It has been a while

It has been a bit more than a year, I think, since I last wrote to this blog. I still get hits, but now very few.

I am going to try to get back to this blog, health permitting, and pending agreement with my ethereal Muse (who is a rank lazy BITCH)and pursuant to gently pressure from my tangible muse (Thanks, Lady Dusk).

I have been writing a lot, most of it is either garbage (which I don't share because it is... well..... garbage) and a lot more is background work (lists of Neofelid names, governmental structures in the 14 worlds, Variken team names, etc, which is basically self-generated reference material, sort of an encyclopedia of the 14 worlds. I am saving most of this work, but I do the majority of it away from the computer, so it is actually ink (graphite, dye, crayon) on paper (menus, the backs of prescription forms, napkins, etc)

I have a moral question, and I really want answers.

Okay, here is the situation. I am asleep in the daytime (as usual) and my doorbell rings. It is, say, noonish. It is a sunday. At my door is a twentysomething woman and her son, who is about 8. They are well dressed, and holding copies of some colorful christian religious propaganda. I am grumpy and annoyed. If the woman had been alone, I would have either slammed the door, or given her one of a number of verbally abusive but clever lines that I keep in the back of my head for such intrusions, but the kid's presence alters the tableau a bit.

What I want to do is ignore the woman completely, kneel down, and say to the child, in a very pleasant voice "Hi. The only difference between Jesus Christ and the Easter Bunny is that your mommy thinks one of them is real." and then stand up, and smile, and hold out my hand for the mother to shake.

Am I justified in doing that?

The Dragon's Sway

Chasing the dragon
whisps of smoke,
dense, fragrant,
slowly rising
curling
blurring the spaces
between me
and the fire I am taming.

She rides the crest of the wave
floating, radiant and alluring
her black hair's curls adrift
like the Dragon's breath
playing soft about her shoulders.
Her almost-smile,
Her closing almond eyes,
Her softly swaying hips,
spellbind me
as I watch the Dragon
seduce her
and She moves in the slow cadence
of it's beating wings.

The Dragon floats between us
tendrils in a mist of mingling spirit
and entwines us
a welcome third
a presence, a binding,
and the black whisps of the Dragon's breath
holds us together
and we are overtaken, we three,
into one.

Tentacle Hentai

Okay, I admit that I am not a normal person, in many ways, one of them sexually. I learned about sex from Gor novels, incredibly poorly informed back-of-the-bus talk and an unbelievably kinky first girlfriend. I can understand, appreciate and practice deviance of many types (a subdivision of BDSM that will remain mercifully unspecified being my personal favorite). My motto is "If sex is a physical thing, you are doing it wrong". I own handcuffs and whips and -=CENSORED=- -=CENSORED=- and a really nice set of -=CENSORED=-s.

All that being said, WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE TENTACLES?????????????????

I watched Urutsukidoji (legend of the overfiend) which was, I believe, the first appearance of the marauding penis-tentacle-beasts. I thought to myself "That's original, really kinky, and a bit much". That was some twenty years ago, or thereabouts.

There are now HUNDREDS of japanese cartoons featuring these bizarre and quite disturbing critters, molesting their ways through hordes of biologically impossible japanese superheroines (who, as a seeming rite of passage into superheroism, must be sexually assaulted by somebody or, more often, some thing. With tentacles where penises should be)

There is even a LIVE-ACTION version, with real, human actresses, and marauding tentacle-penis beasts. Really badly designed marauding tentacle-penis beasts. I mean, they look like something out of an x-rated version of Dr. Who, circa the 1970's. I watched these as comedies (cough cough). All three of them.

What disturbs me most is the possible effect these tremendously violent, bizarre and sick depictions of the sex act will have on an entire generation of young japanese boys (the obvious target demographic). Literally ALL sex acts depicted are violent and nonconsentual.

I am comfortable with my own sexuality, but even as bizarre and troubling as my sexual education was, I was never really exposed to the wholesale degradation of women until I was an adult, had already learned the important difference between fantasy and reality, and had, in real life, respectful and very fulfilling relationships with women. I can hardly imagine how hard it would have been to deal with my own sexuality if it had been formed by japanese cartoons.

I am a devoted liberal, and a free-speech fanatic absolutist.

Tentacles make that somewhat more difficult to justify.

Healing

So, night before last, I had a good night. I got a lot of writing done, I was in relatively little pain, my chest didn't feel tight for the first time since the heart attack, things were good.

So last night, as I started to realize the implications of my impending good health, I had a meltdown.

Fear and I don't have a complex relationship. In fact, we have a fairly simple one. Fear hangs out, a small kitten mewling at me from behind the door, and I ignore it (and occasionally trip over it as I am ignoring it, but I ignore that too). Now, unfortunately this kitten can occasionally (like, once or twice a decade) inflate itself into a giant, angry lion capable of ripping my fucking head right off, eating and digesting it, with a cheshire-cat grin before crapping it out onto my lifeless corpse and then turning back into a kitten, peeing on the remaining mess, and skittering off.

That happened last night.

You take the good with the bad.

I have been, while recuperating from my near-death heart experience, missing enormous chunks of my son's life.

My son really likes me, he likes doing things with me, he likes hanging out with me. He likes doing the things I like doing, and he likes doing them with me. He likes almost everything about me.

Last night, for the first time since he discovered talking, I realized how important I was to him, and it knocked me on my ass. While I have been bitching and moaning about how fucking sick I am and how lousy I feel, he has been relentlessly growing, learning and imitating ME.

I have never been as responsible for something, not even me myself, as I am for him, and last night, I broke. The whole thing. Tears, feelings of complete helplessness before overwhelming responsibility, feelings of complete incompetence.

99.999% of the time, I DEFINE arrogance. Look it up in the dictionary and my sneering face should be staring back at you. I LIKE it that way. I am the smartest person I know. I present, as well as I am able, the image of somebody who, in time of need, could easily kick YOUR ass, rip your heart out of your chest with my bare hands and eat a big chunk of it, cholesterol be damned. I take a perverse pride in having almost no formal education at all, yet still knowing more about any subject I care to than the experts, and making them KNOW it with ease in the first thirty seconds of our meeting. I LIKE it that way, even tho it is almost all a cleverly constructed exaggeration.

Ending up quivering on the bed, crying, hugging a pillow and wishing for nothing more than a big-ass hug from somebody who can make it all better is humiliating to the extreme.

And, as it happens, quite necessary. Writing it down and publishing it where it can be read by close friends and complete strangers alike is humbling, to put it mildly, but also quite necessary.

Hey, world. I am mortal, small, insignificant and terrified. Like everybody else.

And, as it happens, healing. Slowly, perversely and painfully, but healing indeed.

I suppose, in a wierd and weird way both, last night was a good night too.