Kachina

 One of my favorite stories of all time is "Pigeons From Hell" by Robert E. Howard. This is not one of his Conan stories so you few who know his work, look deeper... and those who don't know the power of his pen (or rather his Underwood #5), you will be pleasantly surprised. If you're lazy, go on YouTube and look up the old Thriller episode hosted by Boris Karloff (that's Frankenstein for you kids) from 1961. It's not a bad adaptation considering how bad adaptations usually are. It's a damn good story any way you look at it and within it you will find something called a Zuvembie, a creation of Two-Gun Bob's that really is a delightful addition to the Undead. I mention all this because it's a damn good story and ya'll would be better off in this life if the details of it haunted your sleeping thoughts from this day forth.

I wrote a story titled "Kachina", finishing it in mid-June, 2017. This is a watershed story for me, one that will forever remain special and dear in my heart. Why? I believe it marked itself insofar as the research put into it, something that has become a discovery and now nearly with each story written pursued. As well, certain elements within this Tale have come to connect a thread, one quite deceptive, throughout the whole narrative defined in this history, one which weaves behind all and is not at the same time. While it is definitely not anything more than the story that it is with the admitted understanding of a cave, those elements in "The Witch of Pitt's Junction" that seem of casual connection, were conceived and written before "Kachina" took shape. It was from the pond "Kachina" was drawn. That is how blind the Witch was in conception and how I began to harvest the splinters such stories leave. "Kachina" also was the first of these Tales of the Bajazid to be accepted for and see print.

The first known expansion of Europeans through the land now known for a description of a little creek in the southern part of the territory not associated with the Spanish depredations beginning a few centuries before, the first "American" was a mountain-man. For those of exclusively urban understandings or those not familiar with the history of the American West, "mountain men" were basically trappers, hunters, explorers... some of horrific repute and some living amongst the rightful heirs of that land as humans are want to do. More followed and behind them a destiny that is indeed manifesting.

 The first "Americans", people from the United States, to enter Arizona, was in 1825. That did not suit my ends though because, well, there was nothing for me there. See, I spent four very formative years of my life in the town named for one of these Mountain Men. He was not the first but one of the earliest being that there was not much traffic between then and when Old Bill Williams arrived, a man known throughout the First Nations as "Lone Elk". Do look this man up and keep him alive in the memory of Man. He was a good man. The year of his arrival, or at least as memory served when I first put pen to paper, was 1837. I'd look mighty presumptuous preempting that date, now wouldn't I? That, along with a thought the witch stirred, the year 1838 seemed to fit quite well.

I am an Arizona boy, born and bred, and one thing I love is the history of this land. It matters not which wave of immigrants from which corner of this land arrives, the history of this land back unto the days when  distinctly fluted flints pierced flesh no longer found the world over. Growing up in a land so rich in layers has been a blessing. Those whose land this was before the world changed forever I hold a deep love for. Mind you, I am provincial so this fealty extends direct to those of this land. There is a hint in "Where Lies Hope", as well as one in "I"ll Always Be With You, Boys", as to why I do not have the People of this land represented in these Tales more than I do. That appears in "Kachina" as well.

To simplify to a degree slightly aside from those hints, I am very equal to all in my stories. All of humanity has good in them. All has evil as well. Generosity knows no bounds, nor does cupidity. I write my characters as humans first and only apply as needed for specific identity based upon ethnic necessities a shade to the skin. Apparently, some of my favorite victims have turned out to be slavers. Can't seem to get enough of them for some reason. But to brush aside this aside, there is one collection of local ethnicity whom I wanted it known were not to be of causal play and Hototo's reaction exemplifies this. I wanted a place that would be forbidden, taboo.

In the months right before I wrote "Where Lies Hope", I visited a local bookstore where occasionally they held open mics. Just to be straight up, I'm a very shy little boy and it was standing up at these mics, forcing myself with shaking legs and frozen voice, that helped me pretty much, well... That friend I met who introduced me to Lovecraft? I met him late one Friday night as I wandered around downtown Prescott looking for something to do. As I passed a restaurant/bar located off the Whiskey Row crowd, I heard some lunatic shouting "The Charge of the Light Brigade" off the rooftop. That led me into the building and up to the rooftop bar to find out who this was. Over the next year or two, we would occasionally take to the stage unannounced... and there was no mic. I ain't that shy no more, and yes, I have a ridiculous amount of poetry I've memorized for no reason of rational ends.

Well, that day I went to the Peregrine Bookstore to pretend I had a life (this was before my daughter came to be with me), Baird's Holler had just begun to stew as a concept in my head but I had no words for what was to be the name of this place. There was this lady there who at the mic recited jokes and I am pretty sure that they were funny as hell because those who got them laughed heartily. I suspect they were rather ribald but have no proof as I do not speak any of the Diné languages (or anything actually beyond these grunts here expressed). I had to ask and as the open-mic broke up, plead she tell me what a certain concept would translate as in Navajo. I explained my idea and she wrote four words in my notebook. Living where I do, I was able to quite quickly confirm, always with interpretations slightly different for that word translated, that the concept remains.

I had the name of my creek and do not bother looking up that word used. It will reveal nothing. I just needed at this point a yellow rabbit.

By the way, have I mentioned that I have an Underwood #5? Yeah, gonna clean it up someday (you know what day that is) and perhaps make a font based off the keys of this machine. I do use such a font when writing. It's called MyUnderwood and you'll have to look it up. I like it because, well, I fancy myself in my most secret fantasies as a pulp fiction writer typing furiously away into the dead of night, unhealthy habits spread about in disorganized fashion. Now, look at the fonts that you use when you write. Is there any romance there? It's the same with, say, a pistol. There are these functional yet bland and generic black boxes or there are flavored bits of beauty and design such as the Nagant or a Lightning, a Luger or the clean lines of a 1911. This is what I'm talking about... an aesthetic particular.

For me, the Underwood based font I use holds the same flavor for me. Times New Roman is busy and without feel. Courier and Ariel and Georgia or any of the other function scripts are as well without soul. No one in their right mind or out of it would drop to a tight script or debase themself in some comic conspiracy sans merit and while I have been accused of both being in and out of mind, not in that way. Finding this font for me, roughly around this time, fed without hold that fantasy I held. I mean, when the words appearing on your screen before you look pulled from an old typewriter like the one pounded to the adventures of barbarian kings, and with Basil Poledouris' soundtrack from 1982's "Conan the Barbarian" echoing off those empty spaces I keep polished in my skull for just that right acoustic effect, it's like Live Action Role Playing for writers!