Steven E. Wedel

Dark, soulful tales that haunt long after the last page.

Not much to say


No, there was no blog entry yesterday. There almost was, but I deleted it. It isn’t time to say that yet.

Today we learn whether or not my wife will continue to have a job. The company that has taken over the one she worked for seems … odd. They’ve been asking some really weird — and probably not totally legal — questions as they interview the acquired employees. And the benefits aren’t as good as what she had. Wouldn’t it be grand if she also lost her job? We could become a welfare family, get some pit bulls and deal meth out of our kids’ bedrooms. Wooo-eeee. That’s some Okie livin’, folks.

I had to take some of my part-time job work home with me yesterday. I spent four hours working on a newsletter. My eyes were burning and my head was throbbing before I closed the file. The “extra” money I made working at home will be deducted from my whopping unemployment check (that’s “pogey” to you Canadians), so I won’t actually see any additional money for my efforts. How much did I make for working at home for four hours? Let’s just say I have a friend who does Web design from home and her hourly rate is the same as what I earned in those four hours.

As you may have guessed from my brimming optimism, I haven’t heard squat back about the PR job I interviewed for last Friday. The one high school journalism teaching job I’d found posted has been filled, so there’s nothing good on that front, either.

And there sure isn’t any good news to report on the fiction writing.

But, not to end on a down note, here are a couple of movie reviews. Last weekend we watched two bootleg DVDs I picked up at Horrorfind. These are both flicks I hadn’t seen since the 1980s, but had fond memories of watching them the first time around. The first was Rawhead Rex, based on a story by Clive Barker, who also wrote the screenplay. It didn’t hold up. I remember it being pretty cheesey, but fun. Well, it was cheesey, but not so much fun. Even the baptism scene wasn’t what I remembered; I guess I was remembering it the way I pictured it when I read the story. The monster mask was even worse than I remembered, and the rest of the monster outfit looked like something Blackie Lawless might have worn on stage at some point.

The other was The Dark Night of the Scarecrow and it held up quite well. It was made for TV in 1981 and is a pretty quiet little horror movie about four rednecks who kill a retarded man they suspect of assaulting a little girl. Bubba is dead, but is he really gone? It was fun to watch again, and I found I remembered a lot more of it than I expected to. The screenplay to this one was written by Frank DeFelitta, author of The Entity, so it wasn’t surprising it held up so well over the years. No CGI at all. No gore. Really, no special effects of any kind. Just a good story well told and filmed on a small budget. Too bad Hollywood can’t learn from that and quit churning out CGI-filled crap remakes like The Fog. (No, I haven’t seen it and have no intention of seeing it.)

Steven E. Wedel

13 responses to “Not much to say”

  1. brotherrabbit Avatar
    brotherrabbit

    Wow, Dark Night of the Scarecrow! I totally forgot about that movie. I think I saw it once, when I was little, and it scared me green.

    Reply
    1. sewedel Avatar
      sewedel

      It’s really a good movie. By far the best scarecrow movie I’ve seen.

      Reply
  2. nick_kaufmann Avatar
    nick_kaufmann

    Rawhead Rex was a big disappointment.

    Reply
    1. sewedel Avatar
      sewedel

      Yup. I’d completely forgotten about the eyes of the mask … swirling to hypnotize the cop. What crap! And the baptism scene! I remembered the priest bathing in a heavy stream of piss and the shot being pretty close. I couldn’t even really tell what was going on in that scene this time.

      Reply
  3. badronald Avatar
    badronald

    Steve,
    I hope all works out for your wife’s job. Sorry to hear about the part-time job woes. I’ll send some good thoughts your way.

    Reply
    1. sewedel Avatar
      sewedel

      Thanks, man. It’s certainly been an odd year.

      Reply
      1. badronald Avatar
        badronald

        I can certainly relate to that. While I still have my job, it’s changed so much, some days I awake with a sense of dread about it. It’s not fun anymore, which used to be all I had to look forward to.
        Keep your chin up, Steve. I’m rooting for both you and your wife.

        Reply
  4. eugie Avatar
    eugie

    Steve, I just tried to send you an email (in response to your email) and it bounced back to me with a “The user does not accept email in non-Western (non-Latin) character sets” error. Since, as far as I know, all of my emails only contain Western character sets–those being the only ones I can write in–I’m not sure what’s going on. Is there another email address I can write to you at?

    Reply
    1. sewedel Avatar
      sewedel

      That’s odd. Try me at stevewedel(at)sbcglobal.net. And thanks!

      Reply
  5. shawn_scarber Avatar
    shawn_scarber

    Man, I’m surprised you can get any fiction writing done at all. When I was out of work, after that whole little dotcom incident, I moped around the house doing nothing but badgering recruiters and emailing resumes. Anytime I tried to write there was this overwhelming feeling that I should be working. At least on the surface you seem to be holding up to this much better than I think I could. I hope things turn around for you soon.

    Reply
    1. sewedel Avatar
      sewedel

      There are days, Shawn. With the four kids to take care of while Kim’s at work, I stay too busy to mope much. But I apply for every job I find that’s even closely related to what I was doing, or have done in the past eight years. Writing is my escape, the thing that keeps me barely sane. If Kim loses her job, I’ll probably be applying for a Sprawl-Mart job, ala John Paul Allen.

      Reply
      1. shawn_scarber Avatar
        shawn_scarber

        I worked as a night stalker …uhm, stocker at the old Wally World for about four months. It ain’t fun, and it doesn’t pay worth a damn, but you can get in pretty good shape hauling those giant bags of dog food and cat litter around. Ever thought of moving down here to the great Metromess? might have more prospects. I know the real down side is having to live with the people in the Metromess, but you never know.

        Reply
  6. marcy_italiano Avatar
    marcy_italiano

    Meth is soooo 2004, dude. 😉
    You’ll get through this, and I really hope your wife’s job situation improves.

    Reply

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