The Gualala Show

Here's the piece as it appeared in the show. Ain't nothing like the real thing, though. You see this full size and it makes you want to sacrifice a goat to it. A thousand bucks and it's yours.

I know, I know. I've been ignoring the blog the last week or so. Sorry about that. I've been going through it a bit -- not the kind of mood where the missus cries and worries that I might be arrested, just the kind where I'm pissy and useless. It happens some times.

Part of that has been my nervousness and doubts about participating in this art show up at Gualala. It's my very first outing into one of these things and while I'm not sure where the Gualala Art Center fits into the academy's hierarchy it's definitely a couple of notches up from a pizza place or a realtor's office. What I'm saying is real artists, real art, real display space.

It had me nervous, especially given my stated opinions on the fine art world.

Also, I was part of the group responsible for the food and had no idea what was expected of me and what I could count on from other people. That had me nervous as well.

Then there's the old social anxiety. I'm trying to tackle this one and so was looking forward to using the event as a therapeutic tool as much as anything else -- but I was going to be dealing with a bunch of people I don't know.

And I was spending a ton of money in preparation for this and I really doubt that I'm going to sell my piece and even if I do I'll just be making a couple of hundred bucks and what the hell is going on, oh christ the earth is spiraling into the sun...

... and so on. It is my way.

And here I am standing next to it. It really happened! Really! The observant will notice that since the print is three by four feet and I'm around six-three, that means that my legs are two feet long. Which disturbs me on some level.

The good news was that my family rallied around me. My sister Charity, bless her heart, rented a wonderful, luxurious house for us up in Gualala. My dad Verle came along, and his wife Lisa (we're too close in age to make me feel comfortable calling her my step-mom, same as with me and the missus's daughters) and of course the young ladies Ava and Una.

I can't tell you how much this helped. Being around them socially puts me into a familiar and functional mindset and their pride and support really made me feel good.

So I contacted the other food people, made a shitload of sandwiches (artisanal ham, aged Gouda, and pickle with mustard, sopprasetta, hot coppa, and a nice nasty provolone with vinaigrette, fresh mozzarella with heirloom tomatoes and basil, dressed with a lot of sweet balsamic vinaigrette to make up for the weak out-of-season tomatoes), threw a fistful of Jack Vance novels (perfect for insomnia reading) into my knapsack, and kissed the missus goodbye for the weekend.

Since Lisa was taking the pictures we have no record of her, but here's the rest of my family. From left to right, Ava, Charity, Una, and Verle. You'll have to excuse the expression on my dad's face -- he was overcome by his love for the sea.

The preparations for the show went well -- the people getting the food ready to roll worked well and neatly together and the overall contributions were enough to provide an impressive spread.

By keeping busy I was able to keep my jitters under control. The beauty of the area helped a lot -- nothing like trees to calm me down. And that's how I handled the show. I'd go inside, cruise around, gulp some beer, talk to anyone who made eye contact, then after the conversation I'd go out and walk around, check in with the family, breathe deeply, and return to the fray.

That's how you do it when you're a grownup, right?

It was nice -- not my idea of a good time but not painful.

As for the show itself, it looked good. Really good. It struck me that arranging a collection of extremely diverse art like that is the same kind of exercise of taste as putting together a good mix tape, and in this case the results were very pleasing -- exhilarating jumps and bumps with no jarring transitions.

It's funny. I'm so used to thinking about this stuff from the creative perspective that it was kind of a numb shock to see people looking at it as, well. Art. It left me with a sense of vague dreamlike unreality.

There were all kinds of crazy visual details at the beach. I've got to take photography next semester -- and I think I might try and tease Lisa into taking her photography a bit more seriously. Honestly, throw a little Photoshop on this and you've got a great print right here.

That night we went back to the house. A little wine mixed nicely with my back pills and a hot tub to render me more physically comfortable than I'd been in some time.

And the company was great. Honestly, if you were to record three or four hours of my family hanging out you'd be able to put together a solid forty-two minute show for Comedy Central. They're smart, funny people with a combination of edge and heart that just makes me feel good. I'm so grateful to spend time with them.

Then two things happened the next day that gave me a bit of a slow-burn realization. We were checking out some nifty dinosaur sculptures at a nursery-cum-giftshop, and when I complimented them to the woman running the place I mentioned that I'd done some paleo art. She asked for websites, talked to me about her own background -- a nice little conversation that left me feeling as though I were on the inside.

And then after our delightful excursion to the beach (full of top-notch crabby kid drama; the ladies can sulk like nobody's business when they throw themselves into it, so the inevitable happy ending makes for a good story arc) we went to fetch the cooler I'd borrowed from Dad and Lisa from the art center. While we were there, I asked Lisa to take a picture of me next to the print for the blog.

And when I was looking at the picture on the camera's monitor it hit me. The thing that had been hanging over me the whole time, the reason I had put myself out with no real expectation of selling the work and no real profit even if it did sell.

There I was, in a real gallery, standing next to something I'd done myself. There was my work next to the work of my instructors and TAs and the ringer students, the real artists. And it belonged there. And I belonged there.

It was kind of like a graduation, a bar mitzvah, a wedding. Or like the first check I ever got for my writing. I was different.

I've been faking it out of a combination of intellectual knowledge and bravado. Now I feel like an artist. Doesn't matter if I ever achieve any success. I now know that my work is at that level. I have that. It can't be taken away from me.

It feels good.

Just An Imaginary Landscape

If I posted today it would be grumpy. So here's today's quick sketch with a touch of added color. These are starting to shape up -- if I keep it up in a few months I might be able to contemplate doing some kind of cartooning.

Back To The Writing, Oafboy

You know, this whole post-the-sketches thing is cramping my style -- but it's a style that needs to be cramped.

So I've been arting my brains out lately -- I just delivered my submission for the Gualala show last night (the reception is five to seven this Saturday, love to see you there) -- and I am so ready to get back to some serious writing.

Sort of.

I dunno. I've been feeling a bit... Well, I've been thinking. And you know that never turns out well.

During a brief rest period I recently leafed through the first two volumes of the Clarion anthology and had an odd reaction. This anthology came out of the Clarion workshop, a legendary writer's writer's workshop devoted to fantastic fiction. A teacher of mine once said that in terms of producing published writers it was the most successful workshop ever conducted. Sure looks that way to me.

I tried to get into Clarion a couple of years back and totally stepped on my dick in the application process. I sent 'em material with almost no fantastic elements in it and at the last minute I reformatted the manuscript without checking the page count. I did get a nice "very strong writing, we encourage you to persist" note but I didn't get in. And now that my back's worse, the six weeks that Clarion lasts may well be beyond my physical capacity.

Anyway, while the fiction in the anthologies didn't particularly thrill me I found myself getting all het up by the essays written by the instructors and I said to myself, "Time to step up the game, oafboy. You need to take your writing to the next level." For some reason this thought didn't have its usual crippling effect. I think it's because I was so fucking busy with art stuff that I didn't have time for extraneous self-torture.

It was just a while after that I ran across a post on Eat Our Brains (see the blogroll in the sidebar) and read a post announcing that another writer's workshop was taking applications. It's called Viable Paradise, it was to some extent inspired by Clarion, and it's only a week long. I can handle a week, right?

So now I'm trying to gear up to apply. I want to do it right but I don't want to have my heart set on it. I want to get it out of the way, get on with my life, and if it happens, good.

The way it works is that you submit with one or two stories, total of about 8,000 words. That's not much for me -- I'm a long-winded bastard if nothing else. The stories or novel-selection that you submit will be what gets workshopped over the course of the next week.

So there's something to think about. I need something that's good enough to get me in -- but not so good that it won't benefit from the workshopping. I have such a story. It's been published in Monday Night Magazine (again, see sidebar) but it's one that frustrates me because it has some of my best work in it and yet it fails. And I think the problem is that it needs to be more science-fictiony.

It's about 5,500 words long. I need another story to cap off the submission and I have nothing in that length.

Since the main piece is one that skates along in-between mainstream fiction and SF, I want something that's straight-up balls-out genre work, the kind of thing that would drive the people in my writer's group nuts. Since the other story is pretty gentle in nature, I want some action. Thusly, I ponder.

And I also have another story I wanna write. I've figured out a way into the racoon story, the one that made me give up on my bar series. But that's going to be much too long for the submission, so that gets done second.

Finally, it's about time to get back into the novel. I'm so anxious to start cutting into it that I feel like I've gotta pee. (Huh -- I do have to pee.) I'm going to hear back from another reader next Wednesday but so far all the reports have been encouraging.

One step at a time, though. First comes the short story. Since I had such a blast liveblogging the Psittacosaurus piece, maybe I'll do something similar with the story,

We'll see, won't we?

Crit List 6: MonsterQuest Part Two -- Of Course They Get On My Nerves...

Again, not the most polished work I've done -- but the art isn't the goal. The point of this is to get myself in the habit of sketching daily. Once the habit is in place I'll start worrying about quality.

Before I go much further with this I should make one thing clear -- my idea of evidence has very little to do with eyewitnesses. The human eye and brain are not a recording system.

People are terrible witnesses. People frequently have experiences that did not actually happen. That doesn't mean they're crazy or lying -- it means they're human. Gaps and fill-ins are part of our sensorium. Add that to the fact that there are crazy people and liars in the world and you've got a situation where it's going to take a lot more than a witness to convince me of the absolute existence of anything.

I'm going to require verified physical evidence to believe in anything.

So here's what I don't like about MonsterQuest.

The problem is that the show plays to the gullibility of the public. For every moment when they show an expert debunking a piece of evidence, they balance it with a voiceover commentary saying, "While this may be unlikely, there is still a possibility that an unspeakable horror may be lurking in the depths, waiting for your children."

In an absolute sense, yeah, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- but to keep hammering at possibilities when probabilities have been fairly clearly demonstrated is intellectual dishonesty.

Yes, these things may not be absolutely impossible in many cases -- but most of the time they are so unlikely that you may as well make similar claims about Pikachu and the Tooth Fairy. 'Just barely possible,' isn't 'maybe,' it's 'almost certainly bullshit.' This is a very important distinction that a lot of people aren't good at making.

I know this is a television program and I know that it is entertainment. That doesn't absolve the makers of their responsibility for the show's effects on society. And right now our society is hurting for rigorous thought.

For instance, take the giant trout report I mentioned in the first part of this piece. They had one report from one person of something very much out of the ordinary and they just put the pedal to the metal and went for the investigation without once indicating that the guy in question was in all likelihood crazy or a liar -- and when they found no evidence whatsoever to support his claims they simply shrugged and said, "The mysterious depths."

Now maybe the other reports ended up on the cutting room floor. Maybe the statement that, "In the end, there is no reason to believe a goddamned thing this daffy old coot says," was likewise excised.

But in that case, the editors are responsible.

The show presents almost every single claim on exactly the same level. And in most cases -- the episode dealing with the monsters generated by bird and insect flight as viewed through cameras being a rare exception -- that level is, "Okay, regardless of the evidence this could be true. Sure, the evidence makes it seem unlikely -- but it could be true! It could! Maybe."

Look. This is dishonest. It preys on the typical person's lack of practice and training in critical thought. When I mentioned in the first part the pleasure of the feeling that kind of thinking engenders, it's coming from someone who's worked hard to look at exactly these kinds of phenomena from a critical stance, who has made a point of researching and double-checking, and thinking really, really hard.

Someone who doesn't have that background isn't necessarily going to recognize the fact that they're being fed bullshit.

I mentioned that there seems to be missing information in some of these episodes; in some cases, the missing information is of real interest. The episode dealing with giant squid in the Sea of Cortez featured an early interview with a scientist who claimed a theoretical basis for believing in such squid.

His on-camera statement was so vague and meaningless that I dismissed it out of hand. It was a description of a hypothetical situation, not an analysis of evidence.

But the man was right -- and I want to know what thought processes led him to the correct conclusion. MonsterQuest didn't give those to me. And as a result I am petulant.

Or in the giant spider episode -- they never talked about the physical reasons why spiders are small. (Not to go into it, but they have to do mainly with respiration.) This is crucial to understanding just how nonsensical these claims are -- and they were just skipped. Maybe this was done out of ignorance. If so, that doesn't speak well for the researchers and writers.

Something else happened in that episode that really bothered me -- when one of the locals prepared some spiders for the show's representatives to eat, the soundtrack featured horror movie music.

The man is making lunch for people he hardly knows and they give him horror music? That was as good an example of unconscious racism as you're likely to run across -- "Why this gentleman's idea of lunch is absolutely terrifying and we feel obliged to use it as a means of inspiring fear." Creepy spider thrills were allowed to totally overwhelm the most fundamental levels of respect and courtesy. The guy was being nice and this is how they treat him?

Imagine if Julia Child invited you for lunch, made Boeuf Bourguignon, and you filmed and broadcast it using the Psycho theme as background music. It would be an insult. I hope the example clarifies my meaning...

Mixing images and information from dubious and inappropriate sources is also an issue. For instance, in the episode involving the search for the remains of the Loch Ness Monster, they included an image that came from The Weekly World News, the trash paper beloved of us olde-thymey punkes.

Or in the episode dealing with a Canadian lake monster, early in the show they cut repeatedly to illustrations of sea monsters by Conrad Gessner. Wrong continent, wrong body of water, wrong century -- this was done purely for decorative effect. And thus, was bullshit.

Then there's the habit of taking quotes from experts out of context early in the show to make it sound as though the experts support the monster claims. Later in in the show, when we hear what the expert really said, it turns out that the opposite is the case.

And dramatizing stories that are later shown to be false is a similar annoyance -- again, in the Canadian lake monster episode, they report a story about a giant eel attacking mounties but later in the show admit that the mounties had no record of the story.

Perhaps it seems a bit mean-spirited of me to complain about the bullshit levels of a show called MonsterQuest, but again, our culture is seriously lacking in critical thought.

And the fact is that a lot of the ads on the show seem to be aimed at the gullible, which seems a bit low. One ad in particular was for hair dye for men -- and it implied a direct connection between a man's use of the product and his ability to put his son through college. This is an ad for male hair dye, people -- and whoever came up with that ad should be ashamed of themselves. That kind of sucker bait just ain't right.

I love the show; I watch the show; I will watch the show. But to write about it without pointing out what strikes me as a genuine moral failing would be irresponsible. I know it seems like a minor issue -- but that's because the problem is so widespread and so serious that an individual example like this seems like a spit in the ocean.

That said, when are they gonna do something on the Nandi Bear or the giant salamanders of the Trinity Alps or the idea that there are giant sloths surviving in the Amazon Basin or...

Anyway, I'll be watching.

Crit List 6: MonsterQuest, Part One -- Why I Love MonsterQuest

Okay, this sucks. I know it, you know it, let's get over it and move on.

See, when I was working on that Psittacosaurus piece it was pretty clear to me that if my drawing skills were in better shape I would have done a better piece of work. I need to set pen and pencil together on a regular basis instead of just hauling them out when I don't have any other choice.

I also draw too slowly, especially if I'm going to be doing any cartooning. So I'm going to try and do a page of sketching or drawing each day. I'm posting it not for your delight and not to prove what a great artist I am but rather as part of a ritual. I need to make a habit of drawing the way I've made a habit of writing. Discipline, he said. Iron discipline.

I haven't been watching a lot of TV lately -- just cooking shows while I eat and the stuff like Lost that I watch in order to spend time with the missus. (She's one of those who regards watching the tube together as 'us time,' and I try to accommodate her to a degree. We are, as I've said, a mixed marriage.)

But there is a show that I adore. It's called MonsterQuest and it's on the History Channel. Forteanna is one of the cultures with which I affiliate myself. I've been fascinated by aberrant phenomena since childhood.

I started off assuming that scientific examination would eventually confirm things like psychic powers and interplanetary presences on Earth; I grew to believe that as unlikely as any one event might be all it would take would be one crack in conventional reality to change everything.

Now I think that while there are a few openings for surprises in the world they will all fit comfortably into a materialistic worldview. The more I study science, history, and so on, the more I believe that there is an understandable and consistent reality.

But I still love this stuff. As a fantasist, it's great fodder for my imagination. And one of the legitimate openings for real surprises is the natural world -- there are a lot of animals out there that haven't been found or recognized by the mainstream of European-derived culture.

That's where MonsterQuest comes in. The basic idea behind the show is that they find some report of a spooky critter and then fund an investigation. They bring in a mix of regular guys and gals, cryptozoologists, and skeptical scientists and animal experts, and let them have at it.

This, to my mind, is totally sweet. I am so a member of the target audience.

The most exciting thing about the show is that here and there they come up with something genuinely interesting that seems solid. For instance, footage of a giant squid in the Sea of Cortez. (Since that episode I've felt that any human endeavor that does not involve dropping cameras into the Sea of Cortez is a waste.) Or the giant pike that was reconstructed from a jawbone found in a stream. Or the chupacabra corpse which suggested that there might be a sort of super-mange responsible for a lot of so-called chupacabra activity.

I also love the way they allow the skeptics and nay-sayers to state their case without real argument. "No, it's not giant bear. It isn't even a big bear." "That's a housecat, dude." "It's just a dog." "Uh, huh, looks like a monster but see? Just a couple of otters."

A particularly fine example of this was when they investigated strange flying creatures that were showing up on film and in videos and demonstrated that they were being generated by the cameras themselves. They covered a wide range of speculation, then zoomed in and debunked.

To see evidence gathered and analyzed by people whose expertise seems entirely legitimate is wonderful. To see people who think they have an idea of how to investigate these reports given the funding they need to make a reasonable attempt is great.

The investigations are almost always of interest. By showing the methodologies used in some detail they add a nice dose of education and rational thought to the mix, something we could use a little more of in this country.

And the mix of personalities they get up on the screen is always entertaining. You can't always tell the skeptics from the believers on sight -- eccentrics do not project predictably.

(I use eccentric in a respectful and affectionate sense here -- any really bright and capable person is likely to be eccentric because normal people are inferior. We can talk about this later, if we must.)

And the need for new material puts the producer in the position of accepting some pretty fucking ludicrous claims as the basis for individual episodes. For instance, at one point they had some old fisherman come in with a claim that he'd seen a fourteen-foot brown trout. The show's response was not to laugh openly at his obvious lie; it was to talk about what a fierce predator the brown trout was and then make a fucking two-foot trout lure with a camera in it.

Brilliant. Jut brilliant. This is a mixed blessing, admittedly, and I'll be complaining about this as well as praising it, but it adds to the entertainment value.

They also have a knack for pulling some surprising concepts into the mix. Just when I start groaning, "Jesus, not another fucking bigfoot story," they'll throw in references to Stalin's half-ape army to spice things up. Honestly, the researchers and writers for the show deserve some real credit for this.

And the actual scripting is nowhere near as idiotic as that in most nature shows. It's not thrilling prose but most of the time it fails to offend, which is all I ask for.

There's a particular spooky feeling I enjoy. If I read a whole series of reports of strange events, while my rational mind is busy debunking and explaining, my primitive superstitious mind is building up a sort of static charge -- "Some of this must be true!" The resulting cognitive dissonance causes me delight; MonsterQuest is crack for that, kinda like freebasing Fort.

Like I said, this is my idea of good casual entertainment. But do I have complaints? Of course I have complaints. It is the way of my people. Tune in next time for the pissing and moaning...

Deadline Fever

Once again, the hot new blog is Art Evolved -- come for the ceratopsians, stay for the art.

Well, I'm just about crawling out of my skin. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines, and as usual it's only the immediate threat of blowing them that gets me working effectively.

There were the deadlines for Art Evolved. I did two drawings for the Ceratopsians Gallery, as shown in the logo above. Have I mentioned Art Evolved?

Art Evolved.

There's also the deadlines for the Thinking Big show, my initial foray into the world of fine art. I just got my canvas in to be framed today and I'm going to be sliding in just under the wire on that one.

My class assignments? Three prints and the initial version of my promotional packet for the Bonelands series of prints have been done just in the nick of time.

I'll be able to start breathing and get back to writing soon. Sorry to have been off the blog for the last couple of days.

I also owe an apology to M.L. Heath -- I forgot to mention his poetry reading at the LitPunk show. I'm correcting that post but still... Sorry, man. My bad.

The Big Secret Revealed and What I Learned At The Makeout Room

Okay, all the hints and teasing that I've done over the past while? I can now tell you what it's all about. There's a new group blog in town and it's the first blog entirely dedicated to paleontological reconstruction. Not that there haven't been blogs involving the subject, but this is gonna be something different and spectacular.

So go on -- take a look at Art Evolved. It's got dinosaurs, for pete's sake. Everyone likes to look at pictures of dinosaurs!

So yesterday I did something completely out of character. I went to a reading in San Francisco. It was called LitPunk and it happened at the Makeout Room. The actual reading was a hell of a lot of fun. Some people whose work I really admire showed up and I wasn't expecting them at all, and everyone put on a real show.

Now I'm half an inch away from being a shut-in. But in this case I'd been strongly encouraged to go by John Shirley, a writer whose work I have long admired. I mentioned this in a post from a few days ago. And since I'd had such a good time at the reading in which he participated on Tuesday (when I got home from that I was in a better mood than I'd been in for weeks) I wasn't at all reluctant to make an appearance.

But the actual experience was a mixed bag for me. To start off with, when I walked in they were playing the Joey Ramone version of It's A Wonderful World. I've told you the Ramones are my favorite band right? I recently watched the Ramones documentary End Of The Century and the combination of Joey's sincere delivery and my consciousness of his sad history started the evening off with shot of bittersweet melancholy. What can I say -- I'm a big old sentimental slob.

John was in a very different state than he'd been in at Moe's. Rather than the somewhat retiring, almost shy persona he'd displayed in Berkeley, here he was high-energy, high-dominance, and obviously having a blast. Cool!

I wandered around looking for one of the readers, this guy named M.L. Heath, who'd sent me an email about the show. I wanted to give him a copy of Swill, and while asking after him, I found two of the other readers and gave them copies. I found out later that they were Charles Gatewood and Johnny Strike of Crime. I handed Charles fuckin' Gatewood a magazine with my photographs on the cover... Oh well.

I enjoyed the hell out of the performances; honestly, I haven't been exposed to enough of this kind of thing to have any critical stance. I just stood back and enjoyed.

First off the bat was the above-mentioned Mr. Heath, whose poetry was personal, sexual, and intense. His high-pressure delivery set the tone for the evening -- from the moment he started speaking all attention was fixed on the stage.

There was Rain Graves, who Shirley described as a cross between Lovecraft and Bukowski. Let's just say she didn't disappoint -- there was much cringeworthy nervous laughter.

Gatewood recited a somewhat self-satisfied piece of quasi-pornographic memoir that made me feel a bit better about my own creeping geezerhood. Blag Dahlia of the Dwarves did a cute schtick about groupies, dropping his manuscript at his feet one page at a time in fine punk style.

A woman named Charlie Jane Anders (who I was later informed might not have matching x chromosomes) did a pair of fucking hilarious bits, with a 'end of the web' recitation that pretty much said it all.

Rudy Rucker showed up, much to my surprise, and did a reading of his letters from Burroughs to Ginsburg from his e-zine Flurb. His dry and droll delivery was note-perfect and made me oddly conscious of the continuity of a certain level of subculture, how beat and punk are just drum fills in an ongoing cultural rhythm that's been playing since the first bitter hipster chimps stepped out of the fire circle to exchange knowing sneers.

Unfortunately as he exited the stage and passed by me I shoved a copy of Swill at him in what I immediately thought was a rude and peremptory fashion. I was afraid I wouldn't get another chance to pass it on to him. Of course he's the one at the show I least wanted to offend... Oh, well. Hopefully it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. (I'd send him an apologetic email if I knew for sure I'd offended -- but I'd look like a bit of an ass if I apologized without having transgressed. Social anxiety is a bitch. I wish I'd been raised right, you know?)

Shirley's performance was of the story he gave us for Swill and I've got to say that as much as I enjoyed reading it, it really is meant to be heard live. Caricatured voices and physical comedy made this into a cartoon on stage. It was great.

And he did a plug for Swill, which was nifty. Later, he came up to me and said, "You could probably get Blag Dahlia and Johnny Strike to contribute to Swill."

"Hey, everyone's free to submit," I said.

He gave me a look of disgust. "No, you go ask them." Which for some reason gave me a warm feeling.

Later, I was able to nail Blag Dahlia but wasn't able to get through the crowd to access Johnny Strike. Hey, Johnny -- if you want, submit something to Swill! When Rob's taking submissions again, that is.

And Johnny Strike finished things up with a couple of pieces accompanied by low-key guitar and sound effects, one a slice-of-life freakshow set in a methadone clinic, the other a surreal slab of dizzying incomprehensibility.

But the individual who seemed to get the best reaction from the crowd was a golden retriever who was making the rounds. He or she had the friendly impersonal demeanor of an airline attendant who still likes people and needs to get her job done. It was kinda cute to see all the hipsters reaching out to give the dog a quick stroke as it passed, everyone trying to coax it into giving them a little personal time.

Before I left, I scored a free book from John, passed out copies of Swill to all the readers except Charlie Jane Anders who'd left early, and had my copies of City Come A Walkin' and New Noir signed. I didn't get to buy any of the other folk's works -- the crowds were too fierce for me.

So given the quality of what was on stage and the pleasant interactions I had, why did I leave in a bit of an odd and distraught mood?

I just felt out of place. Because of my back I have to shift from sitting to standing pretty frequently and there was a crowd and it seemed kinda awkward and obtrusive. When I set up I thought I was in the back; by twenty minutes or so into the evening I found myself in the front. I was surrounded by well-dressed attractive young people while facing some of my cultural heroes. I started getting that exiled alien feeling, that "I'll never be one of the cool kids" feeling.

And the overstimulating environment didn't help. I was wearing my bifocals and between that and the shifting lights from a disco ball overhead I was having mild hallucinations by the end of the evening which made me feel feverdream crazy, and all the conversations around me made me feel like I wanted to just wither. I don't have a knack for shutting that stuff out, which goes along with being crazy.

None of this was anyone's doing -- aside from the elusive individual who ran a finger down my left butt cheek as if testing the texture (by the time I recovered from the shock, they'd pulled back their hand), no one was shitty to me and a number of folks were distinctly friendly. (Hey, Michael! Hey, John!)

So when I headed home I gave this some thought.

(Enough thought to get on the wrong fucking BART train... I swear, the last while I've been making one dumbass move like that after another. Last Thursday I wound up walking in circles looking for the writer's group meeting for forty fucking minutes before wandering by my own house accidentally. I am more or less Rain Man with a few more verbal skills these days.)

I do have some areas of arrested development in my personality, and it's all to the good for me to push at them. I didn't get a chance to be a kid or a teenager and now I'm not getting a chance to be an adult -- but by recognizing and working through these moments of tension, by allowing myself to go ahead and be an awkward teen or a frightened child, I may wind up getting past that. Not getting over -- I think that whole concept is just a way of justifying having a low-grade memory -- getting past.

It struck me that I want to do some kind of reading or performance myself. My pal Allison does some of that and I'm realizing that I'm a wee bit jealous. Being in front of an audience is a little nervous but nowhere near as distressing as being in a crowd. I like one on one interactions, and performance is exactly that -- you've reduced things to Self and Other and they have to take what you give 'em...

I also paid attention to the difference in John's demeanor between the two times I saw him. When you're in your element you're different than when you're not, and it struck me that real confidence is the ability to create your proper place inside yourself so you can carry it around with you, so that when it's appropriate you can withdraw without feeling diminished. Ponder ponder.

Now this is the place where I'd usually say, "They should never let me out of the house." But I reached another conclusion this time...

I need to get out more often. And maybe I need to think about dressing like a grownup -- but that's another post.