A Haiku By Outsider Poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg For National Poetry Month

A haiku for day 13 of National Poetry Month from Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is an outsider poet and independent publisher from Rockford, Illinois, who has been writing poetry for more than four decades. His first collection, Concave Buddha, appeared in 1991. He later founded Zombie Logic Press, publishing poetry and other work outside the traditional literary establishment, and created Zombie Logic Review. Vaultonburg’s poetry ranges from longer surreal and narrative work to the haiku and short poems that have increasingly occupied him in recent years. His work is marked by dark humor, mortality, animals, abandoned places, ordinary Midwestern landscapes, and an affection for the strange things people usually walk past without noticing. He lives in Rockford, where much of his writing begins simply by going outside and paying attention.

Effort

at the end of the
instruction manual, a 
diagram of hands. 

How To Deal With Fantasy Football Withdrawals

For sports fans, specifically fantasy football fans, late February and early March are the worst time of year. The Super Bowl has just ended, baseball season is still weeks away, and not even March Madness can take ones mind off the fact that it's still an eternity until your fantasy football draft, or even a real mock draft.

Perhaps The Fantasy Football Folio can help you with your doldrums. There's always something happening related to fantasy football, from Joe Flacco signing the richest contract in NFL history with the Ravens to Kenny Britt doing what he does best when he's not on a football field, The Fantasy Football Folio will bring you articles about the latest in free agency, the NFL draft, drug busts, murdered girlfriends, and players who just don't care anymore.

If you want to become a fantasy football champion like this dude apparently is, get over to Fantasy Football Folio today.

Even In Baator The Trains Must Run

A good friend of mine today asserted if life were a game of Dungeons and Dragons most people would be Lawful Evil in alignment. I have always agreed with the evil part, but found the lawful part troublesome.

But upon further review in the model used in Hell with Arch Dukes who all have dominion over different levels of Hell but are answerable to one Lord, Asmodeus.

When I started to think of it, though, it made sense, because most people knuckle under to authority and seek to oppress those beneath them. They obey the rules slavishly because they fear punishment and because they receive just enough compensation to keep them in order. They don't make the rules, but they do obey them. 

I tried to fit my own personality and moral code into the dungeons and dragons mythos but couldn't decide what alignment I would be. The only one I know I'm not is neutral, but it's also possible in the wide sweep all my various character flaws and quirks balance each other out and make me neutral after all.

Knock Knock. Who's there? Satan. Satan who? 

Dr. Henry Wolfsburg and The Hall of Bad Dudes

Dr. Henry Wolfsburg is the curator of the Hall of Bad Dudes. A doctor of anthropology and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Wolfsburg is an expert on bad behavior and how different cultures define and deal with it. The Hall is his online archive of people various societies have defined "bad dudes." The first class of inductees includes popes, athletes, illustrators, and porn stars. 

Thomas L. Vaultonburg of Zombie Logic Press interviewed Dr. Wolfsburg and learned in the future the Hall will induct men, women, animals, robots, animated characters etc. as the definition of a bad dude is not limited to gender. 

Dr. Henry Wolfsburg, curator of The Hall of Bad Dudes, has written twenty-five books on the topic of cultural relativism. So, who does Dr. Wolfsburg consider to be the worst dude of all time?


Worst bad dude of all time

Pope On a Rope

I don't have any real thoughts on the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI. If you want some in depth history of bad popes go to The Hall of Bad Dudes. I just wanted to do an image search of Pope on a Rope and see what came up. I expected to see this...

I'd be proud to scrub my taint with such a fine soap. But there was more than just literal pope on a rope. For instance...

Now this is the kind of pope on a rope I hadn't expected. I'm not sure how many popes were hanged historically. The most common method I saw was the old Sam Cooke treatment where a man burst in while the Pope was diddlin' his wife/daughter/son/dog/sheep/moist pile of feces and beat the pope's brains out. This literally happened more than a few times. Apparently security was lax at the Vatican back in the old days.

Maybe the next pope will say "yes." Many have before.

The TAC-15 Crossbow Is THE Weapon For Serious Zombie Hunters

If you're serious about zombie hunting the TAC-15 Crossbow is for you. Sure, if you're serious about zombie hunting you're budget is probably limited to a snack-sized bag of Cheetohs and something purple colored out of the cooler at the corner Gas N Sip, but you can dream. 

Let's face it, you're never going to have one of these, but if you did it would be pretty awesome. It mounts on an AR-15. For fans of egregious overkill. Like that last fragment of a sentence. Here's the problem with a fine piece of weaponry like this.

Once you show Bub how to use it, that's your ass. Or as Peter said in Dawn of the Dead, the only person who could miss with a weapon this fine is the sucker with the bread to buy it. So, dream on, zombie hunters of America. If you have a crossbow lifestyle on a slingshot budget maybe you can get one the old-fashioned way (whatever that is). 

You never aim a gun at anyone. Scary, isn't it? Isn't it?

Tim Russert's Thrombosis

This painting is titled Tim Russert's Thrombosis.

Catfish Hunter and Why They Called Him Catfish

Catfish Hunter is a Hall of Fame pitcher who hurled for the A's and the Yankees, compiling 224 wins against 166 losses, with with 2,012 strike outs and a career 3.26 ERA. Good numbers. Really good numbers. If he'd compiled those numbers ten or twenty years later it's unlikely today's Hall of Fame voters would have voted him in, but that's not this blog is about.

Every city seems to have a few men named Catfish. We have three Catfish here. And they always seem to be a Doctor John blues harmonica holdover from the days of hobos. I proposed at one time there should be a law enacted limiting each municipality to only one Catfish. Seems like one of these should be sufficient.

But James Augustus Hunter doesn't seem to fit the profile of the shambling blues man who always seems to spontaneously appear whenever there's benefit for some age-old veteran of the music scene who has passed on. So, how did Jim Hunter get the nickname Catfish?

he doesn't look very catfishy here as a young pitcher with the Oakland A's, though it's clear he self-identified himself as a Catfish by his signature.

However by 1979 he did start to resemble a catfish. Maybe it's akin to the phenomenon where pet owners start to look like their pets. Maybe people start to look like their nicknames. But what's the real story?

The story behind this nickname is quite simple. Oakland A's owner Charlie Finley made it up out of whole cloth because he thought his young pitcher needed a catchy nickname. There was also a story that he was given the nickname when he caught a large fish as a small boy, but the truth is the nickname has no meaning at all. There you have it. 

Chester Marcol Is No Beasley Reece

I remember a Packers/Bears football game from when I was about ten. I know we were watching this game. The Bears were winning. The game was tie after regulation. 6-6. They went into sudden death overtime and the Packers were going to try a field goal. But Alan Page blocked the field goal and one of the wierdest dudes I remember grabbed the ball and ran into the end zone for a Packers' victory. This dude.

Chester Marcol. I remember him looking even stranger and more improbably than this as he ran towards the end zone. I remember it looking a little more like this...

Now that's what I remember. One of the goofiest things I ever saw.  The Packers lost Saturday to  Colin Kaepernick and the 49ers. But by a good old fashioned butt whoopin' not some goofy touchdown scored by a guy who looks like a chemistry teacher.

Does Google Even Know You Exist

Do you own your name? What I mean is if you were to enter your name into Google would you be the first entry? I wonder what percentage of people on the planet are first in the search rankings for their own name. I am. Because I have an unusual name. I can go on for pages and pages before I even see a search entry not related to me. My father with the same name, no search entries at all.

Does he therefore not exist?

In the future will he exist less for his lack of being recognized by Google?

I have to admit part of my life is dedicated to making myself relevant to Google. It has become one of the manias of modern culture. If Google doesn't know you then you don't exist. 

Now Google will tell you the best way to get them to recognize and verify your existence is to do something good. But is that true?

I don't see that Google makes any real determination between good and bad when deciding who is and isn't extant. I don't see that Google makes any real determination between what is good and what is bad in terms of quality either. 

And that's one of the things I love about creating for the search engines. They simply couldn't care any less if you're the best person in the world or the worst. 

These are the Wild West days of the internet. Or perhaps the Wild West days have passed, but either way we're witnessing the infancy of the most incredible exchange of information in history.

And at the center of that advance is a corporation that seems to have no concern if their platform is being used for good, evil, or any other agenda.

I like that. It allows the rest of us to make we will of the internet. The internet has become and should be a reflection of who we are as a culture. 

I believe it is. This is who we are. 

And I like it.

Rescue Time estimated this Google logo cost America 4.82 million man hours. Obviously Rescue Time doesn't know  the American worker very well.

Rockford CSI

I find the current mania for shows where brilliant mentalists use their powers of observation to solve crimes and use all kinds of groovy gadgets to dissect crime scenes and eviscerate criminals until they confess. I find it interesting because the amount of murders that are solved and someone convicted has fallen steadily since the 1960's. Maybe the rash of shows is just wish fulfillment. People wish someone was smart enough to know what was going on and cared enough about their job to actually investigate when things went wrong.

Rockford CSI

An ant crawled 

Into the bottle of Grolsch 

I left on the counter last night 

And drowned like an American 

Tourist in a Dutch brothel. 

I notified the Coroner’s Office 

And they have deemed it 

Death by misadventure 

Though no one is sure 

Who to notify. 

Demented Children's Story Hour

In the early 90's I wrote several books. As soon as I wrote enough poems for a book someone wanted to publish it. It was nearing the end of the Small Press era in American publishing and approaching the digital age where anyone could publish a book with very little effort. But in the early 90's it was still somewhat of an effort and a minor accomplishment if someone wanted to go to the effort to publish something you had written. I had forgotten about many of these books until the whole business about the Mayan Doomsday prophesy reminded me I had written a book of poems titled Poems At the End of the World. I don't think any of the poems had anything to do with the end of the world. Maybe they did, I don't have a copy and I can't remember. 

Then I started finding other books I had written in the databases of University libraries. Another book I had written was titled Demented Children's Story Hour. Published in the New Sins chapbook series with other poets like Glenn Sheldon I wonder what poems are in that book. 

Here I am at the beer can house in Houston.

Nesby Glasgow Where Did You Go

Perhaps my favorite name in NFL history is Nesby Glasgow. Even before the Tongan and American Samoan players made every name an adventure and every NFL announcer a stuttering fool, there was Nesby Glasgow. A name I find on par with the great names of all time like William Makepeace Thackery. 

Nesby Glasgow played fourteen seasons in the NFL for  the Baltimore/Indianapolis Colts and Seattle Seahawks, intercepting 14 passes. Thank you Nesby Glasgow. 

The Wrangler Rhino, For Kids

If you live in Australia, and you can find him, you may be able to hire...

The Wrangler Rhino. (For eighty dollars a day)

But if not, get your child the next best thing...

The Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company

The Rhino's First Appearance In Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man #41. First appearance of The Rhino. Who is he? Why does he suddenly appear and have it out for JJ Jameson's astronaut son?  What are his powers? Who is he working for? None of this is explained in #41, but an eternally beloved villain was born. 

Charge!!!!!

I just finished my first children's book, The Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company. You can order it now

Ratatosk the Zombie Squirrel

It's hard to believe that circa 2000, when I created a website for Zombie Logic Press for the first time, when Google first started indexing websites I was on the top page for the search term "zombie." Twelve years later I can't seem to even break into the first 100 pages. It's simultaneously exhilerating and sad to see a genre you love take the culture by storm, but then feel you're not even a part of it anymore. Such it is with all acts of creativity and movements. By the time the public knows about it, the people who created it are on to something else, and probably even something else after that. This is Ratatosk, a zombie squirrel me and Jenny Mathews created a while ago. Zombie bananas, zombie squirrels, zombie zombie zombies. They're everywhere. 

see more Ratatosk here

Wooly Bully

     Not every poem spins off the assembly line blemish free. Sometimes a poem just never assumes the form you had imagined for it. There are numerous reasons why a poem fails. Trying to do too much, starting with a weak inspiration, failing to concentrate and capitalize on the original dose of creative inspiration, writing just for the sake of writing instead of waiting for the force of the Muse's call. This poem started with a really good and interesting idea. I heard an NPR story about a Wooly Mammoth who was moved from a position where its backside was the first thing visitors saw when they entered the museum in Ohio to a more forward facing position. Everything about that scenario seemed to make for a clever poem, but then I started to write. In this case the poetic failing was probably a combination of just writing to write and trying to expand what is really more of just an idea into a poem. I still like the idea as the basis for a poem and it wouldn't surprise me if any of the 1000 or so poets in the world capable of writing a poem that would be included in the The Best American Poetry anthology does so, but it won't be me. 


Wooly Bully

But what better way to enter this
Chamber of antiquity but ass-backwards,
Inviting the citizenry of Ohio to come on,
Take a look around, buy a souvenir
Made of cheap plastic?

Soon, disassembled and reassembled
Bone by bone, Conway the Mastadon
Will make the 10,000 year turn to the East
And greet visitors to the Ohio Historical Society
Face to face.

Forcing the sentimental amongst us to long
For the olden days when history was still
Showing us its wooly ass.


How To Beat The Claw Machine

The Zombie Logic Bookshelf

     This Tuesday my fourth book arrived at my doorstep. Which surprised me more than anything because I live in a security building and it's been like pulling a jackal's teeth trying to get anything delivered these past three years. But I opened my apartment door Tuesday and saw two boxes sitting there. 104 copies of my fourth book, Submerged Structure.


     Probably the most satisfying aspect of uncrating the books, aside from the relief of bringing the creative process to a final fruit, was putting seventeen copies of the new book on the top shelf of my bookshelf of happiness alongside copies of my other three books. I know it is seventeen copies because I just went and counted. 


     Before I describe the other contents of the bookshelf of happiness, I want to say something about the bookshelf of happiness itself. It's black. Very ramshackle. I know it's ramshackle because I assembled it. Upon first standing it up I doubted it would ever bear the weight of even a slim volume of my poetry, let alone five shelves of assorted keepsakes. But it does. I didn't want the black one because i have two others that are walnut colored and black was a compromise. 


     On the top of even the top shelf of the bookshelf of happiness are three paintings by my friend and  fellow Leaders of Something Horrible Member, Jesus Correa. The first painting, and the last one I procured, has professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper asking "You wanna banana? Have a banana," the second painting has various skeletal characters in different scenes during The Day of the Dead, and the third has creatures too surreal to describe in a hellish scene. This artwork makes me all kinds of happy for multiple reasons. The primary reason being Jesus Correa is an enormously talented and unique artist who is one of a kind. Also, having his work in my apartment, and on my bookshelf of happiness, reminds me how I have overcome the ravages of hard times and both a crippling personality and mood disorder in order to have this space and time to collect such magnificent objects around me. In the past I've lost all of the things that were important to me several times. 


     On the top shelf are my four books. My first book was written when i was a teenager and published by The Press of the Third Mind in 1991. For over a decade I hadn't gotten one out, but when Submerged Structure arrived Tuesday I decided to get them out storage and put them on the shelf, too. I decided to put seven copies on the shelf and leave the other seven in a box for safe keeping. I say safe keeping mostly because the book's only real value is as a proof that i once existed and wrote those poems. 


     To the immediate right of those seven copies of my first book, which I neglected to tell you was titled Concave Buddha and Other Public Dis-Service Announcements, are 79 copies of my second book, titled Detached Retinas. I will now tell you both why it is entitled Detached Retinas and why there are 79 copies. There are 79 copies of the book on the shelf because this June the roof of the building I live in was being repaired and the roofing crew decided not to cover the roof with a tarp or listen to the weather reports and a storm that developed suddenly dropped hundreds of gallons of water into my apartment, including the closet where most of my treasured keepsakes were stored. The deluge further diminished the amount of items I cherish that are still in existence, including several copies of Concave Buddha, a poster my friend Tim Stotz had given me of a Giant woman, the only picture of my mom that I had left, and a crate of Detached Retinas. By the time I pulled everything out, another significant portion of my past had been destroyed, this time while I was right next to it. Anyway, I saved as many of the least water damaged copies of Detached Retinas as I could and later they were the first item to be archived on the bookshelf of happiness.


     Immediately to the right of the 79 copies of Detached retinas are 17 copies of my third book, Flesh Wounds. It's a good book of poetry and a damned honest accounting of a lot of wasted years spent in the service industry, but not one of my favorite things to read. You may feel differently. And to the right of that are the aforementioned 17 copies of Submerged Structure, a book titled for my Scizoid Personality Disorder. 


     I should tell you I make a point to make the title and my name on the of each book a different color. I decided fifteen years ago to do this, anticipating a day when they stood side by side like a rainbow. yellow, white, green and orange so far. The next book will have the title and my name in red. But let me tell you why the second book's spine is white. Because it was cheaper. I had mistakenly received a very high limit credit card in the mail that summer, well maybe it wasn't a mistake as much as a godsend, and I could have gone with the more expensive four color separation, but the artist I wanted to create the cover decided to give up art and join the Navy, so in frustration I drew a stick figure drawing at the last second and told the printer to reverse it so it would appear in white against the black cover. It's poorly done but once I decide a thing is getting done it gets done.


     Shelf two down from the top contains two items. The first is a framed printing of fifteen renditions of the logo for my literary press, Zombie Logic Press, designed by my co-creator, Jenny Mathews. They are in all different colors. The first thing I can say about this is that I knew what this logo would look like when I was twelve years old, but it never came to be until 27 years later when Jenny created it. And it looked exactly like what i knew it would when i was twelve. Let me say additionally that as far as I know I was the first person on this planet Earth to use the term "zombie logic" and certainly the first person to have any entity named Zombie Logic anything. I say this because of the many things I've lost, one of them is the domain name, zombielogic, which someone snatched after I couldn't afford to renew it during one of the hard times. To the right of the logo is a painting by artist Jenny Mathews of the Midway theater, which I can see from my window. It is the theater in Rockford, Illinois, that the city decided not to restore. I may or may not have ever seen a movie like Race For Your Life Charlie Brown there. The only person who could answer that question is gone.


     A shelf down from that are the VCR tapes I continue to keep even though I no longer have a VCR. Some have been played dozens of times and remind me of the years when scouring the aisles of a video store looking at the same tapes over and over hoping to see something new were a diversion from hour upon hour of studying developmental psychology. Some of these are the very same tapes I had rented many, many times over many years and was able to buy when all the video stores went out of business. The one tape I wanted very badly and couldn't get was the copy of Zombiethon that went from a local store named Dollar Video to a national chain called dollar video, and it was the same tape and I know because it had a label on it from Power Video. I was lucky enough to get a copy of revenge of the Dead I'd been renting for twenty years and copies of the two Dark Shadows movies. 


     Below that are just books. The most recent books I have purchased on Ebay. These are interesting because I've found a site where I buy ex-library books auctioned off to raise funds for the libraries that are still open in America. One of these that I'll single out is The New Oxford Book of American Verse. It's a book they had at the Byron Public Library and was most likely the first anthology of poetry I had ever read. I was very happy to find it and put it on my shelf. Also on the shelf are several anthologies that are titled things like best young and best best and best whatever anthologies. Although I'm not in any of these and most likely never will be I like to read them to see what other people think is.


   Now, the bottom shelf. And appreciate this. A man who has lost everything more than a few times showing this kind of trust in fate to assemble such a thing believing he will never lose what he has again... a complete first edition, first printing of all the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons player's manuals. Even when I was fourteen I was many years away from having anything like first printings. The Player's Manual itself took two years to locate, and that pouring over Ebay nightly and searching out every rare and specialty bookseller who dealt in RPG manuals. Nothing. No sight of a true first printing for two years. Then one night I'm doing the same search I did almost night, more out of habit at that point than expecting to find anything, and there it was. I had to decide fast. A true first printing has only a minor difference that distinguished it from a first printing, so I decided to just buy it. And it's on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf of happiness, and is the only one I know of anywhere.


     That's it. The contents of the bookshelf of happiness. On the side of the bookshelf I have posted the results for the last two years of my fantasy football team. I'd have taken a picture but i wanted to write down all the things I have.

Jan. 25, 2013 update: It just keeps getting better and better. I've had to add a third bookshelf to contain the bounty. Here's what it looks like now...

In the background you can see the Zombie Logic Press Christmas tree that  Bombadee  sent me.