I was about to walk upstairs and put some clothes away, when I discovered that, in my haste to open every window in the house on an incredibly rare seventy-degree day in February, I’d accidentally opened a window without a screen. For most people this wouldn’t be a problem, but my special needs cat Charlie is forever housebound due to his abject inability to do normal cat things (read: he thinks my dog is his dad/mom/brother, and has once tried to nurse from his nipple), and in a town where long forgotten “HAVE YOU SEEN FLUFFY?” printouts are stapled to every ninth tree as sun bleached reminders of nature’s cruelty, he would not last an hour in the coyote-saturated wilderness surrounding my property.

Panicking, I scoured every room for Charlie, but couldn’t find him. I threw my headphones off, sending an Audible compilation of Robert E. Howard’s short stories clattering to my kitchen floor, and bolted outside as fast as my legs would allow, trudging through the knee deep snow and bellowing his name. Nothing.

Shortly after that, I began to lose my shit.

I thought of how upset it would make my wife if Charlie was gone forever; how awful it would be to come across his flattened little body on a random drive down the rural dirt road that leads to our house. My mind darted to a future scene in which we discussed how long we should wait before we adopt a new cat, because getting one too quickly would seem like an insult to the one we just buried. For a second I even thought “Oh man, I’m definitely not snowboarding this weekend“, and then instantly reprimanded myself for being so selfish. It’s weird how our reptilian brains shift attention from one benign topic to another during a crisis in an attempt to keep us doing whatever we need to do without seizing up from anxiety and fear.

*trudge trudge trudge* “CHAARRRRLIIEEEEE!!! COME HERE COO COO KITTY!!!” *trudge trudge trudge* “COME HERE, LITTLE BUDDY!!!” *trudge trudge trudge* “EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OK!!!”

But was it?

There was no sign of Charlie anywhere, and the last vestiges of crucial daylight almost seemed to drain from the sky in double-time. Again with nature’s cruelty.

After thoroughly soaking my feet and jeans in the melting expanses of snow in my yard, I sprinted back inside to grab my dog Rodney, hoping the cat would maybe come for his milkless surrogate father, and found Charlie standing on the kitchen table, patiently staring at me as if I were some kind of sweaty palmed, over-reactionary alarmist, which I undoubtedly was, and am, and will most likely be forever.

I exhaled, gave Charlie a pat on his head, shook off my slush-laden sneakers, reached into the fridge for a cold beer, and finally closed this malicious asshole of a window that is clearly trying to tear my family apart.

We now have FOUR hour-long episodes of The Michael Boulerice Show podcast uploaded for your listening pleasure. My wife and Chuck and I are definitely having a blast with this new, completely unscripted project of ours, and despite our inexperience, we’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback. You can find it on iTunes, Google Play and Soundcloud (links below).

iTunes

Google Play

Soundcloud

The equipment is wired up. The levels are dialed in. The music has been composed. The candles are lit. The Riunite is on ice. My body is ready.

Episode one of The Michael Boulerice Show will be recorded this Sunday. If you own a business and/or are in charge of marketing for a business, and you’re looking for ways to promote it that aren’t totally boring, Write me at info@michaelboulerice.com for an ad rate sheet.

7:00 am this morning: A middle-aged man with long silver hair rolled down the driver’s side window of his equally silver Toyota Echo to talk to me. I pulled my headphones out and held them in the hand that wasn’t wrapped around Rodney’s leash.

I’ve been terrible with road directions my entire life, and I suffer a mild panic attack every time a stranger asks me for them. My brain just isn’t built to understand how maps work. I regularly get lost in the town I grew up in. Despite every fiber of my being wanting to divulge this fact to passers-by in need of help, I always stop and pretend I know what I’m talking about. I think I’m more afraid of someone thinking I’m retarded at first glance, than I am of attempting to give directions and actually proving I’m retarded. Nine times out of ten I can be useful. The tenth time, though? Not so much.

“Can you tell me how to get to Walker Bungalow?”

“I’m sorry, what was the name of that street again? I’ve never heard of it before.”

Speaking slowly as if I was wearing a helmet and bib, “Waaaaalker…Buuuungalooooow.”

“No, I have no idea, and I live in this neighborhood.”

*rolls eyes* “Alright, well how about Little Harbor Road? Sagamore? I’m trying to visit a yard sale.”

“Oh, I can get you to Sagamore. Take a left down this street, follow it to the end. Cross it and you’re on Sagamore.”

“So I take a left, go straight and then cross the street?”

“Yep.”

“Left, straight, cross.”

“…yeah.” This was becoming less of a friendly stop, and more of a police interrogation.

No thank you, nothing. The man rolled up his window and drove away. I muttered “weirdo” under my breath and continued my walk. As I rounded the corner, the man was parked in the middle of the road, with his window down once again.

Furiously, “GOD DAMN IT, THE BRIDGE IS OUT!!!”

Pangs of guilt and anxiety ran up and down my chest. In my rush to help the man as best as I could and get him away from me, I completely blanked out about the bridge reconstruction project taking place smack dab in the middle of the directions I just gave him. “Shit, I’m sorry. I haven’t had a cup of coffee yet. Here, what you want to do is — ”

The man shook his head in disapproval and rolled his eyes like a petulant child for the second time. Seeing this, my anxiety and frustration slowly twisted themselves into a coping mechanism braid of irrational anger. I stopped talking, and silently stared at him for several seconds. It was all I could do to make known my disapproval of his attitude, without telling him he should spend his garage sale money on a TomTom, and hurling a plastic grocery bag filled with Rodney’s steaming shit through his open window. I already felt bad for accidentally giving the guy bad directions, but his expressed entitlement to good directions threw me for a loop, and set my mind to its endless task of analyzing everyday situations that desperately don’t need analyzing.

[Where is this guy coming from? Why is he giving me grief first thing in the morning? How can someone be so angry this early in the day? What’s with the salt and pepper Jonathan Taylor Thomas haircut? Is this guy a serial killer who preys on early birds that fail his quizzes? What kind of garage sale starts at 7:00 am, and why would someone be in such a rush to get there? Is he some kind of American Pickers guy? Is this the white trash version of Indiana Jones? Is he going to replace a commemorative Elvis Presley dinette set with a sack of nickles, and pray he doesn’t get crushed by a giant boulder?]

The man registered the look on my face, took a deep breath, and then rolled his finger in the almost cinematic “keep it moving” gesture.

“…Go all the way down this street, take a right. Go straight until you hit Summer Street. Take a right, and Miller will be directly across the intersection. Miller becomes Sagamore. It’s kind of roundabout, but it will get you around the bridge work.”

“Jesus Christ.” The man rolled his window up one last time, reversed and chirped his tires as he accelerated in the direction he first approached, his parting “ASSHOLE!” salutation muffled by the whine of his 1.5 liter economy motor.

“Eh, you’re probably right about that one. Come on, Rodney. Let’s go home and get you some breakfast.”

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

My eyes pried themselves open from a deeply satisfying and much needed sleep. The bedroom was pitch black, save for a ghostly blue hue in the windows that my groggy brain recognized as the harbinger of an autumn sunrise. “Late morning”, I half-grumbled, half-thought to myself as I listened in the darkness, wanting to determine if the noise was a part of the waking world, and not the dreaming one.

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

There it was again, cutting through the silence of the wee hours of rural New Hampshire like a knife forged from raw obnoxiousness; even managing to slice its way through the series of running fans I’d set up as a deterrent before Jess and I crawled into bed that night.

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

It was our cat Charlie, of course. I almost wished it was a four-hundred-pound serial killer holding a machete in one hand, and trying to open a foil Pop Tarts pouch with the other, because at least in that scenario there would be some kind of release from Charlie’s incessant nocturnal carousing after I’d been dismembered. But no, it was just Charlie. Again. Waking me up in the middle of the night for the third week straight. I checked my watch. 4:03 am.

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

Charlie was suffering through his annual bout of frustrated depression that comes around every fall, when we have to finally close his favorite sitting windows in the house at night to keep the cold out. This was the fourth year we’ve had Charlie, and the fourth fall we’ve scrambled for ways to keep him from waking us up, including our poor dog Rodney, who is more often than not the victim of Charlie’s spiteful taunting once the lights go out this time of year.

Extended play time at night to tire him out? Nope. Melatonin laced treats before bed? Those only worked until he built up a tolerance to them. Not letting him in the bedroom? That would probably work, if we were willing to go to sleep with ear plugs in to keep the scratching from bothering us, and settle for a having bedroom door that looked like a family of panthers had been trying to make love to it, but that wasn’t reasonable. Nothing worked, really. In the end, we just suffered with dignity for a month or two, until Charlie settled into an agreeable lethargic winter mode. The end, however, was still weeks away.

I propped myself up on my elbows, and tried to make out what Charlie was chewing on. Something plastic, for sure. A wrapper? My eyes began to adjust to the darkness as I scanned it for movement, a hint of light glittering in a yellow eye, or off a discarded body soap package. Anything to help triangulate where the crinkling was coming from.

“Maybe I woke up at the tail end of it this time”, I thought as I waited for the noise again; silence once again flooding the bedroom, so total that I could hear my heart beating faintly in my ears, and the gentle breathing of my wife sleeping next to me.

I lay back down, allowed my eyes to close, and exhaled. The cat must have given up, and gone back to sleep. He —

*CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE*

I rifled the sheets off of myself as if the house were on fire, and made a beeline for the back of the bedroom. No cat, nothing. I managed to stub my toe on the FitBit bath scale I’d left back there, because I demanded it was too fancy to keep in the bathroom, like a normal, well-adjusted person would have insisted on. Not wanting to wake Jess up, I let out a pained groan through teeth clenched around a dental night guard, and tip-toed out of the bedroom.

*crinkle crinkle crinkle*

As soon as I was in the hallway, I could make out the outline of Charlie’s body in the darkness. I stalked toward the cat until I was a few feet away from him. He’d pulled the crinkly plastic packaging from Jess’s Halloween costume out of the bathroom trash, and had decided two hours before our alarm was due to go off was a great time to start gnawing on it. I ripped it away from him, and almost threw back into the trash, before realizing that he would most likely just fish it out once I’d gotten warm and comfortable in bed again, so I threw the packaging into the stand-up shower, where he couldn’t reach it.

I crawled back into bed, threw the blessedly still-warm sheets over my body, allowed my head to sink heavily into my pillow, closed my eyes, and listened to my breathing get slower, and slower, and slower.

***

***

***

*crinkle*

The noise reached me, even in my drifting fugue state of consciousness, but I refused it. Like a wilfully ignorant adult unwilling to watch a news source that refuses to confirm their inherent biases, I decided the noise wasn’t a noise at all. It did not exist. It was only the ghost of a noise I’d killed just minutes prior, and it was just echoing through my mind a few more times before it went to its final resting place. That’s all.

*crinkle crinkle*

My bloodshot eyes flickered open once more, this time stinging with sleeplessness. I checked my watch again. 4:28 am. I turned over to look at my wife for confirmation that the noise I was hearing was real, but she was sleeping as soundly as Grandpa on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner. Sleeping easily and through anything is her mutant ability. If the X-Men were real, Professor X would recruit her, make her a pajama uniform, and rename her “Sleepy Jean Grey”. The responsibility of battle with our spiteful, defiant cat was going to be mine, and mine alone.

*CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR SLEEP CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE CRINKLE*

The sheets were cast off again, my feet hit the floor, and I was off to hunt for Charlie and his demonic instruments of torture. The hunt only lasted several seconds, as he was sitting right where I found him the first time; in the upstairs hallway. This time he had the crinkly cap wrapper for a bottle of Market Basket brand mouthwash I’d bought earlier that day between his paws. Again, it came from the bathroom trash. Again, I stole his toy from him, and threw it into the stand-up shower, along with the costume packaging. Charlie just stared at me, as if I was the meanest human being in the world. It was a stare that, if it had been delivered by a human boy, would have said “You’re not my real dad!”, and was almost always followed by the child scrambling up a set of stairs and slamming a door.

I plopped back into bed a little too hard, which was enough to jostle Jess out of cryogenic storage.

“What’s going on?”

“The cat.”

“Why are you playing with your phone?”

“I can’t sleep, babe. I’ve been trying to get Charlie to cut the shit for half an hour now.”

“You have a problem with that phone.”

“The phone isn’t the problem. The cat pulling things out of the trash and playing Blue Man Group with them at 4:00 am is the problem.”

“Ugh. Why don’t you just kick Rodney out? The dog was sleeping soundly on his bed on the floor of our bedroom.

“I’m not doing that.”

“Why not? The cat is only playing up here because the dog is up here. If you kick him out and shut the door, problem solved.”

This made all the sense in the world, and it was absolutely true. Charlie is obsessed with Rodney, and would not just follow him downstairs, but to the ends of the earth, to hell, and probably even to a Vietnamese cat meat processing facility. I could finally go back to sleep, and wake up refreshed. Jess’s logic was, as usual, infallible. It did not, however, trump the absurd sense of moral responsibility I project onto my pets.

“The dog didn’t do anything wrong. I’d feel bad kicking him out just because his brother is being an asshole.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“I know.”

With that, Jess turned around, and fell back to sleep almost instantly.

I put my phone back on the nightstand, crossed my hands over my chest, and stared through the skylight above my head at the rapidly lightening sky. Sunrise was imminent, and I was nowhere near being able to fall back asleep. After a few minutes, I checked my phone again. 5:03 am. I debated giving up on sleep altogether, crawling out of bed, and starting my work day an hour early, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. That would mean Charlie won; that I was powerless to thwart my own cat’s bad behavior, and I couldn’t look people in the eye if I let a ten pound bag of furry hate get the best of a [redacted] pound bag of adult male human being.

No, I was going to stay in my bed until our respective alarms went off. That’s how you show Charlie his efforts were futile. That’s how you show Charlie you don’t negotiate with terrorists.

My eyes closed of their own volition. The rhythm of my breathing lulled my overactive brain into a state of serenity. My consciousness floated out of my skylight, and out through the trees, into the pre-dawn sky, and past the blackout curtains of reality.

***

***

***

*YELP!*

Rodney suddenly shot up, as if somebody lit a firecracker under his rear end. I bolted awake, my heart pounding. The dog panted and paced around in a circle, revealing a suddenly sleepy eyed Charlie, purring like a Harley Davidson, wanting to snuggle up to his unwilling brother after an exhausting night of wanton feline fuckery.

Without warning, Rodney jumped up on the bed, circled several times, and plopped down in the protection of my leg nook, shaking the entire bed with enough force to make Jess shift in her sleep. The cat remained on the floor out of sight, but circled around the footprint of the bed over and over again, like some kind of purring shark. Rodney looked nervously over the lip of the bed, keeping an eye on the pint sized bully below. I let loose a litany of whispered curse words that have no business being strung together in that particular order. My watch read 5:57 am.

I stared back up through the skylight once more, defeated. I was broken. The corpse of hope lay splayed in front of me. Charlie won. Charlie was always going to win.

***

The next thing I knew, overcast morning light was streaming through the bedroom windows, and I could hear Jess brushing her teeth in the bathroom. I picked up my phone, and realized it was 7:00 am. Despite Charlie’s best efforts, I’d accidentally managed to steal an hour of sleep for myself, which could hardly be construed as a victory, but at least it meant they day might be salvageable with some extra coffee and a well-placed power nap.

“Morning!” Jess walked into the bedroom in her pink bathrobe.

“Morning.”

“How are you feeling?”

“That cat is no longer allowed to sleep during the day”, I grumbled as I flicked through my news feeds for the morning headlines. “If I’m awake, he’s awake. If I catch him sleeping during the day, I’m dumping a glass of water on his head. I will Abu Ghraib the fuck out of him. Charlie will sleep through the night if it kills me…or him.”

Jess laughed, and continued getting ready for the day. I stumbled downstairs, and brought a cup of coffee into my office, ready to stitch together words as best as my sleep deprived brain would allow. After a while, I kissed Jess goodbye, and she whisked herself off to work.

I drank a second cup of coffee, and contemplated a third, before deciding a long shower would wake me up more efficiently, and without the hassle of heart palpitations. I walked upstairs, turned the shower on, and let it run for a while so it would get nice and hot. I then disrobed, opened the shower door, and stepped inside.

My foot made contact with the wet, slippery costume packaging, instantly sending me sprawling backwards in the shower. The shower handle slammed into my shoulder blade like a baseball bat (if you’re curious about what kind of noise that forces out of a person, it sounds a lot like “FUUUUNNHHHHGGHHHHH!!!”).

With the wind freshly knocked out of me, I crumpled to my knees on the shower floor, which managed to twist the shower handle all the way over to the “boil a potato” setting (if you’re curious about what kind of noise that forces out of a person, it sounds a lot like “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEFFFFFFFFFF!!!”).

I scrambled to turn the water off, and then spent the next minute panting for breath with my back aching; water dripping off of my scalded pink skin, and pattering onto the crinkly costume packaging beneath me.

I laughed; not the laugh of a good-natured man letting a bad experience wash off of him. It was the maniacal laugh of man on the verge of sleep deprived, pain amplified temporary insanity. It was the tortured cackle of a man who just internalized the futility of his existence.

Charlie won again. Charlie was always going to win.

Somebody asks me for an audiobook recommendation at least once a week, probably because everybody knows I’m a total junkie for them. I do plenty of physical reading as well, but when I’m in the car on a long drive, doing super mundane chores around the house, or throwing the Kong football for my collie 18,387 times until he’s tired, they’re perfect.

I figured Facebook would be a great place to list all of the books in my Audible library that I’ve listened to in 2016 so far, and a great time to list them as well with Halloween just around the corner, because almost all of them can be placed in the horror / science fiction / thriller genre. I love that shit.

Here they are, in order of oldest to most recently listened to:

***

Locke & Key, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (more like a radio play than an audiobook, but INCREDIBLE nonetheless. I’m relistening to this as we speak because my Audible credits don’t re-up until Sunday, and it’s that good)

John Dies at the End, by David Wong

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Finders Keepers, by Stephen King

The Fold, by Peter Clines (This guy is going some really cool shit. Very science heavy, if you’re into that thing)

14, by Peter Clines

The Passage, by Justin Cronin (This is a great trilogy. Start with this one first)

The Twelve, by Justin Cronin

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (Absolutely brutal. Will make you want to crawl into a dark corner with a bottle and denounce humanity forever)

The Annihilation Score, by Charles Stross (The Laundry Files is a guilty pleasure of mine. It’s like James Bond meets Lovecraft meets awkward British comedy. Also a little tech heavy.)

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (The Hyperion Cantos was something I read when I was eleven or so, and I wanted to revisit it. Definitely more fantasy than anything else, but I’m very fond of it)

The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

Endymion, by Dan Simmons

The Rise of Endymion, by Dan Simmons

This Book is Full of Spiders, by David Wong

Lovecraft’s Monsters, by Ellen Datlow and Neil Gaiman (If you’ve ever read Lovecraft before, this compilation of short stories from assorted authors will stuff eldritch horrors up your butt, but in a good way)

Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, by David Wong

Sacrament, by Clive Barker

On a Pale Horse, by Piers Anthony

Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

Summer of Night, by Dan Simmons (This one gave me the creeps in a way I haven’t felt since I was a kid, and I was scared of basically everything. Very Stand By Me and It-esque.)

The Winter People, by Jennifer McMahon (Rural Vermont spookiness)

A Winter Haunting, by Dan Simmons (Sequel to Summer of Night)

The Chimes, by Charles Dickens

The City of Mirrors, by Justin Cronin

End of Watch, by Stephen King

The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross

A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay (This one is a total head fuck. Exorcism / possession type of material, but updated and awesome)

The Border, by Robert McCammon (Apocalyptic aliens shit)

The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete first edition, by Joel Richards (a regrettable purchase)

Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch (Blew my god damned mind. Time travel paradox shit. I’ve recommended this to about a hundred people by now)

They Thirst, by Robert McCammon

The Elementals, by Michael McDowell (Creepy house haunting story)

The Last Tribe, by Brad Manuel (don’t get this one; awful. One of the only audiobooks I’ve ever returned)

Haunted, by Chuck Palahniuk

Song of Kali, by Dan Simmons

Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis (Another head fuck. Is the author crazy? Is he sane? You’ll ask yourself this the entire time. This dude also wrote American Psycho.)

Burnt Offerings, by Robert Marasco (Haunted house in rural New York, reminiscent of The Shining and Amityville)

Speaks the Nightbird, Robert McCammon (Historical fiction based in colonial southeastern America. Ridiculously good.)

Here I am reading a chapter from The Adventures of KungFu Mike and the Magic Sunglasses at the anniversary event for Long Story Short, with the theme of “I’ll never do that again.”  I’ll get either better video or a higher-quality audio feed directly from the mic when it becomes available later on.

Michael tests out a chapter from his next book at the “finding your voice” themed Long Story Short event at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His wife (vertically, ugh) filmed from the audience, but professionally recorded video and high quality audio versions of this performance should be available shortly.

Jess and I walked into the local deli and waited for the family in front of us at the register. A middle-aged woman with a makeup job like Mimi from The Drew Carey Show ordered a ham sandwich. Her son, a lanky tweenager in sweats and white socks with mandals, chose a breakfast sandwich from the menu before spinning around and barreling into us on his way to the drink cooler, walking away without apologizing. He was holding his mother’s large, expensive handbag for her, as if she couldn’t possibly be burdened with it during the ordering process.

Here’s an interview I did with NPR earlier in the week, along with several book recommendations. Can you pull the car around for me? I’m basically a celebrity now.

http://nhpr.org/post/bookshelf-michael-boulerices-male-memoir