That's My Bix!

I didn’t get the big fellowship either.

For perhaps the first time, the quarantine/shelter in place situation has kind of gotten into my brain. Between the hopes getting dashed for an exit out of Nevada via a sweet waterfront home to the idea that it might have been partially funded and with a tremendous honor and then horror of watching the death count skyrocket as the dictator in charge uses it as an opportunity to self-promote and gaslight, it has not been a good day.

I did have a long phone chat with my LV bestie and grad school confidante, Lindsay. We are both certain that we’re going to walk out of this COVID experience with extreme agoraphobia. We are both a little weirded out that we have been absolutely FINE without leaving the house. I mean, that’s not normal, right? Honestly, for me it’s been a not just fine but an actual relief. Las Vegas traffic is terrible, parking on campus is terrible, half the people in graduate programs or academia get worked up about meaningless things and have ridiculously inflated senses of entitlement, and until a few days ago, I was heads down on my manuscript anyway, so being still and limiting stimulation helped me get my head centered deeply into the novel.

So I guess some good things are happening in that I’ve learned a lot about myself, but also, I wish we didn’t have to watch more than 30K people die because our leaders didn’t bother to prepare for the pandemic, or chose to underplay it while they moved their stock portfolio.

I really hope that if I do get this disease and don’t make it, the rest of you will make sure that these assholes are punished for their crimes against the country and against the thousands of people who have suffered and died for their irresponsible lack of leadership. Make them say every name of every person who died because of their actions. Have them shake hands with every currently contagious person. Force them to dip into their stock portfolio to pay off the medical bills, mortgages and credit card bills for the people who lost their jobs. Drag my corpse out if you need to but get it done.

I’ve been trying to be open about my mental struggles to help make that more open and less weird to talk about. I have panic attacks. It’s bad. It’s really terrible. It’s basically your body deciding that someone or something is trying to kill you and that you need to fight or run as fast as you can to get away, but really you’re just sitting in your house and you can’t breathe normally and your heart feels like it’s going to explode and generally you also can’t stop the waves of crying jags.

It’s a bad scene.

The last one I had was the morning of my first comp test at the end of January. I don’t remember the one before that, but I think it was sometime in autumn or maybe around Thanksgiving.

I’ve learned to recognize the signs and some of the triggers. Many things are related to the PTSD that I carry from past traumas. Things like sometimes I get freaked out by sudden movements near my face. If I accidentally hit my own head doing something stupid (like not being careful getting in a car), it will trigger a panic attack like clockwork. Sometimes Esteban will lean over me to read something on the computer and I get panicked. I always try to calmly ask him to step back and I know it hurts his feelings a little because of course I know he wouldn’t do anything. I know he wouldn’t do anything, just like I know that no one is trying to kill me despite my body sending tons of adrenaline coursing through my system — knowing isn’t the problem. Your conscious mind might intellectually know that you’re safe but your lizard brain doesn’t listen and has an inbox full of 30,000 unread emails.

I’ve been hearing that some of you are also feeling maybe some of the signs of trauma and physical body distress. Here’s the thing — what we’re all going through is actually trauma. Seriously, I’m not making this up — it’s trauma. And if you have PTSD from anything, new trauma brings back old trauma in weird and unpredictable ways, so you start seeing some of the same behaviors and reactions pop back up but in contexts that don’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to make sense to be upsetting. Stop trying to figure it out. Just go with it and treat yourself with kindness, okay? Because someone’s got to do it and Now You is the best friend that Future You has right now.

Future You is going to need some help. That means Now You needs to do some small things that help Future You deal with this. Because the numbers are going to get more scary. The people staying safer inside are going to start getting tired of it and making statements about how you might as well just get the infection over with, it’s just a spicy flu, etc. Those statements are going to flag trauma centers in your brain. Our poor little trauma centers of the brain are firing overtime, like underpaid Amazon Fresh delivery drivers. We have to go easy on ’em. Future You needs you.

Your assignment: Be kind to yourself. That means if you want to sit on the couch and start up a Gilmore Girls marathon even though the dishes need to be done, well, let’s see what Richard and Emily are serving for dinner this week. That means if you need to have a “from bed” day, then crawl in and put on some soothing music but don’t forget to turn the ringer on your phone all the way off. That means that if you don’t feel like washing your hair today, messy buns and hats are your medicine.

Now, I do have a few rules for Now You that are zero fun but they pay off for the trauma centers of the brain.

First, get enough sleep. Enough sleep is really hard right now — insomnia from anxiety is real, so do what you need to do to go to sleep. Maybe that’s taking an edible two hours before bedtime. Maybe that’s playing soothing music. Maybe that’s making sure you are done eating at least 4 hours before bedtime. Maybe that means you can’t watch scary movies right now or you need to reup your Hallmark subscription to mega dose on cheesy bland happily-ever-after 90 minute shows. Whatever you need to do, 8 hours of sleep is your new religion.

Second, you need to eat protein and fiber. I know, I know, it’s much nicer to just eat white bread and Kerrygold butter and not think about nutrition but you really will feel better if you eat every 4 hours during the day and make sure there’s always some protein and fiber in the mix. Your guts will thank you and Future You will be getting a serious kindness. Good stuff for this include smoothies, hardboiled eggs, and peanut butter and banana sandwiches, but it also counts if you just find a protein drink you like and drink that to get you through the day. Whatever works but try to get at least 20 grams of protein with every meal, and at least three fruits and vegetable servings a day.

Third, at least 20 minutes of exercise per day. If you’re doing everything from your house, you’re not walking even a tenth as much as you used to — think of all the parking lots you no longer walk from, the trips to the restroom which are now only ten feet away instead of across the corporate lobby, etc. 20 minutes of exercise isn’t a lot — and yes, vacuuming or picking up stuff around the house totally counts. You get bonus points if you get outside and get some sunshine though (sorry Seattle folks — do your best?)

Fourth, buy yourself a quarantine present. I don’t care what it is. You know the thing you’ve been eyeing up. Maybe it’s a leather bound fancy journal with creamy thick pages. Maybe it’s a box of fancy fruit from the expensive mail order place. Maybe it’s a Spirograph. Maybe it’s a puppy. You already know what it is. This is your excuse to buy it. If anyone gives you shit about it, tell them I said you needed to do it. Then leave me a comment to tell me what your splurge is. Go ahead. I’ll wait until you get back.

I believe in you, friends. And I believe in Future You. I’m glad you’re here with me. Thank you for being kind and taking care of you during this time. We’re all in this together and it helps me to know that none of us is doing this alone.

When we first moved to Las Vegas, we lived in a very $$$ new area of the greater metro area. It is called Mountain’s Edge because it was literally smushed up against the edge of the valley. We lived in a gated community that, judging by the sheer number of Latter-Day Saints temples within walking distance, was predominately Mormon. They went all out for decorating their homes during the colder holidays (You’ve heard of decorating for Christmas, and even for Halloween but you know who also put out Thanksgiving and Easter lights and inflatables? These people) and frequently alerted the HOA when so much as two blades of grass dared spring forth along our xeriscaped front area (you can’t really call it a yard if it would snap your ankle just by wandering across it, right?)

Then the housing market lit up and our landlord said “Hey, if you move asap so I can sell this house, I’ll make it worth your while, otherwise we’re just not going to renew the lease, but you’ll move on your own dime then” so we had to rush to find a new house. Because Las Vegas is a soulless corporate housing wasteland (you’ve read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, yes? I live in that neighborhood, ten years later), we found the identical floorplan for rent just three miles down the road, in an older less cool neighborhood. It wasn’t gated, was even CLOSER to the raw desert (instead of being 1000 feet from scorpion country, now we’re about 150 feet from the raw desert) and had the downside of being about 15% more rent. But it was an easy move and the neighborhood seemed more relaxed.

Boy howdy it is.

The cool side? Our neighborhood is far more diverse. There are fewer families with tiny kids, which reduces my constant fear that one will walk off their 20 foot deep front area and in front of my car. There are fewer people with dogs — and they don’t leave them locked out of the house in the backyards while they go out of town (like the people directly behind our last house, who had three pitbulls who would bark-howl every seven seconds (not making that up) until someone came home, literally for eight or more hours sometimes. Also, for reasons I don’t understand, almost no adorable tiny lizards but also we have only seen one single scorpion this entire year (and that scorpion was dead and immediately after the move so it’s entirely possible we brought it with us from the last house).

The downside? The people next door — we called them the Drug Dealers. Why? Because they were literally drug dealers, complete with neck tattoos and Hell’s Angels visitors who would drop by and leave ten minutes later on a regular basis. And apparently when we moved in, they were already in the process of being foreclosed upon, so they never bothered to pick up garbage nor weeds or, you know, be good neighbors in general. Case in point: there was a tiny bottle of discarded vodka in their front yard for seven months. Did I pick it up? I did not — partially because it wouldn’t help the house look any less trashy as it was so small, it was barely visible from the road. It was like an Easter egg for me and me alone. Also, it was a helpful time marker for me to see how/when someone was going to make any effort to care for the house.

I have no fear of turning into Gladys Kravitz because that ship sailed long ago. Abner!

They got kicked out, eventually, moving in an interestingly hyper 2 day moving marathon during which time they filled two gigantic Dumpsters with seemingly still fine furniture and household items and then were gone in the night, motorcycles, neck tattoos and oddly-pimped out* cars all at once. Then someone tried breaking back in at some point. Then the bank came and turned off all the utilities and there it sat, weeds getting weedier, a window falling off the second floor and smashing to the backyard, exploding broken glass everywhere, the front balcony door open to a windstorm. Basically a welcome mat to squatters and kids who swore they heard groaning coming from the house at dusk. Basically, it was a welcome mat for future squatters and ghosts.

However, now? Lockdown be damned — there are workmen literally refurbishing the entire house, top to bottom. They have been chipping out tile, playing music 12 hours a day, sawing, hammering, painting, more sawing, more music, just basically everything happening all at once, seven days a week, even Easter.

I think I preferred the haunted vibe. The dogs didn’t consistently bark at the ghosts.

I suspect with the Shelter In Place, the housing market is going to kick up big time as soon as it’s lifted, so I suppose that’s the reason for the rush. I just wish they were more quiet about it.

*For the record, I enjoy a good pimping out of a car, particularly one that embraces the rhinestone oeuvre. However, I didn’t understand the decisions they made, particularly on font choices for some of their customizations. I mean, come on, classics are classics for a reason — but if you’re going for the custom flames, then maybe customize your saying with something other than a font that also might have adorned the last Enya album?)

Despite countering for more than asking price, we didn’t get the riverfront property in Freezington. Back to the drawing board — or the constant watching of Realtor.com for new listings.

Back to Swedish Death Cleaning/Packing to Move At Some Point!

I have begun to consolidate the master bedroom closet and despite making a concerted effort to clean out purses when I am done using them, I still ended up removing detritus from six purses and bags yesterday that resulted in a full kitchen-size garbage bag full of random crap. The worst part is that this is partially purse archaeology, and I know at least one of those purses came, fully loaded with leftover crap, from Green Bay three years ago because it contained several spare oral syringes that we used to give our dog Zuzu, who has been deceased now almost three years.

In a pique of self-loathing, I also went through my phone contact list and removed people I haven’t worked with in at least six years, at least four people who are now dead, and some six businesses that have shuttered years ago. I also removed three listings that I used to call all the time when I had to work from Schaumburg, something I literally haven’t needed to do since the end of 2010.

So. Fine. I need to work on my mental and physical secret caches of clutter.

The comments want to know: What’s the most useless or out of date thing or person saved in your phone’s contact list?

I was a weirdo at the beginning of March — I have spent so much time with my head buried in how pandemics work, how diseases spread, how viruses replicate, how to build the perfect pandemic, etc, that as soon as I saw the virus leave China, I started having panic attacks. I was supposed to go to San Antonio for AWP on March 4 — not only did I have to be there for the literary magazine I work for, but I had been asked to read at an offsite, which is a big deal. But then I kept looking at the numbers in Italy — it was bad. It was very very bad. The death numbers were starting to echo what China was admitting to, and then some, and I freaked out. And then San Antonio had a bunch of cruise ship passengers with known confirmed cases and one of them went to the goddamned MALL and I just thought, you know what? I’m out.

So I cancelled. And then the entire university pulled out and no one went, so I didn’t feel as much like a freak. And then I had scheduled Weetacon Rehab to be in Vegas — and something like 20 people were coming to Vegas. I figured it would be okay — maybe — I didn’t feel right about it but again, I didn’t want to let anyone down. And then the numbers were rising. And I knew with the long incubation period between catching the virus and showing symptoms that the planes would be petri dishes. And no one was taking it seriously. So on March 11, about ten days before people were set to arrive, I pulled the plug on it. I wrote to the people who were coming, alerting them that Weetacon Rehab was going to be postponed until a date to be determined later. I summed up my reasons for what (at the time) seemed like an overwhelming amount of paranoia and caution:

I’m very disappointed, and I’m sure you are as well. Like you, I have been watching with concern about the rise of the COVID-19 viral epidemic. As of this morning, WHO has declared it a pandemic. We’ve been told to teach online if possible, and that’s just to students who already live here. Many campuses are rescinding in-person classes through the end of May. 
The only way to keep this thing from killing more people is to limit social spread — and an alarming number of cases are specifically related to exposure while people were traveling. The mounting evidence and unease made Weetacon Rehab in Vegas next weekend feel very ill-advised and downright stupid. But here are a few other things that brought me to this decision:

• While the COVID-19 survival rates are good for healthy, low risk people, for some it requires ICU and respiratory intubation. Think about the doctor in Wuhan who was young, fit and knew how to protect himself, and he succumbed to this virus. While the prevailing attitude about this illness is that it’s no big deal because of the low-ish fatality rate, Esteban still has PTSD nightmares from his very short stint on intubation. I still have nightmares from trying to communicate with him while he was on intubation. You do not want that. It is certainly not a “just a flu” situation if you end up with one of the severe strains.
• The survival rates are less good for many, such as older folks, folks with diabetes, asthma, heart disease and other immuno-compromised conditions. There are many Weetaconners who have some or many of those conditions, and there are many Weetacon loved ones who are higher risk as well. It’s entirely possible that we could inadvertently be infected and asymptomatic, then bring those viruses back to our loved ones. You also do not want that.
• It’s not only about the people we know — none of us wants to accidentally kill someone. 
• The Las Vegas mayor and Nevada governor seem to be in a state of denial which makes me distrust their decision making process. Mayor Carol Goodman literally said to don’t worry about it because you get sick on an airplane anyway, so what’s the problem. Las Vegas is traditionally the worst hit economically by any kind of snafu — it never has regained the same level of spending since 9/11 and in 2008, the economy here was so crashed that people STILL talk about their lives in terms of pre- and post-2008. We’re already in a huge slump after Route 91 shooting — the powers that be are TERRIFIED of anything that would impact tourism.
• The Las Vegas health system is notoriously terrible. Thinking about numbers, there are just over 4,000 hospital beds in Las Vegas greater metro area — regular hospital beds as well as ICU beds, in a city that has over 2M permanent residents and about 100,000 visitors on any given day. I have zero faith in Las Vegas medical care and have heard horror stories from so many people about how criminally terrible the doctors are here on a normal week. I REALLY don’t want to end up relying on them for keeping people I love safe, and foresee a very real situation where trauma centers are quickly overwhelmed and staff needs to make prioritization of care decisions due to lack of resources, as they did with Route 91.
• Part of this is likely because I’m writing a novel centered around a pandemic, but I’ve been studying epidemiology for over a decade and the numbers of confirmed cases we have now in the US are where Italy was 11 days ago. Italy is now in lockdown to try to control the spread and the ICUs are cutting off ICU resources for higher risk and older patients because they cannot handle the crush of needy. The only difference is that Italy had free access to the testing kits, while the US healthcare must get permission to test and are sending away people with no known travel to red zones untested. This is the text book case for unchecked spread. I’m probably over thinking this. I really hope I’m over thinking this. God, I really hope I’m wrong.
• Vacations are something we do when we don’t have other things to worry about, like global crises. Vacations are not worth dying over. This is the epitome of non-essential risk. If one of you got sick and died because of an insistence to have Rehab in the face of our own CDC saying “cancel everything now”, I would never forgive myself.
• If you stay home, the worst thing that happens is you have a Netflix and Chill weekend next weekend. If you come, the worst thing that happens is– I don’t even want to think about it, but the worst thing is so really really really bad.

That week — the week before Spring Break, there had been noises about teaching online and a gentle suggestion to see what we could, as teachers, needed to migrate to online teaching for the rest of the semester. Cool, I am running an advanced fiction workshop this semester, but it sounded like a GREAT time to avoid campus, so I enacted online teaching that week and hosted my fiction workshop through Google Hangouts. Those meetings were very entertaining — almost like having class outside. My students were primarily teleconferencing from various spots on campus — including several who were in the same giant computer bank inside the first floor of the campus library. I was confident that I could, if needed, teach the rest of the semester doing that — after all, the job I had left to do grad school had been all about sharing and collaborating with content via online deliverables.

A few days after this, MGM announced it was voluntarily closing its resorts and casinos. A day or so after that, Nevada’s governor shut everything down that was nonessential (like the rest of the resorts and casinos, along with a bunch of everything else) and all schools were closed for at least a month. Just like that, a full third to half of the Las Vegas residents were unemployed.

When my class met again after Spring Break, their faces were different. Things had time to sink in. They were eager to be there, fully and wholeheartedly fixed in attention. We spent a lot of time talking about how the semester would go from that point forward. I gave them the option of just calling it a day for the semester — just treat the class as though it was an 8 week class instead of a 16 week class. No, they universally insisted. They wanted the class. They wanted something to look forward to. They wanted to use the time to write. In fact, they wanted MORE exercises. They wanted MORE timed writing prompts. They wanted to workshop MORE.

Okay. This we could do. However, one of the transactional things that I always hate about teaching is that I hold something over them — their grade. In some ways, it’s an incentive to learning because it holds you accountable. But in other ways, it is a pressure that doesn’t need to be applied. And many other professors had replaced the in-person labs and lectures with MORE homework and requirements for discussion. One student said she had a panic attack the last night of Spring Break because she realized that her workload for the semester had literally doubled — work that was counted as 40% of her final grade had deflated in some cases to 10% of the grade.

My fiction workshop was already a pass/fail class — they don’t get a grade, just credits or no credits. I decided that whatever grade they had as of the Sunday night before we came back from break was the worst that their grade could be. The far majority of the class was passing at that point, so for the people who weren’t, they could still push their grade into passing (and then they too couldn’t do any worse than that even if they just stopped coming and handing things in) but it would mean that they only had to do the things they wanted to do, as writers and as members of our small literary community that we had created around our workshop table.

Now in week 11, these authors are showing me what it is to have passion.

Some of them have stopped coming — one because she works at a pharmacy and has been pulling extreme hours while also taking organic chemistry and a biology lab that had doubled the requirements overnight. One student has COVID-19 right now. Another is going through something and hasn’t shared the details but this kid has been in my class for three semesters now, has never missed a class nor an assignment this entire time until three weeks ago when the quarantine started. But what matters most to me is that they get to make the choices that work best for them, from the place they are right now. They are making sacrifices. Writing fiction, above all else, can’t be something you have to do because someone is forcing you to do it. And it shouldn’t be something that costs them something dear, whether that’s a GPA, a funding grant, or a job — or just the breathing space to not think about what everyone else needs from them at that moment. I trust them that they are making the right choices for them — and I’m confident that if they were to share what was keeping them from attending, I would agree that they were making the right decisions. Attending a fiction workshop is literally the least important thing going on right now. It should ideally be an oasis — not a demand.

But what is remarkable is that the people who are doing the work? Are working it. They are pulling forth the most groundbreaking work I’ve seen yet. Some are writing 10K words a week. Some are submitting to journals. It’s been amazing to be part of this explosion of creativity in the midst of all of this chaos and devastation.

We’re going to be okay. In the midst of death, we are in life, and in the face of uncertainty, we create art. We’re going to be okay.

Part of my PhD funding involves building experience and authority in the literary publishing world. Or, you know, such one may contrive through editing a literary journal. My first year in doctoral studies were supplemented by a role as assistant fiction editor — and my second year, I got a promotion to fiction editor. I enjoyed it, despite not really having a permanent assistant fiction editor due to the way that the program split out a new discipline, so we had no incoming fiction PhD student last year.

As I’ve mentioned before, ideally, in one’s third year, you leave the literary journal stuff to the fresher folks and focus entirely on you, baby, all you. However in my third year, they ran into the same problem they had the previous year without an assistant fiction editor — there was no one waiting in the wings to take my fiction editor cap hand off.

The directors of the various funding sources asked me if I’d take a bigger leadership role, and I said no. I’ve been “behind the scenes” editor before. Just because someone is good at something doesn’t mean they want to do it. I really like picking fiction. I weirdly even like reading stories that I know aren’t ready for publication. On some level, I feel like it makes you a better writer — and it definitely forms your eye for fiction that you like, dislike and want to read. Besides, rule one of being a writer is to read everything all the time. I used to read a lot more and gradually had gotten away from that — primarily with the advent of online life — so getting back to graduate school has meant an increased focus on what I now think of as “slow reading” — the kind of uninterrupted reading we do when we’re not simulatenously watching for new emails, tweet mentions, Facebook updates and the like. Non-scrolling, slow reading to the tune of 5000 words or more by the same author. Funny how rare that has gotten these days.

So I stayed on as fiction editor. We also flipped a managing editor and an editor in chief — and of course, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about how to fix the process, the journal and the everything, so I ended up doing things like setting up mailing lists and running metrics and suggesting that KPIs are a good thing to have. I guess you can take a girl out of the digital publishing world but you can’t make her stop acting like a crazy corporate autobot.

The previous leadership had seen fit to remove one of the issues — and wasn’t going to hear otherwise about it. It seemed weird to shrink the publication for really no real reason other than tidying up, but at the time it wasn’t a fight I was interested in having. However, with the new EIC comes a sense of experimentation. I pitched an all-fiction issue to launch during the end of the year — and with a super short turnaround between a call for submissions and the publication. The crux of this was very Wendy-style logic. Our fiction readers were sitting there with nothing to do since we had already gone through first and second reads for the spring issue, so if we could shorten the timeframe between the call for submission and the time when they saw the benefits of their work, the publication wouldn’t feel as abstract. What’s more, half the time my biggest frustration in working with a team is that I could have done it faster myself than explain, discuss or teach someone how to do whatever it is. So my pitch went essentially like this: if we limit it to 100 submissions, we can try a new submission model and a new process model and “fail fast” — so if it doesn’t work, we’ll not have messed with the “real” issues, but if it DOES work, then we can borrow some of those tactics for the next call for submissions. I limited it to fiction because I didn’t want to force the other genre editors to do something that they didn’t firmly believe in/wasn’t a tested and true format, and also, quite honestly, I knew that if I needed to, I could just buckle down and read and select all of the submissions myself if I had to.

Boom — it all worked. It was a bit of a push on the managing editor who had to draft contracts during finals week, but all in all, it is coming out without a hitch. My assistant editor picked the cover image from about 14 images I offered as options — and it turned out that he picked the only one taken by a friend of mine, so that made me very happy. And the stories are some of my favorite that we’ve ever published. I can theorize as to why that is so, but honestly, I think our team is just really starting to formulate our tastes and know exactly what fits in the publication and what is off-brand or way out in left field.

The other thing that I haven’t mentioned to anyone — I modeled the concept of “dripping” the stories on Holidailies! God bless us every one. So there it is — if you’d like to see a bit of what I do for (one of) my day jobs, check out the special Dark Holidays edition. I’m very proud of our work and most excited to see what crazy thing they’ll let me talk them into next.

If I hadn’t been opposed to digging in distant fields and trenches, I might have become an archaeologist. It turns out, I hate sweating and manual labor. Probably lucky for us all that I didn’t go that route — as it turns out, archaeologists are usually funded by trust money inherited by grandparents who made their money in unethical ways. Ultimately, my grandparents also made money in unethical ways — they just weren’t good enough at being unethical to get rich from it.

(Writers usually fall under the trust fund route too, and yet, here we are, being bad at having a trust fund too. Ah well. At least I’m not sweating in a ditch.)

However, there’s one shovel that I would happily pick up and that’s if there’s a peat moss bog nearby because one thing I’d love to do is investigate a bog body.

Bog bodies are fascinating people! They were usually murdered! They are way way way way old! While being very introverted (and sometimes squashed by millennia of bog vegetation), they really want to tell us what they know about life in the BCE. Here are my favorite bog bodies and what I admire most about them:

Best Hairstyle:

Elling Woman, hands down has got the best coiffure out there on the bog lands. This braid is exquisite. Found in Silkeborg, Denmark in 1938, this lady was hanged to death and then placed in the bog around 350 BCE. We know that she was about 25 years old and also, her legs were bound in an animal skin. One compelling theory around her death is that the world was going through significant climate change at the time and her village conducted a human sacrifice to appease the gods. The gods must certainly have loved this hairstyle — I would wear it today if I could do a decent braid. Here’s a reenactment of Elling Woman’s look.

Silkeborg was a happening place in the Bronze Age — and they were fascinated with death. We all know that Vikings were involved in significant human sacrifices — there’s compelling evidence that frequently these sacrifices were volunteers.

A few notes you need to know about this Boggie is that a) the hair turns red due to the Spaghnum moss tannin — it probably wasn’t red and b) there’s some argument in the bog circles that Elling Woman might actually be Elling Man. Humph. The patriarchy.

Best Hug

Old Croghan Man was found in an Irish bog (probably it used to be a lake) at the foot of a hill that was used in kingship rituals. We don’t know what happened to most of his body — Old Croghan is just a torso, but given his perfect arms and the arm span, we know that he stood probably around 6’6″ tall in life — which was exceptionally tall for that era. His hands are in great shape for being 2,000 years old — and also TOO good to have done much manual labor in his life. Some scientists posit that he had recently had a manicure.

We are pretty sure that he was killed violently using a spear or large knife or sword through the chest. The fact that his torso was separated from his body and head suggests that whoever was in charge of his body after death had a lot of strong feelings about him — on his torso, there’s evidence that his nipples were cut, which might have meant torture while he was alive or post-mortem body preparation after deal.

What’s more, he was resting not too far from another partial bog body in similar post-mortem situation. The archaeologists call this “overkill”, systems of homicide might have been done for sacrifices, king or leader “retirement ceremonies” or perhaps for ritual killings (or, you know, all of the above).

The Irish bog bodies are particularly interesting because of the nipple stuff, though. Who knows, maybe there was just a super weirdo serial killer back then who enjoyed kinky stuff.

People’s Sexiest Man In a Bog

It feels too easy to call out Tollund Man as my favorite but look at him! How could he not be everyone’s favorite!

Another alum of the Silkebord-area bogs, Tollund Man has been in our modern bog love affair since 1950, when he was found. Sadly, the preservation techniques in the 50’s were pretty lousy, and scientists recommended that the body be left unpreserved, exposed to the air. We all know what happened, right? Basically people in the 50s who should have known better never did, and Tollund Man’s corporeal self from the neck down went back to stardust. Here’s what he looked like when he was disinterred.

We still have that gorgeous puss to admire though. Unlike the Irish boggies, Tollund Man was probably not a king. We know that his last meal was porridge and that it was mostly cereal seeds, suggesting he was killed in late winter or early spring. He was most definitely hanged and doesn’t seem to have been an overkill subject — once was enough. Maybe only kings got the hat trick murder?

Not Really a Bog Body

Finally, if you’re throwing a party for a bog body lover, here’s a place where you can rent a faux boggie. I mean, a TRUE bog body enthusiast would know it’s not the real thing, but still, it’s the thought that counts.