Hello, friends.
This past week was strange in that it somehow dragged while still moving quickly. It was busy with two nights honoring G, one for poetry and another academically, and the typical return-to-school-after-vacation silliness.
Welcome to the 171st installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and thinking about alternative histories of one’s life. If you’re a reader who subscribes via Substack, my website, or Patreon, your encouragement helps motivate me. I’m not breaking any records but I’m thankful to have any audience.
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I did very little writing-related this past week, unfortunately. Physically, anyway. I thought a lot about stories, the synopsis for Project: Amusement Park, and other things. I will try to fix that this coming week, though the entire month of May looks like it’ll be busy.
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“Where are the new hangers you bought recently?”
I stood near the laundry closet in our apartment, looking for a hanger for one of my daughter G’s shirts. Hangers have become a rare commodity in my household even though I bought a package of 50 or so of them about two years ago. Some have broken, others have been claimed. Or something.
“They must all be being used,” Pamela said.
“All of them? You just bought them.”
Pamela looked at me. “The hangers we bought a few years ago?”
“No,” I said. “The ones you bought last week when you guys went out.”
Now G looked at me. My older daughter, C, was on a videocall with G and even she appeared bemused.
“I didn’t buy any hangers last week,” Pamela said.
I was beginning to grow agitated. She and G had gone out and when they came home, she’s shown me the new hangers, which I took and put into the laundry closet. We needed some new ones. I remember them because even though they were still in their package, the hangers were a mess, pointing this way and that.
And that’s when it dawned on me. “I…I must’ve dreamed it.”
Everyone had a good laugh. Well, everyone except me. I was shaken.
For a few minutes, I would’ve testified with 100% certainty that Pamela and G had gone out and come back with hangers, because G had even made a joke about them being a gift for me. I remember feeling the felt-covered plastic and thinking it was odd that they went this way and that but the package wasn’t damaged.
But it’d never happened.
I realized it must’ve been a vivid dream, which I can have sometimes, but it still rattled me. My mind is my most important muscle. The way I see the world, the humor it provides, the knowledge it retains, the skills in storytelling and art that are housed there. Losing my mind, my ability to think, to imagine, to be, would be one of the scariest things I can conceive of.
My grandmother died in 2002 from Alzheimer’s Disease, but she really died around 1993 or 1994 when she began showing the signs of it and rapidly losing the woman she had been. Not that Grandma had been a peach, mind you, she’d had a hard life and kept her children on their toes, but she did the best she could and I always felt loved. Watching that spark diminish until it was gone, leaving only the husk, is one of the most terrible things I’ve witnessed. I brought my mother to visit Grandma in the Alzheimer’s ward only once.
There were a few residents in the corridor, leaning against a wall and sitting in wheelchairs. Passing the rooms you could see others. They were zombies, flesh and bone alive but unthinking. From one of the rooms came screaming and from several came moans and groans. The air smelled of disinfectant and waste, the ammonia of urine and bleach mixed with feces and a poor attempt at air freshener was stomach churning. When we got to Grandma’s room, she didn’t recognize us. She eventually remembered my mother, but I wasn’t there.
When we left, I apologized to Mom and said I could never go back there. It was too much. She understood.
Now all these years later and I get worried. There’s the trip to the Boston Science Museum that Pamela and I made with C when she was around 10. It was a good time. I remember going into the gift shop with them. I remember the Naboo Starfighter from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace hanging from the ceiling of the museum. When I went back a few years later with Pamela to meet with her friends and see a Harry Potter exhibit, the Naboo Starfighter was still there.
Except that the trip to the Science Museum with C apparently never happened. According to Pamela and C. I still remember it fairly well, although the flyers and such from the visit are lost to time. That’s the thing, though, how could they have existed in the first place? How could I remember driving into the parking garage with two of the most important people in my life, going through the whole place, seeing what I saw, only for it to have never happened?
I remember when I was around 12 or 13, a bunch of neighborhood kids had told my friend I’d come around looking for him. When he asked me what I’d wanted, I had no idea what he was talking about. I’d never looked for him. However, several kids who had absolutely no reason to lie said they saw me.
When I’ve (lamely) tried looking into it, the closest I can come to anything is the idea of false memories, which I don’t know it that’s really what it is.
I’ve been forgetting words a lot lately. People ask me to do things and I forget. It worries me.
Except…
I’ve been pretty stressed lately. Between being a teacher and parent in these maddening, sickening times, the world around us warping into a bizzarro nightmare, trying to navigate health, help my elderly father, make sure my family is cared for, working on my writing career, traversing the politics and bullshit of school, I’m under a lot of stress. Friends have told me that when I mention forgetting words and my fears. Pamela reminds me of it, too. And they’re right.
Unless…
I’m somehow slipping through the multiverse and those things did happen. In which case, I wish I’d wake up in the universe where I had lots of money. And abs.
I hope it’s just stress. I can manage that. Mostly. Anything else? Well, we won’t think about that unless we ever actually have to. I have enough on my mind.
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I haven’t talked much about reading lately.
Macmillan sent me a message through NetGalley that I could read Christopher Golden’s new novel Carry Me to My Grave before it’s July 21st release. Golden keeps knocking it out of the park and Carry Me to My Grave may be his best yet! Tense, scary, and rife with characters you care about, there were times when I needed to put the book aside only because it raced along so quickly I needed to catch my breath. Carry Me to My Grave marks Golden at the top of his craft.
This past week I finished Eric LaRocca’s new book Wretch, Or the Unbecoming of Porcelain Khaw. Wretch is like a bad dream. The cloying anxiety that builds because of the hallucinogenic nature of LaRocca’s writing. The main character’s grief becomes an anchor to the reader as they follow Simeon deeper and deeper into a nightmare. The ending does what phantasmagoric stories do best and is reminiscent of Harlan Ellison and Franz Kafka. A tough book on the soul but so damn good.
I began reading Monsters in the Archive: My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bicks, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. After reading the introduction, the book goes into the writing of Pet Sematary, which I haven’t read since I was a teenager. So I set aside the Bicks book and grabbed Pet Sematary off the shelf and began rereading that. I imagine reading it at 48 will be a little different than reading it at 16 or so.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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