Category: personal

And then there were two…

It’s just my sister and me now. My father died peacefully in his sleep on August 21, 2023. Below is the eulogy I delivered at his funeral service today.

My late father, CMSgt Bob Huff

Writing Mama’s eulogy just six months ago was hard because my mother was part of my heart. To write those words was to admit she was no longer with us. I’m as much my Dad’s son as I was hers and this is tough for similar reasons—and also because you can’t do a man like Bobby Richard Huff justice in just a few hundred words. The poet Walt Whitman wrote of containing multitudes; if there was ever a man in my life who truly contained such multitudes, it was my Dad.

Bobby Richard Huff — Dad — was born in Franklin, Tennessee on June 25, 1936, just one day after his mother Mildred’s birthday. The Huffs — Granny Mildred, Grandpa Ben, Uncle Jackie, and Dad — lived in a tiny tenant farmer’s house on Caldwell Farm. Dad made it clear to me that he both hated and loved the place. In an autobiography he wrote for family, he described his favorite moments in that little house. It’s worth a quote, if only to admire the fact that Daddy had a bit of the poet in him:

“In the summer the heat was awful … The narrow windows were kept open but there was rarely enough breeze to move the curtains. The only relief came during those rare summer storms. The first hope came with the sound of distant thunder. If we were lucky enough to be in its path, the curtains would begin to move. We listened for those first loud drops on that hot metal roof. It would break suddenly with bright flashes of lightning and the roar of rain and thunder. Water poured from the roof and we kept tubs and buckets where we could catch it. The drops would splatter on the screens and send a fine spray over the linoleum floor. The rush of wind would cool that small house before the prop was taken out and the window dropped. That night sleeping would be good.”

Some of my favorite memories are of how my Dad related to his mother. Granny Huff was chatty, smart, sensitive, and sweet, and I think Dad was one of her favorite people to talk to. They had loud, rapid-fire conversations about everything, and they often consisted of Granny declaring an opinion or asking a question and Dad teasing her relentlessly but somehow gently for an hour. And Granny enjoyed every moment.

From them, I learned to love words and conversation and the times when our house was full of people making all manner of noise. When we gathered like that the house was full of joy. That was why when several people came to visit Dad in his final days in hospice, I didn’t ask anyone to speak softly. The conversation flowed, overlapped, grew loud. I believe Dad could hear us, and I believe he loved it. I only wished he could come back to his place as the biggest, most entertaining voice in the room.

Daddy graduated from Antioch High School, the Salutatorian of the class of 1954. However, just as my mother’s class of ’56 yearbook revealed her as “H for most Honest” in the senior alphabet, Dad was — to no one’s surprise — elected most talkative.

He married Margaret Lovene Lane on Dec. 1, 1956. My sister Sherry was born a year later, brother David the following year. Rhonda came later in July 1960, and then after a seven year break, Mama finally had a big-headed carrot top like her husband. That was me.

Daddy had joined the Air National Guard in 1954. He stayed in the service for 41 years, retiring as Chief Master Sergeant — the top noncommissioned officer in his unit — in 1995. Walking through a New York airport for a layover on my flight from Massachusetts to Nashville, the late day light through the windows reminded me of being a boy and running through the grass to meet Dad when he came home from maneuvers each summer. He was often sunburnt and tired, but he’d let loose that big tenor laugh and give me some small souvenir from wherever he’d been. Macadamia nuts and an idol carved from Hawaiian lava rock. Ash from Mt. St. Helens in a jar. Photos of the ocean crashing against Italian coastline, of narrow cobblestone streets in Germany, of haze wrapping the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Daddy went just about everywhere in the Air Guard and as a civilian. In order of fluency, he spoke Spanish, German, Italian, and some French. And he never stopped exploring languages — in his big upstairs office at the house in Smyrna I had to stop three different CDs he’d left on pause in various players. One was a woman singing German songs, another was a lecture on Roman history, and the third was conversational Spanish phrases. That gives you some idea of how my father’s mind worked.

When I was a kid, Dad would make his time in the Air National Guard sound boring. Once he turned 80 he began telling stories and I learned it was anything but. From secret missions to Central America to riding horses in the Southwest desert to drinking wine in the Azores, Dad found joy in exploring, in learning, in observing. My father had a wild, adventurous side and it didn’t go away after he left the military. He and Mom moved to beautiful Lake Chapala in Mexico for a while, and I think that was as happy as he’d been in years. They moved back to the states after my brother passed, but Dad remained restless till the end — because a mind like Bob Huff’s was never content with sitting still, and that was one of the many things I loved about him. We were very alike that way.

Sorting through memories to share with you has been an impossible task. Some are too much about me, not enough about Dad. Others are too complicated to communicate with ease. I did think of one that seemed right because it revealed a side to my father he didn’t let many people see.

Dad and I went on a fishing trip with his friend James and James’s son Kelly when I was 15. I was put out, thinking I was too old — Kelly was younger than me, still a little kid — and also, hey, I was a teenager, you know how they can be. But Dad and James immediately surprised me by going to a store near the lake and buying nothing but junk food. We stayed in a cabin, and seeing how relaxed my father was with his friend, how at ease, making silly jokes, poking fun at James and James giving good as he got — it all made me realize for the first time that once he’d been a kid like me. Dad and his friend only got annoyed with us, their sons, one time — when we both caught fish and they didn’t catch a thing.

The best moment of the trip, though, was when we took the boat out at night to see if we could get any bites. It was a full moon and with his sharp eyes Dad navigated easily. We anchored in a cove surrounded by high, tree-lined cliffs, and dropped our lines in the water. After a while, I noticed that Dad had fallen silent. Then I did too, as did James and Kelly. And we sat there quietly in the cool summer night, just watching fireflies flicker in the trees above and listening to the water hush itself against the limestone walls around us. At some point, I realized that my loud, loquacious father was simply letting himself enjoy the silence. It was like that perfectly still moment that sometimes falls after a congregation has prayed aloud in church. In that instance I knew I’d never fully understood the depths of my father’s personality, just what a truly complex, brilliant, wonderful man he was.

Dad’s command of words was formidable, but he knew that living, like music, is made of silence as well as sound. He knew that sometimes you just let go of words and listened to the world breathe around you.

At this point I already feel like Dad would say I’ve gone on too long. After all, after my fourth child Dylan was born in 2003, Dad greeted me on the phone with a hearty, “Congratulations! You can stop now.”

Mom and Dad lost two of their four children. My brother David died in 2000, and my eldest sister Sherry died in 2016. I was worried both deaths would break them, but I should’ve given my parents more credit. And Dad surprised me again after Sherry passed. It was storming when she died. Just after the storm moved on, Dad said he stepped outside and for the first time in his life, saw the actual end, the termination point of a rainbow. In telling the story I always heard a little wonder in his voice.

A few days later, my family’s dear friends Silvia and Nacho brought Dad a cedar sapling. They showed him where they’d found it, and it was the exact place where he’d seen the rainbow end. So they planted the tree in one corner of the back yard as a memorial to my sister. Even though in life my father could very much seem like a practical, no-nonsense military man, he held strong spiritual beliefs and never stopped studying mythology, history, philosophy, and scriptures from various religions. Even after Bob Huff had trouble walking without assistance, he was ready for an adventure, if only in his kaleidoscopic mind.

I’ve read that seeing deer after the death of a loved one could be a sign “that our loved ones remain connected to us in spirit, even though they are no longer physically present.”

My father died at 2 am on the 21st. I stayed with him for a while, told him I loved him, that I would take care of my sister. Then I drove back to his house in Smyrna.

As I passed Stonecrest TriStar Medical Center, where my sister died and where Dad first went when he got sick the final time, I saw motion out of the corner of my eye. I glanced to the right and saw a young stag running through the grass beside the road. Mindful of the danger of hitting a deer — to the deer and to me — I slowed to about 10 mph. Sure enough, it bounded into the road, flashing through my headlights for a moment, then it leaped into the field on the other side. It was 3 in the morning, and I simply stopped the car on the empty road and watched it race away into the dark.

For a moment I felt real wonder cut through the lead-like grief sitting heavy on my heart.

The truth is that it was the coolest part of the day and the young male was taking advantage of it to seek out food and water. Yet I couldn’t help but feel it was also a message.

My father is gone, but his wild, wandering spirit will always be out there somewhere, looking for another adventure. Looking for more wonderful, colorful stories to tell.

I make excuses to myself…

…but really, there are a few reasons my desire to just blog for the heck of it ebbs and flows. And it’s more often ebbing. One is that I write and edit for a living so I see words all damn day. I never realized there would be moments when I just couldn’t read another thing or feel so emptied of eloquence I didn’t want to bother writing. But that’s been happening inside my head for years.

Also, there are rules to what makes blogging work, get new eyeballs, etc. At least in professional digital publishing. So when I get to my own blog I don’t want to fuck with those. Like, “Always have an image! People are more likely to read on if there’s an intriguing image!”

Well yeah, I get that. I have no objection in my day job to ensure every post I’m responsible for in any way has a grabby, interesting image as a draw. Even better if there’s a well-chosen video or I’ve padded it out with relevant tweets. That’s the job and I’m gonna do it right.

When it’s just me, I just want to write. I write a shocking amount by hand in journals and on notebooks to get my brain limbered up and working. One of the joys in that is I only have to please myself with what’s on the page. I get to a blank blogging CMS edit screen here, I don’t want to worry that no one will bother if there’s not an image. I kind of resent the feeling I need an extra hook, I guess. Plus, choosing that media is extra mental energy and creativity that could be directed at something more permanent.

Then there is the fact that I established I could get paid for this 16 years ago and have made a living doing it ever since. There comes a point when a personal site like this feels low-key like just giving it away for free. When I have what I think is a good story idea that might not fit the publication that employs me, I don’t think, “I’ll put it on my blog!”

I think, “wonder who I can sell this to as an article/book/show or documentary idea?” Because I know that possibility is always there for me (and make no mistake, I am eternally grateful for that; I know how lucky I’ve been). I tell myself sometimes that just putting it here will make it into a throwaway.

The word “throwaway” has nothing to do with those who do read it (you, whoever you are), it just has everything to do with the way Google and social media work.

That’s perhaps my buried lede, but again, this isn’t for work and if I want to present someone with a portfolio of my work it won’t be this blog, but stuff I got paid to do. I can bury all the ledes I want here.

People still blog plenty, but as Google kept adjusting itself to point away from personal sites owned by individuals who might not be able to produce professional-level reportage and writing, ranking sites, as Twitter and Facebook began coding all sorts of arcane rules based entirely on what Silicon Valley thinks is worthwhile, readership of workaday blogs dwindled to next to nothing.

Maybe that had to happen in some way, and there is no doubt I’ve benefited from it, too. But it slowly reduced the chances that you or I might really discover a site, or a writer.

My example of this: Fifteen years ago, I was googling about an unsolved crime from 2004 and the top result I got was TrueCrimeDiary.com — the crime blog established by the late author Michelle McNamara. At the time, no one in any online true crime community knew who she was, who she was married to, that she had real journalism training, etc. — but thanks to Google and Michelle’s innate gifts as a writer and journalist, I found her quickly and she became my first choice in “solo” bloggers to check out for reliable writing, reporting, conjecture, and thinking, in general.

We became friends and it still took me two more years to put it together that her “comedian husband” was Patton Oswalt. It was about the crime stories for us, especially the unsolved.

She said later that she’d found my blog within months of me beginning it pretty much the same way I’d found TCD.

Those connections are still possible online, and I’ve seen them happen a lot on Twitter, in particular. I’ve also made a ton of good friends on Twitter. It is hard to square in my head why that’s still possible, but keeping a blog up is hard because search engines have turned into Interstate highways steering between the big cities only. Personal blogging and whatever is left of the blogosphere seems to have become like Route 66 after Eisenhower’s big roads took over America — a pleasant, even quaint relic of an earlier time, one that is slowly pixellating over time and turning into so much digital sand. To extend the stupid metaphor.

I sat down to write this to work something out, as is probably obvious, and that’s another thing blogs provide to those interested — you sometimes get to watch someone work things through in their minds almost in real-time. That’s not too interesting to many people, but it is to me. The best we get now is Twitter threads, and those are hard to write and remain organized enough to permit the reader to follow your train of thought.

Work it out I did, though. In essence, I’m aware that the problem is almost entirely in my personal, subjective perception, though I’d submit it’s grounded in realities. A way for me to both be a lazy thinker and writer and not stretch. Something that becomes easier and easier to do with age.

(Side note: Something else I do to limit myself is constantly search for new online writing venues, even as I’m thinking the things I wrote about above. I tell myself I’m ensuring I’ve got my name and identity under control in that domain so no one can pretend to be me or whatever — which is something that can happen but is truly statistically rare — but I’m really putting off pushing myself a bit.)

I’ve got some story ideas I’ll work on this summer and I’m going to at least start here. One is simply too thin to make a book, or I’d consider it. Not enough information on it to flesh out a full read. I still feel compelled to write about it. It’s the story of a killer who might make you think of the Zodiac, or if you really know your true crime history, the Texarkana Phantom. This killer was neither, as far as I know. And there’s a possibility he never truly existed at all.

Giving myself a deadline on this would be setting up a situation I’d find easy to fail, so I’m just gonna say, soon.

And if you are reading this, especially all the blather above, thank you. However you got here, I’m glad you’re there.

 

Uncle Leroy Was a Country Singer

Leroy Lane in the center, standing, holding packages.

Uncle Leroy died in January 1972. I was 4 years old, and would not turn 5 till November that year.

That surprised me when I looked up his obituary. I have always remembered him so clearly, I forgot just how young I was. He was tall with narrow shoulders and he walked with the kind of hybrid cane and crutch that has handles and elbow braces. That’s him standing in the center of the photo above, which was published in the Nashville Banner in 1957.

Uncle Leroy had a form of muscular dystrophy or he wouldn’t be in the photo, which was made at the Brentwood Country Club, some kind of Christmas charity event for MD adults and kids.

Leroy Lane kept going for as long as he could. He had four kids like his younger sister, my mom. Like my mom, he had those kids with a strongly-built, temperamental redhead for a spouse, his wife Lois. As a result of that coincidence, his kids looked more like my siblings than cousins.

I remember I loved Uncle Leroy because he and my mom were a lot alike. A unique combination of sly wit and kindness. I was still more toddler than pre-K age but I was often compared to him. It was partly us all just looking like Lanes — any photo of my maternal grandfather reveals I inherited his facial bone structure, as did mom and Uncle Leroy.

The funny thing is, Leroy and I really had a lot in common. Far more than I knew at the time. Like music. Listen to the video below.

That’s Uncle Leroy singing in his big, plain voice. If you go listen to any number of lesser-known country singers from that time — the record was pressed in 1968 — well, well, well, well-well-well, he was just about as good as any of them.

Especially considering he had a disease that affected his upper body musculature and lung capacity.

I don’t know if taking a keen interest in my family’s stories long after many firsthand sources have “gone home to Jesus” (good old Southern Protestant phrase for being dead) is a byproduct of my own aging or what. I mean, I’m sure it is to some degree, but I wouldn’t have some of these clear memories had I not always had some interest in family.

Because all families are full of stories that could inform you about yourself and your own choices.

It doesn’t help that I’ve finally read Tolstoy, who was masterful at writing about the real inner lives of people tied together by blood and marriage, and my wife and I are also into genealogy, though she is by far the expert on that subject. If anyone thinks I’m a gifted researcher, they just haven’t met her yet.

For years I felt my interest in my own family stories was self-centered, or solipsistic. And perhaps it is. I knew for a fact, too, that it was at odds with the way I relate to my family. I’m the only one who ever moved over 1,000 miles away to live, thoroughly establishing myself in another part of the country. I’m certainly the only one who has done the kinds of jobs I’ve had, especially writing and editing. I’m from a long line of men who worked with their hands, dropping out of school in 8th grade, 11th grade, getting whatever higher education they needed from the military or on the job.

Majoring in voice and focusing on classical music, I did for a time feel sheepish about my white trash background. But with age, I’ve turned around and in a way, it has become a source of pride.

I’ve also thought about how my family was full of talkers and storytellers. I inherited that impulse and channeled it into writing. No matter how loquacious I might seem, I’m outwardly kind of quiet compared to people like my late paternal grandmother, late sister, or my dad.

So, with Leroy above and with the preceding post, which was the first installment in what will be a longer (somewhat fictionalized) story about Dad’s maternal relatives, I’ve begun to tell family stories. I am, in part, doing it for myself. I’m doing it to answer questions I have been asking in some form since I could speak. Also, because the story I began in the preceding post is so in line with how I launched my writing career — with true crime — I’m trying to trace patterns through generations to try and understand how they produced me, and what in me is an echo of those people and the lives they led.

Like Uncle Leroy, a good man with ambitions who overcame some mighty challenges for as long as he could.

Sometimes, you can still find 45s of Leroy’s songs on eBay. So it cheers me up when I think about them and know he left a little legacy.

I might even sing a duet with him one day, if I can ever figure out the software.

 

Genealogy, Part 1.

Gonzlaught @flickr

November 13, 1937

It was cold out but fair that night as Arthur Jasper Heflin walked along Franklin Pike. Middle Tennessee wasn’t as suburban as it is now, a place of shopping malls and celebrity sightings at the Outback Steakhouse by the Cool Springs Galleria. It was quiet once you left the pools of light by roadhouses like The Lousy Duck. Then you were under the canopy of stars and in the country of night, where the November trees were dead claws rising from graves, the green that would come in March seeming a century away.

Heflin went by Jasper. He was a laborer and farmhand by occupation, married to a lively woman named Mamie Johnson.

At some point during his walk, headlights appeared. They swayed a bit as they came down the long, gentle hill toward him. He bowed his head to keep the glare out of his eyes. He tried to step a little further toward the fence running between the highway and farmland. But something was wrong. The car wasn’t quite on the road. The driver was perhaps sleepy or drunk.

Jasper was a little drunk himself. He decided not to worry about it. A man couldn’t go through life afraid of everything. There was not enough whiskey in the world to ease that kind of fear.

Jasper thought of his occasional boss, a man they called the Bull o’ the Woods. It was an ironic name if you saw the man at a distance. He was slender and not even 5’10”. But he had the presence of a 7-footer with shoulders wide enough to haul a calf. That was a fella who wasn’t afraid of much, thought Jasper.

He looked up. The headlights of the oncoming car grew until they swallowed him.

November 14, 1937

The litany of injuries was gruesome:

  1. Compound comminuted fracture of the right frontal bone & extensive injury to the brain (his skull had virtually exploded on the right side)
  2. Fracture of both bones of both lower legs
  3. Secondary shock — due to loss of blood

They formed a list of what a good 1930s American sedan of modest size could do to the human body in the wrong hands.

The wrong hands that night, according to a report in the Nashville Banner, belonged to Frank Allen of North First Street. The shattered body belonged to the former Arthur Jasper Heflin.

Heflin’s wife Mamie, that lively girl, was alone in the world.

But she still had her job. A crisp $3 a week, cooking and cleaning for Ms. Bertha, whose nerves were constantly shot. At least in part due to her marriage to Jasper’s off-again, on-again boss, The Bull o’ the Woods, Harry Brent Dalton.

Mamie knew that Harry–my great grandfather–would take good care of her.

Note

The preceding is the first installment in a work of fiction based closely on real events. Some names have been changed to protect me from the wrath of elderly, distant relatives. 

While many dates will be accurate and events will be described as they were recorded in various legal and personal documents as well as aging memories, I elected to fashion the connecting tissues myself to lend structure to the narrative. 

Sources: Nashville Banner and The Tennessean via newspapers.com; a variety of archived Tennessee state civil records found via ancestry.com. 

Something to push against

The author at the gym
Image: Huff
Person in the Image: Huff

Yeah that’s me and no I’m not doing Bane cosplay. It was just the best flu mask I could find before I headed to the gym.

After I had COVID earlier this year something went to work in my brain. Something that’s always been part of me. Best example: Sophomore year in college, late spring, and we were all dreading Music History. That was next up, all junior music majors required to take it. A band guy, brass player whose name I’ve forgotten but I still remember he looked like the Big Boy restaurant mascot but with serial killer glasses and a cheesy ‘stache, looked at me with a serious expression and said, “Don’t worry about Professor Olsen’s class”—the name of that year’s music history prof—“No one passes it the first time.”

The guy wasn’t being a jerk. He was sincere. Yet some alchemy just happened to take place in my brain right then, some combination of moment, mood, mindset. I said, “No one? Ever?”

”Far as I know.”

I took that as a personal challenge. Something to push back against.

Here is the silliest part: I was generally not a great academic student. I majored in music, vocal performance, and I lived for being onstage. I memorized my music early and diligently, always fulfilled my obligations as a singer to the hilt. But a lot of the academic side of music bored me. I was a low B student, basically.

Yet I decided then and there to be one of the best scholars Professor Olsen ever lectured, with his permanent handkerchief held to one side of his permanently leaky left nostril. I did it in anger. I was mad that anyone would dare lump me in with the masses of students in previous years and in years to come.

Junior year rolled around. I was in the class with two of the smartest people I knew, the woman to whom I was engaged at the time and the woman I would break up with her for and end up married to for 8 years. (I get horny for brainy people but refuse to ever use a term like “sapiosexual,” it just sounds…pathological.)

Both young women (52 and 54 today) were dedicated students in general and both were superb writers with razor-sharp, incisive minds. Both had already helped me limp through previous courses we took together. I feel bad about that today but at the same time, it would be 10 more years before I was diagnosed with ADHD.

I did not feel competitive, exactly, with either, but I did decide I would make better grades in this famously writing-heavy music history course than they did. On one hand, I look back today and that’s totally manic. An observer who knew all three of us might have laughed if I’d said that out loud.

I proceeded to do exactly that. At the end of junior year, Professor Olsen told me I was “the most incisive historical mind” he’d taught there, one of the finest writers, and cut out to practice law (he was, oddly, also an attorney). He had no idea what a shitty student I’d been and would be again in the future. And he might have been right about the law, I wondered myself. But just opening the LSAT study book made my eyes cross, so maybe not.

Anyway, I’m indulging myself here, but there is a point—I have frequently shocked myself by accepting a challenge no one even issued just to prove I can conquer it if I want. I remember every one, but the story of music history is the one that I often reflect on.

Sometimes I think catching COVID hit me a bit like that brass player’s laconic challenge. I came out of it saying to myself that I would respect the fact I survived the virus by completing a mission I began in earnest at 44: Making my aging body as ironclad as possible against whatever aging and life throws my way. I don’t have the natural energy to try and get superhuman with it, but now I feel like I did heading into that first history lecture junior year: weirdly assured I can accomplish the vaguely ridiculous goal I have in mind.

I don’t reject aging, that’s not it at all. In fact, since I turned 40 aging has been kind of, well, fun sometimes. I joke about it, but the truth is, I’m strangely proud of already making it this far.

That is, making my body “ironclad” isn’t about reversing the clock of my skin, fading spots or filling wrinkles. It is about making the man the age I am now as strong as he can be.

Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I may get there.

Hi there.

In the years since I first began a blog in 2000 (my wife, then fiancee, inspired me to start one for reasons not worth going into now), I became a professional writer and editor. Blogging, which I initially enjoyed enough to daydream of doing it for a living, is what I do for a living. That plus writing the occasional book means it’s not a bad living, either.

What happened over time was the more I wrote for money, the less I wanted to give it away for free. That makes sense, right?

I would have a twinge of nostalgia sometimes over the last 11 years–I last kept a regular blog of my own in 2009 or so–and start something new, only to give it up again. There was an embarrassment factor in that as well. I have ADHD — not diagnosed until I was 33 — and have found I’m kinda sensitive about the way it affects my behavior. I can be disorganized and forgetful, easily overwhelmed. The word “flighty” comes to mind. To me it is an intensely negative, dismissive word, yet it certainly fits me where some subjects are concerned, at least on the surface.

…But what I’m saying is of course I worry that I’ll do it again. Write this post about how I want to do this more then not write anything personal and casual for the hell of it for a year or more. It’s like a running joke.

And I might, I don’t know.

But here are the facts as I sit here at 9:23 pm in Central Massachusetts on a warm August night: I have this blog, to which I’ve imported various blog posts written randomly over the last six-seven years, and I have this: truecrimepost.com.

At the moment the true crime blog contains crime blog posts I (again) imported from other destinations, just to flesh it out. They are missing images and links might be broken, but hey, there’s something there. I also frankly think it’s a good URL, which was important back in the early days o’ blogging, but who knows, now. So it might fire up too.

I have a Medium account at Huffwire.com. The only wishy-washy-ness I feel right now is deciding on which blog CMS to use — stick with WordPress or make myself Medium only. Medium is a lovely content management system and there’s a built-in audience… but it kind of pisses me off on a regular basis too. The writer’s program doesn’t work as well as Medium intended, I think, and for every intriguing Medium post that is well-written and worth reading there are 20 badly-written, semi-plagiarized piles of automated content farm level bullshit.

But I ramble, something I haven’t given myself permission to do in a while.

The thing about doing my own blogging again is it hit me recently that the things I do don’t really have a home online. I’ve kind of been coasting. I need to present more than just my whack-ass Twitter account to the world.

I’m a singer and a writer of more than men’s lifestyle stuff for Maxim or any other sites.

Also, I’ve believed for years now that the deprecating of longform personal blogging for “micro-blogging” was in some ways a mistake. It has led to a soundbite culture. That has its place but sometimes you don’t want to click the “thread” link on Twitter. You want to read the full thing written out and in editable form, should the writer make a mistake that needs correction.

I can’t bring that back and I can’t bring back crime blogging, make it supplant true crime podcasts, most of which I find either tone-deaf or severely lacking in bringing anything new to the table. I won’t even look at this as trying.

I just know it’d be nice to return to a more personal space. One where I don’t feel pressed to worry about SEO or whether I’ve got a goddamn image embedded every two paragraphs or so.

It’s worth a shot.

Plague Diary, 1.

And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world. This situation continued [from May] until September. ~ Agnolo di Tura, Siena, 1348 

Plague_doctors'_beak_shaped_mask
A medieval Plague Doctor (Wikimedia)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Agnolo di Tura, called The Fat.

I don’t mean to be melodramatic. In fact, I very strongly doubt the world in the grip of the Coronavirus Pandemicwill be anything like the graveyard that was Europe in the wake of the Black Death. Most things will go forward. There may even be opinion pieces written later about how it was all overblown.

One hopes, anyway.

I began with the passage above because this sentence is like a prose earworm in my brain, some days: “And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands.” If you read all of Agnolo’s narrative, you’ll see this is how it begins:

The mortality in Siena began in May. It was a cruel and horrible thing. . . . It seemed that almost everyone became stupefied seeing the pain. It is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth. Indeed, one who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed. The victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath the armpits and in the groin, and fall over while talking. Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through breath and sight. And so they died. None could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship…

You can read the entire piece here.

There are other readings as well, but the image of Agnolo, a fat man struggling in the heat to bury his children under a merciless sun, has never quite left me. The simplicity of his narrative has always struck me as sorrowful in a timeless way. The kind of devastation that has no point in history because whatever the year on the calendar, it would be the same for anyone in similar circumstances. The words of a man writing nearly 700 years ago, and it’s almost as if you can still hear him sigh.

I’m mostly just following the brush with this post, which is being written on the kind of day that has always given me the creeps, because it is so like bad dreams I had as a child.

It is windy and a little chilly outside. Clouds are rushing by, white and gray, and the sun isn’t really out but I can see blue sky as well. The evergreens that rise behind the houses across the street are restless in the wind, which doesn’t moan so much as it murmurs.

I had a lot of wind-filled nightmares when I was a child.

One that I never forgot came shortly after watching the 1964 film version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, The Last Man On Earth, starring Vincent Price. In that nightmare, I woke to a murmuring and constant wind pushing its way through my childhood home, which was in ruins. One of my sisters was just a mummy in a creaking swing on the back porch. I found myself outside then, and I stepped over two mounds in the driveway that I realized were my parents’ graves.

The wind never stopped, and I know I thought that whatever happened to everyone had come with the wind.

The dream ended at my elementary school, with me standing outside my kindergarten classroom, which was in shambles. I heard the distinctive ringing bounce of a red gym ball on the cement behind me, as if someone had just dropped one, and I turned to see a ball bouncing away, but there was no one there who could have dropped it.

And so I come back to this wind outside today, and all the coronavirus news skittering across my Twitter feeds, on my big-screen TV, and the Agnolo di Tura in my mind, hunched and sweating over the dead.

No one wants to know that kind of sorrow. No one wants to know how alone the man must have felt.

So I guess even the worst-case scenario imaginings in my mind regarding coronavirus are enough to shake me a bit, to rattle my cage.

There are probably many lessons to learn from Agnolo di Tura. The one that will not leave my thoughts today is something that first occurred to me after my brother committed suicide 20 years ago. Then again after my sister died from septic shock in 2016.

Sometimes it is a curse to survive.

Blogging and me

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I first created a blog in 2000. My wife got me started and I learned some early blogging conventions I still use today from her.

By 2005 I was a professional writer. I didn’t expect to become one, even though I’d dreamed of it as a kid. It happened after I’d spent 5 years honestly just blogging about whatever the hell occurred to me. I wrote about a ton of subjects, from personal stuff to the paranormal, just whatever hit me as interesting. Eventually I settled in the groove of just crime blogging and that was what led to the paid work—which eventually was the main thing I did.

I’ve maintained a couple of WordPress sites—this one and a crime blog—in spite of rarely using them. I may have used Medium more in recent years. I’ve been unsure as to why, the whole time.

I write up to 18, sometimes 20 blog posts a week. They are all for my work as a contributing writer and the weekend digital editor for Maxim magazine. It’s all content only appropriate for Maxim, subjects of interest to the mag’s readers. Subjects that don’t necessarily always interest me.

When this has occurred to me and I’ve considered blogging about whatever I’m really into there’s been this feeling of “Ugh. I write all the time. My brain can only handle so much.”

But not lately. And Twitter, which I unapologetically use a lot, doesn’t always cut it.

And the thing is, I feel like I found something in those early days blogging. I don’t mean writing ability or anything, but a freedom inside my brain that I have since reeled in, for some reason.

Maybe I’ll resume with the memory of those early blog days in mind. Plenty of people read my paid work now, but few read this. That’s a freedom I should take advantage of. Especially since I turn 50 soon.

Living half a century gives you just enough to talk about it might be worth the trouble.

On grief

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My sister Sherry Huff in her early 20s.

It’s been one month and three days since she went away. My sister, my friend. My second mother. Brash and beautiful and loving. One month ago, on June 6, I was writing this, her eulogy. Today I realized, as I was going for a short run before the heat set in, that even if I’m fine day-to-day, even if I get work done, I’m still filled with sadness and a sense of loss that’s somehow tinged with anger.

And yet I also think I write too much about grief. I was just looking at Huffwire—a separate Medium blog I set aside to publish slightly more finished things I couldn’t figure out how to pitch to people who’d pay me for them—and saw it. All the grieving. I’m not sure how to get past it, at the moment. I joke a lot on my Twitter feeds, I’ve written a book that is sold under “Parody” on Amazon and am writing another in a similar voice. I don’t even think of myself as a gloomy guy.

Grief has figured in my writing life for so long. I guess in part it’s my way of processing things—writing it out—and that’s good, perhaps, because others can maybe see they’re not alone in feeling some of the things that go with mourning. It’s also bad because it can lead to accusations of self-dramatization. The worst of those accusations come from inside my own head, of course.

But here I am, writing about it again. And not sure what I’m saying. Perhaps just writing things out to see them on a screen, hoping once they’re out they’ll burn off under the lights of other eyes, like fog at dawn.

Maybe all I’m saying is this, something that’s occurred to me more than once over the last month: Grief is a shape-shifter. It’s always the same creature under the skin, but its lifespan and colors change over time. One time it’s a storm, flattening you, the next it’s a tsunami and you are the lone swimmer caught unawares and puzzled as to why the tide is coming in so fast. Then it’s back and disguised as the longest, darkest night, the only sound an angry wind outside, worrying the eaves.

So I guess you just hold on, try to stay awake and watchful, and rely on the fact that the sun will come again. That’s all we can do. That’s what I’m doing. My sister would want me to. She loved the sun.