Much of what is below was written yesterday, starting around 8 p.m. in the evening. Then the Redskins/Jets game came on, during which Paul came home, after which various people showed up, and I didn’t get back to this. So bear in mind, a lot of it is from Thday, Sept 4.

As to today, I’m in an extremely pissy mood for a great many reasons, all of which are entirely childish and beneath me, and I know that, but I’m still in a pissy mood, and that’s just how that’s going to be for a while.

In email: some young snot named TmcGrady has been sending me mail asking for my input and feedback in re: Black Panther, and then insulting me when I don’t tell him what he wants to hear. He’s basically an immature fan-dweeb who doesn’t understand characterization or how to write it effectively; he wants the Black Panther to be able to beat hell out of all the white superheroes with, like, his feet, and to give his readers really snappy Frank Miller type first person narrative captions while he does it.

He also sent me a seven page essay with his first email, begged me to read it, and then got really irritated with me when I told him it had been horribly written (it was) and made him look like a moron (it did, since about 2/3s of this nominal thing about the Black Panther was actually obsessing on X-Men characters).

He also can’t spell, and while he admires my off the cuff, informal, humorous writing style when he’s reading it in one of my essays, he gets all upset when I take it in an email to him.

I’m being at least slightly unfair to him, but still, only in emphasis, the essence of my analysis is true. He’s a snot-nose who apparently thinks it’s okay to write someone he doesn’t know, beg them to give him feedback on a 1,500 word essay that absolutely sucks to read, and then insult them when he doesn’t like the feedback he gets. He has decided he doesn’t wanna talka to me no mo’, and that’s just fine.

That’s at the martianmanhunter account. At docnebula, today I got four whole emails. Three were spam. One was from somebody who needs my help to make Paul’s birthday just the spiffiest thing in the world for him.

Oh, yes, today’s Paul’s birthday. I wouldn’t be aware of that at all, except that Paul’s been mentioning it four times a day for the last two weeks, all Paul’s friends have been dropping by to wish him a happy birthday, Paul has gotten a bunch of birthday cards in the mail, and apparently he’s getting presents sometime later tonight. And if you’re thinking I’m sitting here trying to figure out when the hell it was anyone on this planet made one-tenth this much fuss about MY goddam birthday, and you’re about to tell me that I’ve made my choices, Paul is much nicer and more socially successful than I am, and nobody made me be the kind of asshole whose birthday comes and goes without the slightest ripple whatsoever in the local social fabric (well, my mom always sends me a card, that’s nice), well, yes, you are absolutely correct, it’s my fault only my mother even vaguely celebrates the day of my birth (and I should appreciate that more, given what a general bummer my birth was for her in the months immediately following it, so, thanks Mom, sorry I’ve been such a dick). Now, having admitted that you’re right and I’m a great big whiney loser, I think it’s time for you to please go play in traffic.

I need to get my own place, where I just won’t have to pay any attention to shit like this.

Okay, backwards to yesterday and then maybe I’ll add something and post this. I’d apologize for being such a sulky bastard today but Jesus Christ, it’s not like you people are PAYING me or anything.

SHELF LIFE

I’m very tired.

I have a sense of enormous physical satisfaction, though. I took something that was a horrible mess and made it much, much better looking, and much more useful, too.

I have a cinderblock and board bookcase. Which is to say, I have five 2x4s and 24 single square cinderblocks I bought at a Home Depot my mom drove me to back when I first moved into my apartment in Tampa. Since I moved in here, its been a pile of cinderblocks with five boards piled on top of it sitting on Paul’s ramshackle front porch, because in this tiny apartment, there was only one wall where it could fit (the boards are about 8 feet long), and that wall was taken up with clutter… to wit, components of my mom’s old computer carrel, which got given to Paul years ago, and a small bookshelf, holding the very small number of books that Paul still owns and which haven’t been too ruined by neglect over the years to still be readable.

The desk section of the carrel, the part that normally would have made an L side adjoining the section holding the computer itself, Paul had his stereo and huge piles of CDs on top of. The next section down was the computer carrel itself, which had basically become a clutter dump… I’m sure you know what I mean and unless you’re a truly obnoxious neat freak (that’s you, Gary L.), you have them yourself… places you tend to dump stuff you’re not sure you want to throw out right this second, or that you’re sure you don’t want to toss, but that you sure as shit don’t have the energy to actually put away where it belongs right now, especially since you have a fairly strong feeling you’ll be wanting it again… soon… even if you’re not quite sure when.

I’ve been warming Paul up gradually (translation: bugging the living bejeebers out of him) to the idea of getting RID of all that crap so I could put up my bookshelves, get my books back out of storage, and unpack them. Paul was resistant because, well, it’s Someone Coming In And Fucking With His House, and who among us likes that? Especially when the Someone is as obnoxious and ugly as I am.

To my credit, and I seem to be the only one who will say this so I’m gonna, all the Fucking With Paul’s House I’ve done since moving in has been for the better.

Anyway, recently a few things had come together, like me running out of money and facing the prospect of having to borrow $50 next month from Paul to pay storage charges, and Scott vaguely mentioning he might bring some hot chicks he knows from his job around to smoke out here (somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen, but Paul had to agree a bookshelf full of books, even geeky books, would look better than the crap that was there at that point…) and Paul being in a good mood this week and last because of playing in my RPG and going to the Counting Crows concert this Saturday, and he’d become more or less amenable to the idea of getting rid of all that SHIT and setting up my shelves. The sticking point was that it was going to be a huge amount of very onerous work, shifting things around and cleaning under these pieces of furniture that had been in place for years. Paul doesn’t even like to help me sweep the floor (although to give him credit, he did help me do a pretty good clean up on the place yesterday), so any time I mentioned maybe we should set aside some time to tackle that wall project on one of his day’s off, he’d kind of snarl at me and retreat backwards into a burrow with his teeth showing.

So yesterday, I mentioned that I’d do it myself today, after Paul went to work and got out from under foot. Paul didn’t protest, just said “Dude, I really don’t think you’re going to want to do all that shit on your own.” I, being a model of maturity and self restraint, did not snap back “No, I’d actually rather eat a bowl full of broken glass than do all that shit on my own, but it’s pretty obvious you’ll help me do it right around the turn of the next millennium, so I might as well.”

It was one of those incredibly aggravating and seemingly endless physical tasks that was full of frustration at nearly every turn, and, like most such tasks I know of… packing to move, unpacking after a move, serious cleaning, shit like that… it would have gone immeasurably more easily with one other person there helping. But that wasn’t gonna happen, so I did it myself. And, honestly, while it certainly isn’t the same as having someone I’m in love with fall in love with me back, selling a novel, or stepping through a warp hole into the Marvel Universe in 1963 and discovering I have Asgardian super powers, still, there’s a sense of real satisfaction and happiness (as well as a whole set of aching muscles) in having taken something that was a goddam disgraceful mess and and transformed it so substantively through sheer hard work.

It’s also pleasant to know that, for all my completely spastic lack of coordination and my woeful lack of physical condition, still, I must be fundamentally healthy, since I just spent an afternoon hauling furniture out onto the front porch and cinderblocks and 2x4s into the living room, and I had no difficulty doing it. It wasn’t FUN, mind you; telekinesis would definitely have been welcome at many points this afternoon, and a functional power ring would have absolutely rocked my world.

But then, I’ve encountered few situations where either telekinesis or a functional power ring wouldn’t been totally awesome, dude.

OFF ROADING

For $235,000, any of a hundred people can now have the opportunity to drown in an entirely novel way, or at the very least, completely ruin their new car.

Yes, engineers in Britain have invented the Aquada, a car that, upon being driven into a body of water, turns into a speedboat.

Now, I’m a geek and I love this shit, and frankly, I think the idea of a car that turns into a boat is a completely awesome one. But my thing here is this:

Moving parts fail first on any mechanism.

Now, quoting from the paper: “…once it hits the water, the wheels retract into the wheel arch, a jet kicks in, and the car is suddenly a boat”.

What they don’t mention is that in order to maintain watertight integrity, there has to be some kind of sliding hatch that comes out and covers the wheel well… which is fine. Except that if this particular sliding hatch doesn’t happen to function correctly… or actually any of four particular sliding hatches doesn’t work… on any particular occasion… well, the problem is, the occasion that these things are going to fail to work properly during is a pretty severe one. Like, you just drove your frickin’ $235,000 car into a frickin’ lake.

And now you’re sinking, because the automatic sliding hatches that cover your wheel wells didn’t work.

I mean, this is one of those situations where a 99.9% success rate isn’t going to cut it. If you have a car that turns into a boat, chances are you’re going to be using it, you know, to turn into a boat, fairly often. In Tampa, for example, a car that turns into a boat would be pretty handy. You could drive down to the beach, zoom into the water, whiz across the Bay, drive up onto Rocky Pointe, for example, and right into the parking lot of wherever it was you wanted to get to. Assuming you lived on one side of the Bay and worked on the other, you’d probably be doing the car-to-boat thing four times a day (assuming you went out for lunch and came back too). Which means you’ll get up to a thousand uses in about a month, and, well… when that .01% failure in your hatch seal occurs, suddenly your quarter million dollar car is under forty feet of water and hopefully you’re alive and screaming into your cell phone to your insurance broker.

Or, you know, I could be totally wrong about the sliding hatches over the wheel wells. Maybe they just found a way to make wheel wells water tight that would still let tires turn freely at high speed. I don’t know. Seems doubtful, but nobody’s paying me to design a car that turns into a boat.

THE GODS HAVE ENTRUSTED YOU WITH A SWORD

Knights of the Old Republic was, apparently, a big and long lasting hit around here. I say this because having moved on from that to Halo, the group has now moved on from Halo to something called Soul-Calibre II, which is a Mortal Kombat style fighting game… what Paul refers to as a ‘button masher’s paradise’.

I’ve never played one of these games, although like nearly everyone, I’ve seen other people play them in video arcades, and I’ve always been really impressed, sometimes even stunned, with the stuff that a skilled player can apparently make these characters do on the screen with some simple controls.

Well, now I find out that it’s all a fraud; all anyone ever does is just mash buttons and pray something cool happens.

I started playing this thing yesterday; Paul told me there was one particular character… a big bosomed, white haired chick named Ivy… that hardly anyone ever played, because her fighting style was so hard to use effectively. Naturally, I had to play her, and found to my surprise that apparently, my random button mashing style is a good match for Ivy’s array of offensive tactics. Which is to say, I kicked ass all over the place with her, especially after buying a special weapon for her… something called an Auberge (I think) that is basically a thorn studded, rose handled whip that Ivy used with deadly facility.

However, I’ve discovered that I need a lot of work to bring me up to the physical condition necessary to play this thing at a high level… which is to say, my thumb strength is pitiful. After a couple of hours of having Ivy beat holy hell out of every other character in the game, my left thumb specifically was so numb and weak I couldn’t take the wrapper off an ice cream bar.

Obviously, being an elite athlete requires peak physical condition. I need a mini-camp.

SOULS FIERCELY ENTWINED

Could be something like this:

Imagine you are some sort of energy entity with no real material form. Your thoughts, such as they are, move at the speed of light (or perhaps faster) and your perceptions (however they may function) are probably indescribable and unimaginable to the human mind. You may perceive the fleeting, picosecond, firecracker beauty of tachyons flashing from one wave form state to the other, hear the deep booming high gravity baritone moaning of the stars as they move through their ponderous celestial march step, bob and wallow in the quantum wake of a slowly swinging singularity.

Yet in the end, timeless eternity and the rich range of perceptions that the universe offers you begin to pall. You discover this small speck of dirt and you (and perhaps a few hundred million other bored energy entities like you) begin concentrating your will on it, lashing it with intense storms of electromagnetic radition, bombarding it with various comets and meteors containing trace elements of various complex carbons and amino acids, attempting, over the course of the next few minutes/epochs, to transform this tiny crumb of lifeless rock into something more complex… something covered in a vast variety of different highly convoluted organic and inorganic lifeforms.

Why? Well, other than it being an interesting way to stave of the ennui of being eternal, perhaps you theorize it may be possible to actually enter into some of these organic envelopes once you’ve managed to create them… to subsume your energetic life force within their coarser material substances, and to effectively transform your state of identity from what you are, and have been since the Big Bang (which you’re kind of tired of by now) into something new and different… if only for a short period.

So perhaps you do that. You subsume yourself into the interesting mitochondrial life cycle of a single celled organism. You experience photosynthesis first hand as a primitive fern. You permeate the newborn body of a gazelle and spend a brief, fleeting instant of universal space-time reveling in the sheer physical strength and grace of your amazingly powerful new body. And, eventually, when these local life forms that you and your other buddies have carefully husbanded and helped along manage to get that far up the evolutionary ladder, you find yourself capable of taking over creatures whose brains are complex enough to allow you some form of rudimentary self awareness.

Of course, the primitive protoplasmic matter these creatures use to process data with has no room for the millions of years of experience that make up your own memory and unique individual consciousness, so you leave those behind. And of course this ridiculous carboniferous life form, this completely bizarre matter-form that you’ve somehow created by artificially bending, folding, and spindling the energy wave form into some oddly frozen and contorted, very brief-lived perversion of space/time known as ‘solid matter’, cannot even begin to perceive or appreciate the true semblance of the universe it finds itself in. Of course the life you will live as a corporeal being on this tiny little mudspeck is horribly brief and limited, and while you are there, your self awareness will be constrained and confused and, for the most part, miserably unhappy because somehow it will know everything it has given up to be what it is, if only momentarily, and long for the celestial reaches it has left behind in order to assume a human shell.

Yet, still, there are experiences in this form of existence completely unavailable to a higher energy form, pleasures you could never have imagined as a disembodied cloud of vaguely coherent anti-spin. So you keep going back, over and over again, taking that brief moment of access between the infant-body’s separation from the electromagnetic aura of its mother and the strengthening of its own protective aura to enter into it and make its lifespan your own. You lose almost all of what you are, yet you retain your fierce determination to keep this particular cellular shell functional for as long as you possibly can, to prolong this strange but euphoric experience that you, as a mortal, call ‘life’, and you call that determination ‘your will to live’, or your ‘survival instinct’.

And when your chosen body finally cannot be flogged through another micro-moment of ‘life’, you leave it behind, traveling back upwards from the coarse, base, vile, heavy, clumsy material world into the gleaming upper reaches of the quantum structure, heading back towards the shining white light that is your waiting electron-shell, to once more re-assume the lonely mantle of etheric energy being that, when you are mortal, you sometimes dream about, or even get a brief, fleeting glimpse of, and then, you call it an angel, or a god…

Could be like that.

But that would be kind of depressing.

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.