Turns out, Blackbeard didn’t bury his pirate booty. He hid it in plain sight. Up there. In the trees, an arboreal secret cast among the branches and disguised as leaves through some rainbow sorcery that makes treasure seem as green as the laurel throughout a summer of sunshine. But then Captain Jack (Frost) sails out of the mist in the chill of a dawn, the magic spell decays, and – presto! – gold doubloons cascade to the ground. Rubies and sapphires spill to Earth amid rustling chains of gray and tawny pearls twisting like serpents with each gust of wind.

To be sure, if you try to enrich yourself with this buccaneer’s swag, it will crumble in your hands and blow away. You have to squint to catch the magic, have to filter it through the shimmer of your eyelashes in order to separate the transmuting crimson and gold from the illusion of falling leaves.

What’s that? You live among palm fronds or cacti or – gasp – tar and cement? Then close your eyes. Forget Blackbeard, you have all the treasures of your imagination to substitute for autumn’s wonders. Who told you there is only external reality? The inner reality of fantasies is just as potent and much easier to get to. I go there all the time. Nothing wrong with outside stimuli, mind you; but it’s a dependency on something outside yourself. And if it doesn’t show up for work when you want it, you’re out of luck. So it’s nice to look inward to your imagination and be self-inspired. Not to mention, inspiration and outside stimulation are not mutually exclusive. Magic starts between your ears, but it merges nicely with whoever and whatever is around you.

So-oooo much response to my characterizations of American society last month, and most of it wanted to lead me in one political direction or another! But no, I’m still not going to advocate for any one political view. This here is a No Partisan Zone. The manipulative media is fair game, however, because they have long since stopped being the Messenger in favor of being the pushers of partisan Messages.

Bad enough to have sanctimonious politicians lining up behind political correctness. But when you filter that through a Machiavellian media, perspective gets elbowed aside by hysteria and common sense shrinks to the emotional limits of a third grade classroom. Summing up each side as seen by the other: Conservatives say Obama’s legacy actually divided the country, but Hillary won the popular vote; and Liberals says Trump is doing a terrible job, but they want to take credit for it. Meanwhile, political violence and intolerance of free speech are ignored or reported according to the political objectives of whichever network preaches your gospel.

But what if you don’t have a bias-hardened political gospel? I don’t like either party – or as I like to call them, the Charlie Browns and the Lucys, holding the football for another field goal try. Both parties are without scruples, and I’m not sure which is worse – politically stupid or politically ruthless. Seems like the most neutral approach is to weed out the misrepresentations and vote for the lesser of evils. Hmmm. Lemme see if I’ve got this right before I vote in the mid-terms for Congressional control: according to Democrats, if you vote to keep Republicans in charge, you tank the economy and put the brakes on illegal immigration; or, according to Republicans, vote Democrat for 2 years of chaos, gridlock and years 3 and 4 of the scavenger hunt for Russian collusion. Choose one.

Is the media ever worse than when an election looms? No matter which way the bias goes, it’s a bias. And it’s not that biases haven’t always been there, it’s that journalism has become radicalized by them. What’s striking to me is that these biases never change. Historically, the parties themselves have completely flipped each other’s positions on core identity issues, almost as an exchange. Why hasn’t that changed the biases of the news organizations? Fox News was created in the 90s specifically as a conservative bias to oppose the liberal bias of all the other networks. And America’s two biggest dailies are two peas in a pod – the NY Times hasn’t endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since 1956, while the Washington Post has never endorsed a Republican in their 141 year history.

To me that says that media bias is bred in the bone and not reasoned. The pretense of objecivity is maintained mainly by selective reporting. Whatever mitigates or is exculpatory to whoever a network is attacking simply gets left out. Calculated deception and outrageous dishonesty are built into the narrative. And blatant identity politics is as unabashed as campaigning in a junior high election for the queen of the cheerleaders or the captain of the football team.

A couple of the networks seem impervious to being called out for unambiguous false reporting, but the thing that ill-serves our society the most is without doubt the relentless bombardment of small and stealthy distortions. Give the talking heads a statement that someone on their enemies list has “an infectious smile,” and they’ll report that the person has an infection. It’s why I maintain that unless you source your news from all pundits wall to wall, including the ones you hate, you can’t know what’s going on.

Polls, too, have become tools of advocacy, designed to whip up or suppress voting. Their incredible inaccuracy in the last major election was a red flag. But increasingly they will become self-fulfilling prophecies that shape a result. And with that, the merging of media with government will be complete. Guard your mind, guard your vote. Let your choices be rational rather than emotional. Do not permit agenda-driven media to cherry pick history for you or edit your life.

Act III of October’s Sullygram is half pictures and half explanation in this photo update: #1-2 a damp autumn at Elm Creek; #3 the grandlad and moi; #4 Jan Lockert of Norway (a former editor who flew me to Oslo to speak at the House of Literature and is now a valued friend) shared some time with me last month – that’s Elm Creek, and we’d gladly oblige that sign if only Mom Nature would supply the snow; #5-6 Mom Nature beginning to blush; #7 a night at the movies with Norby Nation (yeah, we had to go in the John to get the selfie); #8 autumn blush at Crow-Hassan; #9-10 had some requests for a look at the face of she-who-must-not-be-named, and I don’t know who the bounder is who photo bombed her alabaster beauty; #11 my friend Linda captured this not so dark midnight in Alaska; #12 stained glass windows and Halloween? Well…if they’re stained with the blood and powdered bones of saints, as they once were, it’s no stretch at all to conflate the two. Years ago I spent a winter in Zephyrhills, Florida, and was astonished to discover a reclusive Germanic clan making bizarre stained-glass windows in a studio compound. The matriarch was a white-haired woman with sinkhole eyes, and she had just closed their operation because of a murder in the studio. Simultaneously, there was a serial murder spree in the area. I nearly got myself shot prowling around at night, but I took that inspiration and wrote THE MARTYRING. It was decades before I published it, but thereafter it soared to prominence across multiple genres. My publisher thought it was a detective story, I thought it was a mystery-thriller with romance elements, Barnes & Noble had it under science fiction, reviewers thought it was Gothic horror and it was a finalist for Best Novel at WorldFantasy Con. I told my agent, “If they can’t figure out who I am, give me a medal for schizophrenia and get on with it.” But the bottom line is a fully fleshed out novel that has endured. So I’m very proud to see this brand-new trade edition from Crossroad Press in time for Halloween. If you’d like some excitement and a fulfilling gallery of characters to read about – and especially if you are one of my fans or friends who have been asking about my next release in print – it has arrived! Here’s the Amazon link, and, as always, I appreciate your interest and support:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1948929163?keywords=THE+MARTYRING&qid=1538400842&s=Books&sr=1-2-catcorr&ref=sr_1_2