Well, the sore throat from Hell is still hanging around. It doesn’t seem any worse, at least.

Let’s see… Tuesday during the day I pretty much just loafed… I hadn’t slept at all Monday night, so I made myself stay up all day so I could try to get back on a regular sleep schedule. Oddly, I didn’t feel all that tired for most of the day. I watched a lot of movies… Out of Sight and The Peacemaker, the Director’s Cut of Tombstone, and Arlington Road. Then, yesterday, I watched The Ring, which Pat had brought over at the same time as the DC of Tombstone, and I’m currently in the middle of re-watching Addams Family Values.

Yesterday… I don’t think I did a helluva lot worth mentioning. Managed to lock myself out while I was putting Chewie out and had to crawl back in through a window, which was much more effort and less fun than I’m going to bother writing about. Pat picked Paul up at work and they decided to go out to Blockbuster and re-rent this Street Shooters basketball video game they’re now addicted to and Paul got back about half an hour later than he usually does, so I bitched at him a little when he got back, since, like an idiot, I’d been worried when he didn’t get home on time. Christ. Sometimes I feel like I’m married. Other times I feel like I have a 13 year old kid. Although if I had a 13 year old kid who smokes as much dope as Paul, I would beat his ass for him.

I’d been hoping to get Pat to give me a ride to Wal-mart but he didn’t feel like it since he and Paul had already been driving around, which meant today I had to hike up to Eckerd’s, which is, I’m going to guess, about three miles away. It’s a grey and overcast day (it rained hard this morning) so it wasn’t too bad a hike, but still, it was hot and muggy and I could have lived without it. However, I picked up a bunch of stuff I needed… zinc lozenges (which so far don’t seem to be doing much, but they don’t taste bad), ginger ale (having gone through the IBC cream soda and Orange Crush I picked up during Monday’s grocery store trip), some Listerine to gargle with (maybe it will help knock back this sore throat some), and Vaseline, which I’m always embarrassed to buy when there are people along, because, well, I really can’t think of anything I’d use it for except the obvious ‘guy who can’t get laid’ purposes. My readers may now all be thinking ‘ew, that’s more information than we needed, Darren’ but I think this whole blog qualifies under that header, folks… if you’re going to be squeamish about my non-sex life, then the good looking single women in the audience are cordially invited to do something about it, and everybody else is similarly invited to set me up with their good looking single exes or female relatives.

Oh, yeah, I also picked up a new pizza cutter, since my old one, which I’m sure I made an effort to pack and bring with me because I loved it to death, seems to have migrated elsewhere, the fucker. The new one is nicer looking than the old one, though, which is good, since I had to cross the street to Wal-green’s to find it, Eckerd’s not really having a housewares section.

Other than that, I have mostly wasted today online. Here’s a tip for those of you without a credit rating who like porn: it’s amazing the amount of really decent stuff you can find going through Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Briefcases. (‘Decent’ may not be the right word there.) What I’ve been doing lately is calling up a Yahoo Profile that has a lot of Yahoo Profile’s more unusual sexual Interests listed on it. You click on that and you’ll go to a search page listing every Yahoo member who is also registered in that Interest (usually by joining a Yahoo Group devoted to it). There you can specify ‘women’ or ‘men’ or an age group or (I think, I’ve never bothered with it) a marital status and from there, it lists all the profiles that match. Start going through profiles in a particular interest and eventually (it generally doesn’t take long) you’ll come across some freak like me, who collects a lot of porn and keeps it in their Yahoo Briefcase (where it’s nicely deniable, since chances are, your parents, significant other, roommate, or other self appointed members of the Decency Police will never find it, and if they do, they can’t tie it to you). I’ve come across some very sizable and very nice collections of porn this way. And it’s all free.

Yeah, I really SHOULD upload all my porn to a Yahoo Group or Briefcase, now that I’m thinking about it… Not that any of my stuff is illegal. It’s just not the sort of thing you really want your family to know you enjoy looking at (unless, of course, you WANT to be taken off everybody’s ‘possible emergency babysitter’ list and put on their ‘terrible influence for the childen’ lists instead, which, come to think of it…

Some lovely woman named Trinity has a very interesting weblog named Eyesicle. I’ve posted some comments there and she’s been kind enough to give me a blog link, so I’ve linked her back starting today, and if my ten or so readers wanted to go over there and post some comments on her blog, that would be fine with me. Of course, you should all post comments on MY blog first, dammit…

Paulie Pooker just called, to inform me that his work number at the Circle K is 788-1082. Call him up and tell him he’s a doodle. Or, you know, don’t.

Interestingly, if you do a Google search on my name, you’ll find that I perhaps shouldn’t have burned (well, okay, blew to shards and flinders) my bridges at Electrolite so fast, since a couple of the comments I posted there seem to have instantly been picked up on by other bloggers and re-posted in various other places. Electrolite is apparently much read, and I guess I could have gotten quite a bit of exposure there, even if PNH just kept slapping me around the live long day. My foolish pride. Ah, well.

E-mail has been very slow lately.

Okay, movies:

Oh, Kristy and I are on good, cordial terms lately… I guess being several hundred miles apart is beneficial, for the most part, when it comes to getting along well with your exes. We’ve had some good chats online recently.

Cuz in law Mel loaned me two books around a month ago, Vampirica Erotica, which is a collection of near porn about vampires, and The Uncanny by Andrew Klavan, which is some kind of spook story. I normally wouldn’t have picked out either to read for myself, but since returning the St. Germain books to the library (one only half finished, goddam it) and with all my other books in storage (sometimes the pessimistic side of me thinks, forever), I didn’t have much choice… Paul being a 21st century video/DVD geek the way he is, he doesn’t exactly have a lot of reading material lying around.

I read the first five stories in Vampirica Erotica before giving up. A couple of the stories in the collection are by Warren Lapine, the guy who, along with his girlfriend, currently owns and edits Weird Tales and who is a huge vampire buff. These guys encouraged me to write something for them via emails a few summers ago, but absolutely refused to consider an electronic submission, so I did write them a short story, went to a lot of trouble to print it out as a hard copy and mail it to them because, again, they simply WOULD NOT EVEN REMOTELY CONSIDER letting me submit it electronically… and then they lost the damned thing, or at least, months later when I sent them an email asking if they’d reviewed it yet, they claimed they hadn’t yet received anything from me. And at that point, they still wouldn’t consider an electronic submission, and I just gave up on their snotty asses. Of course, I have no way of being absolutely sure I addressed the envelope absolutely correctly, or that the post office didn’t mishandle it, but I used to work for the post office call center, and I am ALWAYS very careful how I address snailmail, because I know that 99.9999% of the time, if something goes astray in the U.S. mail system, it’s because of sender-error in writing the address.

However, regardless of what happened, editors who won’t accept electronic submissions annoy the hell out of me. I know they can’t accept them from everyone or they’d be swamped with submissions, far worse than all magazines are now with hard copies (as witness my recent rejection notes from BLACK GATE, a place I’d electronically submitted to so long ago that I’d forgotten I’d done it). But the childish part of me still thinks ‘well, they should accept them from ME, I can actually WRITE’. Leaving that aside, I think if a couple of editors encourage you via email to write something for them, they should let you submit it to them electronically, and if you do go to the trouble of jumping through their goddam hoops and they lose the ms. on you, THEN you should be able to submit it to them electronically. So the Lapines have annoyed the shit out of me, as nearly every editor I have anything to do with manages to do to me fairly quickly, and I completely fail to see why they can’t go to my website and read my fiction there, anyway.

However, my bad experiences with one of the authors included in this anthology aside, I didn’t care much for the stories I read. Most were written just about as well as modern day vampire fiction ever is. Pretty much all modern day vampire stuff I’ve read has the feeling of fan fic to me; which is to say, it always seems rather amateurish. Much of it is written horribly (like most fan fic) but even the stuff that’s relatively decent seems to be written pretty much entirely to give the writer some kind of vicarious thrill, rather than for the purposes of actually communicating something interestingly and coherently to a second party. And since all of these vampire stories are ‘erotic’, that just makes it worse; very few people trouble themselves to write porn any better than it has to be to get them off while they’re writing it.

Whether the stories are well written or not (and they didn’t seem to be to me), I have a basic problem with the idea of ‘erotic’ vampire stories. Vampires are all about dark sexuality, but it’s supposed to be sublimated, with the night walking and the hypnotic mental seductions and the way vampires have to be invited into your home (usually into your bedroom) and the coercive penetration and the drinking of the bodily fluids. To talk about vampires having actual sex just violates the mythology to the point where I tend to lose interest (it’s one of the things that makes vampires rather un-scary in Buffy, but then, vampires are rarely at all scary in Buffy so I just deal with it). Vampires are among my favorite horror icons/monsters but it’s not because of the sexuality in them, it’s because unlike most monsters, which simply kill you, vampires kill you and turn you into one of them, which is scary enough, and worse, vampires do this to people you trust, which is a real nightmare for me… the idea that friends and loved ones can be ‘turned’ into monsters that want to kill me really freaks me out. (It freaks everyone out, which is why every major vampire story has a scene in which one of the characters, usually someone everybody likes, gets turned into a vampire and has to be killed.)

To me, vampires are evil, monstrous supernatural predators that stalk the darks and deeps of the night. They are the walking dead who crave and feast on the life forces of those still living. When you start writing short stories in which vampires are three dimensional people who have actual jobs and have to pay rent, who enjoy sexual encounters with the living, who sometimes seem rather nice other than the fact that they can’t go out in the daylight and they drink human blood, well, it just kind of ruins the whole mythos for me. I want vampires to be bad guys, and I want them to be Undead, and I want them to be scary. Bisexual vampire hairdressers going down on gorgeous teenage girls who smell like cinnamon, however titillating that may seem, just aren’t what I’m looking for in my vampire fiction.

I’m about thirty pages into The Uncanny and I have no idea how it is yet. Seems okay. I have nothing else to read, as I’ve noted. If anything at all that I’ve asked for from my editor at Joe Bob Briggs were to arrive, I’d probably stop reading this thing and never pick it up again, but in an absolute textual drought, it passes the time.

By the time I’m done with this, I may have to change the ‘Thor’s Day’ date to ‘Frey’s Day’.

BRING IT ON

Tentatively and cautiously, I’m going to say this… Dubya may have finally made the serious mistake all we liberals have been waiting for him to make for the last three years.

I don’t say he has made it, but as I have noted repeatedly on this page, an elected official, and especially a President, does not suffer politically from taking actions or making statements that aggravate those who don’t like him anyway.

This is a perceptual error we liberals make a lot. We cannot understand, for example, how it is that so many people can continue to support a President who has abused his office as egregiously as Dubya clearly has… who has, in three years, enacted a litany of stupidity and short sighted domestic and international avarice, such as flipping off the world over several necessary treaties, completely ignore enormous corporate malfeasance on his watch, lie to the entire planetary populace about the need to invade Iraq, actually invade Iraq over the strong protests of, well, pretty much everyone currently alive with a functioning cerebellum, send our national economy into a tailspin it may need decades to recover from, steadily strip away our civil rights to a greater extent than any President since Woodrow Wilson, and make America into a Third Reich-esque enemy state in the eyes of probably a majority of the nations of the world at this point.

What we liberals don’t understand is that none of this stuff matters to the people who voted for Dubya last time and who are going to vote for him next time, and therefore, politically, none of this stuff is a mistake. Until a President does something to mortally offend his core constituency, he’s fine. We liberals hate all the shit that Dubya has done, but, well, we didn’t vote for him the first time and we won’t vote for him in 2004, so our opinion really doesn’t impact his political credibility much.

However, I thought that, a while back when Dubya did his completely unnecessary Top Gun publicity stunt, announcing victory in Iraq from the deck of an American aircraft carrier while wearing a flight suit, after having just hopped out of a multimillion dollar fighter plane, he maybe, just maybe, pushed the wrong buttons on some significant percentages among his core support groups. Oh, most of the right wing whack jobs that voted for him in the first place ate that nonsense up with a spoon, but at least a few thoughtful conservatives out there reflected on the fact that Bush really had absolutely no right at all to be wearing that uniform, and that this was obviously simply all staged as a publicity stunt… and the fact that a billion dollar Unites States military vessel and several hundred United States soldiers were basically used as a back drop for a photo op stuck in quite of few conservative craws. Or so I assumed, from the rather feeble way that many of the more intelligent right wing commentators defended Dubya back then, from charges on the left that this was a ridiculous abuse of Presidential power and privilege.

Mind you, Bush in a flight suit didn’t offend the right anywhere near as much as Clinton in a spurious military uniform getting out of a fighter jet would have offended everyone… but Clinton ain’t that stupid, either.

It wasn’t a grotesque blunder, but I thought it was a tiny misstep, and since Bush’s handlers generally don’t allow even that much, well… I was hoping it might be a sign of things to come.

And now we have this ‘bring it on’ speech, which is about twenty times worse than the whole Top Gun debacle, and which I think even conservatives are rather shocked and stunned by.

Bush’s idiotic macho swaggering is normally safe enough, since, again, idiotic macho swaggering isn’t going to offend any conservatives any time soon. In this case, however, we have to add in the word ‘cowardly’. It’s hard to escape using that word for someone who tells armed extremists to ‘bring it on’ from halfway around the world, while surrounded by thick walls, the most sophisticated early warning system in human history, and about a thousand heavily armed bodyguards. It’s especially hard to not use that word, or to at the very least not think it, when we reflect that what Bush just did was openly invite crazy ass terrorists to attack more American soldiers, all of whom are in harm’s way because Bush decided to put them there, over the protests of millions of Americans and most of the rest of the civilized world.

This is much like Saddam Hussein screaming defiantly that the Iraqi soldiery will fight to the last bullet, while hiding in a concealed bunker only he knows the actual coordinates of. It’s virtually impossible for even Bush’s most zealous partisans to avoid thinking now just how easy it is for someone on the other side of the planet from an armed militia to shake his fist threateningly at said militia… especially when the guys who are going to get shot and blown up due to said fist shaking are young American soldiers who wouldn’t even be over there if Dubya hadn’t sent them there in the first place.

All told, Dubya may… I say may, because people are people and have enormous capacity to just not think about things they really don’t want to think about… have just seriously stepped on his dick. He may have just put his foot in his mouth over something his core constituency will find extremely offensive… and if so, this could give the Democrats a badly needed shot in the arm.

Of course, the Democrats being who they are, it may not matter if this is a Republican fumble on the Repub’s own 8 yard line; the Dems are perfectly capable of fumbling the ball right back again, and watching the Republicans pick it up and carry it all the way downfield for another touchdown, too.

However… first the Top Gun thing, which I think was a slight miscalculation on the part of the Bushies. Now this. And in September, Bush plans to kick off his re-election on the anniversary of 9/11… which seems like a smart move, since he can wrap himself in the flag all over again… but I’m wondering if, combined with these two previous blunders, that won’t be enough to open the eyes of even his most avid partisans, and make them realize just how ruthlessly opportunistic and shameless Dubya and his support machine really are.

Thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, and dozens of dead and wounded Allied soldiers, in a war that most of the planet absolutely did not want, for reasons that, it turns out, were entirely lies… and the American Commander in Chief struts across an aircraft carrier wearing a uniform he has no moral right to, reducing the United States Navy to little more than a good looking photo opportunity, to smile like a bobbing head doll as he declares ‘victory’ in battle very nearly as close as any Super Bowl between the Buffalo Bills and the Dallas Cowboys. Dozens of murdered U.S. soldiers in an unending, unwanted, and illegal occupation, and Bush, from the safety of the Oval Office while peering out between several heavily armed bodyguards, sneers ‘bring it on’ to the people who are killing them. And in three more months, more or less, our unelected jefe will self righteously wrap a flag made from the scorched and blackened pelts of three thousand dead American civilians around his shoulders, and declare himself a candidate for election in a democracy that he enthusiastically buttfucked four years prior.

It may not be too much. He may not have gone too far. The people who voted for him are, for the most part, very very stupid and very very gullible.

Nonetheless, this time I have hope.

A REASON TO BELIEVE

Every fag basher I know insists that homosexuality is a matter of choice.

While this is obviously and manifestly idiotic, it is, in fact, a hopeful and positive sign. Why?

Because it means that even the most narrow minded conservative bigots currently alive have, in some way, been somewhat enlightened, in that they all now understand implicitly that if you’re going to hate someone for something, and if you’re going to institute or prosecute an actual legal bias against someone for something, then it has to be something that has to do with their voluntary behavior.

Yes, hateful conservative bigots who long to see every queer in the world either stuffed firmly back into a closet or just plain shot in the head and dumped in the Gulf of Mexico, have still, nonetheless, absorbed the lesson of the last fifty years or so of social progress… you cannot legitimately express bias against someone for something they have no choice about.

Let’s not forget history, and let’s try to keep this in perspective. Fifty years ago, hate mongers believed no such thing. Fifty years ago, the sight of a black man openly holding hands with a white woman on a public street anywhere in the South would most likely have drawn an irate mob. Had you asked any member of that mob if they really believed it was the black fellow’s fault that he was black, you would at most have gotten back a stare of uncomprehending hostility. ‘Fault’ and ‘choice’ didn’t much matter to the unreasoning hatred of 1953, or, for that matter, 1963, or even 1973. What mattered was the relative melanin content of the skin of each member of said couple, and ‘behavior’ and ‘choice’ were only important to the extent that said couple had chosen to behave in a manner not acceptable to their neighbors. The fact that neither had chosen to be members of their respective races mattered not a whit.

So, for conservatives to insist that homosexuality is a ‘choice’… well, yes, it’s moronic and completely counter intuitive (does anyone out there, regardless of their sexual predilections, remember ever making a conscious choice to be sexually attracted to anyone or anything?)… but it represents a big social step forward.

Oh, I know… many of them don’t believe it in their hearts. Down inside, they honestly don’t care whether it’s a choice or not, just like, down inside, there are still a great many bigots out there who covertly long for a return to the good old days, when small towns could openly post signs at their municipal limits stating ‘Nigger don’t let the sun set on your black ass here’, and those uppity nigras were happy to get a good job as a janitor or doing laundry for their betters. But in public, those people have learned not to shoot their mouths off because those toxic and worthless sentiments are no longer generally acceptable. Interracial couples may have to deal with hostile glares and even the occasional bit of verbal harassment from truly unreformed assholes (which, like the poor, will be with us always) but they aren’t getting rocks thrown at them any more and nobody is being dragged through the streets, horsewhipped, or lynched. We have made some progress.

Who knows, in another ten or twenty years, gay couples may be able to openly hold hands in any small town in America without getting much more than sneers for it. The fact that the hateful are now insisting that homosexuality is a choice… well, that’s a sign that we’re making progress.

Slowly but surely.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

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.