WHO'S THAT GIRL??

Who's the blonde in the pink coat? The one rockin' the Gangnam like nobody else? The girl with the pompom? WHY. . . IT'S LAUREN GUNNING! 

Yes, THAT Lauren Gunning. The one you've heard about. The Lauren Gunning you are sure to watch over and over again on this video from .17 to .23! 

The fact that I gave birth to her Daddy (sitting beside her in the stands) has nothing to do with this - I just think she's cute. Must be the Gunning (Gangnam!) genes.

WHO is that person singing?

This movie came on Turner Classics, and it was one of those things where I was going to watch 10 minutes of it, maybe record the rest. . . and I instantly fell in. I've seen it (Alfie with Michael Caine) at least twice before so there were no surprises. But it didn't matter. Like Gone with the Wind, you watch it because you know what's coming next. It sort of brands itself on you because we've all known someone like that, or maybe several someones, or maybe we've seen traces of it in ourselves.

I didn't remember the ending and in fact, the end credits were different in one version I saw on TV, they didn't have the rights to the music or something. . .because I remember thinking, hmmmm, aren't they going to do "that song"?, and they didn't. I knew the melancholy Dionne Warwick version, but WHO was this person singing, this raw, heartstring-wringing, out-on-the-edges-of-loneliness rendition that seemed to squeeze all the bitter pathos out of the detestable, irresistable character we couldn't stop watching for the past two hours?

The arrangement over the stylish black-and-white credits had a definite '60s context, a sort of harpsichord-flute-heavy-percussion feel to it, and that alone should've given me a clue (and it did, after the fact!)  Then partway through the singing I guessed, then held my breath, wondering if I could be right, if it would be in the credits at the very end, and it was. All I can say is, it's a singer whose voice later dissolved into a heap of unattractive mannerisms, but back then, in 1966, before her real heyday even began, she had something, something raw and magnetic, something incredible which literally made me gasp. Artistry, all of it. And Michael Caine, and all that he was able to express. There is something beyond the scurrilous crap we have to live with every day. Listen for it.

(Oh, and - the person who uploaded this cut a few seconds off the end - like cutting the final resolving chord off a symphony - PLEASE don't do this! It matters!)

(And P. P. S.: I dreamed about this song all night! I dreamed about the movie, watching it all over again with a man I was supposed to know, someone with tattoos who spoke Cockney and seemed like some version of Michael Caine. I kept saying I watched the movie twice back-to-back over two days, which I never did, I couldn't stand to.  Like a tattoo by an inept or even sadistic artist, it leaves a bruise, a dark sordid shadow of pity mixed with contempt. For all his seeming redemption at the end of the movie, we know Alfie won't change. He'll keep attaching himself parasitically to women, men too, lower companions that just get lower, until he ends up being found in a cheap room somewhere, a violent suicide. I've seen it. Believe me.)

Biggest idiots I’ve ever seen: or, why do we write?

So late at night

I don’t have to listen to the thumping and tumbling of my soul

Why do we we write?

Where was I born? I remember a front porch, and not

Much else. Always there were books around

A whole room of them, a den lined with books,

Most of them in German, seemingly,

Goethe Werke, Schiller Werke

Whatever the fuck that meant

So I tried to make my way
 

 

One day in the buriedness of deeply sucking at

An author I raptly chose

As my favourite of the moment or the day,

I had this thought: you can MAKE these.

Somebody makes them, somebody DOES them.

They don’t come out of nowhere, someone

Sits down and does them.

I began to write. In shaky block capitals at first,

Always in pencil like they told me to in school,

In case I made an error and had to take a pink pearl eraser

And rub it out, leaving disgusting grey crumbs like dead insects

And when I had finished the story

Which was probably about horses

I thought it was good

And I began to write out copies.

 

 

Does this mean I was published? If publishing

Means distributing written material

To a number of different readers, then yeah,

Just don’t count the numbers

As later on,

Having written novel manuscripts, poetry manuscripts, thousands of

Book reviews and gazillions of newspaper pieces,

I did not wish to count the numbers,

As I did have an income

From writing, a steady one,

Just very small,

So I hoped no one would count it up

And see that a paper boy would make more,

Or a counter person at McDonald’s.

 

Oh but you’re in the arts, someone would say,

So why do you even think about making money?

Why do you sully yourself, what’s wrong with you,

Don’t you think you’re lowering yourself by writing for newspapers?

Especially when they line birdcages the next day.

Or start fires, I mean in the fireplace. Good for that.

I didn’t want to tell them about Dickens and guys like that, I don’t want to

Look them up, lots of guys and maybe girls too, who plied their trade

Whatever way they could.

If it's out there at all,

it becomes Game,

Public property that prompts some people

(who always wanted to write but never

had the guts to even get started)

to send you Criticisms

which are For Your Own Good,

and aren't all writers 

interested in "feedback" from readers,

isn't it always a good thing

an educational thing

a thing that will doubtless hugely improve them

if they're "real" writers?

So then I'm a fake writer,

and you can have your fucking gratuitous, sneakily sadistic criticism back

open your mouth and I will return it to you

(or some other orifice, I don't care)

because you don't know what the hell you are

talking about

anyway.
 

But there are bigger problems than this 

I hope I don't live to see it

Grammar is slowly eroding, not the schoolmarm type, not parsing sentences, I mean the matrix below and beneath vocabularly

That helps the whole mess make sense.

 

I wonder how it will be in 100 years, if I came back,

Which I will not,

Even if I could,

Or 300 or 500, if the planet hasn’t blown up by then or is

Taken over by cockroaches, who could probably

Spell better

Than the lamebrain mutants on Twitter.

I wonder if I’d know what they were saying at all,

With the speed with which they were saying it,

The fractured syntax,

Verb never matching subject EVER,

With no one noticing or caring, not even really educated people

Or will there BE such a thing

As everyone spews Orwellian Duckspeak.

 

Maybe just bouncing brain waves off each other.

I would not mind dispensing with words, I mean for-bloody-ever,

Because I honestly wonder

What good they have done me

Except to light in myself

A feverish desire to be “read”

Which has never come about,

Not even in this-here blog

Which probably has an offputting title

That I sincerely thought might ignite some sales.

 

At the same time,

I am unable to wag my ass

Or kneel down

The way I suppose I am meant to

To “get ahead”, to play the game.

There is a randomness about it

So that squealing ambitious pretenders

Say, look, look, there’s 100 Shades of Swill or what-you-call-it

Look, SHE made it work by writing three atrocious books

Full of appalling sadism against women

And these were ebooks

Did you know that

She didn’t even have to send a stamped self-addressed envelope

Or print out 900 pages and parcel them up and mail them

Or put them all on floppy disks.

 

But this is the business part

I suppose I must keep it purely away

From the mad addiction that keeps me sitting in front of this machine

I know I would write anyway because I am an idiot

I am STILL involved with this abusive person, this sadist

Who throws me a crumb once in a while

And kicks me in the face the rest of the time
 

 

And who needs Fifty Shades of Grey

When you serve a Master

Who is so completely

And utterly

Sociopathic

I'm turning Japanese (I really think so)

I've got your picture of me and you

You wrote "I love you" I wrote "me too" 

I sit there staring and there's nothing else to do 

Oh it's in color 

Your hair is brown

Your eyes are hazel

And soft as clouds

I often kiss you when there's no one else around

I've got your picture, I've got your picture

I'd like a million of you all 'round myself

I want a doctor to take your picture

So I can look at you from inside as well

You've got me turning up and turning down

I'm turning in I'm turning 'round

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I've got your picture, I've got your picture

I'd like a million of them all 'round myself

I want a doctor to take your picture

So I can look at you from inside as well

You've got me turning up I'm turning down

I'm turning in I'm turning 'round

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women

No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it's dark

Everyone around me is a total stranger

Everyone avoids me like a cyclone Ranger

Everyone...

That's why I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

[guitar]

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

Turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so, think so, think so

I'm turning Japanese

I think I'm turning Japanese

I really think so

But I got one of these in a cereal box!

Here was have it, the wonder of the ages, a calculator that only costs $345! I wonder what the expensive ones cost. I remember my Dad furiously working at an adding machine, and before that, I guess, we had the abacus. But this one revolutionized everything. You could actually lift it and carry it around (with difficulty). The only calculator I own now is a fridge magnet doubling as a clip to hold papers (usually my grandkids' fingerpainting and stuff). I got it free somewhere from some place that was trying to get rid of them. 

The mentally-challenged smart phone

Nothing is stranger, or funnier, than watching old TV ads where people gasp in awe over what we now see as dinosaur technology. This one was just jaw-dropping. You had to carry around a 25-pound suitcase around with you to make a phone call. Hell, why not just use a phone booth? It would sure cost a lot less. But hey, this was the '70s (or late '60s), the Space Age. It sure must have looked weird, however, toting that thing around. What happened when it rang, or could you only call out? Today we'd think it was a bomb and the guy would be arrested. Could he get it through airport security?

This is real Maxwell Smart stuff, though not quite as bad as the Shoe Phone.

It's kind of like the Jetsons (without Rosie)

What I remember:

People saying "by the year 2000. . .", followed by some kind of prediction (either really great or really awful)

Domed cities, sort of like in the Jetsons

No more food, everyone would get their nourishment from pills

Robots would do all the housework (Jetsons again)

Computers would do everything (actually, that one came true)

Everyone would use those jet-pack thingies to get around, no cars

World hunger would be solved

No more war

20th Century Fox would change to 21st Century Fox

"The Year 2000" was considered magical, powerful, special. It was something to aim for, to strive for, a shining Olympian ideal, when really it was just a dumb-ass date lumbering along waiting to come at us. Then there was Y2K! Remember Y2K and "the new millennium" (which everybody spelled wrong)? The new millennium this, the new millennium that, when really, all that happened at midnight was a lot of booze and fireworks. Besides, the real new millennium didn't start until 2001, and we all know what happened THAT year. 

It's fun, though, when you're watching, say, an old Star Trek (and I'm into watching them again now that they're in HD and look so much better - how did they do that, I wonder? Now I can see every pock mark on Sulu's face) and all of a sudden they're talking about the awful war of 1992 that annihilated all life on earth except for a few protozoa. Or one of those SF movies from from the '50s where they're making predictions about the future, say, 1980 or 1990, which is now way in the past. So how can it be, like, the past and the future at the same time?

And these time-travel things, I don't know. You'd go back and meet yourself, wouldn't you? You'd watch yourself walking around and eating Fritos and washing the dishes, and it would TOTALLY freak you out. And then what would happen when you saw each other? Which one would be the "real you"? Would you sort of cancel each other out? There'd be this younger you and this older you. Either that or one of you would disappear. Sounds like a crappy deal to me.  Sorry, Mr. Einstein, I think you bombed out on that one.

Things to do with a floppy disk

Blogger's note. I found this delicious article in a magazine called The Magazine (from somewhere in Britain, the BBC I think). As usual I was looking for something else. I got watching old documentaries on YouTube about the history of the computer, The Machine That Changed The World (including one made in 1992 that approached the subject with a mixture of spine-chilling awe and goggle-eyed dread). Then I got watching old Commodore 64 ads ("I adore my 64. . . I rate with it, create with it, telecommunicate with it" - one of the best jingles ever). 

Then I found those old IBM ads with Charlie Chaplin, charming little vignettes designed to take the trembling horror out of this "new technology". The Mad Men of Madison Avenue must have decided to reach deep into the past and use a hapless, harmless, hopelessly anachronistic charmer (one that everyone instantly recognized) to neutralize people's fears of a soulless and totally-mechanized future. Didn't work, but it was a good try.

Anyway, before I get totally sidetracked, this list of "40 ways we still use floppy disks" came out almost three years ago. I just could not post the entire 40, so I did a bit of editing and limited myself to the more intriguing and original uses. 

(Hey, the floppy may not be dead yet. The other day I was on a publisher's web site and, after telling me in a scolding tone that I must type my manuscript on 8 1/2" x 11" white bond paper, double-spaced, on one side of the page only, in 12-point pica type, they told me that if by some far-flung chance they actually decided to BUY my manuscript, I was required to mail it to them on floppy disks. So you see? Some people in the publishing business still get by with 20-year-old computers. That's economy, by Jove!)

40 ways we still use floppy disks 

Floppy disks: headed for the museum, or treasured home for your data? When Sony said this week it was halting the production of floppy disks, the Magazine set out to discover who still buys and uses this anachronistic computer storage medium. Here are (not 40 - just the good ones) explanations for why floppy disks are still needed. 

I regularly buy floppy disks. I own a pub with a retro theme and I use them as beer mats.
Shaun Garrod, Ashby de la Soul

I am an artist from London and I use floppy disks to produce my paintings. I tile them up as canvases. The personal information on each disk is forever locked under the paint, but the labels are left as a clue. I use the circular hubs on the reverse for eyes!
Nick Gentry, London 

Not as much a user as an owner of a great many floppies, I was planning to tile the roof of my shed with them (using the two existing corner holes to take the nails) until my wife forbade it.

Erik Ga Bean, Stevenage, England 

Have you seen the cost of clays for skeet shooting? Pull!
Paul Taylor, St.Helens England

Drilling holes on four sides and interlocking them with industrial clips, I have created a retro futurist sliding curtain for a client's loft. Monochromatic colour floppies with occasional accents of bright red and yellow give different moods on sunny days or ambient lighting by night. On them are stored formulas and theories of leading edge scientists...
Paolo, Montreal

My band released our first single on a floppy as a gimmick last year. It took us quite a while to find somewhere that actually sold them anymore.
Chris Bennigsen, Manchester 

I buy these little beauties for a quite different reason. The floppy disk costs an average of £3.66 for 200, however they have a resale value of £5.50 at any good computer recycling centre, so I buy them in bulk and simply sell them directly at a profit. Take that, Bill Gates.
Cynthia, Tamworth

I still buy and use floppies for my electronic organ and some older synthesizers. Many professional keyboardists still own older synthesizers for their unique design and sheer power.
Nick Chan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

I put handles on them and sell them as spatulas. I sell thousands of them a year.
Stan Russell, Squatney, Delaware – USA 

I buy about 100,000 floppies per year as I have a business that makes them into drinks mats, fridge magnets and toast racks.
Ken Pork, London

I have a stack of old 3.5" floppies I keep in a box. They work perfectly for adjusting a bookshelf or the like set up on carpet. If the bookshelf tilts, I just slide floppies under the appropriate corners until it's upright.
Greg Goebel, Loveland CO USA

I've always used an old floppy disk as an ice scraper for the car, just the right combination of rigidity and flexibility. Just don't use the side with the metal sleeve on. They last about a year before they need replacing from my endless pile from the 1990s.
Chris, Swindon, UK

I use a multitude of coloured floppies as a fashion statement, as part of outfits I make. The pieces I create are for cyberpunk/goth outfits.
Alexandra "Chii", Yorktown, Virginia, USA 

Romania's fiscal agency still requests documents on floppy to process taxes. 
Jack, Bucharest

Sad to say but there are a lot of ancient computers in church and school offices, and the old lady at the church or the school runs it the same as she did 20 years ago, so the floppy is her tool of choice. I donated a couple of newer used PCs to the church and had to take the floppy drives out of the old systems and put them in the new systems for her. Simply amazing.
Barry, Dayton Ohio, USA

Recently I decided to lay down some new concrete walkways at my home, and came upon the idea to grind up floppies (along with some other plastics) to mix in with the concrete. The addition of the fibres makes for a stronger concrete, and looks interesting as well.
New Orleans, LA, USA

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

It'll never happen: the scary world of computers

(Transcript of caption: hey, is that Eisenhower standing there, or what?):

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortras language, the computer will be easy to use.

Nothing but a raving bitch (and she shows her tits!)

Nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time. All the time.

This went as far back as she could remember and she could never find out why or even how it got started. Mostly it involved men, although she could remember a very few times when it had happened with powerful women, women whose attention she craved for some mysterious reason.

In the schoolyard, she was a pariah from the start, as if the other kids could just smell something on her which made them jerk violently away. She knew even then that it happened in the animal kingdom too, causing chickens to be pecked to death, or young eaten. She had seen a YouTube video, a really gross one, of a hamster eating its pink, squirming newborn offspring just as casually as if it had been a rabbit pellet.

In the past, I jumped and jumped after people and panted and bounded like a dog begging for attention, and the other person would totally ignore me, making me leap and bound and wag my ass even more, until finally they would slap my muzzle hard, causing me to yip in pain and slink away to hide under the bed with my tail between my legs. And then it would start all over again. These were called “relationships”.

Well, you have to take what you can get, don’t you? Aren’t you grateful to have people’s attention? What’s the matter with you? But in some ways, this masochistic pattern was beginning to seem to her like a case of “kiss the whip”. The kind of loneliness that was thrust on her in childhood bent and twisted the natural health of her soul into an impossible corkscrew that would never be straightened, like the spine of the Elephant Man or those wretched ancient bones of King Richard III.

It always started out well. It started out with at least a degree of mutual interest, with a frisson of excitement, a bouncing back and forth of energies. Often, years back, it all happened through the mail, scintillating handwritten letters exchanged with other writers, some of them even a little bit famous. There was a tinge of eroticism in these, at first.

Then it began to “turn”. It was at this point that I’d step up my activities.

In some cases the person moved, and moved, and I had to keep scrounging up forwarding addresses, at newspapers or literary mags or wherever. Sometimes it occurred to me that if I didn’t hold up both ends, the whole thing would come crashing down.

How long can you run back and forth on the tennis court, trying to hit the ball from both sides?

Oh, but there was one.  A musician, so she was a goner. God, he was beautiful, and he was friends with her, and he encouraged her music, her singing, even describing her voice as “gorgeous”. It was bait, and she snapped at it ravenously.

Then he moved away, and the emails began. Freed from social constraints, they began to flirt madly, skirting around the edges of sexuality. This man was an electronic Lothario without the courage to try anything face-to-face.

Plus he was lonely, teaching music in some northern outpost. Then the messages began to coolly pull away, tripping off that whining, salivating  dog syndrome once again.

I wrote all these songs, see. It was idiotic, but that’s what I did. I mean, I wrote the lyrics and he wrote the tunes. I must’ve written 30 lyrics, and I thought some of them were pretty good. In fact, I KNOW they were good. He wrote tunes to a couple of them, some of them very strange.  Often he carved up the lyrics, adding his own lines which always seemed nonsensical.

And then: a jazz concert at his school! His band would be performing one of MY songs:

SILLY BOY

You walked into my life

And left your footprints on my skin

I could never tell if loving you

Was joy, or sin

It seems that if I touch you, I fall right in

And so I stay away. . .

Silly boy

I never should have

Set my heart on you

You’re a dream

That has no hope of coming true

When you smile

The angels smile along with you

Silly boy

I thought you meant it when

You said you’d be with me a while

But staying close to someone

Is not your style

It seems I have a habit of self-denial

And so I stay away. . .

Silly boy

I never should have

Lost my mind for you

You’re a dream

That bathes my heart in shades of blue

When you smile

The angels smile along with you

Silly boy

And when you left without me

All my plans just blew away

I knew that my composure

Wouldn’t last the day

It seems it doesn’t matter if I try to pray

And so, I say:

Silly boy

You never should have

Played games with my soul

I’m a fool

Who has no hope of feeling whole

Now you’re gone

My heart’s an empty, aching hole

You stole my joy

You silly boy

Silly boy . . .

Yes. And he actually worked on this one and set it to a tune so the lead singer in his band could perform it!  I couldn’t be there, of course, but he sent me the audio.

The female singer, a picture of whom he also sent me (sooty-eyed, slinky, with shingly black hair and multiple piercings) sang;

“You came into my life

I didn’t know I’d been

Something like

Joy or sin or – um - ”

Suddenly the accompaniment roared up louder to cover the fact that she had completely forgotten the words.

Then there was the “igloo".  Sometime during her mad puppy-scramble around him, wagging the stump of her little amputated tail, she told him a story about her childhood (half-fabricated): about how Hermie Kneuchdel had a crush on her and surprised her by building an igloo for her in his back yard.

Should she have been surprised when he began to write his own lyrics, one of which said “you built an igloo in my heart/now I know we’ll never be apart,” or some inane thing?

Then he came back for a visit and wanted me to sit in his car. (What??) “You have to hear these new songs I wrote,” he said, and turned on his sound system.

The songs were obviously, obsessively about one “girl” that he was madly infatuated with. Many of the  metaphors were snagged out of MY work and casually incorporated. For one wild second, I thought they were about me. How else could he so casually steal all my best stuff?

“What’s all this - ”

“Oh. These are about Alison. She’s – she’s one of my students. Seventeen years old, but she’s a lot more mature than I am! We can’t really be seen together so we have to do a lot of sneaking around.”

That one died a slow death. When was the last email? The last stinging whip on the puppy dog’s quivering nose?

There is this much left. He sends me birthday greetings every year. It's automatic, in his computer. Nice of him.

How many more? Let me count. There was the sour-faced drama critic she corresponded with for years and years, until he suddenly, completely inexplicably, left her this message:  “I won’t ‘friend’ you because I hate Facefuck.  Get lost.” She had no idea what had caused the connection to turn so poisonous. What had she said? What had she done?

When he suddenly died, she posted an angry diatribe on her blog and was attacked from every angle by people who accused HER of being nasty and mean-spirited.  She remembered her psychiatrist saying, “Lonn van Dyke is the meanest, most narcissistic, heartless, self-centred, vindictive. . .” and on and on it went. (She wondered how he knew. Maybe some of his male patients had “talked”.) It was of some help, but not much.

Meantime, she was reamed out, eviscerated by people who refused to see how much truth there was in what she was saying. One blogger found a ridiculous picture of her pulling a weird face, blew it up huge, posted it, and spent 500 words or so stabbing her through the heart, just to be sure everyone knew what a twisted old crackpot she was: "This woman insisted on following him around and harassing, even stalking him. He had probably been trying to scrape her off the bottom of his shoe for years."

Was it really that bad?  She looked at her post a couple of hours later and realized it wasn't much better than Lonn's "Facefuck" remark. So she took it down and deleted it. There was not much use in posting a heap of ashes. How much easier it is to feud with someone when you never see them face-to-face!

So what did I think would happen? As with so many of these men, I never met him face-to-face, but I kept pushing at it, inserting little lines in my letters about “meeting for coffee”. Ludicrously, she bought a dress that she never wore, her “Lonn dress”. She joked about it to her girl friend, but she was deadly serious. Sometimes she thought she saw him at concerts and plays, but she was never sure enough to come up to him. She knew he hated people anyway.

She suspected he lived in an emotional cave, had no family  and was close to no one. When he died, the accolades from co-workers (all retired now) were almost apologetic, thinly-veiled versions of “well, he should have written for the New Yorker instead of this sad little backwater rag”.  Weirdly, the "rag" was the only paper that published anything about his death.

Meantime, what had happened to all the bile he had spewed for people's entertainment? His venom had made him famous all over town (if nowhere else). It was supposedly an honor in the local arts scene to be "van Dyked", though people secretly received much more pleasure from seeing other people attacked. They waved the columns around and made their friends read them, and chuckled and sniggered over his evisceration of their  colleagues, reading the choicest sentences out loud. This fanned the flames of  vindictive rivalry in the arts community and made Lonn happy, providing him with the only sense of power he ever had. 

But even this debacle with its train wreck ending wasn't enough; she had to start all over again. 

Oh, don’t count the rest. Don’t tot up the desperation. WHY do I do this, why can’t I just dump it? What might happen? A fuck? I don’t want to fuck these men, and half of them are gay anyway. Do I want fairy-tale magic, do I want to make it “work” just one time, to turn around an immutable fate?

Somebody said to me – sounded pretty lame at the time but maybe it’s true – it has something to do with my father, how he ignored me and emanated a sense I wasn’t welcome, that I never should have “been”. This was between bouts of drunken dining-room buffoonery and table-pounding about the injustices in his life. Incredibly, he once said (and I’m still trying to get my head around this) that everything in his life had been great until I came along. As if I “came along” under my own steam, a virus invading the family, rather than an accident caused by HIS stinking spermatozoa.

He told me, drunk, that it was plain this baby (me) was an accident and completely unwanted (though if I’d been a boy I might have squeaked through). So he told my Mum, “Don’t worry, this one will be smarter than all the other three put together. He’ll be a genius and play the violin like Paganini.” Another time he told me “well, when you’ve lost one baby” (my eldest sister, a crib death) “maybe you have to take on another one.” Something to plug the hole.

It seems to me I was dumped down the chute into a world of impossible expectations. I’ve been trying to buy my way in ever since. Are these men, these men whose sweetness is always tinged with sadism, supposed to be my way in, my key? Why has nothing I’ve ever done been good enough? Why does it magically turn into a slag heap the moment I’ve accomplished it?

And what’s the matter with you, anyway – aren’t you grateful for your life, for all these opportunities to connect with illustrious men?  With nasty infantile musicians, with bitter reclusive faggots? What ARE you, a parasite? You hate parasites, don’t you? What would happen to you if you stopped the ridiculous puppy-frisking and walked away from it all? Would you really be left with nothing?

Nothing?

  

(Blogger's note. Whew. I don't know what happens to me sometimes. I'm not saying there's no truth in this. What happens in fiction is fractal, or should I say fractured, kaleidoscopic pieces scrambled around and reconnected by imagination. If this were the whole truth about my life, I doubt if I'd be around any more. But there are certain issues. They go around and around. I don't know about other people because they don't talk about it. I suspect there are more hidden sinkholes and sore spots than people care to admit.

I found it interesting that I was so viciously attacked for my post on van Dyke, who comes the closest to a "real" person in this story (the others are more like composites). I think it happened because there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in what I was saying. This guy sent me Christmas cards for ten years, for God's sake! What caused him to turn on me so savagely?  I've never quite gotten used to being one of these people who gets attacked. The internet is a veritable playground for predators and sadists, because everyone is wearing the same blank mask.

I'm not much of a dog person - I find them uncomfortably loyal and prefer the idiosyncratic aloofness of cats. (More than two cats, however, is an affliction.) Right now I have a bird. What does that say about me, I wonder?

My original title for this story was either Bird Dog or She's a Bird Dog, but I didn't think people would remember that song (which I've always liked: "hey bird dog get away from my quail,/Hey bird dog, you're on the wrong trail". I think Hound Dog has stuck in people's memory because of Elvis, who was also too doggish for my tastes.) (P. S. I changed it again because I seem to have lost my entire readership. Should I dumb these down, I wonder, or put "tits" in every  title?)