in time

 by  roving reporter   shaun grub 

  dumzine's not about anything in particular, so it gets to cover a little about everything. our staff remembers the days we used to buy poetry books for .10cents a pound, I fondly recall the campus bookstore cashier loading up a whole stack of the ted hughes book the crow on the scale and charged me a buck and some change for a tidy pile of 'em, this would've been back in the mid-80's, when I began my sophomore year in college pursuing a degree in creative writing at arkansas tech located snug in the ozark mountains in russellville, a quaint little town caught under the splendorous web of radioactive sunsets. nevermind the times we spent in total darkness in the heart of eden fall's hollow egg cavern sanctuary, perhaps the only cathedral I've been in. 

    dumzine reporter shaun grub here, sent forward in time forty-two years to cover the state of the dream in the mind of the two very weird heroes, shaun and greg grub. theirs is a legacy with a history so labyrinthine and mind-meltingly complicated with its entanglement not just at the quantum level of the universe but enmeshed within a diabolical scheme as if entangled in the twisting strands of a jacob's ladder trap, it would arrest the majority of us into a state of paralyzed apprehension or send some fresher and more pliable minds into spastic reactions of pleasant panic bordering on synaptic lubrication.  y'all can go pluck yourselves right about now, just pluck yourselves out of the loosely strewn gardens you managed to get yourselves planted into for time's sake, or am I the only one that allowed this to happen to me?  speaking of, here in the year 2024 there's a series on a streaming service reinventing time bandits, and its really quite charming to say the least. I watched along with my wife and son a show with a unique take on shape-shifters called me.  we all really adored the six seasons long young sheldon, and are eagerly awaiting season seven to arrive to our channel. 

     our current favorite show, that is my wife and son and I, is without a doubt a series of unfortunate events, reprising the books with immaculate, if sometimes getting carried away representations of most of the events in the books, or so I've been told by someone who appeared suspiciously to know, now I feel as if I've been lowered on a rope into a tornado hole, and landed on another plane, a prairie leading towards a mountain range and up into a valley 4,600 feet above sea level, nestled along a drying out lake of salt beginning to shed aluminum and other compounds of dust into the air to be mixed with and settle into the periodic inversions awaiting in the future since the pandemic momentarily hit the reset as it did with pollution worldwide.  

     the things happening post-pandemic embedded within their russian nesting dolls of different sets of context, combined in a world-wide stirred phenomenon that can be seen as a conflagration, emblazoned within a pixel, forged into a mustard seed that will grow into the flaming tree that will produce  the double-edged mercurial sword running through the sap coursing in the veins of the forest.  blinkerbeasts we've been called, because we can blink through time at episodic intervals, which creates the eerie effect of teleportation for reasons of complex planetary orbital and revolutionary advancement factors.  in the grub tribe, shapeshifting becomes an integral skill when moving through the underbrush caught outside in the after hours with the moon low in the sky scudding after you.  reporting back from another ripped interval. it occurs to me at exactly the same time it occurs to you, just as its always been doing for everyone since the beginning it seems, only we've already proven there hasn't been a start able to be established since the limits of our vision into the rear view mirror diminish before the uncanny valley can open its eye. when the whole universe remains an eye the metaphor cannot be lost. all I'm saying is we better pay attention at the wheel because not only were we not even at it actually, but the real wheel's been left unattended, I mean how many of us here don't already know this, raise your hands so I can get a count of how many of you are still being driven along without even having one single finger of yours on the wheel.  see the grub bros knew this because they shared the secret in silence.  I suppose we were best friends because we both eliminated the impossible and whatever lay around us, wherever we happened to be, was the truth, because it was all that remained.  we had a knack of knowing we were each thinking the same thing, because it was only obvious to us.  we led people to believe we could read each other's minds so well that we began to believe it ourselves.  and why shouldn't we. 

        we create our own reality, you believe what you want, but our lives were not a fantasy, despite being in full blown possession of the dream, I guess you could call it possessed by a certain filthy sort of breed of angel and demon, a mongrel anamorphication of sorts, depending from which angle you look at it. in time we all come to believe something or other. in time we all come to be leaving.  we have no idea who's turn will be next. 

      in time I will be leaving, too; before or after you.  I repeat this because it has yet to become all too clear. until another soul mate gets reaped from our garden by the grim sickle, we can't even have a clue. that's because television has done so much for me and you. don't forget that was in a sense just one of the phases of the genesis of our mass hypnosis. primed by radio signal decay imbuing the slightest charge in what creation assumed was a dead battery.

     so the heart of the dragon lay dreaming yet, squandered in the hidden chaparral of the carbonales valley. I know this to be a fact, since I was born there, in the exact center of the sixties, and lived my first eleven years as a child in the midst of the eye of a storm of such proportions I would not learn about the details and context for thirty seven years. now this year 2024 is the second set of nineteen-year spans since the annular revolution of the infinite dragon distended the rings of its mind, until we were caught up in the middle of it all, staring at the constellations from the frozen ice of chalk pond in abject fascination by our lonely little ski chalet we rented deep in the woods behind arkham. my father was born in marblehead, do the math. 

         don't talk to me about asylums and mayhem. I walked through the fire until my face burned to ash and got licked up by the wind.  I rode my bike bareskulled without slowing straight through all the downtown boston intersections passing right through red lights even while jam-packed rows of automobile traffic going 30mph passed along sliding leftward on  commonwealth avenue like a river of cold and glistening molten steel while I pedaled my 21-speed racing bike with curved back handrails using a keen eye for steady timing to match the velocity crossing through to intersect with the moving strip of head- and tail-lights knowing by instinct I could thread between the red and white to make it to the other side, and I always did without altering the course or speed of my easygoing ride. Centaurcycles we were, prowling the late night streets of boston, following curved sidewalks lit by random lamp lights, hardly a human soul in sight, maybe the wind blowing scraps of trash and wrappers across the concrete walks, we were as free as a couple of prehistoric birds soaring the bluest of skies. in a sense, we worshipped the avian race. the world sent omens our way in the shape of a wide variety of raptors and assorted other birds.  these sentinels remain in our time and are still there not just in our mind but more to the point our mind remains in there. think of it as a big panoramic diorama menagerie cornucopia. 

    the black box canyon where our buried dream lies hidden in a cache of rock. the striations in the mineral landscape are the fossilized remains of the great dragon's wingtip. we always knew the northernmost territories of the aztec kingdom extended to the wasatch mountain range. it’s patently obvious many stalwart a tracker from any number of indigenous tribes from south and central america would've likely wandered in awe and wonder until they discovered this jewel of the inland sea. more than bright mythic dreams leave golden flares in the traces of our memory. for within the packed folds glinting mica sparkles amid the rings of a long petrified tree.  that's where you'll find the remains of our dream.  in the undulating cloudscape being siphoned through the sky. the harrowing shape of our wildest imagination whipped into stately grace and passing with such eloquent consistency, reminding one of the very passage of time and the slowly arcing mass of constellations which you realize is actually the velocity of the planet turning, their counter spinning parallax achieving megahertz perfection. 

      blossoming up and open through our eyes.  we knew how to finish each other's sentences just for fun. we innocently gaslighted a jock into believing his shadow was chasing him.  much worse nightmares lay waiting for us in the darkness ahead.  we eagerly ducked into the shadows of the cloud forests deep within honduras. little did we know what the spores we breathed in while exploring the mutant rainforest would do to us in a few short years. without even knowing it, we became living revenants sent like sentient capillaries from a remote colony of the vorrh into the urban landscape we came to fear as dark city.  those were the days and at least I can say for myself they haven't ended.  not one of my friends in this life were ever pretended. the joke can only be on the last one of us standing because the laughter of the wind sounds like the cold yawning void of outer space having leaked through the planck cracks of this reality, see what I mean. you're damn straight this is america.  

      it means we are here. 

         

 

dumzine's not dead yet! {a brief autobiographical synopsis}

by  your roving reporter, Shaun Grub 

 (how much you wanna bet dumzine will live forever)

har har as if that's very clever. 

   This is roving reporter Shaun Grub (of the weird heroic duo the Grub Bros). You don't know anything about me, but it's aight. I arrived here from a long, strange and twisted journey after graduating from high school at Joe T. Robinson in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1983.  After that I went to UALR to begin my Freshman year exploring creative writing under the professorship of David Jauss. That's when I met Mona, three years older than me; we quickly hit it off and began dating. Once we were lovers...can they understand?   

   She introduced me to the music of David Bowie and Lou Reed & the Velvet Underground.  I already was an Iggy Pop fan, so that annealed the trifecta.  Prior to meeting Mona, I hadn't been introduced to the underground world of gay bars and going clubbing. 

   Mona was my vector into the realm of actual living punks.  One of the more outgoing ones (for some reason I'm thinking his name was Paul, but I'm not at all certain all these years later) would brazenly drop trou, squat and do the dooky out on the sidewalk in front of the club late at night after last call had died out, it was just one of his rebellious quirks. Various goths and punks hung around, smoking cigarettes and paired or grouped off in discussions, mostly amused at the sight. It was nothing, so I stood and tried not to look as if I were staring at him. That scene certainly left an impression on me. I can remember that Sisters of Mercy FLOODLAND was playing very loudly from inside the building, at some point that night. It was the first time I'd heard music in a club at such a loud volume. I thought it was amazing. I'm trying to remember if I'd even started drinking alcohol, at that formative time of my life. I'm going to take a guess and say yes. I remember Mona used to take me to the military balls, back in those halcyon days. Those were the days of burning out fire with gasoline. 

    

   [This Xerox of an old sort of concrete poem I wrote, just over a decade after those years trapped under the lid of a steaming, recalcitrant youth simmering along the rim of the Ozarks, designates another chapter in my developing life as a poet and artist. With hormones going full bore and a sense of pure adventure running through our veins 24/7, we were up for anything back then.]  

    I'm trying to remember some of my creative writing instructors at Arkansas Tech University. (I remember one of them wrote smut as a sideline to bring in money, "D.C.” or something, if I recall correctly; he was quite a character.) I transferred there after one semester at UALR because ATU offered a creative writing degree. It was there that my best friend Greg & I met Craig Fields, who was to also become one of the best friends I ever had in this life. Craig responded to the hand drawn D&D posters we'd pinned up across various bulletin boards on campus. [Greg & I = The Grub Bros] That was when Greg and I actually got lucky and ended up as roommates by sheer coincidence, as if our mutual energy fields made it so.  The previous tenants had painted an eye with a pyramid over the legend THE TEMPLE OF ETERNAL ROCK upon the surface of our dorm room's door.  Another perfect piece of synchronicity, in which we fit like fated missing jigsaw puzzle pieces. 

 

     By the time I got to Emerson college in Boston (I'd had enough of the radioactive sunsets in Russellville), my mentors would become Ray Ronci (Zen monk poet), the eccentric genius Bill Knott, and the unfathomably meticulous Franz Wright, with whom I eventually became great friends.  Franz and I often haunted the late night cobblestone streets of Boston together, plastered out of our minds, with his arm wrapped around me snug and gripping me tight, while we rambled on about every subject under the stars.  Strangely enough, Franz passed from our mortal realm on my 50th birthday back in 2015, having left a permanent impression on my life and the lives of many others.  

    It's strange and altogether too appropriate that along the wild course of my life I'd eventually meet and befriend another fantastic writer, John Shirley. 

VOICES

by John Shirley

  Synthographic art by Charles Carter for the flash fiction story VOICES, by John Shirley appearing in the 30th issue (December, 2021) of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. 

   Incidentally, I happened to meet John on my 40th birthday, in 2005 when I made the trip out to San Francisco to a science fiction and fantasy bookstore where he was doing a reading.  I got an autographed John Shirley card from him that day, and he invited me to have dinner at a nearby fish taco style restaurant.  Andrew Phillips was with me (I was visiting Andaru Grub on that trip, and staying at his place; this was not long before he consciously took his own life in the bathtub of his apartment in the most painless manner possible).  

    A year later, I paid the $350 or so fee to take a six-week creative writing online workshop with John Shirley in 2006.  I learned some solid rudimentary nuts-and-bolts aspects of writing that have really helped me polish my style. Additionally, the things I've learned from publishing John's stories in the FREEZINE are measureless.  My own writing has slowly been taking this natural evolutionary course streamlined by all the literary influences I've relished all my life. (There will come a day when very few left among us will say "no one does that anymore" when referring to the unique perspectives of talented creative writers like them. My personal aspiration as a poet is to beg to differ, even while in general agreeing with the sentiment.) 

    The other writer who's been a great inspiration to me and I can say I've corresponded with enough over the years that I feel a real bond of friendship with is the revelatory and lucid A. A. Attanasio. The written threads I've woven online with him over the years have really helped guide me toward sharing a scientific based outlook on this reality.  Considering my heavy fascination with the writings of Philip K. Dick (which began in '82 when VALIS was published during the summer I turned 17) I can say that my strong cyberpunk undercurrent, coupled with having collected Creation Books in the 90s and having dovetailed my literary obsessions with Alan Moore's legacy, and augmented by reading a lot of K. W. Jeter's books, eventually led toward aligning my recent online energies with none other than Kenji Siratori, a truly enigmatic figurehead perpetually on the cusp of the evermorphing avante garde cyberscape of posthuman literary glitch deconstruction. 

     My intense ambivalence and tightrope-walker agility over the highest tension wired stylistic crevasses along this poetic journey have allowed me to reach previously inaccessible realms along this developing post-literary landscape.  Long ago, Franz told me my poems were possessed of an inherent musicality, and so too have I more recently discovered that same pulsing melodic and lyrical beat remains inherent to John Shirley's writing; in fact, John told me the same thing, that a certain musical rhythm was inherent to my writing, so somewhere along the pathway of my development as a writer, I recognized that I'm one of those types where the writing itself matters more to me than whatever run-of-the-mill plot lines etc. define more typical or mainstream writing. This has been my number one challenge and struggle, as an aspiring author. It's hard getting a foot in the door when your writing leans too dangerously close to the experimental. On the other hand, I've already penned an inordinate amount of these stylistic writings, enough to gather them together into one volume thick enough to stun an ox, so it's just a matter of time before I release that tome under my own self publishing imprint, Plasma Press. 

      With the advent of the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction, I've developed an underlying editorial thread into a futuristic narrative that's slowly cohering the further along I work on it.  (That would be the reports from the bloodHost, which I'm writing piecemeal as The Nanochronicles, which continues to be serialized incrementally on my aforementioned science fiction webzine. Follow the hyperlinks above to catch up.  

      (to be cont.)