Lights Out! Imagination On!

 By Thomas Kies

Isn’t that when your imagination runs wild?  In the dark?

On New Year’s Eve my wife and I met friends at one of our favorite restaurants on the mainland.  We had a relatively late seating for eight o’clock, but after dinner we thought we’d walk over to the harbor where we could watch the holiday fireworks.  

The stage was set for that evening when fog rolled in from the oceanside and then a steady drizzle fell.  Before we headed over the bridge, we’d heard the fireworks had been canceled due to the incoming inclement weather. 

Not to be deterred, we all convened at a cozy table in the dining room and started our evening with a round of drinks.  Taking our time, we enjoyed conversation, listened to the specials, and gave our server our orders.  Knowing that the dark gloom was just outside, it made the dining area even more congenial.

Until the lights went out. 

Where we live, momentary lapses in power happen on a relatively regular occurrence.  Usually these are only long enough to screw up the clocks and force your computers to reboot.  

This wasn’t one of those times. 

We spent the next twenty minutes speculating what may have caused the outage and how extensive it was. Patrons and servers were consulting phones, searching diligently for information.  

“Was it the wind?”

“There was an accident behind the hospital.”

“A transformer blew downtown.”

“Must be more rolling blackouts.”

The most ominous of the theories was, “Someone shot out the grid.”

Our waitress came out of the kitchen into our dimly lit dining area and announced that they simply couldn’t continue with service under the circumstances.  Our friends decided to stay for another drink but Cindy and I bolted, hoping there was power on our island and I could get to our favorite dive for a pizza before they closed.

The rain was falling, the streets were eerily dark, the stoplights were out, and traffic was building as New Year’s Eve celebrants realized the evening was over and it was time to go home. As we crossed the bridge, aware that there were no lights behind us and only darkness ahead of us on the island, we realized there would be no pizza, no Chinese, no take-out at all.  We’d be foraging for food once we got to the house.

But as I drove, one thought kept intruding upon my thoughts of a cold holiday dinner.  Someone must have shot out the grid.

Such is the mind of a mystery writer…or a paranoid conspiracy theorist.  That’s what we do. We wonder what if? We wonder what if someone actually attacked our power supply like they did on December 3 in Moore County, North Carolina, not far from us, where someone with a rifle shot out two substations and knocked out electricity for 40,000 people for four days? 

I wonder how I can incorporate that into my new book????

The power of imagination.  It’s what keeps writers in front of their laptops and pumping out the prose.

So, my wife finished a salad she found in the refrigerator, and I made peanut and butter sandwiches, and we ate by candlelight in our kitchen.  We listened to fireworks as they went off in our neighborhood sounding like gunshots.  That didn’t quell my nervous imagination.

I found a live feed on my phone beaming images of fireworks displays from around the world that I pulled up at our table. My wife proclaimed that, “Boring.”

Then I found a movie and began to watch it, still chewing on my PJ&J sandwich.  Just before she left to go upstairs to read by candlelight, she told me, “I’m not watching a movie on your damned phone.”

The movie?  War of the Worlds.

Ah…new paranoid thought.  Was the darkness on New Year’s Eve caused by aliens?

In actuality, it was an insulator here on the island that had gone bad.  The salt air wreaks havoc on all manner of things.  We never did get our power back until five in the morning. 

I’m still not convinced it wasn’t aliens.  Such is the power of imagination. 

Back to The Scene of The Crime

 My holidays began with a visit to a client in Bradenton, Florida. When I arrived at the airport Hyatt, I found out that the hotel restaurant was closed. Upon asking the desk clerk for dining recommendations, she handed me a photo-copied map and said the closest place was Rico's. Off I went on foot. When I read the street sign at the next intersection and saw that it was the North Tamiami Trail, I said to myself, "I've been here before."

The opening chapter for my third novel, The Undead Kama Sutra, took place close to this intersection. My detective-vampire Felix Gomez had been summoned by an alien from the first book. The alien was asking Felix to find "the man who killed me." (The alien was dying from a gruesome blaster wound.) The scene:

"I sat on the alien's bed. We were on the second floor of a cheap motel in Sarasota, Florida. To get up the stairs I had to get past three hookers, their pimp, and a blind man selling pot--for medicinal purposes, of course...

Outside, the second shift of hookers prowled the curb alongside North Tamiami Trail, the main drag in this part of Sarasota. They strutted on stiletto heels around discarded hip flasks and bottles of malt liquor...

None of the hookers showed any interest. Considering the neighborhood, a whale could fall out of the sky and flatten the motel, but no one would admit to seeing a thing."

To Florida's credit, North Tamiami Trail has improved considerably since I wrote that passage. Had I continued straight at the intersection I would've wound up in the John and Mable Ringling Art Museum (of the Ringling Brothers circus fame and fortune). But as I was hungry, I took a left at North Tamiami Trail and continued in search of Rico's. The street was a wide, divided boulevard and in spite of the busy traffic, surprisingly dark. The sidewalk passed stretches of businesses, closed for the night, and gloomy grassy lots, marked with signs prohibiting access. Like similar places in other American cities, empty liquor bottles, discarded clothes, and stolen grocery carts lay abandoned in the weeds. Whereas closer to the airport, you had your pick of chain hotels, here the accommodations were local motels. Most seemed well kept, some retained the sketchy vibe from my book, and others were shuttered and deserted. No hookers anywhere. As I said, it was quite dark and when another person approached from the opposite direction, the chance meeting filled me with a cautionary dread. What if he--they were all men--pulled a knife or a gun and decided to rob me? Step by step we closed the distance and even in the meager light, I could sense they were as apprehensive as I was. I find it hysterical that anyone would be afraid of me, but being Mexican, you get used to this sort of thing. When we passed shoulder to shoulder and realized that we would survive the encounter unscathed, we both breathed a sigh of relief but quickened our pace away from each other, just in case. 

I made it to Rico's, alive. The pizzeria was quasi-divey but friendly and welcoming. My earlier meals had been in over-priced airport restaurants and frankly, Rico's was the cheapest and best place I'd eaten at all day. 

So with this tale of my most recent adventure in Florida, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The Big Meh

If you look up conspiracy theories, one of the most famous is Majestic 12, which was claimed to be the US government's secret operation to cover up its study of UFOs and to discredit anyone who reported the existence of Majestic or that UFOs were real. People who said they had witnessed UFOs--flying saucers--or their crew of little green men were ridiculed as crackpots. Others who came forward with stories of being abducted by the aliens and "probed" became for a time, practically a cottage industry. Over the decades we've had numerous tales of UFO encounters, the most famous of which was the Roswell Incident of 1947 (which is a plot feature in my debut novel, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats). The radio program, Coast to Coast AM, was infamous for giving air time to many conspiracy theories, UFOs among the most popular. I grew up reading books and watching programs about alien encounters and was of the opinion, to paraphrase Jodie Foster from the movie Contact, that if we are alone in the universe, "it's a waste of space."

The USAF did have Project Blue Book, which investigated UFO sightings from 1947-1985. After that, case closed on flying saucers, or so we were told. Recently, the US Defense Department has admitted that it has been cataloging UFO sightings, that UFOs have appeared repeatedly around military bases and nuclear facilities, but there's no public speculation about the UFOs other than we don't know what they are or where they come from. So, Majestic 12 was probably true, but as a disinformation campaign meant to disguise the actual study of UFOs. Score one for the conspiracy theorists.

Now we stand on the brink of confirming that we humans are not alone in the universe and that our visitors are creatures with technology hundreds of years more advanced than ours. In the near future we could either be entering a period of glorious enlightenment or facing horrific annihilation. 

And the reaction to such a monumental turn in our history is MEH. Unless a UFO lands in a display of pomp and high-tech wizardry like in The Day The Earth Stood Still, I doubt many will peel their eyeballs away from their smart phones. And when they do, we can expect a surfeit of Tik-Tok videos, involving the aliens...how? Hopefully just dancing.