Under a Black Rainbow

It's only five-ish months into the pandemic and I've decided to start reading some of my own stories out into the internet. I figure if I can't create new stuff, I can at least create a little buzz about the old stuff if some people still haven't had a chance to check it out.  So here's the first Story Time with Bucho. A test run, if you will. I'd previously planned on doing this via Snap Chat, but maybe doing all this through YouTube will be the easier thing, especially for sharing across social media platforms.  Hit the follow button on my Facebook author page to get future updates on my personal publishing news, new books I'm putting out, and more episodes of me reading both new and old material.  Feel free to snag a copy of either of my books on Amazon as well:  "The Machinery of the Heart: Love Stories"   (A collection of interactive short stories) "Scaring the Stars into Submission" (A surrealist version of a science fiction collect

I have always had an appreciation for the dark and the weird, but it wasn't until I got to grad school that I realized I also appreciated that in my fiction. Primarily with books like " House of Leaves," "The People of Paper," and "The Book of Lazarus." For whatever reason, I found myself very comfortable in the chaos found on the pages of those books. They were fictional narratives that colored outside the lines and made their own distinct choices as to how they wanted to be told. They were original and bold and I was enthralled by the formatting and narrative possibilities they awakened in my own writing.  More often than not, I'm also drawn to the more challenging narratives found in film or art. I like the absolute weirdness found in David Lynch's work (specifically  Twin Peaks ), though I confess to not understanding a great deal of what he's attempting to say (though I've heard plenty of people go on and on about their theories).

(Noah Silliman / Unsplash)  We are nearly five months out from our initial quarantine warnings and things are, for a great many people, predictably and laughably bad. The internal itch to return to normal has taken over the rational thinking parts of a great many of the population and so...here we are. I saw a meme the other day that said (paraphrasing) that basically, with the handling of all this, the US is the Florida of the entire planet. I hated to laugh, but it's true. We're appearing as the perfectly idiotic representation of how other countries tend to view us: selfish, ignorant, uncaring. Is anyone really surprised by this? I know I'm not. Disappointed, sure, but definitely not surprised.  To fill up my free time, I've done what others have and found little projects to complete. I continue to go to the gym every day for my allotted hour. But I recently pulled my bass guitar out of storage. It had been out of commission for so long that the protective foam from