Flaming Chords

This is my front page. All comments here are screened; if you don't have my email address, you can drop me a line here. If I know your email address, I'll reply by email -- if not, I'll reply to your comment, and then rescreen both your comment and my reply.

It's also got every tag I have -- this is because my current LJ style doesn't include a tag index. (At least half of my participation on LJ is on my Treo. I chose this style because it loads quickly and it's still readable on a small screen.)

I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.

Well, Mom and I went to the Kool Aprul Nites [sic, nonsic, sic] parade last night. We've both had our fill of fancy cars, fast cars, powerful cars, old cars, and cars so expensive that I will never be able to own one in a million years. Fortunately, I have a big dick¹, so I'll never have to.

Okay, I'm being unfair. At least three out of every four cars there were older cars, appreciated by their owners as pieces of both Art and Automotive History. Most of these cars were very obviously well cared for by people who love them, and are loved in return. This still leaves one out of four whose bravado doth run over, whose cars are writing checks their blood testosterone levels can't catch. Or cash. Or something.

Oddly enough, there was a real Hummer. One of the Hummers our Armed Forces uses, with real Marines driving it and everything. Don't get me wrong, it was still an ugly vehicle, but the H1 was apparently intended to be useful, and is ugly in a completely different way from the H2 and H3, which are completely useless unless you're trying to announce your sexual inadequacy to the world.

There were lots more cars, but I have no idea how to describe any of them. A lot of them were very nice. Some of them were basically phallic symbols. (And a few were a little of both.)

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1. To those of you new to my LJ: yes, I occasionally make cracks like this. I do not expect you to take them at face value -- as with most guys on the internet who say they have big dicks, there is an excellent chance I'm full of shit.
   

I've brought with me a case with forty pounds of free weights and dumbells. It's keeping me from going completely bonkers, but it's far from a complete workout. It's also barely a workout; I've long since outgrown it. Between this trip and a neck problem I had a week before, it's been about two weeks since I've been to the gym. You ever see someone at a gym, day in and day out, and marvel at how much discipline they must have to have kept at it for so long, and how much willpower it must have taken to get such good results? Well, guess what -- it ain't willpower! It's an addiction, and withdrawal fuckin' sucks, man!

I have no friends up here, in the middle of nowhere. I can keep up with you guys online, but my cell service is spotty up here, so it usually takes me a few minutes just to log on, to say nothing of actually loading content. No doubt I've missed plenty, and have a shitload of catching up to do. I've also exchanged emails and text messages with a few of you, but it's not the same. In the real world, under normal circumstances, I visit friends something like three times a week, whenever work doesn't get in the way. I didn't realize I'd miss that quite so much. I didn't realize I'd miss IM quite so much, either.

In a vein similar to the lack of real-world contact with friends, there's a lack of real-world contact with, ahem, friends. See earlier comments about being out of action due to neck problems, and being in the middle of nowhere. As a result, well, let's just say that ( there's some dude TMI, here ).

I have one day off left, once I get home. Any guesses on how I'll be using it? No, don't bother guessing. Too easy.

On the plus side, I've used the time up here to work on a couple of habits. I've gotten a decent amount of music done, I've cut my junk food consumption to absolutely zero, and after having fallen off the wagon for a while, I've been free of caffeine for several days and will have an easier time remaining so when I get home.

I've also taken a few books with me, and finished them. Philip José Farmer is a good writer, but he's a weird bird -- if you've ever complained about Heinlein and his occasional obsession with sex, don't even bother with Farmer. Or if you must read him, stick to Riverworld. There's a very fine line between stories with sexual themes and outright porn, and the collection Strange Relations comes within a eyelash-breadth of it and says, "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you," over and over and over. And then that line gets annoyed and walks away, and Strange Relations yells, "come back, I'm not done not touching you!"

(I also finished Double Star, by Heinlein. It was published in 1956, so it's pre-Time Enough For Love (1973), and therefore lacks that aforementioned focus on sex. An excellent book, overall. If you've seen the movie Dave, in which an actor gets shanghaied into playing the President, you've already got a vague idea of what this book is about.)

Mom and [Step-dad] watch a lot of TV, and despite myself, I've been watching a lot of it with them.

Dancing with the Stars, for instance, is pure cheese. But it has some damned nice eye-candy. I saw a whole bunch of people with perfect-or-damn-near bodies, and one kinda heavy-set woman who was not even remotely self-conscious about it. "Yes, I jiggle a lot, and I'm gonna use that jiggle!" Very sexy. I'm surprised she made it on the show at all, since she doesn't have that perfect dancer-body that practically no one in real life can attain, but I'm still delighted she did.

(Nothing against people with perfect dancer-bodies, mind. I like perfect dancer-bodies. But there's more to sexiness than that, and it's nice to see that a TV show can make that point, even if only with a token example.)

The rest of the stuff that's on, though... pure scare tactics. I can practically hear Sigourney Weaver on an endless loop: "be afraid, be very afraid!" It's inspired me to filk a Yes song...

You can watch TV,
until you're scared to leave your house.
It will feed your fears...
"It can happen."

Hundreds of pedophiles
seem to live in every town.
You watch --
It can happen to you!
It can happen to me!
It can happen to everyone eventually!

It's a fright -- it's a fright --
It's a constant fright.
The welfare queens are breeding like rats.
It's a fright -- it's a fright --
It's a constant fright.
Your children could be eaten by bats.
It's a paranoid fantasy.
You buy it like clothes at the mall.

Look up! Look down!
Look out! Look around!
Look up! Look down!
There's a crazy world outside,
and serial killers in your town!

It can happen to you!
It can happen to me!
It can happen to everyone eventually!
As you see on the news,
it can happen to you!
When it happens, you're totally totally screwed!

...there's more to the song, but I'm still working on that. I should have the rest of it done by tonight.

In a few minutes, I'll be turning off my home computer and heading to work, where I'll be picked up by my sister and taken up north to see family. From now, until about the twentieth, I'll still be accessible by email, and I hope to be able to visit LJ occasionally, but I won't be on IM.

(I've installed PDANet, a program that lets you use a Treo as a modem without paying the extra charges that cellphone providers usually charge for the modem-as-phone service. Due to certain quirks about how this program works, I do not expect to be able to anything net-related that doesn't begin in http.)

See you guys around!