Lightning Crashes Here: Essays

By Costa Koutsoutis

LIGHTNING CRASHES HERE: ESSAYS is a collection of previously-released and all-new nonfiction by writer and academic Costa Koutsoutis, writing about life, nerd culture, punk subculture, the complexities of immigrant families, and more. From video games to grappling with what it means to "be a man", LIGHTNING CRASHES here is a look back at a writing path that started over fifteen years ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Costa Koutsoutis
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781370507306

Costa Koutsoutis

Costa Koutsoutis is a writer who lives and works in his hometown of New York City. His fiction & nonfiction has appeared in print and online in places like Akashic Books’ “Monday Are Murder” short crime fiction series, the book Team Cul De Sac: Cartoonists Draw the Line at Parkinson’s from Andrews McNeel, the horror fiction podcast The Alexandria Archives, the long-running punk subculture magazine Razorcake, and more. Some of his work include the sci-fi near-future novella The Go-Between, the essay collection Lightning Crashes Here, and the detective fiction of Running The Train and All The Stories, featuring the adventures of PI/bondsman Ben Miles. Besides burying his head in the keyboard writing things, he can be found chasing the cat around, watching cooking shows and horror movies, and generally plotting how to get his hands on a full suit of steel-plate armor. You know, for fun.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

The Men’s Man

Get Boring

Closing Time

No Maps For These Obituaries

Shredding, Saying, Thinking, Feeling

Corned Beef

Inners & Spinner Racks

Anthony Bourdain, Dirt, Amends

For Grandmothers

I’m Coming Home

The Big Knockover

silence

Lo-Fi VHS Dreams

Hometown Heroes

My Family the Animals

Comfort

Young, Loud, and Scotty

Lightning Crashes Her

Acknowledgements

About the Author

FOREWARD

When I was about twenty or so, I started blogging. I got a LiveJournal, one of the early platforms for writing for free in some sort of diary-type fashion online that was popular at the time. Eventually this open-to-anyone-like-a-moron diary became a place to write about the punk shows I was going to and the music I was listening to, somewhere to flex the muscles of personal narrative, confessional, and expressing my feelings about art.

It’s gone now (I made sure to wipe it off the face of the earth ages ago) but from there, I ended up writing more and more, writing for others, and finally doing my own writing online, essays and reviews, and from there, I ended up in the illustrious ivory tower of academia and publishing you see before you...drinking whiskey in my apartment in front of the window fan working on this as obscure 90’s punk darlings J-Church play in my headphones.

Blogging online and just being online has gotten a lot different since I first started, in ways that make it feel incredibly difficult to survive. More than once I’ve thought about giving up blogging and writing online, feeling like it’s just fluff in the aether that preens and pretends to be anything serious of meat and value. I think buddy Matt Maxwell, another similarly-cynical monstrous writer, recommended doing what he’s done with a lot of his blogging through the years;

Put it in a book.

It’s not a bad idea, honestly. LIGHTNING CRASHES HERE is a collection of some of my favorite essays and writings from my online presence (that I have the rights and access to), on life, video games, movies, music, food, and more. Plus a few just-for-this stuff that’s all-new, so, you know...you’re welcome.

Anyway, here it is. Enjoy.

-Costa, October 2020

The Men’s Man

Sometimes I think too much about stuff, but sometimes, I realize that it’s not so much overthinking as it is a taking stock sort of thing. 

So I read Nick Offerman’s 2013 memoir Paddle Your Own Canoe, his first book, and while a lot of the more casual humor has Offerman’s obviously best-known for being the comically-stupid libertarian (redundant) city bureaucrat and hypermasculine Ron Swanson from TV, but a lot of that character is elements of himself wrought unto flesh, though reading about his college and early 20’s he definitely comes across far more like a punk/stoner-type who threw himself into theater and liberal arts with abandon, reinforcing the latticework of his own almost-cliché homespun machismo/masculinity with support beams of humor, love, drugs, art, and culture. He’s such an interesting person to read and listen to (I like having his casual interviews and book readings queued up because of his tone and personality, it’s just...fun...to listen to).

Offerman’s sort of created this persona that nowadays seems to have created (or at least validated in pop culture eyes) a model of masculine that embraces not only art and open-mindedness, but also allows space for what might be considered conventionally-masculine and macho things, the kinds of things you’d see almost eschewed by people who are bucking against conventional and conservative masculinity.

I gotta say, I dig it a little.

If I try to think about my own models for being a man, it’s hard. My father and I have a relationship both very complex but also sorta surface, in that we care deeply for each other but never show it. We can always rely on each other, but most of the time our interactions are about baseball or how work is going. I’ll more easily admit to being a momma’s boy and going to her first most of the time growing up, even though she was traditionally the disciplinarian growing up, so I always saw her as running the ship, so to speak.

Of course, throwing myself into punk rock and art and music and rebelling against a family rooted deeply in being a very traditional one to remember its immigrant and refugee roots, I hated dude stuff. I hated that I sucked at physical stuff and hated doing it because it felt so macho, like sports in school, helping family fix stuff, any kind of physical labor. It was a weird and stupid combination of self-loathing, laziness, and a conscious decision to not be a jock.

What the fuck was wrong with me?

Anyway as I’ve gotten older and shed all these dumb notions about what teenagers and young men in particular should or shouldn’t do (partially as I grow to hate dumb absolutes of subculture and partially because I’m lazy and it’s hard to maintain) I’ve been developing my own sense of and definitions around what it means to be a man, which is a weird precarious thing, being that I’m white and straight and so much of masculinity is awful but also works hard to be catered especially towards me. I’ve comfortably been settled into my own skin finally in the last couple of years (hitting my 30’s was amazing) that allows me to indulge in traditionally macho things I enjoy but still maintaining my own interests in very non-macho stuff, threading a path through masculinity to hit the good stuff on the map and avoid the toxic traps that I feel like, honestly, I skirted against dangerously as a teenager (like the whole nice guy trope was a thing I indulged in as a body- and self-conscious teenage boy who was shy and anxious around the opposite sex...until I learned better).

It’s a model that I’m proud of, a model I’m comfortable in...and a model that because at times I know appears conventionally traditional, can sort of not scream I’m not a conventionally masculine male in public, or even in the circles in which I’ve run growing up (or even now). So, it’s interesting to see someone relatively famous (at least to me) be so open about it and how their acceptance of that as being an acceptable standard of masculinity and a celebrated one, nevermind a celebrated model of humanity in an arguably classical humanist* way.

I’m married now, we just got back from our honeymoon two weeks ago, and while I know that honestly it didn’t really change anything about my relationship with my significant other, myself, and the world, it did make me think about being a man and being a husband, simply because as a man, shaking off the burden of having to be the strong one, and as a husband having to be the provider, is rough.

It’s real rough, and despite all my self-identified liberalism and nonconforming ideas about self, about society, and about gender roles’ danger to personal mental health,