Love and Time And Ferretts

I make an odd distinction in love that I’ve recently come to realize is not universal:
I love easily, passionately, and freely.  And for me, love is defined as something that I wrote to Jenphalian (although this love I’m describing is more amorous in nature, while much of my love is platonic):
“Each love I have is a unique thing where I sigh a little differently. (Gini has ‘An S smile’ she gets when she’s texting with her boyfriend S, which amuses me.)  For me, a core need is to know that I’m not some interchangeable widget in my lover’s personal factory, and that if I left it would leave a small, Ferrett-shaped hole – a tiny wound that could be worked around, perhaps even eventually heal over without much scarring, but a thing that still would cause a unique and wondrous ache in its absence.”
Anyone I love, I would be there for if they needed me.  That’s a part of that love – that their happiness is, in some part, essential to my own, and I’ll work to fulfill their needs.
But there’s also a strange, flip side to it that I realize is not present for most people: the intensity of my love does not necessarily require a similarly-intense time component.
Which is to say that I love Nayad, who is a wonderful person and smart and witty and fun to hug, but I can go several weeks without hearing from her and not be particularly the worse off.  Don’t get me wrong, I like to hear from her – my day is always much brightened by a Nayad text or an email – but despite my deep feelings for her and the way I’d drop nearly anything to help her if she was in trouble, there’s no obligation to spend my days in touch with her.
Likewise, I love JFargo, a wonderful man who I wish I had more time with, but though we exchange comments and Facebook posts and whatnot, there’s no need for me to plan all my time in New York to see more of him.  I’m just happy when we intersect, and I don’t necessarily need to eke out more time.  That’s the way it works for me.
Those are both platonic loves, of course, but it works for many of my more amorous loves as well.  In many cases, we’ll exchange spates of flirty texts – but they’re busy, I’m busy, I barely have enough vacation days as it is.  We’ll think about planning an intersection when I’m in their vicinity or vice-versa, or plan an annual get-together… But it’s not the burning need to spend every day with them.  The fact that I don’t have a requirement to see them doesn’t mean that I love them less, it just means that my love’s a slightly different flavor.
Which is weird.  I mean, I do have loves who I need to see (Gini, Bec, Angie being the main drives, which is why I suppose they’re my “main” partners) – but to me, that’s just one of many wondrous factors that goes into making those particular loves unique.
Yet I can have a torrid affair with someone who I see maybe once every two years, and keep that love going, and not necessarily have a burning urge to drive out to Albuquerque.  I’m not sure how weird that makes me.  Pretty very, probably.

Fuck Yeah, Little Girl

A seven-year-old girl speaks out on the new Starfire.

“I want her to be a hero, fighting things and be strong and helping people.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because she’s what inspires me to be good.”

David Willis’ Shortpacked! strip on the same topic is also very good.  Dude, one can enjoy sex without being a joy-dead robot.

Severe Tire Damage, Track 1

This is the blistered horror of my left hand.  Note the blood-blister just below my wedding ring, the regular blister on my middle finger, the open wound on my index.
It’s a good pain.  It means I’m drumming again.
A very pretty girl was foolish enough to tell me that she liked men with nice arms, and I thought, “Well, I used to have great arms.”  Plus, I needed to get into exercise again, having fallen off recently, and there was this full drum kit downstairs – so why not do that?
Vanity, thy name is Ferrett.
Drumming’s a little different than other instruments in that you can’t drum in silence – or, rather, you can if you have a) a very expensive electronic kit with headphones, or b) silencing pads.  I don’t have a), and b) means I can’t actually hear what I’m playing, which means that when I practice, the whole neighborhood gets to hear me fucking up.  And I am fucking up, because my style of drumming has always been “technically sloppy, but big on feel.”  Which means that I play differently every time, going for these elaborate fills and winding up off-beat because once again, I bit off more than I could chew.
As I’ve been playing over the last ten days or so, though, I’ve felt those skills surging back – and there’s a strength in going for an elaborate set of triplet-to-kick-pedal fills in the middle of a song and nailing it.  There’s that Babe Ruth feeling of the called shot, of going, “I fired here and dropped back into the pocket, fuck yeah.”  Which is nice.  It’s not so nice, only playing along with other people’s music, but the iPod makes that considerably easier than it was back when I played along with CDs or (gah!) tapes.
I’m too old to be in a band, alas. Don’t have the commitment or the social network.  Would be nice, though.

So Superman, Archie, and Jesus Walk Into A Bar…

Yesterday, I held a poll asking which character has had more stories written about them – Archie, Superman, or King Arthur?  This generated a lot of interesting discussion.  But in remembering the conversation, I phrased the question slightly wrong:
Mike did not argue that “Superman has had more stories written about him than any other character.”
Mike argued that “Superman has had more adventures than any other character.”
Now that’s a different kettle of fish.
Then again, once we start unpacking the whole “Who has the most stories written about them?” then we start analyzing what a story is, which makes this a really fascinating question.  Because there are a whole bunch of considerations to Mike’s question that really flavor how it works.  Let’s look at them:
Breadth of Adventure.  
While there are a lot of stories told about Jesus and King Arthur, they tend to be the same stories recycled in only slightly different forms – which makes them going on the same adventure over and over again.
Which is not to say that Superman is immune!  Baby Superman has the same adventure leaving Krypton over and over again, and much the same adventure in meeting Lex Luthor for the first time, and much the same adventure in that one time he had to save Lois after she investigated some angry mobsters.  There’s a lot of recycling in any comic book canon.
By these standards, Archie, lacking an origin story or recurring villains per se, may have even more adventures.  Sure, they’re very similar adventures (who will he date, Betty or Veronica? Uh-oh, he’s in trouble with the Bee again), but they are separate.  Then again, Archie was never turned into a giant golden ape by Red Kryptonite.
Depth of Fandom.
Harry Potter was mentioned repeatedly as something who’s arguably had more adventures, and this is where Archie falls behind.  On FanFiction.net, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of Harry Potter stories, lots of Superman stories (mostly Smallville), and pretty much no Archie stories.
People like Archie, but they’re just not invested in the mythology to create their own.  Certain fandoms inspire a lot of mucking around in the universe, and certain fandoms don’t.  Judging by the “self-created” stories, Archie falls far behind on any measure; yes, they can churn out twenty original stories a month, but a good fandom can do that without blinking.
Access To Technology/Length of Fandom.  
…that said, it’s not like King Arthur and the Greek and Roman Gods didn’t have a lot of adventures told about them.  Just not all of them survived.  It’s vital to remember that before Gutenberg created his crazy little press, storytelling was primarily vocal, and not recorded anywhere.  Yes, storytellers often told the “classics,” but I find it hard to believe that kids didn’t tell new stories with the same old heroes over campfires… Some of which, if they became popular enough to survive over the years, made it into the “official” canon, but most of which we never saw.
Tales told over campfires by illiterates don’t last, no matter how brilliantly told they may be.  (And one has to assume that given there often wasn’t much to do but think during the menial tasks of the day, some of that storytelling had to have been fantastically honed.)
Then again, the ancients were never in a space where a) their kids had this much free time, and b) could all be collected into one place where they could read the fanfic of people all over the world, inspiring and egging each other on.
So I’m not sure how much length counts.  We have a much more massive population now, and more communication.  It’s entirely possible that the amount of Harry Potter output actually has overtaken the original tales of the Greek mythos.
What Is A “Story”?  What is an “Adventure”?
Does a one-panel Archie gag count as a story?  What about a coloring book scene, where Superman is putting out a volcano?  What about some Mary Sue story, where the goal is to make Harry fall in love with a thinly-veiled version of the story’s writer?
Clearly, the characters are affected by these moments (even if it’s just “Archie falls prey to wily Jughead’s pun”), but is that a tale?  How’s that work?  Is it an “adventure” when the whole point of the story is that Watson’s cock winds up in Sherlock Holmes’ mouth?
And how far afield does one have to go before a the new details added to a retelling becomes a separate adventure?  If you turn Lex Luthor from a mad scientist into a greedy businessman, is that a new adventure?  Clearly Marion Zimmer Bradley’s take on King Arthur is a different adventure, but is Prince Valiant still King Arthur or has he become something else entirely?  When does it diverge sufficiently to become something new?
How does one delineate?
The Mythos
Superman’s not just Superman – he hangs out with a lot of friends.  So is it a separate story every time he shows up in the Justice League, or hangs around with Batman in a supporting role?  (I’d argue yes, but still.)  Likewise, the Greek and Roman pantheons are always hanging around each other, interfering and getting tangled up.
If you hang with a big pack of friends, you’re going to have more adventures.  Sorry, Jesus.
The Finality
With all that in mind, I’m going to agree with my friend Mike and say that based on the word “adventures,” I will proclaim him correct – Superman has had the most adventures.  But feel free to shill for your guy in the comments and explain why you think X has had more adventures.

The Fleshlight: A Review

On Friday, I posted a link to the Zombie Fleshlights, and in the comments a number of people asked, “I mean, how good can the Fleshlight be, anyway?”
I figured I might as well tell you.  I mean, I do own one.  I don’t use it much, but you should know why.  So, as with most sexy things I’m doing these days, I posted an essay over at FetLife (the Facebook for kinksters!) that you can go read, assuming you want a surfeit of personal details.  Here’s the opening, if you’re curious:

If you’re looking for a vagina in a can, the Fleshlight allows you to pork your portable pussy in a properly perky procedure. But it’s not until you explode into delight into an artificial mouth that you realize just how convenient it is having an actual girl attached to the vagina.
Because the thing about having sex with a girl is that when you’re done, she nips off to the bathroom to tidy up, and then all of those helpful organs and biological processes take care of the rest. The Fleshlight, being an inert mass of food-grade (GAH!) polymers, merely sits there, leaving your semen to a) drool back out onto the floor, or b) sit inside its enfolded interior until it congeals, rots, merges with a new form of germ to gain sentience, and then slither up your cock the next time you stick it in side to lay eggs and give birth to the new army of manborg sex toys. Awkward.

Anyway, if you want to see it, signing up for FetLife is free, and as an added bonus, you can friend Poppy Z. Brite over there and see his writings, which are phenomenal.  Just make sure to tell me where you know me from if you friend me, so I can associate LJ names with Fet names.  Danke!

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I was hoping to post my thoughts on the Gay In YA today, then realized I owed an essay to someone else that I had promised a long time ago.  So that’ll have to wait for Monday.
In the meantime, you know about Fleshlights, don’t you? Those male sex toys that are the size of a large flashlight so you can insert your – well, anyway, they now have Halloween-themed versions in Zombie, Frankenstein and Alien versions, among others. (This isn’t unusual for them – they also, infamously, came out with the double-clitorised Na’vi Fleshlight.)
I wonder how many of these will be gotten as joke gifts for friends. And then how many in, the wake of a lonely night spent drinking, will quietly be unwrapped from the packages as some horny college kid looks at his fake zombie pussy and realizes just how low his life is about to sink….