So the UFO brought me home from NYC and Louisville. I’m downtown at the Los Gatos Coffee Roaster. I’s so full in here today that I’m forced to take a table next to three people slinging buzzwords about teaching English online: “Metrics, outcomes, leverage, challenges, solutions, interactions, diagnostics, issues, gabble gabble gabble…”

It’s a gray rainy day, kind of cozy. Nice to be in California again. It’s so much warmer here.

On the plane I was reading a book I borrowed from my brother Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter, written by the Englishman W. D. M Bell around 1923, and republished in 1989 by the Safari Press. The book has marvelous accounts of safaris through unknown lands, and of encounters with tribes who’ve never seen Europeans before. It’s fun to read about the excitement of geographical exploration, even if it is more than a little unsettling how many elephants Bell kills (for the ivory).

The safari personnel includes a “chronicler,” a native who composes an epic poem about the journey. Every evening, around the campfire, he recites the poem thus far—and adds a new verse. I like that.

Before I left on my trip, I was working on starting a novel with working title Jim and the Flims. And I was stuck, unsure of where to go next. And now I’ve been gone so long that the whole idea of what I thought I was writing has pretty much left my head. Which is good, as now I can get a fresh start.

Today I’m leaning towards something more like a fantasy than like science fiction. And I might not bother with UFOs after all.

In the last two novels, Postsingular and Hylozoic, I pushed the science perhaps further than ever before. For my new novel, I’d like to try something different—both to make the task feel fresh and exciting, and perhaps also to attract a broader readership. So, as I say, I’m thinking of something a bit more like a fantasy, although more like The Twilight Zone or like Borges than like Tolkein.

I like the notion of a “universe next door” scenario. The universe next door isn’t reached via an SF-style higher-dimensional hop to a separate brane, but rather by walking around the streets of one’s home town in an odd way, turning unexpected corners, cutting down heretofore unexplored alleys, and slowly the buildings take on an odd cast, and you see some unusual animals—not exactly dogs—around the corners.

By the way, I get this mode of transfer from a Robert Sheckley story—”The Altar,” 1953, which appears in his epochal collection, Untouched By Human Hands , of 1954. In “The Altar,” the protagonist, Mr. Slater, is led into an alternate world by a stranger named Elor. They walk around and around the streets of Mr. Slater’s little suburban town, and somehow he ends up as the sacrificial offering at temple in the alternate world. Here’s how Sheckley writes the transition:

They walked down Oak Street, toward the center of town. Then, just as they reached the first stores, Elor turned. He led Mr. Slater two blocks over and a block down, and then retraced a block. After that he headed back toward the railroad station.

It was getting quite dark.

“Isn’t there a simpler way?” Mr. Slater asked.

“Oh, no,” Elor said. “This is the most direct. If you knew the roundabout way I came the first time—“

They walked on, backtracking blocks, circling, recrossing streets they had already passed, going back and forth over the town Mr. Slater knew so well.

But as it grew darker, and as they approached familiar streets from unfamiliar directions, Mr. Slater became just a trifle confused. He knew where he was, of course, but the constant circling had thrown him off…

Mr. Slater tried to place what street they were on without looking at the sign post, and then they made another unexpected turn. He had just made up his mind that they were backtracking on Walnut Lane, when he found that he couldn’t remember the next cross street. As they passed the corner he looked at the sign.

It read: Left Orifice.

Mr. Slater couldn’t remember any street in North Ambrose called Left Orifice.

Sheckley is a spring of inspiration that never runs dry. I just found an interesting Sheckley page that has links to a number of his essays and stories online.

I still mourn that the King is dead…

I watched the Inauguration in downtown Louisville, on a big screen in the Kentucky Arts Center. I felt extremely excited. History taking place. It felt like being in some huge, rich novel. The transfer of power. TV images of the big bible being carried down from the Capitol’s attic, the heavy book waking from its slumber and beginning to twitch. The sea of people, their will not to be denied. Cheney in his wheelchair, unmasked as an evil, fraudulent insect from the subdimensions.

It was nice to be part of the large, interracial crowd in this Louisville theater. The woman next to me said she was as proud of Obama as if he were her own son. I said it was going to be nice to have a smart president. We shook hands on that.

A few blocks away some carpenters were demonstrating against an unjust employer. The struggle never ends. But now perhaps the government is on the side of the little guys.

I took another walk in the woods this afternoon, looking at the ice, the rocks, and the trees, with my brother’s dog Ziggy my companion.

Hallelujah! We’ve got our country back!

Another day in Louisville. I’ve come to rest here, like a fishing float in an eddy of the Sargasso Sea. Overhead fly the honking geese, blurred by the falling snow.

The long barges putt up the Ohio River, passing through the locks of our Falls City.

Disguised as an elephant tusk, the Great White Worm sniffs the air for the scent of humans.

This morning I got together with two brothers that I knew well in high school, Phil Ardery and Joe Ardery. They were in the Chevalier Literary Society with me—a Louisville social club. Phil is a year older than me, Joe two years younger. Great guys with brilliant minds, a thrill to meet with them after all these years. I met Phil for breakfast in a Steak’N’Shake coffee shop on Bardstown Road.

And then I dropped in on Joe where he works in the offices of a legal firm housed in an sinister-looking monolith downtown—it looks like a building that one of Superman’s rivals might have his lab in. One day Joe will rule the universe…

On the way back out to my brother’s farm, I stopped by the Zachary Taylor military cemetery, which lies about half a mile from the house where I grew up—which is on a street named, synchronistically, Rudy Lane.

Even now, more than fifty years later, I still have dreams about the Z. T. Cemetery, not exactly nightmares. In the dreams its surrounded by high hedges. Sometimes I’m just trying to go in, or peering down the paths. Sometimes the dreams lead to endlessly unfolding phantasias with infinite regresses of casket doors. I used a sequence like that at the start of my novel White Light.

Our 12th President, Zachary Taylor himself, is buried here, you understand, and you can see his stone sarcophagus through a glass door. As I imagine it, I rip off the top, and there’s another lid and another and another, all the way down. The tumulus depicted above was his original grave.

I used this spot in my Louisville novel, The Secret of Life. That stone wall in the background is where my hero finally confronts his fellow aliens, who have marooned him here, disguising him as a human. (The high-school state of mind in a nutshell.)

In the afternoon, I was back to wandering in the woods with Ziggy the dog. There’s something so atavistically familiar to me about the patterns of the bare Kentucky trees against the sky. These are, after all, very nearly the first shapes I ever saw.

At the tail end of my trip to the East I stopped by Louisville, Kentucky, to visit my brother Embry and his wife. I was born and raised in Louisville, and lived there till I was 17. While I was at college, my parents moved away from Louisville, so now I hardly ever get back.

It’s been fourteen years since the last time I was here. The downtown isn’t especially lively—I guess this building’s windows are boarded up—but Louisville’s not dead either.

Sylvia and I happened to have lunch in an impressively hip hotel/museum called 21c. They have a mural of famous Louisvillians. I should be on it, but I didn’t have the energy/chutzpah to agitate for admission. I’m on vacation. And, after all, I don’t live here anymore.

They have some interesting art in the bar at 21c. I bet this devil is a self-portrait by the artist.

There’s a cool old waterworks at the foot of Zorn Avenue in Louisville. When I see Zorn Ave, I always recall that, when I was in high school, a kid was speeding up Zorn Ave in a convertible, trying to outrun the cops, and when he wouldn’t pull over, they shot him in the head. That was the first time I realized that the police might do things like that in real life.

My brother lives on a farm outside of town in Skylight, Kentucky. It’s nice to be out in the real country. Growing up, we lived closer in, more in the suburbs—or rather, the suburbs had engulfed us by the time I was ten. This dog is called Ziggy. He’s a good boy. But you have to watch him around this pasture. Some valuable thoroughbreds live there.

It was just as cold as NYC here, with ice on the creek. I feel nostalgic in Kentucky, and amazed at the distance that life’s currents have carried me.

I walked along a frozen stream in a gully behind Embry’s farm, marveling at the ice shelves crystals and the water bubbles under the glaze—which is exactly what I used to do fifty years ago.

The woods are calm and mysterious, the same as ever. Nothing changes in the woods.

I’m wearing this hat I got for $15 on the street in NYC, from a vendor on Fifth Ave. Lots of people in NYC are wearing this kind of hat this winter. The ears have some real personality.

I like how, when it’s really cold, ice gets to be like a mineral.

Back in Louisville, I can hardly remember what I usually do. My fiction seems like a remote dream.

I sit by the fire most of the day, and sometimes I go out and look for patterns. Like this nice wall I saw downtown.