High Weirdness
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t." (The Heights of Weird Part 2)
In my last post I wrote about how my failed book project was actually a sequel to my first book China Lake, and how the tie between the two is really, really weird.
Weird, that is, the original sense of the word, as in tied to fate, destiny, unseen forces (wyrd, wayward, Weird). Indeed, it was through the fate-spinning witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “the three Wyrd Sisters,” as the scholar Erik Davis points out in his brilliant opus High Weirdness, that the word first wandered into popular use.
“The weird that enters modern English, then, suggests both the esoteric knowledge of causal necessity and [in its connection to wayward] the perverse turn away from natural law.”
So how exactly was the book about the nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Lab in Los Angeles related to the first book, China Lake? How is it a sequel? What ties the two? And why is it so weird?
For years now this is something I’ve been avoiding writing or talking about for fear not so much of the death threats, which were real, but more so appearing paranoid, courting ridicule, and perhaps, something more nameless. . .
As I proceed in the coming weeks, please bear in mind that all this is true. While I often joke here, the basic facts are nearly always accurate, and in this particular case they’re all true.
My hope is that in looking back on my wayward path, the fates might show me the way forward.
The coming post, “Scratching the Surface,” will mark the third in a series I’ll call The Heights of Weird. I plan to follow the posts with a podcast mini-series similar to what I did with the luxury wellness grocer, Erewhon.
If you haven’t done so yet, do scope out the podcast series, Expanding Erewhonian Nightmare. I appreciate the abundance of positive feedback I received on those episodes. They were fun to create and didn’t take very long.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, rate the trash, share it, and. . .
Sounds interesting, but could you clarify, when you said your former friends were raving about the podcasts. Were they former, before, or after having listened?