(based on input from etcet in his personal LJ)

Instructions: Reply to this meme by yelling 'Words!' and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

The five words given to me by etcet:

Tits - Yes, please. Like martinis, one is not enough and three are too many. How well you know me, sir. The bigger the better, although I believe I have found my upper limit. And real, if you please. No cyborgs, they turn me right off. I prefer a modestly-endowed woman with her original factory equipment than a surgically-enhanced monster. Fake breasts may look good under clothing, but they are useless for anything else. Also note that the word "boobs," although somewhat childish, is more acceptable in polite company. But then, I have no polite company.

Texas - It's all good. Strangely, I like east Texas the least. My interest increases the farther west I go (with the exception of El Paso, which is, putting it nicely, not a resort town). But the trans-Pecos region is beautiful and stark. If I had the money and could vacation anywhere, I'd go to west Texas. And then continue on to New Mexico.

Writing - I have 150 pages of a novel somewhere. I should finish the damn thing. If Stephen King can write ten pages a day, I should be able to manage three.

Reclamation - ¿Que? I have no idea what you mean here, so I have none of my usual sass. Personally, my life is in need of reclamation. I need renewal: financial, social, and spiritual. I should call my cousins in Dallas: my near-relatives here are useless for moral support. And I need my moral support.

Gigantic Hamburgers - For some reason, at first I only saw the word "gigantic" and thought you were being redundant. (For those of you who came late to Camp Crystal Lake, etcet is referring to our one and only face-to-face meeting, at Port of Call in New Orleans, where gigantic hamburgers are served.) And now, you've just made me hungry. I'll have to have one for lunch. And a Dite-Rite cola, because I'm watching the weight. Har.

I went to Scare Escape last night. Blair and I resumed where we left off, wherever that is. We sat at the bar when no one else was there and traded "Trivial Pursuit" questions for awhile. We didn't actually play: Blair hates to lose, she's very competitive, and I won't throw the game. So we just traded questions until the bar got a few customers, then I left.

This isn't going to work, if every time I look at the buttons on the front of her dress, or her sweater, I imagine unbuttoning them, one by one. I thought perhaps I had gotten past that stage. Apparently not. Not going to work at all, especially if she's now planning to buy a house over on the west side of town with The Young Man.

     "Child Roland to the dark tower came,
      His word was still 'Fie, fo, and fum;
      I smell the blood of a British man.'"

--King Lear, III, 4

I am going to Scare Escape to reconcile with Blair.

I don't know how long I've got to live. No one does. Thirty years? Forty? Fifty? At the moment, I'm fed up with what Mark Twain called "the damned human race." Cynical beyond belief. I hope the next world, if there is one, is better than this one. I hope it has some decent people in it. At the moment, I feel that the only two choices I have are hating myself (and turning my anger inward) and hating everyone else (and turning my anger outward). I'm tired of hating myself, so the rest of you get it. At least I don't hate what I see in the mirror, which was what I did for the first half of my life. Right now I hate the world and everyone in it. Consider yourselves fortunate that I don't have a button in my hand that would blow up the Earth, because with the mood I'm in now, I'd use it.

I'm sure I'll get over this bad patch eventually.

I hope your Fourth of July was good. Mine was not.

Woody Allen's collected work is a little like Jane Austen's. They both have a very narrow patch of ground to tend, but it's immaculately well-maintained and groomed. The complaint by the writer of this essay is that the garden isn't bigger or more diverse, and it's a valid complaint. But you can't be all things to all people. At Allen's age, it's admirable that he's still trying to stretch (even a little bit) as an artist. But he never gets really far from his comfort zone.

The writer of the essay is complaining that Woody Allen doesn't treat themes with which Allen isn't familiar as well as he treats themes and subjects with which he is familiar. That's like complaining that it's not as warm in winter as it is in summer. Allen has his small patch of ground and he tends it well. It's not a large plot, and it ends at the Hudson River, but it's neat and prim and well-kept.

Clint Eastwood (about the same age) has tried, and succeeded, with far more diverse themes and subjects than Allen has. That doesn't make Eastwood a "better" director. He's taken more chances and succeeded with them more often, and his work is more diverse. Apples and oranges. Don't expect Georgia O'Keefe to paint a seascape, and don't expect Ansel Adams to use color film.

I'm not having much success with my current job search. I guess I should delete "does not work and play well with others" from my résumé.

People remake good movies because they liked them. It's a form of homage. So only good movies get remade. Unfortunately, as good movies, they don't need to be remade. The movies that need to be "re-made" are the abysmally bad movies--but of course, because they were bad in the first place, no one wants to be associated with them. No one wants to risk spending millions of dollars renewing a tainted concept.

Having said that, I wonder what a full-scale, $150 million remake of Plan Nine From Outer Space would look like. Think of it: aliens create the Zombie Apocalypse in order to take over the world. It would be half-horror, half science-fiction, like Alien (which was a haunted-house movie in space). Or I suppose a better comparison would be with Event Horizon. I think it could work. But no one would dare fund it.

Perhaps the aliens' idea is to alter the progress of life on Earth going as far back as the dinosaurs. (This would all be shown in a short prologue.) The first plan would've been "kill the dinosaurs by deflecting an asteroid." The other eight would take us up to the present day: genetic engineering, black monolith stuff. The aliens' last "plan" is zombification of the dead. Or perhaps that wasn't their plan, but something went horribly wrong: the first eight plans go fine and on schedule, but the ninth goes horribly wrong. You could just shorten the title to Plan Nine. Think what Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay would do with it. (On second thought, don't.) But I still think it might work.

(ETA: I just realized that technically Plan Nine From Outer Space was already "remade," because Phantasm had the same basic plot. But I'm talking a summer blockbuster here, not a cheap B-movie treatment.)

Heaven? Hell? It's not that simple. But leave it to the extemely "devout" to reduce something so complex and transcendent to a black-and-white dichotomy.

We associate hell with "down" and heaven with "up." Hell is supposed to be deep underground, which is a coincidence considering underground is where we usually put the dead to begin with. How convenient. But the devout of old didn't have the ability to shoot the bodies of the saintly into space, after all.

Heaven and hell are thought of as places, which is a simplistic way of looking at the afterlife. (It's a little like reducing God to a very old, white-haired, white-bearded man wearing white robes and sitting on a golden throne somewhere in the clouds.) It's a big universe; I'd imagine God would put heaven farther away, if only to demonstrate how far we are from Him. I concede that the image of hell as a big cavern underground full of lava, flames, and huge vats of molten tungsten has its ability to scare people straight, but I don't think it's literally a description of hell. I don't think heaven is in the clouds. These are symbols of a person's spiritual state. And what about possible alien civilizations? Any discussion of afterlife must be more inclusive than our planet.

I believe that heaven and hell are as real as our dreams. Obviously nightmares have the ability to frighten and terrify. They are real to the person experiencing them, and that's all that is necessary. Pleasant dreams have the ability to evoke wonder and awe, and that's an analogue to heaven.

We will all get the afterlife that each of us deserve, irrevocably, even if it's not a place but rather a mental state or a spiritual state. Consider it a dream (or a nightmare) that you never wake up from. It's like being trapped in your own psyche forever. For the saints, that would be heaven. For the evil among us, I can think of no greater punishment than to be trapped for all eternity with nothing but their own black souls for company. And for the rest of us, perhaps something in the middle. We each get the afterlife that we deserve--which was the whole idea of the doctrine anyway, right?

In the first place, I'm sick of sceptics taking an almost "proprietary" attitude toward science. Everyone performs "science." Science is nothing more than trial and error (although professionals usually operate at a far more exacting and precise and measured level than everyone else). A child playing in the sandbox is "performing science"--he's learning about the laws of physics and "how the world works." For that matter, a dog trying to escape from a fenced-in backyard is "performing science" when he tries to jump over the fence (and it doesn't work) and then tries to dig under the fence (and it does--or doesn't). That's trial and error. That's forming a tentative hypothesis and testing it using experimentation and observation. Even an animal can do that.

What I object to are people who are by nature sceptics demanding that everyone else needs to be a sceptic as well, as though science and scepticism are synonymous rather than frequently co-existent. As I've just said, even a child (or an animal) can "perform science."

A non-sceptic may have certain ideas about the universe. As long as they are untestable, those beliefs are "not science." That says nothing about their truth or falsity, because absent experimentation those beliefs are simply hypotheses. They may be true or false. Absent experimental evidence, they are "undefined." What these scientists get wrong is that they assume that at any given time the "truth" is what they can know. Truth and the ability of a human to "know" something (which is a philosophical position, not a scientific one) are not synonyms. Getting back to the dog in the backyard scenario: if you threw a book on quantum mechanics into the backyard with the dog, the dog could tear the pages, chew the cover, or even bury the book. That says nothing about the book's truth or falsity. What it does demonstrate are the cognitive and perceptual limits of the dog.

Scientists need to learn a little humility and admit that just as there are limitations on a dog's cognitive and perceptual ability, so there are limits on humanity's. That does not invalidate the idea of science. It does, however, limit it.

Speaking of feeling as if you want to be carried along in a basket, I feel like that again today. I can't cope: "The one set of footsteps, my son, was when I carried you"--and I need to be carried. It's not meant to be a permanent thing, but I need to be carried. Then I need to be taught, slowly and carefully, to walk, with no need of the basket.


Perhaps a call to Mary R________ who lives over in Madisonville would not be a bad idea. She's always supportive. It's not a long drive, maybe I could talk to her in person. I have cousins in Dallas I could call.

No one cares enough to help. I'm not asking to be carried along in the basket forever. Quite the opposite. I want to be surrounded by people who can teach me a little emotional self-reliance. I don't know many people like that. 'Til then, basket.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.



Married.

" . . . Did you cry, but nothing came? . . . "

God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.

"Well, I just saw Hailey's Comet
Shooting
Said why you always running
In place?
Even the Man in the
Moon disappears
Somewhere in the stratosphere . . . "

OK, those of you who might have been following the latest drama with Blair at Scare Escape (and even if you haven't, even if I'm just typing this for self-therapy), there's new wrinkle.

Blair has apparently completely freaked out and has been going around behind my back telling the staff and regulars at Scare Escape that I basically walked in last Wednesday and, out of a clear blue sky, started asking her about her sex life. If you remember, that is not what happened. I just got a call from Mike Schilling, the owner, who told me on the phone that Blair's story was that I walked in and, with no preamble, started asking her about her sex life, that Blair was extremely creeped out by it, and that if there was a choice to make between firing Blair and banning me from the bar, he'd take Blair's side. I told him my side of it, and as God is my witness, I'm telling you the truth when I say "that's not the way it happened."

So I am about to be banned, apparently, from the only place in town I even feel remotely at home. Because of a woman, naturally. Because the woman is getting believed over me, naturally. And my anonymous friend is right. They never were my friends after all. None of them. When the chips are down, they just pretended to be my friends . . . so that I would tip them.

"Tell my mother,
Tell my father
I've done the best I can
To make them realise
This is my life.
I hope they understand.
I'm not angry, I'm just saying . . .
Sometimes goodbye
Is a second chance. "

"Your blog is boring. Who cares what you think?"--Spider Jerusalem, Fresno, CA

Dear Spider:
This is LiveJournal. Half the people here are college sophomores posting about what they had for lunch. On the other hand, there are people here posting about every kind of hobby, not to say every kind of sexual fetish, that you can imagine. Some of the comms here have posts and comments that are quite literate. You can actually learn a few things here. My personal LJ isn't so much a list of my daily activities and dramas as it is a record, a snapshot, of my mental or emotional state on a given day. First and foremost, it's here to give me a vent. Consider it a kind of emotional heat-sink. That doesn't mean I don't consider the hundreds dozens three of you that read this, it just means that it's firstly self-therapy and only secondly me trying out my comedy routine.


"In addition to bad grammar, you make errors both historical and logical."--Gianna Michaels, King of Prussia, PA

Dear Gianna:
Yes, well, I only made it through the first two years of college, and I had to go to about seven colleges to get *THAT* far. My apologies. I've always admired people like yourself who can spell "Mediterranean" and "Renaissance" the first time without having to look them up. By the way, the capital of Vermont is Montpelier. I concede that I get a little rusty about "who" and "whom." Also, the Ottoman Empire, where apparently the chairs didn't have any backs--I'm a little rusty about that whole period of world history. And the Byzantine Empire. And the Goths--I mean the historical ones. And I know that Charlemagne was born or died or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in AD 800. And I use "BC" and "AD." Fuck that political correctness bullshit. Fortunately, my borderline Asperger's Syndrome allows me to stick to a project until it's done, so it's not all bad. What was your question again?


"I like what you write, but my eyes are getting tired."--Tony Stark, Palo Alto, CA

Dear Tony:
OK, I get a little long-winded trying to describe my latest conversation with the "hot" bartender at Scare Escape. It's a literary device. It's one of those scenarios where the narrator is not entirely reliable and gives away information that he doesn't realize he's giving away. Sort of like Lolita. Okay, bad example there. But I'll bet you thought I wasn't paying attention to the whole "unreliable narrator" aspect of the whole thing, didn't you? Nope, I'm one step ahead of you, Tony. Point noted, but gotcha. Yes, yes, pathetic older man with crush on nubile young girl that he will (in all probability) never have. I read the ending. Believe me, I jumped ahead and read the ending. Let me spoil it for you: Your Humble Narrator never does Get The Girl. She goes off with her boyfriend and eventually marries him and they move to Spain. Oh, sorry: ***SPOILER ALERT*** The narrator, when he realizes this, goes home and cries like a child. All the books in that series end like that. Oh, and Dumbledore's gay.

"What filthy piece of . . . shit . . . did I do now?"
--Gary Oldman in The Professional

This journal was never meant to be a list of what I do on any given day. It's a snapshot of my ideas and emotions on any given day. As I said in my very first post, more or less: no one wants to know what I had for lunch.

I feel like a baby--no, older than a baby, but still mostly helpless--a toddler. I feel like a toddler, being carried along in a wicker basket. Mostly helpless. I can feel the rocking back and forth, the lack of contact with the floor, I can see the texture of the ceiling overhead. I want to be taken care of. I want to be nurtured. I want to be loved. I want to be taught good habits and independence of spirit, so that I don't have to be borne along in this basket permanently. I want to be helped. And if they can't help me, the least they can do is not make it worse.

I can't stay here. Everyone in this house dislikes me. Even my nephew has taken a persistent dislike to me, and I thought he respected me. The only beings in this house that love me are my sister's dogs and maybe my niece. I have to get out of here.

I have no money left. I haven't been able to find a job, and I am tired of my sister telling me, every time I try to find one, that my efforts are inadequate. Fuck her. I am surrounded by emotional incompetents who couldn't nuture if the world were coming to an end. I'm even on the outs with Blair, and that feels like the end of the world, because that was the only bright spot in my day sometimes.

An online IQ test.

Warning: the test begins as soon as you click the link. Spatial reasoning, no verbal, useful regardless of language. Thirty-nine questions. You have a time limit of forty minutes.

(Ah, a relevant topic at last, ripped from today's headlines.)

Sex. Come to think of it, that's what I miss most now.

Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate.

Just kidding.

The first mother I thought of was actually June Cleaver from Leave It To Beaver.