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.

Anthrax

First, let me be very clear, I am not a lawyer.

This is not a place where I like to play out my morbid and obsessive infatuation with politics.

I have been, for the last three days, posting and absorbing responses about the current anthrax investigation, and my posts have generated a bit of e-mail and some nice hits to this blog, as well as some uncomfortable questions that I have refused to answer in other places and have promised to answer here. This is the post I promised.

I am interested in the subject because a friend of mine was tangentially involved in one of the attacks, like literally hundreds of thousands of other people in Washington D.C., Newsrooms in many locations in Florida, and New York and many other places. (no, his name was not in the news and is not important to this discussion)

I am not a doctor, and have no personal knowledge of the case outside what is available publicly. And no, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, believe in Elvis sightings, Astrology or God.

I also don't believe everything the government tells me about anything.

ANY examination of the publicly available evidence adds up to one thing: "Trust us, Ivins did it, because we said he did it, now go away, nothing to see here." on the Government's side, and literally thousands of well-reasoned questions that have no answers on the other side.

I have only one thing to contribute from personal experience with drugs and the people who do drugs, stretching back for my entire life: It is incredibly easy to self-medicate yourself to death and never actually commit suicide. It is the sudden end of careless or irrational or uneducated self-medicating, and it happens all the fucking time, and it is only through fairly relentless self-control and relentless self-education that people who explore self-medication DON'T end up killing themselves. It is dangerous buisiness and it is fatal a lot of the time.

A bottle of good vodka and ten tylenol can be a ticket to bye-bye very very easily. If you have a dead guy, a bottle to vodka and a bottle of tylenol #3 and no note, there is no way you can call that suicide without knowing a WHOLE lot more, like when the script was written, how much he had been taking regularly and the condition of his liver. You can die from as little as a gram of tylenol (That is between 2 and 6 pills) if you are on a good bender, and that is WITHOUT a compromised liver. Throw in a few cough pills and BANG, you can check out. That is one fifth of Stolie and a SMALL handfull (not even a recreational dose of codeine) of the big bad 3, and it is liver necrosis within twenty hours, sometimes a LOT less.

These are things drug counselors know, and a few of the better cops that work with chronic users, and any good e/r doctor knows, but you will not find in a PDR. You WILL find people in detox with tracks up their arms who will tell you just how easy it is to lose control of a very small habit and end up cold and dusky blue.

So if the government is telling you that a suspect who drinks and has had the FBI breathing down his back for more than 2 years checked out with an overdose of TYLENOL and by the way, there is no autopsy, and did we tell you he was the mastermind behind the most sophisticated bioweapon attack in history that we want you to accept the suicide as proof of guilt about, you aught to be very very skeptical.

Our government lies to us about almost everything, we are believing this exactly why?

Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a shrink, just a guy with a LOT of real world self-induced biochemistry knowledge, a high IQ and a good self-education.

Now, back to socially meaningless ramblings, demented poetry and bad fiction.

Since the heart attack, everything has been so dark for me, for so long. I had a good night tonight, and it has been long time since I could last say that.