Sulk alert: I’m in a pissy mood. So skip on down if you don’t want to read more of me being what Emma Goldman feels is ‘arrogant’ and ‘condescending’.

I just got back from seeing Wrong Turn, which is basically a 2003 version of The Hills Have Eyes starring Eliza Dushku. I’d watch Eliza Dushku paint a house for 90 minutes and be quite content, so the movie wasn’t going to annoy me unless it was really bad… and as it turns out, given the genre and everything, it was actually reasonably good. I was pleased when the first two victims died (they were truly obnoxious) sad when the next two got it (they were nice, and the girl was extraordinarily hot) and a bit disappointed that Eliza’s character wound up being simply a victim who needed rescuing (I’m used to her playing Faith so I was expecting a little more female empowerment). But it wasn’t a bad movie… the characters were all two dimensional and, ultimately, it was just another ‘here’s what the city folks are most afraid of’ slasher flick… but I didn’t think it was a waste of two hours.

There was an amusing fake credits scroll at the end, which only ran long enough to let people get up and start for the doors, before one final scene featuring yet another really stupid West Virginia State Trooper came up. Other than that, there wasn’t much in the film that fans of the genre haven’t seen many times before, and there was absolutely nothing here but Eliza that Jeepers Creepers didn’t have more of and better. But I didn’t mind it.

Beyond that, the movie struck me as being one that must have been, on a technical level, a complete bitch to film, for the crew and for the actors. A lot of times we pay little attention to the amount of trouble it can be to put even an obscure, quickly forgotten ‘B’ suspense movie up onto the big screen, but clearly this movie had to be a whole lot less fun to film than, say, National Lampoon’s latest ‘our lead actors had to throw paint at people, look at naked chicks, and make out with hotties’ thing. Not that how tough a film is to shoot means anything as far as quality goes; Jackass: The Movie looked damned painful to produce, judging from the commercials. Still, Wrong Turn looked like a really tough shoot.

I grabbed a lot of boxes out of a dumpster behind a Payless Shoes on the way home, so I’ll do some packing tonight, as has become the norm. I haven’t heard a thing from my family since Friday night, so I guess I’ll be writing a rent check tomorrow… it annoys me to give these guys most of the money I currently have when they’re kicking me out, but it doesn’t look like anybody is all that motivated to get me out of here quickly, either. Well… more time to pack, I guess…

Writing all this down has seen much of my pissy mood subside, so I’ll just note in passing I’m in an email feud right now with Emma Goldman. I noted on her blog, under an entry where she discussed blog ethics in general and, in specific, reciprocity of blogrolling, that she’d been on my blogroll since I started this thing, and she’s never listed me. She got mad at me about that. The Great Kos, it seems, advises everybody who wants to be just as big an asshole as he is to be stingy with their blogroll space, and Emma has explained to me that since my blog is not primarily political, and her blog is, she isn’t going to blogroll me. I don’t agree with that assessment; I think the social contract, as well as supporting your friends, is more important than being really really selective in who you blogroll… and frankly, I think my stuff is brilliant and people would like it if they read it. But unlike gorgeous redheads who loathe me for being in love with them, this issue between my blogroll and Emma’s is one I can resolve pretty easily, and if you look to the right on my blogroll, you’ll doubtless find I have.

In addition to people who manage to somehow filter into a movie theater exactly two minutes after the movie starts, regardless of how many commercials and trailers were just shown, another thing that truly annoys me is people who don’t answer my goddam email. Emma, whom in many ways I simply adore, nearly always answers my email quickly. As does Jonathan Nolan, Hartmut Schumacher, my mom, my cuz-in-law Mel, Scott Shepherd and my ex girlfriend Kristy. However, Emily Jones, Dean Esmay, my brother Pat, my editor at Joe Bob Briggs (who I’m starting to assume is my ex editor, since I haven’t heard anything from him in weeks), a certain gorgeous but deeply addled and unfortunately snooty redhead, and various others, answer my email when and if they damned well please, and it’s very annoying. I answer people’s email very promptly. I deserve the same courtesy in return.

Of course, as William Munney has been known to intone, ‘deserve’s got nuthin’ to do with it’.

(To be fair, the gorgeous/addled/snooty redhead isn’t supposed to answer my email, and I’m not supposed to be emailing her, but I got to feeling nostalgic and melancholy and decided to use the occasion of my being evicted and leaving Tampa as an excuse to write her a long good bye note. As with anything anyone does in a social context, it was shameless attention getting behavior. In fact, it was shameless attention getting behavior of the worst sort… unsuccessful attention getting behavior, that is. Since, naturally, she won’t write back to me, and in fact, I will never know if she didn’t simply delete the email unread.)

(I’d call her a bitch now, and she certainly has proven herself to be one towards me, anyway, but here in the 21st Century, a man calling a woman a bitch is rapidly becoming as socially abhorrent as a man actually belting a woman in the chops was to earlier generations. I suppose this is a good thing, but I’m really not all that happy with social ‘evolutions’ that bring our culture to a point where we are equating angry speech with actual violence and/or crime.)

Later…

It’s about 5 in the morning. I’m tired, but can’t sleep. Probably won’t much tonight or tomorrow.

About 8 this evening (Sunday evening, mind), my brother Paul called me. He told me he’d been trying to get hold of me for two days. I’d discovered earlier on Sunday that the phone connected to my answering machine seemed dead, which is annoying, since the only other phone jack in the apartment is the one the computer is plugged into. I only knew to pick up the phone when Paul called because the answering machine went off… something Paul said it hadn’t been doing for the last couple of days. It’s one of the unpleasant things about modern life: you don’t know your phone isn’t working until it starts working again and someone calls and tells you it wasn’t working.

Anyway, Paul had found a buddy of his who could drive a truck (a guy named Pat, which gets confusing because we were kind of waiting for my brother Pat, the prosperous one in the family, to step up with that). Anyway, Pat had offered to come in and pick me up with Paul on Tuesday. When I asked if there was any way we could make sure that happened on Tuesday after 5 p.m., though (when Sondra the on site manager will have left the office for the day and I won’t have to worry about annoying confrontations with people who are perfectly happy to throw me out of my home on their schedule, but who certainly don’t want me saving on my last month’s rent by leaving the premises at a time more suitable to me), it turned out if I wanted evening pick up, it would have to be Monday night (tonight, as it were). This still isn’t completely definite, he has to call the truck rental place tomorrow. However, suddenly my packing schedule shifted into high speed.

Obviously, the computer is still set up… I’ll break it down tomorrow (well, today, but hopefully after a few hours of sleep) probably after I get a confirming phone call from Pat telling me I’m outta here tomorrow night/tonight. I’ve filled an amazing number of boxes and am, regrettably, leaving quite a lot behind, and I hate the fact that I’m going to be leaving the apartment full of crap and quite messy, too. I’m aware that this is not because I’m a nice guy (I honestly don’t give a shit if the bastards who run this place have to do some work cleaning up after me; they wouldn’t have to if they weren’t tossing me out of my home after I’ve lived here for five and a half years), but is simply because I, like most people, feel a psychological urge to clean myself entirely out of a place when I leave it behind. I won’t have that luxury here due to the speed I’m moving with, and the fact that there’s no room at my brother's to bring all my furniture (I’m fairly sure he doesn’t have room for all the crap I am bringing, but we’ll find somewhere to put it all) means much stuff gets left here.

I left a lot of stuff behind when I hurriedly left Syracuse, too, and it still annoys me that I did. Losing bookshelves is always a pain when you’re a serious bibliophile, and some of the shelves I left up there I’d had since the early 80s… while another one had been given to me by Kristy for Christmas our first year together and it had a lot of sentimental value to me.

At least it looks like I’ll be able to salvage my shelves from this apartment. The hardest thing I left behind in Syracuse was my comics collection; it simply wouldn’t fit in the van my brothers rented to come up and rescue me in, once we crammed in all my books and videotapes. A friend of mine put the comics in storage in his parents’ basement for me, but he’s kind of faded out of the picture over the past six years, and I have only a vague idea that they’re still there at this point and no idea if I’ll ever get them back again. For awhile another friend of mine was swearing blind he was going to get them shipped down to me, but that’s an expensive proposition (or I’d have done it myself already) and anyway, right now, it’s just as well I don’t have fifteen more boxes of shit to take out to Paul’s with me. (Although Paul would be psyched to have my Silver Age comics collection under his roof, I’m sure. He’d sleep out in the rain himself to make room for them, if I let him read them.)

My email feud with Emma is over, as is, apparently, whatever you want to call a cordial fiber-optic cable enabled relationship between fellow bloggers. I spent quite a lot of effort over the past half day trying to explain myself to Em through emails; she felt I was being arrogant and condescending and abrasive (and I probably was; when I respect someone, I tend to be forthright with them, although I know that irritates a fuck of a lot of people and Em is quite evidently one of them) and she finally just wished me the best of luck and washed her hands of me. Well, as I told her, that’s a big boat with a lot of people in it (all of whom, apparently, have very clean hands). Seems like a big uproar just because I put her on my blogroll and she doesn’t want to reciprocate, though.

However, it’s her loss. I hope her emulation of that fine and wise blogging Yoda figure, Kos, keeps her warm and dry.

A lot of people have washed over this blog in the last six weeks or so since I started it. Emily Jones threatened to start kicking up a ruckus in my comment threads, but never quite managed to put her hand to the tiller. Most of the traffic Emily sent my way a month ago seems to have gone elsewhere again, probably when they discovered I was pretty much just going to blog about my life and geek stuff and not give them another liberal political goat to tie cans to. My recent influx of stripper related traffic from Las Vegas also seems to have ebbed, which is seriously disappointing to me; if I can’t actually have wild monkey sex with Las Vegas strippers, having them drop comments on my blog seems the next best thing. I note I’m still blogrolled by Dean Esmay and Elayne Riggs, but both of them have marvelously long blogrolls, and I doubt anyone much notices me in the midst of that crowd.

Still, I’m grateful for those few newbies who came and stuck (Scott and Dan seem to comprise the lot of them, unless I’m forgetting someone, in which case, I apologize), and for the usual small crowd of mostly relatives and a few old friends who occasionally put an oar in the water here, too.

Oh, before I close this long, meandering thing (it will be the only entry for Sunday and Monday, I’m pretty sure, so it being overlong is okay, I guess), I should note that Warlord of Erberos is currently being serialized in four parts in an Aussie e-mag called Thrilling Mysteries In Space, which also features some fine ERB and Walter Gibson type pastiche by fine e-buddy Jonathan Nolan, who helps put the rag together. And while you can still read my nonsense for free at the other end of that link up there, y’all should really think about ponying up the $2 to download a copy of the e-zine to read Jonathan’s stuff. And if you haven’t read ERB’s fine “Chessman of Mars” yet, that’s the public domain tale they’re reprinting in this issue, as well. (“Chessman” is one of the better Barsoom books, featuring some of ERB’s most ghoulishly imaginative creations. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out! (Actually, you can’t really call an e-zine a ‘rag’. A ‘screen’? A ‘phospor-dot’? A ‘tube’?)

I recently sent Jonathan a link to The Jeff Webb Art Site, and he likes Jeff’s work so much we’re going to put together an e-book of all Jeff’s non-copyright protected work (yeah, I know… no nude superbabes… sucks, but that’s the world for you) for sale on his web publishing site. I really don’t care how much money it makes, but it would be great to see Jeff getting some recognition as the brilliant creative and artistic genius he was, even if it has to be post-humously. I’d been planning to do some work on that today, but obviously, that’s going to have to wait a while.

And, assuming I don’t have any really startling email or comments on this h’yar blog (As. If.) when I sign on, that’s about it for news hereabouts. Next time you hear from me, I may be broadcasting from sunny scenic Zephyrhills.

With, alas, no gorgeous/addled/snooty redheads anywhere within a thirty mile perimeter.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I’m not a likable guy. I’m not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It’s simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don’t like my opinions or my blog, don’t read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I’m not going to say that this time around, because I’ve realized that what this is basically saying is, ‘if you don’t like what I have to say, tough, I don’t want to hear it, don’t even bother to tell me, just go away’.

And that’s actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country… for a little while longer, anyway… and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I’m not sure that’s a right when you’re doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don’t feel like reading… and I’m really quick with the delete key… as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don’t like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance… these things are only worth my time and attention if they’re entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me… try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.