Service Without Service, part 1

Days ago, friends faced off with our local Code Enforcement. If you’re not familiar with this form of government overreach, it’s like a steroidal HOA (homeowners association), where a few people relish telling other people what to do. Hey, I’m somewhat of a maven on the subject, which is about as glorious as a rancher hitching up his trousers and saying, “Why yes, Little Missy, I am an expert on cattle bloat. You must read my dissertation on Guernsey rumenectomy.”

Photo of Code Enforcement Clerk

Meanwhile back at the ranch, my friends stumbled upon a lien filed on their property to the tune of $45,000 and ever increasing. Lambs in the woods and babes to the slaughter they were. They phoned Code Enforcement innocently asking what they must do, much like asking a Big Bad Wolf where to buy your building materials. They said, “Pay the fines and interests and liens and anything else we can dream up.” Yeah, they said that, more or less.

“No,” said I. “No, no, no,” said other friends, some which have had direct experience with the agency. “Code Enforcement is not your friend,” we told them. “Don’t pay the lien. Take it before the board. Take it before their magistrate. You might pay a few hundred dollars, but you won’t pay tens of thousands.”

I volunteered to go before the board. Armed with a limited power of attorney, I was willing to do battle. This offer wasn’t without a plan.

My friends had done something unusual, they’d saved every bit of mail going back decades. They hired a investigative bookkeeper to unbundle those boxes of mail searching for Code Enforcement communications. None. Not one whit. In particular, I enquired about proof of service. None. Not a scrap in evidence.

Consider me unsurprised. I’d been dealing with County Code Enforcement a long time. They almost demolished a house twice while pretending they were victims of a computer error. Funny… The signature on the demo order looked awfully human-like.

I learned some of their tricks. Statutes offer a substitute service option of ‘publishing’, i.e, inserting a notice in a local paper. Our local newspaper is The Orlando Sentinel, but funny thing: certain county departments routinely published in the Heritage Florida Jewish News in Fern Park. The county claimed that saved taxpayers money. The rest of us had a darker hypothesis. However, thanks to saving all their mail, my friends found themselves in the unique position of proving a negative. 

Code Enforcement hadn’t come up with proof of service, so I felt more confident than ever. “You’re in a great position,” I said. But… have you had a friend who asked your advice but invariably did the opposite? Well, these are them.

They said, “That’s not what the nice Code Enforcement lady told us to do.”

“Code Enforcement is not your friend,” I repeated. “You’re asking your cellmate why you need an extra bar of soap.”

My brilliant combination of mangled metaphors did not deter them. I’m devastated to report they didn’t request an appearance before the Board or the CEB magistrate. They paid the full amount. A party erupted. “Whoopie, we got a live one!” celebrating their windfall could be heard in Alligator Alley. I feel horrible.

Now that I got that off my chest, I confess this has been a buildup to write about process service– or the lack thereof. See you next time.

When They Stop Teaching the Classics...and Cursive

I heard recently that the school district I am in has decided to stop teaching Shakespeare.  That alarms me for so many reasons, but also for a personal one.

Quite simply, I'm having a hard time finding books to use as examples in teaching fiction writing.

I used to have a lovely example, when trying to show what was meant by 'plot'.  I'd ask my class:  "What is the plot of Gone with the Wind?"

Several people would put up their hands, and say, "It's about the Civil War." 

And I would say, "No it isn't.  You've just described setting.  The SETTING of Gone with the Wind is the civil war.  The PLOT is something like this:  Scarlet O'Hara falls in love with a man who does not return her love, and she spends the entire civil war chasing after him.  Until in the end, she decides other things are more important."

Lots of Ohs! and Ahs!  Smiles all around.

Flash forward to my last term. I ask the same question of the class (all adults):  "What is the plot of Gone with the Wind?"

Not a single hand went up.

Nobody had read it or even seen the movie.

Me:  "Come on, people!  I can't use Harry Potter for EVERY example!"  (lots of laughter)

Yes, Harry Potter seemed to be the only book everyone in the class had read.  And - dare I say it - most had seen the movie Twilight (but not necessarily read the book.)  This does not leave a lot for me to reference as examples.

Further gripe: 

So here we are today, taking Shakespeare out of the school system.  Does anyone honestly think kids will read Shakespeare on their own?  Are we honestly to face a world in which no one knows the lessons learned in The Scottish Play, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, the Richards and Henry's?  And so many more.

A world in which I could say, "He would make a great Caliban" in a business meeting, and no one would know what I meant?  (I made the mistake of saying that once.  Probably not my best political move...)

So this leads me to my latest fear:

I hear they are no longer teaching Cursive.  Which means, in a few years, only a very very few people will be able to read any historical documents.  Any manuscripts in the original.

In fact, I was told today that a California town is asking people who know Cursive to apply for town jobs. 

Does this not scare others?  When only a few can access original text, I worry that everything will be 'as interpreted' by a central body.  

We already know how Homer's work was translated and tinkered with by men centuries ago to change and sometimes diminish the role of women in it.

Dammit, I'm worried.  I want a world where everyone is given the chance to be exposed to ideas.

Not a world where only a few can refute the masters (AI or other) who control the narrative.

Melodie Campbell worries and writes on the shores of Lake Ontario.  Her latest book (available for pre-order everwhere) was given the following review by BOOKLIST (we're permitted to post one sentence in advance of issue date):

 

 

 

 

 

 

Writing Conferences: Networking vs Connecting

Early in my writing career, I was given the advice to attend writing conferences and network.  

I never liked the word, “network.” It feels transactional. (I am seeking a connection with you because you have something I need or know someone who may benefit my career.) 

Still, I would attend conferences, and they were always nerve-racking events. I’d either try to sell myself, or I was so nervous that I didn’t know what to say.

Until a few years ago, I had an epiphany. 

I was at ThrillerFest, attending a cocktail party, looking out at the sea of people and feeling anxious, as always.  When it hit me. The people in this room, we all share the same passion. We all love stories—reading them and writing them. This is my tribe. How lucky am I to be here. 

And this perspective changed everything for me.

Conferences stopped being about networking and became about connecting—talking about stories, sharing experiences, learning from others, and contributing to a community I cared deeply about. 

When I return home now, I remember these moments long after the conferences are over because they came from an authentic place of genuine interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm. 

If you're reading this and the idea of connecting at conferences still feels awkward or intimidating, consider shifting your mindset. Seek connection, contribution, and curiosity as opportunities to build meaningful relationships, share value, and learn from others. 

Here are a few conversation starters to help you get started:

Connection:

What do you write?

Are you working on something right now you are excited about?

What are you hoping to get out of this conference?

What are you reading?

Which panel did you like the most so far and why?

Contribution:

Share a resource or a tip that may benefit someone else.

Introduce people who may be able to help one another.

Ask about volunteer opportunities at the conference or how you can help support your local writing chapters.

Curiosity:

What’s the best way to work with an editor?

What’s the best resource for anthology calls?

What advice do you have for someone first starting out?

Is there a craft book or podcast you may recommend?

When you focus on connection, contribution, and curiosity, the pressure fades, and you just may create relationships that continue to grow long after the conference is over.

*** 

Feel like exploring this idea more? Check out my conversation with Jeffrey James Higgins at Elaine’s Literary Salon Podcast from November 2025. We talk about the writing community and the difference between networking and connecting. You can listen here. I hope you will check it out.  

What AI Fundamentally Misunderstands About Fiction

 Disclaimer: this is NOT a doom-and-gloom, "AI will kill us all!" rant.

We're gonna talk about AI Slop today.

Yes, you read it right. "AI Slop." I use the term advisedly, because it defines a particular type of "Large Language Model" (LLM/AI) generated writing. How do I know this?

Well, in part because "AI Slop" was Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year. In the PBS article linked in the previous sentence, Webster's defines AI Slop as: "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."

From the article:

'It's such an illustrative word,' said Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster's president, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press ahead of Monday's announcement. 'It's part of a transformative technology, AI, and it's something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bit ridiculous.'

 

And while there are all manner of examples of non-textual (especially image-generating) AI Slop (see the end of this post), for the purposes of this particular post we're going to focus on AI Slop attempting to pass for human-generated fiction.

But before we dig in to this topic, let me just say that I find AI to be a welcome and powerful tool for all manner of things: especially assistance with organizational problems.

It's pretty nifty at generating historical images, too.

AI can organize, systematize, collate, quantify, inventory, lay out, define, compare and contrast a wide variety of data at the snap of your fingers.

But it can’t think for itself (no matter how well it may have been “trained” to fake cognition), and it’s not been able to bridge the so-called “uncanny valley.”

And obviously I think using any variety of AI to attempt to replace human cognition in the workplace is both shortsighted and bound to fail long-term. (#layoffs)

This one may seem familiar to those who have read any of my recent posts here at SS.

I am also in no hurry to read the “fiction” it will generate upon command.

If you have spent time reading Kindle Unlimited content, or on writing sites such as Medium or Substack, you have without doubt encountered AI Slop that someone is attempting to pass off as human-written. And if you, like me, don't want to be bothered with investing any time in "faked human" fiction, there are "tells" you can keep an eye out for.

And who better to help flag these sorts of giveaway electronic tics, than one of the "good" AIs?

Talking about Claude.

(First off, shout-out to my friend Xochi for steering me in Claude’s direction. Thanks Xochi! Secondly, and Full disclosure: Anthropic, Claude's parent company is currently putting the finishing touches on a $1.5 billion copy-write infringement settlement with authors whose works were used to help build Anthropic's LLM. A legal action to which I, and damned near every other author I know, are all parties. And boy, do I have big plans for MY coming settlement! All kidding aside, while I don't find Anthropic's attempt to address copy-write concerns raised by the manner in which LLMs have tended to be built perfect, I also don't see the likes of Open AI, Palantir, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, or Meta stepping up to try to reimburse the authors who produced the content they used-without-permission to build their insanely profitable LLMs, either.)

I guess you could say I went to the well. I mentioned one of the most common "tells" I've seen signifying AI writing (the so-called "not because X, but because Y" rhetorical structure) and asked Claude about other common tells.

I find what I got back very much worth sharing:

Yes, I'm familiar with this critique. It's become a recognizable pattern that readers and critics have started flagging as a kind of AI stylistic fingerprint. The core observation is that these constructions share a few telltale qualities:

The corrective reframe — "not because X, but because Y" — artificially dramatizes interiority by presenting a false binary and then resolving it. Human writers tend to trust readers to infer motivation; this construction over-explains while trying to look like depth.

The fragmented "twist" sentence — "She smiled at him: not with kindness. With liberation." — uses punctuation to manufacture a pause that signals profundity. The colon-then-fragment structure tries to replicate the rhythm of a revelation, but it often feels mechanical because it's applied indiscriminately, regardless of whether the moment actually earns that weight.

What both share is a kind of performed literary quality — they're doing the gestures of literary fiction (subverting expectation, revealing inner contradiction) without the organic necessity that makes those moves land in genuinely strong prose. Human writers use these constructions too, but AI tends to reach for them constantly, because they pattern-match to "good writing" in training data without understanding when they're appropriate.

There's also a broader critique underneath this: AI fiction tends to be emotionally explanatory rather than emotionally evocative. It tells you what the feeling means rather than making you feel it. These sentence structures are almost a microcosm of that tendency.

And then Claude went on to elaborate further:

A few other tells that tend to cluster with those patterns, in my observation:

Emotional labeling dressed as showing. "A wave of grief washed over her" or "he felt a complicated mixture of anger and relief." It gestures at complexity while doing the opposite of demonstrating it.

The wisdom-summary sentence. A paragraph of action or dialogue, then a standalone sentence that packages its meaning: "Some wounds, she understood now, never fully closed." These appear constantly and almost always at the end of sections or chapters.

Over-varied dialogue tags. Characters don't just say things — they murmur, breathe, exhale, rasp, offer. Human writers vary tags too, but AI does it with a kind of aggressive consistency that draws attention to itself.

Sensory cataloguing. Descriptions that hit smell, sound, sight, and texture in rapid succession in a way that reads like a checklist rather than a scene.

The reflective gerund opener. "Watching him leave, she realized..." or "Turning away from the window, he wondered..." These appear with suspicious frequency as scene transitions.

Oh yeah, these all seem really familiar, come to think of it!

And of course, there's the most obvious tell of all:

Pulled from a novel published and available on Amazon. Highlights mine.

If you're too lazy to write your own content, I guess it stands to reason that you might well be too lazy to even proof-read what you copy and paste into "your" work-in-progress, right?

C'mon, man. No one wants to see that.

Is it any wonder we're beginning to see "badges" such as this one on fiction offered for sale?

So hey, use AI for what it's good for: organization, systematization, categorization, copy-editing?

And, of course: helping you, as the reader/customer, avoid wasting time/resources on AI Slop attempting to masquerade as "human-written" fiction.

Lastly, see below for what ChaptGPT came up with in response to my prompt requesting a "comprehensive visual image embodying AI Slop."

See you in two weeks!

Don't say I didn't warn you!

Neglected Favorites

 

I was going into the hospital in November, and I thought I’d better pack a good, big book – think Shogun or Lord of the Rings – and Jack Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy popped into my field of view.  As it turned out, I didn’t read it in the hospital, after all, but it was nice to make his acquaintance again just the same, and I’m now about to sink my teeth into an earlier series, The Dying Earth.

Jack Vance is one of those guys I read quite a lot of, in the late 1970’s, and then stopped reading, I don’t remember why.  This probably isn’t unusual, our enthusiasms aren’t consistent.  I went through almost all of Steinbeck, for instance, in my late teens (the only one I left out was A Cup of Gold), but I haven’t picked up any of the books since.  I can go back and read Irwin Shaw’s short stories, or O’Hara’s, and enjoy them – as well as learn something from them – so it isn’t the period or the fashion, just a lack of curiosity.  I admire Steinbeck’s muscularity, and I think he’s an influence on me, so I can’t explain it, not at least to my own satisfaction.  Jack Vance, though, falls into a different category.  It’s not that he isn’t a stylist, he’s a very graceful writer, if not quite as limpid as Ursula Le Guin, say, or Sylvia Townsend Warner, but no mean shakes.  The thing about Vance is that he’s an extraordinarily convincing world-builder; geography, and cosmology, yes, and politics, but language, and food, and music - ritual, in other words.  This is nothing to be sneezed at.  He’s right up there with Philip José Farmer and Philip K. Dick.  My favorite book of Vance’s has always been The Last Castle, an odd, dystopian novella I gave or lent to many other people, some of whom got it, and some of whom didn’t.

(Speaking of Sylvia Townsend Warner, I think Kingdoms of Elfin is one of the most startling and original books I’ve ever read, but I’ve never been able to get more than half a dozen pages into anything else of hers.  It’s a mystery.)

 

Rediscovering, or revisiting, Jack Vance got me thinking about this question of enthusiasms, and maybe it’s exactly that, that we can blow so hot for a writer, that we can’t help but blow cold, at some point.  J.D. Salinger comes to mind.  There’s that famous quote from Isaac Asimov, which I’ve used before.  He was asked, When was the Golden Age of science fiction?  And he said, Fourteen.

It’s true that we can go back to somebody we adored, in our early reading, and be disappointed; it’s also true that we can go back, and be astonished, not only that they can still cast the spell, but that we see things now that we of course missed, then.  Robert Louis Stevenson is one of these.  The opening chapter of Treasure Island is a masterful piece of compression and suspense; but Treasure Island actually begins before the opening lines, it begins with the frontispiece map.  Another example is Dorothy Sayers.  Most of us would have come to her later on, she’s not for kids, but at the same time, most of us would have raced through the books.  If you go back and read The Nine Tailors, or Murder Must Advertise, which has the reputation of a slighter book, but giving them breathing room, taking your time, they present as novels of manners, as much a highly-colored portrait of the years between the wars as Trollope is of the mid-Victorians.  And Sayers casts an unsettling eye forward; her world may seem serene and comfortably hierarchal, but Wimsey is in some ways strikingly modern.  He clearly suffers from shell-shock, PTSD, and Bunter, who was with him in the trenches, is more than a gentleman’s gentleman, he’s a refuge.

I think we sometimes outgrow writers we once liked.  I don’t think it’s disrespectful.  We still harbor a residual affection for them, which is in some ways a melancholy reflection on who we used to be.  I don’t think any the less of Robert Heinlein, for example, I just don’t think he’s readable, any more – at least for me.  (I could give The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress another shot, I guess, but I’m not that tempted to test my own bandwidth.)

It’s refreshing, on the other hand, to find out you can be hooked again by a writer, just as thoroughly as you were the first time.  Here’s an embarrassing story.  I read Jefferson Parker’s Laguna Heat when it first came out, and then the next book, Little Saigon, and I liked both of them a lot.  And then I had the misfortune of watching the TV movie of Laguna Heat.  I’m sorry, but Harry Hamlin, for all that he seems to be a nice guy, is not a very expressive actor, and even with Jason Robards and Rip Torn and Jimmy Gammon – no.  Least said, soonest mended.  But here’s where I mortify myself.  I stopped reading Jeff Parker.  We all know the writer has zero control of what happens when they sell a book to the movies.  Sure, you got Dutch Leonard, or Dennis Lehane, but the rest of us are up shit creek.  You can open the oven door, and the soufflé will fall, but Jeff wasn’t even in the kitchen when it happened.  It took me fifteen years, before I picked up Silent Joe, and realized what I’d been missing.  I can say now, with all humility, I never would have forgiven myself, if I’d missed A Thousand Steps, or worse, The Rescue.  And what about the Charlie Hood books?  There’s always the satisfaction of knowing you can give yourself a second chance. 

Take this as a cautionary tale.  Fashions change.  Our own tastes.  The way a writer looks at the world, or the way we do.  But don’t pass up a good book.  They sneak up on you. 

Sixteen Lives

Launched in 2017, BCMM
lasted 16 issues.

Black Cat Mystery Magazine—not to be confused with Black Cat Weekly, though it often is—lasted sixteen issues, the final issue releasing September 16, 2025. I had hoped to convince the publisher to continue through issue eighteen, so I held onto the stories already accepted for issues seventeen and eighteen far longer than I should have, not notifying the writers of the magazine’s demise until early February of this year.

My excuse for the delay, lame as it is: I was unable to accept the magazine’s demise, especially during fall 2025 when so many other publishers and publications had announced closure, hiatus, restructuring, new ownership, and other negative news. The market for short crime fiction was collapsing and I didn’t want to share one more bit of bad news in the midst of the shit-storm.

UNOFFICIAL HISTORY

Perhaps someday someone will write the official history of Black Cat Mystery Magazine but, as someone associated with every issue of the magazine, I can share some unofficial history.

I first heard about the impending launch of Black Cat Mystery Magazine when another writer shared inside information mid-2017. I contacted the publisher for more information and was invited to submit. Carla Coupe and John Betancourt were co-editors and they accepted my stories for the first six issues.

After the fourth issue, Carla announced her retirement from the magazine (she didn’t stay retired; she now edits Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine and co-edits, with John and me, Malice Domestic’s annual anthology), and I joined the editorial staff. I co-edited issue five with Carla and John and became the sole editor with issue six.

Many of the stories selected for issues five and six—including mine—were acquired by Carla and John, so my influence over the content didn’t take full effect until issue seven, the special private eye issue.

While the magazine was—much like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—open to all sub-genres of crime fiction, we produced two-more themed issues. Issue twelve was the cozy issue and issue sixteen was the historical issue.

I believe the content of the first issue was solicited, but I’m uncertain how Carla and John found the content for the next few issues. While John selected the classic reprints each issue, I acquired the original content for the issues I edited via open submission calls.

And that lead to the situation mentioned earlier. From the hundreds of stories submitted, I accepted more than I could publish in a reasonable amount of time given the magazine’s publication schedule.

BCMM's final issue was
published in 2025.

LEGACY

Though BCMM lasted only sixteen issues, it published many great stories, including several that were recognized by awards and best-of-year inclusions:

“Rhonda and Clyde” by John M. Floyd (issue 5) was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2020.

“Blest Be the Tie That Binds” by Michael Bracken (issue 6) was selected for inclusion in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 and was named one of the Other Distinguished Mystery and Suspense stories by The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021.

“Mustang Sally” by John M. Floyd (issue 7) received a Shamus Award.

“Show and Zeller” by Gordon Linzner (issue 7) was short-listed for a Shamus Award.

“The White Calf and the Wind” by Mike Adamson (issue 11) was short-listed for a Derringer Award and was included in the Honor Roll for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023.

“Real Courage” by Barb Goffman (issue 14) was nominated for Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards.

“El Paso Heat” by Peter W.J. Hayes (issue 14) was selected for inclusion in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024.

SUPPORT 

While I am dismayed at the loss of Black Cat Mystery Magazine as an ongoing publication, all back issues are still available from the publisher and at various online booksellers. If you didn’t purchase copies when they were first published, you can certainly purchase them now.

Additionally, there are several crime fiction magazines still publishing and a few new ones have recently launched. So, while you’re picking up back issues of BCMM, spend a few dollars supporting the remaining and new publications. Your support helps ensure their continued success.

* * *

“Store-Crossed Lovers” was published February 4, 2026, in Cold Caller.

“Takes the Cake” was published February 5, 2026, in Micromance.

* * *

I’ll be at Left Coast Crime later this week and will be joining the “Short But Usually Not Sweet” panel at noon Thursday in the Seacliff CD room with Tom Andes, Vera Chan, and David Hagerty. Brian Shea will moderate.

* * *

ShortCon, the Premier Conference for Writers of Short Crime Fiction, returns to Alexandria, Virginia, on June 6. Join acclaimed crime fiction professions for an immersive one-day event and learn how to write short crime fiction, get your stories published, and develop and sustain a long-term career writing short. Session leaders include Gary Phillips, Art Taylor, and Michele Slung. Learn more and register at https://www.eastcoastcrime.com/#/.

* * *

Spend four weeks in South Carolina this summer learning to write crime fiction from some of today’s masters: Joe R. Lansdale, Cheryl Head, Michael Bracken, and Warren S. Moore. The Newberry Crime Writing Workshop is an intensive, in-person, one-month workshop focusing on fundamentals particular to the writing of crime, mystery, and suspense fiction. It takes place July 6-31, on the historic campus of Newberry College, in Newberry, South Carolina.

A different professional writer or editor conducts the workshop each week. About fifteen participants are housed in college apartments, and classes are held in seminar facilities. Lunch and dinner are provided and continental breakfasts with coffee will also be available. The writers-in-residence live nearby and are continuously available to students. Mornings are devoted to critiquing manuscripts in a workshop setting. Afternoons, evenings, and weekends are devoted to individual writing, conferences with the current writer-in-residence, social activities, and the completion of class assignments.

Learn more and apply at https://www.newberry.edu/academics/academic-experience/crime-writing-workshop.

Baby you can drive my car.

          According to the calendar, this post will appear on February 23^rd, so maybe by then the blizzard we lived through in the Northeast in late January will be a distant memory.  But while it’s still fresh, I’m here to sing the praises of my car, which handily conveyed us throughout the worst of the storm.  It’s a 2023 Subaru Outback, with the turbo 2.4 liter engine, and I’m not being paid to say so.

Indomitable Subaru Outback

            My father was a mechanical engineer, and for him breathing was the only thing more important than his cars (family, country and school ties came after that, though I’m not sure in what order). I’m a creature of suburbia, having lived in city apartments only three and a half years out of a long life.  This means cars have also been a full extension of my being, as necessary to survival as arms and legs.   I don’t remember learning how to drive, because this was just something we did from the moment we could see above the dashboard.  Acquiring a divers license was a simple formality easily accomplished on one's sixteenth birthday.

            The world will be better off when self-driving, electric cars take over, but for some of us, car guys, something will be lost.   

            If you’re looking for relevance to a blog focused on crime writing, I’ll refer you to Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe, who spend a lot of time driving their mid-century jalopies all over California, or a great fresh talent, Shawn Cosby, whose hotrods live at the center of the action.  My main protagonist owns a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix, an impossibly enormous and powerful hunk of Detroit Iron he drives for no other reason than it belonged to his dead father.  One of our legendary mystery writers said that a detective’s work mostly entails driving around in cars and interviewing people.  I can’t remember which one, but the conclusion is inescapable.  A lot of mysteries involve wearing out shoe leather, but the vast majority require a drivers license and the willingness to test local traffic laws.

            In life as in fiction, cars are a means to an end, but the journey can be just as important.  Odysseus had to make do with creaky ships, cowboys and knights errant had their horses, but we’re lucky these days to slip behind the wheel of a stupidly wasteful device that, appropriately powered, thrusts us back into the seat and hurtles us over macadam with heedless intent.    

1965 Chelsea Grey MGB

            A few weeks after graduating from college, a friend and I got in my '65 MG and drove from Pennsylvania to California on a circuitous route that covered about half the lower 48.  We weren’t trying to mimic Jack Kerouac, or Martin Milner and George Maharis, we just felt like doing it.  Since road trips and narratives are inextricable, this was a tidy novel of experience that defies calculation.  I recommend it for all young people, though I’d use something a little more cushy and commodious than an MGB. 

            We know rationally that cars are not living beings, but the ones of my youth were animated when christened with names.  An abbreviated list includes Alice Blue, Dudley, The Silver Goose, The Blue Max, Vinnie, Ford Maddox Ford Ford, El Clunko, Vance and Jeanne la putain. I had one of the first Accords that I named Jane Fonda the Honda, and whenever my toddler son climbed into his car seat he would say, ‘’Hi Janie!’’. 

We maintained those cars mostly ourselves, spending lots of time under the hood and chassis, on creepers with grease on our hands and drips in our eyes.  So maybe intimacy with their inner workings created a bond impossible today, cars being black-box computers on wheels only knowable to high tech diagnostics.  That’s true of my Subaru, though its

Brake job on The Silver Goose

personality still leaks through the circuitry and into my subconscious.  The basics prevail.  It’s an internal combustion vehicle with pedals and a steering wheel, and it goes where I point it and apply thrust.  And most importantly, responds to the little turns and twitches of my fingers and the instantaneous judgements of my eyes and reptilian brain. 

James Taylor said it best:

Now when I die
I don't want no coffin
Thought 'bout it all too often
Just strap me in behind the wheel
And bury me with my automobile