At first light, the memories will find us. They are infinite and deep, though time has stripped away the individuals’ names, their faces even, who fell lifetimes ago on our behalf. Those who fell, fell for the future, for generations hardly close enough to dream about, for worlds not yet born and hopes not yet conceived.
Following the journeys of the fallen, we cannot help but think of Lincoln’s Words, “we can not dedicate…we can not consecrate…we can not hallow this ground.” It has already been consecrated, and we cannot add or detract from it as we keep the sweet and sad memories close in our hearts.
Before the twilight’s last gleaming, we will have followed our fathers and grandfathers, our mothers and grandmothers, our friends and our neighbors’ friends down the long miles of Memorial Day. It is, as Lincoln said in 1863, the “unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
Our dedication comes at a great expense of time and money as we walk the aisles our ancestors walked according to the customs of their times. The aisles are more modern now: the pickle barrel and the checker board have long since been replaced with the folkways of a new century. But we are diligent. We soldier on from appliances to apparel, from tools to jewelry, from sports and fitness equipment to automotive sales.
When evening comes, the remains of the day will sit upon tables and counter tops in either paper or plastic comprising our developing memories, both sweet and sad, of our trek across the sacred ground, kept pure and holy for those whom we follow into the night.
Suffering Succotash: The Comic Life of Molly Maise,” by Lula Mae Barnes (Corn Fritter Press, September 2012), 4,837pp with illustrations, index, maps, and bibliography.
As time goes by, fewer and fewer people remain on this Earth who suffered through depression-era and Thanksgiving meals constructed substantially of succotash.
“As far back as the Revolutionary War,” writes Lula Mae Barnes in her new and overly definitive biography of the 1770s Rhode Island innkeeper, dancer and lady of the evening Molly Maise, “people were thankful to live off succotash when times were hard and just as thankful to get rid of the vile mixture when good fortune smiled upon them again.”
Barnes, who spent the last fifty years uncovering the obscure details of the inventor of succotash, claims that the mixture of corn, various forms of beans and minced oaths is far too improbable a concoction to have occurred by accident.
Young Molly Maise, an innkeeper on Aquidneck Island who supported the “divine cause of everything that wasn’t British,” devised succotash as a “devious treat” for British sailors enjoying her favors in the days leading up to the 1778 Battle of Rhode Island. Ever after, she claimed her succotash made the sailors so ill, they scuttled their own fleet to kill the pain. While historians agree that the fleet was scuttled, they do not cite succotash as a cause.
According to Barnes, Maise spent a lifetime giving humorous talks, some bawdy, about the ills of succotash and the role it had in the war. While her speeches and dance routines, including “The Succotash Rag” (which pre-dated the American Ragtime boom by one hundred years) were well attended, she failed to gain the validation as a soldier and inventor she was seeking.
In fact, the biography’s references clearly indict most, if not all, of the United States’ founding fathers, soldiers, newspapermen and historians of a “treasonous level of guilt” for their roles in covering up the role of Molly Maise and succotash in “the cause of freedom.”
Barnes’ epic work clearly shows that every human’s recipe for defeat is based on the foods they eat, how they mix them together, and what they name the resulting entree. Had Maise called her corn and beans a Corn & Bean Medley, history might have duly honored her for the suffering her invention caused herself and all the generations that followed.
The epitaph on Maise’s tombstone reads: “Loose corn and beans sink ships faster than loose lips.”
Phoenix, Arizona, August 28, 2012–An anti-abortion law created close enough to this year’s April Fools Day to qualify as absurd, took effect this month in a state where the powers that be have taken another baby step toward the goal of nationalizing women’s bodies.
The oddly titled Women’s Health and Safety Act states that pregnancy now begins two weeks prior to conception depending on the current phase of the moon and what, if anything, the woman was smoking. Women who listen to music by “such people” as Madonna and Lady Gaga are deemed to be pregnant at all times.
According to sources close to the governor’s office, the law is aimed at those who are still promoting “new age clap trap” about sex, drugs, rock and roll, and the Our Bodies Ourselves philosophy.
The sponsors of the bill stated in a white paper called Honey, here’s the way it’s goin’to be that many of the law’s precedents can be found in the Book of Deuteronomy, the transcripts of the Salem Witchcraft Trials and in records from Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis.
Jonathan Corwin, director of the Arizona Devil’s Magic and Pregnancy Task Force, told reporters that, “our great state believes that what God enriches, no man make take away. The female body is a natural resource that will, in the near future, be placed under state control for the benefit of our children and our children’s children as yet unborn. Those with views slanted the wrong way belong in places like California and Oregon.”
According to Planned Parenthood, the law reduces the time period within which women in Arizona may obtain a legal abortion.
Admitting that policing “the matter” may be somewhat difficult, law enforcement jurisdictions—with the help of federal funding—will soon be certifying neighborhood watch groups, vagrants, burglars and others “who are in a position to know” as Devil’s Magic and Pregnancy Officers who, in technical terms, will keep lists of who’s been “doing it and when.”
“We don’t mind if you do it,” said Corwin. “But just remember, in the State of Arizona, real or imagined pregnancy has no UNDO key.”
Speaking of myself now in the third person, Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of magical realism, contemporary fantasy and satire published by Vanilla Heart Publishing of Washington State. While my noir satire, Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire, is set in a fictional Texas town with a really screwed up fictional newspaper, my three other novels are set in Glacier National Park, Montana and other places where I have lived or visited.
Last summer brought the release of Sarabande, a harrowing heroine’s journey and contemporary fantasy about a young woman who is haunted by the ghost of her sister. Sarabande seeks the help of a young man who has, on one previous occasion, bent time to “raise the dead.” The solution to the problem is not without its nasty down side.
Satire for your Nook
In 2004, I came out with the first edition of my novel The Sun Singer, the story of a young man whose psychic dreams ultimately lead him into a dangerous mountain world where it will take all of his skills to survive. First things first: he had to figure out who the good guys are and who the bad guys are and, as it turns out, who exactly he is. The second edition of The Sun Singer was released in 2010. College students at Lone Star College, Texas, read and discussed the novel this past Spring as part of a Wayfaring Heroes course.
Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey (also released in 2010) is magical realism about a man who grows up on a Montana ranch who loses his way when a failed love affair sends him down dangerous roads along which is is betrayed multiple times by those he cares about the most. The book is also available as an $4.99 e-book from OmniLit.
Where To Find Malcolm R. Campbell on the Internet
The Sun Singer, Sarabande and Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire are available at multiple online booksellers, including the paperback and Kindle/Nook editions at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Gem pulled her hands away and stood up so quickly she knocked over her spinning wheel. She didn’t appear to notice. She walked to the window and leaned out as though making sure no one else would hear her words.
“I was shamed by the king.” Gem pulled up her left sleeve to reveal the letters SJ in a bold pink scar that contrasted with her walnut-colored skin.
“Your strike brand!”
“I bore Justine’s mark as well as his child. Both were conceived in pain in a dark cell covered with urine and rat droppings.” Sarabande went to her, but Gem rolled down the sleeve, covering the ugly mark that signified Sovereign Justine. “No, my friend, I cannot abide your seeing it close at hand. My daughter, though, this doting mother will speak of her at great length if allowed to do so.”
“Cinnabar has shown me her brand,” said Sarabande.
“Discretion is a lesson I was never able to teach her. But listen: on your journey to Osprey’s house, you won’t walk through the domains of kings.”
Sarabande gasped and sat down, suddenly lightheaded when she understood why Gem showed her the scar.
“If there are no kings, what dangers have you seen?”
Gem put her hands on Sarabande’s shoulders and kneaded out the growing knots. Her touch always felt like a touch of power, and she wondered if she shared Osprey’s way with healing magic.
“I have seen a dark creek beneath a bridge on a foggy night. I have heard screams and howls outside my comprehension. I don’t understand it,” said Gem, holding their eye contact as though she understood more than she would say. “Sarabande, you know without my lecturing at great length about the ways of the world. A a woman on a lonely road can be a target. Travel with a sharp knife.”
The impromptu massage felt good. The unclear warning did not. Vague predictions were worse than silence. They stirred up what did not need to be stirred up.
“Yes, I know that, Gem. I will carry a knife and take care to have it handy.”
“With due care, you can avoid your fate, but destiny is the way you’ve already written your life’s story.”
“I wanted to walk the sixteen hundred and fifty miles to Osprey’s house long before it occurred to me I would ever do so. If there is to be shame in it, then I will live or die with whatever I find on that lonely road.”
–
Thank you for stopping my Malcolm’s Round Table today!
Wolfbane on poppies and ghosts on tables;
Dark shrieking shacks and houses with gables;
Splintered brooms held together with strings;
These are a few of my unfavorite things.
Cream-colored potions and ill-smelling lotions;
Snape and Voldemort demanding evil devotions;
Wild owls that fly with horcrux rings;
There are a few of my unfavorite things.
Unshaven wizards with nasty old spells;
Ministers of magic in their private hells;
Sinister doorways covered with dents and dings;
These are a few of my favorite things.
When the spell kills,
When the witch thrills,
When I’m getting mad,
I simply remember my unfavorite things
And then I feel oh so glad.
Everett, WA, May 29, 2011 (Star-Gazer News Service)–Vanilla Heart Publishing is seriously gobsmacked to announce that invesitigative reporter Jock Stewart might not be a real person.
Stewart, whose Jock Talks – The Collectionwas released by Vanilla Heart today, used an autopen to tell reporters that he’s just as real as Betty Crocker and Cap’n Crunch.
“Jock Talks – The Collection is, first of all, a collection,” the autopen said. “For only 3.99, readers who want to be seriously gobsmacked and/or laugh their butts off will find 117 pages of satire, parody and other lies from four stunning e-books:”
Jock Talks… Satirical News
Jock Talks… Politics
Jock Talks… Strange People
Jock Talks… Outlandish Happenings
A Few Choice Excerpts
Washington, D.C.—The U.S. Capitol building will be dismantled by the end of the day to clear the way for an Almighty Dollar Big Box Store, the Manifest Destiny Development Corporation (MDDC) announced this morning.
–
“I blame news editors for the dumbing down of America,” said DDAS president Mary Worth. “Today, while the Libyan Civil war rages on, the two biggest stories are ―UNEXPECTED PAIR SENT HOME ON DANCING WITH THE STARS and PIA TOSCANO SENT HOME FROM AMERICAN IDOL.'”
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Junction City, TX—Last night, I dreamt I’d fallen on hard times and had once again been forced to take a job as Britney Spears’ cook.
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Dubbed the Shit to Shinola Highway, Interstate 666 rips through Junction City‘s primeval forest where the wind stings the toes and bites the nose.
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Daytona Beach, FL―The latest racket in the death business is the sale of skyscraper crypts for those who want to advertise how high they climbed before they died.
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Greg, Jim, Dixie and Sweetie Pie of Junction City’s Cry of the Raven Memorial Gardens are among the 72,000 dead Americans who received stimulus checks of $250 each from the Social Security Administration (SSA) as part of a massive economic recovery package intended to stimulate a dying economy.
–
“I may be butt ugly, but the rest of me is pure goddess.”
–
At a press conference at high noon today, Vanilla Heart Publishing’s Satire Editor Bill Smith (not his real name) said he used the word gobsmacked after hearing Chef Gordon Ramsay use the expression a thousand times on Fox Broadcasting’s “Kitchen Nightmares.”
“Gordon also screams, IT’S RAW, IT’S RAW,” said Smith, “but the phrase seemed totally inappropriate for a collection of satire.”
The e-books are available on Kindle for 99 cents each. They are also available in multiple formats, including PDF, at Smashwords at 99 cents.
Except from Jock Talks Strange People
Readers Looking for ‘The Lust Symbol’ Ravish Bookstore
Angry, and apparently horny, shoppers tore apart the Main Street Book Emporium at high noon today looking for a book purportedly called The Lust Symbol.
Owner Jim Exlibris, who accidentally promoted a one-hour half price sale for Dan Brown’s new novel The Lost Symbol with a 48-point Century Gothic “‘LUST SYMBOL’ REDUCED FOR HARD-UP READERS” headline, said that he could only blame himself for the misunderstanding.
“I just a country bookseller, not a advertising specialist or a bloody proofreader,” said Exlibris.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, so many people in heat at the same time. They ran through my shop like bulls from Pamplona trying to find The Lust Symbol. They tripped over a life-size cardboard cutout of Dan Brown next to my display for The Lost Symbol without even noticing it.”
Police, who were enjoying lunch-time doughnuts across the intersection at the Krispy Kreme are being criticized for failing to respond to the bookstore riot.
“We presumed the whole thing was just customers having fun,” Chief Kruller. “Sure, we thought there might be porn involved, but the FEDs handle all of Junction City’s porn.
Witnesses report that Exlibris escaped from the mob, ran across the street, threw a copy of The Lost Symbol against the side of Sergeant Wayne Bismarck’s head, and screamed “arrest somebody, dammit, they claim I’m hiding all my lust from them.”
“Nobody’s ever thrown the book at me before,” Bismarck said.
According to local bookmakers who serve as police consultants, Exlibris “has a lot of priors” when it comes to misleading advertising. Main Street Book Emporium entries in the police database include advertisements for books called Bone With the Wind, Jane Error, The Hell Seekers, For Whom the Belle Rolls and the Handmaid’s Tail.
Friends of the Library board members Hilda Meek and Anna Van Landingham, who were in the store to pick up a box of books Exlibris was donating to the lost readers program, said under interrogation they believed the purported “lust for lost” misprint was a publicity stunt.
“We make proofreading mistakes at the Public Library all the time,” said Meek. “Last year when we promoted a ‘fun at the pubic library ball,’ we feigned embarrassment and everyone ended up having a bang-up time.”
Police warned Exlibris to improve his proofreading skills or else.
Junction City, December 12, 2010–In a post-dawn raid of wild leek farmer Giles Asinine’s onion-domed mansion on Lady of Shallot Terrace here today, police found thousands of recipe cards stolen from the files of Gluttony Magazine and area restaurants including the Purple Platter and Kentucky Fried Scallions.
While charges have yet to be filed, police department spokesmen claim the recipe cache is the pièce de résistance withinthe Asinine-founded non-profit Wicked Leeks Publishing empire. In past years, Wicked Leeks has garnered a controversial reputation for publishing recipes stolen from magazines, restaurants and farm families as a “public service.”
“Junction City became a better town,” Asinine said in a 2009 news release, “when we learned Kentucky Fried Scallions ‘secret recipe’ claim was the work of mad chefs who were covering up the fact the restaurant was actually frying shallots.”
The first layer of the Wicked Leeks organization was peeled away when the Purple Platter Restaurant sued Asinine in state court earlier this year for stealing and disseminating the recipe for its famed cock-a-leekie soup. While news reports at the time focused on the difficulty of jury selection in a town where 98.6% of the residents think cock-a-leekie is British slang for using a restroom, the restaurant successfully proved some $100,000 in damages once its famed soup du jour was “put in cans across the state.”
“Prior to the Wicked Leeks disclosure, nobody knew we put prunes in the brew,” said master chef Coral Snake Smith. “Fortunately, none of our sous chefs leaked our more-famous meatloaf recipe to any Asinine stool pigeons.”
Spokesmen for Junction City’s Gluttony Magazine said that the publication is on the cusp of bankruptcy because Wicked Leeks gives away for free what the magazine is selling.
“Our June issue featured recipes for chicken-leek casserole, fettuccine with leek sauce and leek quiche,” said vegetable editor Sue Jones. “We sold only one copy of the issue because everyone else in town surfed out to the Wicked Leeks site and got the recipes for free a month before we reached the newsstand.”
Informed sources say that Jones’ fine-tuned palate provided the foundation for her expert testimony in Platter v. Wicked Leaks that showed that “Giles’ Take-a-Leak Soup” was exactly the same formulation as “Coral Snake Smith’s Cock-a-Leekie Soup.”
“Jones is no spring onion,” said Smith. “She’s eaten so much food in her lifetime that nobody can sneak a recipe past her from soup to nuts.”
While giving due credit to Jones, Mayor Clark Trail claims that last summer’s expansion of the police department’s vice squad unit allowed it to cut the leeks off at the blender before they were pureed into a “free-for-all Internet Vichyssoise.”
“Our city council saw the wisdom of enlarging the focus of our vice quad from the more enjoyable vices of gambling and prostitution to include the more trivial moral faults of tattling and publishing stolen goods,” Trail said. “Righting a wrong with a wrong, shouldn’t be right.”
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Coming December 17th: Purple Platter Meatloaf
Vanilla Heart Publishing’s authors will post recipes from their novels this coming Friday. Tune in here for the meatloaf recipe the Wicked Leeks site never found. Then follow the links to other great posts and recipes.
For more Jock Stewart, you are invited to partake of Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire, available on Kindle for less than the cost of a dinner out on the town.
StewartWhile waiting for my first appointment with psychiatrist Dr Henry Jekyll, I couldn’t help but notice one wall in the waiting room was plastered with inspirational signs.
PAYMENT IS EXPECTED WHEN SERVICE IS RENDERED
IF I CAN’T CURE YOU, YOU BELONG IN AN ASYLUM
PRIMAL SCREAMS, $150 EACH, TWO FOR $275
IT’S LATER THAN YOU THINK, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR DREAMS ARE?
I was about to tell the receptionist, a nurse Ratched look-alike that I had to go see a shaman about an evil spirit, when the cuckoo clock above the door to the inner sanctum squawked high noon and a pale little man came out and said “Mr. Campbell, please follow me.”
He sat in the comfy chair next to a bottle of Jim Beam and I sat in the straight-back chair next to a dirty glass of tap water. Before he said anything, I counted 13 mangled sock puppets on the shelf next to his collection of Freud bobble-head dolls.
“First things first,” he said. “Did you bring the money.”
I slid a briefcase of sorted, well-laundered $100 bills across the glossy hardwood floor. He counted the money, moving his lips as he did so.
“Second things second,” he said. “Are you here for our primal scream therapy or do you want to pursue a 15-year Freudian analysis.”
“I scream at home for free,” I said.
He nodded sagely, with a hint of oregano on his breath. “You shouldn’t self-medicate,” he said. “Be that as it may, I understand from Nurse Wretched’s pre-therapy interview with you that you hear voices. Are they mean and nasty or are they sweat and vapid?”
“The last voice I heard was yours,” I said, “and so far it sounds rather expedient. But far be it from me to judge, I hear what I hear and write the stuff down.”
“How do you feel about that?” Jekyll asks.
“Humorous,” I said, “because I know that at night you turn into Mr. Hyde and careen about the neighborhood doing vile acts that drive people so crazy they have to come here and gnaw on sock puppets.”
He maintained a dour expression and wrote something down on a yellow pad. “Not counting my voice or my nurse’s voice or any other real voices like Bob who runs the parking deck, what other voices have you heard?”
“Jock Stewart’s voice.”
“Who is he?”
“The protagonist in my satirical novel.”
“So, you’re a writer?”
“Yes.”
“That tells me a lot. It tells me you probably belong in an asylum. It tells me you’re probably incurable. It tells me you’re going to be here for years and that I’m going to make a boat load of money writing up your case for HarperCollins weird psychology series.”
“You are wise beyond your years,” I said. “Jock tells me that he likes you.”
Jekyll looked around the room with alarm as though he expected to see ghosts. “Is he here now?”
“Sure.”
Jekyll’s face went white. Of course, it already was white, but suddenly it had a bleached out look.
“What does he want.”
“He wants you to continue acting in a way that invites satire,” I said. “He’s a master at it. He talks, I write it down, and then I send it to the publisher.”
“Holy superego, Stewart doesn’t use real names, does he?”
“But of course.”
“Then he’s crazier than you are, and you are definitely certifiable.”
“Thank you.”
“If I were to slide this suitcase of money back over to you, would Mr. Stewart see his way clear not to use my real name?” asked the quivering shrink.
“Perhaps.”
“Oh thank you. Here’s an extra $150. I really do need to scream now.”
And he did, like a banshee in heat, like a blind man falling into a volcano, like a woman looking out an open window in an old movie seeing a killer trying to get inside while she sits at her dressing table.
I felt cured, I really did. And so did Jock.
–
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the comedy satire, “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire,” a novel you can find in multiple e-book formats for only $5.99 at Smashwords and Kindle.
“Armed with a sharp wit and a (secretly) soft heart, Jock sets out to investigate the theft of the mayor’s missing horse, Sea of Fire. For readers, arriving at the solution to the crime is secondary to simply enjoying as the colorful (and aptly named) characters become embroiled in a multitude of small-town hi-jinks.” — Nancy Whitney-Reiter, “Unplugged: How to Disconnect from the Rat Race, Have an Existential Crisis, and Find Meaning and Fulfillment “
What do the rich and famous, a Florida swamp, an expensive upscale spa, a rat-faced dog, state-of-the-art galas, NASCAR, pot, an inner garden of rare hybrid plants and vampires have in common?
The standard answer is nothing.
But in Evenings on Dark Island authors Rhett DeVane and Larry Rock have turned the highly improbable into a hilarious and tastefully bloody neck biter that’s quite something.
Vincent Bedsloe, who has party planning in blood that’s not altogether his, is the flamboyant, details-oriented master of an exclusive spa set in the middle of an isolated Florida island where the rich and spoiled come to be drained of their income–and perhaps a bit more–while they are ramped up into an ecstatic level of health and fitness.
Bedsloe, who ponders over the emotions of his guests–emotions he no longer has–often retreats into an inner sanctum where he watches old movies and gets his kicks by debunking the silly vampire lore flowing out of Hollywood like blood from a burst artery.
Vincent is a kind-hearted vampire who cares about his human guests. Even his NASCAR-crazed, white trash vampire mechanic Jimmy Rob has an occasional redeeming thought: “He led her to the far, shadowy corner of the bar, behind a thick hedge. Kissed her again. Nibbled her neck. Bit down and drank until he felt her knees buckle. He pulled back abruptly. No need to kill the gal. She’d had a hard enough life.”
The only somewhat normal person in the book is DEA agent Reanita Geneva Register who has been inserted into the mix by the Feds at great expense to prove the obscure island is a haven for drug smugglers. Posing as a rich heiress, Register not only feels naked without her gun but a little nonplussed by her ability to enjoy the island’s pleasures.
The tight-lipped Dark Island staff are notoriously loyal to their employer and, with the annual Blue Blood Ball benefit for the American Hemophiliac Association fast approaching, much too busy to be easily questioned about the strange boats passing in the night.
The authors advertise Evenings on Dark Island as a fang-in-tooth spoof of the vampire genre. And what a spoof it is. This book is not only inventive and well crafted, but it’s filled with the kinds of one-liners and puns that will even wake the undead.
The plot, characters and setting work to perfection without blood, gore and body counts. While the spa at Dark Island may not be the transfusion you need for your physical health and well being in real life, DeVane’s and Rock’s collaboration has a high-clotting factor as well as the kinds of hijinks that will have you laughing all the way to the blood bank.
Copyright (c) 2011 by Malcolm R. Campbell
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the comedy satire, “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire,” a novel you can find in multiple e-book formats for only $5.99 at 
Malcolm's Round Table 