the undead subtract the subjectivity of math.

"Vampires a mathematical impossibility"?!?

If physics professor Costas Efthimiou thinks he's so damned clever, why isn't he working on applied fusion, as opposed to pulling this cynical nonsense to get his name in some third-rate science website's well-buried Halloween feature article? Publish or perish, indeed. (What's also odd is a dead link from his homepage to Transylvania University, and vacation pictures of the Greek islands -- an alleged hotbed of vrykolakas activity! Is he really a disinformant?)

Math relies on unproved postulates to complete its geometries, and resorts to imaginary numbers to solve its problems, while even Euclid's unreal linear thinking unravels and frays when distances inevitably curve. If some number zealot needs to go comfort himself under spreadsheets of theory so he can feel safer at night, then let him fool himself. Anyway, Efthimiou's based his formula on a zombie mechanism, not a vampiric one. Single vampire bites do not necessarily spread the blessing.

Stoker's Van Helsing, yet another self-proclaimed "Mr Know-It-All", was partly deceived the by this same misconception: "... they cannot die, but must go on multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead becomes themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water." (pp. 263-264, McNally & Florescu, eds.), which is likely where the mathmonkey drew his flawed timestables from. Plus, the idea of vampirism's been around for far more than 400 years, as paintings on ancient Assyrian pottery suggest. And by the time numerous official military and medical accounts of vampirism crashed upon the intellectual shores of the Ages of Reason & Enlightenment, it was none other than philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788) who had the illumination to conclude: "If ever there was in the world a warranted and proven history it is that of vampires."

Maybe Count Vladislaus Dracula in 2004's "Van Helsing" encapsulates it best: "Why can't they just leave us alone? We never kill more than our fill. And less than our share. Can they say the same?" Only stupid hunters shoot all the game, while the smart ones care to leave enough for next season, and vampires aren't required to kill their prey like humans, monthly or otherwise.

Leave the vampires to the vampirologists, and go say your faithless rosaries on the abacus you litanical mathematicians, because undeath defies not only math, but the limitations of life itself.

[From a long-ago blog, re-posted/re-contexted here in honour of the recently deceased Jerry Nelson, the voice of Sesame Street's Count Von Count. His character lived the folklore that vampires are possessed by a compulsion to count grains or thistles, a facet that could be used to stymie pursuing undead or delay their entry into homes. But for The Count it was not only a teaching technique but a joy that seemed to celebrate his infinite nighttime existence, a creature beyond the rational using the rational to sum up the world around him, and arguably the happiest of characters on the Street. Thanks for all the love of countless things in life & unlife, Mr Nelson.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

Tucson, obviously.

So beyond sick of hearing complaints about the heat, the "scene", that it's not a "real city", the "boredom", the "lack of culture", and most ridiculous, that "there's no trees".

I also hear I-10 is still open. You may leave now, if that is really your wish. Believe me, we won't object.

Aside from being a third-generation Tucsonense, there actually are alot of reasons Tucson is the superior home. Cairo, Amsterdam, Olympia, Seattle, DC, Chi-town, Vancouver, Toronto, Detroit, Manhattan, New Orleans and more. I've been to all of them, but at the end of the night I still come home to Tucson. As a collective we lay claim to:

• Saguaros. Anyone can have and plant trees, but Saguaros are available nowhere else.

• Big city amenities without metropolitan ills. The crawling traffic, overtly violent crime, and indifference of the population haven't come here to detract from our fine dining, clubs, and culture.

• Astronomy. City codes prevent civic lighting to be over a certain amount of lumena, so the night skies remain relatively visible for professional and amateur stargazers who are lucky enough to be in the astronomy capital of the world. Yes, the world.

• Residents are nice, smarter than the average bear, and relaxed, which translates to all of those good qualities rubbing off on you. Sure they can't all be winners, but on the curve we're a brain trust.

• Most tectonically stable place in the world. NYC sinks by 2020. San Andreas will one day turn LA & SF & SD into New Atlantises. Meanwhile, we'll have a beach in Yuma so sit tight and wait for the new coastline.

• 300 days a year of good weather. No ice scrapers, snow shovels, or salted roads eating your car's undercarriage. July & August swelter, but it's a small trade, and nothing swamp or A/C can't remedy.

• More galleries per capita. While I'm not sure where I heard this, I'll buy it with all the artspaces downtown, the Historical Society, UA museums, and, of course, the TMA.

• Coyotes! Hear their mournful howls at night. Watch them cross breed with lonely dogs. They go through your garbage but you'll feel so sorry for them you won't care.

• A club scene more than proportional to our size. Also, unlike most cities, even major metropolises, we have a Gothic weekly happening at three different venues, on three nights a week. Other cities usually only host a monthly, if that.

• The Wishing Shrine. El Tiradito is the only wish fulfilling shrine dedicated to a sinner who got shot for loving a married woman. Amen.

• San Xavier. Rising from a dusty plain, a white stucco brilliance that is called "The Dove of the Desert" is an intact structure of Spanish colonialism. The indians of the surrounding reservation have made their peace with it and every weekend booths outside sell the best frybread you'll ever eat.

• The re-opened Fox Theatre. The 1930s art deco cinema reflects Tucson's civic sense of historical preservation over progress. Rio Nuevo will feature a mission-like structure at its heart as well, which will retrofit these same sensibilities.

• Bats! Droves of them. I hear them many nights, twittering about lampposts for flying insects. Seasonally camped out in underpasses at River Road and East 22nd, they emerge in big living whirlwinds at sundown.

• Our weirdest secret is The Door to Pandaemonium. In the heart of the city at Speedway Blvd and First Ave there's a bit of prime real estate that should've been developed ages ago, but never has been. This cactus and scrub lot just feels ... wrong. Don't believe me? Go visit in the dead of night for yourself, and we'll compare notes.

• Sunset. Reds like you can't buy in a jar.

• The largest All Souls' Procession in the world! You'd think Mexico City being the most populous, but no -- it's us with our 10,000+ mourners and celebrants who photograph each other and dress with an inventiveness rarely seen elsewhere.

• The ladies. That 'Zonie accent, the Latina calenturas, and given the enclaves of Greeks, Russians, Indians (feather & dot), as well as the flood of university and corporate transfers we get like a respiration of new beauty every season, every flavour you can savour is here for the seducing. Come get some.

Still dissatisfied? Then it's you, not the city. Only boring people get bored, so go be boring elsewhere. I hear Portland's the new spot for this year's grass is greener crowd. Get in your fucking Volvo and go be too hipsterist for Portland instead. We'll probably see you in two years when you realized how good you had it and what a fool you truly are. By then however we'll have rented your cool Barrio Viejo apartment to someone far less whiny than you.

[This long arm of Tucson belongs to Clay.]

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the Secret of the Golden Bowl.

The singing bowl haunts me, its note following me hundreds of miles away from that back alley music shoppe hidden within the depths of San Francisco's Chinatown.

I ran the striker hard around the bowl's lip and suddenly the space just filled with ringing as if out of nowhere. Or maybe an unheard sonaressence pulled from the corners of the room into the bowl and poured out again, an invisible but tangible aural reflection.

It made me wonder if there were bowls that sang, like celestial choirs, or others, a dark portal of lowest basso pouring up from an Abyss. Genesis stories state that matter gets created from sound, God conjuring the world from The Word, and the Aum, same as song evoking an emotion from nothing.

I asked an esotericist I know about the bowls and he mentions the blocks of the pyramids, after somehow getting treated, being lifted with a tap from a resonant staff or tuning fork (perhaps our ankh ...). I think of lamas & saffron robed priests levitating in their Himalayan temples, attuning themselves, perhaps with the bowls as a focusing tool. I'm sure my odd source also thinks of rounded saucers with their otherworldly humming being a slight friction against the atmosphere as they spin & turn at high velocity -- ships also rumoured to land or originate from within the Earth's highest mountain ranges.

Apparently around since 11th century BCE, the bowls were made with a now lost technology that used 5 to 12 metals, including amounts of silver and gold, all of which seems alot of trouble for a simple bell or container for offerings, so there's more here than meets the ear. On a molecular level everything vibrates. If you place one singing bowl near a silent one including some of the same metals, it will begin to sing.

Silver's negative charge attracts particles, and gold's noble and electrically conductive qualities may have factored in the forger's choice of materials for the bowls. The older the bowl, the darker a tarnish it has, affecting the tone.

Listen to the still, to the silence where there's supposedly absence. Instead you'll hear presence, the hum of yourself & your echo reflected back, a low roar awash with subtlety, as blood passing through artery and vein. Call this frequency or soul or anima or chi, the bowls reveal the ringing that is everywhere to begin with.

Last week, dozens of dealers in imported wares brought bowls into Tucson to sell at our international gem show. After playing hundreds of bowls, many centuries old if not unknowingly older, I found the bowl that hummed my song, a deeply shadowed opera conducted in infinite wavicles that push and flow through the invisible so hard you can feel it through your very skin.

With the right bowl one could summon the prima materia sound, to fill the bowl with intent, as a magician does a cauldron, and then send it out with the sound's return to whence it emanated to act on that will & wish from within, to affect the timbre & fibre of existence, to destroy, to refine, to reform, to remake the World. That is the secret of the Golden Bowl.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.