Love And Hate And Other Chimps

My dad's recovered enough from his back surgery so that today we were able to take a walk. I was explaining to him that I'd recently figured out the main reasons why the past few years have been so hard on me, despite my finally beginning to get my art and writing out into the world.

For whatever reason, I have always admired artists and scientists more than any other type of person, and I have always mentally linked the arts and sciences as being representative expressions of a particular quality of mind.

I spent my whole damned life sitting in my room studying the arts, going to school for the arts, thinking that if I ever got to be good enough, I might be allowed into the world of the arts. I lost the sciences when I lost the university system, but the arts I could do on my own.

And I thought the world of the arts was going to be The Arts. That once in the door, I would bask in the glow emitted by my superiors, contaminating myself with their glorious radiation until I, too, was luminous. We would do the art and nothing but the art!

Well, yeah, as far as it goes. But it turns out that the world of the arts is like any other human endeavor -- it is primarily social. The arts serve an organizational and focal function, and are frequently central in the lives of individual participants, but the actual world of the arts is a club, or a gang, or a trend, or a hangout far more than it is an activity.

"The thing is," I told my dad, "I feel like I've pissed some people off just by showing up to play."

Dad got a little solemn. "Well, there's something that I think nearly everybody pretty much knows instinctively, and I don't think you do," he said. "Every group of human beings is going to be more concerned with hierarchy than anything else, and just about everything they do is about figuring out who goes where."

I was not prepared for this. I mean, I heard it and it made perfect sense, but. If you had told me ahead of time in a way that allowed me to actually understand? I might have simply evaporated from terror on the spot. I certainly would have wondered if it would be a good idea for me to follow the path I've taken.

I am not good with groups. I strongly prefer to interact with people one on one, as equals. I assume that I am on the outside of any group, and above the top or below the bottom of any given hierarchy. I am very emotionally vulnerable, and have a desperate need for affection and attention. I have very poor boundaries. I am quite naive about a lot of things, particularly sexual things. I do not expect to flirt or be flirted with; I expect to be treated as a neuter by women.

And there is no way to say this without sounding like a caveman, but you know what? I'm a primitive motherfucker. I expect men to behave as though violence is a natural arena for contention -- in other words, if someone's acting like a dick it means they think they can fuck with you, and if you let them keep acting like a dick, they will escalate to violence -- dickishness is just the soft edge of violence, and pulling it out is starting a fight. So men are polite to one another if they aren't interested in fighting. I mean, this is how it is, right? Right?

Guess what.

There are some folks I have run across that have been snipey, snipey, snipey, nasty, guilty apology, snipey, apology, etc. And I never believe they're being rude to me at first. I think about it, I ask any witnesses for opinions, I grill the missus, my dad, the hon. Richard Talleywhacker for their opinions before I feel anything but hurt.

This is a pattern. It's not just my writing, I've gotten this reaction with my prints as well. It has repeated four or five times in the past three years, and it honestly seems to be antagonism based on my ability or my modest successes -- people who actually dislike me on a reasonable personal basis don't behave this way.

And this comes from people who are hypothetically on my team, and who are in positions where we are supporting one another. People who are poorly served by their antagonism. It feels like a betrayal to me, it makes me wonder what I've done to deserve it, and it has cost me more topsoil over the last three years than anything else.

The only way I can cope with these situations is to emotionally place those people outside my circle, to say, 'I work with them, but they are opposed to my best interests, and in any emotional conflict they are regarded as opponents. I will not choose to hurt them, but I do not actively support their interests.' A friend who hurts me? I can't do anything about that. An enemy? That I can understand. It makes me feel coarse to categorize people in this fashion, but it is also invigorating. Necessity!

I need to recognize when people are actually being rude to my face. I've put up with things from people in classrooms and labs that would have gotten them terrorized if they'd tried it on the street. I absolutely will not pull any tough guy crap around this, but I shouldn't be taking shit just because I'm scared of being a bully.

I need to make room for this so that I don't shred myself every time someone fails to love me to a sufficient degree. It ain't their job to love me.

And too much love is hard to accommodate, too. Oh, it's turning out I ain't neuter. I need to be conscious of this. Not hitting on women and not cheating isn't the same as being sexually continent, and I prefer to be the latter.

For instance, did you know that some women interpret genial, good-natured bullying as a form of flirtation? And here's one I only figured out about six months ago.

I talk to people one-on-one, remember. Most of my friends have been women. If a woman and I are pals, we will spend a certain amount of time talking by ourselves alone, and that is a sexual safe-zone. I assume that sexual neutrality.

But recent readings and reflections suggest to me that when a woman goes into an isolated location with a man, much of the time she's going to be very conscious of being either vulnerable or available, and she's not always going to feel comfortable about that, and sometimes she's going to feel entirely too comfortable about that.

I am not going to go into details, but based on those two revelations I can now see how I have been a horrible, baffling tease at times. I don't want to be that kind of rotten person! I didn't even know you could do that to girls!

On the other hand, a little harmless flirtation isn't something that should cause me to bolt like a startled horse, writhe in guilt at my unfaithfulness, or fall hypnotized with my mouth hanging open. I'm gonna get flirted at, I may as well learn to enjoy it.

Having people look up at you and go, "Ooooh!" is a drug. When those people are attractive women, that drug is freebased. I am officially hooked, and I now need a certain amount of admiration in my diet. It makes me feel gross, but there it is. I am now doomed to go out into the world every once in a while and impress girls if I don't want to wither and die.

But having people admire my talent also feels kinda wrong and creepy. It's a freak show feeling, as though what's being admired could be easily detached from me and idolized on its own. I suspect this is how it feels to have an admirable bosom. It's fun, but you can get too much of it and it could lead to feelings of disrespect toward the admiring, and that sucks. Who wants to be admired by people they look down on? Defeats the whole purpose.

So, basically what we're facing here is the collapse of my previously-adequate Jane Goodall posture, where I regard humans as a fascinating alien species demanding compulsive study despite the obvious dangers involved. I have set down the clipboard, and set out to establish my place in the troop.

Pray for me.

Attention: I'm OK Now

Well. It's been weeks since I've had a mood swing or an episode of vomiting. I'm feeling consistently optimistic and excited, and I've never written stronger material than what I've produced recently. My episodes of paralytic confusion have almost entirely dissipated, and I've recovered from my withdrawal from psychiatric medications.

So I'm declaring myself officially well, for the foreseeable future.

The missus has said all along that this period of crisis has been about my fear of success. That's not quite right, but it's definitely leaning in the proper direction. I've got another piece to write about this, but essentially, my journey into the world of professional fiction has been much more complicated than I thought -- I am being forced to change my relationships with both myself and society in general in radical and expansive ways.

I was able to tap-dance around the increasing levels of stress in my life until I started puking. Hospitalization and my first round of treatments left me feeling like a psychiatric patient instead of an artist, and that period of last winter and spring was one of the points in my life where I really hit bottom.

Interestingly, I did not experience true despair. The burden of self-hatred that had been lifted from me at the Viable Paradise workshop has made these times dangerous for me in the past, but now the temptation to self-destruction is much weaker. And the missus, rather than drawing away from me, treated me with a sort of tenderness that hasn't been part of our relationship before.

But I'm better now.

I've started counseling in the last few weeks, and that's helping to solidify the gains I've made over the past months. The missus, bless her heart, decided that I had fallen through the cracks in the system, so she found a counselor who would trade for bodywork. This does make me feel a little weird, but very grateful. I'm still on the lists for public assistance, because it would be a good idea for me to have access to sleep aids and tranquilizers, but I feel good about the person I'm working with now.

My counselor is not a psychiatrist, so she does not see me as a collection of fascinating symptoms, a sort of living crossword puzzle, which is the reaction I get from medical types. Her position is that I'm in the process of assembling myself into a functional human being, and she seems excited by the prospect.

I've decided that the optimum state of mind for me is not that of conventional mental health. That just isn't an appropriate ambition for me. Rather than fighting my nature, I'm learning to embrace the positive and ameliorate the negative.

For instance, rather than struggling with my sleep, I've gotten in the habit of going to bed between nine and nine thirty, then waking up at two or three, going to my studio to listen to music and look at art books for an hour or so, then go back to bed and lay down. I don't always get back to sleep. I don't usually get back to sleep. But if I lay there quietly in a meditative frame of mind, I get enough rest so that the next day has a warm fuzzy hallucinatory edge rather than a sharp, brittle one.

And right now I'm getting my eating habits in order. Cleaning up my studio. And so on. And so forth. Regaining a sense of control over my life.

I know I'll go through the cycle again -- it's pretty likely that I'll be useless for a month or two in the middle of the winter, for example -- but things feel different. Even when the recent situation was at its worst, I didn't feel as threatened or endangered as I have at comparable earlier points in my life.

One of the reasons for this is that I felt as though I was part of a community. Both the science fiction world and y'all here on the net have formed some attachments with me, so I felt a continual sense of...

"Well, I guess I can't afford to lose here. It'd fuck shit up for too many people."

I know when I contemplate everything from your health to your careers, there are times when I feel concern. Sometimes I let people know, sometimes I don't, if it doesn't seem quite needed.

But I have also felt concern from you, and that helped keep me focused on getting past the situation rather than sinking into it.

One very interesting aspect of this whole thing is that I turned to a lot of self-help and popular science books for assistance, and I am damned lucky to be going through this during a time when cognitive science is starting to really understand how the mind functions.

I have been doing some very deliberate skull hacking, and have even been integrating this information with the techniques of meditation and ritual I learned while studying occult traditions. As the man said, "We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon/Our method is science, our aim is religion." (Yeah, I know, he was an asshole. All my heroes were assholes. This is key to my identity crisis.)

So.

Right now, the process of reconstruction has advanced to the point where I am working again, and substantial improvements are being made to my support system. I have greater stability than I did before going through the crisis. I am happy-by-my-standards, and pleasant company.

Yes, my life situation could be better. Sort of. Yeah, I would like to be financially stable, and not a lunatic, and so on. But when you have a life filled with good people, a sense of purpose, and the ability to pursue that purpose effectively?

What the hell is there to complain about?

Fictional Me: A Daydream Game

This is taken from the collection Lat's Lot, copyright 1977 by the Malaysian cartoonist Lat. Lat's work is just wonderful, the kind of thing I periodically force down people's throats.

Anyway, I'm not the only one who plays this game! This is a panel from a cartoon Lat did on the same subject. I remembered it while writing, and was able to track it down.

It's been a while since I did something properly goofy. Just for fun, here's one of my daydreams.

Hey, writers? I have actually gotten a number of stories from this little game. And if you read this blog for soap-opera purposes, I will no doubt make some truly unfortunate unconscious revelations here, along with some tragic misapprehensions of self. Should be good for a laugh.

Here we go:

If I were in a thus-and-such type of story, what would it be like?

And to clarify, the whole thing has a casting sort of quality to it -- there are roles that I've played in certain books, I can always get work standing in the back of a Viking scene, that kind of shit. Remember -- daydream.

Hard-Boiled Detective

I'm starting here because in this genre? I am not the lead. I'm the guy who knocks the detective out. You can tell it's me and not just a random thug if there is --

-- a revelation of unexpected depth of character lending a tragic tone to my inevitable demise.

-- a hint of sympathy directed toward the detective.

-- I turn out to be a sadistic intellectual who smugly torments our hero.

(As an aside, I also play this basic role in a number of Daniel Pinkwater books, but I'm a butler for one of the heroes in those ones.)

Police Procedural

An amusing witness or suspect. Really, not a whole lot of point to me in this genre. I'm just another one.

Cozy Mystery

I hate cozies. Hate, hate, hate 'em. The domestication of murder for the amusement of human housepets rankles severely.

Too bad, because I am custom-made for cozies. I'm a fact reservoir, a detail-noticer, a loveable good-natured eccentric, and when that one little moment comes when violence is threatened? By cozy standards, I am a warrior king. Thankfully, I am also bound and determined to mind my own damned business.

But as all fiction writers know, that just means I'll be dragged into the mystery kicking and screaming against my will. How? The writer's groups. The band. My attempts at breaking into the arts. These all provide interesting points of contact with the world that could fuel a series.

But worst, and most obvious of all?

The missus. She throws herself into the middle of every dramatic situation that comes along because if it interests here, then it's her business, isn't it? And yeah, we do in fact banter amusingly, bicker ceaselessly, and come to one another's rescue on a regular basis.

I really wish I liked cozies, because that series writes itself.

Adventure SF

I'd be good here, but nothing special. I'd fit in all kind of roles. One of the settlers on another planet, a field illustrator in a time travel story, the guy the aliens first contact, all that stuff. Unfortunately, I'm too quirky for the starring role in this stuff. Fine with me, he said huffily, you're all a bunch of dummies anyway. (I'm just bitter because I wanted the male lead in a Stanley G. Weinbaum planetary romance, and the woman has to be the quirky one in those.)

I'm putting this here because of the psychic powers in Known Space, but Larry Niven could get a good alien race out of me.

Hard SF

Similar, but with less scope. I'd be the one who asks the questions the reader wants answered. Maybe if I'd had more study skills when I first tried college...

Quest Fantasy

Again, a tooth-gritter. No really good roles for me. I might be like Beorn from the Hobbit or (oh, I hate this) Tom Bombadil. The good-natured outsider with an uncanny link to the natural world, who provides both a place to rest for the heroes and a vague sense of menace.

Or I'd be an orc, or a troll. Ah, well. It's work.

Heroic Fantasy

God help me, this would be the perfect fit. If you've ever read blurbs describing characters like Conan ("A man of great mirths and great melancholies...") or Kane ("Half-savage, half-savant, with a dash of Satanic seasoning..."), well. Jesus. Have you ever hung out with me?

I even have a knack for swordplay -- when I studied fencing in high school, a number of instructors gave me free lessons, and I kinda got the impression they thought I might go somewhere with it. Too bad money issues ended that.

My main problem with life is that it isn't sword-and-sorcery fiction.

Memoir

It's been done. I'm The One That I Want by Margaret Cho. My brother Duncan is a major character. I'm the briefly-mentioned bit player who means nothing to the reader but the writer needed to acknowledge. At least I can walk into bookstores and see my name in print.

Mainstream

Well, you should be able to figure this out. I do not have a mainstream life, my life's subject matter has been strongly genre. So I'm stuck in an outlying subplot -- 'Whatever will become of our beloved shining nutjob?' I wind up dead in a lot of these, usually suicide. I blame society.

Underground

Do I look like an idiot? Ask me in person. You might want to get some booze in me first.

Superheroes

Okay, three ways to go. In mainstream comics, I'm definitely a Marvel guy -- I'm uneasy with the ideas of good and evil as supernatural forces influencing the world, and there's a lot of that lurking in DC's mythos.

I'd start off as one of those guys who comes across as a villain at first because he's too caught up in his cause. I would guess an endangered species of some kind, probably a reptile. My costume would be one of those ones that looks dorky in a comic, but might be okay on Halloween. First appearance would be written by Don McGregor or Steve Gerber. The Avengers would have second thoughts after beating the shit out of me, eventually I'd lead the team for a brief run, and my unsuccessful limited series would feature me getting made a fool of by a sexy supervillainess in a complete tonal about-face from any prior appearance.

In the movies? Costumed adventurers would be all supervillains initially, carving the world into despotic city states. I'd be a man with nothing to lose, who in a moment of desperation finds that he once had powers, and they've been stolen from him, and he can only get them back by killing the bad guys one at a time. This one is just oodles of fun. I might write it someday.

Independent comics? I'd be a quirky, humorous hero along the lines of the Badger, Flaming Carrot, or maybe an oddly dramatic one like Kevin Matchstick in Mage or Go-Man. The book would be rough during the first few issues when the focus would be on me, but then I'd start taking a back seat in an ensemble piece.

I'd be an unbelievably neurotic hero for hire, whose staff manages to keep him in line enough to be a force for good, mostly, by cuddling, cajoling, badgering, threatening, teasing, and general bullyragging. It would be about the idea that it takes a dozen or so people to actually make one superhero -- or regular human being -- work. This one might get written as well.

Romantic Comedy

An unexpectedly good fit. The difference in appearance between me at my seediest and me at my best totally satisfies the ugly duckling requirement. My general emotional neediness and neuroticism make me a hard but satisfying nut to crack, romantically (the missus has a well-rehearsed performance on this subject), which is good drama. I can provide pratfalls and physical comedy, then turn and provide a strong masculine presence. I am easily flustered and embarrassed and given to blushing, and I have been given the impression that while in that state I am most amusing.

Truth be told? I tend to view my life as a humorous horror story, but it has a strong romantic comedy element as well.

Thrillers

I'm two guys here. The one who raises the monster and is heartbroken when it turns on him just as the story gets going, and the cannibal genius psycho-killer. The first one depresses me, and the second one has been thrown in my face on a regular basis since childhood.

When I read Silence Of The Lambs, I knew it was just a matter of time before someone said I reminded them of Hannibal Lecter, and I was right. It was amusing the first few dozen times it happened, but now when some distant acquaintance comes up to me and says, "I read a book/saw a movie last night, and there was this character who really reminded me of you," I just feel creeped out.

Horror

Oh, this is such a natural. There are two main roles for me here. The misunderstood monster, and the shapeshifter slowly devoured by the beast within. I could do a little mad science, if it was required. Maybe bravely allow myself to get killed so the lead could get away.

Situation Comedy

Like romantic comedy or sword and sorcery, a totally natural fit. But while I find it easy to put together something where I'd be the lead, I'm actually more a side-character. I'm the one who periodically sums up the situation in a bafflingly hilarious statement that turns out to be either dead accurate or utterly incomprehensible.

And so on. The fun part of this game is when the rules of the genre force you into a role you may not care for -- or which surprises you with its aptness. Yeah, it's fun and, if you write down what you daydream, do it well, and sell it, it's profitable.

There are times when I wouldn't trade being juvenile for anything in the world.

Bone Chips

So I got a shout-out this week from Joe Clifford of (among other things) Lip Service West. He claims to be the last of the angry white male writers, and it's true. He was like three guys ahead of me in line when they ran out of licenses, and ever since then I just haven't been able to pull that shit off. I'm kinda pissed about it, actually.

Joe's been on a roll with his fiction, working smart and hard, and it's been fun watching him build his chops in stories like this and this.

So, as I mentioned before, I'm gonna be reading at Lip Service West on August 12. Save the date; I expect to see you there. It will be my second reading, and I'm looking forward to it.

Part of my pleasure here is stepping outside of genre fiction distinctly. (I am willing to be photographed with genre fiction, but I don't want us to be perceived as having a 'relationship.') But more than anything else, I look forward to the pleasure of terrorizing an audience. There will be a laugh or two; they will be emitted under conditions of great pressure.

I see this as the first story in a three-part sequence to be read as a one-man show. It will be roughly half an hour long, and it will be called Bone Chips: Stories Of Intimate Violence.

The first section will be the piece I'll be performing on the thirteenth. It concerns a beating I received in high school, and what it meant from a racial perspective.

The second will be the first piece I performed. This was based on an excised chapter from the novel, and concerns how being kept at a specific proximity -- not to near and not too far -- from a number of women led me to break one of my knuckles a couple of times.

And the third will be based on an old blog post, about how I developed a sort of wistful romantic nostalgia toward a splash-mark left by a suicide. That one goes a little dark, but it's probably the funniest of the three.

These were all formative experiences for me to one degree or another, and by taking them and using them in this way, I'm pulling some of their teeth. I own them, not the other way around.

Performing made me feel powerful. I felt at home on the stage, and I knew that when I meant the audience to laugh they'd laugh, and when I wanted them to cringe, they'd cringe. To watch people responding to me, moving in their seats, expressions changing to match the story, really feeling it. I sit here and tappety-tap-tap and think, "Yeah, boy, that's gonna get 'em," but writing ain't nothing next to DRIVING THE WORDS DIRECTLY INTO LIVING BRAINS WITH BRUTAL FORCE AND OBSESSIVE PRECISION.

And I want more. I feel that this is a very unseemly desire, but I have it, and I know that it will not diminish with time. I want to see an audience full of people who have come to see me. I need to take steps toward achieving that.

And this may be an unseemly statement, but I have the first requirement down. I got the goods, and I can deliver them. Now all I need to do is find out how to put something like this together, get funding, find a support crew, and then round up a bunch of people who are really into hearing me rant about blood-spattered nihilism. Sex and violence, audience! I've got sex and violence!

Notes on the Re-Acquisition of Mojo

So. I needed some good news. So I went out and got some. Yeah, things will probably change eventually even if you just sit on your ass, but it does no harm to put some effort in.

I submitted to Lip Service West for the second time, tried forcing the novel to work, bounced off it, sought advice from Nick Mamatas, and on his suggestion impulsively submitted to an anthology of Lovecraftian science fiction.

The Lip Service West submission was a hard one. It's a piece I've had in the mix for a while, dealing with some fairly brutal autobiographical material involving race and violence. I submitted it in a state I knew was imperfect -- but that I also knew I could pull of solidly as a performance.

The submission to the anthology used some ideas I've had drifting around in the back of my head and tied them all together into a setting that I may use again. It was a piece that, had I submitted it to my groups first, I would have been told was a synopsis rather than a story. It is nowhere near polished. It was written, line-edited, and sent off in a two-day period.

Well. Both got in. I will be reading at Lip Service West on August 13. And my story Deep Blue Dreams will be appearing in the anthology Future Lovecraft.

So after all these months of struggling with my writing, I saw some extremely varied opportunities -- one oriented toward pop culture, the other toward the transgressive end of literary writing, and bim-bam, I pulled them both off.

Honestly? I made mouth noises and tried to demonstrate due humility, but in my secret heart-of-hearts I assumed that I could just get into both spots, never really doubted that I'd get in, and I was correct. Do you know how that feels?

It feels like walking into a glass door or having a chair pulled out from under me. It seems like a violation of natural law.

I mean, did I just do that? Is that kind of thing now an option? What the fuck? Is this some kind of superpower? This is a joke. Someone's messing with me.

Don't get cocky!

Maybe I can allow myself to get a little cocky. That shit doesn't just happen. First off, I never quit struggling with my writing. Even if it was shit, I was still writing. When my writing stayed shit for an intolerable period of time, I considered my situation, and decided to work laterally.

This is a tricky concept. But I've come to realize over the last bout of shrinks and research and so on that my most functional state is one clinically termed hypomania. Basically, I am manic and depressed at the same time all the time, and if the mania has a slight edge, I become creative, volatile, active, and social.

This may be a clinically recognized state, but it is also me at my best -- and potentially worst. Learning how to work with it has been a lifelong project, but I haven't experienced it since anti-depressants made me actually full-blown manic. That's the thing -- I'm really not easily medicated, because my stability is the result of a wide spectrum of contesting conditions. I need each of my little quirks to balance out another one.

So. How to either slightly lift depression or slightly accent mania.

The secret is stimulation. One of the problems I've faced over the last year is that between no longer being able to buy comic books and no longer being able to take art classes, I have wound up with fiction at the center of my creative world -- it has killed my fucking writing. I need the pressure of multiple forms competing for attention in my head. I need to feel the high-pressure buzz of fruitful compulsive thought.

I decided to try including another art form in my routine, and began developing a new technique for producing digital prints. This got me itching, got me thinking, gave me a set of solid creative problems to wrestle with.

It worked. I'm going to have to watch myself for the next while -- I will be prone to grandiosity, spending sprees, temper tantrums and incomprehensibility. But I'll also be functional.

There you go. The basic two-stroke of good luck is that it's something that occurs when ability meets opportunity. I've always had a pretty good grip on developing ability, but this whole seeking-out-of-opportunity thing is a new one.

If I can turn it into a habit, I'll be doing well. If I don't scare myself to death in the process.

Jungle Hat

I'm in the process of returning to functionality, or rather the process has hit the point where it's obviously working. Nice to get some results. Here's how it started.

I was walking to go pick up my niece one afternoon. Because I have a shiny bald head and do not drive, I'm a hat person. Purely practical, but I've recently started thinking of them as part of a developing look. Hats are tricky. They're one of those areas of life where the chance of coolness is matched by the risk of dildonics.

Anyway, at the corner a big family was waiting for the bus. Mom and Auntie were talking trash while the kids went nuts, and as I came by, one of the little boys, probably seven or eight, planted himself on the sidewalk in front of me, scowling fiercely, knees bent and arms akimbo. (How often do you get a chance to use that word properly? I think this might be my first.)

I ball up my fists, lift my upper lip so my teeth show and my eyes go away, and shuffle toward him, fast, so he's startled but he doesn't have a chance to move.

He looks up at me and I grin at him, give him a thumbs up, and dodge past him respectfully, step off the sidewalk but give him just a little bit of a messin' shove -- I don't send him sprawling, it's just a hey-buddy.

And as I step past him into the crosswalk, he yelled. "Hey! Did you see that man? I want to go with that man! He had a jungle hat!"

Right then, I remembered being a little kid and getting that feeling of running across an adult and wanting to be part of their lives, or to have something of what they had. And I thought about how the boy oaf would respond to the adult me.

I would have had exactly the same response that kid had. I am in cold fact exactly the kind of person who most thrilled me when I was a child. The problems that have been weighing me down would have seemed both pitiable and romantic, more the latter than the former. They certainly wouldn't have provoked any judgment.

And I thought to myself, why don't I get to be the man in the jungle hat? I mean, why don't I get the fun of being one of those people? As I mentioned earlier, there are some areas where your chance of being cool is balanced by the risk of being a dildo, but hey. My chances of conventional dignity, respectability, and success are not just slim, they simply do not exist. It is too late. I am who I am.

I've known this for a while, but it's hard to really embrace yourself when it's obvious that you're an oddball, and self-acceptance means being a little more of a visible freak.

But my problem currently? What's been screwing me up over the last while? It isn't mental illness, and it isn't chronic pain, and it isn't poverty. What is is, is a lack of mojo. And mojo does not thrive in conditions of self-denial.

I needed my mojo back.

So I took steps. Here, courtesy of Nick Mamatas, is a taste of the results, which are still coming in. Nick's post deals with issues relating to the personal side of professional relationships, and should it ever become widely known, its essential decency will represent a threat to his carefully-maintained reputation as Satan incarnate.

If you're interested, next post will carry a big blast of bragging, and some practical techniques for mojo reacquisition.

That picture up there? That damn well looks like a jungle hat to me.

Touched By An Imbecile

The fun thing about this technique is that it opens up all kinds of color possibilities for the images if I get the chance to do them as large-scale prints.

The missus is visiting her mom, so I decided to take advantage of her absence and indulge myself by pacing through the house in the dark instead of sleeping. (If she was here, she'd make me turn on a light.) Well, I got an idea so brilliant it impressed even me. I swear to God, I'll be able to retire on this one.

I want to do a TV show called Touched By An Imbecile. You'd get a group of regular old idiots -- you know, like the kind at work, or the ones who have a hard time telling you where the C-clamps are? No one so slow that you'd feel bad about making fun of them, but none of them so smart that it's a good idea to let them drive and vote and stuff. The kind of people who 'feel truth in their heart.'

So we'd give them a van, and have them go around the country and show intelligent, well-educated people that their so-called 'smartness' is just something they put on to avoid facing their basic humanity, and that all it does is keep them from seeing the magic in life. Fun and hijinx will naturally ensue.

Then at the end of the season, the van, with the cast in it, will be driven into a crusher. People will be able to bid on-line for the right to trigger the crushing mechanism a little at a time, and they will be given the option of having their name and image flashed to the people inside the van so they know who's killing them.

Most smart people don't have a lot of money, but if we do this we'll get pretty much all of it.