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fredblee.bsky.social
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fredblee.bsky.social Fred Blee @fredblee.bsky.social · Feb 13
Skyline 20240923-1
#photography
Downtown Milwaukee at night, viewed from the north. Included are the 7Seventy7 building, the old gas company building (with the flame on top), the US Bank/Baird building, the Hilton (?) and a couple of Northwestern Mutual buildings, the one in the foreground undergoing complete and utter gutting, much as Acting President Musk wishes to do to the US government and our Constitution. Northwestern Mutual intends to end up with a lovely new building. Musk intends to leave smoking ruins. Resist!
May 13, 2025 at 4:08 PM
emilyinkpen.bsky.social
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July 30, 2025 at 4:51 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
#altstories
fredblee.bsky.social Fred Blee @fredblee.bsky.social · Feb 24
Breakwater 20250223-1
#photography
#Resisr
A pinkness descends upon the waters, and, lo, the waters are chill, but the people are not. Though ice remains upon the waters, the people are wroth, and cry out in lamentation, “Who will preserve us from this iniquity? Who will be our breakwater, beating back the waves of calumny and falsehoods?” No gulls are about; the horizon isn’t. Only the breakwater can save us now.
April 9, 2025 at 6:56 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
#altstories
jecsa.bsky.social jecsa.bsky.social @jecsa.bsky.social · May 21
I was getting quite good at remembering the alt text thing, now I'm regressing! Sorry 😞 I will try harder! #AltText #Photography #FibroFog
May 22, 2025 at 12:37 AM
fredblee.bsky.social
Breakwater 20250415-1
#photography #altstories #resist
Mid-morning on the lake, dark clouds and bright sun and a sharp wind blowing off-shore. Small craft would be advised to stay ashore; toy dogs and people wearing large hats are advised to remain indoors lest a gust send them skittering down sidewalks and perhaps perilously into traffic. I will venture out, cap crammed down and windbreaker zipped, to purchase provender for the week’s repasts. Wish me luck, as I do you. Given the ongoing, slow-motion coup in this country, we’re all going to need it. Well, the rich won’t. But you and I will.
April 15, 2025 at 2:30 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
Sturgeon Moon 20250809-1
#photography #altstories
At dawn, the Sturgeon Moon setting in the west, reddened by the smoke from the wildfires in Canada. The city is quiet this early on a Saturday morning, but for the cries of the gulls and the occasional siren that signifes someone's day is off to a very bad start. Perhaps, though, it will turn out to be only some very bad indigestion, not a coronary, and the patient, after a few hours observation, will be sent home to question whether they over-reacted or not and to wonder if the next time will be the real thing and they will dismiss it and never hear the sirens drawing near, and to ponder on the fragility of existence and the mortal callousness of it all, how there may be no time for goodbyes, or that the goodbyes will stretch through weeks, or months, of suffering. Oh, the moon rises and sets every day, but you, my friend, you get one orbit, one brief transit, one chance to shine. Make time to look up at the Sturgeon Moon, truly listen to the gulls, and send a blessing after every siren.
August 11, 2025 at 2:34 PM
emilyinkpen.bsky.social
We’re officially on Patreon and so is a brand new bonus episode of Wasteland!

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July 11, 2025 at 4:39 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
Mount Antero 20180520-1
#photography #altstories
Mount Antero girdled with early morning clouds while its peak juts into a clear Colorado sky. If you stop your car at a crossroads in the hills across the valley from Antero on a gorgeous spring Sunday morning, you could see something like this. You might just jump out of the car and stand there a bit to soak it all in, forgetiing for a moment the ill temper you left the house in and the chill you'll walk into when you return, all over what? Control, you suppose. But standing in that crossroads you get the inkling that control is overrated, and often illusionary, and the seeds of apology begin to form in your heart. Because one thing the mountain does is humble you. You can be sure this mountain will not come to you at your bidding; you will have to go to it, across that valley, beneath those clouds, up the snow dusted foothills. And it's that way with an apology, too. You have to traverse a valley of apprehension and perhaps receive a frosty reception. Still, they say that regret is the forge of character where ones moral awkwardness is hammered back into plumb and square on memory's adamantine anvil, and you've got to gird up and make what poor amends you can, for only you can do it. Of course, that's pretty much your situation generally: you've got to whistle up your nerve and begin to repay the debt you owe the world and accept the fact that only you can do the work. The mountain isn't going to come to you. The mountain isn't even going to care what you do. The valley is wider to walk across than look across. The clouds may or may not disipate. Nothing is known about the journey ahead, but you get back into the car and drive to a rustic minimart in a hopeless quest to procure gluten-free bread. That failure will do nothing to sweeten the morning, and your mood is dark and fearful despite your time gazing at Mount Antero. Courage, my friend, courage.
May 21, 2025 at 3:46 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
#altstories #resist
fredblee.bsky.social Fred Blee @fredblee.bsky.social · Feb 13
Skyline 20240923-1
#photography
Downtown Milwaukee at night, viewed from the north. Included are the 7Seventy7 building, the old gas company building (with the flame on top), the US Bank/Baird building, the Hilton (?) and a couple of Northwestern Mutual buildings, the one in the foreground undergoing complete and utter gutting, much as Acting President Musk wishes to do to the US government and our Constitution. Northwestern Mutual intends to end up with a lovely new building. Musk intends to leave smoking ruins. Resist!
April 9, 2025 at 6:58 PM
storiesalt.bsky.social
This week on the Writing Worlds Podcast we'll be chatting with @kaitlinfelix.bsky.social and @joshuagillingham.bsky.social about world building inspired by Vikings and Norse settings.

Patreon backers can listen now (here www.patreon.com/AltStories) the episode will be on general release tomorrow
An image of author Kaitlin Felix with the Writing Worlds logo and a picture of the cover of Kaitlin's boook "Ran's Daughters" A picture of author Joshua Gillingham with the logo of the Writing Worlds Podcast.
August 5, 2025 at 8:17 AM
fredblee.bsky.social
Breakwater 20250810-1
#photography #altstories
Dawn, and the little freighter rides at anchor outside the harbor, awaiting a berth and a cargo. Last night's storm, the torrential rains and the fierce winds, has cleansed and cooled the air, leaving pools of water faintly tincted with the residue of the northern wildfires. The amount of rainfall overnight was truly incredible, over 14" slightly to the north of us and from 4" up everywhere in the metro area. The last day of the State Fair was cancelled and too many folks spent their Sunday trying to salvage what they could. They are calling it a 1,000-year flood, but no one knows whether that should reassure or frighten us. There are too many 1,000-year catastrophes these days.
August 11, 2025 at 3:00 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
Revenant Canoe

Tory Tepp

Tampa, FL & Sauk County, WI

Image made: 20241010

#photography #altstories
This is a piece of art by Tory Tepp called "Revenant Canoe" captured during the Farm/Art DTour 2024 in Sauk County, WI. We had stalked it all the morning of our first day until we stumbled upon it behind the meeting house at the Witwen Tabernacle Church Campground. Despite its attempt to conceal itself behind some reeds, we snapped it standing fully erect and a quarter submerged in a small pond between the North Fork of Honey Creek and Honey Creek proper, apparently its intended posture and habitat. I have to look up revenant to see how a canoe could be so, and it seems this canoe is back from the bottom, a corpse of a canoe that came back as a cabinet. It stands mutely, startling and stark and sharp against the green sward that lay beyond it. And then a finch swoops and hops into the orange and white birdhouse. Suddenly the canoe is no longer a bashful artifact, but one with the landscape. The mirrors become eyes, and a face, not visible to us before, appears in the area below the birdhouses. The lantern becomes a helmet. We see the canoe as a figure crouched on the bank, waiting. We saw a lot of other art that day, took pictures of many pieces, always felt the slight disappointment one can feel because the pictures are never as good as what you saw, like memories. Even when we've adjusted the image and crafted the story, we're not.... there. Because we're here. We keep taking pictures, though, and looking at art installed up to its knees in a Sauk County pond, wondering why Tory Tepp would use the word revenant. Perhaps it really is a salvaged canoe, and all the objects in it found, discarded, and they've come back to tell us "Be kind to each other and to things", for there's a face where you least expect it and art in farmers' fields and a blue canary in the outlet by the light switch who watches over you. I can't suppose that Tory Tepp intended all that, or ever heard that song, but I'd like to think he and I are on the same wavelink, if only a bit.
May 23, 2025 at 2:36 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
Hey, Rube!!!!
#photography #altstories
Back in the day, there were hundreds of circuses crisscrossing the country, and several of them had winter quarters in Wisconsin. Delavan claims not only to be the birthplace of the Barnum Circus, but the capital of the nation. That summons to mind the present situation, where clowns and sideshow grotesques have pitched their tents and let the voracious beasts from their cages to raven the capital of the nation, in that other capital of the nation. Millions of bumpkins have been gulled by the patter and the promise, hypnotized by the steaming bile issuing from the Hack Narcissus, eighth wonder of the world who walks and golfs and slithers on its belly like a reptile. Be sure to put your two bits down to see the Craven Senator cower before Steve-O the Slug Boy and watch the Elongator crack his whip and as a climactic finish, flog his dead phallus. Of course, women and children are not admitted, or even considered, for that matter. If you’re as tired of this crap as I am, tell everybody you know. They’re probably tired of it too. It can be exciting when the circus comes to town, but you don’t want it to stay.
May 6, 2025 at 2:24 AM
saraaaaah.bsky.social
I am a #voiceactor on this one🎉
No nonsense General Azrita Zerakin
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February 13, 2025 at 2:24 PM
storiesalt.bsky.social
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July 13, 2025 at 9:45 AM
fredblee.bsky.social
Breakwater 20250509-1
#photography #altstories
The breakwater separates the harbor from the bay and from the lake and from the low clouds on the horizon and from the spectrum of blue, blue twilight sky wherein a pale moon hangs, under which, long ago and in a country far removed, a sailor sat eating dates. Upon the endmost piling of the wharf he sat, fingering one by one the dates from a small bag, sucking the sweetness off each, and spitting the stones into the dark water beneath his feet. God is good, he thought, for giving us dates. And then it occured to him that there was no reason at all for the moon to be there, for the moon to even be. It came and it went and it was fortunate that sometimes it lit up the night so bright one could see as if it were day, but there was no reason for it to be there. Perhaps it is there because God wills it to be there, he thought, but that is as much as to say there is no reason. And it occured to him that the wharf and the warehouses and the port city behind him had no reason to be there either, but they were different. They were human, and like all things human they would pass, dissolve into nothingness eventually. Just as he would. But the moon? Would it too vanish one day? And then the sailor thought of his wife, dead these five years, and the small ache it still gave him to think of her engendered other memories of loss and people gone; his boyhood friends, shipmates, his brother. The sharpest pang of all was at the thought of loss itself, so cruel to beasts with memories. So cruel that it must be part of life itself, as inevitable as moonrise, as voracious as the sea. At least there are dates, he sighed, and put the now empty bag into his pocket and dislodged a sticky fragment from a molar with his tongue. The moon went higher, went buttery bright, and the sailor arose from his perch and went home to bed, humming a snatch from a tune his wife had often whistled. At least there are dates, he thought again, and smiled.
May 10, 2025 at 2:16 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
Breakwater 20250810-2
#photography #altstories
At nightfall, the freighter still lies at anchor, still waits. All day the crew has busied itself with the waiting, the ten thousand tasks that keep the ship afloat. Tomorrow may mean lading, or only more waiting, but for now there is only the deepening dusk and a day's work done. Some of the crew will sleep, a few will stand watch, and the ten thousand things will be there again come the dawn. And so each day for each of us, whether moored or moving, each on our journey toward the one. May you find safe harbor, good cargo, smooth sailing.
August 11, 2025 at 4:07 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
Moonsliver 20250825-1
#photography #altstories
No longer new, the moon was a waxing sliver last night, chasing the sunset. The skyline was already dark, as dark as the future can sometimes look these days, for we are in and age of turmoil. As Gramsci said "The old world is dying and a new world struggles to be born...." Each morning we awake to new occurences of age-old savageries while the perpetrators point their bloody fingers at the victims and justify their deeds with lies, sophistry and sanctimony. The clowns distract the audience while the cutpurses glide through the crowd unfettered. Devilish machines are unleashed, spewing hateful slogans and sowing confusion. Dieties are invoked, propitiated, cursed, denied; blasphemy falls from the lips of the pharisees and the flock murmurs "Amen." "...now is the time of monsters."
August 26, 2025 at 4:52 PM
storiesalt.bsky.social
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August 12, 2025 at 12:22 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
42.976, -87.919
What might well be an Aermotor 702A lists away from a small shed, surrounded by signs of an active, if weedy, garden.
#photography #altstories
The decrepit windmill leans drunkenly, half its sails gone, clearly defeated in its tilt with the atmosphere. The weeds, too, are winning, edging ever into the garden, relentlessly. Each year the tillable plot grows smaller, and it is still too much for the old couple who have tended it for years, who feasted on its beans and squash and tomatoes, who hoed and watered and mulched, who now are just as liable to topple as they wend among the rows, too frail to tend the land properly. Who will step onto this plot to restore its fecundity? Or will it return to a wildness made unnatural by the foreign species that have bullied their way to dominance. Vine and thistle of whatever provenance will win the day, and prevail when all trace of shed, of windmill, of human, are gone.
May 8, 2025 at 2:15 AM
fredblee.bsky.social
Spanish Ham 20190406-1
#photography #altstories
The plane from Atlanta arrives in Madrid early on Saturday morning, and, after a metro ride al centro, we find our hotel, drop our bags awaiting checkin time, and wander out for a late breakfast. We find this little place which could offer everything from Dewars to donuts and are soon feasting on castelvetrano olives and manchego, and yes, a slice or two of ham. A few people come in, usually just for coffee, but one intrepid customer has two quick shots of something from a bottle I do not recognize. 10:30 AM on a Saturday? Who am I to judge? No matter where in the world you go, there are folks whose troubles have gotten on top of them, and won't let them up, and you need to be kind to those people, or your luck at finding huge ham haunches will evaporate, and then you'll have more troubles to wrestle with and the cafe will never be open when you need a coffee. That's the way things *should* work, anyway, but too often the heartless knife their way to the top of the hierarchy and spend the rest of their days stepping on anyone who is a perceived threat and making the world a lesser place generally. Those people don't deserve to have jamon iberico in a dive cafe on a non-descript side street in Madrid, and if they did ever show up at this place, the owner would surely be rude to them, and perhaps even ask them to leave. Have no truck with the heartless, he'd say (but in Spanish), and vote them out of office if the opportunity arises. You should wear a red taffeta dress to their funerals. Honk at them in traffic. Mock them to their faces at christenings and other solemn occasions. Pretend not to recognize them when sharing an elevator, and push all the buttons below their stop. Right now, too many heartless are infesting our government at all levels in the US, but the day of judgement is nigh, and then the shoe will be on the other side, and they'll have to eat their own crow and learn a useful trade at a minimum security prison. At least I hope it works out that way.
May 12, 2025 at 7:12 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
Trees, Snow, Denver 20180402-1
#photography #altstories
Downtown Denver rises up from the snow-capped pines of Cheesman Park. The park, and the Botanic Garden next to it, is also a burial ground, but not a cemetery. No one has been interred there for well over a hundred years, but not everyone who was buried there has been disinterred, and so there is the occasional accidental exhumation. Not long ago a humerus was found as they made repairs to the Japanese Garden water feature. It always makes the papers when it happens, but no one ever stops to ask whether or not a Japanese Garden in a Rocky Mountain botanic garden is a form of cultural appropriation, or point out that patrons do not get the experience of being in a Japanese garden, but rather that of being in the Japanese Garden in the Denver Botanic Gardens, which is quite another thing, and that experience includes walking over the graves of hundreds, if not a couple thousand, long-dead Denverites. There is near to that garden a long shed full of tiny tortured trees, wherein one can savor an aesthetic frisson akin to satisfying the taste for fois gras, pleasuring in the result of nature perverted. One can’t spend ten minutes enjoying the simulacrum of a Japanese garden without hearing a siren, anyway. What a world we’ve built, on the bones of our dead.
May 12, 2025 at 2:42 AM
fredblee.bsky.social
Train, Mountain, Boy
#photography #altstories
A young boy presses his face upon the window to watch the Amtrak cars ahead be swallowed by the mountain, just as our car will be soon swallowed and the boy’s head will snap back at the nearness of the stone, and all the passengers will look to each other in the sudden darkness to reassure each other, to reassure themselves. Perhaps we are now merely heading into a dark mountain, and will emerge from the depths, having foiled the trolls and prosecuted the orcs of Pluto, to a verdure where we may safely pasture. Resist.
May 7, 2025 at 1:05 AM
fredblee.bsky.social
Under the surface, what creatures dwell?
#photography #altstories
As the snow slowly recedes, things are revealed. Beneath the surface, there are always demons, demi-urges, ghosts... and when the beautiful covering is peeled away, there they are, in all their ugliness. Now we live in a time when such ugliness is celebrated, when the demons are made flesh and the basest turpitude is lauded, no, not just lauded, rewarded. But now that the veneer has been stripped away there is hope, for the would-be gods are transparent in their avarice, their cruelty, their lust for power, and we now know what we're up against. They are as heartless as this stone. As cold as this snow. We are better than this. Resist.
December 4, 2025 at 5:42 PM
fredblee.bsky.social
Train, Mountain, Boy
#photography #altstories
A young boy presses his face upon the window to watch the Amtrak cars ahead be swallowed by the mountain, just as our car will be soon swallowed and the boy’s head will snap back at the nearness of the stone, and all the passengers will look to each other in the sudden darkness to reassure each other, to reassure themselves. Perhaps we are now merely heading into a dark mountain, and will emerge from the depths, having foiled the trolls and prosecuted the orcs of Pluto, to a verdure where we may safely pasture. Resist.
May 7, 2025 at 1:10 AM