MOVED!

Please check out my new home:

http://jdfoxpresents.com


 

Contact

Okay, in keeping up with the Russells
:-D -- as if I could ever match my husband's productivity -- :D

I have posted a contact form.

This wasn't particularly easy with my color scheme challenges and tech abilities that sometimes seemed to be either

a) copy/paste and hope it works

b) make a change (and hope it works)

In light of this celebratory occasion, I have created a new g-mail account. I originally was going to use JD Fox, but it was too short. My full name, Johndfox, has already been stolen by some poser who obviously is not John D Fox, or at least not the most important one which is, or should be, me. Same with my writing name, JD Fox, which kinda pisses me off to see jdfox.com taken. etc.

If I ever get famous, I think I will have to exert my new found influence to boot my would be namesake squatters off of what should be cyber reserved for me.

Anyway,
the new e-mail for this is...

Um, I'm not hearing a drum roll, folks..

Okay, that's better.

it is

jdfoxpresents@gmail.com 

 

JD Fox Presents...

Okay.

So I've been kind of negecting things on the blog update. It sometimes gets semi-overwhelming trying to earn money, work on fiction, keep your social profile updated, and research markets.

Sometimes things overlap, but most of the time it seems like there just isn't enough time in the day to do what all needs to be done, let alone what should also be done and what you would like to get done. Only seem like, though, or course, because there really is time enough, or at least there really is as much in your possession as anyone else has of it.

One of things I have done recently is start making videos. In part inspired by Gary video making, and also in part because I want to practice my speaking abilities with thoughts towards open-mike, which has been somewhere in the back of my mind for a long time.

Towards that end, I've put the link to my You Tube channel in a more prominent place on this blog.

There is No Wife

There is no wife, plain and simple.

A comment in the Indy Star that was probably only half-joking asked me how Gary and I decided who the "husband" was and who was the "wife". I had referred to Gary as my husband in my post, which prompted his display of either his ignorance or what he thinks is humor.

Either way, I thought I would spend some time on this topic, which might actually be on the mind of even some otherwise enlightened people. In the above paragraph, I do not use ignorance as a pejorative. Ignorance can be a bridge if we want it to be.

Now how I'm going to explain things is from my view. That should be a given, but sometimes it isn't as much a given as you would expect. I do not represent Gay People but only my gay self. Still, I hope my perspective sheds light.

Usually when people are thinking of being a wife, they are meaning who is the "female". And, as is the mind of the typical American, that usually cashes out as who is the "female" when you have sex, which further cashes out as who is penetrated.

Sex and love reduced to penetration has an unfortunately rich religious history (Paul the apostle's writings, for example) which is probably why it is so maliciously pervasive. But there are a couple other erroneous reductions to roles that likewise contribute to misunderstanding of being gay that I think might make for a better first grasp than jumping headfirst into penises and where they go.

These other reductions typically lump distinctly different concepts together. They surely can be together, as many concepts can be, but it is the failure to mentally understand that they are indeed distinct that bring about ignorance.

The first, gender appearance.

Some persons are more comfortable to wear clothes more appropriate of the opposite gender. Now that is worth an essay in itself as to how "appropriate" gets constructed by a social group. But the point is, it is a commonplace enough notion that at our wedding someone asked us who was going to wear the dress.

I don't own a dress. Gary doesn't own a dress. We wear "men's" clothes as far as I know, as that is what we are comfortable wearing. This does not take a stand for or against men, gay or straight, who wear "women's" clothes. It is just to make the often lost distinction that being gay has nothing to do with the clothes you wear.

You can be gay and wear a dress. You can be gay and wear pants. You can be straight and wear a dress. You can be straight and wear pants.

Gender identity.

Some persons are more comfortable identifying with themselves (their societal "role", which again is another loaded word beyond the scope of this piece) as someone anatomically (by at least physical appearances) of the opposite gender.

This identity is separate from Gender appearance and sexual identity. An anatomical male who knows his identity is a female isn't necessarily attracted to men. He can be, or rather she can be, but the anatomy of the body's matching the brain's gender identification is wholly separate from sexual orientation.

For myself, and Gary's, our bodies anatomically match our gender identification.

The point is that all three distinctions -- sexual orientation, appearance, and anatomical matching -- can be present in any possible combination, and are. But they are always three separate components that have come together to make the whole person, rather than being automatically bundled up together.

So back to the person's remark.

I am a man, comfortable with being physically a man, who loves another man who is comfortable being physically a man, and loves me as a man. Could there be cases of "gay" that don't follow our form of being gay, and perhaps there is a "wife" present?

Sure. As I said all combinations are possible. Though the term "wife" itself is probably as loaded as gender-appropriate clothing.

And besides, I don't think the person making the comment was really trying to find out what my "combination" of identity factors was, but was simply confounding them into so much gay soup.

And as for the sex part of our lives...

Gary and I know where are parts go. And quite frankly, we're the only ones who need to know it.

And if you think you still need to know who puts what into which hole in order to understand what being gay is, I think you're still missing the point of all the words I've written here.

And I don't know what else I can say.

Feed Me

A simple click or two and on the above and you can "frequently updated information" available at your neuron tips. Well, not the above above, which is just a static image (sorry), but icons like it on web pages, typically nesting at the bottom.

It's a "Feed" button and one of the more popular feeds are RSS Feeds. Which I thought stood for Really Something Stupid, so never gave it much further thought than tonight when I was trying to decide if I wanted to put a Windows news gadget on my desktop.

Or rather, having decided, trying to get it in a fashion of news broadcasting that suited my needs. I first tried Google News and learned two things: RSS is actually Really Simple Syndication. Followed by this, I realized I was evidently Really Someone Stupid.

I clicked on the orange icon like I was supposed to do. According to Windows I would then see options for subscribing to the different feeds available. What I saw was:

I read and reread the Google instructions which informed me I could simply put the address in any reader... I clicked on the orange thingy again, hoping I maybe clicked wrong or something and still the above appeared. So I gave up on Google News (thinking to myself how good news would it be anyway) and went to the NY Times.

There after clicking the orange, and another "sub-orange" I actually got something that made some more sense to me, with the words "subscribe to this feed".

News at last and I could have stopped. But I thought science might be more my linking, so I thought I might subscribe to the Science Blog I have listed on my blog; but it would be through my desktop gadget. No such luck, as I discovered Its orange wanted me to use a host of different readers I'd never used before...

Meantime, I decided that aesthetically I didn't like gadgets on my desktop anyway and removed it.

I actually don't have anything on my desktop except the background; even the recyle bin is hidden. I use buttons on my toolbar for frequently used things and prefer a wide open, uncluttered desktop. The gadget idea was half-whim and half-thinking I should do a better job of keeping up with affairs of the world.

But on the other hand, is that even possible? I mean, even if I get the whole RSS thing mastered, and only get the feeds I'm interested in, how does one handle all of it? By handle I mean process, not just skim and sort as if by doing that we are actually turning the feed into nutrition for the brain. Does anyone have time to do anything meaningful with all this fed content?

And what about the content providers? Have you ever wondered who it is on the other end pumping out all that "frequently updated content" for you to ingest?

I mean besides that engineer guy who's written something like one million wikipedia articles.

Or are we all one in the same, just taking information in and regurgitating it back to one another with no  pause -- who has the time -- for digestion?

Wanting Willies

Okay, the title of my blog post here is a bit playful as a lot of fun things could be said about a certain kind of willy, let alone about wanting them. But here I'm meaning the kind of willy that for whatever linquitic reason always travel in packs.

It is the hair-raising kind of willies that can scare the bejesus out of you, which is yet another strange fear phrase we have. I'm not sure if Be is a twin to the Nazareth one or not, nor if Jesus stays when Bejesus leaves, but such things are for another blogpost.

Here, willies is not only a neat term, but also the title of a 1991 movie; an admittedly very cheesy movie and highly predictable if you're paying attention. But so what? It is still a fun one. And I love how it involves a story within a story: a story of boys camping out and trying to "outscare" (and outgross) one another with a scary and/or gross story that can top the previous one told.

Such a scenario isn't just situated in the realm of horror. Nor is it kept even in just the realm of fiction in general. Storytelling itself is the fundamental way we communicate, whether it is the fact-based storytelling of science, the faith-based storytelling of religion or the outright Mr. Roger's neighborhood full of make-believe.

It is an excuse to a boss of why we were late, yet also it is telling our spouse about the day we had, letting a friend know about a nice vacation spot, or letting others know about how you see the world; the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.

We make up stories thoughout the day, some of us spinning truth with a little fiction, others of us with more fiction and a dash of truth, but the overall goal is the same with wanting the listener to share in what you have to tell, whether for a momen, an hour, a day, or a lifetime.

How incredibly wonderful and precious it is for us as humans to have such a device at our disposal. Every story we tell, even if just for a good scare, or to invoke a "gee whiz, that was lame" connects us humans with its common ground language that we are blessed to be able to interpret together.

"Dad, can you tell me a story."
"I always do son, I always do."

More than da Blues

I call it depression, for lack of a better term, when trying to describe it to doctors or anyone else on a short list of those who care either by choice or payment.  

But depression has always seemed too simplistic, too generic, of a term to me to fully capture the insidious miasma of melancholy that frequently pervades me.

For one thing, I usually  associate depression with sadness. And I guess sadness is often somewhere in there, too; but that is when there is a there for it to be. For me, when the darkness is at its worst, I feel gutted out, like there is so little there, a mild wind could scatter the remnants like so much ashes to ashes.

This is when I don't care whether or not I live.

Also depression seems restricted to mental, but the feeling consumes the  whole of my body. Its skin starts seeming claustrophobic tight and it suffocates me. The atmosphere becomes sulfuric and smothering, like I'm an astronaut on some strange planet without my helmet.

This is when I care not to live; not to die, mind you, as there is a difference here. But rather to somehow someway free myself of a mortal coil that chokes.

I usually can battle it by writing. Putting one word in front of the other helps, like putting a chink in a wall of a pit into which you might be able to set your foot or your hand for pulling yourself up towards the remaining light. I don't get writer's block, so if I choose to write I can.

But sometimes the feeling is so intense, so filled with meaninglessness, I can make no such choice. Such has been the case this past month with trying to work on TFK.

It sometimes presents itself in a façade of rationale: You're too tired, you're too busy, you've got too much on your mind.

All true things.

Other times it is more direct: Your writing is too crappy, too explicit, too amateurish, too fucking devoid of value (just like your pathetic life in general, it might add as a bonus taunt).

Which may or may not be true.

But that never is the point, is it? The point is…

Well, that's the buck fifty question, ain't it? If I knew the point I'd join Tony Robinson on the Self-help circuit. Instead, I know that buried deep inside a partial point for me is to keep on writing no matter what external or internal circumstances might bring.

So today I stuck my hand into my chest and pulled TFK back out. I shook off accumulated blood sweat and tears and put another 1,000 words towards completion of whatever it is wanting to be. And those words were probably too explicit to amateurish, and too fucking devoid of value.

But you know what? During the writing, I was able to keep the dark at bay. And the written words are still there.

And I am still here.

Volunteering at Indy Pride

Gary and I volunteered at Indy Pride today, doing a shift at the SGI-USA (a gay-friendly Buddhist organization) booth and also a shift at the Indiana Youth Group (the only state-wide organization focused on supporting LGBTQ youth) booth. We did the last shift there at IYG, so we helped tear down afterwards.

Large events like this pose some challenges for me:

I have some mild face-blindness (Thank you Oliver Sacks for my now having a name for what I thought was just me -- Prosopagnosia)  so people often will recognize me but I will have to embarrassingly ask "Who are you?"

My spatial-directional sense is frequently crappy, so I often get disoriented, having to repeatedly hunt for the same booth.

I dislike crowds and the nature of this event means a large crowd is a good thing.

And lastly I'm not a very social person (which shouldn't be taken for anti-social, which is a completely different thing (I hope)).

But nevertheless, I feel compelled to attend the event, work the event, and otherwise show my pride through action. For pride is not something static, but a way of conduct as a whole. As Aristotle put it, it is the "crown of the virtues" and rightly so. The Christian idea of it being a sin wrongly conflates it with arrogance, when really it is better understood as sister to worth.

For we should all feel a value in ourselves that allows us to be ourselves. As one of the T-shirts at the event proclaimed: Be Who You Are.

A high school boy came over to the IYG booth. He said he was so glad there was an organization like IYG and he's trying to get the word out to his friends about it. For a lot of them are gay, but the school they attend is private and the kids are forced to be closeted. He is trying to start a related group at his school, but he has to be discreet and call it something else, for in the administration's eyes the kids have no fundamental right to be who they are.

Pride is wanting to reclaim ourselves from those who would try to tell us we must be molded into their image. Pride is developing the ability to correctly point out to any number of arrogant fucks that it is they who have no fundamental right to tell us who we are.

Pride in the current age has to be more than: I'm here, I'm queer, get used  to it.

It needs to be: You see, I'm me, and frankly I don't have time for you to get used to it, so you better get out of my way. I am here, I am queer and I am here to stay.

A (possible) Gay Future

I was on You Tube just poking around and trying to find old sitcoms such as What A Dummy (no luck). I ended up watching a funny scene from War at Home (Kenny is Gay clip), which led me to a clip from the show where their son, played by Dean Collins, has taken up being nude around the house.

Also a very funny clip and I wasn't expecting to go all serious and tender and romantic, but, lo and behold, to my right a clip from El cor of the ciutat, a Catalan television series.

I've been impressed with the way Days of Our Lives has been handling their gay story line, as it's very believable and is played well... but wow, it is so empowering to see this much more progressive gay portrayal of love in these scenes from a televsion show across the pond.

When you live in a country like the USA where it seems like many people want to yank us back to slavery and closets, it is such a breath of fresh air to realize there are some countries actually moving forward as if this were the 21st century.

Props to you, TVC!

Catch Up 22

I cracked my skull open
and out I came
all shiny and new
full of sparkling intent.

But I slipped on semantics

and fell headfirst into apathy
while the world busied itself
with its spinning.

I caught the tail end

(or was it a tailwind)
of a life already in progress
leaving me behind.

Exclusion

So I'm wanting to check my Yahoo

e-mail account

and my computer is waiting

for Yahoo to respond.

My computer frequently has to wait

for certain
other sites as well
such as G-mail

and live dot com which sometimes doesn't respond

at all.

I wonder what is going on here

during such times of waiting.

I mean, is my machine,

waving its digital hands trying to get the site's attention?
Or is it more a milquetoast
fallen victim to a binary slight?

Maybe the site is laughing at us

smug in having what we at the moment need,
Its code ablaze with algorithms
designed to keep us out of the equation.

Quest for What

My husband impresses the hell out of me.

A political scientist and social activist, he writes an informed blog and puts the constant in constant reader. He delves deep into issues and you can be assured his opinions are backed by much critical thinking. He doesn't rely on the nonsensical, half-baked crap that passes for analysis on Sean Hannity and the like but instead reads Court Opinions, Legislative Bills, and analyses by accredited experts and actual scholars in the field.
 
To give an example of the kind of reading he does, he is three-fourths through Hannah Arendt's Origin of Totalitarianism, a massive three-volume academic work. If you are unfamiliar with Arendt, imagine a particularly erudite work with a ton of footnotes. Then triple the number of footnotes.

I, on the other hand, have really dropped the academic ball since graduating with distinction in philosophy. Oh, I've thought about different philosophical issues, and those issues are still important to me -- but I haven't made the concentrated effort in my field like he has to advance my knowledge of such things.

There are several reasons for this, none of them good; although probably a good chunk of them rest on the shoulders of depression and feeling overwhelmed, stupid, and drenched in a sense of meaninglessness.

I have an inkling of the kind of questions I am asking, but there is so much nothing out there that it is hard to even know where to begin to find the answers. Compounding and confounding things are the dead-ends you are bound to find. For you won't necessarily know a particular author is full of crap until you understand his or her crap. Or it may be the case that the author is not so much full of crap, but it turns out that the questions he or she is answering is not what you were looking for after all.

In other words, if you really want to "solve" philosophical "problems,"  it requires a lot of time and effort, both of which are in limited supply. So it can be a challenge to even know where to begin, encouraging a constant ever-present real fear of your efforts being "wasted".

But on the other hand, time and effort will be "wasted" just as quickly standing still. So I reckon I should try to pick myself up and travel a little further down the road before I die. So I'm bookmarking sites like PhilPapers and checking out possibly illuminating library books. I'm working on wrapping my mind around what it is I'm trying to answer.

Still, there is that nagging voice screaming in my head "Dead-end, dead end." So I'm also working on responding to it with "but maybe, just maybe, it's not."

And maybe even adding something a little stronger: "And if it is a dead-end, so what?"

Chanting and Cursing

Yesterday I smashed our car.

Oh, it could have been when I was having one my bottled-up, rage-filled moments, which seem to be occurring more frequently of late as I try to cope with all the crap happening to us right now. I'm in the red of stress a lot of the time with my jumble of nerves pulled tight.

Despite the above, I generally do try to be a "defensive" driver; however, I do have my episodes where the other drivers are like vermin and I wish I had a box of D-Con with a car-to-car delivery mechanism.

So the accident could easily have been because of maybe a little too much aggressive driving or driving a little too fast or taking a curve a little too sharp. Or it could have been because of righteously zipping through that just-turned-red-but-should-have-been-yellow-longer light. Or it could have been because of my using our car to show a stupid asshole driver the error of his ways.

But no, it was none of those things.

It was just plain old fashioned stupidity involving myself and a stationary object.

I was maneuvering around the parking lot at Healthnet Southwest Health and Dental Center looking for a space. I parked in what looked like a space, but after getting out I decided it wasn't suitable because of the way my Mazda 5 stuck out. I decided I should go back to the edge of the far lot where it turns gravel and then into grass and some people were making their own spaces as they may in that limbo area.

As I backed out of that non-space, I started to turn my car so I could go in that proposed direction. But there were three cars in line already coming towards me from there. This is significant, because anyone who knows the lot I'm talking about knows the path to it is a two-way but one lane stretch. So I'd have to at the very least wait until the three cars cleared out before I could progress.

So I got the bright idea, and it actually would have been a bright idea if I hadn't also gotten a bout of stupid, to just park in the street. The street's not that far away.

And besides, I'd have to move anyway so those other three cars could clear out.

So I switched my reverse turn so I could be poised to head out into the street instead. I was watching the end car, a pickup, in a nearby row of parked cars, worried I was going to hit it as I backed up due to the tight confines of the lot.

I didn't hit it.

No, instead I hit a great big pole that was also planted at the end of the row. Or rather, not the pole, but the wide cement encasement around the pole, no doubt placed there to protect it from stupid people like me. And when I say hit, I mean HIT with sound effects.

I smashed in the driver's side rear corner of our beautiful car.

Fortunately it is still drivable and the hatch still opens and closes. It still should probably be fixed, but with money being the none that it is right now, drivable means it will have to wait.

Poor car.

So what's that have to do with Chanting and Cursing? I appreciate the indulgence of you reading this far, as I am getting to that. And if you aren't reading this far, to hell with you.

Anyway, so today I went to the Post Office and then to the store. And of course it was raining, which didn't put me in the best of moods to tackle those chores. Usually I deal with my less than best of moods by yelling at the vermin drivers, cursing at them, gesturing at them, and asking rhetorical questions to them, like:

Are you waiting for permission, or what?

You know it's not going to get any greener, don't you?

What the fuck are you waiting for?

I could go on here with commands to the other drivers as well, as I have a whole barrage of on the fly driving chatter, largely peppered with expletives. I sometimes include the weather, the road, and the world in such invectives, being the equal opportunity curser that I am.

But today, starting with my initial getting into the car and starting to curse the weather, I chanted instead: Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Literally in a forced change of wordage: Goddam fucking wea-Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (NMRK).

I chanted NMRK all the way to the post office. I treated the clerk with respect and she treated me likewise. I chanted to the store as well. Oh, I had my moments along the way where I started to let a Fuck or Asshole out, but I caught myself and said NMRK even louder, trying to keep my mind from falling into the negative space that draws me.

I should say right now, I'm not much of a religious person.

There's just too much evil in the world that's been committed in the dogmatic name of God, Ideology or Faith for me to generally have a high opinion of such things. I also can't just believe something as my naturally philosophically critical circuits aren't wired that way. Some religions I can appreciate more than others, but belief itself is more my husband's bailiwick.

Rituals in general seem more geared towards promoting the self-proclaimed elite rather than promoting the humanity of humanity.

I'm Buddhist more by marriage than by firm conviction, though Buddhism is one of the appreciated religions I mentioned above. A lot of the basic ideas and values of it make sense to me; more so than, say, a cross, seventy-two virgins, or circumcision. But the chanting -- praying -- of it is difficult for me take with the seriousness that the truly devout -- like my husband -- do.

Still, I'm of a somewhat pragmatic bent. So chanting in the car is one of the ways I'm trying to improve the way I handle stress, anger, frustration, and life sucking more than I would prefer. For we all know that familiar Einstein quote that is easy to remember but difficult to put into practice:

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insanity.

Cursing sure as shit hasn't done me much good. I'm generally as angry after the curse as before it. So why the hell do I do it? Damned if I know.  But I'm trying like a motherfucker to change that god-awful habit of mine.

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Connie Lawson, Secretary of Hate

My e-mail to former Senator new Secretary of State Connie Lawson:

Dear Secretary of State Connie Lawson,

Your signature on the letter to the BMV asking for the removal of their specialty plate shows severe deficiencies in your ability to serve all Hoosiers. You should resign your new appointment as Secretary of State.

As a citizen, you are free to hate gay youth the way you evidently do. But the state shouldn't give you a paycheck for it.

Regards,
John D Fox
outsidethefox.blogspot.com
[tweeting this blog page under #ProfessionalBigot]

Um, No

Dear Mr. Ryerson,

I read your March 18th Doonesbury commentary with some interest.

Oh, not about Doonesbury. But instead, I focused on the absurdity of your other comments. Having isolated and occasional liberal voices such as Dan Carpenter in a paper otherwise awash with extreme right wing rhetoric is hardly providing a space for a rich conversation. Take for instance Micah Clark's hate speech disguised as "argument" given such prominent ink and real estate in your paper. My heart goes out to the IYG kids who read that moronic nonsense smearing their organization and felt their own hearts deflate.

Here's an exercise you can do that might disabuse you of your delusions of balance. Take a paper on any given day. It doesn't matter what day, really, as your paper is consistent enough. Take a blank page and divide it into two columns. Label one side left and one side right. Start filling up those columns with names of editorial writers you deem Conservative and those you deem Liberal. See what you come up with.

And that's not even giving sway to actual word counts and layouts, which provide emphases of their own.

Don't think that such things go unnoticed.

As Reverend Al Sharpton might say on PoliticsNation, "We got you, Mr. Ryerson."

John D Fox
http://outsidethefox.blogspot.com

Not Green but Red

It's St Patrick's Day. March 17. That's what my calendar tells me.

It also tells me it's 2012. 2012? Really? You could have fooled me.

We have long since passed the millennium, yet my husband Gary and I keep fighting the same battle for equality. I'm sure some people get tired of me writing/ranting/speaking about anti-gay stuff; but try to imagine how tired we get of living it.

The latest attack by the people elected to serve us was on kids. The only gay youth group in Indiana finally got approval for a specialty plate. They were selling well. Then, at the eleventh hour of their session, our state government, having failed to be able to legislate it away, pressured the BMV to pull the plate for reasons that are specious at best.

Gary has written a blog about it, along with the senators involved, which you can link to here. Politics is more his area than mine and he does a better job of that type of explication/exposure/fact-checking.

My educational background is in philosophy and I articulate it via my fiction. I write stories that I hope will entertain as well as subtly stimulate some new thoughts or reconsiderations of old thoughts in at least some of those entertained people.

Subtlety is one of the reasons I prefer fiction. Oh, I do have a definite moral vision in mind when I write as well as a philosophical space from which I am coming. But I try to keep my focus on describing the "real" fiction events in a "this is what happened" way that hopefully leaves it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For I firmly believe it is up to people to decide such things for themselves.

But the state of our state forces me to be more direct.

Lawmakers practice deceit, so I must be an outspoken champion of honesty to counter it.  Hate groups spread lies so I must be an outspoken bringer of truth to expose it. Unholy religious leaders subvert faith to warp kids' minds so I must be an outspoken evangelist of what's sacred.

For how are people free to decide for themselves when the triumvirate above alone crowds their ears and eyes with the white noise of their malevolence?

It makes me so angry I see red. And it makes me want to cut through that red into a greener world. I want my words to rain down on my -- our -- world so full of beautiful potential and leave in its aftermath a vibrant rainbow for anyone -- and everyone -- to see.

Doing the Disconnect

I am disconnected from our network as I type this.

For some reason our broadband gets kind of screwy at times, spontaneously deciding it doesn't have a connection to the Internet. It doesn't last, and is usually just annoying, but sometimes it can play havoc with blogging.

Oh, not my lowbrow kind of blogging where I'm typically just rambling like now. I mean, the seriously intelligent blogging like the kind my husband Gary does. He sources damn near everything, making sure his commentary is as informed as possible.

Which is good, as it makes his posts well-constructed and informative. But it also means as he composes his blog he typically has several tabs open for different articles he is citing and subsequently wants to link. A loss of connection, even for an instant, can cause problems for him as he tries to find all those lost web pages again.

So to help him out, I've been staying off the network as he works, wanting to ensure no sharing bandwidth issues encourage a lost connection.

But how I have done this in the past is put my computer to sleep by closing the lid. For generally when my computer is on it is also connected. I don't "do" anything to the connection, it just is on and when I open my computer lid and log-in it is on. I have a weird compulsion about not disconnecting it.

And yeah, I know you can disconnect it. And yeah, I've traveled to hotels where I have had to connect to new networks. So I'm not quite a Luddite. But I guess it's because I had to put in serial keys and what not to get it initially set up that I get worried -- unfounded sure -- about disconnecting it and finding out that connecting it is a huge hassle.

For I don't like things to be a hassle. Especially with technology. I know what I want to accomplish and hate having to deal with set up and codes and other crap. So I avoided such potential by just shutting the computer down altogether. But today I overcame such stupidity and just chose disconnect.

And it proved to be a painless action (I know this because I did test out reconnection, which was a similarly easy click). But it got me to thinking about how much can be done, really, without being Internet connected; something I sometimes forget.

Decades ago at Purdue, the Internet wasn't on my mind or even an option. Hell, I didn't even have a computer (not counting Atari 2600) until I met Gary. Instead, I had the library for occasional research and a dictionary when I was at home.

The Internet has definitely changed such things, with now my being able to spontaneously call up the most obscure detail if I need it for a story. It is a library on demand. But, as I am prone to do with real libraries, I can't help but wander beyond my original research purpose, until I'm in areas of knowledge  that are not needed for the current writing.

And for both better and worse, being connected now means I can click over whenever I want to check mail, or check Facebook, or check Twitter, or check a hundred and one different things. Growing up and going to school sans computer, the mail came once a day and then, unless the landline phone rang or someone physically knocked at your door, you were pretty much done with communication and there wasn't much else to do but focus on your work.

Oh, I'm not disparaging the current time and no way in hell do I want to back to what really wasn't all that golden of a time. But it does occur to me as I type this and Gary is in the other room working on his blog, that maybe I should periodically just disconnect for a while; not just for Gary's sake but for mine.

Disconnect and focus full-square on the words in my head coming out rather than all those distracting words coming in.

Addiction of Power

So I went to a substance use and recovery class today as part of a HOPWA requirement. I don’t use drugs other than caffeine. Not out of a sense of morality, but one of practicality: I create better art when my mind isn’t any more muddled than it usually is. So I guess I don’t use out of a sense of write rather than right.

Yeah, yeah. Feel free to groan at that…

So why was it a requirement for me if I don’t use? Bureaucracy moves in mysterious ways. But that’s not the point of this piece, anyway, so we can just leave it that I was there. And of course with substance use, the catch phrase power of addiction comes to mind.

But later as I was walking to the library sorting out the characters Randy interacts with in That Fargo Kid – a novel I am revising – I started thinking of the addiction of power. For that’s essentially what the story is about. Through circumstances, Randy finds himself in positions where he wields heavy influence on those characters, each of which have their own particular set of issues and insecurities.

Whether his influence is good or bad as far as the other characters are concerned will be up to the reader. But for the purpose of this mini-essay, it’s enough to say the influence is there. And Randy can’t stop himself from wielding it.

Power corrupts and all that. But it is not quite as simple as such a clichéd slogan makes it out to be. For we need power to accomplish anything in this world. You can surely harm people with your power; but then again, how can you help them if you have no power?

I think part of the “trick” of life is recognizing the power you have at every single moment while simultaneously making a conscious decision about how you use it; a decision to use it for the Good.

Moral might be a better word than conscious in the above, though I dislike using that term since people tend to wrongly equivocate it with religion. What masks as ethics in contemporary culture is far too often just a list of precepts rather than actual thought-out moral belief.

Deliberate would fit, too.

So what is the best use of one’s power? The answer to that is dynamic and wholly dependent on the particular situation. But I am struck by the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she shared her power with the other slayers of the world.

In our rush to use our power we forget that sometimes the greatest power we have is letting others use theirs.

And I wasn’t intending to go political with this piece, but I can’t help but end up there. For right now, we have a Republican congress that is using its power to take away my power as a US citizen; to harm me and my family. Why? Because they can or think they can. Just because they have the power to pass anti-gay legislation doesn’t mean they should.

Hassle

What is hassle? What's it mean to be hassled?

I'm not meaning like when other folks hassle you, although that is an important question with there being so many groups out there determined to do just that. Rather today I'm thinking of it in terms of day-to-day existence and the struggle with my own demons.

Today has been yet another "junk mail" day. I've been waiting on some important news moving at the pace of bureaucracy. Waiting for some time. And I feel like I'm in limbo because it's relevant to what some next actions might or might not be. So I start thinking about life itself being one great hassle and… well, depressing thoughts lead to depressing thoughts.

And such thoughts are kind of about the mail but not really just about the mail. When people think of causes, they like to think of one specific cause as if it works in isolation. But the whole past of existence -- environment and self -- is causal. So I might say, for simplicity sake, I'm depressed about not getting news in the mail, which sounds and is absurd. But the truth is more akin to something like: nothing in the mail scrapes at the scab of depression that frequently wants to bleed.

I start thinking how it seems like death would be hassle free, especially if an effective method is chosen. One, two, gone, and no more hassles.

But on the other hand, death isn't really hassle-free, is it? Because a hassle-free object would require a subject. It's neither hassle-free nor hassle-full, in that regard. In fact, in truth, it's not even a something to be a neither.  It can't even be described as an end because once it occurs there no longer exists the subject that would makes it into an end.

By logic, death is not a way out because at death "way" and "out" are no longer applicable values.

So I put the junk mail by the shredder, turn on the computer, and fight the feeling of it all -- all of it -- being a hassle by writing this.

It helps. Not always a lot. But enough.

And enough, is, well, enough.

Overcoming Can't

So the Draft of Hello Kitty is done. Now what?

Which really isn't a what at all now, but more of a how.

For the plan after I finished Thumbs, the work before Hello Kitty, was that I would revise. Not Thumbs, which needs to ferment some more before such revision. Not Jeff of Yellowstone, which needs revision, but more of the fine-tuning kind. And certainly not yet Hello Kitty which has just been finished. Instead, I had/have my sights on the novel That Fargo Kid, which not only needs revised but in some places fixed.

In fact, I intended for Hello Kitty to be just a short story to end 2011 and act as a buffer between the long work of Th and the expected long work of revising TFK; however, HK turned out to be a fairly long work in itself. Sometimes stories are like that, making me cautious to do another buffering 'short' work before such revision, as it could easily take up another few months or more.

Yesterday towards that end I moved TFK notes, an attempted formal timeline and incomplete reverse outline to OneNote (an amazing program) along with the current draft to the Working file on my computer. Everything is set. So what now?

Well, I should probably: read all 468 pages (134,000 words) of TFK first to get my mind back into that groove; take notes of certain sequences and/or details which I will likely need to change, delete, or expand; kill darlings that don't fit; and generate copy that fixes some things.

However, all of the above are wide-scope strategies that intimidate the daily. When I'm in the midst of writing a novel, my day-to-day goal is straightforward: 1,000 words a day and I feel like I'm making progress on the story.

Here, the envisioned work ahead is more difficult for me to break up into daily chunks that will leave me feeling satisfied with that's day's output. Heck, it is downright overwhelming and the urge to drown in a sea of can't washes over me: The story is broke; it's unfixable; go on to something else, something that will get you back into the bliss of 1,000 words a day.

But in the end I don't want to just write 1,000 words a day. I want those 1,000 words to be good words; the best that I can create. So I owe it to my craft and to my story to make every effort to thwart that nagging can't.

An effort that overcomes can't and takes do all the way to done.

HK Draft Completed

Of short story cum novella:

Hello Kitty, D1, 70,113 words, 213 pages.

Not my longest, probably not my best, and who knows if it will ever see readership. I'd like for it to do so, but that's a whole separate thing from the writing itself.

I'm particularly proud for completing this as my emotional health has been under quite a lot of strain and it seems like melancholy has loomed ever larger. Even though I love to write, I'd inexplicably push off writing in the morning, filled with doubt and depression.

This morning alone I got off to a late start, doing nothing really but being caught up in the stranglehold depression can have, unable to set myself down in front of the keyboard; unable to do much of anything at all except drink coffee.

Pangs of depression and doubt about where I'm going with the story, for sure, but more just ugly inertia preventing me from getting words on the page; preventing me from even starting.

And, as a consequence, I didn't start till long after 8, after I'd imported the five CD's I'd checked out from the library, read Gary's blog, posted to Facebook, pulled in the Sunday paper from outside, had waffles, drank several cups of coffee… quite the procrastinator, all pushing me away from doing the very thing I love; inexplicably pushing me away.

I just start feeling so empty and melancholic it is sometimes hard to even do the things I love. Time and life has been so hard on us, with us selling so much of our once cherished belongings and the continual struggle for mere survival that it is hard to focus on things that are important to me like continual creation. Things that once were important have been taken away, time and time again.

But I managed to break through such depression, not all the way but enough to type, which I'm glad. Not sure if any of my words will be good enough to be up for consumption; I sure as hell hope so. But at least I'm getting it out there from my head and not letting depression fully consume me.

I'm especially proud of getting this story down as my depression has been worse of late and there have been many emotional upheavals and stressful things going on with our lives.

This is at least one bit of constant in a life that is racked with a seemingly never-ending supply of uncertainty.

Today I can say I did at least this much: put some words on a page, as I have done every day since I started work on the story, regardless of my state. And some of those words are actually pretty good; pretty good for me, that is, as pretty good to the outside world is a judgment that can only be rendered by the outside world.

An outside world to which writing, perhaps ironically, keeps me grounded.

Different Kinds of Gay Sex

Oh, I don’t mean like anal or oral or krámpack.

I mean like buying him flowers for Valentine's Day, kissing him good-night, or making him his favorite meal. OR I could mean like being excessively jealous, physically abusive, or pressuring him into doing something he doesn't want to do.

But wait, you might say, those things don't sound like kinds of sex at all, but more like relationship-type things. And you'd be right. And you'd be wrong.

For sex IS about the relationship; that is, a manifestation of it. Sex never comes detached from relationships. Even having "no relationship" sex is still having a relationship in the same vein as choosing not to decide is still making a choice (check out Freewill by Rush).

Yet time and again the opponents of marriage equality and "gayness" in general keep resorting to a bizarre genital checklist in their quasi-analysis:

Penis. Check. Vagina. Check. Ok, good. Penis Check. Ass. Che-wait a minute. Not good, not good. Danger Will Robinson, danger.

with the only quality of a good and proper marriage for them seeming to be if there is a penis-vagina connection, or potential connection going on.

When they talk of "traditional" marriages and "same-sex" marriages, I never hear considerations raised like:

Do they love one another?

Do they treat each other with respect?

Do they care about one another?

Instead it all goes back to an unwavering penis-vagina ideology where black eyes, affairs, or spousal rape are inconsequential in the consideration of the marriage's worth.

I just don’t understand that mindset at all. There is lots of sex in my stories. Writing from a gay perspective, penis-ass is frequently a given. But not all penis-ass arrangements are equal, with the dynamics of the relationship as a whole manifesting in the act.

In my eyes, there is a world of difference between love and rape; between sticking by him and just sticking it in; and between being with him and just being in him. For me, the genitals involved are just that: genitals. Far more important to me than how the sex organs matchup is how the persons attached to the sex organs matchup.

But then again, what the hell do I know about marriage?

Your penis, his ass? Sorry. Not valid. Find a vagina and you can join our club.

 Forget 17 years. Forget stormy and sunny weather. Forget sickness and health and until death do you part.

Just repeat after us: "Traditional marriage is between a [penis] and a [vagina]."

Amen (and Awomen).

Cut

I cut myself today.

On purpose.

Oh, nothing 911 worthy. Heck, pros would sneer. Even my cat would laugh, knowing I didn't do any more damage than he has done to me when he's not in the mood to have his teeth brushed or is pissy about some other cat thing.

But nevertheless I did, making thin red lines on my left arm and testing the blade on my right by hitting it against skin. Testing. That's as good a word as any. Maybe I should not call it cutting at all, the marks being so shallow. More like testing; practicing.

Keeping options open.

There are some things I have control over, such as writing. Sure, I never am able to get the words out quite the way I want; and sometimes they're probably downright crappy. But I can keep on putting words on the page and trying to make them better, and I know the only one who can make them better is me.

But life outside the self is filled with externals where sometimes even when you try the hardest you can imagine,  even when you try to conceive of every possible variable, even when you want with all your heart for things to go a certain way, it plain and simple turns to shit before your very eyes.

It's like watching the glass that's already slipped out of your hands connecting with the floor. Today I didn't have a chance to register the glass was even slipping before the crash. And now there's pieces all around, no glue, and just these all thumbs hands of mine.

But a knife is simple in its demands; it has none. Whatever you want to accomplish is all the same to it. So you can rest at ease knowing whatever you do with it will be at your sole discretion.

A discretion that tries to decide the frequently nebulous demarcation between success and failure in such matters.

Hello Kitty Notes: thinking about word order

I wrote a small scrap thinking about tomorrow's scene and my characters went beyond it onto a philosophical tangent; I don't know if I'll go into that digression in the actual story, but I still found it interesting, particularly in light of Obama's State of the Union and Mitch Daniels' State of the Absurd.

The extraneous scrap I wrote was, in part:

"What if I didn't show up?"

"But you did. If you didn't I might have needed it. But you did and I didn’t; and also I didn't and you did."

"And also? Didn't you just say the same thing again?"

"No, I switched the words around."

"But it was around an and, making them equal."

"You're thinking math. Language doesn't have reciprocal properties. Where the words are placed always matters."

Language never is just the words with static definitions. Where they are placed in a given sentence can affect their meaning. Further, the surrounding sentences, paragraphs, pages can all affect it. Further further the whole baggage of environment brought to the reading continues to revise the work long after the writer is done.

I currently hear a lot of dangerous rhetoric in politics, where I have to wonder: are they fully cognizant of their use and being wickedly crafty or are they just being stupidly irresponsible?

The solution for us as citizens is the same either way: we need to be fully engaged and critically thinking consumers of the plethora of information being fed to us, regardless of the source.

For a blog that does an excellent job of that, check out The Russell Report.

Hello Kitty (a novella) Thoughts

From my daily writing log:

This story seems to be shaping up as one of my most explicitly moral stories, though I don't know if anyone will see it like that . But that's how I'm intending it. The power of love, the power of virtue, to win in the end.

I just use boys and boysex to tell it :-)

The story in question is a short story (now more a novella) that I would describe as a boy-meets-boy supernatuaral horror romance. Since it is a romance, sex and potential for having sex (and not having sex) are there. However, having and not having sex are not the morality I am referencing.

Sex in itself has no morality in my eyes; rather the morality is that of how sex plays out between the persons involved: is it an equal share of power, of respect, of giving/taking for example.

It amazes me to no end that my country seems to get all up in arms over things of a sexual nature, even allowing words to describe the act to be considered vulgar, such as fuck and suck and jackoff, while we have a vast societal tolerance for words like KILL and HURT and HATE.

Are we so afraid of our bodies that we find maiming each other much more agreeable than loving each other?

The AFA, FOF and other hate groups seem to think so with their constant anti-gay rhetoric. But a boy loving another boy isn't immoral. What is immoral is man or boy's inhumanity to man or boy. This inhumanity can involve sex but it is not sex itself.

The world would be better off with more people reaching for condoms rather than guns and using whole hands full of tenderness rather than just a pointed finger.

A Right to (my) Work

"Are you working?"

I get asked that a lot, whether in the form of that specific question or one of its many variations. Sometimes the wording is roundabout: "What are you up to?" Sometimes it is more blunt: "Do you have a job yet?"

However it is asked, I feel a sense of American shame flowing from my philosophy-with-distinction-graduate head down to my supporting-Homo-Erectus-life-for-43-years feet. My eyes go to the floor, forced down by my overwhelming sense of failure. I have no choice but to answer; the question compels me to answer.

And being indoctrinated as I am in good capitalist citizen dogma, I answer it in the only way that I know how: I lie about it.

"Not at this time" is my most frequent lie. And it is a lie.

For I am working all the time.

I am obsessive-compulsive about my work; that is, about my art. I usually write seven days a week and days that I don't I'm a wreck: there are just too many damn stories pushing against my skull for me to move a day closer to death without creating some pages.

Gary has severe health problems, so I've taken on the bulk of our household responsibilities. I don't begrudge this, as that's what spouses do for one another. Oh, wait, our government doesn't think of us as spouses, so I guess I should say instead that that's what people in loving relationships do for one another. I spend a goodly chunk of time working on daily to-do's.

My own health isn't great. It's better than Gary's, but it still frustrates me, there being so much in life I want to accomplish before I fertilize the ground. I work hard to do what I can when I can. If idle hands are the Devil's workshop, then my hands are the Divine's playground.

But none of the above matters with regard to the holy are you working question. No one cares about my art, my health, or my life.

What the askers really want to know is how well I am circulating In God We Trust paper.

"Not very well right now," I'd have to say to that question, and that wouldn't be a lie. "But I'm working on it," I could add and it still wouldn't be a lie, because I work all the time. But it is only a partial truth, because I know my work won't be considered real work until it makes money.

Until then, I'm just a lazy, no-account bum who does nothing and amounts to nothing.

Whatever Weather

I have a problem with weather.

Oh, I don't mean the real weather. Sometimes I wish a day were nicer, or less gloomy, or less rainy, but in general such wishes are just passing thoughts that do not take up huge amounts of mental fretting.

So little mind is given that I tend to think in simplistic weather terms such as wet, cold, hot, dry, and so on. I don't dwell on shapes of clouds or hues of sunlight or ripples of water and find extended ruminations on such things boring.

This little mind carries over into my writing where I get much more excited about a dialogue between two people than how the sun warmed their skin or how the rain pattered outside their house or how the wind made eerie noises. I mean, ho hum. The sun warms, rain splatters, and wind makes noises. I don't need nor want multiple pages of a national weather broadcast to litter my fiction.

However, I am so disinterested in weather and other ubiquitous but boring to me elements of setting, I sometimes forget to include them at all. I get caught up in the back and forth words and character interaction which is what I'm most passionate about, and most skilled at, and forget details like weather, time of day, and other externals.

Not only can this manifest as poor writing which I'm trying to self-correct, it can also manifest as causing problems with the story itself. For instance, today I had a scene where a character thought back to when he saw something but wasn't sure if it were a trick of the light. It occurred to me when I was remembering it for him:  Trick of sunlight?  Of moonlight? Dusk? What kind of light?

The protagonist  had dropped a kid off home from school, left, then came back some time later where they had a conversation that I was excited about writing (as I said I get about such things). But I had only placed them in this vague and weather-less sometime later temporal space as I typed away their much more interesting to me back and forth exchange.

One of my writing goals is to improve this lacking. I will never be the kind of writer comfortable with long dissertations of atmosphere, but at the same time I don't want my characters to exist as talking heads in dimensionless space.

I don't need a hundred and one words for snow, but I probably should do a better job of solidifying in my work whether or not there is at least the one.

Resolving to be Specific

It's that time of year again when you're supposed to lie to yourself about how perfect you are going to be this year and then forget about it until this year is about to become last year. Then it's By golly, this year is going to be the year for the new and improved me…

For better or worse, though, there is no real new me, just a continuing me, and as for improvement, that word quickly gets dicey. The word improvement implies a comparison of sorts; that is, it attaches itself to something specific. What is the problem with that? It's not so much a problem as this: attached to a specific means necessarily not being attached, or not as attached to some other specific.

 A less awkward (or maybe not) way of saying it might be: an action requires specificity at the detriment of some other specificity.

For example, time spent on Xtube is time not spent on writing (or other endeavors) and time spent on writing is time not spent on Xtube (or other endeavors).

Which time usage is an improvement? It depends… but whatever the decision is, it can only manifest itself in terms of specificity. This requirement is what makes resolutions on the whole often meaningless. I know this, but still I find myself uttering inane proclamations like:

I'm going to exercise more. I'm going to read more. I'm going to do a better job at researching markets to send my stories.

Why are these inane? Because more by itself has no specificity and fails in the same way the word improvement fails.

Resolving to write a Great American novel won't get you any closer to doing so. Resolving to write one page ever day from 7am-8am might still not get you there, but it will get you a lot closer. And that's essentially what I do with my writing, being fairly good at only having the novel as a whole in the back of my mind, while the front of my mind works on getting a 1,000 word a day out seven days a week.

But I need to carry that level of specificity over to other tasks that I do, like reading. Too often I make grandiose goals like I'm going to read Character of Consciousness this week only to find at the end of the week that reading the specific pages somehow got sidestepped.

So my chief resolution for 2012 is to be specific in my resolving and resolving to be specific.