utopia, 09 april 2026

Alewife Bayou: October 1998

As you might gather from yet another posting gap, I'm not in the mood right now to make any observations of the world around me, and if I did they'd probably just be a stream of profanity ... so we might as well Dredge some more.

As usual, something on blueboard like this is a latter-day remark (2026).

conversation of ideas

one october ninety eight noon

I was relieved to find a response to the Yom Kippur essay. It tells me that someone read it. Once in a while I write something which I think is provocative -- I think, "You know, if I read this, I would have to write something in response or send an email about it" -- and then, when I don't get any responses, I assume no one is reading.

On the other hand, when I'm just telling you about my weird train dream -- well, how do you reply to something like that anyway?

I forget that some people just don't write email at all, and not many people write it on the drop of a hat like I will. I can't send personal email directly from work anymore due to a configuration change, and let me tell you, it's a heartbreak, because I read most of my regular web sites at work and I can't reply immediately if something tickles my brain.

On the other hand, it's good for my work productivity, and it means that some of you (such as Diane with one n, whom I find very provocative, but who finds me annoying, I think) don't have to suffer as much of my emailed drivel.

Sometimes I get the feeling that all this emailing I do is because I want to have a Conversation of Ideas, something I rarely do in person. The spouse and I rarely discuss Big Ideas -- we discuss domestic minutiae, and when we're writing mouth organ, we discuss sex. That's about it.

My friend Marc has a unique point of view on questions of philosophy. If you want to talk to him about religion, you're guaranteed an interesting conversation. But in all other respects it's like talking to a Buddhist monk who's been isolated from society for fifty years. He literally does not put such stuff in his head. Sometimes that's enviable -- it must have been nice to have been the only person in the country who didn't know who Monica Lewinsky was.

Of course, eventually we caught him and tied him down and force-fed him the information. He lives on this planet; he has to suffer like the rest of us.

quick, the light is going

one october ninety eight nine p m

I left work early and went to take photographs. I walked along the river by MIT (people drive too fast on Memorial Drive!) and crossed the Harvard Bridge and then walked up the Charles River basin on the other side.

I was wearing cutoffs, a large T-shirt (I like them too big for me) and an even larger denim workshirt (I like overshirts which are way too big for me) with the sleeves rolled up. It was extremely windy, which is what inspired me to go take photos in the first place. I love the way trees look when they're in a hard wind.

It was a red-flag day at Community Boating. Green flag means mild wind; red flag is rougher. The advanced sailing test can only be given on red-flag days, and they were seizing the opportunity -- I saw several sailboats being paced closely by motorboats, which either means someone's being taught, tested, or rescued.

By the time the sun was almost gone, pink-orange, and I had used up a second roll of film, the temperature had dropped ten to fifteen degrees, and shorts were becoming incorrect. So I went home.

It doesn't matter if none of the photos come out -- and they may not. I tend to ask impossible things of my film, and my hands shake so I tend to use a faster shutter speed than is good for me, so they won't be as likely to blur.

That's irrelevant. I had a good time, like I always do. I could probably just go out with an empty camera, have the same amount of fun, and spend less money ... but then I eliminate the possibility that one of the photos might happen to be that one truly amazing shot that the laws of probability apparently allot me, about once every five rolls.

One of the consequences of the Death of the Camera is that, perversely, even though I carry a camera-of-sorts with me everywhere I go, I don't take any pictures, unless I see something I want to post a snarky remark about on social media. The days of my going out with a camera and just spending the afternoon looking for good photos are over. What would be the point? They'd always end up looking like phone-camera photos always do ... crappy. Crappier than the several single-body digital cameras I've owned over the years, which is saying something. I still have my old Pentax rig, with a lot of lenses etc, in a bag in the closet, and I've half-assedly researched buying a digital body for those lenses, but nothing has ever come of it.

a regular customer gets burned

two october ninety eight eleven a m

This morning I stopped into my local Au Bon Pain to get my morning coffee before descending into the subway, as I do just about every weekday morning, and as I have done for the better part of five years.

The Pain serves their coffee in these square urns, like metal cubes with a screw top and a spigot attached. These are left on hotplates for the customers to serve themselves. For some reason they tend to adjust the feet on these hotplates so they're leaning forward at a dangerous angle -- so the customers can get the last drop out of an urn more easily perhaps?

The customers need that, because there are five urns of coffee -- two dark roast, two light, and one decaf -- and the four urns with real coffee all seem to run out at the same time. Coffee is apparently subject to chained demand failure the same way that electricity is -- when the person's favored kind of coffee runs out, they serve themselves from the other kind, which means that kind runs out faster. You might call it a brownout.

I got there this morning and several of the urns were in the back being refilled. I saw a row of exposed hotplates -- and don't holler about safety, I assume a customer is smart enough to not put his/her arm down on a hotplate, so I don't consider that negligent (although OSHA might). And the counter is too high for children to reach.

The decaf was full, three urns were missing, and there were a few dregs of something in the fifth urn. I got my cup about one-third full before it, too, ran dry.

I stood back in frustration and waited for the staff to bring more out of the kitchen -- if the urns were missing, it meant they already knew about the problem and were attending to it. A little red-haired lady in her sixties kept fiddling with the same urn I'd just drained, tilting it and shaking it. I didn't say, "It's empty, ma'am" ... she'd have wanted to try it for herself anyway. People are like that.

I noticed she was having trouble getting the urn to sit properly on the hotplate without threatening to slide forward and off, but she seemed to finally get it.

(You can sense the train wreck coming, can't you?)

About this time, the young thug-boy came out of the kitchen bearing a full urn of dark roast. Now, those things are heavy when full. He pushed past people in his hurry to set the urn down. He slammed it onto an empty hot plate -- and the empty urn the woman had been fiddling with began to slide forward, heading for the floor and someone's foot. I caught it by its handle at the last second.

Then I reflected that fully one-half of my T-shirt -- the entire front left side -- was covered with hot coffee. And that there was some pain involved.

"Sorry about that," the thug mumbled. The red-haired lady was staring at me, and probably would have said something sympathetic, had I not put down my partially-full coffee cup and stormed out of the store.

I went back home to change T-shirts. Fortunately the coffee had miraculously not hit my overshirt. In the pocket of the overshirt was two rolls of film to be developed. If they had been ruined, I'd have been quite upset.

Now, here's the mystery. Where did the coffee come from?

It can't have come out of the sliding urn -- that was empty. This was not a few drops of coffee on my shirt, this was about eight ounces' worth -- a big splash. It can't have come out of the red-headed woman's cup - she hadn't been able to get any coffee yet.

That means it either came out of my cup -- which seemed to have about the same amount as before, when I set it down in disgust -- or it came out of the full urn, the dark roast urn -- which seems unlikely, given how tightly the tops of those urns screw on.

Or another customer had been bumped aside, either by the thug or by the red-haired woman trying to get out of the way of the falling pot, and their coffee spilled on me.

Ah, who knows? At any rate, I now have a very mild burn, like a sunburn, in a cashew shape over my left nipple, and a slightly pulled muscle in my neck (probably from lunging to save the pot). And when I went back into the store after changing shirts to get my coffee, no one -- not even the regular cashier who saw the whole thing happen and knows me on sight -- said anything about it.

I don't want to sue or anything, but I feel like "sorry about that" is not a sufficient response.

Something odd occurred to my warped mind a little later. I wanted a little extra sugar this morning, so I put three miniature candy bars into my bag. I only wanted one -- I was planning to eat the other two later in the day, I suppose.

As it turns out, I ate one on the way to get coffee, as planned; then I ate the second on the trip back to the house to change shirts; and I ate the third on the second trip back to the coffee place. One per trip.

Do you suppose, if I had randomly chosen to pack five little candy bars instead of three, I'd have had to return to my house twice this morning?

Au Bon Pain doesn't exist any more and I work at home, so I don't need to find a place to get coffee every morning.

can i go hide now?

five october ninety eight eleven a m

One of the problems with the death of Stay Tuned is that the Monday morning crowd doesn't have anything to read. I generally don't keep up with what happens on other peoples' web pages over the weekend (that's why I like sites that archive, so I can catch up) and I often don't have the time or inclination to update this journal over the weekend. For all intents, the weekend is web-free.

I realize that's the reverse of the way some people do things, but that's just the way I am.

At any rate ... today I am fighting a harsh deadline at work, one which fills me with panic. It's a project that I feel insecure about, so in typical fashion I have put off doing it, and now the deadline is staring me in the face and it's making me jitter and giving me stomach troubles. I realize I'll probably understand it once I immerse in it, but don't want to. Of course I don't want to -- it's not one of my projects.

Anyway, I should be not leaving my desk, not writing this, not doing anything else today except trying to figure out some other loser's C code ... but I can't have a day without an entry here, not when I didn't say anything all weekend. I take these things seriously. When I start a project I set my own standards for it, and it doesn't matter if anyone else on earth cares about those standards -- I am the final arbiter of my conduct and I'm a really mean judge.

Additional complication: I really feel pressure to go home and upload some files (which I obviously do not have the leisure to do) because of a different nerve-wracking experience which I initiated by making a hard decision yesterday night. That, too, is making my stomach bubble.

Unfortunately, my default response when confronted with unpleasant situations is to crawl back into bed and ignore the entire universe. It's great for dealing with stress; it's lousy for deadlines.

Later this evening, when I finally manage to leave work and have some time to calm down, I will read all my usual web pages and try to come up with something else to put here.

On the other hand, depending on your outlook, you may find this shot of angst more interesting than anything I have to say about ads, the German election, or the price of tea in China.

go look at the photos

six october ninety eight two a m

I should be in bed, so I'll make this brief: I put up some photos with captions and stuff. Go see them. [Dec 2004: They've long since been taken down, so I removed the link.]

I'll have more to say in the morning.

unwiring columbine's brain

six october ninety eight eleven a m

You may have noticed that I've been considering more than ever lately how my time is spent. Milton has nothing on me.

I'm not usually this weird about the subject. The part of the story you're not getting is that I have been scrapping projects right and left, conducting triage, removing things which are clearly no longer worth the time, things which probably would be worth the time if I only had it, and things which fall somewhere in between.

Although the demise of Stay Tuned was some time ago, the bald announcement yesterday "since the death of Stay Tuned ..." apparently brought some mourners out of the woodwork. Yes, it's gone, and yes, I do have some more to say about that, but not in this particular postcard. I cite it only as an example of a project which lies somewhere in the middle -- not a good use of my time, but hard to give up.

And last night, with my work project temporarily on hold due to other people's incompetence, a major project painfully jettisoned that day, and the evening free, was I working on my fiction projects? Why, no. I was scanning photos. (See previous postcard.) And playing an old computer bridge program experimentally. And listening to the Brian Setzer Orchestra play what is ostensibly "swing," I'm told.

I believe that if I have something I don't want to do, I will always do something else, whether it's good for me or not. And my usual reason for not wanting to do something is that I worry that I can't do it well enough - by which I mean almost perfectly.

Consider that, for several nights this week, after a day spent frantically trying to not work on the C program my deadline involves, I went home to voluntarily work on a Perl program for several hours at a stretch.

The difference is that fixing and changing someone else's C code does not fill me with confidence. I'm not sure I know the right way to do it. Whereas with these Perl CGIs I generally know exactly what I'm doing and why.

During the period when I hit a stumbling block in the Big CGI, I didn't work on it for two weeks -- regular readers will remember my griping about it. I said at the time that I didn't have time to work on it, but I know better. It was because I had a problem I couldn't solve. As soon as I reach a point in an activity where I'm not sure what I'm doing, I drop it.

The punchline is that I eventually did resume working on the Big CGI, because once the code is done, it turns into a fiction-writing project, and the fiction jones will engage me even when nothing else does. I want to dump some of these waiting ideas into the project so badly that I eventually did resume work on the CGI, and lo, I found a very pleasant solution to the problem with only about a half hour of hard thought.

This doesn't reflect very well on me, does it? I have a reasonably good mind, I guess, but I hate the sinking feeling that comes with the idea that I'm out of my depth -- and it's not hard for me to get that feeling. Mind you, it doesn't mean the puzzle has to be solved already for me to take it on. I devour logic problems and I used to be in a national association devoted to cryptograms, long ago and far away. I just have to be clear enough on the rules that I know I can solve it with some work. I hate not knowing the rules. I guess that's that INTP personality at work.

(Oops, I told. Stupid personality inventory. I hate being in the rigid little anal-retentive pigeonhole, almost as much as I hate anal-retentive people.)

Anyway, so last night was particularly ironic because of the side activities I was doing. Listening to Setzer, who as far as I can tell is doing the same things he was doing with the Stray Cats, but in front of a horn section. I love it and always did, but what makes it "swing?" The fact that people dance to it? The fact that he covers a Louis Prima song?

And I loaded an old card-playing program, almost too old to run on my computer (system requirement: a '386!) because my friend Eric has been teaching his son bridge and spreading a little of the enthusiasm around -- so they'll have other players, I guess.

Now, here are three things which historically I have always wanted to be able to do and which I have always given up as hopeless causes:
- Being able to dance
- Playing the guitar
- Playing bridge

There are others -- "being able to draw" is a big one, but there, the jones is big enough that I never really give up, just bang my head against the same wall every now and again.

I really do think that if I can't instantly do it well, I don't want to do it. I think writing has spoiled me. I was the kid who wrote A+ term papers the night before they were due. Some things have gotten harder as I grow more careful about style, but in general I can still just sit down and let the words flow out. Why can't everything else be like that?

Worse yet:

While playing the computer in bridge last night, I noticed a weird bidding pattern. The player to my left bid one no-trump. Her partner bid two clubs. Two clubs? She returned a bid of two diamonds. Wait, I thought, oh my goodness wait. I know what this is. This is Stayman. I just read about it. The two-clubs bid is a signal to find out how many suits she's good in. The two diamonds says "very strong." And, sure enough, her partner raised to three no-trump immediately -- a very tough contract.

And I thought, oh my God, and that was that. I didn't immediately turn the computer off, but my heart wasn't in it after that. Because I thought to myself: I don't want to be a bridge geek.

I think somewhere in my brain "aficionado" became a bad thing. I have never mentioned cryptograms before this, even though I can read off those stupid substitution ciphers in the newspaper puzzles like they're plaintext. I don't babble about a lot of my skills or interests, and it distresses me that I mention computers as much as I do here.

So apparently I don't want to learn any new skills and if I do learn them I don't want people to know I have them. That's just great.

You know, I didn't think I was especially mixed up before I began writing these postcards but I'm starting to change my mind.

Very little of this has changed. I don't talk about my nerderies except under sharply controlled circumstances (e.g. in a journal that's far enough below radar that few people will ever see it). I don't like challenges where I don't immediately see my way to a solution. Et cetera.

One might, seeing my behaviors, conclude that I am a dull, incurious person who dislikes using their brain and conceals everything interesting about themself. But that isn't true. I am a highly curious person, with a brain constantly wandering and sliding down rabbit holes, and I have all kinds of interests and fixations. But being around poorly-socialized nerds all my life has made me aware of just how unwelcome disclosure is (e.g. no one wants to hear about your hobbies), and I'm never going to beat the "avoid problems where I can't immediately figure out how to get to the answer" because it's a physical reaction in me -- a sinking I'm about to fail this class feeling in the pit of my stomach that I find extremely unpleasant and will go to my grave wanting to avoid at all costs.

I never did go back to learning to play bridge after that. I will never learn to play the guitar; the notes are too hard to find. I will never be able to dance, and we won't discuss the situation with me and drawing, which is an essay (or three) unto itself.

nothing ever happens at the diner

seven october ninety eight ten a m

Al is talking this morning about telling stories. I don't tell stories much anymore. Oh, I know this stuff counts -- and I'm not trying to disparage it -- but what I mean is stories about events that didn't actually happen.

I have a lot of them, as ever. I spend my whole day thinking up stories; it's what my mind does when it's idle. But they don't ever seem to make it onto paper, for a variety of reasons -- either they've got fatal flaws, or I figure they're so weird that no one would want to read them, or they only make sense to me, or because of sheer inertia.

A lot of times I have what Diane would call a "notion" -- not a plot, nor a hook for a plot, but a conceit that might be a good setting for some hook some day. A most ephemeral thing.

The Diner stories are like that. Here's the problem: I have tried to write about the Limbo Diner three or four times, and so far only one vignette has seen the light of day. I have a long project in the someday file -- has about five thousand words written, or chapter 1 and part of chapter 2, plus an outline. It's about a woman who for various reasons has to make a trip to hell, and what she finds there. Chapter 2 used to be finished too. I had to rip the limbo portion out.

The problem with the diner setting is that all the characters can do there is eat, drink, and talk. It makes it the perfect setting for a surreal, limbolike place, where the pacing is slow and deliberate -- it makes it lousy for conventional setup-resolution, and the over-before-you-know-it speed that a short story demands.

Instead, you get something that sounds like "The Dumb-Waiter," which, in case you don't know it, is one of these damned absurdist plays that some of us were forced to read in high school (at the same time that we were learning the allegory of the cave).

It's a pity. I had a cast of characters all mapped out, and some of them are really fun characters to write, but I'm having a hard time thinking of things for them to do. The current story -- the one I've discarded three times -- is supposed to introduce Luxine, the angel character. Luxine speaks with a Nashville drawl and dresses like something from a Pigeon Forge tourist trap. She has a heart of gold and a short fuse. She and Henna don't like each other much, which is a problem since they habitually eat in the same joint.

The story should also involve the three recurring characters, Cassie, Mme S, and a waitress (Ruby or Pearl). Cassie isn't secure enough yet about who she is or what's weird about her that she can hold a story without Mme S. That only makes sense to me, because of course I know all the good stuff, but I can't give in and tell you all about the characters at once -- I wouldn't have any cards left.

Now if I can just think of a plot. With Henna it was easy, because diabolical characters are out to get people's souls. But people whose jobs are saving souls -- that's not as interesting somehow. Even with Dante, the Inferno is a hoot and the other two books are tedious as all get-out.

Oh, if you want to read the Diner story that's been written so you'll understand what I'm fussing about, you'll find it in the story area. But that's not a plug, just a public service announcement.

And here I thought I was going to write about ATMs today ...

I haven't been back to the Limbo Diner stuff since these entries were mentioned. In fact, I have no recollection of the plot of the first one I managed to do. I need to go back and dust the whole thing off. I do remember that at one point I was thinking about doing it visually, because I still have sketches of character designs lying around somewhere, but that crashed headlong into my inability to draw.

On the other hand, it could work in the current comic format ... have to give that some thought.

It's always nice to find something in these entries where I can look back and say the situation improved. Boy, do I make fiction now. Constantly. Non-stop. It's possible no one ever reads most of it, but that's the thing; gradually I made my peace with the idea that caring whether anyone reads it was an important roadblock that had to be removed. Once I stopped caring about that, it was all systems go.

thoughts of the involuntarily muted

eight october ninety eight one p m

It's really a pain that I can't send email (Columbine email, that is) from work anymore. When I changed providers I lost that ability, for various good and sound technical reasons I won't bore you with.

The problem is that I read everyone else's pages at various free moments during the day, and being a thought-into-action kind of person, if I see something in those entries that I want to reply to, I want to do it immediately. By the time I get home tonight, I'll have forgotten the things I wanted to say. Most of them were probably trivial anyway, but I wanted to say them.

For example, I could tell Dianne that there are already a few books of good, obscure words, and that one of them, Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary, is something everyone should have for those times when they need to grab a weird word. I, too, would rather use interesting profanity than the short Anglo-Saxon monosyllable, but there's always the danger of one exceeding the intelligence threshold of one's audience.

Ann: I cannot believe you were so obsequious with that man!
Remy: [reaching for dictionary bemusedly] What does 'obsequious' mean?
Ann: It means you had a high-ranking member of the Mafia in your office and you kissed his ass!

Of course, I'd also have to tell her that she misspelled "Rubenesque," which would only annoy her.

And I'd tell Beth that there are quite a few of us ostensible adults who collect and love children's books, and anyone who doesn't love the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books either lacks a heart or hasn't read them. Also that anything by Robin McKinley is good, not just The Hero and the Crown, and that I like its companion story, The Blue Sword, even better, in part because it's my idea of the perfect fantasy to cast myself into.

I would also make her an offer of some non-Geocities space, but that's another story.

I suppose if I joined one of the diary or journal mailing lists, I'd get some of this ongoing conversation firsthand. But mailing lists are a huge time drain -- I love to write/talk, and I'd never get anything done because so many interesting items would come over the threshold ...

Of course, I wouldn't be able to reply to them until I got home. Grrr.

I also have a tendency to misspell "Rubenesque" (I want to put an E in it like the sandwich).

The quote is from The Big Easy. I didn't attribute it at the time because it was for three people and they all knew perfectly well what it was.

extra plumbing

eight october ninety eight one p m

Since the previous entry already looks at the plumbing somewhat, I think I am justified in posting this addendum.

If you have written me about joining the Thinking Aloud ring and I haven't responded, rest assured that your email is sitting in my mailbox, waiting for the time when I get a chance to have a look at your site. The ring can accommodate about ten sites so there's still some room to expand.

If you wrote me about the photos [Dec 2004: now unavailable, alas ], thank you! Everyone seemed to like them, and they made several ex-Bostonians a trifle wistful -- something I didn't anticipate. I'm glad you enjoyed looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them, and I'll post another set when the binge strikes me again, which isn't often -- about once per season is the rule.

Heroines

nine october ninety eight eleven a m

I'm stealing from Al again. I can't help it. He often writes entries where he lists things he likes, thinks he doesn't like, things he believes ... and I'm a sucker for those, I'm afraid. They make me jump up and down and say "Oooh! My turn!"

Besides, Al is one of the Thinking Aloud people who doesn't read my pages regularly, so -- heh -- he'll never know.

The dovetail on this is that mouth organ is also having a little discussion about strong female role models, and/or the lack thereof. I had the audacity to suggest that TV is a wasteland for good female characters -- an idea that some readers back up strongly and others dispute strongly, and the funny thing is that both sides seem to have a plausible case!

But I am not a TV watcher, so please excuse me if I confine myself to printed matter here. Movies are good too, but I didn't start seeing movies on a regular basis until college; before that, they were a very occasional treat, and usually pretty fluffy. My taste in fluffy, eye-candy movies persists to this day; whereas I'll give books some mental effort, I only rarely want to make that climb for a film.

[At this point, I began to write about how I had started with books at a tender age, but when I stopped to rest my fingers, I had written nearly two thousand words about my childhood in libraries, which is quite a digression! So I expanded it and put it in a rather frank Circular Cruise instead.]

Al mentioned Susan Calvin, Asimov's irascible and inscrutable robot psychologist. I think his response to her was "grudging admiration." She was one of my role models. The Asimov robot stories are some of the first SF I remember reading. Some people envy that character's control, the way she hardly ever displayed any emotion or sentiment. I don't consider that an admirable quality. I valued Calvin for her analytical skills, for her mind. Asimov was at his best when writing tales of pure reason; as I've commented elsewhere, emotionally his characters are often cardboard.

But I digress.

[And since one digression has already spun off several thousand words, we can't have that.]

I have two kinds of favorite heroines; the kind I want to be, and the kind who act as mother/goddess/influence figures.

Calvin belongs in the latter category, as does Morgaine (any rendition of her, but LeGuin's especially) and Lady Sally from Spider Robinson's books (even if you don't like them -- I know they make some readers very unhappy, and that's a discussion for another day -- you have to admit that Lady Sally is a goddess). [Dec 2004: For "LeGuin" read "Bradley." See next entry.]

There are a lot more of those, but I don't have my bookshelf here. When working on The Novel I realized that I had built a goddess-mother figure into it, who pretty much stands as my ultimate example of the archetype. In fact, in later revisions I had to tone her down, give her some flaws - she was supposed to be a real human, after all, and was originally too good to be true.

The former category is more interesting, because there's a very strong pattern here: I like ugly-duckling female characters who are actually very powerful, very worthwhile, but don't or won't realize it until some event comes along that helps bring them out of their shells. (Actually, this is possibly my favorite storyline of all time, male or female. No speculation permitted on what that says about my psychology.)

Robin McKinley is very very good at this. I have wanted for several years to be Angharad (Harry, or Hari) from The Blue Sword, and also the heroine from The Hero and The Crown, whose name escapes me. In recent years she has written Deerskin and I want to be that heroine even more so, although her tribulations are much more painful than the other two.

The ultimate example of having to walk through hell to find yourself is the heroine in James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter. This is a painful book to read -- by which I mean there are scenes which will have you reeling in sympathetic pain for the heroine. But she triumphs.

Charles De Lint's Jack of Kinrowan novels are good too -- Jack, or Jacky, is a girl, the stories are sly reworkings of old folktales, and the two novels have been collected in a volume with the title above.

Robert Heinlein's Friday isn't really an ugly duckling -- she's not rejected by anyone, she just doesn't realize what she has. This too is a novel some people have objections to, but that's a fight for another day.

That reminds me that Lazarus's mother -- what's her name? I want to say Maureen, but I may be thinking of the Maureen in the first Lady Sally novel, who is an example of the former type of heroine -- is an example of the latter type of heroine.

Ooh. If you can plow through that sentence, you get an award.

I have seldom written male protagonists; in fact, except in some short stories where it's actually important for story reasons that the protagonist be male, I can't think of any, and that includes crappy juvenilia from when I was in middle school. Certainly not in the three novels I "published," and certainly not in any of my longer comic-format stories.

My first novel, never to be seen by the world, does have a male protagonist ... but it's about a journey of gender discovery, the protagonist isn't actually male, and realizes that. (And that's one of the two reasons it won't ever be seen; not only is it much more autobiographical than I'm comfortable with, it's pure wish-fulfillment fantasy. Also not very good. Though it is set in New Orleans, which is always a plus.)

I am not a boy and I am not very interested in telling boy stories. This is a small annoyance to certain readers, who would like a bit more representation, especially gay male representation, but my feeling is that there's already plenty of that, written by people who do a better job of it than I could.

That said, I do sometimes have a protagonist who has a certain amount of emotional disconnect, and thus is a very "male" female character to me (because I think men are trained to be emotionally stunted; they are taught by society to blot out that portion of their brain on purpose). Randa Guerrero, in the Quitclaim stories, is not a person given to emotions, though she has them. She's no robot, but she keeps that part of herself buried pretty deep. The heroine of [NOVEL TITLE REDACTED BECAUSE WE DON'T CROSS THOSE STREAMS] has immense difficulty relating to all other people and is probably the closest thing I have ever written to an autistic character. Wendy Barlowe in Coldpoint would also say she is not very good with that sort of thing, though her reactions to some of the events in those stories belie that. In particular, my detective characters tend to be like this, because I feel that summoning that kind of detachment is necessary to be a good detective.

Incidentally, I have a plotbunny sitting around waiting for its time which involves Susan Calvin. Ironically, for someone with the track record with women he had, Calvin is the closest Asimov ever came to making a real character in any of his fiction. It's interesting that his two best characters both had that emotional disconnect: Calvin and Elijah Baley.

oh, shucks

nine october ninety eight one p m

OK, so the previous postcard says eleven a m and I posted it closer to one. It sat on my computer while I did other things around the edges. That's not the problem.

The real problem is that I mention Ursula LeGuin in a place where I mean Marion Zimmer Bradley. At least I'm pretty sure I mean MZB. I mean The Mists Of Avalon, doggone it. I've read exactly one MZB book, and exactly one LeGuin book (The Lathe Of Heaven), so I tend to mix them up.

If you haven't read the previous postcard yet, then you'll have to store this information and use it where appropriate.

It got easier -- but also even more important -- not to mix them up once it surfaced that MZB commited child sexual abuse. I don't think I knew about that at the time; I don't think anybody did outside of a small whisper network in the fantasy community. Stephen Goldin didn't start posting about that on the web until 2000, and Moira Greyland didn't begin talking publicly about it until 2014.

oh, shucks (part two)

nine october ninety eight one p m

And then Heliotrope split the page on me! (She does that automatically when a page is over 28K). So the "previous postcard" with the error isn't "below," it's on another page.

Isn't this fun?

[Dec 2004: Once upon a time these entries were stacked up several to a page with the newest at the top. This was, in retrospect, a lousy way to do it. In early 1999 I went to one entry per page, and now I am reformatting the old stacked entries to one-per-page as well. The physical arrangement often led me to say "below" when I meant "previous." When reformatting, I have tried to change all such references as I go, which makes the comment above even more obscure.]

And now we're back to stacked-several-to-a-page again, but "below" is "above." Heh. Anyway, we'll hit a point in the Dredge very soon where we won't be able to do a whole month at a time. They'll get too long.

the left hand nags the right

ten october ninety eight one a m

Oh, do stop writing me about how I have not read The Left Hand Of Darkness.

I am perfectly aware that with my peculiar gender outlook, this is a very important book for me to read. My significant other, who is a much bigger LeGuin fan than I am, has told me this on several occasions (and has had a good laugh at the contents of my email this evening).

Truth is, LeGuin's writing style never did all that much for me (I liked the filmed version of The Lathe Of Heaven quite a bit more than the book), and when I was in high school, I tried to read The Left Hand Of Darkness and abandoned it early on. Of course, at this point I don't remember why.

I'll probably attempt it again soon, though, in the face of all this nudging. After all, as I remarked to one of the two Mary Annes, in high school I hadn't yet realized I was a girl.

[Dec 2004: I did eventually read it -- in fact I started it soon after posting this and wrote about it later the same month. There are present-day comments appended there as well.]

Obviously the "present-day comments" were present-day in 2004, not 2026, and you'll duly find them below. More importantly to me now, I have absolutely no idea who the other Mary Anne was ...

the impostors

twelve october ninety eight midnight

We went to see The Impostors tonight. Really, I don't know what Entertainment Weekly was thinking. Don't believe them. Or, depending on your outlook, maybe you should.

Let me explain.

I have griped repeatedly lately (for some reason, it keeps coming up) that no one writes screwball comedies much anymore.

(Oddly enough, before leaving for the movie, ye spouse was watching one rare example on TV. It's a film we saw in the theatre a year ago or so, called Rough Magic, it has a great cast, and you should rent it if you are like me and don't like romances unless they're quite quirky. But I digress.)

So the spouse read a better (and more thorough) review of The Impostors in the local alternative paper and said, "C'mon, read this, you'll love it -- it's a screwball comedy!"

I read the review and said, "This is not either a screwball comedy. If this review is faithful, they're trying to make a Marx Brothers movie."

Actually, as we realized afterwards, it's a Laurel and Hardy movie -- Stanley Tucci poker-faced, while strange expressions wander all over Oliver Platt's face. (I adore Oliver Platt.)

A lot of this movie, though, will remind you of A Certain Marx Brothers Film, since Tucci and Platt are inadvertent stowaways on an ocean liner through most of it. All of the regular characters and complications are here, and all of them are done to a turn (including Dana Ivey in the Margaret Dumont role).

Anyway. This is a wonderful, giggly film if you like only the best in farce. Farce has a bad name these days, since people think it means Chris Farley movies. Farce is not necessarily slapstick, not just physical humor. If I wanted that, I'd watch the thrice-damned Three Stooges.

Even farce is sometimes a hit-or-miss thing. I like the movie Oscar, which is your basic film adaptation of your basic one-set slamming-doors farce, but the weird casting (read: Sylvester Stallone) puts people off. Honestly, though, it was casting judo! His character is the eye of the storm and only has to stand around looking completely puzzled by the events swirling around him. He's perfect for the role! Besides: Peter Riegert! Chazz Palmintieri!

Sigh. I digress again.

The film has a great cast and it is the best this type of material has been done in some years. If you like the material, see the movie. If not, trust Lisa and Owen over at EW, whom I suspect were expecting another Big Night and didn't get it.

[Dec 2004: It may be worth noting, though, that while I still like both The Impostors and Oscar, repeat viewings of both have given markedly diminishing returns. Then again, at the time of this comment I have just gotten Marx Brothers films on DVD and Monkey Business isn't as funny as I remember it either.]

protecting my brainwork

thirteen october ninety eight one p m

Later than usual. It's been a weird morning. I did some nastiness to my ankle and had to turn around and go home. Don't worry, no real damage, just sore. The first of many, I'm sure; I generally manage to strain a muscle somewhere below the hips at least once a week in ice-slipping season, which is only a few short weeks away ...

Anyway, then I worked for a while from here, but stopped to check my mail and found someone in my mailbox griping to a civil-liberties-type mailing list about Senate bill 505, which extends all the copyright durations for twenty more years. Copyright in this country's very generous: it exists from the moment you create the work ("fix it in tangible form") until fifty years after you die. Now it'll be seventy years after you die. Seem ridiculous? Maybe, maybe not. What if your royalties are the only thing supporting your widow and kids?

Basically, there are a few places where my "information wants to be free" side conficts with my sense of value-received, and that's when I sense something endangering my creative property. I am fiercely protective of creative property.

The way I see it, my mind is the only tool I have. It is what I make my living with. I should have primacy on all works which spring from my mind. I get to make money on them before anyone else does, and no one else can have them for free until I am no longer able to make money from them. And I don't think that's unreasonable.

Work-for-hire is another matter; that's an agreement I enter voluntarily, where I am trading away some rights for easy cash. Most of the programming I do every day is, in essence, work-for-hire, and that's OK with me. In that arena, I have chosen to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

(There. That's your obscure reference for today - collect the whole series! Get 'em while you can! Card #1, The Allegory Of The Cave, is already SOLD OUT!)

Speaking of intellectual property, I'm working on a new story. I hope to have a link up for it this afternoon. Now, will I be making money from this story? No. Do I anticipate I will be making money from it later? No. If I thought it was profitable, I certainly wouldn't put it up on the web to get stolen. (How's that for anti-freedom-of-information?) Nonetheless, I'd still be really annoyed to find it on some other site, or reprinted somewhere, without my permission.

So clearly it's not just money. There's something deeper at work there. It's probably like the notice on the story page says: It's mine, I made it, and I'm the only one who gets to decide what happens to it.

[Dec 2004: This topic has been a source of intermittent discussion and controversy in this journal ever since. You will find the most immediate responses to this rant two entries hence.]

These days, of course, arguing about copyright duration seems almost quaint when a group of assholes have built a Massive Information Theft Machine which is structured around not paying anybody for their work, and it's defended by people who hate creative work, would love to be able to do without art and artists or at least never have to pay them for anything, and we're now probably on our second generation of people who don't understand why they have to pay for content at all, anytime.

jacob?

fourteen october ninety eight midnight

As I am desperately trying to finish this weird Story Without End (it was supposed to be a 3000-word silly sex story; 4000 words down and I'm just now getting to the sex), what on earth am I doing writing a 2100-word frivolous retelling of the book of Jacob?

Frankly, I haven't the foggiest. But I wrote it, and it's there if you want to read it.

"Jacob" is in the Circular Cruises and may get unearthed eventually. I haven't reread it practically since I wrote it. It may not actually be any good. More importantly, I now need to sift through the clues and see if I can figure out what the silly sex story without end was!

fourteen october ninety eight noon

Well, so far the original correspondent has raked me over the coals privately about the copyright screed I sent him -- which is not the same as the one I wrote here, below, but covers the same things. He asked me "Are you completely amoral?"

I wrote back, no, I'm not amoral, I'm just poor, but leave money out of it for a moment: My creative works are my property and I should have the right to choose what becomes of them. If I choose to hog them, well, that reflects poorly on me, but it should be my choice and the government should not get a say-so.

He wrote back, Ah, but you are only thinking of your creative output as "property" at all because you have been conditioned to do so, and in fact until comparatively recently such things were not legally property at all.

At which point I realized we had no further basis for discussion, since we are essentially speaking from different religions. I will say that a world where my ideas are not mine is a very scary world to me.

I remember learning that I couldn't copyright the idea behind a board game. (True. You cannot copyright the rules and methods of play. You can copyright elements of the package design, the look of the game board, even the exact wording of the rules, but you cannot prevent someone from making another game which plays exactly the same way.) When I learned that -- I was sixteen, and it would have been a really good game -- I said, well, that's it. I'm not designing any more games, ever. In fact, I was so disheartened that I misplaced all the materials and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find I've lost them.

I don't need to write to make a living, and I probably shouldn't have dragged money into it. Money distracts. I think this is more of a claim-staking thing. If I am the first with an idea, I want the rights. I want the recognition. Egotistical of me, isn't it? Maybe, but it's due to my underlying underconfidence: I know I will never be recognized for anything but my ideas -- I am no sports hero, I am no artist.

(By the by, note please that artists have it easier than writers here -- nobody tries to make another Mona Lisa, even though they could, and if they did, they'd probably go to jail for forgery. Meanwhile, if someone writes a novel with the same plot as one of mine, a critic might say "Gee, that's a lot like this other book," but plagiarism at that level is an unenforceable charge. So the art is allowed to be as individualistic as handwriting -- i.e. if you copy it it's forgery -- but my writing style is not.)

[Note, added later: I am going to clarify that last paragraph, because it's muddled. I'm conflating the idea and the style there, and what I really meant was not "if someone writes a novel with the same plot" -- I could probably live with that -- but if someone writes a novel which is clearly trying to be as close a duplicate of mine as possible. I steal plots all the time; there are very few "new" plots -- but I don't want someone trying to copy the way I write things. OK?]

Meanwhile one regular reader notes that her personal take is that the copyright terms are being extended because Mickey Mouse is in danger of falling into public domain. She dislikes Disney, and I'm no fan of the money empire myself, but I'm a big fan of the cartoons, and I feel that's a damned shame. I think Disney, for all their myriad sins, owns Mickey Mouse fair and square and shouldn't have to worry about losing him.

Oddly enough, the history of Mickey both reinforces and undercuts my weird ideas on this subject. Walt's original creation, Oswald the Rabbit, was stolen from him by his studio. He left in a huff, started his own studio, and created Mickey in retaliation.

The reinforcing part is that idea theft is incredibly damaging. Walt loved animation more than anything, but it was a very near thing -- he almost hung it up then and there, there almost was no Mickey. If it had been me, there probably wouldn't have. I wouldn't have been able to get over it.

The undercutting part is that Mickey (as he looked then) and Oswald look almost exactly alike! Oswald has longer, thinner ears, and that's about it. Mickey is Oswald, with the serial numbers filed off. Walt stole back his own idea. And clearly the fact that he could get away with this (after all, Oswald was legally not his, so he was doing something Wrong) is a Good Thing.

I am in favor of many of the same things my original correspondent is in favor of -- free exchange of ideas and an atmosphere of intellectual openness. I want people to not be scared to toss out their ideas for other people to see.

But I feel that not having strong protections in place for one's ideas creates more of a "chilling effect" on expression than the strong protections themselves do. I still don't think that the two are mutually exclusive.

By the by, not that I thought you were, but -- shed no tears for Disney. They have a gambit available which us normal folks do not. They will simply trademark enough aspects of Mickey's distinctive visual representation that no one will dare make new movies featuring the mouse. Yes, Steamboat Willie and other such old cartoons will probably become freeware, but Disney doesn't care about those -- several are already public domain, I believe, and Disney uses the others as a sort of loss leader. That's not a moneymaker for them.

Note that as of 2024 that final paragraph finally came true and was absolutely correct. You can use Mickey in your porn, as long as you keep him exactly the way he looked in Steamboat Willie. Use any later iteration of Mickey and Disney will come after you with attack lawyers.

I have a strong suspicion I know who the "original correspondent" was. In ensuing years I concluded he was not only a troll, but a sociopath. He's one of the few acquaintances from this time period I've lost where I have no regrets about that.

jacob again, and those who read

fifteen october ninety eight midnight

I had to post a revised version of the Jacob story. I made a factual goof near the end, which is what happens when you write late at night. Also I read the whole Jacob part again, Genesis 25-37, in my old KJV (I generally only read chunks of it, as a supporting text) and found out that Isaac lives the whole way through, which my other Bible book didn't mention! So much for deathbed blessings!

I've got to find a good theology book, one that's readable by humans but which takes the Bible point by point and addresses some of its weirdnesses and (forgive the term) plot holes. The story of Joseph has a whole bunch, as a friend pointed out in email; maybe I'll do that one next time -- if there's ever a next time.

[Oct 2005: I eventually found The Unauthorized Version by Robin Lane Fox, which I commend to your attention, although it is not quite the book I was looking for. Maybe one day I'll write the one I was looking for.]

No one screamed in anguish, so you either liked it, didn't read it, or weren't really impressed by it one way or another.

I know that sometimes I write for people who won't be reading it. For some reason I often find myself inserting bits of prose into my work for Diane's benefit or Al's, which is sorta ironic since they are two of the members of the little bitty Thinking Aloud ring who don't read these pages. (Nor does Beth. Anita reads it in fits and starts but stays caught up; Dianne and Kymm read it daily. Did I get everyone right?)

There will be some new additions to the ring soon. I've been busy. Yes, admittedly some of that was me telling Bible stories, but what's your point?

morning miscellany

fifteen october ninety eight ten a m

Got to work by nine-thirty this morning. That's really unusual for me. The cat is helping. Not Inu -- the Other Cat, the one who has appointed himself my personal groupie. He loves the way I smell, he loves the way my blanket smells, and he loves the way the bed's warm in the morning -- which means that as soon as my significant other opens the bedroom door, presto, instant cat. Right on top of me, usually.

I can't gripe much. It's obviously more effective than my alarm clock.

I imagine that to some readers my journal entries don't sound particularly "journally" -- more like essays about whatever Topic is Fretting Columbine Today. But really, that's what's in my head. I hardly ever think about the small daily events, unless something unusual happens.

I saw a cartoon this morning which gave the Four Ages of Man as "Ritalin, Prozac, Rogaine, Viagra" -- which is unfortunately too close to the truth for me to laugh.

I also saw another article about this damned sheriff in Arizona (I want to say his last name is Arioso, but I could be mistaken) who has brought back the chain gang and is now making prisoners pay for their meals. The meals cost a dollar and aren't worth that. He says they're not supposed to be good. He brags that it costs more to feed the guard dogs than the inmates.

This guy's a grandstander who is playing this tough-on-crime image to get reelected. It's so much easier to lock people away than it is to fix the problem. The thing is, harsh jails don't work any better than soft jails do. At the risk of sounding like one of those ivory-tower liberals: Underlying causes! Fix the underlying causes, damn it!

One of the things which puzzles me: part of the ordeal this guy inflicts on his inmates is making them wear pink underwear. What's that prove? I wear pink underwear all the time. Also orange, burgundy, turquoise, and lots of other colors. Victoria's Secret. I have a lovely pair -- pink with little white roses -- is this pink underwear thing supposed to imply something I'm deliberately missing?

Checked my mail this morning -- can't reply to it of course, not until this evening -- and Beth says I'm wrong, she not only reads daily but checks several times a day, since she knows I sometimes sneak in more than one postcard a day. Mea culpa indeed, and thanks for calling me out.

More later perhaps -- I have got to finish the stupidity they pay me for today.

The "pink underwear" remarks were tongue-in-cheek, of course. I knew exactly what Joe Arpaio was trying to do, and what he'd think of me. That's OK. It would have been a lot nicer than what I thought of him. Arpaio, by the by, was sued repeatedly by the feds for various violations and misconducts; it's estimated that the penalties and such cost Maricopa County in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty million dollars during his twenty-four years as sheriff. In the 2016 election, worn down by the costs and the scandals, even his constituency (which must have been full of assholes) refused to reelect him. Since then he has failed to win every elected office he's tried for. He's still alive as of this writing, age ninety-three, and I hope he's sitting somewhere in darkness being angry at everything.

rings and bibles

sixteen october ninety eight midnight

Well, tonight I finally got around to adding the three new Thinking Aloud sites. Apologies for the delay to everyone involved.

As usual, the sites are in the ring list, but the links have probably not been put up on the people's pages yet -- so once you get beyond Beth, you will end up stranded. Use the list function if you want to check the new folks out.

(Ooh, I have to be really careful about names now. Not only is there Diane and Dianne, but I just added a second Beth. Oops. Well, you knew what I meant.)

That brings the site count up to ten, and I suspect it means the ring is closed. There is one more site I'm still trying to get a chance to read, which may join -- but I said the limit would be "somewhere around" ten sites, and I meant it, vague as it was.

Bought three books about the Bible today -- that Jacob thing got me really curious to see how some of the scholars explain the Bible's weirdnesses. I was careful to get what I consider to be a very pro-Bible and a very anti-Bible text so I could play them against one another. Plus a more world-history-oriented one to hold the middle ground.

I'll let you know if there's anything that comes out of this which is halfway fascinating. Believe me.

i must mess with something immediately

sixteen october ninety eight eleven a m

[Dec 2004: This entire first section has been rendered obsolete by later redesigns, bigger site changes (the purpose of inu.org evolved several more times), and this retroactive reformatting. The "little scrawly faces" were replaced eventually by much less scrawly ones.]

Would you hurt me if I said I'm thinking of redecorating in here again?

I get bored, true, but that's not what's behind this. I've left the top page of inu.org unchanged for ages, and since I'm trying hard to make it defunct, it probably won't change in the future. I have found a design there I like.

(By 'defunct' I don't mean anything really bad, folks. I am arranging to sub-let parts of inu.org to other journallers. None of my stuff is outside the 'alewife' area anymore ... and none of theirs will be outside their own little fiefdoms ... so there is no longer any reason to look in the top directory of www.inu.org.)

Anyway -- I have had a design in mind for Alewife Bayou since the beginning, but I have been unable to realize it. The itch begins again, so this weekend I may have another stab at it.

Don't worry, the little scrawly faces aren't going anywhere. I love them too. But this blue and brown gradient was always a stopgap and it needs to vanish. The Alewife pages were always supposed to be greenish - how I got into this brown detour I'll never know.

My friend Eric has suggested to me on a few occasions that I might have Attention Deficit Disorder. This provokes such a fierce look from me that he generally qualifies it immediately.

I've worked with ADD kids. I used to tutor one. He was completely unfocused except when he was a Ritalin zombie. So that can't be me, right? For all my bouncing between projects, when I get into one I have the extreme concentration demanded of a programmer. I worked on the same code in two four-hour stretches yesterday without getting up from my desk, moving my body much, or even really being aware of outside stimuli. Programmer trance -- it's a job requirement. I do the same when I'm writing.

But that's exactly the point, Eric replies. Most people misunderstand ADD. It doesn't mean you can't focus -- it means the switch is broken, that it's either all or nothing. That you give your full brain to something or you can't concentrate on anything. That your brain, when not in the trancelike state, has a problem with filtering out information -- that there is literally too much happening and your brain spins in place merrily, trying to choose.

Heaven knows I often get the feeling of having too much happening in my head. I also bore easily -- I get bored while driving, while riding the subway, any period of enforced awake idleness longer than fifteen seconds -- and so my head finds things to do. Sometimes I mess with whatever's around, and cause problems. (My significant other says I understand the cat's bad behavior so well because the cat also makes trouble when he's bored -- which is usually.)

I generally bring books and so forth everywhere I go, to avoid this problem, but I note that I still prefer driving by myself, and I still don't mind not having a radio in my car. Why? Because I sing to myself, recite bits of story dialogue, hum, and who knows what else -- and it seems to be a useful outlet for my brain, one which I can't indulge when someone else is in the car due to embarrassment.

I would be amiss (ah, would that it were that easy to be a miss!) if I didn't mention that today is my friend Marc's birthday.

I don't ordinarily believe in birthdays, mine or other people's ... which is a postcard I'll write one day ... but Marc is my favorite alien in a human body, and he has so often been the recipient of various abuses when I get bored that there is no paper large enough to hold all the apologies I owe him.

This quote, which my remark above reminds me of, is one of his favorites:

Wadsworth: How many husbands have you had?
Mrs. White: Mine, or other women's?
Wadsworth: Yours!
White: Five.
Wadsworth: Five??
White: Yes, just the five.
Men should be like Kleenex - soft, strong, and disposable.

Neutered By Ursula

sixteen october ninety eight two p m

Gender-studies lit-crit rant approaching. I find all literary analysis pretentious, and I'll understand if you do too; if this bothers you, then simply don't look inside my glass house. Try the previous postcard from today instead, which is chatty and in an altogether better mood.

I am now about one-third through The Left Hand Of Darkness. I recognize that I should wait until I finish it to comment on it, but right now it's annoying me enough that I may have to calm down before I finish it. As Mark Twain said in a similar situation, "You don't have to eat a whole apple to know it's rotten."

I am happy to say that I have managed to overcome the gripe about the book that led me to put it down, barely begun, when I was in high school.

That was the problem of "begats." These are the inclusions of too-many made-up nouns and pseudohistorical details, intended to bolster the atmosphere I suppose, but annoying. Do I really need to know that Roderick was late an envoy to the Sultan of Diplodocus, the legendary Fourth Kingdom on the continent of Blip? (The term is after the bible chapters which consist of nothing but "A begat B, B begat C, C begat D ...")

As I say, I've managed to get past the begats and successfully caught up in the story. But now I have a much more serious problem.

(There are mild spoilers ahead, which shouldn't be a problem since I'm apparently the last person on earth to read the book.)

LeGuin makes this race androgynous, but what she really does is she makes the race asexual. Ok, men are no less a "shameful" form in the book than women are -- but this equality comes at what cost? Sex -- even taking on sexual characteristics -- is a hidden act, a secret pleasure. In public, not being asexual would be seen as being perverse.

Furthermore, LeGuin chooses to use the male pronoun by default -- or, more precisely, her protagonist does. So I am left with the impression that her hero is interacting with a race of completely sexless men who have a variety of cliché behavior characteristics taken from both sexes.

Does LeGuin sincerely believe this is an improvement? She had her hero eliminate racism by making everyone gray, in The Lathe of Heaven, and I never could tell whether she honestly thought that was a good solution or whether she was pulling the reader's leg.

It would be nice to have a world where there aren't any gender stereotypes -- better yet a world where we could choose our gender -- even better a world where we could keep changing our gender at will. This isn't the way to do it, though.

Digression.

I remember reading "When It Changed," by Joanna Russ -- an amazing story. On the planet in that story, there are no men. None. They all died. They can make more children, but since they're essentially clones, all the babies are female. The planet's been that way for ages. Now male spacemen have arrived from Earth.

Russ, bless her, is a hard-liner. The women are happy as they are, and the men cannot seem to understand that. One of them keeps repeating, "Where are the people?" He really means, "Where are the men?" Russ paints him in a way that he literally cannot conceive of women as human.

Another, more sensible, astronaut can see that the women are happy -- but cannot get past the idea that the arrangement is unnatural, that something is inevitably missing from the arrangement.

And the protagonist -- Russ's stand-in -- is filled with bitterness.

Sometimes I laugh at the question those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask, looking at the lot of us [...] Which of you plays the role of the man? As if we had to produce a carbon copy of their mistakes!

In the end, Russ undermines herself with her own sense of the inevitable -- the men will come back, the paradise she has built for herself is not permitted to continue to exist even in her story.

Nonetheless, my reaction to this gender-utopia is much more favorable than my reaction to LeGuin's.

To a certain extent, my self-loathing may be butting heads with what I am reading. I concede that if these people were shown as basically asexual women, some of whom occasionally grew penises for sexual convenience, I'd be a lot happier.

In other words, I'm aware of my own biases here, and that I have a lot of loathing for my own gender. (How could I not be aware?)

That bias, though, is not as severe as you might think. I tend to innately favor women, true. But I also resent any "all men are pigs" diatribe. No clichés allowed for anyone!

(I have read some journal entries from women who don't like other women much -- there are apparently quite a few -- and I find myself thinking, "You've spent a lot of time meeting the wrong women." But I also read a lot of entries -- from writers of both genders -- that make me say, "You've spent a lot of time meeting the wrong men.")

I despise the bad blood all around. I'd love it if we didn't carry all this gender baggage around with us, if we realized that some men are bad news and some women are too, and that gender is not involved in whether people are cruel to each other or wishy-washy or what-have-you.

But neutering everyone isn't the answer. That misses the point, and takes away some of the best parts.

Yes, I intend to finish the book. It has a nice plot despite this, full of intrigues, and once I am resigned to the fact that there will not be any sexual love in the book, nor any women, I'll keep going.

At least it's not Dawn (Octavia Butler), which was wonderful up to the last twenty pages -- at which point I threw it across the room.

I hope my reaction doesn't startle everyone too badly, but just in case, let me make it clear: I don't want to be sexless. I don't want to be ambiguous. I don't want to keep people guessing. I want to be female. Got it?

I think I've just succeeded in upsetting myself. OK, time to go think about something else for a while. Men don't get to cry in this godforsaken culture.

Should have skipped the postcard like I told you to.

[Dec 2004: I thought about adding this after the Le Guin part, which is what it really applies to, but that would have disrupted the flow, and adding this comment is bad enough already. As Le Guin herself puts it: "But as for changing the actual text of a book written twenty five years ago, rewriting it with hindsight no. That would be cheating. The book stands." You can't change what you said. But you CAN add footnotes, as Le Guin did. That's from her 1994 commentary on LHD, where she admits that using "he" as a generic pronoun was, in retrospect, a mistake.

This mollifies me somewhat on the topic of LHD, but not completely. I still believe that the book takes the viewpoint that being sexless is the state that ensures peace and justice, that gender is a big nuisance that causes us to do nasty things to each other ... whereas I tend to believe, yes, even to this day, that the problem (in this world) is that men have historically been running the place, and men like to hit each other with big sticks. That's a humorous oversimplification, but you get the point: It's not gender that's the problem, it's that we keep letting the WRONG gender be in charge.]

Oh god. For years later I had to go back into the archives and search for this piece for various reasons; it's the closest of anything I wrote in Alewife Bayou to the long-tail phenomenon. I find, at this late date, that I don't have the energy to go there again.

If anything, I have become more hostile to men as a collective (I like some of them individually a great deal) in the ensuing years. I have also, in the ensuing years, become aware of the idea of asexual representation, which I concede is valid even if I (a writer of pornography) don't understand it much. So the waters have grown no less muddy.

LeGuin's remarks in 1994 have unfortunately disappeared, and I have deleted a stale link above. I tried searching for another source and couldn't find one. If you find one, let me know.

a slew of alterations

eighteen october ninety eight two a m

Well, it's very late, so this'll be brief.

You'll notice some changes at the homestead. They're still not everything I want, but they're closer to the swampy feel I had originally planned for the place. The green text is on probation -- I'll see how I like staring at it for a couple of weeks, and how much everyone else does. But really, I hated that brown. [Dec 2004: The "swampy" scheme was widely considered too dim, and got adjusted a few times.]

There's a new logo on the Alewife page, a new (and, I think, entertaining) bio page, an extra link on the links page, and four or five new exhibits at the end of the self-portrait gallery (which, along with the boston photos, now has a proper link out on the Alewife page).

Also my first "sub-let" is here, although as of ten minutes ago she only had one entry -- give her time, the pages just went up at midnight! Her area is called Anhedonia.

Now, the www.inu.org/anhedonia/ area really is under her jurisdiction, so if you want to ask her about it, write her comments, etc, use her address given there ... NOT mine. And start thinking of inu.org as a collection of sites, not a site all done by the same person. There will be others to come. [Dec 2004: I never had more than two sublets, and they both moved to places of their own. You will find Jette, of Anhedonia, these days at Celluloid Eyes.]

Oh, and all three new Thinking Aloud folks have their links up, so the ring is back in order again. Welcome all!

And, having had a productive day of art and web pages, I must now sleep.

Celluloid Eyes was, I believe, the last of Jette/lanalee's journal locations, unless I forget one. It's no longer there and the link has been removed. She kept it up for quite a while, but it didn't survive the fragmentation and expansion of the web and the rise of social media. Facebook killed a lot of things. We might talk about that one day.

save time - write your own

eighteen october ninety eight four p m

It's nice having Sunday afternoons free do do other things, but I admit I miss Stay Tuned a little.

To answer the various mails I've gotten about it, the main reason for not doing Stay Tuned anymore was not really the elitism accusations, as much as they hurt ... nor the fact that the time it ate from my Sundays was becoming time I'd rather spend on other things. The real problem was that I'd said all I had to say.

I mean, think about it. The distilled version:

1. Advertisers will say anything to get your money. They have no ethics and little taste.
2. Advertisers think we're all stupid sheep.
3. Sometimes, through apathy or ignorance, we reinforce that impression.

There. You have now read every Stay Tuned column ever written. Except for the humor, of course. And the humor is the only part I miss.

How many times can you repeat the same message? I don't think I made a dent in anyone's purchasing habits with my ranting and raving -- and mine got worse because of it -- I found myself buying schlock I normally wouldn't want my dollars to encourage, because "it'll make a great column."

Here I have three items yon spouse pulled from circulars, all in the same weekend. They've been sitting on my desk, amusing me and providing bewilderment value.

One is an ad for Kellogg's Breakfast Mates, a box with a wee container of cereal, an aseptic box of milk, and a spoon.

(Since sterile-pack milk doesn't require cold storage, it puzzles me that the boxes are "in the refrigerated section" of your grocery -- then again, I was always puzzled at the stores which put Parmalat milk (same thing) in the cold case. Isn't that the point, that you don't have to refrigerate it until you open it? Maybe they're worried no one would be able to find it.) [Dec 2004: If you have more brain than I do, you will not need to see the next entry for the answer.]

The second is an ad for Campbell's Ready To Serve tomato soup. It comes in a big plastic bottle, and is not a concentrate -- you just pour it and heat it.

The third is Dragone Lasagna Made Easy. This is a big tub of ricotta cheese, just like their regular ricotta, except that herbs and other types of (hard powdered) cheeses are mixed into it.

Now, take these three ... "time-saving" products which actually save little or no time ... and write your own Stay Tuned around them.

The columns are still out there, in your ad circulars and newspapers and televisions and magazines. You don't need me to write them. You just need to look.

milk, women, and klingons

nineteen october ninety eight two p m

Duh!

The adorable Ranjit writes to tell me that the reason sterile-pack milk is kept in the refrigerated section may be a very obvious one: Whether it requires it or not, people like their milk cold.

Rhonda, though, agrees with me about people being able/not able to find it. Maybe both have some basis. I'm still bopping myself on the head for missing the first one.

I was bad today. After I paid the bills last night I had a small surplus (above and beyond what I need to buy minor necessities, like food, for the rest of the month).

I walked to the mall at lunch today -- for other reasons, honest! I was sick of the fast food around my office and wanted some different fast food. I passed by the game store and I wasn't going to buy anything, really I wasn't. But then I saw this game: Klingon Honor Guard.

Now, this is a first-person shooter. Think of it as a guerrilla mission. You go in and accomplish your objectives and probably (all right, definitely) kill a lot of things along the way which want to kill you. I love these games. They generally don't demand much thought but they're my form of mindless depletion (as opposed to TV, which I barely watch).

This one not only uses the Unreal engine, the best shooter engine I've seen yet, but also has Klingons -- such an obvious idea for a game like this, I'm surprised it took so long. How could I resist?

Most of these shooters let you play as either a male or female character, these days. When you're playing alone, it doesn't matter much, since all you see of yourself is your hands holding a weapon. Minor cosmetic differences, like the sounds you make, and that's it.

But when you're playing a network game against other humans, it's very important, because they can see you (and in some cases, like team games, have to be able to pick you out visually in a big hurry).

The reason game companies started building in support for both a male and female set of "skins" (as they're called) was not because of their liberated minds or anything like that -- it was simply audience demand. You see, there are -- surprise surprise! -- quite a few women who play these games. "Clans" of players (who organize to find network opponents and form tourney ladders) are all over the web, and there are quite a few prominent (and vocal) groups of female players, like the Quake-PMS clan.

The female players said to the game designers: We don't like playing these games looking like boys. Well, not all of us do.

The game design world is still pretty sexist, with some noted exceptions. The view of most people who create and market games -- especially shooters -- is that the games are designed by and for boys, and girls never NEVER like to kill things, not even as stress release. These are the same people who, for example, made Lara Croft, she of the gravity-defying breasts and impractical field clothing, a female ... because "they figured the player would rather stare at a female butt all the time than a male one."

(Tomb Raider is a third-person game instead of a first-person one -- you can see yourself while playing, and usually you see yourself from the back because the camera follows you.)

With Unreal -- and now I don't mean the engine, I mean the original game which used it -- I noticed something odd, though. Normally one of the first things I do is change the player's appearance to female (and the player's name to Columbine, of course). When I opened that menu in Unreal, I was already female. Unreal is the only game I've seen of its kind which uses a female player by default.

It's a minor thing and probably not worth the charge I got out of it.

I'm not a big Star Trek fan, and I'm certainly not into the Klingon mystique the way some others are (they're brutes, all of them, although some manage to overcome it -- I don't believe in the myth of the "noble warrior.")

Nonetheless, if you're going to have a culture that believes in honorable combat, I think it's meet and just that the women are allowed to be warriors too, and are taken seriously as such.

I'm looking forward to playing a female Klingon.

This was, of course, written during a time period when we were on a gradual upswing. Eventually we got too prevalent for the toxic boys -- remember, statistically, the point where men think "there are too many women in this" is when the room is about 30% women -- and the backlash came heavily, with Gamergate starting a lot of men down the road which is a straight line to our current political situation, influencers talking young men into fascism, et cetera. You could view our whole situation the last few years as The Last Stand Of The Horrible White Boys, and you would not be wrong. My worry is not that they will win; it's that they will be such destructive sore losers that there will be nothing left for us once they lose.

Ranjit Bhatnagar is still at the same homestead, moonmilk.com. He has always been a much cooler human being than I will ever be.

lovely weather and vicarious lives

twenty october ninety eight two p m

Lunch made me aware that it is a beautiful day to be outside. And I am inside. This is Not Right.

Nonetheless work must be done.

I actually had a good meal from The Institvte's food services (read: the cafeteria). I try their food now and again, on the basis that it's got to be better for me than Burger King. Also, one does crave vegetables. I never would have guessed, as a child, that I'd get to the point where I'd crave vegetables.

The food service here is notoriously bad. The students are always grousing about it. Of course, students grousing about the cafeteria is a time-tested and universal tradition, but having eaten at a bunch of other universities, I feel I can make a judgement: This place is definitely below average.

But today it was good. And afterwards I strolled across the campus in the piles of bright yellow and orange leaves with my coffee, and now I'm back at my desk, and ooh, I don't want to work.

I suspect some of my email is being lost or ignored, and I can't decide which bothers me more. I hesitate to name names, because I could inadvertently pick on someone who is unexpectedly backlogged for other reasons -- after all, you have lives. Kymm, for instance, is doing a lot of Things right now, so it doesn't fret me that she hasn't responded -- I just wish I knew if she even got it in the first place!

Oh, and thanks to everyone who wrote me about Ursula LeGuin and The Left Hand of Darkness. I don't think I've ever gotten that much email from a single journal topic before, and it was all good stuff.

I noticed an unusual phenomenon a few days ago, during another of these brilliant fall afternoons. I was out walking, and I had my customary cup of coffee in hand. Sitting in Seven Hills Park was a woman in a pink skirt and loose, tied-off black blouse. She had large black square plastic handbag, a small dish of soft ice cream, and a little white dog of indeterminate breed. A puppy, I think, as opposed to being just a small dog. She had brought a plush toy for it to fiercely attack.

The puppy was so excited to be outside and on the grass without a leash and all that its brain just couldn't handle it. It kept running around in circles, in a state of sensory overload. At one point, a very small child encountered the puppy, and both were so thrilled that they just sort of ran around each other aimlessly, not noticing that they never actually made contact.

Anyway. I found myself staring at this woman, who was obviously enjoying the outdoors and the ice cream and the antics of the dog, and I realized that I was not staring at the woman. I was trying to envision being the woman. I wanted to be her for a little while, just to see what the story was, just to see what it felt like.

Now, although I do that all the time -- imagine being female -- it is generally with a female version of myself, generally a mental construct. I have never before found myself involuntarily wanting to project into another actual, random human. I've wanted to live a female life, but always my own; never someone else's.

I'm not sure if this is gender-related or not; it seems to me it's not especially, except that I'd have been much less likely to want to step into her head if she'd been male.

It was both an interesting and disturbing phenomenon. I think I also felt some of that when I first started reading Anita's words ... but never before with a person whose life I knew absolutely nothing about.

I hope she didn't think I was staring for other reasons!

Running In Circles

twenty-one october eleven a m

I am at low ebb.

1. My code doesn't work, I really hate working on it, and it's a week late.

2. Last night reminded me why I don't play on MUCKs anymore. Dismal. More people than I had seen in this room in ages and we all stood staring at each other. I tried, really I did -- I can be vivacious when I'm in character -- but when you're the only person being lively in the room, it just gets old fast. Faster if you're the person firing all your best material into the void.

3. So I played a Klingon a while (the game is good, but buggy and wildly difficult -- I have to cheat a lot) to appease myself. Then when I went to bed (late) I couldn't sleep. And thus this morning I am extremely groggy - which brings me back to the difficulty of solving #1.

I want to finish my story and my writing for The CGI. But I don't.

Internal dialogue:

"You're going to write that story and put it on the web somewhere no one ever reads and it'll sit there. Why bother? Go work on The Novel instead."

"There's no market for The Novel. As far as I'm concerned I wrote it, finished it, a year ago. All the editing is fine-tuning so I can present it to an agent and the agent will tell me there's no market for it because publishers never take risks and it doesn't fit a genre."

"Well, you could say the same thing about working on the stories. You know how hard it is to sell short fiction. There are, what, five markets, and fewer for the not-quite-smut, not-quite-fantasy stuff you write? And most of them don't pay squat. You'll never make a living from short stories."

"I'll never make a living from novels either. At least with the stories I can write it off as a hobby. I can't write off that overlength monster on the floor as a hobby."

"Did you think, when you were eighteen, that you would ever refer to writing as a hobby? It was your goal in life. It was your only aspiration. Now look at you. You write fiction once every two weeks at most, in tiny little 3000-word bursts, and if it doesn't get finished in that burst, it doesn't get finished. Never mind. You're a flop. Go back to your tedious code that you hate working on, and languish. I don't care anymore."

Piers Anthony is an author who long ago lost all credibility with me, but he wrote some good stuff once. In the first Incarnations book, Gaea is explaining the five modes of thought to Death, using five sticks.

When you're trying to reach a specific conclusion, there are three ways to go. You can think serially, in slow steps, each conclusion leading to the next. This is five sticks end-to-end in a line. It gets you there, although maybe not quickly or efficiently.

Or you can do what we computer types refer to as "parallel processing," several different lines of thought all working toward a common conclusion. That's five sticks laid out in parallel, each over the other in a neat stack.

And then there's the intuitive leap. This looks a little like Evel Knievel preparing to jump three ramparts -|||- and works about the same way: You got there, but you're not sure how you did it.

But what about non-goal-oriented thought? There are two ways to go. One is good, the other is usually bad. Creative thought is represented by a five-pointed star: New ideas branching out in wholly different directions, all at once.

The final one is five sticks in a pentagon: A paranoid, self-chasing loop, running around and around in circles and never getting anywhere.

The thing is, those of us who think in stars most of the time find that they can turn to pentagons at a moment's notice. And it's really tricky to get out.

That mental loop I describe is a large part of what I mean in a comment further up the page about how, in order to really kick into full gear with writing projects, I had to stop caring -- well and truly -- whether anyone ever actually reads any of it. (I haven't managed the trick completely. I still do care. But I don't care enough to let it get in the way of producing new work.)

at last the end of the story

twenty-two october ninety eight two p m

I am feeling much better now. I write about my mental woes in order to get them out into the daylight, where they are laughable. This enables me to get rid of them.

I wrote a lot of words last night, almost completing one of the stories which has been hanging over my head like the sword of you-know-who. (We're over quota for classical references this month.)

I have been working on this story in fits and starts, as it grew like Topsy. Originally I had thought to write it in a single session. That didn't happen.

This morning I finished it -- slowly, in the breaks while I was working -- and that's why this entry is so late in the day. The problem is, now that I've finished it, I don't know what I have. Perhaps you can tell me.

It's in the story area, as ever, and it's called "The Tale Of the Defiled Convent." You be the judge. Note: the story does contain a sex scene, if you're squeamish about that sort of thing.

You will also notice another story on there which you may not have seen if you check that site periodically. This "new" story was actually written in the first quarter of this year. It's called "Feedback." The reason I didn't post it was not because I didn't like it -- quite the contrary, I'm rather fond of the story.

Unfortunately I submitted it to a publisher with an enormous backlog, and since I feel that putting it on the web breaches first serial rights, I couldn't put it in public view while that was pending. It's still pending -- I have received neither acceptance, rejection, nor even acknowledgement of submission - and given that the publisher is so backlogged that it will take a month to even answer my query, I have given up and simply put it out where people can read it.

It's a pity -- given times like that, I don't imagine I'll send them anything again, and not only were they one of the only markets for certain kinds of material, the publisher is an acquaintance of mine.

But if no one can read a story, what good is it?

I can only think of two places at the time I might have tried to send material with sex in it where I could say "the publisher is an acquaintance of mine," and since this doesn't seem like the kind of thing I might have sent to Clean Sheets, I must have been talking about Circlet. But the thing is, I can't actually imagine sending "Feedback" to anyone. As I say in the forenotes when I reposted the original story to go with the comic-style version I posted in January 2025, "Feedback" was written for a single specific person who had a very specific kink -- a kink which I'm not sure even transmits as a kink to other readers. It's a good enough story (the comic version is better) but it definitely does not read as smut to anyone who doesn't have that kink, so I'm not sure why I'd have submitted it to a smut outlet.

Meanwhile, "The Tale of the Defiled Convent" is waiting for me to pull it out of the vault, but if I do, I will have to rewrite it. I still like the point it was making, but the approach was badly flawed.

grew like who?

twenty-two october five p m

I got mail a few minutes ago from Correspondent J in Austin about the previous postcard, asking me, "I understood the sword reference, of course, but who or what is Topsy?"

And, you know what? I had no idea. I've just always liked the phrase. Furthermore I am apparently using it correctly (as you shall see) -- not to connote rapid growth, but to mean growth which is unplanned, piecemeal, which just sort of happens.

But who or what is Topsy?

I went to two internet search engines and had a look. The phrase, old-fashioned though it may be, actually comes up quite a lot -- it's a handy metaphor because the internet, as we all know, grew like Topsy.

But no one actually bothered to explain it.

Two articles came up again and again. Cranky old Vannevar Bush, who has a function room on the Infinite Corridor named after him, wrote an article in 1945 called "As We May Think." This article is one which certain factions find inspirational (you'll see why if you bother to find it and read it, but don't knock yourself out), and it is reprinted on the web in a number of divers places.

The other is an article on "The Internet Regression," which gives the thesis that people act like brats when they get on the net -- sending insulting mail, doing rude things, etc.

It's a fascinating thesis, but we're no closer to Topsy.

Finally I found a Bill Machrone column from PC Magazine which gives his explanation. It may not be the true one, but it's the only one we've got.

Ever heard the phrase, "grew like Topsy?" Most people misuse it to mean that something happened quickly, like wildfire. Actually, Topsy was a fabulously successful racehorse. Of his parentage and lineage, his trainer said, "He don't have no lineage. He just growed." The Internet is this decade's Topsy. It just growed. And those of us who use it have to deal with the ramifications.

Indeed.

[Dec 2004: Machrone's pulling your leg. See the next entry.]

housecleaning (and topsy)

twenty-three october ninety eight noon

I began this morning by cleaning the bathtub in the nude.

(Isn't that a wonderful opening sentence? Grabs the reader by the eyeballs.)

Yes, it strikes even me as strange, but I have gradually come to think it efficient. Our tub is hard to clean, because it has sliding glass doors on a track instead of a curtain (not my choice) and the faucet end is half-blocked by the position of the sink (again, not my choice). So I generally end up in the tub just so I can reach all the grime.

I tend to take baths with scented oils and other greasy things, so the grunge is very oily and I've found that it's actually better to try to scrub it off without using any water. So I create all these little crumbs of loose oily dirt, and quite a bit of it gets on me.

The easiest way to get rid of what crumbs I can't scoop out is to run the shower -- and I need a shower after cleaning it too -- and I generally take a shower first thing in the morning anyway -- and ... well, you see how it all makes sense now.

It does make sense, doesn't it?

Last night we had to give the house a tidying in order to prepare for weekend guests, but some strange and alien fit of cleaning energy seized me -- I think I finally just went over the edge at never having enough places to put things -- and I went on a big cleaning binge, from about eight pm till about one o'clock in the morning. I didn't finish, and I'm making a slow start today (aside from the tub), but I know I should finish it or it will never get finished. Besides, the spare bedroom isn't done yet, and that has to be done by five.

Lest you wonder about my being home cleaning house on a work day: I beat my nasty code problem late yesterday afternoon, and I already know that I'll need to go in on Sunday for about six hours to finish up. Under the circumstances, I'm not losing much. The house rarely gets cleaned, but the code just goes on and on.

I created seven bags of garbage last night. Most of it was things which I hadn't touched since moving in five years ago. Some of it was truly hideous stuff which I hadn't touched for several years before that, but hauled up here in a Ryder truck because of vague sentimental value. Well, I believe in sentimental value, but the forces of practicality gained back some territory last night.

Terence Stamp: I did all this years ago.
Hugo Weaving: And you did it so well.

One of the things the cleaning has produced is various coffee mugs (no, no, clean ones -- we may accumulate papers and books, but we don't leave dirty dishes lying about) with allegedly humorous words and pictures printed on them. People love to give these to me as gifts for some reason -- probably because I have a justified reputation as being hard to shop for, and because everyone knows about me and coffee.

Memo to any interested parties: Lay off the coffee mugs! I admit it's impossible to buy me books, CDs or software, my three main entertainment needs, because if I want it I've probably already bought it. But I'm not hard to buy for. A gift certificate at Victoria's Secret will be completely adequate, thanks.

Anyway, I have a entire packing box in the basement full of such mugs, the ones from Louisiana, which I never unpacked because we accumulate them so quickly there was never any need to. In fact, since I have a few spaces empty in the box, I'm thinking of retiring a few from our overloaded cupboard.

Where was I going with this? It had something vaguely to do with the Priscilla quote. Oh, yes.

I noticed one today as I put it in the sink -- it was a Dilbert mug, and it said "Your happiness and your job performance are influenced more by coffee than any other factor." And it occurred to me that someone had done this schtick before -- the whole work-is-hell-my-boss-is-deranged bit -- and done it much better, with the gloves off.

Oh, come on, I just gave you a big hint.

Everyone who said "Matt Groening" gets a gold star. That's right. Life In Hell, the edgy little strip he did before Bart and Lisa ever existed, and is, as far as I know, still doing, covered all this territory years ago. Go find the collection Work Is Hell and see for yourself.

I've gradually come to dislike Dilbert. There are a lot of other reasons why as well, but that's a story for another day.

The revolution
The revolution will
The revolution will be Fantasized
-- Geggy Tah

This part may fall in the Too Much Information area for some. You can always skip ahead to Topsy.

In addition to the Nude Scouring Experience, I had a nasty attack of transgenderitis while putting clothes in the closet. I have a lot of "play clothes" -- clothes meant for females, clothes I probably couldn't wear out of the house even if I were female -- and all of a sudden I absolutely had to stop and wear some of it, run my hands over it. Sigh.

So one thing led to another, and I ended up in white tights, a short black puffy multi-layer petticoat (like square dancers wear -- in fact, my mother is a square dancer and I recognized the label when I bought it and thought wryly that it would have cost half as much if I'd bought it from a dancer's supplier instead of a fetish clothing store -- sigh again), and my black Miracle Bra with the silicone forms beneath.

This looked quite ridiculous, I need not add, more so because my hair was still a mess from the shower and I haven't shaved in a while. But this was a tactile sensation thing, not a visual thing.

I thought, in my reverie, that perhaps a little lipstick would be fun -- went out into the hall to rummage in the makeup box -- and ducked back into the bedroom in a big hurry. My sprightly landlady was out on the front porch, tidying it up for no good reason. (She has random fits of cleaning energy just about every day.) Our hall has uncurtained windows!

She didn't see me, thank heavens, but you see what happens when you get distracted from your housecleaning? No good can come of it, I tell you.

Miss Ophelia: Have you heard anything about God, Topsy? Do you know who made you?
Topsy: Nobody, as I knows on, I 'spect I grow'd.

And now, a complete change of subject.

You'll notice that when I quoted the explanation of Topsy in the previous entry, I hedged a little about its accuracy. I did that because somewhere at the back of my head lurked the nagging idea that Topsy was a young female human of some sort, and that Machrone was barking up the wrong tree.

My suspicions were correct. Three people wrote me to say that Topsy is actually a character in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Two of those three people noted that Carol Mosely-Braun took offense to Trent Lott's using the phrase on the Senate floor, claiming it was racist ... and one of the three even gave me the quote -- which is good because I don't own the book.

This is one of the many reasons I love you folks.

Metadreaming

twenty-four october ninety eight six p m

This afternoon, we came back from a trip to the mall and the spouse decided that she needed a nap. So she lay down and I closed the bedroom from the outside with a catproof rubber band, as is our method.

At that point I was already coming to the conclusion that I was rather sleepy myself (we had eaten a big lunch), so I lay down in the "guest bedroom" -- which is mostly the room owned by our books, but also has a futon on a raised frame.

I dreamed, but I dreamed I was doing awake things. And I knew, during occasional flashes of insight, that I was dreaming, because the things I was doing had -- well -- a dreamlike quality. I was checking email, for example, names and tones and writing styles I know well, but the email was -- odd. A few bubbles off plumb.

Gradually -- still dreaming -- I came back to myself, lying under a single old blanket on the futon, snoring. As if I was coming awake.

I heard the sounds of the spouse emerging from the other room, undoing the rubber band, looking around the house and not finding me.

Ah, I thought, that must be what woke me up. She opened the door to the room where I was and looked in on me. I wasn't quite ready to open my eyes yet. Seeing me asleep, she backed out and closed the door again.

I woke all the way up.

I heard the sounds of the spouse emerging from the other room, undoing the rubber band, looking around the house and not finding me.

What ...?

I got up and went into the living room where she was sitting. "Did you look in on me and see me asleep?" She hadn't. She hadn't actually gone in the guest room at all. I had dreamed her coming out of the bedroom before she came out of the bedroom.

This reminds me of something that happened several weeks back. I was having some extremely disturbing dream -- I don't remember what, except that it wasn't one of the ones where I'm being chased by something endlessly. This had specific symptoms. I seem to recall that I was being tortured, beaten. I recall being hit, perhaps across the face ... because I actually moved in the bed -- recoiled, probably even made a noise -- and that woke me up.

I lay there, breathing hard, allowing my brain to come back to reality, and I realized that I wasn't the only agitated person in the bed. She was making noises and thrashing. She makes noises in her sleep a lot when she dreams, and they're not always happy, but these were exceedingly upset noises, like pain noises. And the way she was moving ...

I realized then what was bothering my head: We were having the same dream! She was being abused in the same way I had been.

I have no proof one way or another, of course, but I continue to maintain that we were dreaming the same dream. In fact, I think we were dreaming it at the same time, in synch -- except that I dropped out, because I almost always wake up if my physical body moves or makes a noise, and she almost never does.

As long as I'm on the subject of dreams, and to end with a less disturbing note: Early this morning, I dreamed that she and I went to a nightclub. We went entirely on a whim, coming from having dinner or some other excursion, and had not really dressed for it. When we got there, we found that the club was having a "Dom/Sub Night" and that (according to the sign) "a special dress code will be in effect." Knowing how outré some of the club patrons' clothing was even on normal nights, I didn't think we'd get in. Oh, well.

But the young woman with the buzz cut at the front door, looked at both of us, and immediately handed her one of the "dom" tickets. She handed me a "sub" ticket, looked at me again, as if she wasn't quite sure, and then decided she had been right.

I was wearing a white T-shirt, I remember that much -- I may have been wearing cut-offs as well, I seem to recall my legs were bare. She was wearing some dark T-shirt, blue jeans, and the leather jacket she generally wears throughout the fall.

Sometimes I wish I could just interrogate my subconscious directly. This is a really inefficient communication method.

toy fetish dolls!

twenty-four october ninety eight eleven p m

Oh, look, two postcards in a single day. I always find it just a touch worrisome to write two of these or more in a day (three is still the record so far), because I figure most people just read the latest one and don't bother to scroll down to see the other one from the same day. Since the second one is hardly ever as good as the first one, I'm scared you might be missing one of my flashes of brilliance.

I get so few, I have to be a little protective of them.

At any rate, I was so busy writing about dreams in the entry below that I didn't remember to mention the Catwoman fetish.

I mean "fetish" in the sense of the object itself, not the fixation about the object. A fetish, as in something a voodoo priestess waves around.

We went to the Warner Brothers store, and they had all these little beanbags of various cartoon characters (everybody wants to get into the bandwagon now; thanks loads, Ty). Most of them were pretty innocuous, but this Catwoman figure -- wow! I saw it and couldn't believe it -- showed it to the spouse and she couldn't believe it -- even the salesman, who apparently hadn't seen one of them yet, said, "Well! That's ... interesting."

Most of the beanbags are plush; this one is not. She -- I cannot refer to this toy as "it" -- is made from that fake-leather stuff that upscale car seats are sometimes made of, with a texture halfway between leather and vinyl. Black and glossy. A realistic if cartoonish figure, in proportion, with definite hips and breasts.

I'm not sure what the intended audience for this toy is, but I have placed her atop my computer as a totem -- I'm hoping she'll help me write better smut. Anyone who's been lurking around the story area knows I need all the help I can get.

Sluts and Mothers

twenty-six october ninety eight eleven a m

OK, I wasn't going to write anything today. I was in a snit. Not only have I not heard diddly about reader reactions to the tragic tale of Sir Robert, but I have not received a single piece of email about the dreams or anything else I've said in the last three days! I am going to have to work harder to be provocative.

I only say this because I am something of a yenta. No, that's the wrong word. I don't want to meddle exactly; I just want to sit on the sidelines and offer color commentary.

Hardly a day goes by, reading the webring (and I check every page in the ring nearly every day) that I don't read someone else's entry and get the temptation to fire off some comments.

In short: I often find the words of other journallers provocative. But I have stopped commenting on their words, for the most part, because the lack of turbulent flow in my mailbox indicates -- to me -- that no one else really wants to get comments the way that I do (despite Dianne's insistence that "Write me!" is not a suggestion). Am I wrong?

I think one fundamental issue is that I am an Email Slut, whereas a lot of the other journallers I read seem to be Stats Sluts. You know what I mean. When I hit a page and it seems to have -almost- finished loading, yet there is some intangible holdup ... I know that I am waiting on someone's odometer, or that funny little statistics thing with the logo kinda like the planet Saturn, or some other number-crunching dingus. What is the point, I think? and I hit the Stop button perforce.

OK, admittedly I get a rather comprehensive report every week in the mail from my provider. I look to see roughly how many times people have asked Heliotrope for a postcard (a couple hundred a week, if you're curious) and then I discard it. Oh, no, it's not my intention to dis the readership -- and thank you for stopping by, sir or madam! -- but if it's all the same to you, I'd rather hear from you than detect your footprints on my pages. [Dec 2004: And my later ISP does not automatically send me a report, and I have never once checked my stats. I remain consistent.]

Ah, well. Pardon my mood. With the exception of Diane's RPG experiences, which are most provocative but dovetail into something I already planned to write about later, here are some Random Things Which Occurred To Me while reading other journal pages:

1. I wonder if Al would be shocked if I showed him the X-rated haiku I write sometimes when I'm bored.

2. Everybody's mother seems to be getting on the web except mine. A blessing in disguise? My mother doesn't know the extent of some of my weirdnesses (read: gender) although the woman who sewed me my first garter belt couldn't possibly be too shocked by the news.

3. Speaking of motherhood: Lest one dismiss Sam's comments on not having children (because she's only in high school, which some would think makes her point of view suspect), let me point out that I'm thirty, have given the matter considerable thought, and I agree with everything she says completely.

4. I didn't talk about ANTZ here because I figured everyone would see it anyway and I was much more interested in getting you to see The Impostors. But ANTZ was good too, although I never liked Woody Allen and he does exactly the same tired schtick here. All the way through. Non-stop.

5. Aussie notes a bunch of things that men should know but often don't, and ditto for women. Hear, hear. Everyone should be able to follow a recipe. Everyone should be able to sew a button back on. Everyone should be able to fix a toilet (honest, they're not complicated). Everyone should know how to change their own oil, even if you never do, and how to change a tire, and and and and ... I could go on for days.

Instead I will point this out: To be completely gender-cliché about it, the number of women who have brought themselves to acquire traditionally "male skills" is substantially larger than the number of men who have done the reverse. There are a lot more women who know where their carburetor is than there are men who know how to use an iron properly. That means something. I don't know what. It may be a "protect that fragile masculinity" thing, but if so, there are a lot of deluded men. Isabel Allende isn't the only woman who knows that there is nothing more seductive than a man who can cook.

There. Somewhere in those comments I'm sure I provoked someone enough to get some email. That'll do for now.

Of course, that was before social media came along and made Stats Sluts out of everybody. Now, and for some years now, it's been about "engagement" and not content -- doesn't matter whether your piece is good or even whether it makes sense, it's about how many hits you get and how many arguments you start. Well, OK, I mean I admit I was trying to stir up traffic by being provocative here, but I was mostly joking (I think).

I've gotten much quieter over the years; I still have all kinds of responses I want to make to things I read, but I actually make them a lot less often. Mostly I keep them to myself. This is primarily because I've seen how annoying it is on social media when you get the kind of person who feels they need to fire off their mouth about absolutely everything. I had days once when I was that person, but not for a long time now.

basics and sudden insights

twentyseven october ninetyeight elevenam

After my rude rant about mail yesterday, I got a nice flow of correspondence. And -- get this -- most of it was from the people whom I read regularly but whose pages didn't get specific comments from me: "You didn't mention my page!"

Most of them were at least half-kidding, but it occurs to me that maybe all online journallers are secretly or not-so-secretly craving the attention.

Hey, looka me! I'm writin' stuff over here!

Hmm. Online journaller. Is that what I am? I have resisted the idea of being classified as such. I'm not in any lists of journals and very few people know I exist -- I'm not in diary-l or journal-l or anyother-l that you can think of. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Anyway, I got mail, and several people pointed out that I don't always reply to mail when they try to send me some. Well, true. But if you're telling me about your day, or what's good/bad in your life -- although I love to get it, I'm not sure it calls for a reply. And if I'm talking about my daily mundania, that doesn't seem to call for a reply either -- fair's fair.

But if I state (for example) that more women have learned boy skills than men have learned girl skills, I'm stating a clear position and trying to drag you into debating it. A couple of people picked up their cues properly -- but we'll get to that last.

Some of you will say I should have reached the conclusion long ago that online diarists want attention - that it's pretty obvious. Well, maybe. I wouldn't have said that I was writing this for attention, and I bet a few other friends with journals would deny the charges too -- which may just mean we're kidding ourselves.

At any rate, I am sometimes slow to get that flash of insight, yes. Unrelated example:

I read a comic strip called For Better Or Worse. Maybe you do too. I don't usually go for the heartwarming strips, but these are in a class by themselves. Anyway -- there's a character in these strips, a college kid named Weed, who hangs out with one of the principal characters, Mike. Weed has some odd turns of phrase. One of them is that, when he likes a suggestion, he is likely to say "Bone idea!" I just wrote this off as a non sequitur.

Now, the cartoonist is Canadian, and the strip is set in Canada, but even knowing those things, I didn't catch on -- until Weed (a photographer) said "Dites fromage!" today ("Say cheese!") Then it hit me: "Bone idea" is what you get when you deliberately mangle "Bonne idee."

Duh. I'm sure everyone else in the world but me had already figured this out, right?

I'm in a better mood about email today in general, not just because of the flow of teasing last night, but also because one of the major pieces of Unresolved Business has been fixed -- Ginkgo has written back and added me to the guests for the Hallowe'en Ball! [Dec 2004: A collaborative creative project. Link removed because it's long gone.] For a while, I wasn't sure if she was going to get to me in time for the thirty-first.

You should go have a look. So it's frivolous. What's your point?

Oddly enough, and in response to one correspondent's question, I am doing nothing for Hallowe'en in the flesh. It's my favorite holiday, but I don't know any parties or anything to go to -- don't forget that I really don't know all that many people here.

Even in Baton Rouge, my preferred way to celebrate Hallowe'en was to either wear 1. something extremely elaborate 2. absolutely nothing and go take a walk alone in the open fields in the dead of night and meditate. Of course, I could get to open fields where no one would see me in Louisiana -- easily. In a city it's a little harder.

Now, about those vital skills. I got two interesting messages, one from Dan and one from Anita, and as I noted to Dan, I'm afraid I misled you by dragging gender into it. Gender may be a red herring here.

The problem is not one of women knowing how to cook and men not knowing; the problem, increasingly, is that neither men nor women know how to cook. I'm not talking cordon bleu here. I'm talking about people who would literally starve to death without a microwave.

Anita sent me this link, which lists some skills the author thinks everyone should have, but these are all social and mental skills -- "white-collar" skills if you will -- and the ones I'm worried about are the "blue-collar" ones.

I have a book on my shelf -- a very good book called Back To Basics. It's about how to make a garden that really produces, how to raise, breed, slaughter your own livestock; how to weave baskets and make drystone walls; how to make jams and jellies, mend clothing, fix things, et cetera. It is from Reader's Digest, but don't hold that against it. Along with their amazing home repair book (you can practically build a house from the foundation up with the Red Book), this book is astonishing. Like the home book, it has breadth but not depth. If you seriously wanted to get into animal husbandry, you wouldn't find much to help you here. But if I were stranded on a farm without access to civilization and I had to become self-supporting in a big hurry, these two books are the ones I'd want first. They give you enough to get started and then some.

And, looking through this book, it's amazing how much I don't know.

Now, you may argue, "But I don't need to know how to milk a cow!" No, you don't. But do you know how to turn off the power to your house? Do you know that (once you figure out how to turn the power off) small home electrical repair (i.e. replacing a light switch, rewiring that busted lamp) is usually a cinch? Do you know that the plumber will charge you an arm and a leg to come replace that sink trap, but it costs a pittance at your hardware store and you only need one tool?

I'm no saint here. As I noted a while back in another postcard, I have all but stopped changing my own oil. It is worth it to me to pay someone else to do it. And, having been on my back in the crawl space under a house for three hours in freezing mud, trying to unstick a pipe joint with a wrench and blowtorch while not burning off my face ... I'll get the plumber to do that next time. But the point is, I know how. I could do it if I needed to. And that's more important than you think.

There's also the economic argument. If you don't think you can repair a thirty-dollar lamp, you're likely to just get a new one, right? But if you repaired it, not only would it boost your confidence, it would save you money.

Finally, there's the following sentiment (which my wife uses as the signature under her email):

Humanity has an amazing inability to plan. Not too many generations ago, when our relatives lived by hunting and gathering, the inability to plan for the next season meant death. Planners survived. The clueless died. But today, Homo Sapiens eats at McDonalds -- for the moment, planning and survival are not strongly linked.
--David Isenberg

I stopped arguing about vital skills years ago. It is a game that cannot be won. Besides, these days I am convinced that there are far more fundamental skills we're losing by the bucketful every day, such as speaking, writing, and thinking.

facial faults

29 october 98 eleven a m

What, no postcard from Columbine yesterday? How can this be?

Well, I worked all day to finally finish the project at work which I had been missing deadline on -- and, boy, that felt good. And then I went home and we tried really hard to write a mouth organ column which unfortunately spun wildly out of control -- sigh. After that, there was enough time only to read a couple of new pieces of escapist transgender fiction before bed. Sorry. By then my brain had nothing left in it.

Somewhere in that mess last night, I shaved off nearly a month's worth of beard, and boy am I glad. I didn't realize how glad I was until I looked in the bathroom mirror this morning and didn't say "Urgh!" I despise the way I look with a beard. I don't even like stubble. I'd go for facial electrolysis in an instant if it were possible (ask me why it's not, if you like, and I'll tell you what I've learned about it).

No, this morning I looked in the mirror and my face was back! But I had another problem, one which I don't actually experience too often: I felt like I needed makeup.

My face was blotchy -- pale in most parts, red in some places from yesterday's razor burn. My lips had almost no color to them and therefore looked thin. I had bluish areas below my eyes -- not bags, but definite discoloration. And my eyes looked small -- tiny in my face, for some reason.

If I didn't know how to fix these things, that would be one problem. But I do -- I know exactly what to do about each of these little faults -- and I'm not allowed.

Let me tell you, I came closer to making that "damn the torpedoes" decision (the one which will probably get me in Big Trouble one day) than I have in months.

But sensibility got the upper hand -- I merely put my usual skin grease on and applied some cinnamon lip balm. It was a minor consolation prize -- I felt its waxiness on my lips as I walked out in public and could feel like at least I was getting away with something.

Makeup Make-up

29 october 98 ten p m

All right, a clarification.

After this morning's postcard, two women told me that they still didn't possibly understand how anyone could want to wear makeup.

These two women, I mention as an adjunct, were my girlfriend and my ex-girlfriend, respectively, and over the years they've put up with me, I've heard the comment from them several times -- hence the word "still" above.

I note that these entries seem to have, for whatever reason, more female readers than male ones, so before the rest of you say the same thing:

I don't always want to wear makeup. I agree that it is a royal pain, and I can certainly understand your reaction. But that wasn't really my point. I never said I want everyone to wear it, and I don't approve of any social standards that say women have to wear makeup -- to the office, for example.

I think it is just as unfair to have a standard which requires makeup as it is to have one which prohibits it. And we have both, unfortunately.

Ultimately you should have the right to be free of the dratted stuff whenever you so choose -- just as I should have the right to apply some whenever the mood strikes me, as it did this morning.

Nobody gets what they want.

By the by, I made several discoveries about wearing glossy lip stuff. It improves my mood and my confidence, of course, since it helps me feel a little bit female, and I am always at my best when I feel female. But it also prevents me from biting my nails and induces me to keep my lips closed whem my face is in neutral -- two Good Things. (My mouth tends to gape a little while I'm working or idle, partially because I have difficulty breathing through my nose sometimes, and I do not find it becoming.)

You wouldn't begrudge me such a little thing that does so much good, would you? Lip gloss every day! Vive la resistance!

Because these entries have already been edited once before, in passing, it's introduced a certain ambiguity in terms about my spouse. Apparently back in 2004 I changed a lot of "girlfriend" and "significant other" references -- or maybe I didn't, maybe all of the "spouse" changes so far have been me in 2026 because I've been replacing the places where I called her by name? I don't know. I'm losing track. (I married her in 2002.) Anyway, I've left "girlfriend" here because I like the symmetry of "girlfriend and ex-girlfriend." The ex-girlfriend, of course, is Jette, the only one of my exes I am still in contact with. (There have not, to be clear, been all that many.)

lovely and turbulent

thirty october ninety eight eleven p m

Tonight is beautiful. The shrill wind is blowing the last of the red-orange from the trees, the half-moon is choked into haze by clouds, and I was enjoying the wind in my hair and the look and feel of my new full-length coat and the taste of the hot coffee as I took a late-evening stroll.

It was a pleasant evening. It didn't start out to be. I had been committed to go to a reading of "scary erotic stories." Now, first off, there are very few of those. (There are quite a few grotesque erotic stories, which is an easier trick.) Second, with the exception of Firesign Theatre recordings, I am not in the habit of just sitting and listening for any period of time. Third, although I have heard some truly sexy spoken pieces, my odd sexuality seems to dictate that pieces which are sexy when read are seldom as sexy when spoken -- whereas most of the pieces I find sexy when spoken were never intended to be sexy pieces at all, and do not read as such. Go figure.

But Eric had chosen a really unusual piece to read, not erotic but compelling, and since there were very few readers, my nightmares of having to sit through much droning didn't happen, and our dinner was lovely.

Good thing, because on the way there, I was nursing the same case of vague inner unsettlement which has given me such a bad week. It's been a bad writing week, a bad gender week, and a bad sexuality week, and they're all tied into the damned story of Sir Robert, where my gender baggage tangled up the story so badly that no one knows it was originally meant to be softcore smut. I am also realizing that I can't write genre fiction, which is very depressing. Everything I write -- mysteries, humor, sex -- eventually spirals out of control and turns into a Columbine-style story. It's a wonderful style, and I do it well. But it is completely unsalable. To sell, I must be able to write genre. And all my attempts have failed.

Adding to my general depression was the story of the young crossdresser, Alex McLendon, who was thrown out of her high school just because he preferred to dress, look, and act female. She was very convincing -- many of his classmates didn't even realize she was a boy until told. Four separate people have sent me this story now, and I appreciate your sending it ... you were right to think I wanted to see it ... but stop sending it. It made me cry.

But as I said, I'm cheery now. Honest. I'm describing why I was gloomy before. The weather and the dinner and the evening and all -- they cheered me right up. I'm easy. I get unhappy quickly and recover quickly. My moods blow around like the branches of the trees outside.

Venting also helps. While on my way to the reading tonight, in a fit of black humor, I composed this.

All My Friends Can Write Dirty But Me

Recollecting the scope of my thirty-plus years
Sex was never the root of my hopes or my fears
And my sexual progress was never a strain
With all my needs met by my body and brain.
Well-amused by the thoughts which I locked in my head,
Full at ease in the softness and calm of the bed,
Transported by sexual whim-on-demand,
And the warmth of my skin and the touch of my hand --
Was it always an error, this complacency?
All my friends can write dirty but me.

I admit that the body is not my concern.
(Though I note that I've always been willing to learn)
For the playgrounds of flesh to me usually seem
To have been less well-made in the fact than the dream --
Add to this the tired knowledge my skin doesn't fit,
And I love my own corpus not one little bit --
When impossible things are habitual play,
The truth of the body just gets in the way.
Is this why the carnal flows unfaithfully?
All my friends can write dirty but me.

I think reason's the reason I linger behind,
Handicapped by the idea that sex is the mind.
While my peers spatter ink over urges primeval,
I wander a labyrinth of the cerebral,
And I watch all their antics, as they tumble and sweat,
With a look on my face that's akin to regret.
I suppose if I struggled I could see myself blessed,
With coitus unfiltered and lusts self-possessed,
But I cannot avoid dreaming enviously --
All my friends can write dirty but me.

I still, to this day, would not describe myself as being very good at writing smut. This is partly because (as the poem just told you!) I find the physical bits of sex -- the bumping together of meat -- to be the unsexy parts. To me the sexy parts happen in the brain getting to the bed; once you get to the bed the fun bit's over and it's just sweat and grunting after that.

What I write is mysteries or crime stories or horror stories or space operas or what-have-you that happen to have people having sex in them, often as an important plot point. That I've gotten fairly good at. But the sex scenes are generally nothing more than two people naked together and fade to black. The reason I take up the mantle of smut writer is because the world is full of people who are prepared to call any story with any sex in it "pornography," and I've decided the best thing to do is own it. For solidarity, if nothing else.

Besides, despite the fact that they're light on physical sex, many of my stories are definitely kinky -- often kinky in weird and dark and sometimes unpleasant ways. It's the kink, not the sex, that's the real hazard of my stories, the actual minefield, and I figure by calling them smut in advance, I defuse some of the reaction to that: Hey, you've been warned, you knew this wasn't Disney going in.

09 April 2026 (Last updated 11 April 2026)