my stars, a negro!

The last pen in the nice set I'd bought went dry a few days ago. I'm not very good about keeping up with pens and paper, probably because of a subconscious fear of a nascent obsession I have with them.

(You don't say — a blog entry about a hollow neurosis?)

The nice set was about as nice as you can get in a multi-pack. Black rubber and chrome, ergonomic and retractable, with rich black gel ink that rolled over the tip smoothly — clean, unbroken lines, mm — and dried quickly, so that it didn't smear all over the page and leave splotches on my hands.

A guy's gotta write. I turned up a box still packed away in my office.

Foray
.5mm Precision Point

I remembered these. I got them in some business conference: a little bit of kiss-ass from an office supply store. This was their house brand. Whatever; I'm not picky.

Yeah, right.

These pens aren't so hot. Their plastic barrels are coated in cheap paint with no topcoat that chips off on my hand and in my pocket, tapering down into an unremarkable naked tin tip that leaks ink in tiny, sloppy lines that creep out along the fibers of the paper like black frost shitting all over my shitty penmanship. It takes its time drying, even on the cheap, coarse paper I use to take my notes. It's too thin for my fingers.

I fucking love this pen.

See, it makes an amazing sound. When I write with this pen, I can feel the texture of the paper in my fingers, and hear it scritching and scratching faintly over, onto, and between the surfaces of the paper and its resonating dully in the paper of the pad, and the wood of the table beneath that. I like the imperfection of the lines, too, but that's impractical and completely secondary.

In What Dreams May Come, a pretty okay to middling movie (great visuals, good acting, but there's a Magical Negro), there's a scene where Ann, less than sane, is writing a letter to a dead person. She has a fantastic pen and what looks like vellum, and the sound of this process, the flow of the ink, and the stroke of her pens are so well captured that I actually bought the movie just to watch that scene whenever the whim took me.

I'm realizing I'm all about sound. The dark, moist raking of my nails over a partner's excited skin, thinly coated in a fresh sheen of sweat, the warm, hollow sound of a heavy-bottomed glass moving across a wooden table, a heartbeat and breath, the falls of my bootheels, the minor-key ring of a knife, the dead tapping of my fingers on the touchscreen of my smartphone.

Few things, though, can compare to a resonant pen over the right sheet of paper.

Gotta play with this more.

liminalia's daughter has run away. If you can help by crossposting or networking in some other way, please do.

Thanks, everyone.

So, an expensive phone comes out. Lots of hype. Lines around the corner. Phone sells out.

Folks love their new shiny thing. Pretty shiny. Shiny loves me. But wait! Some of them find out that the antenna doesn't work when you hold the phone a certain way. Left handed people are required to touch this part of the phone in order to hold it in their left hand.

The official corporate response?

"Just don't hold it that way."

HA HA HA THAT IS A GOOD ONE NO?

Folks keep asking me what I look like these days. The answer is: not much different. A little hairier, a little skinnier.



Still quite pale. I need more outdoor hobbies.

"Chode" is pretty good. So are "butter" and "chowder" in reference to any liquid product of sex. I seriously lose my shit at least half the time whenever anyone says "taint".

Also, "douchebag" will always have a special place in my heart.

More, perhaps, to come.

Alright. Lemme hear yours.

A lot of stuff has come and gone through Chicago's alt community lately that touches on the spiritual: energy work, sacred sexuality (where it refers to the metaphysical), chakra groundings, that kind of thing.

I enjoy hearing about this stuff. I'm really into what gets people going, what gets into their heads, watching them in the process of experiencing it. In the past, I used to go to various churches, spiritual gatherings, and other worshipful whatnots. As long as what spiritual people are doing is respectful, I respect them and their beliefs. I even interact with those beliefs. I'm interested in them.

...vicariously. That shit's not compelling for me, personally. I've had a couple of near-arguments with people lately because they couldn't understand how I couldn't believe that there's more to the day than the mundanity of what's readily apparent, or how I couldn't be personally enticed to go on a quest for levels of experience that transcend the physical.

The answer is that I really just don't care. I learned a couple of years ago that there's a name for this: Apatheism. That's me. I seem to get more shit about that than I'd think.

I acknowledge that there's more to the universe than we understand, and more still that we may never be able to. I actually take a kind of comfort in that, which manifests as an interest in science, technology, and enthusiasm for the acquisition of knowledge and pioneering of new frontiers.

I'm not an atheist. Atheists, particularly strong atheists, still subscribe to a type of theology that requires a level of passion that I just can't muster up on the subject. Agnostics might give a damn. Then there's me. I can work up a lot of intellectual enthusiasm and interest, but it ends there.

Here's the thing: if God were to appear in my morning oatmeal and start performing miracles and gathering followers, I'd probably check myself in somewhere and hope for a strong prescription.

Just kidding.

If a real-deal God were to show up on CNN immediately after I posted this, I'd be interested, and I'd even be excited. I wouldn't feel compelled to worship it. Worship's not my thing. What's more, when I think about it, I can't imagine that any deity that'd create a world like this would really care to be worshiped -- I feel that if something made our universe, it just rolled the dice and is content to watch them tumble.

I'm alright with that. I'm alright with what you think, too.

A lot of folks seem to think that feeling the way I feel takes some of the lustre off of a person, or, better yet, removes a dimension from their sexuality. I'm actually a little offended by that.

I've had experiences with partners that seemed to transcend the physical acts, and felt connections to partners that felt as if we were sharing the same space outside of our heads. Many of those partners had spiritual beliefs and chalked what was going up to the metaphysical, while I chalked them up to the excitement of intimacy, or the exchange of power, surges of adrenaline and endorphins, and the synchronization of our physical forms together. I didn't reject those transcendent feelings, or dissect them with cold logic, or minimize them any more than anyone who'd say we were walking together on the astral plane. I share that with a partner -- just from a different place. There isn't anything fraudulent or patronizing in it.

It'd be nice to hear that someone else knows where I'm coming from. And, since I'm openminded: anyone (else) think I'm full of shit?

Brain drain from business copywriting has hindered my once-appreciating blog output. The good news: this can't last forever.

That said, I know I could do better than this for my first post in a while, but... I have to share this with someone.

The Booty Pop Panty.


By the way, does anyone else find the word 'panties' kind of unright?

IAEA fears Iran working now on nuclear warhead.

I don't always agree with Bill Maher, but this is a fine article, and I'm going to act on it:

Stop the Abuse: It's Time to Break Up With Your Big Bank

Heeeeyyyy iPad iPad iPad. iPad? iPad! iPad = maxi pad haw haw but seriously iPad.

Are you going to catch Obama's State of the iPad address tonight? Do you have your preorder in for your iPad? Will you go with the conservative FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR OH MY GOD IS ANYONE AWARE THERE'S A RECESSION ON $499 version or do you need a little more space and 3G? Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. It'll be hard, but I'll wait one paycheck because I just put in an order for a longer leash for my toddler and the retainer fee for the publicist I just hired for my Western privilege.

You know what else I was thinking? About how great Apple is. I was looking at my dick the other day and thinking, "Golly gee willikers my dick and I have a lot of fun together, but man wouldn't it be great if my dick were shiny and only had one button and was made by Apple?"

So then I went to the Genius Bar and laid my dick on the counter and said SIR I'D LIKE AN UPGRADE and the fellow gave me a latte and said WELL APPLECARE DOESN'T COVER THAT BUT YOU SURE COULD USE IT AS A STYLUS FOR YOUR iPAD!

iPad!