This Space Intentionally Left Blank

I don't really want to shutter the blog. It has been so much fun chatting with you all about food and music, existentialism and insanity, menstrual cups and killer geese, loud yard guys and squishy identity, the global economic meltdown and the perfect pair of underwear, political geekery and gender theory and hierarchy and imperialism and of course, ogling Captain Kara Thrace and her Special Destiny, yeah baby. (Which destiny btw apparently was too mysterious to reveal beyond: vanishing undefined but-NOT-a-cylon entity of the woo sitar mapmath and That Voice omg.)

Every time I think of all the conversations we have had here over the years I just grin. And I know I'm biased about it but I honestly believe you're some of the nicest, smartest pants-wearing apes on this here elaborate string-and-cans piece of tech, which was why my blogging stint was so wonderful. There was never a single troll here, and I never had to moderate a single thread. Never had to delete any comments other than spam, never had to ban anyone, and this on a blog where we all frequently expressed strong and unpopular opinions about controversial subjects. There were a few arguments, some more intense than others, but in almost three years of constantly active comments threads and almost 500 posts there was never a single flame war, which says something profoundly beautiful about all the people who stopped by to comment. Ah, for so many reasons, I really don't want to shutter the blog.

Unfortunately, the way my stupid chronic illness limits me often requires me to make choices I don't necessarily want to make, and so what's happening here is a sort-of "something's gotta give". Blogging does not take all that much time or energy from me but writing novels always has. It used to go a lot faster but it was always very consuming work, it is still much harder (but also much more pleasurable) for me to produce words for a book than for a blog. Something else had to come off of my table in order to get writing books all the way back onto it, and blogging was pretty much the only thing I had to offer to the gods in that regard, so here it be.

I write for the love of it and no matter what happens I doubt it will ever be a proper occupation. I mean, I think about publishing, I think about money, I think about exposure, I dream and stress about those things, and perhaps I will throw myself into them next year, but I don't write for reasons that fall into those categories. I write because I am in love with writing and I can't imagine living without writing. It is the longest bestest love affair I have ever had. Which sounds weird and makes people think I am in love with myself. And I am! But not like that. It's more like this: writing, for me, is a kind of sense-certainty but it is not an unthinking kind. Time goes pop and my body catches this feeling and it is almost like having all of immediacy and all of eternity/infinity balled up into one delightfully magical toy dancing back and forth between the forefront of my mind and my fingertips. Carvel may well taste like happy, particularly the classic ice cream cake with the chocolate crunchies, but fiction writing tastes like kissing the truth.

I've been a net-head for as long as there has been a net, so I will still be around. I enjoy all of your thoughtful and entertaining blogs and will visit you all often enough to make you bored of seeing my name in your comments threads. And maybe a few paces down the road I will also find myself needing to set up a new web presence in order to try to sell some books, we'll see how things shake out.

Thank you all so much for blogging with me! As best as I can gather, I am obligated by my awareness of all internet traditions to cap off our zany digital adventure here with a quote from Douglas Adams:

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.

Call & Response: Freezing Inside Your Golden Garden

This flare has been so miserable, it is one of the ones with a lot of neurological symptoms and pain and blegh. My balance is terrible, I have fallen twice in the past couple weeks (neither time badly). I have been so sick, so tired, and so busy just trying to keep up with chores and the day to day business of living that I have not had much time or energy for things I enjoy. But some of the busy is aimed at enjoyable as I am in the process of relocating my home office from one room to a better room. I have actually commandeered the guest room so now if you come for an overnight visit you'll have to pick a couch or a lesbian to sleep on. There are worse fates.

This will be my first real writing room. I have never lived anywhere that had enough rooms for that before, and when we moved in here, I originally set up in what would have been the dining room of the house, which I didn't want to do but did as a compromise. It hasn't really worked, though, especially now that Wesley has moved in (Lucy is so mellow and easy, Wes is...not, heh) and I am finally writing for reals again, so E and I have renegotiated and emptied out what used to be the guest room and I am presently shopping around for a luscious shade of purple paint to cover up the slate blue so I can move in there.

The cats had their first birthday a few weeks ago, aww. They are very well, hale and hearty and hilarious except for Wesley's new obsession with scratching the window glass from sunup 'til sundown letting the spring birds know he can SEE THEM and if he could he would EAT THEM D-E-D, and I would post pictures but I still have no desktop so manipulating my personal data is cumbersome.

I have three hypothetical builds on my laptop but nothing material. Fucking Microsoft and their OS nonsense, for the other geeks, the problem set went kinda like this:

1. Desktop crash.


2. Had an old mobo & cpu so decided to do a total rebuild and get one of those multicore chips.


3. Started riffing off of a Gigabyte unit with decent onboard sound and pieced out a moderately priced rig that should last 5 years before the next major upgrade; included one of those AMD quad core phenoms, Radeon HD 4850 graphics card, 1TB hd, and planned to start with 4MB RAM in a board with a 16MB limit. Some of you have spotted the problem.


4. I like to play just enough video games such that Linux is not a workable alternative for me.


5. Screw Apple and their inaccessibility for builders.


6. Fricken frackin Microsoft Vista would seem to be my only option because I need an OS that will recognize all of the RAM and XP will not. Plus which, I cannot re-use the copy of XP that I have because of the restrictive -- and restrictively enforced -- EULA, and getting another copy of XP still costs full price even though Vista has been on the market for over two years already.


7. So I thought okay fine, fuckit, even though I want practically none of the so-called features that Vista offers if it is the only thing that will run my RAM and let me play the games that necessitate said RAM in the first damn place, then so be it, it will not be the first or last time I'll have to make peace with an intrusive authority running a system which flatly ignores the organization of my components and/or pleasures. And then just before I ordered a bunch of crap, I saw MS was coming out with a new OS, Windows 7, in ~6 months.

I still have not decided what to do about that mess but I am not waiting until October to build another desktop and I am not joining Team Guinea Pig for Vista's successor.

Have you ever had a pet peeve that people would not stop irritating for such a lengthy stretch of time that you began to consider getting a tattoo warning people off about it? I would do this about how people confuse the data from social group analyses and misapply it to individuals in every wrongheaded and/or essentialist way possible but I don't think I can pare the theory down to few enough words to fit on my forehead. My back, yes, but then I'd have to meet people topless and backwards and I already confuse them enough as it is. It's kinda funny how I say these things like even if I did them anyone else would give a shit, huh? There is approximately zero chance of any tattoo in any location serving as an effective deterrent of that particular irritation.

Opposite to irritating, I cannot stop hearing this Jimi Hendrix song in my head lately. The album it's on, Bold As Love, is serving as one of the main soundtrack elements to the b-novel I'm scribbling right now, which is one batch of absurdity piled atop the next, very different from the a-novel. But Dolly Mae gotta make sure it's right, so until tomorrow, good night.

What strange words stutter from the mixed up minds of you lot?

Linkbraindump

Jon Stewart rubs me the wrong way sometimes but when the guy gets hot he catches on fire. This thing with Stewart and Jim Cramer that's been smoking around the internet was what everybody thought real news reporting was supposed to look like. If you haven't seen it, you really should. I love when Stewart busts out like that, but, you know, it's on our comedy channel. It's funny 'cause it's soul-crushing.

DOMA might get some cracks in it soonish. This is not the sort of challenge that is likely to overturn it entirely, so I will probably not follow it very closely. I'd have blogged the California thing but I am so fucking sick of talking about marriage. The only reason I even care about it at all is that every time I run the general equality analysis it dumps out that winning marriage is our quickest bestest shot at cresting Equality Hill, and I care very much about equality. Sponserbilities are fustrating.

WTF, FLG? I'm so angry over this story I have written three lengthy posts about it but they are all too ranty to put up. I know people in that town. I do a lot of eyerolling and sighing at the superstitious gay-haters, of course, but imo it's always far worse to be fucked over by someone who's supposed to have your back than by people who run right at you calling it out exactly how it's coming down. In an odd and backhanded way I actually respect some of the people who openly and honestly hate me a lot more than I respect some of the people who think of themselves as queer allies but then treat our equality like a rerun of a television show they didn't even want to watch the first time it was on.

Doesn't anyone at the Fox network read their pilot scripts? If you saw the pilot episode of Dollhouse and thought "meh", here's the script. That this wasn't what aired is more proof on the pile that they should just pinkslip all their execs and start over. Rather than letting the boy alone and letting him do his thing, they keep trying to "help" and they're killing everything smart and good about what he does. Hey, it's just like the superstitious gay-haters!

Heh, Leonardo da Vinci was kinda hot. (link goes to video)

If I never hear the phrase "gold star lesbian" again it will be eons too soon. What is with these women who treat the penis as if it's some kind of pollutant of the female body? It washes off, ladies. And not for nothing do I casually mention in passing that gauging one's worth, value or status as a lesbian according to whether one has touched a penis is a damn strange arrangement of lesbianism. Why, it's almost like these women think the penis is so almighty and important that one ought to arrange one's entire identity in relation to it, as if it is The Primary Referent, which I think, give me a minute to do the arithmetickin, carry the balls, yep, makes them gay men.

So we're just going to let this rich-fuck-over-the-poor shit go, aren't we? I mean, we're going to hoot and holler while Jon Stewart tells Jim Cramer off, but we're not going to do one damn serious thing about the stuff that causes this, right? We're basically just going to aim for re-establishing the status quo, the same arrangement of bells, lights and bumpers we had right before the pinball machine that is our national economy started blinking TILT? We should've elected the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson and at least made this thing more fun to watch on tv.

I guess for solace there's the fact that this last thing wouldn't be half as damn hilarious if we weren't all so stupid. Do's & Don'ts for baby handling.

Got linkbraindump?

Alarm Clock

We have two microwaves in the kitchen. There was a built-in unit over the oven when we moved in, but we don't like it. It's small, our dinner plates are a bit oversized, and they don't fit in it. So we also have a stand alone microwave on the counter. We got that one in Flagstaff and it is the best microwave ever, which it had better be, because we had to return something like 3 or 4 different defective units to the Sears at the Flag mall before we finally got this one. That was a surreal week, I weighed something like 96 pounds at the time and had to hobble on my cane through packs of military recruiters trolling the food court in order to conduct microwave transaction after microwave transaction. Most of it is a blur.

Anyway, there was really no point in telling you that since you probably do not care about the history of the microwave. This microwave does have some awesome features, though, and the most useful set of preprogrammed options I've ever encountered. When it dies, we will both be sad.

There is also something about the blue LED it uses that makes it much easier to see than a lot of digital displays, so I prefer to look at it whenever I need to check the time in the kitchen, and E prefers to use its kitchen timer feature over those available on other appliances. The single feature on this microwave that isn't well suited to our use is that when the timer expires, it doesn't re-set back to the clock display. E's scattered attention means she can't cook as much as an egg without using the kitchen timer, and it also means that she forgets to manually re-set the LED back to the clock display pretty much every day.

And because I am not particularly well grounded in my spacetime coordinates in any case as well as presently stuck in a sleep cycle where I wake up foggy at around 4am every single day, each and every morning I lumber into the dark kitchen half-asleep glancing about checking for the time and I see the microwave clock blinking END END END, and just for a second but every goddamned morning, I experience this instant of full-throttle panic that the end of all of time is happening right now. I almost don't even need the coffee after that.

Don't forget, daylight savings starts tonight.

We Don't Live Here Anymore

While poking around online looking for something totally unrelated, I found a review of the movie We Don't Live Here Anymore that interested me enough to program the DVR to find the flick and record it for me.

I hardly ever watch a complete movie anymore, especially now that I can get so many of them without paying extra over what we already budget for cable. Usually I get about 20-30 minutes in and I just can't take anymore, but I stuck through this one even though I felt ambivalent about it all the way through. It definitely didn't suck, nor did it grab me in that place where I knew right away I would love it, but it did grab me in an uncomfortable way and keep me watching it 'til the end. It was not exactly what I would consider a disturbing movie -- I saw one recently called The Dead Girl that I found disturbing -- this one was just more honest than most, to the point of being difficult to watch. After it was over, initially, I thought it was a so-so movie. But in the days that followed, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and now I'm blogging about it, so apparently I thought it was better than I realized.

Browsing through user reviews of the DVD clued me in that a fair number of folks had this exact same delayed reaction to this movie. It seems like nothing exceptional at first. Not to downplay the writing or the performances (Laura Dern was pretty amazing in it) or the directing or anything, it was all technically very good work, but none of it immediately grabs you by the throat and makes you go WHOA. It is just this decently written screenplay off of a couple of novellas by Andre Dubus about these two heterosexual couples who constitute a foursome of friends, and it is immediately evident that it is well shot and well cast as it opens with one person from each couple beginning an affair together. Right away you get heavy foreshadowing that the other two are also going to get together and have an affair, and eventually they do. Totally mundane, right? No twist, no adventure, no puzzle, no mystery. Whole movie is about that, the fights and the sex and the lack and the lies and the disclosure, nothing else happens, there are barely any other characters, few sets, even the couples' kids play like background.

But the honesty of it, in it, it lingered. It wasn't like it was entirely honest, I mean, try to catch the ocean in paper cup, right? But so many movies construct characters that are not even a little bit believable that this one was very refreshing in that way even though it was hard to watch. All four characters were under-constructed. There were enough details to present distinct personalities but too few details to make them feel truly unique. They felt almost like templates, but not in a cookie cutter identical way. They could have been anybody you know. This genericness paradoxically made them feel even more real, as if they had been drawn off of real people who maybe you do know, but who'd been stripped of their more identifying details. I don't know whether this was in the writers' minds, the screenplay writer or the writer of the original novellas, or whether they had a different approach to construction altogether, but the effect of it for me was to make the characters feel very slippery while I was watching the movie, but then creep back into my head later in this hauntingly familiar way, where do I know you from? Eh, everywhere.

We have this heterosexual monogamous model for intimate relations in which we are all expected to fit ourselves, and it comes with so much baggage and so many expectations and all of these gendered behavioral roleplay demands both between the partners and presenting together to the rest of the world, and I never met a single person in my whole life who truly fit that mold. Oh I've met some who almost fit, you know, close enough. And some who didn't seem to care that they only fractionally fit even though this generally made everyone else around them completely miserable, but those have been exceptions, as are the folks who ditch out on the molds altogether, or try to forge their own or whatever. Most everyone I meet seems to be cutting off gigantic chunks of themselves frantically trying to fit into the socially expected mold.

This movie was like a close up examination of what happens when people who have been cutting off parts of themselves to fit into that mold wake up one day and realize that they are incapable of feeling solid or whole anymore. Instead, they feel adrift and empty, in need of filling, or an anchor, or a compass, something. And they turn to each other and realize, hey, they're both empty, they're both lost. They are also exhausted, clueless as to how things got so bad, and desperate in ways they never imagined were possible, let alone common. So they turn away from each other, and they hate each other and themselves for all of it. The whole thing was heartbreaking, and it happens every day.

But it kept itself pretty honest. You hardly ever get that in a movie! Did you see it? What did you think? Have you seen anything else worth watching lately?

Flare

My stupid chronic illness is beating the crap out of me yet the hell again, which is why I have not been blogging much lately, since I am exhausted and running crazy just trying to do basic things like grocery shop and visit my dentist. I am having a very hard time concentrating on anything, and this flare is one of the neuro-centered ones where I'm having all kinds of weirdly unpleasant electrical disturbances, like L'Hermitte's.

But here's the up side: I am fortunate that my illness is not badly degenerative, this flare will pass, and the book I've been working on will be there for me when it does because the new writing process I've cobbled together through 10 goddamn sick years of trial and spectacular fail is actually holding together even as my mind goes all diffuse.

SQUEE!

Ahem. I couldn't know for sure this was going to work until I crashed again, so I'm feeling crappy but so stoked. Is there a word for that? My brain won't fire that way right now, which is why I can't write, but I am thinking the Germans probably have a good word for that sort of paradoxical feeling.

The pace of producing this book is so slow you can barely see progress without using time lapse photography. It will take me at least a year, and possibly as long as two, to finish a draft that is ready for readers. But the second upside is even better than the first -- it is vastly better work than I've ever produced before. You almost cannot even compare it.

Before I got sick I wrote like it was a race. Not because I thought I was in a race, but because the need to get the words down on the paper felt so incredibly urgent. I never intended to work at breakneck speed, it just sort-of happened. I'd get an idea, like it, start developing it, and then the ideas would start coming so fast and furious and I'd be working as much as my body would allow just to slam them down on the page, edits later, ideas NOW. Then I got sick. After my brain got all loosey-goosey I began to appreciate just how essential my previous clarity and effortless ability to remember just about everything had been to my old process. I could not do it anymore. I'd get the idea I liked, start to develop it, and then my health would crash and the whole thing would sort-of dissolve.

Writing a novel, for me, is a lot like building a castle in the air. I used to be able to switch back and forth between working on the blueprints for the whole structure, and nailing materials together for one small part of it, then a whole different part, pretty easily. At least, I felt like I could. I believed I could.

But once I got sick, I couldn't be running back and forth between those tasks anymore. If there weren't enough blueprints done before my health crashed, the whole thing came tumbling down and could not be rebuilt because I could not remember how any part of the structure was intended to be connected to any other part. So this time, I spent months and months working on nothing but blueprints before I started trying to cut materials or nail anything together. I had just started cutting and nailing for the novel's walls when the flare came and the walls in my mind came down. And the structure is holding! There are enough blueprints. The whole thing is not only not crumbling down all around me, I can still see how each bit connects to every other bit, and I can see that the fact that I'm taking this much time drawing out blueprints is going to make the finished castle far more interesting and solid than any I've built in the past.

Oh, all I want to do is build the thing. I am enormously pissed that I am in a flare. It feels like sitting in front of my favorite food, starving, and not eating it. But you know what happens when you gorge and guzzle; you don't really enjoy any of it, you can hardly taste it, and half the time you choke.

I know I can't do narrative work when I can't get my mind to hold on to a zen-like space, that's the way I get the feel of the words the way I like them. For me, writing is a synesthetic process. Other people sometimes experience words as if they have colors or sounds; for me, words have feels to them, like a form of sensuality, they feel rough or creamy, or maybe like pavement or like a tongue, or they overlap across any number of sensations, and punctuation alerts to the intensity of the sensation. I get into that zone that people talk about when they work out or meditate, and from that space I use how words feel to make choices about how I string together a sentence, a paragraph, a story. Can't do it when I can't get my body to feel the words properly, or get my mind to hold onto the right space.

So right now I'm pretty bored. The most exciting things I am capable of doing today are continuing on my eternal quest for comfortable underwear -- low rise stretch cotton boy boxer briefs made for bodies without penises, where have you been all my life? -- and play the goofy little Top Chef video game I bought while I was scouring the local department stores for comfortable underwear. But I am so excited that my book will be waiting for me when I come out, I cannot even tell you. I hope you all have something in your lives you feel this good about looking forward to! :)

LOST

No, not the show. I found the A-story really compelling but they kept dodging out on it to tell this whole list of D-stories that were not interesting to me, so I stopped watching a while back. I'm talking about being physically lost in the material world.

I have virtually no sense of direction whatsoever. This is not even a little bit hyperbolic. You hear that thing about people who couldn't map their way out of paper bag, I could not even tell you I was trapped in a bag, because I'd just be in there wandering around in circles starving to death, I'd never hit the edges to discover what sort of container I was in. Fuck north and south, most days I'm lucky I can find up and down.

Recently when the winter froze my car so badly it freaked out, forgot everything it knew, and had to go spend the night back at the dealer for a refresher course regarding the fundamental components of its electrical identity, E dropped me off one morning to pick it up and drive it home. I know where the dealer is. It is right by my doctor. I know where my doctor is. And I still got lost trying to come home.

I know exactly how it happened, too. I made a right turn sooner than I should have, and I thought to myself: Oh it'll be fine, I'll just go up a few blocks and then go left and then go right, be exactly where I need to be. And then the road curved. And I thought to myself: Oh I should turn around right now or I am going to so so so sorry. Yeah. I was lost for well over a fuckin' hour, and the entire time I was never more than twenty minutes from where I fuckin' live. And still I found myself driving around the innards of a recently closed down manufacturing facility before I found my neighborhood.

Yes I am, very soon, buying one of those satellite navigational thingers that will find places for me and then talk to me about how to get there so I don't have to have my identifying information Sharpied onto sticky labels and pasted onto my shirt fronts whenever I venture further than the grocery store.

I have been lost in every state in which I have ever lived and at least half the places I've visited. I have been lost so many times in Miami I could not possibly count them. I remember becoming aware of how bad the situation was around high school, when my girlfriend could pathfind her way around SoFla so much better than me that I didn't usually bother to keep track of where we were, and this even though I'd been born down there and she'd moved to town a few years before from a place so deep in the rural south they barely even had roads. In addition to Ohio and Florida, I've been lost in Georgia, Texas, Alaska, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, the Bahamas, on Grand Cayman ffs, and even a few times in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is quite a feat considering you can pretty much climb up on any random rooftop anywhere in town and actually see wherever you're trying to get from wherever you currently are. I was never lost badly in Flag, never for more than a few minutes -- seriously, the town is only like 15 miles broad, if you can get lost badly there, you need a legal guardian -- but I did wind up unintentionally on the expressway heading to Phoenix on multiple occasions because for some mysterious reason my brain just would not retain the direction to not make that particular turn at that particular intersection. It is pretty funny like the fifth time you do it. Oh shit I'm on the expressway again, guess I'll be pretty late to anthropology.

And still, somehow, I have never been very badly lost. Oh so very many times, but never for very long. None of my experiences compete with the stories my family, friends and lovers tell, they of the excellent senses of direction, about how lost they have been.

I have one ex, for example, who somehow managed to get herself and a carload of other lesbians lost so badly they were not only in the wrong state, they were something like three states away from the one where they should have been. I still can't figure out which drug combination you have to be on, exactly, to create an outcome that far off course. It would seem impossible to do with mere beer and dope, but she swears they did. Speaking of beer and dope, two of the men to whom I'm related, both of whom consider themselves such fine navigators they'd boost a spaceship and head out into the 'verse together with twenty bucks and a pocketknife, got their asses so desperately lost trying to sail from a Caribbean island to Miami that they wound up washing up on the shores of Mexico. You can't find the right nationstate when it's less than 400 nautical miles from your starting point, I start to have doubts about you locating a habitable world in shiny new galaxies.

What is the most lost you have ever been?