In the pandemic era, faces are mysterious

Karl Elvis2 Comments

A funny thing about the pandemic era is that we now (in some places/cases at least) now have people we routinely see, who in effect have faces that stop below the eyes 

This makes the rest of the face a mysterious, intimate place, much as things must feel in cultures that routinely veil. 

There is a young woman at my physical therapist’s office (one of two who run the front counter) on whom I have a wicked crush. Pink hair, glasses, lots of very well done tattoos. She’s bubbly and friendly, relentlessly enthusiastic. We talk, at least every other session (I do PT twice a week, rehabbing a shoulder surgery), about tattoos, and she can’t wait to tell me about her last piece, or next piece, or pieces she’s planning for future. I’ve told her about piece i’m getting next week, and again, she can’t wait to see it. 

We’ve never seen each other’s faces, in all the months we’ve been chatting. 

Today, we were talking about coffee; someone had just brought her some fancy pour-over latte thing from philz coffee, and she was complaining about it, meanwhile laughing and telling me in great detail about whatever was wrong.

And then she tuned partially away, pulled down her mask and sipped.

Seeing the whole of her face, lips parted as she brought cup to her mouth, was as thrilling as catching a glimpse of accidentally exposed underwear, and to be honest, was nearly as thrilling as a brief glimpse of nipple. 

Because i’ve now been chatting with this beautiful young woman for about three months, twice a week, and never gotten her whole face, it was a wildly intimate feeling. Her face seemed too beautiful to believe, but I think that’s entirely the veil idea; the fact that I should not see it, made it intensely wrong, which is hotter than hell. 

I’m not, to be clear, saying anything positive about cultures that enforce veils/hijabs. It’s indefensible to enforce any such rule on a woman.

What i’m saying instead, is that the side effect of a practical need to protect each other with masks during a deadly plague, has produced a side effect that never occurred to me; faces have become a hidden, intimate place, a mystery. And I do love a good mystery.  

I already wanted to kiss this young woman. But this glimpse makes it a hundred times worse. 

Let’s talk about ADHD

Karl Elvis1 Comment

 

I’d rather be telling filthy stories but i’m kind of fighting with an (unusual for me) anxiety issue.

This is a long story and I would rather not tell it all right this moment, but we’ll see, these things grow as I go one sometimes.

I’ve worked in high tech for an absurd number of years. I had an aptitude with computers from the time I first encountered them in the late 70’s; I learn things hands on, and pick them up quickly. So when, for example, the poster/plant department of Tower Records needed a person to take over ticket sales when we first got a terminal, my boss tapped me because he knew i’d be all over it.

It’s always been that way. I don’t have patience with manuals and instructions, but things I can learn by getting hands on and problem solving, I launch at. My first high tech job was as a shipping clerk, but I quickly found my way into a test department (at Seagate in Scotts Valley), moving into engineering on hard work and fast learning.

This got me every job since, going through most of the top tech companies of the 80’s and 90’s. I won’t mention my current employer by name, but Sun and Cisco were both great for me, allowing me to keep learning and growing as an engineer as well as a technical expert in non-engineering teams.

It’s the same story throughout; aptitude, work ethic, intelligence, and extremely good communication skills.

The fact that I didn’t always excel at deep focus tasks was balanced by all the rest; if I could not solve a deep technical problem, I knew how to diagnose the issue, and collaborate to get it solved quickly by people who had the specific skill I did not have. I compensated for certain difficulties, by multi-tasking exceptionally well. Yes, I have had phone sex while programming perl code, and did both well, thank you.

 

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More stupid housekeeping and moronosphere history

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As long time readers will know, xmas eve, 2013, my friend Brandon Dawson died of an overdose.

Brandon – despite the obvious – was a kind and generous human being, and a good friend, and i’m forever grateful to him for hosting so many of my (and my friends) blogs, free.

However, his demons won out, and when he passed away, he left me locked out of our server (he’d recently updated passwords, and didn’t give them to me, or did, and I didn’t write them down). I struggled to get access to our server, but was unable to do so.

Several friends lost blogs when the server was taken down; I was lucky to be able to export all my writing from THIS blog, though I lost a few others (one that was sort of a secret, exorcising the demons and confess the sins sort of thing which is probably better gone, anyhow).

As i’ve mentioned, I was able to recover nearly 1400 entries; everything, basically. But in rebuilding all of this, i’m finding a vast number of broken links, including internal links (my direct links used to be at site/blog/archives/<title>.php, but is now site/title), lost images/songs/etc, as well as the simply outdated (links to news articles, links to now-gone blogs, etc)

All in all I had more than 1500 broken links. I’m gradually repairing all this (sometimes by deleting no longer relevant entries, sometimes by just un-linking, and going forward, sometimes updating links). But, it’s quite a bit of work.

Why do this? Well, first, broken links hurt SEO, which I am trying to improve to bring in more readers (and by more, I mean, higher single digit counts; i’m keeping expectations low here). But also, for the couple of friends who may delve into archives (Hi Liz!), broken links are annoying (and annoying for me as well).

I’m down to 1350 broken links as of this writing, but I think it’s just going to take weeks of a-few-at-a-time to get through it all, with the image posts being hardest (trying to figure out if I have the original images someplace, and then uploading, or replacing, or just un-linking).

or i’ll give up and quit dickin’ around and just wrote porn instead.

Mmm. Porn.

By the way I now have ‘subscribe’ option for new updates, when you comment, so if you’re aching to know the second I put up something new, comment and look for subscribe options.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

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It’s been interesting to look at stats since I got more active.

I used to be able to judge engagement by comments, and had sitemeter (I think it was called) to measure hits. I learned a lot as to who was hitting from where, and how much, and when someting had gone viral (as when I blogged about Snakes on a Plane, back before it was actually made, and my post went viral when the whole SOAP thing took off).

However, in the last 10 years or so, things have changed a lot. Far more users have privacy blocks of various sorts, including what’s built into IOS and MacOS, as well as various browsers.

The tracking tools I have are vastly less informative than in the old days. Thus is a good thing in privacy terms, obviously, but, as a blogger who wants to know if anyone is reading, the whole thing is a bit of a mystery.

I had a burst of hits a week or so ago, which I took to mean a combination of SEO and frequent updates (and a big increase in my activity on Twitter) were paying off, as was my own increase in activity on blogs; i’ve been liking and commenting anywhere I can find, and was seeing increase in activity in logs. But, no increase in comments, which is the only way I can actually tell if I’m getting read, and, after that burst a week ago, there’s a sudden drop both in stats data, and in ‘like’ activity.

It’s all a bit of a head-scratcher at this point, and i’m back to assuming that, aside from one (new) friend i’ve made, i’m not actually getting much readership, even if something hits my posts and pages.

But, the point isn’t just being read (though it helps), the point is to write more. For me at least, shark-like, I have to move or die. If I stop writing, I fear I won’t start again for years.

So as much as possible, daily updates will keep coming.

It’s not that I lack things to write about; it’s that I lack time to write about all the things I wish to, and often don’t start for fear of doing a half-assed job.

As always though, if you read this, please comment. I don’t need a real name, or a real email, you can put junk in there. But I do like to know someone got this far down the page.

Love will have to do

Karl Elvis2 Comments

I I’ve spent of a lot of my life, a lot of my time, thinking, and writing,  about love.

Love is a wholly inadequate word, in english, to express all the dozens of things we mean when we say love.

I love a good sandwich, my favorite bourbon. I love my favorite band, my favorite song.

I love to cook. I love my favorite teevee shows. I love riding mortorcycles.

These are all true, without being metaphoric. Because these are loves.

I love my kids, my dogs, have loved a dozen rats, mice, guinea pigs. I loved a parrot my daughter had. And these are loves, true and heartfelt.

I loved my parents, I love certain friends. I’ve cried over the heartbreak of loss, because love can mean heartbreak.

One word, Love, isn’t enough for all of that.  It’s the same word; each one of those things is a love, but each one is wholly different. The love for bands or books or art, isn’t the same as the love of a friend. The love of a pet, and the love of a child – while in many ways almost the same – isn’t the same.

We need at least three words to cover the above. Love-of-object, love-of-activity, love-of-friends/family/pets. Really that could be 5 words, and I could keep subdividing, like kids today will with gender/sexuality identity, or musical genres.

But however many we end up with, it’s not one. Love won’t do it.

And then there’s another kind of love, which is not at all like the above. And we could have the same conversation, because it’s not just one thing, when we discuss it.

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Fuck Off, Ian

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Ironically my late brother was named Ian, and I imagine the title phrase has been said out loud, oh, a thousand times. But nevermind that, for now.

This is about the namesake hurricane.

This freaks me the fuck out: my best friend in the whole world, someone I have loved for decades, lives just about under where that cluster of rainbow spaghetti hits FLA, and I really, really do not like that.

I know there are a million people who may get clobbered if Ian hooks more north and west, and i’m sorry, but I don’t care. I can only care about the few people I truly love, and I need them to stay safe.

I know, no hope or thought or prayer will turn a hurricane; it’s all goddamn physics. But animal brain still says force of will can turn this thing, and if I have anything, it’s force of will.

Hurricane Ian

 

 

Shoelace moments

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Some days nothing seems to work out.

It’s not that anything is bad, relatively speaking, but it’s also nothing good, nothing going the way you want.

Shoelace moments, I call them, in reference my favorite Bukowski poem.

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

so be careful
when you
bend over.

It’s that shit, all day long. Nothing that means anything, really, but,

Just the fucking shoelace.

what we call stalling

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I”ve been trying to figure out ho wbest to create a ‘favorite posts’ menu.

I’m relatively sure this will be easy when I focus on it for more than five minutes at a time, but, I thought i’d start with the idea of what favorites are.

Most popular? I don’t even know what that means anymore, since it’s been a decade at least since I last had a lot of readers. Most popular now is whatever I last posted that got likes.

No, it has to be the best of what i’ve written, according to me. But that means I have to dig through 1300 goddamn posts (and try to resist deleting all the ones that seem stupid, now), to try to figure out what i’m actually proud of.

I don’t quite know if I want to do that, but, I guess somebody has to.

But anyway, what i’d rather be writing about is sex.

One of the tricky parts for some of us is, inspiration. What gets us writing.

I used  to write colossal rants, which was easy to get into. I used to write reviews of things, or at least my impressions of them (books, movies, etc), which as often as not took the form of a rant.

I don’t enjoy ranting the way I used to; I can’t quite work up the energy to be that angry about things that don’t matter so much.

But sex will always drive me. I am there pretty much 24×7 (well, I don’t sex dream like I used to, alas, since those kinds of dreams tend to produce great fiction, so let’s say, every waking hour, and some of the sleeping ones).

I’ve made a few attempts at short stories and at novels that were not primarily erotic, all of which got going but stalled for one reason or another (which doesn’t mean they’re done with, it just means I need to find time where work ins’t always in the back of my head, to try to mail down what exactly i’m writing, when passion isn’t my primary driver.)

So for now, as i’m getting back into writing, i’m going to be working with what I know I can do.

Why am I not doing that here, now? That’s really what we call stalling.

I need to focus myself on what I do, which has always begin with characters. Every piece of fiction i’ve ever succeeded with began with a person; sometimes real, sometimes dreamed, sometimes invented, but always a person. Character-driven, is what a writer would call it, rather than plot-driven. So I need to gather my thoughts to try to find who i’m writing about, first, and who i’m writing as, second (because I tend to find first person infinitely easier, and today, easy is the name of the game).

I have a few places to start – it’s easy to begin with a person I actually know, as a model, at least if I can picture them well. Real life helps, because I can model how they move, how they sound. In some cases I have reference for how they smell (which matters a huge mount to me), or even how they come. Knowing these things means I can more easily build my model.

From there crafting erotica is a simple matter of setting, mood, tone. Something like Long Dark Car, it was easy because person and setting came from a dream, so mood and tone was easy from there, once I had a song in my head to define mood and give the story a beat.

So I need to know who, and then where. The who needs to come to me, which i’m hoping will occur in a few minutes when I can close my eyes and imagine.

I have good candidates; some I know well, either in real life or, in some cases, crushes I could pull out of a movie or tv. Others, who I have not yet gotten enough feel for, to write convincingly, but may do yet.

The trick though with real people is, you have to be able to remain authentic and accurate, even if you are fictionalizing them.

I’ll have let someone volunteer, so to speak.