Under a Black Rainbow

3/22/21 - Nearly three years ago, my mother was diagnosed with primary peritoneal carcinoma. It was a pretty harrowing moment for all of us in the family as there wasn't much of a history in the family of cancer. We didn't have a lot of experience dealing with it or handling it; it was a pretty foreign endeavor for us.  That was July of 2018. I spent much of that month packing up my apartment so I could break my lease and move into her basement to help out around the house and be more readily available for her should something more serious arise. Luckily, those moments were few and far between, but we had a few feverish late nights that required several baseline hours of hospitalization. This was part of the deal and I understood what my being in the same house would require of me in this regard. It was one of the biggest, but also easiest, decisions I've ever made.  Though true to form, mom didn't always need much help from me, incredibly self-sufficient woman that she...

Time is the strangest construct; the older I get, the easier it is for me to lose myself in its hours, to feel untethered and without firm footing. A minute passes and a family member is no longer an infant, but a fully-grown adult. An hour passes and I am caught drowning in thoughts of nearly a decade's worth of living that looks so much different on this side of 40. Not bad, not good, just...different and alien. A decade's worth of decisions and their impacts upon this moment in this life and this moment in this life and that moment in this life. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum .  * A year into this pandemic and I crave human contact as equally as I crave total solitude and escape from the same contact. Again, untethered and without firm footing. I am normally very firm in my belief system and, whether right or wrong, in my actions. At the moment, I find myself caught in slipstreams and incorrect placements and streaks of starshine just out of reach. This is fine for now, but I'...

This was a fun one for me to write. Often, the mind of a lover can go to some interesting and irrational places, so I wanted to try and take that particular bit of truth and blend it with my brand of weirdness. Personally, I'm really happy with the final result and it's both sensual and strange. This one is also fun to read out loud, which I was able to do late last year here in Kansas City for a publisher's book release.  There's nothing too terribly explicit about the piece, but no one's gonna be confused about what's happening in the story, so maybe consider it NSFW in case you're trying to watch the video in public or at work.  Enjoy! "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 collection of short stories) (1,647)

 I've been bad at updating things here, despite being pretty busy with both working on new DJ mixes and (finally) finishing another story that I began last year. I've since updated all the thumbnails for each of the new Story Time with Bucho videos I've posted, giving them a more thematic feel. I bought a new microphone to help with volume control (it's better, but not great).  Anyway, here's episode two. I'll post up the others every day this week for those of you that follow the blog. Feel free to subscribe to the YouTube channel if you like what you hear. Feel free to purchase a couple books as well (see below) to help a struggling fiction writer out.  Enjoy! "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 collection of short stories) (1,644)

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 ...