howlingfan Mail #1
During my “working vacation,” I’ve had time to catch up on many things, with sleep and reading tied for most important, along with several other things.
Also high up on my list is letting my email accumulate. It’s like a good snowfall: If you watch the snow tumble minute by minute, hour by hour, it’s lovely and peaceful, to be sure. But I find there’s comparably less magic than when you go to sleep after a few flakes and then wake up to find your backyard smothered with them. Especially if you have school that day, extra ’specially if it’s August and I’m constructing wintry metaphors.
Anyway, in the inbox, some of these emails are actually addressed to me, and I do my best to reply.
Some more of these emails contain questions that I hear often by other senders. I thought would be entertaining and informative to share some of these answers with the rest of the howlingfanbase.
Here goes with the first batch of FAQs. How many batches will there be? Enough to go around until this cliched and 100% contrived device runs out of steam. Buckle up. Set phasers to fun.
(Oh, by the way, names have been altered to protect those who don’t exist.)
Why are you “howling” in the first place? — M.M., Spearfish, South Dakota
An ocean is not fed by a single source, M. Any number of rivers, each falling and flowing through its path of least resistance, can claim its self-importance. That said, there are at least two reasons why this site is what it is.
(1) It’s not quite a pun, but it’s not very funny either: See, my profile indicates that my last name is “Mooney.” My athletic persona was nicknamed “Moondog” (also “Mad Dog”), and what is a “moondog” but a wolf?
And what do wolves do? They howl.
But since I am neither a wolf nor a werewolf (though pints at night create some sort of animal) but rather a man, I am a howling man. howlingman…
[Incidentally - my name shows up in the third Harry Potter movie, on the Marauder's Map. That's because someone with the last name "Mooney" worked on the film. In the book, it's "Moony." As you were.]
…and I’m not just howling at a light in the sky, no sir. This is about everyone. I howl so you’ll howl. For further symbolism, check out this site for an illustration of just how self-righteous a once-repressed and twice-degreed egotist can make himself.
(2) Second verse, same as the first. The phrase “howling man” itself, occasionally bumped into one word for the sake of obliterating underscores in my lifetime, manifested itself while looking through a book I own, and shamelessly so, called The Twilight Zone Companion.
I was flipping through the book this past New Year’s, when I located the Sci-Fi channel on my television and left it there for, oh, eighteen hours or so. One of the episodes I saw listed in the book, but not on TV, was called “The Howling Man.”
Read up on it here.
Now, I didn’t read the episode summary that day, because I wanted to see it first. But I liked the title and kept it for my blog and penname. Then I saw the episode and realized it’s more complicated than outright cool. So I dunno about that one.
I’ve been reading your blog for a few months now. You’re not as funny as you used to be. What gives? — W.R., Intercourse, PA.
W., anger is a valuable thing when it fuels you to do good, to create, to live. But when you live to be angry, and only for the sake of creation, you’re actually being destructive in the process. And a little ironic, too, because a calming, if intense, voice of reason – a confident howl – is not the yell of a madman.
(Parenthetical permission to be blue: I made W.’s hometown “Intercourse, PA” because he’d be able to state one of my favorite and overused triple-entendres: I come from Intercourse.)
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