recent increases to US Post Office First Class rates and increases in photocopying costs make massive runs on flyers cost-prohibitive. (Honestly, the jump in photocopy price in just the last three years is beyond ridiculous, even as paper prices remain relatively stable.) Designing the flyers, though, remains a lot of fun, so the Academics page now contains copies of each new flyer for download and use. Print them out. Use them as screen backgrounds. Spam your friends (within reason). Attach them to job applications and lease agreements. Go wild. They’re not going anywhere.

Other Reading

Here’s another development: partly as an opportunity to collect influences, friends, and interesting bystanders in one place and one as a blatant attempt to monetize the Annals (I get a percentage of any sales made here), I set up a Bookshop.org storefront for St. Remedius. Expect it to be updated incessantly, especially as I keep getting reminders of writers and subjects needing sharing, and it’s already grown pretty impressively in the past few weeks. In addition, the site’s Research page contains links to this and publishers and booksellers in need of inclusion: I don’t get a thing by recommending the publishers and booksellers, other than relief that they’re doing what they’re doing. Either way, feel free to browse, peruse, and purchase, and know that every purchase makes Andy Jassy at Amazon cry.

Events

Due to finances and lots of interfering issues, 2025 wasn’t an especially big year for St. Remedius events, as much as I hoped otherwise. (Trust me: spending June through October looking at the bare floorboards that used to be your kitchen floor puts you off wanting to do much of anything other than wait for repair work to be finished so you can cook your own meals.) The plan is to rectify this in 2026. Keep the Campus and Off-Campus Activities page near and dear both in your heart and in your browser bookmarks, because starting in January, it’s a matter of dragging friends and cohorts out to all sorts of related and associated events, both in the greater Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex and elsewhere. Of particular note: the Dallas Museum of Art restarted its Late Night At the Museum Friday night events after a long, lamented absence, so make no other plans for January 23 other than to hang out and see what’s in the main exhibition halls. (The Perot Museum of Nature & Science restarts its Science on Tap adult event series in April, so keep those in mind, too.)

Otherwise, the biggest travel plan is for October. Next May marks a full half-century since I moved from Michigan, so the plan since 2023 has been to make a trip to visit my grandmother on her birthday on Halloween. (True, she’s been dead since 2002, but she’d have wanted a party on her centenary, and since I was fresh out of the hospital after a nearly-terminal bout of appendicitis at the time, I don’t think she would have blamed me for having to skip out.) If, IF, the universe decides not to vomit in my face the way it has since the end of 2019, expect gatherings around the state just in time for the height of autumn foliage color and just before it starts getting really cold. If nothing else, Dinosaur Gardens in Ossineke celebrates its 90th anniversary in 2026, and that should be worth a St. Remedius tour on its own.

Final Words

Unlike plenty of others who are justified in their loathing, I have no particular urge to shoot 2025 in the knees, or even corner it in an alley and introduce it to the deep taste of curb concrete with the help of a boot to the back of the head. I’m happy to grab it by the scruff of its neck, rub its nose in its mess, and yell “NO NO NO!” as a warning for the next year. We’re now a quarter through the 21st Century, and it’s time to start acting like it.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

BEGIN SIGNAL

So. 22 years after quitting pro writing and swearing that he would sooner become a dedicated Dallas Cowboys fan before returning, Your Humble Chronicler relapsed, prolapsed, and regressed. 19 months after starting the current project, the easiest part of the whole thing was getting back into the writing habit: various wannabe wags brought up that because of various blogs and promotional projects involving the Interstitial Project, I never quit, but this mostly came from fear that “if this guy quits and doesn’t come back, then how does that reflect on my own writing career, such as it is?” That’s why the whole St. Remedius project is how it is: it’s writing on my own schedule and my own scale, with no concerns about spending three months working on a massive article that was either spiked by editorial ego or because the whole publication shut down without notice, no worries about a major release being eclipsed by an editorial temper tantrum on a completely unrelated subject, no waiting months or years for publication, and, most importantly, not spending time and energy trying to convince publishers that contracts reading “payment 90 days after publication” are actual binding legal documents and not vague recommendations that don’t apply if they’re inconvenient. I’m too damn old to be playing those games, and i was too damn old to be playing those games when I started writing in high school.

One of the great things about coming back to the science fiction/fantasy/horror genre after two decades, quite honestly, is how much things have changed. I look at the few remaining print magazines and the waves of online magazines and just thrill to the fact that I don’t recognize any of the names in tables of contents. (It’s up to friends fluent in Yiddish to decide if it’s inappropriate for a lapsed Catholic to use the word “kvell“ when I see all of the new voices in the supergenre, but that’s the best word to describe the feeling. If I had any idea in 1991 how many new voices and how many new perspectives would be available and given audiences in 2025, I would have been a considerably less angry and confrontational twentysomething.) And that can be a problem, too: instead of being one of a few young curmudgeons in a very small field, now I’m just one voice in a field packed with them. Ever try to pick out an individual cicada buzz on a Texas summer evening? You haven’t? Well, let’s just say that you need to come out here and catch a Dallas insect wall of sound to grasp the metaphor to its fullest extent.

Even that isn’t a problem, because part of the fun of St. Remedius is the hustling to reach new readers and remind old enthusiasts that I’m back. Well, it is a bit, because situations have changed with said getting word out. A LOT. A significant portion of last summer went into creating, printing, mailing, and otherwise disseminating flyers, cards, press releases, and other swag to build up a new readership, to mixed response. (I won’t even get started on how so many US Post Office locations are now so understaffed that mail that doesn’t obviously resemble bills just gets dumped into bins, tagged with “Unable to Forward” notices three to six months later, and sent back.) Social media is completely poisoned these days: half of the venues require paid “boosting” to allow links to be reached by more than ten to twenty readers at a time, the other half work only if a writer has a face for video, and one is run by and for Nazis and/or Cat Piss Men. So what to do?

If you thought “Why not get out of the house and meet people,” boy do I have a story for you, mostly involving the near-impossibility of getting people to put their phones down and leave the house. My girlfriend Sarah, Alice Tompkins to my Jay Sherman, has multiple reasons to get out and touch air and huff grass, erm, reverse that, and we make plans for events with plenty of room for everyone who wants to join in. For the last year, we’ve both had the same attitude about events: we understand that others may have prior commitments or obligations that keep them from going to everything, so our .sig is “If you can make it, great, and if you can’t, see you next time.” That said, the tiresome aspect is spending weeks or sometimes months rattling cages with calendar proclamations, having nobody else show up, and then getting three weeks of “Oh, if I’d known this was happening, I would have been there,” starting after the event is safely over. So be it.

The next option was to look at conventions and bookstores. What exposure I had with conventions over the previous 20 years was purely as a vendor, and I was very happy to keep it that way: it was easier to bow out of a local convention by noting “I can no longer make my booth fee on carnivorous plant sales” than having to share “I couldn’t make back my booth fee because the attendees you encourage also scare the hell out of grownups with disposable income.” Oh, the big Fan Expo shows are still running in Dallas, but it’s purely for non-literary media. Texas Frightmare Weekend is a must-attend, but not quite the right place for promotional efforts until St. Remedius gets a movie or TV deal. Besides, part of the idea of the trip is to see what everyone else in the genre is doing, not just stand up and yell “Buy my book!” That left the few remaining small conventions in the greater Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, and as Mark Finn shared earlier in the year, these are all dying off for multiple reasons. This is part of the regular cycle of convention decay and rebirth that last started at the end of the dotcom crash 20 years ago and rotates every 10 to 20 years, but there might be the opportunity to build something better.

The book publicist Kathleen Schmidt brings up excellent arguments on how book publicists need to change their focus in the next year, including not wasting time on legacy media, an assessment I can’t agree with highly enough, considering that often there’s nobody available to write reviews or interviews and even fewer to read them. If anything, the focus now with legacy media is to pick subjects that maximize the amount of Web traffic coming to their sites from the subjects’ fans and enthusiasts, which means they’re very averse to giving time and space to anything new. Old-school literary conventions are in the same boat, so the attendee lineup is usually one or two big stars with enough name clout to get other writers and other attendees to sign up, four or five local writers willing to come out for a full weekend on their own dimes, at least one self-important editor who assumes that everyone reads their magazine or book line for them (and often stays just ahead of convention anti-harassment policies created mostly to deal with their latest depredations), and con staffers who also think attendees are there solely for them. Fine and good when things are flush, but when attendee money gets tight, the only attendees who show up are usually the ones who make a point of going every year, and their business isn’t enough to keep things going.

Now, I know that any suggestion of running a revised literary convention is a case of building dream castles and planning to move in at the end of the month. I’m not talking about going after the big Expo Extravaganza Kidney Stone events where you get to wait in line for three hours to get a photo with a Marvel Cinematic Universe star and maybe have enough money to buy food afterwards. I’m also not talking about changing the few remaining literary conventions still doing business: we know that their patrons are still complaining about when Analog magazine went from digest format to standard magazine size in the early 1960s, and the best option is to leave them alone and not agitate them. But for writers beginning and established who want to get something out of a three-day convention weekend other than a perforated duodenum and a twitch visible from orbit, and for potential convention organizers wanting to try something different that will get everybody talking, let’s throw out nice-to-haves and get a discussion of what would work and what is delusional.

To that end, we’ll need some room to navigate and some room to sprawl, which means this essay needs to be broken up. Hence, get ready for Part 2, coming very soon.

END SIGNAL

St. Remedius News

Two weeks to the new year, and things continue to get stranger and stranger. In response, the Annals of St. Remedius Medical College reciprocate the sentiment. Those who haven’t visited the main site in a while are welcome to get caught up at your convenience, because it’s getting kinda full over there with new stories. That keeps expanding due to new inspirations, and at the rate things keep going, you may get a couple of standalone St. Remedius novels to go with the installments before the end of 2026. The original plan was to have 200 installments ready and readable by the impending New Year’s Eve, and the dream is to hit 400 by 2027. This next year, I won’t have moves, kitchen repairs, or jury selection impeding this, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

(As a sidenote, many of you may remember original plans to shut down the old SubStack page at the end of 2025. Cohort and fellow appreciator of countryside interdimensional portals Tom Cox brought up a major issue when he shifted away from SubStack: same material, same writer, and nobody wanted to subscribe or even read his non-SubStack installments. With full solidarity to Tom, who is a wonderful fellow I either want to meet in the UK or convince to travel to Texas just so we can talk about cats for the next week, the Personal Interlude installments will continue to appear both on the main site and on SubStack, but everything else stays on the site. If you’re on the SubStack list and want to stay there, knock yourself out. If you want to move to the site and get newsletter injections of every new installment, feel free to subscribe over here.

In other additions, it’s time to go retro into the 21st Century. Last summer’s line of St. Remedius flyers were extremely popular, to everything but the wallet, and recent increases to US Post Office First Class rates and increases in photocopying costs make massive runs on flyers cost-prohibitive. (Honestly, the jump in photocopy price in just the last three years is beyond ridiculous, even as paper prices remain relatively stable.) Designing the flyers, though, remains a lot of fun, so the Academics page now contains copies of each new flyer for download and use. Print them out. Use them as screen backgrounds. Spam your friends (within reason). Attach them to job applications and lease agreements. Go wild. They’re not going anywhere.

Other Reading

Here’s another development: partly as an opportunity to collect influences, friends, and interesting bystanders in one place and one as a blatant attempt to monetize the Annals (I get a percentage of any sales made here), I set up a Bookshop.org storefront for St. Remedius. Expect it to be updated incessantly, especially as I keep getting reminders of writers and subjects needing sharing, and it’s already grown pretty impressively in the past week. In addition, the site’s Research page contains links to this and publishers and booksellers in need of inclusion: I don’t get a thing by recommending the publishers and booksellers, other than relief that they’re doing what they’re doing. Either way, feel free to browse, peruse, and purchase, and know that every purchase makes Andy Jassy at Amazon cry.

Events

The Kylo Boomhauer’s Ultimate Exonormal Gift Overload event was an overwhelming success, and the last of the Silent Read events of the month are done, so things should be reasonably quiet for the rest of the year. Next year, though, things continue to get weird, in both contemporary and archaic meanings of the word. The hope and plan is to take the St. Remedius show on the road, possibly outside of Texas, if finances allow, so keep the Campus and Off-Campus Activities page near and dear both in your heart and in your browser bookmarks. Considering both horrible weather in January and possible snowstorms and freezing rain in February (as a rule, Dallas is reasonably assured of not seeing further freezing weather after St. Patrick’s Day), things may be quiet for the first couple of months, but once spring sets in, the plan is to get outside with a fury.

Final Words

I know some old-school convention people are going to be less than happy with the impending suggestions. I’d worry about taking grief, but suspect that they’d have to get off Facebook to express them somewhere where they might be read.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

SIGNAL BEGINS

Oh, it’s been one hell of a fortnight. The last vestiges of the old Texas Triffid Ranch moved out of a storage space and either found homes at a garage sale, or they’re going to Operation Kindness on Tuesday. Weeks and weeks of sorting, stacking, pitching, and recycling are pretty much done, with the dream of having the garage back for vehicle storage by the beginning of December. All of the model kits, toys, and other bits of strangeness purchased for greebles, nurnies, and wiggets in carnivorous plant enclosures are going to find new life in a new St. Remedius project/publicity stunt very soon, but now? It’s time to catch a breath, because the constant “ running as fast as you can to stay in the same place” gallops have been going all year, and something’s going to break without a chance to rest.

And that’s your cue. Saturday, November 22, 2025 marks the 61st celebration of Dallas’s most hallowed holiday, and this is the last call for interested bystanders for a new JFK Day tradition. For those coming in late, or those who didn’t get a chance to read previous installments, if you can get to Dallas on Saturday, there’s a desperate need for time travelers and time traveler impersonators in Dealey Plaza starting at noon: all we need are chrononauts lost and found to collect at the base of the Grassy Knoll at noon, hang around for a half-hour, look at our various chronometers at 12:30, yell at once “WRONG YEAR!”, and skedaddle. That’s all. In return, you get to take pictures with Kylo Boomhauer, snag the latest batch of St. Remedius flyers, and have the rest of the day free for shenanigans: I highly recommend both the Dallas Gem & Mineral Show in Mesquite and the Funky Finds Holiday Shopping Experience in Fort Worth. And if you can’t make it yourself, feel free to spread the word to interested friends, because it’s not a party without plenty of Morlocks, Daleks, and Dancers At The End of Time. So who’s in?

For everyone else, those poor souls who can’t get in on the shenanigans, as always I refer thee to the main St. Remedius site: expect photos from Saturday soon, and lots more St. Remedius stories, interludes on St. Remedius flyer rack construction, and planned holiday events in the coming weeks. It’s going to be a weird December, in all the best ways.

SIGNAL ENDS

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Photo by Shelby Bauman on Unsplash

BEGIN SIGNAL

Here in North Texas, we’re in the final stretch of autumn. Halloween is done. Generally, all of the typical Dallas autumn events are winding down (for instance, this coming weekend is about the last chance to host a garage sale before the weather risks getting nasty), and we’re all gearing up for the five-week slog that is the Dallas holiday season. We’re broke, we’re anxious, we’re pissed off, and we’re looking for something to do, preferably free or as close to it as can be managed. Whether we’re locals, transplants, or visitors, what do you do in that weekend before everything turns into traffic jam hell and practiced nastiness in the name of “Peace on Earth”?

How about a trip to downtown Dallas’s Dealey Plaza? As a St. Remedius gathering?

Now, put down the net. And the taser. There’s a madness to my method. Ow. OW. Let me explain. OW.

Okay, for the last 61 years, Dallas wasn’t famed for its architecture, or its cuisine, or relevant history, save for one event. November 22, 1963, Dallas turned probably its worst moment into a tourist attraction. Oh, city leaders will cluck their tongues about the “horrible tragedy,” but have no problems with sleaze like Oliver Stone using the city as his personal testicle mop if there’s a buck to be made. It’s time to take this in a different direction, and all of you and your friends can help.

Back in 2013, in a drastically different venue, I wrote a modest proposal on how to celebrate this “holiday”:

For the last fifty years, anything involving John Kennedy in Dallas has been a circus. There’s the actual assassination, of course, as well as the tourist industry that built up around it. Then there’s the backstory, which entities such as the Dallas Morning News want to bury and pretend didn’t happen. Then there’s the current effort for a massive panegyric the weekend before American Thanksgiving, simply entitled “The 50th”, which intends to “celebrate the life of Kennedy” without, you know, actually saying what happened to end it. Complete with efforts to make sure that nobody “extreme” gets anywhere near it. If there’s one thing any good circus needs, because it already has plenty of clowns, it’s costumes.
So here’s the idea. It’s a dangerous vision, but one that should be the maraschino cherry atop this gigantic, indigestion-inducing banana split of an event. It’s open to everybody who wants to participate, and it won’t cost a thing.
The idea: on November 22 of this year, Dallas gets a flood of time travelers. Famed travelers from fiction alongside ones brand new to the continuum, with outfits to match. Before you know it, the streets of Dallas are full of temporal explorers, cartographers, and marauders of all sorts, all asking the same question: “Which way to Dealey Plaza?”
At this point, half of the fun will be the responses. After all, if time travel is possible, then (barring the Morphail Effect, of course) an event as big as the Kennedy assassination should be so flooded with time travelers that they should outnumber the temporally static by a thousand to one. There’s no reason to believe that you wouldn’t have visitors planning to change the time line, keep it static, or take out anybody trying to do either. That’s why, when asked by reporters or passersby as to what’s happening, just hinting “I’m here to see history” is a good start.
The punchline comes around 12:20 Central Time, as the streets continue to flood with the Displaced. By this point, there should be more Daleks on the streets of Dallas than on those of London in 2100, and I won’t even start with the Yithians. At that point, everyone looks down the road where Kennedy’s motorcade drove a half-century ago, pulls out watches, clocks, sundials, chronometers, and hourglasses, and all exclaim at once “Right time, but WRONG YEAR!” before evacuating downtown.

That was then. Now, the 62nd falls on a Saturday, a perfect time to visit downtown Dallas. The weather should be great, traffic relatively light, and parking and DART trains with plenty of room. For those keeping up with the St. Remedius annals, you know exactly why no real time travelers will be there, so we have to fill the gap. So here’s the plan:

For those who can get to Dallas: starting around noon on November 22, 2025, get to Dealey Plaza on the west side of downtown in your time traveler best. Waistcoats, Lycra, Dalek battle armor: just please, PLEASE limit any gore to a dull roar and leave weapons at home, and if you’re coming in pink suits and pillbox hats, tell everyone you’re Dr. Girlfriend. If all else fails, look for Kylo Boomhauer handing out St. Remedius flyers and other ephemera.

For those who can’t get to Dallas: Among other places, go visit the Dealey Plaza Live Cam from the Sixth Floor Museum. Let friends and cohorts know about the event, and tell them to hit the Live Cam and any other feeds coming from the Plaza.

The Plan: Generally, come out to the Plaza, with clocks, sundials, watches, hourglasses, chronometers, and whatever timekeeping apparatus around noon on Saturday. Feel free to wander around and greet cohorts, and explore the Grassy Knoll. The area has regular vendors and tour guides happy to show the particulars of the Plaza: be nice, buy postcards and guides, and tip well. By about 12:20, though, get over on the sidewalk on Main Street, looking to the east (east is toward downtown: west is toward the tunnel) and checking your timepieces. Stay out of the street, but feel free to look in anticipation to the east.

At 12:30, look at your timepieces one last time, yell “WRONG YEAR!”, and scatter. Hang out in the Plaza or visit the Sixth Floor Museum, or hit any number of restaurants in the vicinity. Any way you go, go in peace, and take lots of pictures of your fellow chrononauts. If it works out well, we’ll do this again next year.

After the Event: You have plenty of options that weekend, both in and out of costume. Among other things, the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, a vital part of history that day, is hosting its JFK Week series, running the films War Is Hell and Cry of Battle at the same time and price as when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas in 1963. If that doesn’t work, there’s a lot to do in the vicinity.

And after this? I have plenty of ideas for more St. Remedius events, but first, let’s hit the ones already on the schedule.

END SIGNAL

St. Remedius News

If you haven’t been to the main site in a while, there’s a lot of new stuff: the current plan is to have 200 installments of St. Remedius lore, including Mandatory Parker stories and a few more Personal Interludes, up and readable by New Year’s Eve, so the last few weeks have been packed with new anecdotes and forbidden lore. As of this installment, we’re at 175, and the plan is to hit 300 by the end of 2026. After that, let’s see.

Cooking References

Over two years ago, I nearly moved to New Jersey for work, and one of the draws to the relocation was to live close enough that I could drive to Princeton with a 20-foot truck, visit the Princeton University Press store, and tell them “Just fill ‘er up.” The Press’s natural history and art history selections are already dangerous, and the recent book Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human by Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez. Purchase mass quantities for your science-loving friends, and even more for your culinary friends: I just started, and it’s a trip.

Other Reading

More newsletters you should be reading:

Heat Death: Asher Elbein is one of the best living Texas nonfiction writers out there, and he’s definitely in the top five living English-language science writers anywhere. (As both a former science writer and an incessant popular science article reader, I can say that with a bit more authority than usual.) Heat Death is a project by Asher and his brother Saul on a wide range of subjects, but Asher tends to concentrate on Texas paleontology as part of an upcoming project, with hilarious results.

Jack Boulware: Early 1990s gonzo magazine addicts remember The Nose, the West Coast counterpart to New York’s Spy, and Jack Boulware was the editorial voice responsible for its high weird content. Lately, Jack started a newsletter sharing both some of his biggest stories from the 1990s, with annotated updates on everything that changed since the original publication, and lots of new material to go with them. Al Jourgensen of the band Ministry famously said that anybody who remembers the 1990s wasn’t actually there: for those of us who avoided the drug and alcohol saturation of alternative culture (and who can explain why alternative and “alternative” were completely different things back then), Jack’s columns are a great way to touch up your memories. For the rest of you, it’s a great reminder that for a brief sparking moment in the early 1990s, things almost changed with more finality and force than at any other time in recent history, and there was just so much going on that won’t make MTV documentaries.

Simon Owens: When I first started compiling what became the Annals of St. Remedius in 2022, the original plan was to develop the pieces into a possible Netflix miniseries, with plenty of room for additional installments. The reason why I didn’t was thanks to Simon Owens’s media newsletter, which rapidly disabused me of anything new getting done in the middle of media consolidations, studio layoffs, and a general malaise in entertainment right now. Any up-and-coming screenwriters, directors, and development crews wanting to get a lead on projects when the malaise ends should subscribe right now: as it is, I make sure to go through his whole newsletter every week, and I catch the segments on LinkedIn as well.

Mark Finn: I’ve known Mark Finn since the days of the long-defunct Dallas Fantasy Fairs, and his North Texas Apocalypse Bunker newsletter just reminds me every Friday why he’s still a friend. Do you have that friend who’s crotchety as hell but with good reason, and who keeps up the crotchet to keep your morale up? If you don’t, go subscribe, and you will.

Events

The Campus and Off-Campus Activities section was just updated with a slew of new opportunities, including the recent schedule for the Dallas Oddities & Curiosities Expo (with four Texas shows in 2026, Dallas’s is running at the end of September at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center), but if finances allow, the St. Remedius tour moves outside of Dallas next year. In particular, StokerCon, the big Horror Writers’ Association convention, runs in Pittsburgh in June, and the fervent hope is to have to finances to go out to say hello to several of the guests of honor. In particular, it’s very much thanks to the one and only Billy Martin that I have that original St. Remedius icon on my bookshelf, and I promised him dinner a long time ago as thanks.

Final Words

The big event day for St. Remedius is his feast day on February 3, not to be confused with my birthday on February 30. The plan is for things to get really weird then, possibly with a recreation of the St. Remedius Time Traveler Balls. Stay tuned.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Okay, here’s where we all find out who actually reads each newsletter instead of just opening and deleting. I had an online discussion with Jason Sanford about the future of social media, where he shared a prediction from J.J. Johnson:

Obviously, this could go a lot of different ways. I for one never want to return to the days of pre-Internet Dallas, where the streets downtown rolled up at 5:00 in the evening and working a graveyard-shift job was a perpetual lesson in enforced loneliness. Obviously, so many people depend upon social media for contact because of work situations, their current residences, social responsibilities, and just simply the fact that the folks who have the most in common with so many of us just happen to live on the other side of the planet. That said, we’ve been crawling more and more into our phones since 2007, to the point of where you can send out print and electronic invitations, make open announcements, and shoot off flares to inform friends, cohorts, fans, and interested bystanders of real-life, in-the-flesh events for a month, and the only response you get is a month later from someone who ignored the repeated invitations who now complains “Why didn’t you tell me about this when it was happening?”

Why indeed?

Now, I could show my age and yell about how all you young whippersnappers can’t be bothered to put down your phones and get out of the house or apartment for a few minutes without going into severe withdrawal, except that it’s people my age who are the worst offenders. At this point, fine: stay at home with your carefully curated collection of AI slop. Here’s to those who want to get out to DO something other than sit at the computer waiting for something to happen. Here’s to those who look at winter in the Northern Hemisphere as the ultimate in boredom, who are willing to face a little weather and a little inconvenience. Here’s to those who want to meet other weirdos without dealing with Cat Piss Men, former Livejournal narcissists, and others who expect the event to be all about them. Here’s to trying something different.

Here’s the deal. Right now, the Campus and Off-Campus Activities section on the St. Remedius site has a load of potential activities over the next month, with more coming. If you can’t make any of these because travel to Dallas is prohibitively expensive, or if work or family schedules make it impossible, if they simply don’t move you, or for any number of reasons, feel free to sit out some or any of them. For instance, just this month we have:

• Day of the Dead 40th Anniversary Celebration at Alamo Drafthouse Richardson: Tuesday, October 28 at 7:00 pm.

• Nosferatu with live soundtrack by the Invincible Czars at the Texas Theatre: Thursday, October 30 at 8:00 pm.

• Garland Silent Book Club at The Lake Flying Saucer. Saturday, November 8 at 11:00 am.

• Half Price Books Silent Read at Half Price Flagship. Wednesday, November 19 at 7:00 pm.

Any different from other writers’ convention and reading schedules? Not really. What’s going to happen next is that visitors to that page get a collection of events for St. Remedius readers that have nothing to do with Dallas, but that might appeal anyway. Keep checking back, because the plan is to hype up events where the only St. Remedius connection is that it’s different, it’s somehow tied to the subject matter, and that people can wander around without interacting with any other reader and absolutely nobody would know. We’re talking about international events from coffee shop readings to massive music festivals, but ones that caught interest and that would definitely catch your interest. Most importantly, they involve getting out of the house, or at least out of the social media bubble.

Now, if anybody wants to wear St. Remedius buttons or shirts in solidarity, I certainly won’t complain, and I appreciate the gesture. However, it’s absolutely unnecessary. Because friends and cohorts have physical or mental considerations keeping them from travel, I’m going to be looking for virtual events that encourage that bubble-leaving. With all of these, it’s great if you can participate and completely understandable if you don’t, but what’s necessary now is the option, and I for one am sick to death of staying inside and waiting for someone else to make the first move. I have no idea if this is going to work, but half of the adventure is in the attempt. Here goes.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

SIGNAL BEGINS

Previous subscribers and readers might remember, way back earlier in 2025, when a windfall of abandoned real estate guide bins from the Aughts led to an idle summer project of converting them into St. Remedius flyer bins. Well, that started just before an emergency kitchen renovation blocked off access to kitchen and garage for over three months. Now that the kitchen is back in order, the summer heat finally let up, and there’s enough free time to get back to work, we return to the first rack conversion, already in progress.

Now it’s time to distinguish between the two racks, and to take advantage of the massive hollow space in the top of the fake house. it took a while because of the variability of the thickness of the plastic (a major problem with vacuum-formed items such as this, from what I understand), but first the “windows” came out, and then a good paint base coat (I swear by Rust-Oleum Ultimate aged metals for projects like this, partly because of the paint’s superior adhesion and partly because of the wild colors: I’m still hoarding a final can of “Carbon Mist” if in case I ever construct another carnivorous plant enclosure) both to prime the surface and to reveal surface details that might need to be removed.

And here we go: one of those surface errors, namely flashing from the mold. Were this made of resin or polystyrene, a few minutes of sanding (and ALWAYS wear a filter mask when sanding either of these, because you don’t want lungs full of plastic dust) would clean this up. With this plastic, though, the best option is to cut off the flashing with a razor knife and then repaint. Be prepared to find additional flashing in some of the weirdest places.

In addition, some of this has to be ready for Stage 3, so a nice drill hole goes right in the center of the “roof,” smack dab between the two windows. You’ll find out why next installment.

Now it’s time to channel my inner Jack Kirby. After the gallery shut down, I had a tremendous stockpile of various plastic Christmas globes, Halloween “eyeballs,” and Beer Pong glow-in-the-dark pingpong balls, and this project needed all of them. First, to make sure they’re all consistently colored, it’s time to hit them all with two coats of “Hammered Black“ after sanding them smooth. The surface doesn’t have to be perfectly smooth: in fact, I went with a coarse sandpaper to give sufficient “tooth” to minimize later chipping or peeling. This was by far the longest aspect of the whole project, so it’s best done with a good selection of tunes to relieve the sanding monotony. Some of the globes had a glitter finish, so those were just painted to add a granular effect.

To make a respectful Kirby Crackle, you have to go for structure and disassociation at the same time. This required building an underskeleton to support the weight of the rest of the Crackle, preferably one not so heavy that it risks knocking over or damaging the rack itself. Bamboo skewers intended for heavy grilling offered both the necessary flexibility and strength (much larger, and fiberglass rods may be necessary), and the globes were drilled through to slide them down the skewers. Mix up sizes and textures, and we’re getting going.

To give the impression of the Kirby Crackle flowing out of the house, one end of each skewer was secured in holes drilled in the top and side of the house, and then all three were gathered at the other end and held together with florist’s wire and epoxy putty. This was just the start of the work, because now all of the other painted globes had to be applied to conceal the skewers and add body to the whole structure. Many acted as anchors between globes on skewers to add additional strength, but others went on just as the spirit moved me. The idea was to impart motion, flow, and a strange order under the chaos.

Since the Kirby Crackle was to pass through the house, it made sense to continue it at the bottom left of the rack. Again, bamboo for strength and flexibility, but a little more cohesion partly to give the impression of anchoring and mostly to keep the assemblage from falling out of the bottom of the rack.

To finish up this stage, one last blast of paint, but to hold sprinkles of Glow Worm blue luminous powder into the still-wet paint. The plan is that in a location that gets lot of light in the day or lots of black light at night, this adds an extra level to get people to come up to the rack, even if it’s to ask “What the hell is that?“

Want more? Just wait for STAGE THREE, as well as a thumbnail on the other rack. Oh, and there’s a third rack on the way: now to find places to put them...

St. Remedius News

For those who got this far and actually read the newsletter rather than clicking and deleting, there’s a lot at the main Annals of St. Remedius site. The plan is to finish 200 installments, including Mandatory Parker and Personal Interlude installments, by New Year’s Eve 2025, and try to keep up at least three per week through 2026. This is in addition to two new book proposals: the way things are going with the publishing industry, they might get released in installments over at the site as well. As always, to get those regular installments in your email box, please feel free to subscribe, as everything is moving over there by January 1.

Cooking References

Any Michael Hultquist spicy food cookbook is one that needs to go in the culinary library, and his upcoming Flavor Madness is no exception. Next week, we finally get the temperature break in Dallas we were supposed to get at the beginning of the month, and now that the kitchen is in order, it’s time to saturate all that new paint and grout with only the best kind of fire.

Other Reading

More newsletters you should be reading:

Finding Dee Fish: ever run into someone whose daily experiences parallel yours so much that you wonder if the two of you are an expression of Bell’s Theorem? That’s Dee. At a time where so many Webcartoonists from the Aughts have either faded or confirmed everyone’s suspicions that they were hot garbage, Dee is a wonderful change of pace, and the parallels between her wife Heidi and my own Sarah are a bit disturbing, too.

Skookworks: I’ve hyped David Lee Ingersoll before, and I’ll hype him again. Back in the 1980s, several science fiction publishers put out trade paperback novels with additional illustrations by various artists, and several novels through Bluejay Books were my introduction to the very influential works of Matt Howarth. If interest in St. Remdius justifies a full novel, not only would I want to resurrect the Bluejay Books look, but I’m not going anywhere without hiring David to do the interior illustrations.

The Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter: those who knew me back in the 1990s might question my sanity for endorsing a Star Wars newsletter. I was a real asshole back in the 1990s, and besides, Jeff K has a great sense of humor about his fan interests that make this newsletter a blast to read. He also lives in Dallas, very close to the Texas Theatre, so he’s a great moviegoing buddy, especially when the Texas has its Akira Kurosawa retrospectives. He regularly jokes about Darth Jar Jar, I regularly joke about Kylo Boomhauer: it’s a wonderfully relaxed friendship.

Finally, I have to mention The Flytrap because of the involvement of longtime friend and longtime idol Andrea Grimes: I question her sanity about living in Austin, but other than that, I want to be the writer she is when I grow up. The Flytrap gives the same vibe as a lot of much-missed literary and commentary small-press magazines from the 1990s, and I’m always here for that energy.

And now a Shameless Plug for an old and dear friend: Stephen Dedman is even busier these days than I am, has been busy with Shadowrun novels, including a new one set in Texas that has a tuckerization of a certain recently defunct carnivorous plant gallery. Stephen, I’m going to return the favor one of these days. I SWEAR it.

Events

As before, everything moved over to Campus and Off-Campus Activities, and now that we’re amenable to going outside without slow-charring, it’s time to get busy. There are a lot of movies to see and things to do, and not enough people who want to put down the phone to do it, so let’s get cracking. Next week, for instance, Alamo Drafthouse joins in on celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of one of my favorite movies, and it may be time to get a St. Remedius gathering out to a local show.

Final Words

Now that the house is in order, the heat is over, and winter approaches, get ready for a lot more projects like this. I am in a MOOD.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

When it appeared, it was hard to tell if it was an April Fool’s Day prank that came out six months early. The fantasy novel The Primal of Blood and Bone by Jennifer L. Armentrout special edition with garlic-scented ink, created as a tie-in with Hellmann’s garlic aioli in a coffin-shaped gift box, hyped as Hellmann’s Booktok debut. It certainly seemed as if these were two diametric opposites: I still have books in my library where my best friend read them while eating potato chips, and the thought of combined water, oil, a touch of egg yolk, and minced garlic all over dust jackets and inner illustration plates made my inner book hoarder scream like a cornered opossum. And then I thought about it.

The reality is that while this is definitely an innovative promotion, there’s no guarantee that this will lead to book sales. That’s just reality. Those who remember the big horror fiction boom of the mid-1980s remember all of the various gimmicks intended to get readers to pick up a paperback. My local new/used bookstore, lamentably gone for over 35 years, had a wonderful New Books section carefully curated by the store owner, and I LIVED for going through it and the rest of the store every week when I had a few dollars’ disposable income from my groundskeeping job. (60 hours a week at $5 an hour in 1987, and almost all of it went into books and magazines. Many I still have, nearly four decades later, and some stained with blood and grass from that grounds job.) Oh, it was a grand age back then, with paperbacks loaded with embossed covers, split covers, hologram covers, and even glow-in-the-dark covers. To get readers to pay a little more, trade paperbacks increasingly came with illustrations from increasingly gonzo artists: my first exposure to the comics artiste Matt Howarth came from his illustrations for the K.W. Jeter semi-cyberpunk novel Dr. Adder in its Bluejay Books edition. And hardcovers? Oh, the sky was the limit, with slipcases, additional volumes, prints, maps, and bags of swag, depending upon the price of the edition.

Note that I didn’t mention much about the contents, because realistically most of those purchasing those books for gimmicks were buying them to put them in plastic bags in the hopes that they might become valuable later, not to curl up with them on a cold rainy afternoon. They definitely didn’t seem to help general sales: the big horror boom instigated by paperback publishers trying to cash in on Stephen King’s fame imploded at the end of the Eighties, with a lot of successful authors essentially disappearing when they no longer had publishers. If any of those books were reprinted, they came with new contemporary covers, without any of the marketing features from the boom, and a lot of them never saw reprint. These days, the standard paperback market is pretty much gone, as the cost of paper and binding is high enough that most new fiction goes straight to trade paperback anyway, and the gimmicks are as dead as grunge.

35 years ago, 24-year-old me would have shrieked up a storm about gimmicks and stunts replacing new authors with new concepts. In fact, 24-year-old me DID shriek up a storm, much to the understandable aggravation of my then-girlfriend Laurie. (Laurie and I reconnected as friends several years back, and she gets a lot of understandable mileage out of reminding me what a pretentious twerp I was back in 1990. I’m giving her a raise.) Books are meant to be READ, Snotnose Me lamented, not collected and certainly not put up unread because its cover might be damaged. Snotnosed Me continued: “Every penny spent on one of these gimmicks might be a penny that could be spent on new writers or established writers who have nothing to say!” (Snotnosed Me was really big on giving new writers a chance, especially new writers who had no track record for making deadlines or creating an original story. Every accusation is a confession, and all that.) “Get rid of the gimmicks and put out books that we want to read! Enough with stunts!”

As you can tell, Snotnosed Me was a twerp. In fact, there are days where I want to focus my life’s work on cheap and effective time travel solely to go back to 1990 and beat Snotnosed Me into a coma with an axe handle. I might even give 1990 Laurie the handle and let her get a few licks in, temporal paradoxes be damned.

Anyway, back to the garlic-scented ink. Alter Kokker Me, older and smellier but probably not wiser, looks back on both the previous gimmick boom and the Booktok gimmick boom with weary but smiling eyes. Not only does Alter Kokker Me not lament garlic-scented ink, but argues “How about MORE of this?”

No, I haven’t hit my head. I’m just acknowledging that good writing is its own destination, and time will tell. Readers will buy books for their own reasons, regardless of some 24-year-old punk crying about artistic integrity, and the final proof is in whether people are reading those gimmick books 35 years later, or even a year later. That part will never change, because if there’s an absolute in the publishing business, it’s that the publishing business is a business. Hype is all fine and good, but just look at the number of sales hits, or perceived sales hits, that flood the clearance sections of your local used bookstore, many still with the receipt in the dust jacket from where it was purchased and never opened since. Even the great books go through waves and stages, and a lot of great writing fades from view solely because there’s so much new great writing piling on top, compressing it into coal and diamonds. A lot of writers who were extremely important to me back in 1987 are now trivia questions, not because they were bad writers or because bad writers supplanted them, but honestly just because tastes change and readers only have so many hours out of the day to read. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Instead, Alter Kokker Me argues for an expansion of gimmicks, but fun, interesting, and relevant gimmicks. Gimmicks not to entrance book critics, mostly because the few remaining book critics out there have their own motivations, but to get average people to give a book a shot. Dyptich covers spread not between one author but one artist for five separate books by separate authors. A revival of maps and glossaries, including opportunities for framable versions purchased directly from the publisher or artist. Weird little artifacts that tie into the book or collection, where each book in a series has an artifact with additional value when all five or six are gathered (for instance, bookmarks with each volume that, when applied across maps in other volumes, give otherwise missing details that directly apply to mysteries in the next book). Augmented reality covers, photo-sensitive paper, and all sorts of time-limited accessories that require the reader to pick it up NOW or just lock it away because the promotional window is over. We’re all already flooded with advertising and promotional spam of little cost and little quality, so it’s time to offer promos that make readers stop and consider, or at least get them to tell their friends “Man, you won’t believe what I got with my new book!” No, this won’t be cheap, and no, it won’t always work, but aren’t we going to have fun?

15 years ago, when I was hyping up my second book, I got talked out of sending miniature cast-iron skillets with review copies. Now, I’m thinking long and hard about St. Remedius hot sauces, scratch & sniff cards, and other related accoutrements that would have tickled William Castle. Let’s go for weird before weird comes for us.

St. Remedius News

The perpetual reminder for those who only get the Personal Interludes: the main St. Remedius site gets lots and lots of new entries every week, and odds are pretty good that you haven’t read most of them yet. The plan is to put out three articles per week, including the St. Remedius Radio request line every Friday, and you’ll definitely want some St. Remedius Radio in your life.

Also, because I’ve actually been asked for it, and not because the voices in my head told me that it would be a good idea, the St. Remedius Redbubble Shop has new designs since the last Personal Interlude, including promos for Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald and my favorite Bible verse. If you can’t afford or don’t want to buy a subscription, you’re definitely welcome to wear a Carlie the Celebrated Crawfish-Crunching Cryptid From Carl’s Corner shirt to help cover site expenses and show your Hodag Pride. (And yes, St. Remedius Women’s Football shirts and extras are next on the agenda.)

Cooking References

Well, Month Four of the perpetual kitchen restoration is finally winding down. The mold under the sink and in the foundation is under control. We now have spectacular tile on the floor and on the backsplashes, the cupboards and drawers are repainted, and the new sink and dishwasher are going in as I write this. Once the microwave goes back over the stove, then it’s a matter of emptying storage tubs of cupboard and drawer contents, getting the spice racks and pantry rebuilt, and making plans for autumn cooking. Dallas weather being what it is, we’re in for prime indoor and outdoor cooking time, with a bounty of dropped pecan wood for the smoker, and it’s time to give the new kitchen its shakeout and shakedown cruise. It may be time to start bottling homemade barbecue and hot sauces.

And speaking of hot sauces, Michael Hultquist of Chili Pepper Madness keeps putting out great books for those of us craving spice and fire, and his new book Flavor Madness Cookbook is available for preorder. Now that the kitchen is finishing up, it’s time to prepare for winter cooking, and Michael’s cookbooks already get a major workout here.

Other Reading

This time around, instead of focusing on books, it’s time to spread word on other newsletters, because the way social media is going, we all hang together or we all hang separately. This time, the writers of note include:

• Ernest Hogan and Emily Devenport: not just two old and dear friends, but two writers without whom the St. Remedius stories would be considerably less...organic.

• Tom Cox: photographer of temporal portals on the English countryside, warrior against crooked publishers, and chef and valet for Jim the Cat.

• Jack Boulware: former editor of the 1990s weirdzine The Nose and chronicler of so much West Coast strangeness.

• Subnormality: the only Webcomic you should be reading, and the artist I’d hire in a microsecond for a St. Remedius tie-in comic.

• Susie Bright: fighting the good fight long before the rest of us had any inkling there was a fight in the first place.

Events

As always, check out the Campus and Off-Camus Activities page for related activities, particularly now that the Dallas heat is breaking. And keep checking back, too, because there’s a lot going on in this town after the State Fair of Texas shuts down.

Final Words

Now that the garage isn’t full of kitchen construction materials, it’s time to finish up the new St. Remedius flyer racks. Look at this as Fun Promotion, because I guarantee people will get as much joy out of them as they get out of the newsletter.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

As mentioned a few months ago for those coming in late, the Annals moved to its new permanent location, http://www.stremedius.com, for multiple reasons, mostly related to limitations with the Substack system. I’ve made a lot of great friends and cohorts here, and I’m planning to give them all a shoutout in the next couple of Personal Interludes. (With the collapse of both dependable search engines and social media not run by and for psychopaths, getting word out about interesting people and resources is now more important than ever, and those who remember the zine Factsheet Five can appreciate the value of a well-considered review.) That said, it’s time to move on, and this Substack is shutting down at the end of the year.

That’s not to say that the whole project goes with it. In fact, the plan, now that the temperatures are dropping in North Texas and it’s possible to think, is to get things even more lively, if only out of spite. (The notebook of St. Remedius ideas is getting heavy enough that I list to the left when carrying it.) If circumstances allow, this means between three and four new installments per week (including the regular St. Remedius Radio installment every Friday), as well as more Mandatory Parker porn, and hopefully one to two new designs in the St. Remedius Store every week to two weeks. The idea is to flood the zone with high-quality and environmentally friendly strangeness, guaranteeing both entertainment and edification for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, installments reposted here are going to be much more limited: expect maybe one every two weeks until the inevitable end.

However, because I want to give everyone currently subscribed here on Substack an illusion of freedom, moving over to the site’s newsletter is completely voluntary. If you’re tired of getting St. Remedius newsletters but worry about what others might think, you’re encouraged to unsubscribe or just let things lapse at the end of the year. If you want to keep getting installments in your mailbox, feel free to subscribe over there. If you just want to bookmark the site and binge every few months when you have the time, go for it. Either way, The Annals of St. Remedius isn’t going anywhere soon, because the stories keep building.

With that out of the way, if you’d like to help out, I’d have to be a fool not to accept assistance. That can go any number of ways:

• Numero uno: These days, I’m off most social media for a good reason (I still have an account on Bluesky, but that’s about it), but if you want to inform friends and compatriots who remain who might remember either the old Healing Power of Obnoxiousness or the Texas Triffid Ranch sites, please pass on word.

• Numero two-o: If you’d like to get a paid subscription when you get to the new site, it’s very much appreciated but not necessary. If you’d like to support the Annals but can’t justify or afford a subscription, consider a T-shirt or bedspread: it’s taken a while, but the first Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald poster is up and out, and there’s always room on the back of your laptop or car for a Mandatory Parker sticker.

• Numero three-o: Should you be or should you know a practitioner of the journalistic arts, feel free to send them to the site or to me directly. I know there’s a lot of options for odd fiction these days, but maybe the Annals might tickle an editor’s interest.

• Numero four-o: A new set of St. Remedius flyers should be ready by the beginning of October, and while the US Post Office continues to annoy (I’m still receiving returns on flyers sent back in May, from where they rotted in tubs until being labeled “No Such Address” in bulk until last week), I’ll continue to give it a chance. In addition, readers in the Dallas area should soon have wildly artistically converted flyer bins in select locations in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, with news on where to find them soon. (I would have had them out sooner, but the ongoing kitchen conversion in the new house just keeps going and going and going, and it’s impossible to work in the garage when the garage is full of sheetrock and cabinet drawers. That, though, is coming to an end faster than expected.)

• Numero five-o: Just spread word. Send copies of newsletters to interested bystanders. Cover your car with stickers. Don’t deface national landmarks, but if you feel the urge to project the St. Remedius logo 200 feet high on the side of a building on a busy Friday night, I will neither endorse or discourage it. I’m currently working on the particulars for St. Remedius patrons to become honorary members of the St. Remedius Bromley Contingent, including perks for wearing your swag in public (think of something like the old Shirt Price options with the Triffid Ranch or even the Q Cards for the long-defunct Dallas radio station Q102), and I’m always open to venues wishing to have a St. Remedius Bromley Contingent event or social.

That said, as another insufferable asshole once said, do what thou wilt. See you there.

SIGNAL BEGINS

It's the final vigil for American Science & Surplus. As of midnight Central Time on September 14, one of the greatest accumulations of science tools, toys, misfit items, and general strangeness closes its online store forever. Two of its physical stores will continue as employee-owned venues carrying the AS&S name, but the tremendous online store and its matching print catalogue, full of funny drawings of available products and funnier descriptions, shuts down on Sunday night. After 88 years, it all comes to a halt, and it's going to leave a hole.

I first came across the AS&S catalog at the end of 2002, at exactly the right time to make the most difference. I had recently quit a long writing career and was at loose ends, not quite sure what to do with my sudden surplus of free time and wanting to expand upon creative impulses. The AS&S catalog, a newsprint publication sent to anybody who asked and, as used to be the tradition, continually sent for as long as one kept making regular purchases, was a catalyst for those impulses. It carried electronics. It carried garden supplies. It carried art tools. It carried other tools, like watch repair kits, lineman's pliers, pipe cutters, and wraparound clamps. It carried a lot of odd items that could be used for all sorts of other purposes, such as misprinted pens, carving tools that were on deep discount because the closing latch on the front was installed in the wrong direction, horribly underpowered battery-operated can openers that were a mother lode of plastic gears, and reams and reams of raw components such as speaker wire by the spool, retro momentary switches, and solar cells. The crew at AS&S was always delightfully surprised by what their customers did with their offered treasures, and often shared tips with catalog and (later) online newsletter subscribers, which led to further inventiveness.

Looking across my office at the moment, almost everywhere the eye falls comes across AS&S treasures from 22 years of purchasing. Diffraction glasses (in the photo above), bulk sticker packs, electrical plug USB adaptors, drinking glass coasters, lighted business card holders, and retractable feather dusters. The rest of the house is the same way: plastic cutting boards and Erlenmeyer flask coffee cups and ceramic knives in the kitchen, removable hangers and storage tubs in the bathroom, and a truly ridiculous number of sculpting and measuring tools in the workroom. My girlfriend Sarah used to laugh at how often I referred to AS&S for weird little things one didn't know one needed, until I snagged a heatable weighted shoulder pad and detachable clips to keep her phone charger cord out of the way. Back in the Texas Triffid Ranch days, AS&S literally made the Triffid Ranch distinctive, especially when they offered sales on empty Lava Lamp bottles on sale because the boxes had been water-damaged in transit: the absolute last bottle went out, six years after that first purchase, on the very last day the Triffid Ranch was open for business. Laser bicycle lights and garden twine and battery-powered Tesla globes and travel silverware packs and skull bottle openers and resin horned toad sculptures...the house would be strangely empty were it not for AS&S largesse over the last quarter-century.

Sadly, it's all coming to an end on Sunday. AS&S was already having problems with online distractions and with multiple venues trying to get into the business of salvage and surplus. They had warehouse issues that led to a frantic search for a new affordable warehouse at the beginning of 2025. AS&S only sold within the United States for multiple reasons, but that prevented international sales for interested techies and artists outside the US. Obviously, the current postal rate hikes and tariffs were a big factor. None of that diminishes what they accomplished, all the way to the end, with multitudes all singing the same song with the catalog: "Ooh, check THIS out!"

So if you can, give American Science & Surplus the sendoff they deserve, with a stripped warehouse and lots and lots of good memories. With luck, the employee-owned stores in Chicago and Milwaukee will weather the current economic horror and bring back their online sales, and we'll be waiting for them. If not, well, at least we're all going to have great memories every time we look around. Hail and farewell, you lot, because we're really going to miss you.

SIGNAL ENDS

St. Remedius News

The ongoing migration from Substack continues, with more features being added all the time. In particular, check out St. Remedius Radio every Friday: it's a continuation of the old "Have a Great Weekend" feature at the old Triffid Ranch site (which I stole blatantly and openly from the one and only Jack Bogdanski), combining music with more St. Remedius stories. Expect a lot more in the next few weeks, now that the Texas heat is breaking and it's not as much of an ordeal to write.

Also, for those who want to chip in on St. Remedius expenses but don't or can't necessarily afford a newsletter subscription, let it be known that the St. Remedius Redbubble store has all sorts of new items, including new Mandatory Parker band gear and the new Proverbs 26:11 shirts and stickers. This, of course, is just the beginning, because Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald stuff is on the way, too.

Cooking References

The whole Cooking References section started thanks to the constant inspiration of my friends Jen and Martin Meier, who have a truly stunning culinary library and who constantly keep me looking for new recipes for the day that the kitchen renovation is done, Sarah and I have a working kitchen again, and we can cook for guests because we'll have spaces not filled with appliances, dining room chairs, and big tubs full of canned goods. (We're coming up on three months of this, and we're still waiting on a replacement subfloor and tile. This, obviously, prevented me from making a Malcolm Tucker birthday cake this year.) And yes, we have Plans, especially if the long nightmare ends in time for American Thanksgiving.

With that in mind, most fannish-themed cookbooks are a disappointment, but The Official Godzilla Cookbook by Kayce Baker was a delightful surprise. It was already a wonderful surprise being a birthday present from Sarah (when we first started dating, she didn't believe me when I told her the cat specifically demands to watch Godzilla films on Friday and Saturday nights and The Walking Dead before he goes outside every evening, and I mean DEMANDS), but it manages to combine "Official" with some honestly great recipes. Of particular note is the Drinks section: those of you who know me know I can't drink, but I love to make drinks for others, and so many of these, particularly the Gigan's Eye (hibiscus flowers, agave syrup, seltzer, rum, and ice) and the Space Titanium Sling (just buy the damn book) are just beautiful to look at. Expect possible plans for a post-Thanksgiving movie-watching party, both online and in person, involving some of these treats.

Other Reading

In the next few weeks, expect a St. Remedius installment involving this version of Dallas's Exposition Park, but in the meantime, go hunt down a copy of It All Dies Anyway: LA, Jabberjaw, and the End of An Era by Bryan Ray Turcotte (Rizzoli, 2015) on the famed 1980s/1990s coffehouse/live music venue Jabberjaw and its influence on popular music ever since. Dallas's Bar of Soap (the area's first laundromat/bar, hence the name) needs a similar in-depth perusal, and It All Dies Anyway is just full of the same energy. It's not the same as being there, and without time travel technology you lot won't ever experience it anyway, but maybe it'll act as a template for new wonders. (When I was finished, I honestly started looking vaguely at venues that, if unlimited funds became available, could become a location for a real-life Glass Glyptodont, and if the money actually came through, would be a perfect spot for a real-life science bar. Stay tuned.)

Events

For the four people who got this far, things will be a little quiet this month on the St. Remedius events front, which is why all of the events are available on the site's Campus and Off-Campus Activities section from now on. Expect some new possibilities in the next few days, though, because Dallas and Fort Worth start to open up once the heat breaks, so October is going to be interesting.

That said, it's been three years since I last made a road trip, and it would be nice to visit friends in Austin without worrying about a truck full of carnivorous plants. The first weekend in December is the weekend for the famed horror-related bazaar Blood Over Texas Horror For The Holidays at the Palmer Event Center, and this year's HFTH turns into probably the best venue to fight the inevitable withdrawal symptoms between Halloween and Texas Frightmare Weekend. The road trip is still very tentative, but it would be nice to wander around Horror For The Holidays purely as an attendee (as a vendor, I was always swamped from opening to closing),and it would be even nicer to see old friends. Heck, considering the costumes at each show, it may be time to take Kylo Boomhauer on the road, too.

Final Words

It's getting rough out there, but at least we have each other. Take care of yourselves, and expect more surprises soon.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

You know that old saw about how "you pick the family you have"? Some of the people I considered family, the ones for whom a query of "Can you spare a kidney?" gets the automatic response of "How many do you need?," show up like cats: you didn't plan it, you weren't prepared for it, and you're as surprised as they are, and they just walk in and take over your heart. Earlier this month, we all lost Danielle Yazzanno, the best little sister anybody could ever have, certainly a better little sister than I deserved, and those who never got the chance to meet her are that much poorer for the lack of opportunity to rectify this. Danielle was, by any measure, sui generis, and while she and I shared no genetics other than the commonalities we had with every other human on the planet, I couldn't have been prouder of her if she and I had been legally recognized siblings.

Let me start at the beginning. For those coming in late, I used to have a thing for carnivorous plants. I got hooked when moving to Tallahassee, Florida in 2002 for a short-lived job, and I came back to Dallas right when both reading material on them and easy-for-beginners specimens became available in just the right window. That led to starting a business of raising, acclimating, and selling carnivores called the "Texas Triffid Ranch" that started in 2008, culminating with a gallery space showcasing rare and interesting specimens that ran from 2015 to 2023. Between 2008 and 2023, the Triffid Ranch went on the road, first around the Dallas area and then elsewhere in Texas, with plans to visit surrounding states that were derailed by COVID in 2020. Starting in 2009, one of those stops was with Texas Frightmare Weekend.

Also for those coming in late, Texas Frightmare Weekend is one of the world's largest horror conventions and certainly one of the best. Running since 2006, Frightmare is three days of high-octane weirdness with people from all over the planet, all waxing enthusiastic about all aspects of horror fiction and related topics, and it was high-octane even in its earliest days. The Texas Triffid Ranch's first Frightmare was in 2009, and it rapidly became a major feature among the assembled vendors, attendees, guests, and staff. Not only was nobody expecting to see carnivorous plants in such a venue, but to take home one of their own after learning the ease of raising most species in captivity? Regular Frightmare attendees began to look forward to each show just to see what new came out each May, and I looked forward to surprising them each time.

By 2012, Frightmare became so big that the whole schmeal moved to the hotel inside of DFW Airport, partly for room and partly to facilitate the legions of horror fans who could go directly to the hotel from their arriving terminals. With more room came more attendees, and more guests, and more vendors. To the eternal credit of everyone involved with Frightmare, no matter how big the venues got, it still retains the same unchecked enthusiasm of its early days, where horror fans of every subgenre and every fandom could walk into the main convention area and sigh contentedly "I've found my people." To keep up with the increase of audience, the Triffid Ranch booth grew to compensate, moving into larger and more boisterous North American pitcher plants, hauling in fresh-blooming South American pitcher plants just so everyone could see the flowers, and introducing neophytes and experts alike to Australian pitcher plants and triggerplants. I may regret a lot of things in my life, but I will never regret the time and care I spent on Frightmare, because that attention was returned fiftyfold, often leading to friendships I will cherish for the rest of my life.

And that's where Danielle came in. Anyone showcasing carnivorous plants to the public gets the same things said over and over: the Park Cities crotchdroppings who would crowd the front of the booth and scream "Feed me, Seymour! Feed me, Seymour!" over and over until you acknowledge that they're the first people in the history of life on Earth to make the connection between real life and popular media. (The one person who didn't get a shoutback of "Brawndo's got what plants crave!" was Little Shop of Horrors director Roger Corman when he was a guest at my second Frightmare, but he definitely earned the privilege.) The people who think they're being clever by asking "You got something that will eat kids/pets/exes?" The people demanding whether or not the current selection includes a very particular, very rare, very hard to raise, and VERY expensive carnivore that also happens to be hundreds of dollars cheaper than any specimen they could order online. The hipsters who throw out obscure species like they're shouting B-sides for bands that broke up in 1983, the twerps who argue about plant care and lie "Well, my uncle raises plants that CAN SO be raised on hot melt glue and bat semen," the people who demand perpetual care plans if in case their plant dies as they're taking it to their car and for the next decade afterwards...after a while you hear it all. What makes it all worthwhile is when you get the questions that not only bring up valid points but stretch your knowledge to the utmost, and after this human fusion reactor walked up and started asking questions about triggerplants that made me tell her "You know, I'm going to have to go back and research this, because I can't tell you off the top of my head," that Frightmare got a lot better.

Over the years, I learned Little Miss H-Bomb's name, and she usually came out on Saturdays, sometimes by herself and sometimes with friends. And oh boy, did she come with more questions. The only reason why we didn't spend the next decade down in the hotel convention hall was because of the relentless waves of people with their own questions, but Danielle would usually sneak back when the crowds let up a bit and we'd talk even more. She bragged on her mother, who was a science teacher, and she bragged on her husband Sean, who usually couldn't make Frightmare only because of his work schedule, and then she'd ask even more questions, only stopping because the convention had to close for the night and we all had to get out before convention security took tasers to us. (Jeb, the original and much-missed head of Frightmare security at that time, was slightly sympathetic, as he also became a carnivorous plant junkie, but he'd been up since 5 am and wanted to get some sleep. Because of that, I'll cherish the taser burn scar for the rest of my life.)

For the most part, Danielle and I were able to hang out at other venues sporadically due to distance: she lived in Fort Worth, and anyone who looks at a map and assumes "Oh, Dallas and Fort Worth are right next to each other, so it's EASY to go from one to the other" obviously never lived here. Even so, she was a buyer organizer for Pier One when it was headquartered in downtown Fort Worth, and she once gave a tour on a Saturday afternoon of the main showroom for samples of incoming products. She made many more trips to Dallas to hang out than I did to Fort Worth, especially when I opened up the first Triffid Ranch gallery location. It wasn't until 2021, though, that we started working together: Pier One declared bankruptcy in 2020 and shut down all of its locations, and I got a call letting me know "Hey, you need new shelving for the gallery? They're selling all of the Lundia shelves, and it's first come, first served." The only thing better than getting approximately $5000 in high-end, incredibly strong shelving for the gallery to replace units that were, quite honestly, starting to fall apart was her beaming smile when she finally got the chance to see the completed enclosure display along one entire wall and sighed "They're getting used."

I reciprocated when, after starting a new job, I was able to let her know about a new position that was perfect for her, and the conversations during our lunch breaks got even more lively. She got a good giggle when she saw the figure of the early Cretaceous tyrannosaur Dryptosaurus in my office (she was one of the only people I knew outside of paleontology circles who already knew that Dryptosaurus is New Jersey's state dinosaur), and she returned my getting her hooked on Canadian comedian Rick Mercer's "Talking To Americans" series by getting me hooked on her favorite "drama weenie" show Slings and Arrows. Lunch breaks ended with whole to-be-read lists of new books and sites, and she would belay the horrible commutes back to Fort Worth from time to time by coming over to the gallery to see new works in progress. Her last day at the job, when she couldn't deal with the commute any longer, was also my 55th birthday, so after we had talked for six months about going over to the famed Ricky's Hot Chicken location by the gallery, we hied thee hence on that last day and ate lunch at the gallery, discussing influences and possible new projects the whole time.

Not once did she tell me she was sick.

For several years, we had discussed her getting behind the booth at Texas Frightmare Weekend, but work always interfered. That changed in 2022: her work schedule changed, I had just gone through a horrendous divorce, and she actively looked forward to coming out to lug tubs of carnivorous plants while peoplewatching. The original plan was that I would share booth space with my ex, including paying for passes and wifi access for her entourage, but when she found out Danielle would be there, the Incredible Human Botfly Grub bailed three days before the show with no prior warning. (I discovered why during the show.) So now three tables to be filled with plants, glass, ceramic, and plastic? Trust me: you've NEVER seen someone working so hard all weekend as Danielle.

Two out of three Frightmare tales that completely sum up Danielle: the first day of Frightmare meant wrangling for dock access with dozens of other vendors trying to get their own tables set up, hauling plants one cart at a time across the entire length of the hotel, then moving the truck to a common parking lot at the other end of DFW Airport and taking a hotel shuttle back to the convention to finish setup. A regular interruption I didn't really mind was when other vendors and the guests came up to peruse the plants, and Danielle was already revved to meet one of the lead guests at Frightmare that year, the actor Lance Henriksen. He came to US. The two of them hit it off immediately, with Mr. Henriksen asking questions about the various plants being set on the table and Danielle three steps ahead of him with her particular anecdotes about carnivore care and feeding, with my trying my best not to be rude while trying to get back to empty and move the truck back at the dock. Due to various issues with the hotel shuttle, parking the truck in the overflow parking was easy, but getting back took so long that the convention had already opened its doors by the time I could get to the booth. Not only had Danielle set it all up, including lights and wiring, but she and Mr. Henriksen were STILL giggling away about Nepenthes pitcher plants and the legacy of the flower emblem of Newfoundland and Labrador. He literally had to be pulled away by Frightmare staff for his own events, and I have no doubt that they would have spent the entire weekend making each other laugh with maybe occasional bathroom breaks until the hotel staff kicked us all out. By the end of the show two days later, she was still glowing, and we ended up getting several people who came by specifically because they saw the pitcher plant Mr. Henriksen brought back with him. (He refused to accept a free plant, and because his schedule was too busy for him to come back to the booth, he bought a purple pitcher plant from another attendee and perched it next to him at his booth the entire weekend. An absolute mensch, that man.)

Story Two: When I got back to the booth and Mr. Henriksen left, Danielle broke into giggles as I inspected the front to make sure everything was lined up and labeled. One of the draws of the Triffid Ranch booth was that I looked for containers for indoor and outdoor plants that were as interesting as the plants, which meant ransacking flea markets, estate sales, and secondhand stores for appropriate and gonzo ceramic and glass containers. I'd picked up a slew of kitchen crocks and bins in the preceding months for Sarracenia pitcher plants, including lots of flour and sugar bins and utensil vases, so I didn't see anything untoward. She told me "go back and look again," emphasizing "I'm twelve." I looked at a sugar jar from a set of kitchen jars numbered from one to four, a decorative purple vegetable crock, and a bright red utensil vase with a rooster on the side. I was already so frazzled that I didn't see what she was getting at, so she had to point out "Number 2, eggplants, and a big red cock!" before nearly falling over laughing. I joined her, only to have someone buy the "No. 2" pot seconds later. Hence, I only got a picture of the last two, and those went home with happy patrons shortly thereafter at her prompting. She kept moving plants, too, to the point where the final return on Frightmare 2022 wasn't just the biggest Triffid Ranch ever, but nearly twice what I had sold in 2021, and I gave her full credit the full weekend long. She had a BLAST.

We made plans for me to take both her and her husband Sean for dinner after we recuperated from the weekend. She still didn't tell me she was sick.

Interim tale: For various reasons, particularly a massive rent increase with new owners of the gallery space and the greenhouse failing to achieve low-earth orbit during a massive February windstorm and imploding, The Triffid Ranch shut down in early 2023. A lot of good friends came by in the final days to snag plants, exchange stories, and ask what was next, and Danielle made a point of coming by on the last day to see what was left before I moved out. Again, she didn't tell me she was sick. That wasn't who she was, because she didn't want people worrying over her instead of the other way around.

The last time I saw Danielle was at Texas Frightmare Weekend 2023, the first time I had been to a Frightmare without the plants. She was on an ongoing quest: years before, her college roommate purchased a poster for the movie The Lost Boys, allegedly autographed by the entire cast, for her birthday, only to discover that every autograph was fake. Because she loved her roommate and appreciated the gesture, she didn't discard the poster, but instead made getting authentic autographs a life goal. We were there to meet one of the guests, the one and only Alex Winter, and explain the situation. By this time, Frightmare had moved from DFW Airport to the even larger Irving Convention Center and moved the date from the last weekend in April (six months between Halloweens) to Memorial Day Weekend, and I now worked at a company so determined to mine every last penny of effort out of its employees that even thinking of asking to leave early on a major holiday weekend was like asking the CEO for a spare pint of blood, but I still made it after fighting the horrible holiday weekend traffic. By that point, the line of attendees waiting for the doors to open stretched around the building and through the parking garage, and as soon as I relegated myself to meeting her inside and hoping we could find each other, I got a text: "Where the hell are you?"

"I just got here. Traffic was murder."

"Get your ass up to the front. They're about to open."

I walk to the front of the line and discover that Danielle is about four back from the front door, having been there for hours. We got caught up on chitchat, rushed the door when it opened, and went right back to Mr. Winter's table, where she pulled that beloved poster out of its protective tube and asked him if he could autograph it. When he was confused as to why it already had a signature, she explained the situation, and he grinned so hard I was afraid the top of his head would fall off. He gleefully gave it a flourish, asked her to give his regards to her college roommate, and we went on to say hello to old friends and new folks until she had to bow out because of exhaustion.

She told me it was because of her new job. She still didn't tell me she was sick.

The next couple of years were rough with staying in touch. Twitter, our main common venue, turned into its current cesspit, and we lost touch until meeting again on Bluesky. That's when she made noises about how this was the first time in over a decade that she couldn't make it to this year's Frightmare, and naive waif that I am, I asked why not. That's when she told me about her breast cancer and how being immunocompromised from her medications kept her away from large groups, but she promised we'd get together at some smaller gathering. I promised her that if she needed anything at any time, I was there to get it for her, and we slipped back into our old banter online. I missed her last post about an emergency trip to the hospital, and it was a couple of days later that Sean called to tell me she had died the previous Saturday after a sudden massive downturn in her condition.

The funeral was about what you'd expect from someone like Danielle. Besides photos and sign-in books, a jar of gaming dice sat at the front of the chapel with encouragement for everyone to take one. The chapel was full of so many people who had shared as much with her as I had, and we were all blubbering wrecks. I had one remaining spare Frightmare 2022 wristband, black to denote "vendor," and I left it for her in lieu of flowers because that would have meant so much more to her. I couldn't do anything more for her, but I would have, with the old "how many kidneys do I have? How many do you need?" energy, had it been possible.

There are the friends who you know will miss when they leave, and the friends who take big chunks of you with them. Danielle took a massive bloody gaping chunk out of everybody she knew, and the only thing that eases the pain was the fact that we got to know her in the first place. I was always proud to call her "little sister" and always will be, and we'll only stop missing her when we go wherever she went and look around to see what kind of trouble she's getting into now. Even now, I look at how much of the St. Remedius stories were inspired by our conversations (the character of Morag Feinstein was directly based on her, for the record), and every new story will be written with love for someone who really was so much greater than the sum of her parts.

One last bit: years back, one of our verbal perambulations involved the very odd fake concert movie Get Crazy, coming out about the time she was born, and we talked about possibly planning a New Year's Eve watching party one of these days. In particular, the end credits song performed by Lou Reed seems particularly appropriate right now. Rest easy, little sister. We've got you.

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There’s no easy way to say this, so it’s full-bore forward: your mother and I are getting a divorce. No, wait, I meant “Let me explain why Daddy’s on the top of the newsfeeds.” Gaah. “I’m going outside and may be some time.” No? How about “When Galactus selects you as a new herald, you answer the Devourer of Worlds.” Or do you want to hear the usual riffs about being just outside of Barstow or having no mouth but needing to scream?

Many, you’re a tough audience. “This is to announce the migration of The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College from Substack.” HAPPY?

As mentioned last installment, the tarot cards, I Ching sticks, goose entrails, and vortices in the temporal vortex all pointed to the same thing: getting this newsletter going on Substack was a great and wonderful thing, until it wasn’t. There are a lot of great writers and artists on the platform, but the investor pressure to move from “building a great community” to “give us 500 percent of what we paid in, or we’ll strip out the copper plumbing” is just getting a bit too strong, to the point where the Almighty Algorithm that determines who gets exposure on the platform is emphasizing those with huge numbers of paid subscribers, not just those with large numbers of readers. (As Jeff K of the Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter points out, “Nice newsletter you’ve got here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”) While I appreciate every last one of you for your dedication to this strange little literary project, I also acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of you are either broke or close to it (no shame or admonition, because I’m right there with you), so I’m not the right writer for the ever-devouring Substack machine. Hence, it’s time to move to a locale that makes more sense, and has no connections to the Nazi Bar. I’m already seeing so many subscribers leaving Substack completely for the latter reason, so it’s time to acknowledge the problem and be more proactive.

That spot, still under development, is http://www.stremedius.com, and you’re welcome to go digging. (Among many other developments, Substack is notoriously bad about is archive tools, as well as encouraging new and existing readers to dig through those archives in between new installments.) There’s still a lot of work to be done: the export tools Substack offers are this side of “spiteful,” meaning that I have to go through every last entry and switch all of the links to Substack resources elsewhere, but at least I did this when the newsletter had about 140 entries instead of 14,000. Even so, the site offers a newsletter option for letting everyone know about new entries, so really not that much has changed.

The problem, and the reason why you’re receiving this missive, lies with your subscriptions. Again, Substack’s export tools are best described as “spiteful,” which was bad enough when the platform would skip sending newsletters to anywhere between 10 and 15 percent of the subscriber list for no readily apparent reason. That 10 to 15 percent also was left off the final export list, including several paid subscribers, and the last thing I wanted to do was have other paid subscribers double-billed for duplicates of the same newsletter. I also wanted the paid subscribers to get their money’s worth on their remaining subscriptions, and make things easier for free subscribers to switch over at their convenience. The easiest way to do all of this is to wean everyone off Substack, at their own pace, and with the option to bail entirely with no hard feelings from anyone.

So here’s the deal. From now until the end of the year, newsletter postings go both through the new Web site and through Substack, even though any links to archive articles will go to the site. You can continue to follow the Annals through December 31 here on Substack, or you can cancel your subscription here and move to the St. Remedius site. No more paid subscriptions will be accepted here, but if you’d like to chip in for operating costs and Parker treats, you can purchase a paid subscription or buy mass quantities at the new St. Remedius Redbubble store. And if you’re already overwhelmed by the sheer number of newsletters to which you subscribed upon your arrival at Substack and you simply don’t have time or inclination to read the latest St. Remedius installments any more, I won’t be offended and I won’t be upset if you cancel now or just let things lapse at the end of the year. And if you change your mind and decide that you want to catch up every few months or so, you know where everything’s gone.

As for existing paid subscribers, I have a special present for all of you at the end of the year, that I’ve been gathering together since last March or so. Trust me, you’re going to love these, and it’s intended to thank you all for having faith in this weird little project. The current plan is to offer presents like this at the end of every calendar year, so if you get a query for a mailing address at the end of November, it’s not a scam nor is it an attempt to get personal information.

To everyone, paid and otherwise, thank you again for your patience and perseverance over the last 15 months, and get ready for the rest of the year. You’re going to love it.

SIGNAL BEGINS

August in Texas is a weird time. Other places in the US are full of people complaining about the influx of Pumpkin Spice Starbucks coffee: not only is this a desperate reminder for us Texans that summer will eventually end, one day, but those of us who frequent the Clearance section at our local grocery stores wait for the Pumpkin Spice coffee to become available around mid-November so we can stock the freezer and have cinnamon coffee in June when we need it. School starts in the local area on August 12, meaning that previously clear streets will be filled with dolts whimpering “I gotta get my kid to school” the way northerners whimper “I gotta get the bread and milk,” running down anything and everything that might keep them from that objective and then running down anything keeping them from work because the daily school dropoff traffic jam made them late. August is the one month without a single federal holiday in the United States, which means the mail gets more delayed, the stores more depleted, and bosses everywhere go point-blank MEAN. Countdown clocks tracking the days until Halloween aren’t jokes, but a vague promise that one day, the air won’t smell like burnt flint and the back yard won’t have cracks in the clay big enough to lose puppies. And then we forget it all with the first big September rain until next year, where we’re surprised all over again. Forget Harlan Ellison’s “the hour that stretches”: this is the Month That Stretches, and eventually it breaks and we find ourselves on the other side. Eventually.

For those who have never lived through our entertaining definition of “summer',” you’d be absolutely correct in assuming that everyone in Texas goes completely and irrevocably insane by the eighth month. However, we take after our greatest out-of-state teacher, the Gila monster, in staying underground and only emerging to suck eggs and eat baby bunnies. Well, lots of ice cream and frozen yogurt: bunnies are awfully bony. Only the most brave or foolhardy engage in outdoor events before the end of September, but indoor stuff, we wait until the sun goes down and then we feed.

Anyway, returning to writing after a 20-year hiatus raising carnivorous plants has been full of challenges, including dealing with wanting or needing to write during the worst heat in the day. After the actual act of writing comes the efforts of distributing it, and boy howdy have things gotten worse since the dotcom crash. Publishers, both due to budget cuts and tariff issues, are relegating most functions involved with getting a book to the public to the writer, including publicity and promotion, in a field where getting out that promotion is harder and harder. (If you haven’t heard, Publisher’s Weekly now charges for reviews, just to deal with the onslaught of review copies thrown at the magazine every day, and book review sections in newspapers and magazines are as dead as shopping malls these days.) The author Cherie Priest recently related her issues with the constant promotional push for each new book, to the point where she spends as much energy on promotion on actual writing, and things are probably going to get worse.

Likewise, the venues where up-and-coming and established writers could connect with others are getting weirder and stranger. I finally gave up on Facebook and the rest of the Meta mess last New Year’s Day, when attempting to stay in touch with writer friends was made impossible thanks to incessant ads and “For You” AI slop. Genre conventions are great for the stalwarts who use hanging out at the bar as a business expense, but anyone attending science fiction or romance conventions has stories of mangled schedules, distorted events, and “This is more of a statement than a question” Cat Piss Men taking over panels. That’s if you can even find a convention in your particular specialty: science fiction conventions are pretty much either big-media showcases or tiny gaggles of Morlocks still nostalgic for 1985, and what about writers in everything from nonfiction to Westerns? And what about those who can’t afford to travel across the country or across the planet just to cross-pollinate with others?

And there’s the problem with getting people in the first place. It’s been a problem for the last 15 years already: post “Hey, I’m going to be at X Locale on Friday night at 7:00,” get 1500 likes on Facebook and lots of “Oh, yeah, I’m going to be there!” comments, and the actual event is straight out of This Is Spinal Tap. (I particularly sympathize: nearly three years after shutting down the old gallery, I still get people who only now realized that it shut down and complain about how “I always wanted to get out there” in its 7 1/2-year run. Well, maybe if you put the phone and the bong down…) While it’s unfair to say “mere,” but a mere book signing isn’t enough to get enough people to come to most writer events, or at least signings of one book. The system has to change, and fast.

A lot of these thoughts came to a head upon reading about a new bookstore in Grapevine, Talking Animals Books, trying something different from their end. Specifically, Talking Animals Books joined up with other independent bookstores in the Dallas/Fort Worth area to run a summer book crawl in August. The idea is that participants get a passport that they get stamped at each bookstore they visit, with those participants returning the passport at the end of the month for a chance to win a free book gift card. Bookstores suffered particularly badly in North Texas over the last 30 years, and so instead of vaguely talking about visiting local bookstores while giving Amazon more money, there’s an incentive to get out and check out these places before they’re gone and preferably sell lots of books in the process.

Now there’s a lot of logistics to work out before this can go anywhere, but why not mash up both problems to everyone’s benefit? Schedule multiple bookstore events in a given month, with all of the stores announcing their schedules and maybe a few guest writers, and the rest of us make a point of getting out there just to talk and buy books? Keep each gathering small so as not to overload the introverts, but give everyone a chance to get in, and if so inclined, meet at local restaurants to keep up the conversation. Rotate guests to different stores every weekend that month, so people who can’t travel far have the chance to see those guests when they come around, and maybe even announce a central hub where everyone can meet after visiting individual stores as part of the bookstore crawl. It won’t do a thing for the online-addicted, but if it means others get out of the house and talking with each other, well…

Anyway, this is purely tentative, but it’s already worked well for local arts, as the East Dallas Arts District Art Walk demonstrated last year. The big question is if anybody else wants to participate. Details to follow as things happen.

SIGNAL ENDS

St. Remedius News

Back 16 months ago, when I first started up the Annals of St. Remedius, I had misgivings about the Substack platform. I had been bouncing back and forth on an appropriate newsletter platform (I was less than thrilled with the UI at MailChimp when I was running the old Texas Triffid Ranch newsletter there), but what made me pull the trigger was the news of several writers and artists moving there. I mean, David Lee Ingersoll being there already was a serious perk, but Paul Krugman and Ann Telnaes moving there when they got tired of the editorial interference at their respective newspapers? Sign me up.

Well, that was 16 months ago. Yes, Substack seemed to offer a reasonable interface, and it promised all sorts of options on monetizing works while keeping the writers in control. (After years of working for science fiction and movie magazines that paid if and when they damn well felt like it, if they paid at all or if they paid before they collapsed, with constant calls and emails six months to a year after publication, asking about the status of payments that the editor swore on his mother’s grave would be out after 30 days, you have NO IDEA how freeing that felt. One of these days, I’ll have to tell you the SyFy/ Christmas on Mars story and how I had to threaten to dox all of SyFy senior management to get payment.) Lots of writers I admired, from Susie Bright to Nicholas Kaufmann to Marlon Weems, were already here, as well as more all the time. Life seemed good, BUT.

Well, it’s time for a change. It’s not just the fact that Marc Andreassen of Andreassen Horowitz is now a major investor, and I’ve loathed Andreassen for a solid 30 years now for personal and professional reasons. It’s not just that Substack management defends and promotes newsletters that goes way beyond “protecting free speech,” to where I’m disgusted and appalled as to how hard they’re working to turn the place into a Nazi bar. It’s not just that Jewish friends are now loath to read, recommend, or refer anything on Substack, and I can’t blame them. It’s not just that subscriber counts keep dropping, not because people are disgusted with these newsletters, but because readers are disgusted with the content provider and don’t want to do anything that makes Substack any money. It’s not just that Substack does a terrible job of allowing search engines to find internal content, and an even worse job of promoting newsletters that aren’t the big moneymakers. It’s not just that I’m tarred by association with Matt Yglesias and Chris Cillizza. It’s not just…

After a while, the “it’s not justs” turn into an avalanche, and that’s when you know it’s time to leave.

So here’s the deal. I’m in the process of moving everything to a Wordpress site: most of the delay so far has been with having to rebuild links to non-Substack sources. Posts will continue here to finish off subscriber obligations until I can refund the subscriptions in full, but most of the action is going over there, including a whole new newsletter free of Nazi affiliations. I’m not going to shame friends and cohorts for staying with a viable source of revenue, but I’ll be glad to welcome them over at the new site. Expect to get word when it’s finished, which I’m hoping will be before the weekend is over. And so it goes.

Cooking References

Right now, most cooking projects here at Parker’s Haven are on hiatus, both due to the relentless summer heat and not having a full kitchen. What started as a quick repair to fix a soft spot in the living room floor turned into a pest remediation (opossums under the house), which discovered an otherwise completely hidden leak coming from the kitchen sink that required taking out half the kitchen floor…yeah, just call us “George and Cheryl.” When the heat does break, though, it’s time to go through Baking Yesteryear by B. Dylan Hollis. Mr. Hollis’s assessments and recreations of recipes from the Twentieth Century are probably the only good reason to go through TikTok, and this cookbook manages what all really good cookbooks should: a casual perusal after a good meal, and every last recipe makes you wonder “Am I really THAT completely full right now?” Expect extensive testing in October and especially November, when we’ll be glad to have the oven on all night.

Other Reading

Current reading that may or may not be tied to previous and upcoming St. Remedius installments, but may be of interest anyway:

Nonfiction: Flim-Flam! by James Randi (Prometheus Books, 1982)

Fiction: Red Spider, White Web by Misha (Wordcraft of Oregon, 1999)

Art: Magnetic Storm by Roger Dean (1985)

Music: Tyrant King by GWAR

Events

In events not related to bookstores, the call goes out again. The Texas Theatre understands the need to get out of the August heat and into a well-chilled movie theater, and as always, it delivers. Firstly, it hosts a screening of Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress on August 7 at 7:00: I have never had a chance to see The Hidden Fortress without being interrupted, certainly not in an actual popcorn-and-soda theater, and the additional fun will be seeing it alongside Jeff K of The Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter. Jeff has spent the last year playing Ollie to my Malcolm Tucker, so heading out there to hang out with him in person is just going to make things even better.

The big event, though, comes two days later. Saturday, August 9 at 7:30, the Texas Theatre runs a special 40th anniversary showing of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, followed by a live music show featuring the bands Cheap Fix, The Eerie Family, and Oddfellows, with the option of attending just to see the film or to catch the whole show afterwards. Day of the Dead has been a birthday movie since it came out four decades ago, so if you’re in the mood to celebrate the last birthday of my fifties with the rest of the St. Remedius cohort, we’ll see you there if you make it and hope to see you at the next even if you can’t.

In the interim, the various Silent Book Club events in the Dallas area are a very welcome social/not social event, especially during the summer. In particular, the Garland Silent Book Club meets September 6 from 11 am to 1:00 pm, and the monthly Half Price Books Silent Read at the flagship store in Dallas runs on August 20 starting at 7:00. And yes, there will be flyers.

Final Words

Usenet. Delphi. Livejournal. Facebook. Instagram. TikTok. Now Substack. Anybody else really missing analog media these days?

SIGNAL ENDS

Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.

SIGNAL BEGINS

Welcome to the 135th installment of the Annals of St. Remedius newsletter, bringing you snide commentary, fascinating events, and options for making life ever so slightly more entertaining. I’m Paul Riddell, your chronicler, captain, administrator, and navigator, and we return to previously uncharted waters momentarily. In the meantime, the news, including announcements of upcoming events that aren’t necessarily St. Remedius events but should be of interest to readers.

Since my first summer in the Dallas area in 1980, summer has always been a little aggravating. 2025 is no different. My girlfriend Sarah, Camina Drummer to my Alex Kumal, has been an absolute hero over essential repairs on her house, where everything keeps escalating. A soft spot in the middle of the living room floor? Time for a crew to climb down, only to discover a potential family of opossums and one definitely dead possum, all of which had to be excluded and removed before any further work could start. More foundation repairs to keep a garage wall from collapsing. The foundation crew cut the cable running to our wifi router, which required a crew to install a new router (the tech said “I need to take this one…to a museum”) and dig a whole new cable channel across the front yard. A monster elderly hackberry tree was one good windstorm away from demolishing the garage, which required a top team to take it down without destroying everything under it, and then toppling a set of younger hackberries that settled in the chainlink fence surrounding the back yard. (As most North Texans discover rapidly, hackberry seedlings love growing in the spaces in chain link fences, and the stump of the big elder still had chunks of the long-gone 1970s-era fence it overgrew decades ago.) And the leak from the kitchen sink pipe that was completely invisible until the crew went under the house to fix the soft spot? We’re still waiting on a report, especially since the house is old enough to have had asbestos installed behind the drywall, back when it was still legal in the US.

We’ve been persevering through all this joy. Parker the Lint-Covered Breast Implant takes less after his namesake and more after his namesake’s nemesis, when he isn’t shedding twice his body weight in cat fur. Sarah spends her evenings working on a new project, of which details will only come out when she’s good and ready. And me? I’m making St. Remedius flyers.

For those coming in late, I’ve been returning to my zine roots in efforts to get further word out about the St. Remedius newsletter. These efforts start with, but definitely won’t end with, a regular series of flyers incorporating St. Remedius characters and situations, as well as hyping upcoming “Mandatory Parker” concerts in such bustling cultural centers as Menasha, Wisconsin and Krum, Texas. The idea isn’t just to catch the vibes of the weird-ass flyers one used to find all over Dallas, particularly at Cafe Brazil locales and the much-missed Tower Records store on Lemmon Avenue, but to give tastes of the upcoming St. Remedius zine. Well, it’s been a great opportunity to get up to speed on Affinity Publisher as well, so there’s no complaints.

The problem with flyers, as well as any other print promotional material, is making sure that they are accessible. The idea is to move flyer bins to various events in Dallas, such as next year’s Texas Frightmare Weekend and Oddities & Curiosities Expo, as well as set up more permanent bins in amenable locations. The big issue is to make sure they’re unique but still recognizable as St. Remedius locations, make sure that they don’t lead to a mess, and make an impression. What to do?

Well, to start, it’s time for some creative garbology. Back in the 1990 and 2000s, the greater Dallas area was just covered in bins and dispensers for a wide range of promotional guides, weekly newspapers, monthly freebie magazines, and lots and lots of sales guides. Many didn’t survive the first decade of the 21st Century: if the bins were metal, they were either collected by the owners of the intellectual property in the hope that the scrap value could cover some of the costs of bankruptcy or quietly grabbed by industrious scrap collectors and taken in themselves. Plastic ones generally sat in the locale, literally collecting dust, until the property owner told someone “Toss that crap in the compactor” or some wiseacre grabbed one for gun or bow practice. A few still stand, collecting nothing but dust and occasional dead insects, in places where the attitude was “It’s not MY problem,” offering opportunities to wannabe artists with enough room in the backs of their cars and absolutely no shame in being watched as they haul the bins to their destinies.

And that’s the current situation. Several of these wonderfully UV-inhibiting plastic beasts were still in a back access area behind a recently renovated strip plaza, just taking up space because the owner had neither reason, capability, or intention of retrieving them, and the property owner didn’t care what happened to them so long as they were GONE. A quick trip to the site, and I came back with two to start with. If they could be converted, great. If they couldn’t, then they’d become my problem. Thankfully, they’re going to work out just fine.

The starting problem is that most of these have been out in their locales since the early 2000s, and definitely looked it. Rains washed the dust off the tops, but it was thick inside, and years of ultraviolet abuse left the front sheet of Lucite brittle and almost opaque. The base and sides had labeling where the paint had cracked from years of thermal stresses, but the main structure was still sound and even flexible. This wasn’t going to break into pieces the moment it was moved.

The real determination that nobody was going to miss this: When the bins were stocked regularly, the crew handling the restocking also cleaned off stickers and graffiti every month, or replaced the whole bin if the graffiti couldn’t be removed. This one had been tagged long enough in the past that the Sharpie ink was starting to fade from sun exposure, but the real test was the interior.

Look at that. You could grow potatoes in that dirt. I could spend a day in my childhood rolling around in a sandbox and carrying half of it back with me, and still not have the mineral content of the interior of this bin. Yeah, nobody’s particularly worried about getting this back.

An unanticipated effect of moving this beast was the extensive pectoral and bicep workout getting this into the car. The base contained four holes for mounting bolts into concrete and asphalt and bolting the base to the living earth, but I expect a lot of recipients said “No way on Elvis’s green earth are you bolting these things down in front of MY shop.” This meant that the base had a plug through which a large pile of gravel and an equal amount of water went in to weigh the base down to keep it stable in heavy winds. As I discovered, this was about 30 kilos of gravel and water that went sloshing all through the interior as it was moved, with two holes in the back apparently designed to allow excess water to drain out. It wasn’t a problem to move them: they were just ungainly, and removing the gravel meant cutting a port in the base to dump it out.

In addition, see what looks like paper pulp in the photo below? At first, that’s exactly what it looked like, as if spare bits of paper from years of bin contents filtered down and slowly rotted in the water/gravel mix. As it turned out, this is a great example of what is generally referred to as a “biofilm”: bacteria in the water and gravel entered the previously pristine interior, received just enough sunlight through the plastic to add energy to the mix, and produced quite the bacterial slurry. At least it ended up on the ground and not all over the interior of my car.

Ah, but the acid test: would these be the correct size for a St. Remedius flyer? Well, after removing the badly weathered front door and the equally opaqued Plexiglas separator, it turns out that it’s just perfect. Well, with a lot of work, anyway.

Now, if I merely wanted a generic flyer bin, then it’s a matter of adding a few stickers to cover the original paint, and we’d be done. As mentioned before, though, the idea is to make something unique. After a thorough scrubbing and rinsing, it was ready for painting, and then Phase 2…

To be continued…

St. Remedius News

It’s been a long time in the making, but flyers and other ephemera aren’t the only things to expect in physical form from St. Remedius. This next week starts a push for a shop on RedBubble full of truly unique art for your fancy, and yes, it includes Mandatory Parker album cover art. (There’s really no point in doing this unless it comes with a whole set of Mandatory Parker concert tour T-shirts.) In the coming weeks, expect to see St. Remedius bumper stickers, Mendellosian Books notepads, Siouzi’s Coffee & Books coffee mugs, and Tim Waite For Texas Governor posters, as well as so much more. Look at it as a way to cover costs on the newsletter without locking out installments as “Subscriber-only", and a great way to really mess with the heads of Significant Others, friends, cohorts, coworkers, and fellow denizens of that music fest in northern Michigan where you’re kept up all night with the nimtwits in the tents next door yelling “Can I get a group hoot? HOOOOOOOOT!” (Trust me: there’s a story in this one, and I’m not the person to tell it. However, when the time is right, I might tell the story of how I nearly accidentally killed the actor Butch Patrick, and that’s a group hoot in itself.)

In related news, the gifts for paid subscribers are getting together, including a lot of utter strangeness only available there. Maps of the St. Remedius campus, Mandatory Parker magnets, autopsy diagrams, confidential reports, and maybe even paper dolls. you’ll boogie ‘til you puke.

Cooking References

I have the same attitude about chocolate that I have for Scotch: I have no real interest in either, but friends and cohorts love both, and I’m fascinated by the process of producing both. For Scotch, I highly recommend the book Still Life With Bottle by Ralph Steadman; for chocolate, I very highly recommend The Chocolate Bible by Christian Teubner. Do you want the early history of xocolatl? Do you want the history and the recipes developed when the miracle beans hit Europe? Do you want more information on commerical production, or information on how to work with chocolate? All right here.

Other Reading

Current reading that may or may not be tied to previous and upcoming St. Remedius installments, but may be of interest anyway:

Nonfiction: Show Posters: The Art and Practice of Making Gig Posters by Pat Jones & Ben Nunery (Powerhouse Factories, 2016)

Fiction: Smoking Mirror Blues by Ernest Hogan (Create Space Publishing, 2018)

Art: Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, and Monsters by Davis S. Cohen (Insight Editions, 2013)

Music: Chinese Fire Horse by Garbage (were I three more hours premature, Shirley Manson and I would be the same exact age, so this song hits particularly strongly these days.)

Events

We’re definitely into summer in the Dallas area, and after 43 summers here (I missed two by being trapped in Portland, Oregon for the summers of 1996 and 1997), you learn a few tricks on getting through with safety and sanity relatively intact. In particular, this includes movies, especially with the old theaters with massively overpowered air conditioning that make you forget the heat and the glare for a few hours. For this little ginger duck, this means regular runs on the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, which currently features looks at the big summer films of 1982 and the 40th anniversaries of the films of 1985. For various reasons with which I will not bore my ever-patient readership, I never got a chance to see the John Carpenter reboot of The Thing in theaters during its original release (I call it a reboot because while the Howard Hawks original sharing its title was a spectacular film, Carpenter’s was much closer to a thorough adaptation of the original John Campbell, Jr. novella “Who Goes There?” than Hawks would have been capable of doing at the time.) To those willing to come out to the July 9 screening at the Texas, I can attest that spending nearly two hours in a big theater like the Texas watching events in Antarctica will make you forget the heat outside, at least for a while.

The big one at the Texas Theatre, though, is intensely personal. 40 years ago this August, I celebrated my nineteenth birthday in the Viking Theater in downtown Appleton, Wisconsin, watching the premiere of a film I had been waiting years to see. In fact, I discovered the chance to be an extra in the film a whole day too late, so seeing it was especially important. This was a movie that changed the direction of my life in so many ways, including escaping Appleton and moving back to Dallas, studying everything I could find on practical makeup effects and film theory, and ultimately leading to my first publication with the science fiction magazine New Pathways in 1989. My search for a copy of the soundtrack taught me so much about the music industry and its distribution at the time, and I still refuse to believe any clerk at any store who swears something will be in “in two weeks” until I actually have it in my hands. I made a lot of friends over the years based on our mutual love for this film, and while other friends gave me grief, they at least appreciated that I could argue why this worked for me at the time it did. For the last 38 intervening birthdays, I made a point of celebrating birthdays by watching it on videotape, DVD, or streaming, and now for the first time since 2016, when the Alamo Drafthouse ran a screening with the director in attendance for a Q&A afterwards, it’s going to be on a Dallas screen for a crowd to see it in all its glory.

If you thought the movie was Lifeforce, interesting choice. (I still use the 1980s movies of Tobe Hooper to describe the period of Hollywood “where cocaine ran across the land in great rivers.”) If you chose The Goonies, please slap yourself over and over until some brains seep in. No, I’m talking about the long-awaited second sequel to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, one third of the reason why I get into so much trouble at job interviews when I’m asked “So who is the best Captain: Kirk or Picard?” and I answer “Lochley, Dallas, or Rhodes.”

The upshot: on Saturday, August 9 at 7:30, the Texas Theatre runs a special 40th anniversary showing of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, followed by a live music show featuring the bands Cheap Fix, The Eerie Family, and Oddfellows, with the option of attending just to see the film or to catch the whole show afterwards. I’m not in Appleton, the Viking Theater has been demolished for nearly a third of a century, all of the friends I made at that original screening are gone and some are dead, but the Texas is a very welcome substitute. If you can’t make it, there’s always next time. If you can, let’s turn this into a St. Remedius fan event for the ages.

In the interim, the various Silent Book Club events in the Dallas area are a very welcome social/not social event, especially during the summer. In particular, the Garland Silent Book Club meets August 2, and September 6 from 11 am to 1:00 pm, and the monthly Half Price Books Silent Read at the flagship store in Dallas runs on July 16 starting at 7:00. And yes, there will be flyers.

Final Words

135 installments and a little over a year of St. Remedius. What a long strange trip it’s been, huh? And as a reward for plowing all the way through this, the Comments section is live for everybody. Questions about St. Remedius and Parker may be answered in upcoming Personal Interludes. Just don’t make me regret it.

SIGNAL ENDS

Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.

One of the things about resurrecting a writing career after a 20-odd-year hiatus is how easy it is to get back into the swing of things. Sitting things out during the big social media boom and raising carnivorous plants instead was, in retrospect, one of the smartest things I could have done, as if that was an actual plan instead of a case of spiteful nose-trimming. I’d like to think I’ve grown up a bit, and I definitely have a wider perspective than I had in the middle of 2002. Likewise, it’s been great to get in touch with new writers, editors, and publishers, not to shove my stuff under their noses and scream “Taste it! Taste it NOW!”, but just to see what new folks are doing. It’s been a blast.

Anyway, as part of the effort to hype up this here newsletter, I’ve been reaching out to people and events in my past, particularly literary events of all sorts. Again, a lot of this is sitting back, shutting up, and learning something, because so much of the “essential knowledge of promotion” that was accurate at the end of the Twentieth Century is, well, a bit inadequate today. At the same time, with the ongoing collapse and consolidation of social media, everything old is new again, and if you’d told me even five years ago about the rebirth of zines, email newsletters, and in-person events both regional and national, I’d have looked at you strangely at best. Again, if I had to start anew with a completely different project, now seems to be the time to do so.

At the same time, if ever there was a time to shed things that simply don’t work, now is as good as any. Getting back into the swing of looking at writer’s conferences, science fiction and horror conventions, and workshops as a mere attendee instead of as a vendor, I’m amazed at some of the rapid evolution going on. Science fiction conventions were having a major problem in the 1990s with organization and growth, with issues with incompetence hiding behind volunteerism, proud gatekeeping a half-step from bullying, and an attitude of many orgs that they would rather burn everything down than allow anyone under the age of 50 to get any kind of say over how things should run. The old joke in science academia is “scientific revolutions advance one funeral at a time,” and the same is true of once-clodgy conventions that have bloomed into new and strange growths once That One Person Who Had To Be In Charge finally went back to Hell.

Now, things are improving, but there’s still plenty of room for further developments. Digging through the Web sites for multiple conventions, I admit that I was surprised and not surprised to discover that an old entertainment from the Eighties and Nineties was still a thing. A lot of standard activities at science fiction conventions back then make little sense today: when nearly everyone carries miniature computers capable of pulling video signals straight out of the air, dedicated video rooms had better have either extremely tight curation or guest commentators that justify reserving the space. Considering the current state of publishing and distribution in the US, “How To Get Published” workshops are equally obsolete, much to the relief of the guests pressganged into attending. (There are only so many ways you could explain to the same 10 attendees who went to every one that you could only get published if you submitted manuscripts, and there was a chance of being rejected every time, and there was no super-special secret codeword that turned potentially hostile editors into pliant zombies. And Arioch help you if you even joked that there was such a codeword.) The most sadly expected artifact, though, was discovering that Eye of Argon readings were still a thing.

My poor girlfriend goes through conversations with me like a live rendition of Peter Greenaway’s TV Dante, so here’s the Sir David Attenborough explainer text for those, like her, who have no idea whatsoever as to what the hell I’m talking about. The details on The Eye of Argon are helpfully provided by Wikipedia, and there’s not much more to add to the discussion than the synopsis: 16-year-old puts together a fantasy novel, with more enthusiasm than skill, and gets it printed in a mimeographed zine published in 1970. Writers and editors who should have known better decide to make reading events where participants would read from the manuscript until they fell over with laughter, and then pass it on to the next. The manuscript finally saw print in a formal book form without any real permission from the author, and nearly a quarter-century after the author died, you still get people who think that verbally beating on a 16-year-old’s fantasy story is the height of wit.

That’s not to say that mockery, properly applied, can’t teach us about better writing. I’m a firm believer in it myself, but I also try to punch up. Given a few minutes, I’m sure we could all go after novels of all genres by authors who at least should have known better, that were bought and published by editors and publishers who at least should have known better, and often extolled by critics who should have known better. Ragging on The Eye of Argon is just like the stylings of the late Asimov’s editor Gardner Dozois, who took time away at conventions from referring to his penis as “Mel Gibson” (and he was furious with me for the rest of his life for my responding “You mean ‘Mel Brooks’”) to host readings of short story submissions to Asimov’s, sharing the “worst” examples for those hoping beyond hope that if they laughed along with him, he might be amenable to printing their work one day. It’s not just cruel, but it’s also lazy, and as mentioned before, there are much better and much, MUCH more deserving targets.

Now, you might ask, what do the conventions do instead? I’m glad you asked. While pondering how The Eye of Argon might be best left to obscurity, the twentieth anniversary of a similar fannish landmark just came and went, and wheels started turning. You could probably smell the smoke and hear the gears stripping. Within a couple of seconds, a great alternative presented itself, one that allows everyone to show off their comic chops, and without mocking someone who died as a punchline. We can call it “Spectacular Spectacular,” for obvious reasons, so bear with me.

Okay, here’s the opening. Typical hotel ballroom space utilized by a typical science fiction convention: big space with rows of chairs facing toward a main stage. Emphasis on BIG, because there’s no telling how many people are going to want to participate, both as subjects and as audience. One way or another, we need lots of legroom, and nobody needs to crash into attendees. NOBODY needs to get hurt.

Now before things start, we need participants and a moderator. Before jumping in, each participant arrives with a wardrobe inspired by the Duck Tape Stuck at Prom contest or the Ig Nobel Prizes: fantasy armor, attire, weapons, and magic items, all made from foam and duct tape. The more ridiculous, the better. Go wild on the designs: if the outfit would make a medieval literalist cry, you’re halfway there. If the costumes have action features, make sure that they’re ones that won’t hurt anyone, stain clothes, or make a mess in the room, but otherwise go wild with these, too. Same for the moderator: I highly recommend a look evocative of Sleazy P. Martini. The participants collect outside the room, allowing passersby to gaze in wonder at the ridiculousness, and if anybody asks what’s going on, everyone simply answers “Spectacular Spectacular” and gestures toward the open door. We don’t need a full audience, but it won’t hurt.

(Additional gear for the moderator: a big stopwatch or timer visible to most or all of the attendees, and a noisemaker of some sort. Air horn, vuvuzela, whoopie cushion: it just has to be loud enough to be heard over a crowd. Keep these handy: we’ll need them.)

At the top of the hour, the moderator pulls out a container with folded slips of paper, one of which is simply marked “PRESENT,” and hands over a rubber chicken as each person reaches in. It’s very important that the person drawing “PRESENT” not tell the others they won the drawing, including the moderator. Having selected, the moderator leads all of the participants up to the front, announces “And now Spectacular Spectacular,” and moves to the side, displaying both timer and noisemaker.

From here, every participant takes turns delivering a soliloquy. It could be Shakespeare, it could be Jerry Seinfeld. It could be original. It could be the first page of the participant’s new novel. It could be singing, or knee-slapping, or competition belching. The absolute, though, is to make it at least relatively family-friendly, make it funny, and make it as ridiculous as possible. Most of all, to make it sixty seconds long: every time one starts, the moderator turns on the timer, and each participant gets exactly one minute to present. At the end of the minute, the noisemaker goes off, and the participant has to back off and give the next person a chance, and it repeats.

When everyone has finished and the last airhorn goes off, all participants line up against the back of the stage and hold perfectly stock still. Nothing, nothing at all, for about fifteen seconds. Not a move, not a peep. That’s only to be interrupted by the drawing winner, who steps up, yells “All right, chums, let’s do this! LEEEEEEEROY JEEEEEEEENKIIIIIIINS!”, and rushes off stage. The other participants can take chase, or they can hand buttons or candy to the attendees (yet another opportunity to promote your own work, someone else’s, or just surprise everyone with early Halloween candy), or joust and feint among themselves. Eventually, the winner comes back up on stage, brandishing the rubber chicken and yelling “At least I got chicken,” and the participants pelt the winner with their rubber chickens before standing up for a bow. Spectacular Spectacular is over, and everyone can break free to clean up their messes, let attendees take pictures, and share email addresses before preparing new outfits for the next year.

Okay, so this doesn’t have the easy sleazy laughs of an Eye of Argon reading, and that’s the point. Complete silliness and lack of pretension, inclusive competition, and everybody gets chicken. So who’s up for taking this to Readercon this year?

St. Remedius News

Well, everyone who asked for St. Remedius fliers (including the tour promo for the new Mandatory Parker album “My Life With The Lint-Covered Breast Implant”) should be getting them any day now, if they haven’t arrived already. This hasn’t depleted the current supply, so feel free to ask for a pack. For paid subscribers, get ready for a much larger pack as your pledge incentive, including Mandatory Parker magnets, St. Remedius stickers, and a handy Quantum Pocket Detector that doubles as a bookmark, stencil, and toothpick. Oh, the weirdness just keeps coming and coming.

For those who don’t want a stranger with your mailing address, as the essay above related, it’s time to press flesh and give away surprises over the summer. This includes heading out for the Dallas run of the Oddities & Curiosities Expo on May 31 to reminisce with old friends and meet new ones. (The plan ultimately is to be able to run a St. Remedius booth at O&C one of these years, but sadly not this year.) This might also coincide with a Kylo Boomhauer sighting, but that depends upon whether the weather is amenable to humans that day or if it kicks into North Texas Overload. Either way, coming out early (doors open at 10:00 am) is HIGHLY recommended.

In related news, for those who missed your humble chronicler’s first published piece of fiction (you didn’t think I was making up everything about St. Remedius Medical College, did you?), it behooves you to go through the complete list of entrants in the Small & Scary/Big & Beastly collection. A dream in my very early youth was to get an entry in the DAW Year’s Best Horror Stories series edited by Karl Edward Wagner, and this is about as close as I’m going to get. Go get in some reading time.

Cooking References

With summer in Texas comes a renewed taste for all things garlicky and spicy, so it’s time to mention probably the best book on growing, harvesting, storing, preparing, and cooking garlic ever written, The Complete Book of Garlic by Ted Jordan Meredith (Timber Press, 2008), an essential part of my culinary library. The book has been out of print for years (sadly, a regular occurrence with many of Timber Press’s best books as of late), but whether you pick it up via online sales or a random used bookstore encounter, snag it, hold it, and never let it go.

Other Reading

Current reading that may or may not be tied to previous and upcoming St. Remedius installments, but may be of interest anyway:

Nonfiction: When The Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance by Riley Black (St. Martin’s Press, 2025)

Nonfiction: Discarded: How Technofossils Will Be Our Ultimate Legacy by Sarah Gabbott & Jan Zalasiewicz (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Nonfiction: A Disturbance In The Force: How and Why the Star Wars Holiday Special Happened by Steve Kozak (Applause, 2024)

Fiction: The Basilisk Murders: A Sarah Turner Mystery by Andrew Hickey (Andrew Hickey, 2017 )

Musical Influence: One Eyed Doll (particularly “Battle On”)

Events

As for the rest of the summer, because of the understandable aversion to get out under the yellow hurty thing in the sky and burn off four layers of skin in the July or August sun just for an event, the plan is to coordinate events that minimize the chances of becoming a Near Dark cosplayer. This includes talking with the crew at the Texas Theatre about a possible series of related film screenings, including celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of one of my favorite movies. (And the first person who even suggests that the movie is The Goonies gets cut. Take that hipster crap over to the Inwood.) Details will follow as things happen.

In the interim, the various Silent Book Club events in the Dallas area are a very welcome social/not social event, especially during the summer. In particular, the Garland Silent Book Club meets June 7, July 5, August 2, and September 6 from 11 am to 1:00 pm, and the monthly Half Price Books Silent Read at the flagship store in Dallas runs on June 18 starting at 7:00. And yes, there will be flyers.

Final Words

Conventions have been on my mind a bit this year: last March marked the 40th anniversary of my first-ever convention, the one-shot FanCon ‘85 at the long-demolished North Park Inn on Dallas’s Central Expressway. FanCon never happened again, the hotel’s remnants have been under a Best Buy for over thirty years, and all of the attractions and vendors that engrossed 18-year-old me probably wouldn’t make any sense today, but I hope to recapture some of that magic this year, finances willing. Now to go buy duct tape.

Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.

It’s now been nearly a year since the first installment of The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College wafted your way, much like the other effects of overdosing on pickled eggs and beer, and now it’s time for Phase Two. Much like other attempts to define Phase Two, this one took a while, but now there’s a plan. Sorta. Maybe.

To begin, your humble chronicler has been going through either a wave of revived interest in publishing or a midlife crisis, and the practical upshot is a deep dive back into the zines of the 1980s and 1990s. I don’t miss writing for zines back then, considering the fevered egos and general sociopathic behavior of far too many editors and publishers, but I miss the camaraderie and getting free stuff in the mailbox. Zine culture is undergoing a revival, with a lot of us old guard passing on what we learned the hard way to two generations of youngers who want to get away from their phones for a while, and some of just miss bits of weirdness that aren’t attached to some Facebook AI slop factory. Hence, the plan is for St. Remedius to go analog on occasion.

What does this mean to you? Well, if you’re a paid subscriber, you’re going to start getting pledge incentives for your trouble. (For those born at the tail end of the Twentieth Century or within the Twenty-First, the Public Broadcasting System paid for television broadcasts of Sesame Street and Doctor Who and all sorts of weird movies by shunning ads and instead holding regular pledge drives. This usually meant a group of station managers and a phone bank of volunteers taking calls for pledges of money, usually in exchange for getting various items such as autographed books or other items generally difficult to access other than through the pledge drive. Whether it was worth it to listen to a station manager drone on for an hour before returning to the scheduled program is debatable: a Milwaukee PBS station ran for years just by threatening to bring back pledge drives if viewers didn’t send money, and the vague threat was enough to get grown adults to scream in terror.) I’m currently working on a few specials to go out before the end of May, in a nice folder with lots of St. Remedius goodies. The hope is for these to be regular annual packages, with the likelihood of their coming a lot more often based on the latest ideas rattling around in the old tin can I laughingly call a skull.

And for those with free subscriptions, those coming across this via the SubStack app, or those forwarded this by that elderly relative who also mails you porn by accident? Well, you get goodies, too, but you’ll have to work for it. As of this writing, I have a batch of six flyers ready to go out: some of you have seen the Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald flyer, but the others are brand new and made specifically for this promotion. All I need is a mailing address and they’re yours: the first 100 who respond get their physical mailbox loaded with disturbing St. Remedius lore.

(Privacy Notice: any personal information, particularly email and physical addresses will ONLY be used to send information related to the St. Remedius newsletter, and will not under any circumstances be sold, traded, given away, or passed on to any other party.)

Still interested? Cool. To get your free flyers, either respond to this email if you’re already on the mailing list, send an email to StRemedius at gmail. dot com, or send a postcard or letter to:

St. Remedius Medical College
2334 West Buckingham Road
#230-204
Garland, Texas 75042

…and include a mailing address where it’s most likely to be received. (If you want it sent to a work address and said workplace screens physical mail, I can’t guarantee that you’ll get your flyers. Sorry, but that’s been a problem in the past.)

The usual disclaimers: Supplies are limited. This offer ends when all flyers are distributed or on May 31, 2025, whichever comes first. No purchase or subscription is necessary, but paid subscriptions won’t be sneezed at. One per recipient. Please feel free to pass this to others so they may participate, but please don’t give others’ addresses without permission. No cash value. rty34pr is the pond.

And in other developments, within the next week, Parker is going to get his wish for worldwide fame and acclaim. (The picture above pretty much sums up his feelings on the subject.) It’s time to set up a Redbubble site just for newsletter weirdness, and that includes lots of Mandatory Parker strangeness. T-shirts, posters, notebooks, throw pillows, and even plans for print calendars. Keep checking back, because things are going to get strange.

Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.