WATWB – Your Monthly Shot of News That Doesn’t Suck

Here’s a fun factoid for you: It can take up to 200 years for a plastic straw to degrade on its own. So, in other words, that five minutes of tasty beverage means we’ve got to find some place to stick that sucker (no pun intended) for a couple hundred years.

Plastics are the bane of the environment. They’re usually engineered to be used one time only and then tossed aside like a bad prom date. We chuck them in the trash and then it’s someone else’s problem and we can get back to the important business of watching T.V. and bitching about politics on Facebook.

Those things don’t go away, though. The plastic straw takes centuries to return to the Earth and the plastic the damned thing is wrapped in takes decades to go away.

I get it, convenience is a cool thing to have. A sterile, plastic-wrapped straw just feels safe in a world where diseases are getting sentient and everyone has conveniently forgotten how to wash their hands. But there are better ways of dealing with this problem that don’t suck so much.

No, I don’t use coke, so don’t ask. The joke is, this is a real thing: a double-barrel coke straw that used to be available on Amazon.

By now, I’m sure everyone has seen the turtle with the straw stuck up its nose. If you haven’t, you can see it here. It’s pretty unpleasant, so be forewarned. The problem, though, isn’t a single turtle with a single straw up its nose. For all we know, that turtle was a coke addict and things got out of hand. The problem is the sheer amount of crap we use once and toss out. Americans alone toss out 500 million plastic straws every day. That’s enough to fill 125 school buses with single-use straws every fucking day.

Think about that for a moment. And then multiple it by 365. And then realize that 182.5 billion straws are getting thrown out each year. That’s a lot of trash for something that doesn’t even need to be used. While I’m sure the plastic straw industrial complex will fight it tooth and nail, there are alternatives: paper straws, reusable steel and plastic straws, or not using a straw at all. Even coke-heads know enough to bring their own straw.

So, how is this news that doesn’t suck? Well, for starters, there’s no such thing as suck. Sucking changes pressure and in order to equalize pressure, nature pushes liquids (and cocaine) forward. Also, more and more companies are looking at plastic straws and saying, “Take a hike, dipshit”. Some of this is public pressure, some of it stems from sea turtles with stuffed up noses, and some it comes from trash found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

The good news of the day? The Walt Disney Company is getting rid of plastic straws (and other things) by 2019. Starbucks is doing the same thing. Eventually, plastic straws will be a thing of the past. Don’t worry, I’m sure there will still be some for those of you that want a “real goddamned straw”, but the rest of us will have moved on.

Then, in only a couple hundred years, plastic straws will vanish for good. And that, my friends, is a good thing. Personally, I’m going to forgo straws entirely, but in the rare instances where I feel I need one, it’ll be a cubic zirconia-encrusted straw with “Pimp Daddy” written on it. That should make me look classy.

If you’d like to connect your blog and help spread a little joy (or snark, like I do), it’s easy to sign up. Just ask and ye shall receive. Or go check it out here: here.

Our lovely and talented hosts this month are:
Peter Nena,
Inderpreet Kaur Uppal,
Shilpa Garg
Roshan Radhakrishnan
Sylvia McGrath
Belinda Witzenhausen

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And now, your moment of Zen.

Don’t hassle the Hoff.

But What If It Was Real?

Stephen King once said that the impetus for The Mist came from a trip to grocery with his son and wondering what it would be like if there were prehistoric insects in it. From there, he no doubt wondered what they’d be like, how they got there, and what it would be like. King, being King, imagined a worst case scenario involving monsters, people losing their shit, and no end of mist covering the land.

It was kind of like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, only with more monsters and less hope. And, of course, it predated The Road by almost three decades.

This is how it is to be a writer. It’s all imagination. It’s like the games we used to play as kids, pretending all manner of adventures with talking rabbits, dogs with machine eyes, and Farmington’s vast wasteland behind my house that became any number of terrifying things. Are those flashing lights in the sky satellites, planes, or something more sinister? What if that noise you heard in the night wasn’t just the cat knocking things off the counter because she’s bored?

In other words, what if it was real?

Not real, but for a moment, before you saw the pole, you had a spark of belief, didn’t you?

We recently took a trip up to Edwards, CO – a small town close to Vail, but without the associated snobbery. The road took us up through Alamosa, CO, and onto a long, empty stretch of highway that cut through the Colorado plains like a knife. Just north of the Colorado Gators Reptile Park (yes, it’s real. You can go see live gators living in the natural, snowy habitat) lies the UFO Watchtower.

The UFO Watchtower is an out-of-the-way place dedicated to, among other things, documenting UFO activity in the area. You can stop and visit for only $2 a person or $5 a carload. It’s not a big place and in the bright sun it’s not much to look at. But remember, this isn’t about what it is, it’s about what it could be.

There’s something eminently creepy about this.

At night, you’d be able to see for twenty or thirty miles in every direction in a place where light pollution simply doesn’t exist. In the pitch black, standing on the roof of the watchtower, you’re likely to see all manner of amazing things.

That’s neither here nor there, though. UFO watching is an American pastime and there are more spots dedicated to watching the skies than you can shake a stick at. What made the UFO watchtower interesting wasn’t what was happening in the skies, it was what was happening on the ground.

You see, according to the woman who was running the place that day, there are numerous energy vortexes in the area where you can talk to the spirits or even, I suspect, travel to other places. To a casual observer, it looks like people have dropped off rubbish, bits of things, and the odd bra, and it was all left in situ to create some monumental bit of performance art – a modernist ode to the disposable American spirit, if you will.

It looks like a field of trash, but look a little closer.

That, however, is not the case. The ground is dedicated to small plats where people have left offerings to the spirits, hoping for a little goodwill or help with terrestrial problems. There’s a certain organized chaos to the place, like this wasn’t the ramblings of a diseased mind so much as one that had seen something beyond the pale.

Of course, that could all be marketing and a lot of available free time.

The point is, there’s mystery there. It’s something odd and unique. It may or may not be real, but what if it was? What a story that would make! The UFO part can be interesting on its own if it’s handled well (the X-Files did a marvelous job with it), but the addition spirits and energy vortexes adds a whole new dimension.

All the detritus out there is something that was important to someone, something they felt was worthy of handing off as an offering in exchange for some help. It may look like trash from the distance of Internet and time, but in the heat of the moment, that might have been a powerful experience for someone.

Now take that feeling, and turn it into a story. Then take it a step further and ask yourself what if it was real. Or, at the very least, start wondering. If you want to write, you need to look at things not as they are, but as they could be. And don’t be afraid to be amazed at things.

Book Review – 13 Wicked Tales of Witches by Avrin Kelly

Proving yet again, that Twitter isn’t just a vast wasteland of racism and horsefuckery, I found this book – and its author – on Twitter in one of the many writerly communities that have popped up over time. Avrin Kelly is a horror author busily injecting her own style into a genre that can easily get stale and predictable.

At some point in the past, witchcraft was considered the most heinous of crimes. Religious leaders likened it to harlots cavorting with the devil and the mere idea that a woman could be a witch was enough to ensure her untimely demise. See Salem, MA for information on what can and has happened in the past.

Witchcraft has taken a nose-dive as an addition to the horror genre in recent years as more and more people have come to the realization that a bunch of women cavorting with nature isn’t necessarily a bad thing and – gasp! – some of that old-timey nonsense about being Satan’s brides might be total bullshit flung by folks who didn’t understand what was going on or didn’t like the idea that women might have some power.

Avrin Kelly has taken witches back to the bad side of the tracks and let them work their magic on an unsuspecting populace. While it would have been easy to write thirteen tales about women turning people into newts, she took it multiple directions with nary a newt to be found. In some of the best stories you don’t even see the witches, but you feel their eerie powers poking at you in the woods.

These are clever horror stories, running the gamut from creepy-but-kind-of-amusing to Lovecraft-would-dig-this-if-there-were-more-apostrophes-in-the-names. My personal favorite was the last story in the book, a nice slow-burn yarn that didn’t end where I expected it to, but there are plenty of good short stories about witches to be had in here.

Whether it’s around Halloween time, or one of the other 11 (boring) months out of the year; you are going to love these 13 stories from Avrin Kelly…

Dear Reader,
I present thirteen stories to horrify you, make you question existence, and even those around you. Thirteen tales of treachery, magic gone wrong and spells done right. Stories about people, just like you, who had a run-in with a Witch… or who are Witches themselves.
You won’t know who the villains are until the end. You won’t know who the monsters are until they strike, but isn’t that the best part about horror?
The unknown?
If you are feeling particularly brave, I encourage you to explore the uncanny world of Witches, with me as your guide. Snuggle down with this creepy read, and come with me into the depths of wickedness and strange magic. To a place where nothing is ever as it seems, where the danger could be lurking in the shadows behind you or right beside you, in the light.
Thirteen tales of terror; every one of them involving a Witch…

– A handyman recalls the horrifying details of a job he wishes he’d forgotten.
– An overly curious English teacher gets way more than she bargained for when she sets out to solve a mystery concerning her next door neighbor.
– A Witch out for revenge on an unfaithful lover, finds he may have beaten her to the punch.
– A veteran cat burglar underestimates a wealthy old woman in the dead of night.
– A young handyman tells what happened when he went to work with his father one Saturday afternoon.
– A Warlock in college is having issues with his unruly doppelgänger.
– And more… Read “Thirteen Wicked Tales Of Witches” and treat yourself to some twisty, turny (is that a word?) Halloween frights!!!
Signed Sincerely,
Your Guide

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