A Beautiful Flame

While I do adore fireplay, it doesn’t photograph well.  For one thing, you actually need three people to capture fireplay on film; the person applying the flame, the flamee, and a third person, since you really can’t take pictures and set someone on fire.  At least not safely.
Then there’s the fact that while I find flame to be one of the most beautiful things in the world – I used to stare into my grandparents’ fireplace for hours – it doesn’t photograph well, if you’re an amateur like me.  Either you get this blob of blazing orange and no people, or a washed-out ghostly effect hovering above skin.  But apparently, thanks to a better photographer than me (that’d be Miranda), it turns out the trick is to keep the shutter speed low.
So then, you wind up with stunning little pictures like this.  My flame, not my tattoo.  But pretty nonetheless.  And an indication of why I do love to set women on fire; it’s adding beauty to beauty.

The Best Stories I've Never Written

Earlier this week, I perpetuated a meme, providing myself a fine transmitter for psychological conceptual wads: Tell me about a story I haven’t written, and I’ll give you the opening sentence from that story.
Some of the stuff I wrote was pretty neat.  You can take a look at the main thread (on LJ, which will of course be broken by the mere act of my linking to it), but here are some of the ones I’m prouder of.
Flavortext asked:

A story about a woman who discovers a bookbag that has two unusual properties:
1) Its contents show up as a few changes of clothes on airport scanners, no matter what those contents actually are.
2) There seems to be no upper limit to how much the bookbag can hold.
She does some massive-scale smuggling for a while before she’s brought in on an unrelated charge and the feds learn what her bookbag can do. She finds herself pressured into the US Army, and has to deal with the ramifications of being a human personnel carrier in an active warzone.

So I said:

Evelyn had taken a flashlight in with her, a compass, enough food to last for weeks, bringing a bag inside the bag. The compass had been useless once inside The Sack, its needle jittering nervously in every direction, but she’d been smart enough to bring several cans of spraypaint to draw jagged arrows on the wrinkled proplyene surface.
The fabric cavern around her was lightless, sagging, occasionally sighing as mysterious winds rippled the cloth. Nothing lived in here. There was no water. Just a cave that went on until she ran out of paint, and a never-ending line of rough arrows pointing back to to the unzipped entrance.
This was no ordinary book bag.

Stm4e ventured:

The Schoolhouse Rock song “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here” is about a 3-generation family who run an “adverb store”, selling adverbs and singing their praises. They gloat in the song that the adverbs are “absolutely free”. How do they pay their rent? (How do they eat?) What do the women in this family think, married to a bunch of zealots who don’t ever bring home any money, but run a family business giving stuff away for free?

My response:

Hrm. I’d have to do some serious worldbuilding on that one.
That said, the obvious opening is “We are absolutely, positively, unquestionably, horrifically, and grievously starving,” said Lolly, Lolly, and Lolly, speaking frankly.

Richlayers: “A story about a woman who can plant fairy tales on scraps of paper and grow a garden of variations.”

The mice in her garden tried to turn her pumpkins into carriages. She sprayed them with pesticides.

Pachamama: “In a world where first-person subjective experiences can be harvested and delivered for virtual experiencing by punters, there obviously grows a significant black market in the less palatable aspects of human experience (the virtual experience version of snuff films). ”

The girl was fourteen years old, dead, and laid in pieces upon china plates.
Graeme sharpened his knives, though the cooking – what there was of it – had been mostly done. She was bite-sized, mostly raw, bits of her shoulder laying edge-over-edge on a sashimi tray, her liver in a bowl, both her eyes nestled in ramekins. They had stewed and seared bits of her, and Graeme wondered what had driven her to this. He’d seen the film where she had been dissembled. She went voluntarily though not happily, surrendering herself to the butcher, and Graeme decided that she must have had a family who needed the money. A woman who would volunteer for such a thing as kink was too monstrous to contemplate, even for Graeme.
He adjusted the electrodes on his scalp, nibbled at a Saltine cracker. His technicians gave him the thumbs-up; the other guests, vomit bowls at the ready, also nodded, feeling the salt dryness in their mouth as clearly as if they’d chewed it themselves.
Graeme was ready. His audience, though they would never admit it in public, were hungry to see what human flesh tasted like. And he would bring them every sensation.

(Hey, they’re not all pleasant.)
And my favorite, which Tithenai thinks I should expand into a story, is this prompt: “How about a sentence from that story of yours where drums are a divinatory tool?”

Jules often wondered if John Bonham had known what he was doing.
It was hard for him to listen to Bonham’s extended suicide note in “Moby Dick,” but Julies applied himself to it with the scrutiny that any diviner uses when they pushed their finger through moist dregs of tea. To the rest of the world, “Moby Dick” was the part of the Led Zeppelin concert where you went and got another beer – four minutes of furious drum solo, a dense polyrhythmic stew of paraddidles and crashes, with Bonham arcing up and down the scale in frantic, galloping rolls.
To Jules, though, the beats spoke of darker things. If you listened with the right ears, you could hear Bonham charting his future in detail, his mania, his despair, the rise of Zeppelin and his addictions. And when that final, thunderous beat came, the culmination of everything, he could hear Bonham bringing down both the sticks and the end of his own life simultaneously.
Had he known? Had Bonham understood that he was casting a spell? Or had he just, inchoately, been attuned to something that was nothing but instinct to him?

That’s not really a story for me, as I don’t know what Jules wants or what he’d do in the story, but it’s a fun way to look at Zeppelin.
(If you want to add more requests, dunno when I’ll get to ’em, but I will.)

The Unexpected Benefits Of Premature Destruction

I’m fond of saying, “I don’t have one-night stands, I have three-day relationships.”  I’m also fond of saying, “I have slept with over a hundred women. This sounds good until you realize that it means over a hundred women have decided I was too much trouble.” When I was single, I’d burn through seven or eight girlfriends in a year.
And I do burn through relationships quickly, due to a bizarre combination of absolute self-worth and total utter confidence.  I’ve never thought much of myself, but I come from a family that was big on therapy, big on talking everything out, big on exposing your feelings.  So the moment I have any twinges about anything, I go straight to my lover and say, “This is bothering me.”
Note the lack of an intermediary step: is this worth bothering her for?
So I’d fall in love, and things would be decent, and I’d carp and create fights because this wasn’t a big problem now, but it would be in a few months, and it was better to hash this out now before it came to a head.  Except I was continually anticipating problems that might have worked themselves out, given time, and I was asking for large behavioral changes that may have been premature (after all, I was always willing to be mutable, and so must the rest of the world), and as such I’d be lucky if I lasted two months with anyone.  I’d fall deeply in love, then grind it to shreds.
And I always thought this was a failing.  I did, yes, eventually find True Love with my wife, but even that involved a two-year adjustment period that should by all rights have ended in a hostile divorce.  I should shut up more, be less protective of my own rights.
A friend of mine is having me rethink that.
My friend is recently quote-unquote single after having been kicked unceremoniously out on his ear by his ex.  He’d never discussed her problems much with her – all that emotional talk gives him hives – and so, month by month, over the course of a decade, his ex got increasingly sick of his shit until one day he woke up and found himself being ejected from her life.  He thought things were fine.
Why wouldn’t he?  Nobody had said anything.
Watching him date now, he’s re-committed quickly, and is now dating someone he dislikes.  We’re hanging out, and he goes, “Oh, fuck, that’s right, I have a date with her.”  When asked why he’s so reluctant, well, she doesn’t really like the same movies that he does, and they don’t have much to talk about so they have to go to movies or else there’s awkward silence, and they don’t have the same life’s plans.  Also, he’s pretty sure they’re both rebound-dating, though they’ve never discussed it.
They have a lot of sex, apparently.  At least there’s that.  And maybe my friend leaves all the bitching to me, and has more enjoyment than he lets on; I always allow for that possibility.
Yet when I ask why they don’t talk about it, well, turns out that he hates emotional discussions so much that once again, he’s hooked up with someone who also hates to have emotional discussions.  He keeps saying, “Yeah, this one’s doomed,” and talking (to me, not her) about how they have nothing in common, and expressing the concept that, since he’s busy, this is better than being single again.
This has been going on for, oh, three months.  I have a feeling that unless the new girlfriend does anything – which is doubtful, since she also appears to be of the “Wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful” persuasion – this could drag on for another six months, maybe a year.  And yes, there’s regular sex – always the consolation prize in your Relationship Despair Crackerjacks – but on the other hand, when this sputters to the inevitable conclusion, I don’t think there will be a lot of Lessons Learned.  The next relationship, I think, will be a lot like the past two relationships, because when questioning What’s Happening becomes anathema, you can’t really examine the wreckage to figure out what wrong.
I had wreckage.  Junkyards of wreckage.  But I did sift through them, trying to figure out why this plane had crashed.
I dunno.  Maybe my relentless conversations have been a boon to me, in the long run.  Yeah, I got caught in the quagmire a couple of times – but usually, if we were at all incompatible, we’d discover this quickly, chew our arms off in fights, and move on.  It was over in six, eight weeks tops, and I could find someone else I liked.  I thought of my relentless number of relationships as a bug, but perhaps on balance it’s more of a feature – things don’t drag on with me, usually, they often just crash. Which enabled me to a) learn a lesson, if I could, and b) eventually find the great loves who I’m currently involved with.
Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying my path is ideal; there’s a balance to be had, in terms of learning when to keep my mouth shut, and I’m always evolving with that.  But for years, all I saw was the down side of a rapidly fluctuating love life.  There was a subtle benefit of all those breakups, one I overlooked.
You shouldn’t choose either of these paths, obviously.  But I think, if you have to have one, hopefully you luck out and take the path of destruction.  Maybe.

Stolen From Various Sources, Since All The Cool Kids Are Doing It

Tell me about a story I haven’t written, and I’ll give you the opening sentence from that story.
That one’s been going around, and I’m intrigued.  (The original meme says “I’ll give you a sentence from that story,” but I write all my stories in strict chronological order anyway, so it’d be the first sentence regardless.  Mise well be a challenge.)
Sufficiently silly responses won’t get a sentence; oh, I know many think it’s funny to ask me to write about the sentient whipped cream that ate Roger Ebert, but I AM SRS AUTHOR.  (Also, and more relevant, purposely ludicrous ideas usually don’t get my motor running.)  But if it’s an actual story idea, I’ll approach it with all seriousness.  FOR I AM SRS AUTHOR.
(So srs that I technically “won” NaNoWriMo last night, at 51,000+ words, but I’ll consider it my personal victory if I can finish Act II before the month is over.  More on that in a bit, though.  This morning is therapist and then unfucking my dev environment for work.)

America: As Slutty As Ever

A friend of mine lamented that marriages were breaking apart everywhere because we were “addicted to the orgasm.”  What happened to the days of old, when men were staunch against the ever-impending threat of The Affair, and couples stayed together until death do they part? Where did our honor go?
Well, it never really left.  We’ve always been slutty.  We just haven’t aired that sluttiness in public.
See, in lusting after the “good old days,” you’re also forgetting the days when men were expected to get some on the side, and be discreet.  In Victorian England, land of the staunchest, stiffest-upper-lips of all time, prostitute use ran rampant.  Men were forever nipping off to fuck other women, often for money; you just didn’t bring that shit home.  (Except in the form of copious venereal diseases, of course.)  And there were multiple affairs among the nobility throughout history, which wives often endured, because men quote-unquote needed that sort of thing, and they looked the other way while their husbands plundered their way among younger, more attractive women.
(This is not to say the lower- and middle-classes weren’t also having affairs, but alas – just as People Magazine doesn’t chronicle the affairs of Edna and Herbert Menna, landlords of a nice tenancy in Queens, the history books don’t go into nearly as much detail on the lives of peasants.)
So people were fucking.  Why didn’t we know?  Well, for one reason, divorce back then was considered an absolute sin.  You were castigated if you separated, particularly if you were a woman, but even the men were viewed with a sort of pitable sadness that they couldn’t keep their woman in line.  These days, if someone is cheating you’re free to pack it up, but back in those days?  That was a huge move.  So you had tons of couples who had loveless lives, basically separate, keeping their own affairs, but never divorcing – thus giving the illusion of “’til death do we part.”
(What they didn’t mention is how eagerly many of those couples were looking forward to departing each other.)
And then there’s the issue of public decency.  You didn’t air your personal lives back then; it was considered a great stigma for the press to blow that shit wide open.  Did FDR have an affair?  You bet your ass he did.  Kennedy?  Don’t make me laugh.  Eisenhower?  He actually asked for permission to divorce his wife, but was denied.  By his general.  Hell, even Thomas Jefferson had a few redheaded kids running amuck – though I guess you’d expect that of TJ, that rebel of the Founding Fathers.
The point is that affairs happened all the time, but the press didn’t think it was of interest, or thought it was tawdry, or both.  So they didn’t cover it.  J. Edgar Hoover had files on hundreds of extramarital affairs, but did he go to the press?  No he did not.  Because societal pressures kept all that under the carpet.  It’s not that it didn’t happen, it’s that when it did happen, you didn’t know about it.
If General Petraeus had been caught with this affair in the 1930s, he would have just found some mysterious excuse to step down.  It would be deeply embarrassing, to those in the immediate circle.  Questions would be asked.  But would “GENERAL DICK-DEEP IN BIOGRAPHER” make national headlines for days at a time?  No.  And so you’d think “Gee, people were so much better in those days.”
So are people breaking more oaths these days?  My pal has a point in that marriage is no longer thought of as a lifelong commitment – but then again, given that marriage is no longer pretty much required for women to be functional, I’ll take that tradeoff.  And I agree with him on the larger point, in that I do think that America has pretty much fallen away from the ideal of commitment to anything – Kennedy’s line of “Ask not what your country can do for you” seems quaint, as after Carter and Ford’s attempts to say, “Hey, could you guys do with less gas so we can get out of the Middle East?” got them voted out of office roundly.  No, what we want is abundance, and I see both Democrats and Republicans milking that voter-cow.
But was there a golden age of fidelity?  No.  People have always fucked around.  People will always fuck around.  They may find different ways to do it, and different ways to cover it up, and different ways to react to it.  But those orgasms?  We’re hard-wired to be addicted.  And that’s never gone away.
 

Two Snippets From A Weasel's Odd Life

Snippet #1:
I awoke this morning to go see Gini, who had risen several hours back, in our living room.
“Congratulations on getting up and working out early with Erin!” I said.  “I’m glad it went well!”
“Thank you.”
“I had to tell you that I knew it happened, or you’d think I was ignoring your accomplishment,” I continued.  “Even though I already read that it went well thanks to Facebook.”
“You could have just liked my status,” she replied. “Then I would have known.”
“It might have been hours before you saw my like.  And until then, you’d think that I didn’t care about your accomplishment at all.  I couldn’t risk that.”  I paused.  “Come to think of it, social media is causing me to have some a lot of redundant conversations lately.”
Snippet #2:
My sad triumph over Thanksgiving was this:
I was making the Bosworth stuffing and listening to AC/DC, because they’d finally caved to iTunes and so I filled in the gaps in my collection.  And I was assembling the sausage and toast and all the other secret ingredients in a bowl in the kitchen, rocking out to “For Those About To Rock.” Full volume.  I was doing a very metal stuffing, strutting as I went to get the eggs.
Then we got to the intense part, where Brian Johnson shouts “FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK!” and the band falls silent and then there is that empty pause where you know oh, shit, here comes the thunder… and then wham, he shouts “FIRE!” and a barrage of cannons go off and there, my friends, is the thunder.
And I thought, shit, I’m not going to do this, am I? 
And as Brian screamed “FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK!” I hoisted the egg up in the air, in full-on Freddie Mercury rage pose.
And when he screamed “FIRE!” I slammed the egg down in one smooth motion on the edge of the bowl, hard as I could.
It went perfectly.
In that moment, I was the heavy metal god of stuffing, the iron maiden chef, the Ronnie James Dio of bird filling, and had angels descended to lift me up to heaven, I could not have possibly been more satisfied with the trajectory of my life in that moment, for it had led to this one moment of perfect, rebellious grace.
Then I made the rest of the stuffing.  Even Rock Gods have to finish the meal, you know.