The Volume Library 1976

The Volume Library 1976

Sometime in the 1970s, my mother bought a copy of The Volume Library from a door-to-door salesman.

For nearly the next decade, that enormous book was one of my primary sources of information. Long before I could type a question into a computer and have an answer appear in seconds, if I needed to know something for school, I went to The Volume Library.

I used it for book reports. I used it for homework. I used it simply because I wanted to know things.

What I remember most clearly was its wonderful material on mythology and literature. I returned to those sections over and over again. Greek and Roman mythology, writers, stories, characters, history—the book provided a map of a world that seemed almost impossibly large to me then.

I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but much of what I learned from those pages became permanent. That old reference book still comprises part of the backbone of what I know about mythology and literature.

There is something difficult to explain now about growing up with a book like that in the house. Information had a physical location. If you wanted to know about mythology, you didn't search for mythology. You went to the shelf. You pulled down the enormous book. You found the section. And then, inevitably, while looking for the thing you wanted, you found three other things you hadn't known you wanted to know.

Years passed, and the copy we had in our house disappeared somewhere along the way.

Eventually I went looking for it again.

I found a copy on eBay—not the actual book from my childhood, but the same edition, The Volume Library from 1976. I bought it.

It's on my bookshelf now.

I suppose that's one advantage of getting older. Every once in a while, you get the chance to buy back a small piece of the world that made you.

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Flesh Wounds by Thomas L. Vaultonburg | Zombie Logic Press

Flesh Wounds may be Thomas L. Vaultonburg's most autobiographical collection. Written between 1997 and 2004, the poems emerge directly from the years following his mother's death, a period spent working behind bars, in restaurants, strip clubs, country clubs, sports bars, warehouses, and eventually in a tavern he owned with his brother.

Unlike many collections that spend years being revised and refined, Flesh Wounds feels immediate. These poems were not excavated from decades of notebooks and polished into literary artifacts. They were written close to the experiences that inspired them, preserving their rough edges, contradictions, and emotional honesty.

The collection takes its title seriously. The wounds described here are rarely fatal. Instead, they are the daily injuries of ordinary life: failed relationships, dead-end jobs, bad judgment, loneliness, humiliation, lust, disappointment, and self-inflicted damage. Yet the poems refuse tragedy in its conventional form. Again and again, humor appears where despair ought to be. The speaker is frequently reckless, often cynical, occasionally self-destructive, but almost never self-pitying.

Bukowski's influence is evident, particularly in the attention paid to working-class life, bars, sex, and failure. Yet Flesh Wounds is ultimately less interested in romanticizing excess than documenting it. The bartenders, waitresses, drunks, lovers, managers, hustlers, and dreamers who populate these pages are not literary archetypes. They are people observed at close range during long nights spent serving drinks and watching human beings unravel.

What distinguishes the collection is its dual perspective. The narrator is both participant and witness. He is drinking with the crowd while simultaneously taking notes on it. He is implicated in the chaos he describes, but also detached enough to recognize its absurdity. The result is a voice that can be savage one moment and unexpectedly tender the next.

Viewed alongside later books such as Submerged Structure, Flesh Wounds captures an earlier version of the author: angrier, less guarded, more reckless, and more willing to place himself directly at the center of the story. If Submerged Structure often observes the world from a distance, Flesh Wounds lives inside the collision.

The lasting achievement of the collection is its refusal to separate beauty from damage. The poems recognize that some of the funniest stories, strongest attachments, and most revealing moments emerge from periods of profound disorder. Flesh Wounds is not a celebration of self-destruction, nor is it a warning against it. It is a record of survival written by someone who spent years standing close enough to the fire to know exactly how hot it was.

Buy Flesh Wounds By Thomas L. Vaultonburg At Zombie Logic Press

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There Are Stranger Things Than Dungeons and Dragons

There are stranger things in this world than Dungeons and Dragons, but in the small town I grew up in there didn't seem to be in 1983. It was the height of the Satanic Panic, and the Devil was everywhere. 

That summer my cousin Jeff had been staying at our house because he couldn't get along with his abusive father, and a couple of times his friend Brett came over to stay with us, too. He brought his Dungeons and Dragons books and we played a few rudimentary campaigns that he made up spontaneously. He was a brilliant person. Nerdy. The total opposite of my cousin Jeff who was a born con man and charmer. He was a year older than me, and my favorite cousin. Just full of it. The two of them seemed liked the most mismatched friends of all time.

As far as Dungeons and Dragons: I was hooked from the beginning. That first time I saw the Efreet on the Dungeon Master's Guide my imagination was unlocked. I always was fascinated with mythology and was just starting to become obsessed with horror movies, and it was the first season of Elvira's Movie Macabre, and all of this coalesced to ensure I wouldn't be able to show any interest in my first year of high school.

Dungeon Master's Guide first edition

The second time Brett stayed for the weekend he left me his Dungeon Master's guide and several modules. Actually, I traded them for a nudie magazine I had stolen from my uncle. It was the best trade I ever made.

I was so obsessed with studying my tomes that I had no time for school and barely knew all my friends had joined the Cross Country team. The coach tracked me and my friend Royal down and asked us if we were interested. We said we didn't know, and his quote was "Well, it's time to shit or get off the pot." We decided to shit because our friends were on the team, and group of friends I would keep through my high school experience was formed.

Royal was familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, but the rest were newbies. Their interest was tepid, but we'd meet in basements on the weekends when we could and Royal usually did the honors of Dungeon Mastering.

Then we made the mistake of trying to play after practice night in the school commissary. Retribution was swift and absolute. Not only was Dungeons and Dragons banned from the school, but a committe was formed and dozens of books removed from the library. 

People were honestly scared. The Attorney General had formed a commission to investigate Satanic Ritual Abuse in America, which according to Geraldo Rivera was rampant. 

But this only drove us underground. We started to expand our circle and fall in with some of the older guys on the Cross Country, who also were, surprise, surprise, Dungeons and Dragons nerds. Many of the kids I knew then went on to be very wealthy in fields such as computers and even entertainment. There was a small hobby shop next to the Ben Franklin called Claire's, and she carried a nice variety of Dungeons and Dragons products. My collection grew, and by today's standards was very impressive and valuable. 

It was a junior named David who was the ring leader now, and we'd try to organize sleepovers whenever we could to play. But mostly we talked about playing. And really deep stuff. It's interesting talking really deep stuff with adolescents who mostly go on to be supra geniuses.

Then the books disappeared. Someone had gotten to my mother, who was in the early stages of becoming very ill, and also in the early stages of becoming very religious, and explained to her how Dungeons and Dragons was a gateway to Satanism. I came home one night and my books were gone. 

I guess I slowly got into other things. Sports. Horror. I was till a long ways away from being able to attract the attention of girls, so I moved on and read a lot. 

Then at a cross country meet three years later I heard that Brett had committed suicide with a shotgun the previous summer. He also was a cross country runner. He never made it to eighteen years old, but I can say he had an impact on my life. It was so important in that Revenge of the Nerds 80's America that I knew there were others who shared the desire to get out, to explore other realities and interests without being persecuted, which we were mercilessly, even though we were jocks.

At least I was. The others were smart enough to drop it the moment they were confronted with the taunting. I don't blame them for that at all. Most of the time I wish I had, too. Lived out those two years of high school in what really was and still is an idyllic place, at least for those who knuckled under and didn't make waves. At least back then.

A while ago I was searching for information on some of the guys from that Dungeons and Dragons group, and saw almost all had really made it. They hadn't careened out of control like Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters, or lost touch with reality at all. They seemed to be the ones creating the new reality we now all live in. Computers and games and virtual reality. I was happy for them

Except David. He was the quietest, most pensive of the group. He had bushy hair and looked like an overgrown Hobbit. His family lived on a large farm, and it must have been a shock to them that he had fallen so far from the tree. He had joined the Marines after getting an advanced degree in nuclear engineering and joined the for lack of a better term, and this was how it was termed in the obituary I read, germ warfare program. He died of cancer a couple of years ago. It's hard to say if Dungeons and Dragons continued to be a part of his life. It wasn't much a part of mine until recently. It seems there is a resurgence of interest  with shows like Stranger Things. 

I'm guessing and hoping it's a lot safer to play Dungeons and Dragons in the open now. I never got my books back, but I have new ones now. The one I would trade them all for is the one Brett gave me when I was a new teenager all those years ago. Unlike all those other guys in the group I did go through hard years, long stretches of trying to find myself. I've landed on my feet solidly and prefer reality to fantasy by wide margin now because the last few years have been a fantasy come true. 

In October these gates open, and I want to thank Brett and David for leading the way for me. Introducing me to not only a game, but a way of approaching life that is not by the book: challenging the untruths and stereotypes people try to impose on us if we diverge from the beaten path. 

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New Items That Match Your Interest In The Mont Blanc Meisterstuck Pen, Burgundy

Every afternoon I get an email from Ebay alerting me to new items that match my interest to previous items I have been interested in, including, but not limited to: Hot Wheels, Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, transportation tokens, aspirin tins, poetry books, Spiderman comics, The Monster Club, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, Zombiethon, Shock Waves, silver, copper, and nickel bullion, and Mont Blanc pens. 

It's good to have interests in life. Hobbies. Collections.

I used to do Sears delivery, and was inside several peoples' homes every day for a few years, and I was astounded by how little people had that distinguished them from the next person. Now you could say I didn't really see where they kept their most private possessions and items they didn't want anyone else to see, but I saw enough to get the sense there wasn't much else going on besides what I saw out in the open. I was behind and underneath and in enough unusual places to know I'd seen enough to get an idea who lived here and what they considered important. 

I never saw journals or collections or studies brimming with books and personal mementos gathered during a lifetime of travel, experience, and contemplation. 

Mostly I just saw a VHS copy of the movie Independence Day. I'd have to say that movie was the most common item in all those years. Every house seemed to have it, and someone appeared to have watched it recently.

I like that Ebay shows a daily concern about the collections I curate and wants me to complete some of my ridiculous collections sometime in the coming
century.

Perhaps the thing I lost that was most painful to me was my burgundy Mont Blanc meisterstuck pen. I had bought it in the late 90's at Office Max for $119 and adored it's balance and the smooth, equal amount of ink the ballpoint cartridge exuded. Perfect. And beautiful. I had to Ebay mine when I moved into this apartment because I had lost everything. I needed money for food and to get the utilities turned on. The saddest thing about my life was I had nothing left of value. Except plasma. I got a very fair amount for the pen. More than I had paid for it, in fact, as the meisterstuck now costs almost three times as much to buy new. I suppose my circumstances are that I could buy one right now online, but this one was bought to reward myself for publishing my second book of poetry, and even though they all look the same, that one was mine. 

I'll buy another one, eventually. And perhaps I'll live long enough for that one to replace the memory of the other. These things happen. Lessons that things are just things. Or perhaps the opposite lesson: that things are damn important and should be cherished. 

September 12, 2026 update: I indeed did find myself buying another Meisterstuck pen, then subsequently selling that, too, along with most of my collectibles in what has become a sort of lesson in the impermanence of things, including myself. But at least this may be the last time I have to ever look up the spelling of the word "Meisterstuck".

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Halloween 1974 (Tiny Drawing Poem)

I got my Halloween costume in 1974 from Ben Franklin's. It was indeed Batman. Adam West TV Batman. The font here was the hardest part because I wanted to use Batfont, which emulates the pows and biffs and sock-os from the show, but it didn't match the somber nature of the poem. We finally decided the Carbon Type typewriter font was the most appropriate.

In 1974 my family moved from Freeport, Illinois, to Byron, Illinois, and occupied an A-frame house my uncle Wesley had built on the ominously named Devil's Lane. My uncle and his family had seven children, so the house was huge. Our time there was short, but full of memories, as I was just starting to form my personality, but my most vivid memory is of Halloween, 1974. The usual rumors of razor blades in the apples circulated early, although no one on "The Terrace" was even giving out apples that year. There was an icy rain, and I remember asking my mother about the telephone wires, and she explained how all the voices of the world were transferred into signals and carried across those wires. 

I have a lot of unanswered questions about who we were as a family then, but there's no one left to ask. The poem expresses that longing to be able to talk to her again. 

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