I became a member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund today. This was long overdue, and I've been, y'know, Thinking About It for quite some time. But today's the day I said to myself, "I just got paid and I have no excuses."

It's a tremendous blow for free speech to support these guys, who do Good Things in places you might not even know they needed to be done. And they sell tremendously cool stuff too. If you've got the cash to spend, there are worse things to do with it than get yourself a $25 1-year membership or pick up some of their merchandise. And then the next time you go and pick up Lucifer or Max and Lily or Small Favors right off the shelf at your Friendly Local Comics Store, you can feel good about having helped keep them there.

Stacy still sick, but on antibiotics and improving. Been a rough week or two for her. Damn spring. Hopefully we can manage some retail therapy tomorrow, and the recovery will be in full swing.

Now I go unwind. Crappy week. More updates later.

We were planning on a trip to WV this weekend, which has now been postponed due to lingering illnesses, and seeing as we're sort of booked all month, it's unlikely to happen until June. I think that's probably the longest stretch so far between visits home. Nothing to be done, though. Such is the price of being a couple of in-demand kinda people.

Stacy is home once again today, and about time, too. As she points out, this is partially because I was a bastard at her until she relented, for which I make no apologies. I remember the last time full-on peeneumonia set in, and how much fun that was. I remain unconvinced that anything work-related is that important. (To be fair, I remain unconvinced that anything work-related is very important ever, but that's a whole other set of issues.) And besides, anyone who looks and sounds as rough as my sweet wife does today should be quarantined at home, because a) there's no sense spreading that kind of love around, and b) no one wants to see that shit. So there.

Couple of nights ago I had the pleasure of a Walpurgisnacht dinner with Paul and his girlfriend Melissa, which was actually pretty nice, and a better experience than the last couple of times I hung out with Paul. But I remain in some sense skeptical about the future of my friendship with Paul, if only because he seemed almost resolute in refusing to take a hint about how much better I liked New Happy Paul than Classic Paul with Snarky Commentary. (Melissa, OTOH, is very nice and smart and funny, and I hope for his sake not too good for him. Because all he needs is another reason to get all-out mean from feeling sorry for himself all over again. But I digress.) It's a bit sad that things ended up taking this turn, because I've always liked Paul, usually in spite of himself. But given a choice between being around someone who seems to think of the things I'm into as a number of conversational bullseyes (when any interest is shown at all), and people who make me feel wonderful about myself... well, guess which one I'm going to pick.

(And it's sort of a measure of how things are that I post all this here without fear of consequences, because Paul is much too aloof and cool to do anything like read my weblog, or care much that I have one, except possibly to let me know how nerdy and passe blogging is or some such elitist crap. Which, if you've spent ten minutes with Paul, is the absolute nadir of irony.)

Anyway, I also spent two nights beating my head against the keyboard until 700 words or so of "The Pagurus Game" arranged themselves in a shape I could live with, which is not exactly the kind of pace I wanted to be keeping, but that's the hand I drew this week. Sometimes you gets the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. I think I need another project to decompress into when the main one isn't working for me, just to keep the proper number of balls in the air to satisfy my obsessive and neurotic muse. You wanna know what kind of dork I am? I'm seriously considering writing Exalted fanfic. So that kind of dork. (Yeah, I know. Shaddap.)

This is the morning of the year
A rainy green smile
After a long gloomy
Pale winter night
The shouting of the child
Melts into rustling
When the heavy rain
Rushes from on high

When the May rain comes
All of this shall be washed away
When the May rain comes...

Oh, yeah - happy Beltane, slightly belated.

Something I should've linked days ago here is Maija's Elfwood Gallery, which all and sundry should visit and leave nice comments on so she'll put more stuff up on't. And shame on those asshats who run the site for being tiny-brained about what constitutes "fantasy"; let's all be thankful nobody told Ellen Kushner that shit, or the field would be even more woefully short of effete dandies and salon intrigue than it already is. And besides, I'm convinced it's terribly bad form to try and tell a Finn what fantasy is - those guys practically speak Elvish. That's just asking to be tied to a chair and beaten with the Kalevala until some sense gets in.

Wooch. Okay, I feel better now. Back on my head, then.

Against all odds and good sense, I am at work today. Yesterday I was not, having contracted some kind of Spring-type bug that, vampire-like, sapped my strength and will to be a productive member of society. Feh. So here I am, listening to Current 93's Crooked Crosses for the Nodding God, pondering what kind of minimal productivity I can get away with and call the day a marginal success.

Stacy, however, is home today, it being her turn in the game of Invalid Tag. Though the truth is we've both been feeling iffy since the weekend, not that that stopped us from having our long-awaited pajama cocktail party with Caren and the Marthas and Matt and the Mysterious T---. Which goes to show you just how much we won't let good old-fashioned sense get in the way of having a fabulous time with some vodka and brie.

(As an aside, it's more fun than I'd suspected to have an anonymous new member of our circle; being able to drop a half-veiled reference to T--- makes me feel all Victorian, like a chronicler of some properly spooky Sheridan le Fanu weirdness. I may continue to do so even should the necessity disappear. It seems a fitting welcome to Matt's lovely consort, who is also, in his own right, delightful. [/James Lipton])

Frighteningly enough, "The Ballad of Bobby Sunshine" is almost exactly capturing my current mood. Beausoleil, soleil soleil soleil Beausoleil, Beausoleil... Like a Woodstock revival staged on the outskirts of Hell. Brilliant.

Don't mind me, folks.

I ought to buckle down again tonight and do some serious work on the second part of "The Pagurus Game," since Part the First met with such acclaim on the List, even among those who balked at the bits that earned it a full-on PG-13 rating. (I may have to take that ball and run. These young pups have no idea how much I was holding back, not having had the pleasure of the dubiously-tasteful softcore in A Thousand Thrones. Sigh. It's probably sick of me to take such delight in pushing the buttons of such folk, but, y'know, someone's got to set to cleaning up the damn mess that sanctimonious reformed-whore C.S. Lewis made. Or maybe it's just that my inner Spider Jerusalem has been awakened and is even now clamoring for cigarettes and a bucket of Long Pig. Whatever; I'm having too much fun to care.) It's been interesting turning back the clock from the time of 1KT and seeing what kind of trouble Jenny got up to with hunting down qlippoth back in the day, and it's very cool to have Murdoch playing a part in things again. Not to mention that it's just hard to go too wrong with nasty toothy monsters from the Abyss, which is certainly a suitable in-genre substitute for the "two men with guns" formula for those when-in-doubt moments that threaten to hang up the plot on some convoluted conversation or other. (And for all those who I haven't completely lost yet, Pagurus, in case you were wondering, is the name of the genus of arthropods to which hermit crabs belong; "qlippoth" is Hebrew for "shells." And that's all I'll say at this point.)

Not much else to say. It was a good weekend aside from all the getting-sick nonsense; Jim's Big Ego gave good show, as usual, on Friday night (and Jim said afterwards that the crowd at Jammin' Java was bigger than they'd expected, which is certainly potential good news for us Beltway Egomaniacs); I hope they made it okay to Tennessee or whatever godsforsaken place they were off to the next day. And Spyder and Vishal and I managed our first IM menage-a-trois on Sunday morning, which was about as surreal as you'd expect; Elephant Porn was sort of the top of the downward spiral, if that gives you any indication. 'S good to have friends who are at least in the same ballpark of fucked-up as you are.

Urk. Buffalo Chicken Wrap for lunch was possibly not a choice made in wisdom. Some disagreement going on in there even now. I'll sign off on that note, and let you all know how it works out.

So the first part of my new Jenny Haniver story (working-titled "The Pagurus Game" for a number of reasons that seemed appropriate at the late hour I settled on it) went up on Fantasybits the other night, and nobody asked what the hell I was thinking writing that crap, so that's good. It marks the beginning of a new phase of working in this setting, namely one where I'm settling on the first-person voice I probably should have been using all along. And if the JH canon starts to feel a bit more "Vlad Taltos" for it, well, so much the better.

I'm taking Matt's story about finding his student reading my column the other day as a very good sign indeed, not only of the We-Are-Everywhere syndrome I'm starting to notice these days, but also of the possibilities of a future where the truly geeky are rising to positions of influence. I'm thinking that a tomorrow where people in government would rather be playing Mage or similar is probably an excellent alternative to the mess we've got now. (Incidentally, I never thought to ask if Matt found out what he'd written for the Wolf. I suppose Clanbook: Ventrue would be too great an irony to hope for from an up-and-coming student of diplomacy, but you never know.) [/gamerspeak]

Back in the mundane world, all and sundry should send warm and fuzzy thoughts to Spyder, who's having her wisdom teeth out tomorrow. The words "dry socket" will not be mentioned here. (Especially not when you can find out all you'd want to know, and more, elsewhere.) OTOH, I am just evil enough to regret that I'll be missing another round of amusing speech patterns courtesy of a friend in distress. Having ridden home on the post-dental-work Short Bus myself, it's hard not to take some small amount of schaudenfreude satisfaction in that sort of thing, in a loving sort of way. Or maybe I've just been friends with Jeff too long. But at least I'll have some good company in Hell.

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

Happy birthday, Will Shakespeare. (Probably.)

So we made it back on Sunday, and did not drop out of the sky except in the accepted non-lethal fashion, nor were we swallowed by the great sprawling wilderness that is northern NY. All was well, both there and in transit, save that wee Nicholas was a bit sick and so spent the time we were around being angelically subdued. (I've never seen a sick kid be so bloody happy. It'd be downright unsettling if he wasn't so damn cute. If my own offspring turns out half as delightful as my cousinlet on an off-day, I'll be a lucky da indeed.)

Back at the homestead, I've spent the last two evenings churning out the first 1K words or so of a new Jenny Haniver story, which I hope to post to The List tonight. It's looking like a sequel of sorts to both "The Invitation" (which went up like a year ago) and The Vasty Deep (which is not yet actually finished), so that'll be fun. Especially since there's now a whole new crop of FB neophytes who have yet to be exposed to my quirky brand of Gothy Urban Fantasy. I have to wonder how some of them young'ns will cope with a story that got no elves in it, but with Savant out on sabbatical these days, I sort of feel it's up to me.

"Thoughtless, that I am, I am pretentious"

And there's a new Last Dark Art hot off the e-presses today. I have sort of mixed feelings about this one, to be honest; I don't think it's my best work in the series, despite having spent more time than usual fussing with it. Enh. Sometimes what sounds like a good idea in my head isn't half as clever when it's out on the page, and I end up flailing madly around in my attempt to flesh it out. Whatever. I didn't have another concept ready, and the alternative was to cheat and just write "A system is a language of story. Discuss" and let the posters run with it. This way, if I've said something grossly stupid, at least there'll be some activity in the Forum.

Dip me in d20s and toss me to the geeks. I'm ready. I'll take 'em all on.

I sort of dropped out of all circles of correspondence this week, partially out of short-week syndrome, partially due to working on The Last Dark Art #6 (which, contrary to last week's post, will run next week if the gods are good), and partially out of sheer fatigued slackitude. So if I owe you a hello, or an email, or some IM time, or a nod that I'm not dead, and you're feeling slighted - don't. I will spread the love to each as time allows.

Tomorrow we get up bright and frickin' early to go to BWI and fly to fair Buffalo, New York, from whence we'll drive almost immediately to Rochester for Easter-weekend fun with my cousins. It'll be my first time on a plane in, oh, twelve years. And then I get to do it again in a couple of weeks when we go to the Big Easy, and hopefully again in the fall, to Ireland; suddenly my life has more flying in it than a Miyazaki film. I don't have any particular irrational fear of flying, other than a sort of deep-seated primordial twinge at the wrongness of being so far disconnected from the earth, but it's sort of weird to be doing so much of something all in the space of a few months that's been not at all a part of my life for over a decade. But whatever. I move only haltingly and with difficulty from my comfort zone, which is probably the biggest key to understanding my essential nature I can offer anyone.

In any case, I've been preparing myself for harassment-by-security-for-looking-like-an-anarchist, and reducing the number of metal things on my person to that which can be scooped up in one hand and put in a little basket. Thus I do my part to keep the world, if not safer, at least running more efficiently. (Can't win 'em all.) I only hope that the airport officials don't consider having a copy of Exalted in your shoulder-bag as marking you out as some sort of dangerous weirdo deviant in need of a frisking; not that I'm paranoid, just that you never know.

In other news, both Matt and Caren now have blogs as of this past week, thus expanding the Circle of Exhibitionism in the Greater DC Area. Which already long included Martha (the Good), to whom I linked a couple of weeks ago without giving the attention or notice she is properly due - a thing I remedy now.

I was sure all hopped up on caffeine this morning ("oneoneoneoneAH! oneoneoneone TWO!"), but it's sort of passed now. Sigh. I'm just hoping that not having to go to work tomorrow will compensate for having to get up at an ungodly fucking hour anyway; I'm sure I'll need to be having teh java by the time we hit Buffalo, if not long before. Braaaaiiiiiiin!

And that's all I got. More when I return.

Not much going on here, other than it's been a sad wet cold week in Our Fair City, and I'm ready for spring now, please.

Spent much slack this week tooling around the forums at RPGnet, which are like unto crack and have cost the University no small amount of my personal man-hours in the handful of days since I signed up there. The only thing I'm close to as addicted to these days is my portable Walkman MP3 player, which rocks my socks just because I can carry around my entire King Crimson library without having to worry about the hundreds of dollars I'd be out if I sat on my CD case. Perhaps someday the novelty of both will wear off, but for now I lack perspective.

I've spent the last week intending like hell to get some real writing done, and it has failed to manifest. Perhaps it's a result of overextension. I've brewed up all these excellent projects for myself, and what I really need to do is knuckle down and turn The Vasty Deep into a publishable (and, well, finished) manuscript in the interest of being able to spend all my time in my pajamas someday. And I think once I at least have a complete work there, all of the rest will flow.

Also I need to write this month's Last Dark Art to run next week, but that's another slice of pie entirely.

Going to be a busy run of weekends for a bit, too. Not that that's bad, just... busy. So it goes.

But for now, I shall retire to the sofa and catch as much of the midnight showing of Farscape as my daily fatigue allots me. I am a-weary, and require unwinding and sexy space opera. Too little of either on a regular basis makes Dan a sad panda indeed, it seems. And in the interest of avoiding further incoherencies, adieu.

(Oh, yeah, Maija: I did get your pictures, which were lovely, and haven't sent you my regular fanboy commentary because I had the notion I shouldn't until I set aside time to give them the attention they deserve yadda yadda and wound up procrastinating that just like every other damn thing in my life. Which is all shorthand for "because I'm a big lame idiot." I send you my apologies now, and assurances that I shall make amends soon. When I make it to Finland someday, you can kick me in the shins and I will not resist even a little.)

I spent about the last two days being depressed something awful, for reasons I can't quite explain. Possibly this week has had too much of the mundane in it. And I'm just feeling tired and burned-out and needing some kind of change in my life that I have control over. Enh.

I was so bummed out that by the time I walked to my appointment with TheRapist this afternoon, I barely even registered the plentiful eye-candy that Spring has populated our fair campus with, which seems a telling enough yardstick of having things in my head be fucked up pretty good. A helpful session this time, though, and I had a much better trip back. Ah, college. One of these days I'm going to have to sift back through the last couple of years and figure out exactly when it was I became a dirty old man.

Tonight Stacy's gone up to see an Orioles game with Greg and Charles, giving me a coupla hours of comics-and-spooky-music to burn. Not bad, and worth giving up the nachos and Boog sandwich for, even though it might nearly have been worth it to go and watch Greg get his geek on for the Great Game. Nearly. But, dammit, I got the new Lucifer waiting for me.

In other wow-cool news, I learned last night that ex-Crim bassist and Chapman stick god Tony "Papa Bear" Levin was at the DC peace march last month, which makes me even prouder to be a big old proghead than ever. And he took pictures. Wow - I remember a lot of those signs. That makes a second time I've been within a mile or two of Tony Levin, counting NEARfest '01, though I wonder if I'd've registered it was him at the march. Probably not - in all likelihood, my brain would've processed something like "Wow, that guy looks like Tony Levin" and moved on. A shame - that had the potential to be nearly as cool an encounter as Martha L. getting to shake hands with Jeanine Garofalo the week before.

Oh, it's past five. Time to go the fuck home.

Ah, melancholy. I'm finding I have some upon me tonight. My long weekend's over. Sigh.

But we all had a lovely time. Spyder fit in with the gang like she'd been among us for years, which made me happy happy - obviously we're in the same karass or similar. Too much fun, too little sleep, and a handful of new things will haunt me forever, not the least of which is the Wheel of Sheep (don't ask), but it was absolutely the get-together I'd been hoping for and looking forward to. I am sad it's over. Time to start thinking about the next one, perhaps.

But there are worse things than having so many cool people in your life that it's hard to keep up with it all.

Okay. As Keith Center says: "No more sad!"

Not much more to add. I'm tired and I sooooo don't want to go to work tomorrow, but so it goes. I have lots of new excellent cool stuff to play with now (not least of which is the cable modem that's been rocking our world since last night, but also Invader Zim CDs, the spoils of a trip to Big Planet, and Things in Jars), so I think I'll sign off and carve out some me-time before sleep claims me. Whoohoo! Life is rich and good.

And tomorrow is April 1st. Good fooling, all. And so, goodnight.

Discovered yesterday, to my mingled horror and delight, that I have some esteemed company in the use of the name "Jenny Haniver" as a character moniker. Caitlin R. Kiernan's story "Tears Seven Times Salt" (collected in the anthology Darkside, along with Thomas Ligotti's "The Nightmare Network" and many other fine tales) has a protagonist thusly named, and, with the sort of Deep-One-cum-Nosferatu imagery going on in there, probably pays more homage to the source material than my own creation does. Though I must say, I have just enough solipsism that I was waiting, the whole time I was reading it, for Kiernan's ichthyophile waif to light up a stogie and say something wiseass. Sigh.

Hard to complain too hard when you find you've been dipping out of the same big black cultural stewpot as Cait Kiernan. And it's actually sort of nice to know that it's not a joke with such a narrow audience that no one will ever get it. Though between this, and the fact that the spooky quasi-heroine of Silk is named Spyder, I'm beginning to suspect that my life is vibrating in harmony with some very strange frequencies indeed.

In other news: Friday night was a great time, and I must say that ilyaimy was the highlight of the evening - the asskickingest of three truly kickass bands. Trying to describe them, I find myself at the same loss as all who have tried and failed before me, and falling back on the same sort of Ani-diFranco-meets-Tool comparison that still falls far too short of giving you any real idea of what these guys do. It's not quite folk, or grunge, or punk, or prog, or anything else specifically, but it certainly pays homage to all of those things and more; "alternative" in the best and truest sense of the word. And whatever it is, it's furious and spooky and sharp-toothed and Dionysian, and you can goth-dance to it, which is just about all I ask of a band. Go thou now to their site, and download their stuff, and then go see them live if you can make it at all. And be glad that no one has as yet told rob that his guitar isn't a bodhran.

Also this weekend, I got a letter from Andy, and learned he also has a blog these days at http://abbockho.blogspot.com, which all should go and visit and revel in the eloquence of; you're sure at least to never look at basset hounds the same way again. And this also helped to inspire Stacy to start a fledgling blog of her own, with a title that tips a sequinned hat to the great Eddie Izzard. Poke poke poke.

Soon we'll all be exhibitionists, and it will be a better world.

In a time when sources of national pride are fast dwindling, I'm taking comfort where I can.

Reading Senator Byrd's reaction to the outbreak of war makes me damned proud to be an adopted West Virginian. Just as reading Umberto Eco's thoughts on the international situation from a few weeks ago makes me proud to be an Italian and an intellectual. And now, this meditation by Warren Ellis makes me proud to be a comics fan.

Small things, but significant. And at least I know who I want to be an ally of.

"I never could get the hang of Thursdays"

Pfft. Weird day. I just couldn't quite seem to get my head together. I've been tense and bitchy and irrational all week - the kind of depression that feels like you just did a line of crystal meth and drank a double scotch and got all the bad effects of both, but none of the benefits. Feh.

Thanks, Dubya.

Tomorrow, at least, is Friday, and I'm heading down to VA after work to see IlyAimy and The Dreamscapes Project at the Jammin' Java, in an effort to balance out the week by putting the coolness all at the end. Well, not all of it - I did get my Earth Covers Earth CD yesterday, and scored a used copy of Coil's Horse Rotorvator (speaking of Balance, ha ha) earlier in the week, so it hasn't all been fucked-up and weird, only mostly.

Not that Coil isn't fucked-up and weird, just in a cool way and not an annoying way. Um.

Oh, I also broke down at last and got myself a French press (take that, stupid national Francophobia) like I've been promising myself for a year and a half. I figured now's a good a time as any, since I'm a week away from entertaining another coffee connoiseur/junkie and I'll take any excuse to make a big pitcher of spoon-eating opaque java the way it's meant to be had and then inflict it on other people. And it comes with its own coaster! How cool is that?

So, yeah, a week from now this will be my Friday, and I'll be resting up for a big weekend of geeking out with Spyder (who is coming, undeterred by orange-alert paranoia, because when you work in the shadow of the Empire State Building in these troubled times, nothing fuckin' scares you anymore) and trying to think of fun things to do around Our Fair City. Normally I wouldn't worry about that sort of thing, but, quoth she, "I should at least pretend I didn't just watch movies for three days," and I sympathize; I remember all too well when I returned from my New York adventure last fall and having everyone ask me what I did all day, and wishing I had a more interesting answer than "sit in a Starbucks for five hours and have a big dorkgasm."

And speaking of travelling to cool places to do fun things, Stacy booked our fifth-anniversary trip to New Orleans tonight. Wheee! I dunno about anyone else, but for me, a long weekend of waking up and getting the buzz on in the Goth Capital of America is about as romantic as anything could possibly be, in every sense of the word. And it beats the hell out of freezing our asses off on the beach, which is not the most hospitable place in the middle of May.

Wooch. Five years. I don't feel grown-up enough to have been married for five years. Whatever is the world coming to?

Drink Before the War

Some interesting discussion is going on over at Revland, John Tynes' weblog, where he's posted a link to a thought-provoking article in today's Salon.com that makes an argument in favor of a war that will oust Saddam Hussein from power. It's very much worth a read, even if, like me, you ultimately disagree and oppose the war, or at least the war as it's being carried out by our Fearless Leader.

Such interesting times we live in. John Tynes supports the war not because he's a gung-ho militant uberpatriot, but because he's a compassionate idealist who cares very much about human rights; and I oppose it because, essentially, so am I. We just happen to be idealistic about very slightly different things. That brand of disagreement I can live with. And I won't deny that this situation has provided me with a number of troubling moral quandaries that have no easy answers.

Can I pretend that Saddam isn't a horrible despot who should have to answer for his many atrocities? Absolutely not.

Do I think that the "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad is the way to go about that? No. Nor do I trust my government's motives in this war to be idealistic or compassionate. Nor do I think that the potential fallout - in loss of life and resources and, heaven knows, civil liberties - to be an acceptable sacrifice.

Could the same thing - that is, the removal of Saddam from power - be accomplished by some other means? I have to believe so. I certainly think other options might have been tried. And I know that the rash and violent actions of my government have made it difficult to be proud of my country.

In any case, there are no easy answers. And I don't suspect it will get any easier from here.

***

On a lighter note, the latest installment of The Last Dark Art went up today. Appropriately enough, I talk about pressure.

Bloody synchronicity.

This week's most rewarding source of slack has been the webcomic Something Positive, which is geeky black humor of the kind that makes me grin evilly, and, not infrequently, laugh out loud like a moron. It's consistently good, and often brilliant, and has a lot of moments of things I wish I'd thought of first; go check it out. A caveat, though: it's probably not for the faint of heart. Lines like "I could menstruate a better cup of coffee than this" are at the mild end of SP's brand of mean-funny dialogue, so be prepared.

Turning a one-eighty of sorts from there, I also discovered just yesterday, on the advice of Neil Gaiman's blog, the delights of Gothic Miss Manners, the eloquent guardian of propriety for the black-clad and spooky set. And if I hadn't already been won over by the time I read it, the entry here would have made me a fan for life, where she says:

Oh, and it’s even MORE rude to shout requests for songs that aren’t by that band. Shouting “Freebird!” in the middle of a concert is tacky and dumb, not funny.

(Yes boys and girls, this really happened at a concert Gothic Miss Manners attended recently. She was appalled, and desperately wanted to go start stabbing the offenders with her hatpins.)

(As have I. But I'm glad I didn't have to be the one to say it.)

Tonight after work, I go to Union Station to scout out landmarks in the event it's impossible to decipher where the hell a train from New York is going to pull in. Much as it galls my Dionysian soul, it seems useful, when two short people are likely to be running around a very large place trying to locate one another, to have a Plan. So I shall do my best to formulate one that agrees with the local geography.

And that's all. Time for lunch.

Another Monday down. I keep killin' 'em, but they still keep a-comin'.

Had a nice weekend, starting with finally getting to cleaning out the spare room so it doesn't look, to quote Master Shake, like a flea market threw up in there. I hadn't really planned on doing it, but there I found myself on a fine Saturday afternoon, hauling our antique wicker table out to shop-vac it free of pink fiberglass and drywall, and it all kind of spiralled out from there. So it's now habitable. Which is good.

And then the Marthas called to say they were jonesing for a visit, and I went and picked them up at the Metro and then drove down to Virginia for Caren, whose gran is in the hospital and not expected to last out the week. She's holding up as well as a person can, poor girl, but she's flying up to Buffalo tomorrow night and I'll be going to and fro to Falls Church this week to make sure her cats have food and a clean place to poop. But we all had a pretty good time on Saturday night, aided slightly by the slacker's Holy Communion of beer and pizza (or in the case of the Marthas, who have the gift of lesbian natural class, rum-and-coke and pizza), though I'm afraid I had to derail a conversation about strippers that was begun rather enthusiastically by Martha L. and was threatening to get entirely out of control. Caren wound up staying the night, for which all were glad, and the earlier effort in reducing the biohazard in the spare room turned out to be well-spent indeed.

Last night I made a batch of red-pepper-and-cilantro-enhanced salsa which was pretty successful, and which I think may have improved by a night in the fridge and undergoing whatever strange alchemy takes place in tomato dishes during hours and hours of sitting in the cold. I've been seized by odd urges in the culinary department lately, most of which seem to involve making sauces and then spending a week or two finding things to put them on. But so far the results have been positive, so I'll see where else it takes me.

And this weekend brings my mom, and another peace-rally in our fair town. The one last weekend managed to get Alice Walker arrested, for which the Dubya regime can add some more tally-marks to its lousy karma scorecard; this one's bringing down the Smeds from the wilds of Pennsylvania, and I don't think those GOP-brains know who they're fucking with there. And if Bill brings along a spot of Old Fart Pale Ale, they may have cause to fear me too. We shall see.

I just now, just moments ago, received my copy of the Princess Mononoke DVD I ordered last week from half.com. Hooray!

I'm thinking that's probably another 135 minutes that just got shaved off the sleep I'll get the weekend of the 28th. So it goes.

Have calmed down quite a bit since going all Spider Jerusalem in Wednesday's post, though I haven't changed my mind about any of it (I stand by my assertion that if having a johnson makes it hard for you to use a fax machine or a photocopier, you're doing it wrong). But I've had some faith restored that sense prevails in the circles where it matters. I really believe that the day will come when all the tiny-minded will be lonely folk indeed; perhaps not in my lifetime, or my progeny's, but someday. I can hope, anyway.

Wednesday, also, was the birthday of David Tibet, which might account for any number of strange energies in circulation last week. So in belated celebration, I tip this glass of heady wine, from "The Cloud of Unknowing" on the brilliant, haunting Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre:

Under the rain and teeth of gods
Under the pain and sleeping liddy eyes
Under the brokked wetful heaven
If you are there
If you are there
If you are there
Then I am singing with my eyes

Blessings of the Thunder Perfect Mind on you, Mr. Tibet. And many happy returns indeed.

Rant and Mini-Manifesto

Recent events - the details of which I won't get into - have brought on the following dose of high-test vitriol:

You will find, I think, no greater marker for the idiocy of what might be called "mainstream" society than the fact that it has been so successful in making feminism a dirty word. The real truth is that the only people who have a right to be offended by feminism are people who have something to lose by women being treated fairly and equally. If you are a person of this sort, and find feminism offensive or distasteful, you're obviously reaping the benefits in some way of the double-standards of an unfair system, and you are therefore a moron and a fuckwit and I have neither sympathy nor patience for you.

(And I really, really don't want to hear about how old-fashioned "gentlemanly" codes of conduct were so respectful of women. It's respect for women that makes me an enemy of "chivalry." Remember, folks, a pedestal seems nice until you're up on it, at which time you discover two things: first, you've got nowhere else to go; and second, you're now an easy target. Demolish pedestals, and let people be people, for fuck's sake.)

I also have neither time nor sympathy for anyone who still thinks that work ought to be divided up on the basis of anatomy that has no bearing on the process involved. A phallus does not impede one's ability to wash dishes or type a memo, nor is it of any actual use when, say, swinging a hammer (or, as has recently been demonstrated, a golf club). To paraphrase Lloyd Alexander: Men have complained about doing women's work, and women have complained about doing men's work, but the work has never been heard to complain about who was doing it.

And yet nonsense and fuckwittage have had such a hold on people's minds for so long that their legacy continues to horrify. That it should be acceptable, in the year two-thousand-and-fucking-three, for otherwise decent and intelligent grown men to let pass a reference to a thirtysomething competent, professional woman as a "girl" (in a sense and context that clearly implies "secretary") is nothing short of sickening. We should all be further along than this. Such things are neither cute, nor quaint, nor "just a figure of speech." They're insulting and demeaning and, at the very least, moronic. I won't deny that political correctness has had some silly excesses in its day, but I'd hope that anyone with even a little sense and sensitivity could see that one.

And another thing, while I'm on a roll: I'm about fucking sick of the way feminist men are cast by the popular consciousness as either weak and whiny dweebs or double-talking (and often actually predatory) frauds. This is the kind of thing that sets my rage a-boil, so I now put out the call to all males of heart: If you're waffling about tagging yourself with the f-word, now is the time to cut it the hell out. If you're not a fuckwit, and you believe that women are your equals, then you're a feminist, so quit being embarassed and speak up - for the sake of your wives, your girlfriends, your women friends, your mothers, sisters, aunts, and daughters (and maybe especially the last). Say "I am a feminist" and fucking dare your good-old-boy acquaintances to take you down for it.

End of rant. But I make no apologies either for tone or content. My patience has run out. Deal, world.

So, from today, I have one month to perfect the formula for the Famous Tzatziki or face Hobbit-wrath. Can it be done?

Some things I discovered while working on the latest batch the other night:
- The juice of one lime is sufficient per one large container of yoghurt. More than that results in a slight citrus overkill. Not awful, but not perfect.
- You always need more garlic than you think you do. Always always. The same is often true for olive oil, but not to the same extent.
- The cucumbers are actually a little better chopped fine by hand than pulverized in the Cuisinart. It gives the sauce a nice texture and sustains interest. (I never thought I'd say that. This is actually the only way I even like raw cucumbers. Weird.) I may yet have to weigh out the merits of peeled-vs.-unpeeled, but for now, unpeeled and diced very small seems to work just fine.
- I've been pondering experimenting with the vinegar. I've been using cider vinegar for as long as I've been doing this particular recipe, even though every "official" tzatziki recipe I've seen calls for plain old white vinegar. It's such a small amount - just a little splash per batch - that I wonder if it makes much difference. (Balsamic vinegar is a great big no-no, though, as I learned some time ago to my distress.)

Food obsession? Not me. Not Italian at all.

Hopefully, this weekend will bring a new computer and assorted toys. We've been throwing around the idea of ordering one, but receiving packages at home from anyone but the good old postal service is such a major pain in the ass that it hardly seems worth whatever bargain we'd get on one. (Last thing we need is to have FedEx drop off our nice shiny new Dell outside our door and have it vanish before we get home.) So I think we're going out tomorrow and having a look around, and then jump on whatever deal seems least sucky.

And Tuesday, my birthday present from Stacy came in, one month late exactly. But that's okay, because it was this. My wife is the best.

Things are looking up these days. We're at something like normal now; our bedroom has been de-holed and cleaned and almost doesn't smell like smoke anymore, and we got new sheets on Friday and slept in there again for the first time in days. Life goes on, in its inevitable way.

Still getting the shakes every so often, especially seeing it was only a week ago tonight we were stumbling out through snowdrifts to escape disaster, and it still kind of feels like we beat the devil somehow and don't deserve our good fortune. But, as I'm wont to tell people, nobody really deserves their fortune, good or bad; you just deal with what life throws at you. And Stacy and I are probably closer because of this, and that's a good thing.

As of last night, the kitties are no longer resident here (as they were all week, not being able to go to the hotel with Angie). It was nice to have them here, even though we never really saw them. (They hid in the closet all week while we were awake, the poor scared things. My closest contact was getting scratched and bitten by Spike as I tried to extricate him from the spare-room closet where he'd wandered in sometime in the wee hours of Wednesday night; I sustained some well-deserved wounds from that, which should serve as a warning to anyone thinking of trying some cat-wrestling in your underwear. Not recommended.)

So now we're having a nice Sunday-night relax, and I'm oddly enough not feeling as terrorized as usual at the thought of going back to work tomorrow. Maybe a return to some kind of routine is not such a bad thing now. And even the snow is much less of a pain in the ass than it was a week ago. I feel relieved about a long list of things.

And today is Spyder's birthday; she came into the world on this appropriately Illuminated date way back in dystopian 1984, almost two months after I saw Dune in a cold little theatre in Parkersburg, WV. (The fact that I have a friendship with an adult who was born after the release of Dune is very weird to me, and a little depressing. But anyway.) So go on over to her website, and give la mia sorella some hits and some loooove.

Wooch. What a week. Here's hoping they get better for a while.

Disaster. Relief.

Sometime after ten o'clock last night, the apartment building adjoining ours caught fire.

We don't know why. Someone being stupid and careless, in all likelihood. It hardly matters. We ran outside while our bedroom filled with smoke and with hardly more than the clothes on our backs and watched the fire fighters do everything they could, in two feet of snow, in the driving sleet, hardly feeling anything through the adrenaline and sick fear. When we heard the water was frozen in the lines, we prayed like anything they could get it to flow. And, eventually, they did, and we cheered and lost sight of the whole scene in clouds of steam and smoke.

And when we were all sent down to the rental office, I thought I'd hear by the end of the night that we'd lost everything, that the roof had caught, that there had been too much smoke, that we'd be out of a home. I thought of the irreplaceable artwork in our apartment, and the unfinished writings, and my countless, precious books. I felt like William of Baskerville watching the Abbey library burn. And Stacy and I sat in the office with all the other refugees from two apartment buildings for the unbearable long hours we had to wait, and hugged each other, and mostly felt glad to be alive.

And then, sometime in the small cold hours, someone told us that the residents of the 2221 building could go home. Yes, even the ones in the third-floor units. The building was safe. The damage was contained.

We wandered home and took stock. We saw where the firemen had liberated a small bookcase to use, I assume, as a makeshift stepstool, spilling its contents on the floor; we saw where they'd broken through our bedroom ceiling and scattered drywall and insulation across the carpet; and we so, so did not care.

We slept in our spare room. About four o'clock, our neighbor Angie came, who lived in the basement unit of the building that burned, and slept on our sofa. (We met her for the first time last night, standing underdressed in the snow, terrified for her cats; they lived through it, and are around here somewhere too, terrified and hiding but okay.) We couldn't believe we were home. We couldn't believe we had one.

What would we have done if we'd been burned out and lost everything? Where would we have gone? I don't know. We're snowed in, and will be for some time.

Did the foot or more of snow on the rooftops make the difference in delaying the fire? Did it do more good that way than the harm it did freezing the pipelines? I don't know that either.

I know that I look at the gutted remains of the 2219 building, through which the sky can be seen, and am filled with queasy horror, knowing that we came within quite literal inches of sharing its fate. I know that every time I try and talk about this, I end up speechless and babbling incoherently, unable to frame what happened in words, unable to even figure out how I feel about it. I know I'll be damn glad when the maintenance folks clean up the mess in our place (Such a little thing! So cosmetic!), and when we get our gas and hot water back. I know that I ache for normality. And I just can't, can't believe how lucky we were.

I laugh at inappropriate things. When we walked in to see our computer gleefully running its idiot screensaver as if nothing unusual had happened, I almost had a fit of hysteria. Almost everything is unbelievably surreal.

I'm okay. Stacy is okay. Poor Angie will be okay eventually, and rebuild her life as best she can. I'm fighting the urge to crawl off somewhere and wait for the world to go away. The adrenaline has run out, and I feel incredibly numb. This should have been a weekend to relax and enjoy being snowed in, enjoy the unexpected extra time off tomorrow. Instead, I sit here and shake my head and sigh and don't know how the hell to feel.

My world went very briefly nova last night. I hope and pray, if there's anything worth praying to, that it may yet collapse back to something like its former shape. In the meantime, I'll be here, looking in wonder at the wreckage around me, insensate and uncomprehending. Counting my blessings and my good fortune. Waiting to not feel like such a shellshocked wreck.

Oh, my. Well, it's good to be popular.

Went to the Jammin' Java's Open Mic on Monday night and had a grand time. It's a really nice venue for playing music as well as seeing other people play - almost exactly the kind of pretentious coffeehouse atmosphere that I suspected the Moonlit Port aspired to, back in its day. I did "Master Van Rijn" and "One of Those Nights" to a receptive crowd, and didn't even feel too outclassed by the many talented folks who also did their thing, and did it well, all the rest of the evening.

Met some nice and friendly people that way, including a very talented guy named John who spent the last eight years in China (and thus may be the only person I've met in a decade who knew who Cui Jian was when I mentioned him) and an extraordinarily nice woman named Kris who had glowing things to say about my material, which always makes me happy happy. Also got reacquainted, after two years (!!), with IlyAimy's ubertalented Rob, who since I last saw him has done something odd with his beard that makes him look vaguely like a young Steven Brust. And so I step, ever so tentatively, back into the waters of a musical community, and it was pretty good.

Stacy's home sick today, hopefully not with what I had, which I wouldn't wish on anyone. Bleah.

I hear that, against all precedent, my brother may be making the trip for our big party next weekend. Whee! If memory serves me right, this will be the largest gathering we've hosted in all the years we've been here (if most of the invited show up, anyway). This is what comes of the demise of the Purple Penguin, I suppose; the payoff's that no one will find themselves at midnight with a sword at their throat, as was once known to happen from time to time with some of Jeff's more unruly guests. I guess that's a good or bad thing, depending on your tastes. And speaking of tastes, I'm making my Famous Tzatziki for the occasion, and that's always good.

Only the third post of the year. Gods and powers, but that's pathetic.

Recovered lately from a week-long sickness of mysterious origin, which laid me up for many days and filled my head with unpleasantness. Had one of those visits to the doctor where the medical professional says "I don't really know what's wrong with you, have some antibiotics" and sends you back home to drink fluids. I'm much better now. Also more or less recovered from my recent bout with depression, which got a lot worse before it got better, but resulted in my decision to look into some good honest medication for this, something I think I've put off for as long as I can. I'm fighting the weird nagging feeling that doing so means I've failed somehow to beat this by my own devices, even though I know that's just dumb; I've spent the last three years really, really not wanting to, I don't know, "resort" to that. I think, though, that I'm beginning to resign myself to it being a bigger enemy than I can face down naked, as it were. And it's very possible that three years ago I hadn't learned enough of the things that I got out of a year and a half of therapy, and drugs would have been a bad idea anyway. I don't know. I'm going to talk to the professionals about this and see what happens. But the idea that something might give me an edge over the ... irrational, crushing despair that looms over me gives me a lot of hope for the future.

Last night I had a semi-unexpected treat of going to see Jim's Big Ego at the Jammin' Java in Vienna (and it's a measure of how airheaded I am that, after four and a half years of living here, I had no idea Vienna is as close as it is), which is a great venue and has an open mic I'm now determined to go to; it was an excellent show, and JBE got some new local fans, I think, as is right and good. And I also became an instant fan of the opening band, The Dreamscapes Project, who are quite awesomely good and a bunch of nice guys to boot.

Currently reading The Man Who Was Thursday, one of those books I can't help but feel I ought to have read by now, and it's as good as its publicity - one of the few "classics" that I'm not finding to be a fight to get through. It's odd - I can do Shakespeare, and Marlowe, easily enough, and I do alright with a decent translation of Chaucer or Dante, but works in English from about 1800 to 1920 are frequently like fighting taffy for me. But Chesterton's very nearly as good as Neil Gaiman says he is, even if you have to get past his respectable Edwardian Christianity at times. Also nearly done with Mieville's The Scar, started the night before my birthday and even better than Perdido Street Station. Mieville, despite being occasionally as big an opinionated pain in the ass in his own way as Chesterton, is a brilliant and visionary writer, and fantasy is lucky to have him. Were I James Lipton, I'd say he was "delightful," but I'm not and I won't.

And finally, after the long silence of all Muse-ish energies, I'm getting the urge to write again myself, possibly tooling around with something new for a while before taking up old projects. About time, too.

Okay, off to clean now. Matt's coming up to visit from the District tonight, and it's always useful to have a clean slate on which to write the evening's inevitable debauchery - a word I'll use in the absence of one which more accurately reflects the kind of classy reveling one gets up to with upwardly-mobile gay professionals. Hard to really feel comfortable describing a bottle of wine and a plate of crackers and feta as "debauchery," but it messes up the coffee table just as bad as hot wings and beer, so I'll let it stand.

And now I'm just rambling. More later.