Mehitobel Wilson: writer, reader, chronic curmudgeon.

Tomboy bombshell cowgirl; lover of funk, attracted to roadsides.

Besotted with spots.

Friend to sleaze.

Admirer of filthy films, fleshy steaks, Hong Kong rap, new felt and pocket-knocking 8-balls; prefers 10 gallons of hat and 4 fingers of Jack.

Procrastination here breeds urgency there. Urgency begets sharper fiction. The dream: hone it to a splinter, and sink it deep.

So I'm here.

Don't Trip Over the Ottoman (With Anyone Else but Me)

Tomorrow I'm going to my parents' house for Christmas. I like to go there for a few selfish reasons, above and beyond being able to see my family: they feed me, I get to play with my junkyard dawg, and... they have a satellite dish. I barely have network TV, myself.

Back in 1997, during the air-mattress month in which I lived at my folks' before settling on my current home city, I was religious about watching two shows, and only two shows. One was Monstervision, and that's gone now.

The other was, is, and shall always be... The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I adore Dick Van Dyke. I also adore the character of Rob Petrie. Ideal man, that one. I can't describe why; I suppose you'd just have to watch, and take my word for it.

For a while, LikeTelevision.com showed movies (Night of the Living Dead!) and TV episodes (guess which!) for free, but they've recently started to charge. (That's been going around, huh.) For the first time, I don't have access to a Rob and Laura fix on particularly difficult workdays. Pain.

So I get to go home and watch my beloved, and meanwhile, fret about what I just learned: Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke are about to release the entire show run on DVD. "DVDonDVD," they call it. 158 episodes. 40th Anniversary. Approximately 30 DVDs. I see hundreds of dollars, in my future, vanishing. They even, my dear god, intend to sell a collector's edition of ALL the discs... packaged in a functional replica of the stumbled-over ottoman. Be still my heart.

Are horror writers supposed to flutter over ottomans packed with Rob Petrie?

My Amazon.com shopping cart is full - if I get a gift certificate or money for Christmas, I'll be ordering DVDs. Peckinpah and Petrie. That's my personality in a nutshell, I think, and it just makes me laugh. It kills me that I've so baffled Amazon's recommendation system: in music, they offer me Dead Kennedys and Lesley Gore.

(Hey, yet another way to interpret gore_gal! You don't own me...)

I'm in mourning for a variety of reasons, too. My goof-off companienne & sometime straight-man to the Bel and Robert Show, Casey (aka Lorna Forlorna), has left town. Vamoosed. Sung the song of sayonara. Hied hence. Tripped the U-Haul Fantastic. No more Gatto Fabulous and Ghetto Dowdy, painting the town silly. (That "dowdy" isn't an insult - she aggressively cultivates dowd.)

I fail at goodbyes, do them terribly, if at all. Then I mourn. When I left Providence, I made some asinine joke and said, "ciao," but burst into tears on the plane. (And kicked myself for it.) I didn't even toss Casey a 'ciao,' and never got Robert out of the house for long enough to introduce her to the glory that is Car Wash. Sigh. Crud. Mourn.

But tonight, I have the house to myself, which means VCR access. This is a mini-holiday in itself, this night. I gorged myself sick on a mozzarella-encrusted noodly gruel I cobbled together out of bare-cupboard desperation, and am now suffering carb-drunkenness. (Hence the disjointed rambling here.) It's cold enough here, for the first time since last year ("The Day the Cats Fell Through the Ceiling," my own Bel Van Bel episode), that I get to use my suave space heater.

So, on this quiet, cold mini-vacation Friday, I will enburrito myself with one of the leopard comfortors, coerce my hot-bellied cats into warming my chilly-toed dogs, and watch Sunset Boulevard. And tomorrow, it's off to do battle on Southern highways, and then catch up with other loved ones whom I don't see often enough: my family, my Currydawg, my cats Tavi and Bailey, the woods, and of course, Rob (and Laura) Petrie.

In case you're curious, I'm taking along McGrath's Asylum, Dobyns' The Church of Dead Girls, and the new Simon Clark book.

Be well, folks.



posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 11:02 PM

Updatey doodads

Okay:
1. Mehitobel.com is a free-range chicken now. It has left the Gothic.net Henhouse (there's a Weasel joke in here somewhere) and now hangs out all by itself at... Mehitobel.com.

2. Robert's site, Nomoreromeo.com , is up and foxy. He has neato merch for sale.

3. Brainbox 2 is on its way. I'm in it with "Blind in the House of the Headsman" and a growly essay.

4. Morbid Curiosity #6, due out at World Horror 2002, will contain a reprint of my Thanksgiving 2000 Seeing Spots essay, along with a slew of photographs. See what happens when I spot roadkill and decide not to let it go to waste.

I think that's it, because I've been a bum recently.

Oh.

5. I just got off the phone with Mike Marano, who confirms that all the whispered tales of death, weirdness, and danger! danger! in Swan Point are... very true, and just scraping the surface.

My mom's gonna kill me.


posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 4:10 PM

Lovecraft

It was a rainy Sunday night, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. My favorite, Jeff, and I spent the day - my last in Providence - as sloths: sleeping far too late, hauling ourselves forth to sup upon the entire legal United States harvest quantity of scallops, then keeling over again for a post-gorge nap. (Note that I am by far the least exciting houseguest available.)

The plan for Sunday was a simple and lazy one: go to a punk-rock bar, get tired of it rapidly (though I was gratified to see that Son of Frankenstein was playing on the TV, and that kept me calm), and leave in time to catch a midnight movie.

The movie wasn't playing.

So into the car we go. I'm slacker-fashionable in high-heeled boots and a hooded sweatshirt; he's a porno Dick Van Dyke in a peacoat. We briefly chased a skunk. I'm still half-asleep, and willing to go back to bed for good. We drive around and he says, "I have to show you Lovecraft."

He's said this a few times during my visit, and I, not the sharpest tack in the tire, thought all along that he meant "sites about which Lovecraft wrote," or "places he lived," or whatever.

After a bit, he slows the car, and says, "Aw, it's closed."

Swan Point Cemetery. He meant really show me Lovecraft.

"Closed" means "gates are locked, guards are out, you are trespassing if you enter." It also means "climb the walls and be stealthy."

So my favorite porno Mr. Rogers and I climbed over the rock wall and skulked through the midnight rain.

Swan Point is huge.

As I'm roaming in my best Catwoman fashion through the graves, hauled by my favorite, I'm hearing a nonstop whispered list of dooms.

"Once they found a severed horse penis on a grave, surrounded by candles that had burned down. People dig up graves all the time in here. They break into the crypts - the crypts are carpeted and have electricity, those big ones by the river - we've got to stay away from the river, I'm serious - and have rites and parties. Not long ago a woman was jogging here and was raped and murdered. People come in here with robes and do rituals. People die, steal bones. Two kids hung themselves from that tree there."

I, tough broad, say, "Ah, fuck it - any freaks that are in here will mind their own business if we mind ours. Anyone fucks with us, we can take 'em. Honestly, I'm good at this shit. Don't worry and quit trying to scare me."

I was getting a little creeped out, yes, but more about cops than anything else. Finally I decided, shit, this is so cool - and what's the worst that can happen? We'll get arrested. It would be worth it. I could cope. "The cops here are NOT NICE," he says.

Fine. It's not that I'm inherently positive, it's that I'm negative but prepared to deal with it.

And then, the whisper-stream changes - "Ah, here it is," and there it is, and I land on my knees and, yes. He was surrounded with rotted gourds and pumpkins, a couple of candles, and a little figurine. Touch nothing, says I. I skated my fingertips across the words, "I am Providence," and Jeff recited, "That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die." Except it wasn't really as dorky as that, but anyway.

Then we ran away in search of a good exit point. This turned into a search for ANY exit point. After a certain point I decided that this damn cemetery was too huge and that it must be treated as you treat woods: go straight until you hit an out, or a road, or die. But the joint is girded by a river, so we couldn't go that way, and had guards at one end, so we couldn't go that way, and we found an expanse of green footed by an enormous, solid building, and Jeff said, "Come back! That's the asylum. Inmates escape from there and come here and kill folks."

Asylum? Madmen roaming the cemetery with cleavers and delusions? Okay. I can deal with cops, Satanists, hippies, opossums, wild dogs, and addicts. I was most concerned about the addicts; they can get a bit difficult. But ESCAPED LUNATICS?

That's a wild card, and that was it for me, I wanted out.

And we got out, as you can tell.

Thanksgiving Day itself was cool; I survived minor attacks by children who were pretending to be spraying cats (don't ask, but trust me, it was fucking appalling and hilarious), survived damn good food, and played pool for, oh, five hours straight.

But sneaking rainsoaked with my favorite, through the darkness, to find Lovecraft... nobody can beat that. Sorry. Don't even try.
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 2:40 PM