A Surprise Guest Appearance Of Purest Love

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” Eric said.  “I never sleep well when my wife’s not in the room with me.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I haven’t slept next to Gini in two weeks.”
Gini is having some fairly serious back issues, and as a result the big floofy bed we bought is hurting her.  She’s sleeping in the guest room with the firmer bed, which is a) much smaller, and b) in a room flooded with light when the sun rises, which doesn’t bother her but does wake me the heck up.
So we’ve been sleeping apart.  And that worries us.  We’ve got our own personal rule that “When couples start sleeping in separate beds, they’re in trouble” – which, yes, I’ll probably hear from a hundred people that they sleep in separate beds and they’ve been married for seventy-billion years, but we know of at least three couples where moving into separate beds led to moving into separate houses and then into separate relationship statuses.
And for us, that sort of late-night reconnection is a strength of ours.  We don’t really cuddle all that much – the floofy bed is a fucking quicksand pit – but hearing her next to me, her scent filling the room, being able to reach out and feel her, is just a pillar of reassurance for me.  I sleep sketchily without my sweetie, twisting and turning, but her back is in dire straits and until we get her chronic pain managed (which we hope we can and soon), we need to be in separate locations.
Without Gini, I go to bed later, because I need to be exhausted before I can drop off.  My friends have noted my later-night texts.  I play Civilization 5 until I’m practically nodding off, and even then sometimes I’ll just pop awake and be unable to get back to sleep because this empty bed is lonely.
It’s pathetic.  It’s loving.  There’s not a contradiction here; we need each other, and are so adoring of each other that we work at home and feel isolated if Gini has to go work in a separate room.
And so, last night, I finished up putting the finishing touches on my early-civ American empire, having just built a University in every township, and slogged to bed wearily.
And there was a Gini.
“I’m going to try to sleep here,” she said.  “I need this.”
And she did.
And I dreamed that David Bowie had visited my house, and was hanging around singing songs for me, and that things were going well and when I woke she was there and I had work to do but by God my sweet love was next to me and the day was going to be better.
Nearly fifteen years, and still that in love.

I'm Going To Eat Goop For A Solid Week, And Probably Not Die

I’m going to eat goop and nothing but goop for a week straight, and see whether it kills me.
That’s a bit of overstatement because I’m pretty sure the goop won’t kill me.  The goop – a yeasty, thick paste many have compared to watered-down pancake batter – is scientifically designed to provide all the nutrients a human needs.  Its proponents tell me I could live on nothing but the goop and still be a healthy human being.
The goop is called Soylent – and no, it’s not made of people, all those jokes have been made – and it’s been getting a lot of press over the last year, a kind of Reddit thread forged from madness and made flesh.  A bunch of starving students asked, “Why am I paying for food when I could just put the raw vitamins and proteins in a bag, and skip this whole tedious eating process?”  And after a while of tinkering with various formulas – there’s actually a considerable Do-It-Yourself Soylent movement – they perfected the formula.  A beige glutinous mass that, when consumed, could replace every meal you ever needed.
(I’ve read a ton of articles on Soylent, but the best primer is probably this New Yorker article – which is fascinating reading, if you’re interested.)
“But why would you subsist on Soylent alone, Ferrett?” you cry.  “Aren’t you the guy who’s going around the country to eat at Michelin-starred restaurants, reviewing them?  Don’t you love food?”
And I do love food.  I love it so much that to me, this is the ultimate kind of food to eat.  It’s a food that demands a total lifestyle change, one that could completely alter how I view eating – because the folks who have lived on Soylent for a time have noted dramatic changes, scornfully referring to food as “recreational eating.”  A week is a comparatively small time to eat nothing but Soylent in the scheme of things, but I suspect that week will take frickin’ forever.
Yet what happens if it turns out this works for me?  I love food, Lord knows, but I’m addicted to all the wrong kinds; even after a triple-bypass, I still crave a fatty steak, crave that sugary cake, long for the fatal smears of peanut butter.  Yes, I’ll be missing out on the vital micronutrients that natural foods bring, but let’s be honest here: even with the smoothies, I’m still eating way more Pop Tarts than berries.  It could be that this is healthy.
And what happens with all the time and money I’d save?  “What to eat” would be a choice removed from my life, a choice that until now has consumed a lot of time, because I love variety.  Will I find better uses for that time, or just dork around on Civilization 5?  How would I meet with friends, considering “drinks and dinner” is the normal social excuse?  And what horrors will this beige fluid wreak upon my digestive system?
Only one way to find out.
Alas, y’all won’t find out right away, as all orders of Soylent are backed up 10-12 weeks.  (I could brew my own, of course, but I’ve seen what my first crafts projects look like and I would not want to put them in my belly.)  But yes, I will be blogging about this whole experience from first cup to last glutinous sip, and I’ll let you know how this all works.  If you’d like to play along at home, well, an order of Soylent is only $85 for a week’s supply.
The crazier bit: my wife, who is a Michael Pollan fanatic, forever bringing up her hatred of artificial foods and chanting Pollan’s mantra of “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” has decided she wants in on this crazytrain.  For she, too, is curious about what sorts of lifestyle changes occur when you reduce your eating world to purest nutrition.
When I pitched the idea at her, I expected to be scoffed at, not joined.  But hey!  That’s why we’re happily married; every once in a while, I remember she’s just as nuts as I am.  Especially when we go out back to tend to our beehives.
So. Coming in 10-12 weeks: the complete replacement of my diet with goop.  Blogged for your entertainment.
I’m sure you can’t wait.

One Other Thought On "The Girl In The Road"

So my buddy Monica Byrne’s debut novel “The Girl In The Road” (out tomorrow) is getting the best kinds of reviews, as far as I’m concerned – a jagged mix of 1-stars and 5-stars.
Which is to say that Mark Rosewater wrote a column a long time ago discussing how averages can lie, talking about how Magic card ratings can be misleading.  A three-star average can mean that this card is pretty damn “meh” – people looked at this card, thought it was okay, and moved on.
But a three-star average can also mean that half the people in the world gave it five stars, more than five stars, fell in love with this card and married it and had little cardboard babies.  And the other half hated it, thought it was dreck, couldn’t see why anyone had printed it.
Those three-star averages are the gold, my friends.  The real controversial stuff lies in those types of three-star reviews, because you’ve dug to something that either hit a heart-vein or punctured your spleen.  Awwww, yeah.  (Not that Monica’s at three stars, more like three-point-eight, but still.  Wild variances.  Which is fucking awesome.)
But in retrospect, what I liked about her novel is that it’s not really a sci-fi novel, but it totally is.
Which is to say that most science fiction novels (and fantasy!) revolve around the science fiction element.  If you have an artificial intelligence in a story, 99 times out of 100 the tale will revolve around understanding something about how this AI works.  If you have a spaceship, understanding how the spaceship works will be a plot point.  If you have genetic supermen, you’ll discover something about the origins of the genetic supermen and what that means for the future of the genetic supermen.
Monica’s tale has no real scientific backstory.
Which is fucking beautiful.
I use iPhones all the time, but there’s never going to be a point in my life where the thread of my existence will balance upon understanding the App Store.  I drive in technologically-advanced cars, and my emotional character arc will not consist of fathoming the mysteries of the lithium battery.  I have had life-saving surgery, but aside from having more tests there’s nothing in my life that rests on knowing the Horrible Secret Of What Really Happened in The ER.
And in Monica’s story, the tech exists, it’s pervasive, but it doesn’t really do anything. All that matters is this slightly crazed girl walking upon the rolling surface of the ocean-spanning electricity harvester, and at no point does she reveal the vast conspiracy behind the FloatNet or have to hard-wire a solar panel to survive for one more day or discover the ecological hazards this thing is wreaking.
It’s a pure story.  It’s about a girl who lives in this world, and is affected by it, but the story is intensely hers.
I don’t write stories like that.  Perhaps many people do, but I generally don’t read them.  And it’s a very nice refreshment to have technology the way I think of it, which is to say a thing that malfunctions occasionally but isn’t the main thrust of what I do.
I’m more than my tech.  Meena’s more than hers.  And God bless her, Monica’s written something neat to play with.
That is all.

Come Hear Me Give A Talk On Polyamory!

On June 21st in Cleveland, I’ll be giving a talk on polyamory at Ohio SMART. (That link goes to their FetLife page, which they keep updated – if you don’t want to log in, their less-frequently updated website is here.)  Here’s the pitch:
Handling Jealousy And Conflict In Polyamorous Relationships
You’ve got infinite love, but not infinite time – and your partner may not be infinitely secure in that infinite love. So how can you communicate sanely to smooth out the inevitable bumps as you add (and remove) partners? Ferrett and his wife, polyamorous for over seven years, discuss the best ways to handle communication – and talk about what jealousy really signifies.
I’m excited about this, because Ohio SMART is really a tight group of incredibly wise people, and their playspaces and dynamics are fantastic, and if you haven’t been to a SMART event then please, let me provide you with a handy excuse to go. If you’ve never been, they have a newcomer’s orientation for guests, and trust me – they’re totally friendly.
So if you’re interested in hearing me talk in person, check out the event and get the deets.
The inevitable followup question is, “How do I get you to talk at my group?” and the answer is simple: find a free spot on my schedule, then reimburse me for the travel to get there and back. I like talking to people, I like travelling, and if y’all feel like contacting me to say “Hey, can you make it out?” then I probably won’t say no as long as the trip isn’t a net negative on my bank account.
Or you can say hello by coming to Ohio SMART, doing the guest thingie, and saying hello. I won’t bite.

Do I Know You?

“So this girl I know is going to work at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch!” I told a friend of mine, then stopped.
For I don’t actually know her, truth be told. We’re conjoined on a social network, but @_slut___slut_ doesn’t know who I am and doesn’t care – as one of the prettiest and most popular women on FetLife, she has 18,519 friends, and we’ve never exchanged a word.
The entirety of every social interaction we’ve ever had consists of me clicking a button to request access and her clicking accept. Which, with 18,000+ friends, I imagine her index finger clicking away rapidly like a pair of chattering teeth, relentlessly accepting all onlookers.
So I don’t know her, at least in the sense that’s usually implied by “…and she knows me.” If Jennifer Lawrence says something adorable, as she inevitably does, I don’t say “This actress I know totally said something cute!”
FetLife tells us that we’re “Friends,” but if so, it’s a pretty crappy friendship we have here, @_slut___slut_. Have you ever invited me out for coffee? Have I ever braided your hair while we watched “Say Yes To The Dress” together? No, I think if we’re judged as friends, we’re both falling down on the job here.
I could say “Fet-Friends,” as I sometimes do, but that gets a little awkward when I’m talking to someone who’s not on FetLife – I do that – and also, it doesn’t cover the spread of other celebrities I kinda-interact with on Twitter and Tumblr and other social networks.
I could say, “This girl I follow,” but then that sounds staggeringly creepy, like @_slut___slut_ goes into the supermarket and I sneak in the doors behind her, sniffing the tomatoes she just touched and then hugging them to my chest to feel her residual warmth.
I could be honest and say “This girl who has only a tangential awareness of my existence, if that,” which would encompass her dim acknowledgement that yes, I was the 5,744th “love” on that photo of her butt, in much the same sense that maaaaaybe my favorite acappella band @HomeFree remembers favoriting that clever @-reply I left back in February, but… it sounds so pathetic I want to crawl into a hole and bury myself six feet deep.
So what the hell is our relationship? Come on, I’m gonna talk about her, because all my friends know about my addiction to Cathouse reruns, and the idea that someone I have some small window into their private life is actually going there is kind of exciting.
But that’s all it is: a small window. She posts pictures and the occasional essay, so I kiiiind of have an idea of who she is…
Or do I? I mean, I do a little dorking around in the public sphere myself, and I can tell you that what you’re interacting with at this very moment is not actually me. It’s a crafted snapshot of what I choose to share with you, but you don’t see me yelling at my wife when we’re arguing, you don’t see the crappy way I mistrain my dog because I can’t just ignore her when she looks so damn sad, you don’t see me talking about things I don’t know well.
But my friends-friends do.
What you’re getting here is an impressionist painting of me, and it’s close enough that if you held it up to the actual me you could definitely see the resemblance… but in the end, it’s a construct I send out into the electronic world to interact with you.
And I’m glad you’re here! I totally am. Interacting with y’all brings me joy! But it does remind me that I only sorta-know @_slut___slut_, and what I’m following is what she chooses to show me. I have no idea what she’s like to date, or what movies she likes, or even what her favorite food is.
So… we’re not friends. But we have a relationship. Or at least I do with her. And I’m happy to have that one-way connection, but there’s not yet a good word in the English language that summarizes what she is to me.
Because I care about her. I follow her. I want her to have a good time at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch (even if she has a terrible time, I doubt I’ll ever hear about it, as badmouthing employers in a public forum usually doesn’t work out well). I want her to be happy, as I know that I’m lucky enough to have people who want me happy. Hell, when I had my heart attack, I was shocked by the outpouring of love.
So what is she to me? Not quite a friend. It’s not interactive enough to be a friendship, to my liking. But she gives me interesting glimpses into her life (and her butt), and so I’m happy to continue this relationship.
Whatever the fuck it is.

Some Fruit-y Thoughts On Dialect

I hate tomatoes.  I loathe bell peppers and red peppers and, well, any peppers at all.  And even after two years of eating berries and drinking smoothies for my health, I still don’t like fruit.
These are legitimate dislikes.  They taste bad to me.  I’m quite justified in not ordering the peppers-and-tomato dish at the local Italian restaurant.
But I can also acknowledge that though my dislike is genuine, I may have some pretty awful underlying reasons for not liking veggies and fruits.  I got targeted hard by General Mills and other food corporations when I was a young kid, with thousands of advertisements aimed at deepening a nascent addiction to sugar and fat – no, seriously, read how they planned to warp my tastebuds – and when they were done, what tasted “real” to me were processed foods.  To this day, I’ll choke down some berries and a salad, but what really satisfies me is a bacon-burger and a milkshake.
I don’t like fruits and vegetables.  But I was also trained by people of varyingly active agendas that hey, these Pop Tarts are much tastier, they come in a fun box, all the other kids are eating them.  And so I have to acknowledge:
My dislike may well have emerged from some pretty fucked-up underlying reasons.
I’m not saying I should like bell peppers, but I am saying that the problem may not lie with the bell peppers.  Maybe the problem’s with me, and the culture I grew up in.
The reason I am in a fruit-discussing mood today is because a reviewer at Strange Horizons said this about a story:

Troy L. Wiggins’s “A Score of Roses” features heavy use of phonetic dialect, a literary trick which works perhaps one time out of a hundred—a shame, because the story underneath all the “chil’ren”s and “yo’self”s is charming.

Now, this caused – well, not quite an uproar, but a lot of discussion, because dialect is actually a really powerful tool.  Tobias Buckell discusses it in much better detail than I do – and I’d advise you to go read the entirety of his essay, because it’s that good – but basically, by squashing everyone’s native dialect into clean, white-friendly English, you erase whole cultures.  People around the world do actually talk in dialect, this is an authentic representation of the way they speak and their lifestyles, and asking them to write in the words designed by people who wear bowler hats and drink proper tea under the British flag actually kinda erases them.
And I get that.  If I had to write my stories exclusively in African-American Vernacular English, they’d lose a lot of the flavor that represents my view of the world.  The tale would be less me, filtered through someone else’s cultural perspective, and maybe it’d still work but it’d be as different as an indifferent translation.  (You can actually see a fascinating comparison over at Abyss and Apex where they have a “mostly-dialected” published story intended to be readable by English-speaking readers, compared with the original “full-dialect” version submitted to them.)
Thing is, though, I totally agree with what that reviewer said.
As a reader, I don’t like dialect.  I’m a huge fan of transparent prose – I like to fall into the story, just lose myself in the plot and characters and forget entirely about the words.  There are times I like a dense, chewy-prosed novel, but mostly I read very pulpy stuff.
And that applies to pretty much anything that gets in the way of my reading, including weird other-languages or complex worldbuilding infodumps I have to spend too much time on.  There’s the infamous Junot Diaz quote about “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and [white people] think we’re taking over,” but that doesn’t apply to me – it took me four or five separate tries with Dune to get into it, because I didn’t know what the fuck a gom jabbar was and what the hell is going on and fuck it, I’m putting this book down.
I probably never would have read it, too, if it wasn’t my sainted Uncle Tommy’s favorite book.  And when I got through it, I felt somehow more educated, stronger for having stuck with it, having learned fictional lessons about a new world – but I can’t say I enjoyed the experience of reading the book all that much, merely the satisfaction I get from solving a hard programming problem.
So hand me a book like Trainspotting and I’ll read a page or two and decline.  I don’t wanna work that hard at reading, man.
Yet that’s my dislike of bell peppers, coming to the fore.
Because yeah, I love transparent prose, but that prose is transparent to me because I was lucky enough to have the New England language my family and friends spoke marked as the language of the whole world.  Any book I picked up when I grew up in the 1970s was damn near guaranteed to have people who spoke pretty much like me.  Publishing industries had decided that this was how people spoke, and so like the Pop Tarts in their brightly-colored boxes this became my comfort reading, and even now when I settle in with a good book I’m feeling the echoes of cultural decisions made for me years before I was born.
I don’t like dialect, but I can also acknowledge that this genuine dislike is not necessarily a good thing.
Plus, as Joe White Dude, dialect is something that is often cringeworthy.  I don’t have the ear to know whether dialect is good or bad, and unless I know the author well enough to trust them, I have this nagging fear that maybe I’m reading something hideously insulting and actually demeaning to the people who genuinely speak this way.  There’s a lot of talk about “Hey, people should feel great about reading dialected books!” but what I don’t see anyone invoking is The Help, which has a lot of fairly wince-inducing dialect in the early chapters, used to propel a story that a lot of people feel was written by a white woman in a way that actually made a story about the African-American Civil Rights movement mostly about white people.
(I read the book, and I didn’t feel that way – I quite liked it – but The Help is still a point of controversy.)
Thing is, dialect is really good when written by people who know it well.  I’ve read pretty much all of Nalo Hopkinson‘s books and enjoyed the fuck out of them.. but I think that’s because with Nalo, I have the trust that I’m learning something genuine and real.
If I read Dune, and internalize its concepts, and start dropping muad’dib references in public, then I’m being a big fucking nerd but I’m not actually hurting anyone.  If I read Joe White Dude’s Badly-Researched And Poorly-Done Assimilation Of Someone Else’s Culture and start going, “Yeah, boy, you new hair a total dreadnut!” then I’m actually kind of a douche.
So with Nalo, I have the twin joys of reading a fun story – seriously, try Midnight Robber or Brown Girl in the Ring – and when I’m done, I have that programmer-like satisfaction of having inhaled some new concepts and slang that I know to be either completely manufactured or accurate representations of her culture, and if I decide that I start liking the word “bumbaclaat” then hey, it may be cultural appropriation but at least I’m using the fucking thing accurately.
But yeah.  For me, dialect involves some serious trust on the part of the author, because I’m simply not educated enough to know when it’s done poorly.  So when I’m reading dialect by an unknown author, I have this constant ongoing question of “Can I enjoy this?  Or should I be irritated?”
And honestly?  A lot of the people who try dialect are uneducated people who are stretching their wings as writers in some experiment – hey, can I write like the dudes I hear down at the barbershop? – and fucking it up.  Maybe not all of ’em, but enough that I can’t dismiss ’em.
Yet again, it’s like unpacking all my seething hatred of strawberries – and I do not like strawberries, Sam-I-Am, unless they’re coated in dark chocolate – in that I have an instinctive dislike, but that dislike stems from pretty sucktacular reasons.  Hey, I don’t like reading about dialect because I’m too lazy to do the research on someone’s culture enough to be familiar with it!  So I rarely read dialect!  Now there’s a vicious circle, ain’t it?
There’s not a good ending to this essay, though.  It’s messy, like real life.  I’ve made a conscious effort to eat fruit more over the past two years, and my palate has expanded considerably; I can eat bananas, don’t mind blackberries, and you put a few blueberries into my cereal and I can deal with that.  But still, when I’m having a bad day and I just need to comfort-eat, I have never once gone, “Awww, yeah, frickin’ banana in the house.”
Yet my cardiologist will tell me: You’d be better off if you did.
Likewise, dialect is almost certainly never gonna be my go-to reading preference for the reasons I’ve outlined.  But I do read occasional stories with dialect as a change-up, and I can acknowledge that my dislike of dialect is a flaw not necessarily within dialect itself, but rather a flaw instilled upon me for a myriad of really complicated cultural reasons, and I should occasionally get out there and challenge myself because dude, there is a whole fucking world out there with people who don’t speak like you, think like you, believe like you, and shouldn’t you creep outside of your nice suburban house every once in a while to explore the great and meandering halls the world has to offer?
Yes.
Yes, I damn well should.