Illicit Encounters: or, blow me down, I'm Irish!

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discombooberator's Profile. (643029)

Personal Information
Religion	Atheist	Eye Colour	Blue
Drinking	Non-Drinker	Hair Colour	Blonde
Smoking	Trying to Quit	Build	Athletic
Height	6'0'' (183cm) or above	Education	Graduate/Masters Degree
Occupation	IT/Communications
Interests	Gym / Aerobics

Send Virtual Kiss Send Virtual Gift Send Message Name: discombooberator Age: 34 Star Sign: Sagittarius Race: Caucasian/White Location: Belfast, County Antrim Marital Status: Living Together Last Active: More than a week Gifts Received Recently:

Ideal Partner:

Female between the ages of 21 and 32

I haven't yet got round to completing a full profile. I've used IE's Profile Wizard to briefly describe myself and what I'm looking for. I'm looking for someone who is: adventurous, classy, erotic, feminine, groomed, hot-blooded, no-strings attached, open-minded, playful, sexy, spontaneous

Type of Relationship Friendship, Casual

More Information

General

I would describe myself as: sexy, erotic, hot-blooded, imaginative, sophisticated, altruistic

My Appearance

If we were to meet this is what you'll see! I am : blonde, fit, groomed, normal, medium build Let me know with a message or VK if you're interested - you may persuade me to complete my profile

Since it's Monday morning, I feel it's time for a sociological treatise

I knew these kinds of sites existed. Hell, this is probably the mildest one you'll find on the internet, a sort of hookup site equivalent to dropping into the local pub. But it's the way I found it that it's interesting, to me anyway (though this is the kind of explanation that makes people's eyes glaze over. I'll have to invent a new story that's more entertaining, because somehow reality never measures up, does it? Which is the whole point of this piece.)

I sometimes watch the original Twilight Zone with Rod Serling, and on one of the episodes - a goofy thing with Orson Bean in it - Serling uses the word "discombooberated". I'm not sure  where this non-word originated, but I do remember it from childhood. Perhaps it was in a cartoon - a discombooberator, like the Wayback Machine in Mr. Peabody? - but to me it sounds like a Steve Allen term.

Never mind, it was unexpected and prompted an internet search. It was called a non-word and a slang word and a synonym for discombobulated, which is supposedly a real word. Then I found this British hookup site for married people called Illicit Encounters, featuring someone named discombooberator, an Irishman who had not even bothered to fill in his profile. He used some sort of mechanized profile generator which probably spewed out consistently Aryan blonde/blue-eyed/smart-as-hell/well-employed/non-drinking stats. The only place the profile generator slipped up was in the smoking department, but maybe that was left in to make the whole thing have a semblance of reality.

The fake swaggering was bad enough, but the conclusion - that an interested chick might make him bother to fill out his real information - was hair-raising. This was a play for the truly desperate, like Howard Wolowitz picking up fat chicks at Comicon (until he got married, of course. . . ). I see women going for this guy, I really do. The less we know about him, the better - isn't that true? And he's Irish! There can't be anything bad about him if he's Irish. Even if he lives across that mighty sea, it leaves lots of room for sexting and phone encounters and all those other baffling activities that seem to stand in for real human contact these days.

\

I've often heard it said that if you want a brief and harmless fling, pick a married person - not a person whose marriage is in shreds, because that might lead to an attachment, but someone who has a semblance of a good marriage (though not an "open" one - deception drips off of this thing, which is really the main attraction). Pick someone who's a little bit itchy and wants something on the side with no strings attached and - preferably - some Fifty Shades kinks in it to mitigate the vanilla sex (or non-sex) of the past ten years.

The site doesn't claim to do anything but provide information for these hookups, then leave the rest to the customers. This looks to be true. I would imagine there are code words for various types of sex ("friendship" meaning -what? "Casual" meaning - I can only think.) But I can't help but picture the face-time meetings they set up at the local Starbuck's, with two people searching and searching for each other: where is that guy, anyway? All I can see is some slob picking his nose. . . Don't tell me that bitch stood me up! And who's the fugly one over there, probably hasn't been laid in years. (Picture all these thoughts being thunk with an Irish accent.)  The flimsy masks they hold up for public consumption are suddenly fallen, revealing sad, lonely, not-very-attractive (and perhaps unemployed) people seeking an hour of escape through meaningless sex.

Then they both go home, wondering why their hookup failed to materialize, each of them sending the same message: Didn't see you. Oh, maybe we got the time wrong! No, I got a ticket for exceeding the speed limit on my Harley (lol)!  I broke a fingernail, didn't want you to see me that way. Heart heart heart. So it's time for another round of musical chairs, featuring human bodies instead of furniture.

Does this, um, like, bother them? Well, haven't people done this forever, before the internet even existed? I have another question for you: why does the fact that it has been going on forever justify it? Does this twisted rationalization make such hurtful, pathetic, dishonest behavior acceptable - and why?

Just askin'. With an Irish accent.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Nervous guy on public access

I promise you, this is the last video! I know I've posted this before, but it bears repeating. It could only be real. Amazing how a man can get through a performance knowing only 10% of the words.

Man and Superman

Wizard of Oz 2011: Hanging Munchkin Found on VHS Tape

I just like the concept. The video is, of course, a hoax. But the vastly slowed-down picture and soundtrack is pretty frightening. Supposedly the munchkin committed suicide because he didn't make the Lollipop Guild.

 

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%

k.d. lang - Pullin' Back The Reins (Video)

Just had to do some music today, I feel so played-out. As Oscar Wilde once put it (or was it Oscar Levant, or Oscar Mayer?), the two worst things in life are not getting what you want, and getting it.

Or, to quote Roger Sterling of Mad Men, the worst thing is seeing someone else get it.

I love this song because she is just turned inside-out and must be expressing some pretty heavy stuff. I once heard she was abandoned by her father as a child, a confusing heartbreak that inflicts the kind of unhealable wounds that make an artist.

As a young woman she fell in love with an older, straight, married woman, which must have been agony. This was the Athena that leapt fully-formed from the head of Zeus, the birthing of a supernatural being entitled Ingenue.

Yes. The divine wound that, for just one second, causes us to stop bullshitting (at least to other people) that everything is perfect in our lives. But try it. Try being vulnerable and see where it gets you. For every k. d. there are a hundred Marilyns (or Amys or Mindys or Anna Nicoles). Life under glass destroys people, though it's the thing we're all supposed to want.

To be Famous. To do something Really Impressive, while the really (really) impressive people insist it doesn't matter, that it's all art for art's sake, and that money is the least important thing of all.

So what is the most important thing of all?

I could say love, being an ageing hippie, and I know it for a fact, because it's all that's left when the rest of your life drops away under your feet. Being an instrument of love, embodying it, which I do very poorly, except perhaps when I am with my grandchildren who saved me from certain oblivion.

The least important? Posturing? Vanity? Narcissism? Shallowness? Fine, except that it seems to be exploding under the heady influence of social media.

The refrain goes like this: "My lfe's better than your life, my life's better than yours." It's typical for people to get very depressed after going on Facebook, but as with any other addiction, NEXT time is the charm, the next hit or drink or snort or click or "like" or "poke" or whatever-the-fuck, will do it for them, will get rid of this hollow howl once and for all.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Whatever became of the wildwood flower?

In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means."

Not at dawn, but when I first get up, I find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams.

Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.

I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.

At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.

At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.

There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.

At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.

It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.

That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can.


Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!"

The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially inThe City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The Invention of the Saxophone: take two

Blogger's note. God knows how many years ago, I was standing around in a book store leafing through a book of poems by Billy Collins. I found this amazing poem about saxophones, almost forgot it, then tried years later to find it on the net. No sign of it. As so often happens, I had to go back years later to find it, and by then I had done the unthinkable: written my own poem, which likely has unconscious echoes of the Collins poem. Unconscious, not because I was unconscious when I wrote it, but because I only read the Collins poem once in haste before the store clerk glared me out of the place. Do I need to tell you that the Collins' poem makes me want to stop writing forever?

The Invention of the Saxophone by Billy Collins

          It was Adolph Sax, remember,

          not Saxo Grammaticus, who gets the ovation.

          And by the time he had brought all the components

          together-- the serpentine shape, the single reed,

          the fit of the fingers,

          the upward tilt of the golden bell--

          it was already 1842, and one gets the feeling

          it was also very late at night.

          There is something nocturnal about the sound,

          something literally horny,

          as some may have noticed on that historic date

          when the first odd notes wobbled out of his studio

          into the small, darkened town,

          summoning the insomniacs (who were up

          waiting for the invention of jazz) to their windows,

          but leaving the sleepers undisturbed,

          even deepening and warming the waters of their dreams.

          For this is not the valved instrument of waking,

          more the smoky voice of longing and loss,

          the porpoise cry of the subconscious.

          No one would ever think of blowing reveille

          on a tenor without irony.

          The men would only lie in their metal bunks,

          fingers twined behind their heads,

          afloat on pools of memory and desire.

          And when the time has come to rouse the dead,

          you will not see Gabriel clipping an alto

          around his numinous neck.

          An angel playing the world's last song

          on a glistening saxophone might be enough

          to lift them back into the light of earth,

          but really no farther.

          Once resurrected, they would only lie down

          in the long cemetary grass

          or lean alone against a lugubrious yew

          and let the music do the ascending--

          curling snakes charmed from their baskets--

          while they wait for the shrill trumpet solo,

          that will blow them all to kingdom come

AFTER SEARCHING FRUITLESSLY FOR A POEM BY BILLY COLLINS CALLED THE INVENTION OF THE SAXOPHONE, THE AUTHOR TAKES IT UPON HERSELF TO WRITE ONE OF HER OWN

i don’t know who invented this

reflexive question mark of an instrument

but i think it was a good thing

for it’s great to look at,

with fat keys like frog eyes

and a big bell like royal jelly

you could keep flowers in there if you wanted to,

extra socks

or even a clock

Snakes kink too

and this sound is snakey

purply mauve as the deepest bruise

and raunchy

as a man in love

smoked as some cat of the night

disappearing over a fence

it makes leaps

(but only because it has to)

There is no

morning saxophone

this is a sound that

pulls the shades down

a hangover

howl

fading to twilight

or the blackmost

navel

of the night

Few can wrap their lips around

this gooseneck

without some harm coming to them

for this is an instrument

with a long history of

hollowing out

all but the most hardy

Bird flew into a pane

of glass and was

smashed

we don’t know why it does this to people

(maybe it was mad at him

for taking it all to such extremes)

but how could you blow this thing

halfway

i ask you

how could you rear back

in some great pained whiplash of the spine

without a sense of

terrible commitment

i never much cared for

saxophones myself

until i heard one blown correctly at last

jazz is a genre i will never understand

but perhaps that’s good

for like the priesthood, one must enter into it

without question

reservation

or doubt

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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

Shake, shake, shake: the Telus Hippo!

Coolest Telus ad EVER: and it makes great gifs!


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Amazing -

Sheldon Cooper's worst nightmare

This has been a Gorn sort of week. Oh, it started out OK. Next week will be better, I promise myself.

When things like this show up, your only hope is that a stunt double will take the fall for you. But that seldom happens outside of science fiction.

Sometimes, things just come atcha. And you can't do nothin' but wait for the commercial.

The Gorn roars loudly, and carries a very big stick. Run, Kirk. . . RUN!!

"No. . . no Gorn!" Poor Sheldon Cooper finds the Gorn almost as terrifying as Goofy. Worse, though, the Gorn is taking up sacred space. "That's where I sit!"

But wait, there's more! If you take advantage of this special TV offer, 

we'll send you TWO monsters for the price of one!

Yes! This is the amazing MUGATU, who jumps out of the bushes and harasses Captain Kirk for no reason! The Mugatu, who only looks like a man in an albino gorilla suit adapted with dinosaur spikes and a rhino horn! The Mugatu, who seems to have taken lessons from Ernie Kovacs' Nairobi Trio! The Mugatu, who. . . but let's cut Desilu some slack here. Desi Arnaz probably used up all the budget screwing expensive hookers.

It's gratifying to see McCoy blast this guy with the zipper in his back. It's one of the better special effects of early Trek. But who knows when the Mugatu will return?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm