A DIFFERENT KIND OF AFTER HOURS: ADVOCATE CHRIST HOSPITAL, YESTERDAY

25 YEARS AGO, MAIL TO WILLIAM J. RALEY, PUBLISHER OF AFTER HOURS

I really have been meaning to post these for awhile. I appeared in one of the best of the not-quite-large press magazines of the last two decades of the last century, AFTER HOURS, which ran for a very impressive 25 issues. Photos, interviews, great stories. After there being a Best of CEMETERY DANCE and Best of DEATHREALM, and with a Best of THE SCREAM FACTORY coming soon, I think a Best of AFTER HOURS is needed (perhaps the only other magazine that should also consider this would be Paul Dale Anderson, who published 2AM with his late wife Gretta.)

Anyhow, I thank William for allowing me to repost what had been a private letter. Think of a time with no emails. I typed my stories on a word processor and, as seen in the second image, I'd love to click the wheel and have everything be one or two keys on the keyboard off. You see, if you had a Smith-Corona word processor, you typed the entire page and then click print and everything would clack out. Very 90s. This wasn't too long after I was free of the bonds from the March 1989 car accident and was always showing off the one scar (out of two) on my left arm I could photocopy, and all the broken pieces of hardware inside that arm.

Enjoy the letter in the sense of perhaps overhearing two guys jabbering in a hallway at  a convention, and maybe decipher the second page. I'd guess everything is one letter off, so good luck with that. I guess the one good thing about a personal website that hardly anybody sees is that I can put up images that are even better than just scanning them into my computer. My thanks again to William.

THE MOTHERSHIP

My house would be behind the tree in the photo with the picket fence

WAYNE AT 59, BORN IN 59

I'm finally looking more like the alien in the OUTER LIMITS episode "The Bellaro Shield".

I'VE NEVER POSTED ABOUT MY BIRTHDAY BEFORE...

Tl;dr: skip to the hatchet lady killing people in Hollywood. Or the killer in Milwaukee. Or how to send away for a Confederate hat.

Gifts in the mail. Mysteries waiting to be opened. I always say that I care little about the day of my birth, I'm stuck here and can't do jack about it. I'll post the photos. Magazines from 1959--and I'm 59 today, how the hell could I have outlived Burt Reynolds?--are from Chris and Lenore Lohnes and the books were sent from my friend Amazon Warehouse Lexington. I don't doubt some hipster family names their new kid that one day. Poor slob. But those books came in late August, care of my good friend Wendi Tibbets and her Cubs fan husband Dan. I told Wendi I was waiting until my birthday, considering the closeness in dates and the fact that I was really letting mail just pile up because its been in the 80s and 90s here since forever.

Oh, and I bought myself my dream rug. And a collection of all of The Red Bee stories in print. I'm just doing this this one time. Hopefully this will all be over with soon. Maybe I'll post the photos out of order, just go with it. Oh, and Wendi and Dan have the skull of a coyote hanging in their yard as a pinata.

MONUMENTS: MY FATHER'S CABINET AS IT STAYS FOUR YEARS LATER

THE TEAM-UP NO ONE SAW COMING

Thanks to Mike Olsen for this. Gordon Van Gelder thought it proper to ask where Moe was in the photo. Now we need a shot of Gacy and we are set.

THE SEPTEMBER OF THE FOLLOWING YEAR...

I was doing a reading at UIC as part of Brendan Detzner's BAD GRAMMAR THEATER, it was the middle of the month because Labor Day weekend throws everybody off. It had rained earlier in the evening and so there was fog. I walked from Halsted to State, over the Amtrak trains underneath Roosevelt Road. So this is my Thinking of Dad photo for the year.