I haven't looked at FA in four months. Everyone looks they're doing much the same thing they were doing before. I'm not into "the fandom" much anymore; nothing personal to anyone who still watches/cares. I'm sunk in "real world" issues and will likely be for some time. Will always be furry at heart, of course.

Keep it fun, keep it kind.

RIP Wolfebyte. Toward the end, you were 90% of the reason I stuck around.

To "Frogsbreath" (Demon) -- I still love the avatar you made for me and can't give you anything but my appreciation for it. Hope you're well.

21 years ago today, the earth shook hard in the San Francisco Bay area. It brought down sections of bridges and overpasses, cracked buildings, interrupted the World Series. Killed some people.

I was in college. My roommate was taking a nap, naked, on a wobbly loft bed, on the fourth and top floor of a giant rickety old house from the early 20th century.

As the house shook, he was buffeted painfully by my music collection, which was a mess of cassette tapes stacked on a high shelf.

It was worse for two other guys I knew in another old campus house. They had set up their "beers of the world" display not long before. This was like 250 empty bottles representing like 100 nations, all arranged uber-dorkily on home-made narrow shelves running all around their little double room. They were both pelted by bottles that broke against the rupturing walls and became flying glass shards.

I was doing my Computer Science homework in a lab (only the really rich kids came to college with their own computers back then). I'd just hit "Save" on my just-finished assignment. Then I was knocked out of my chair. Everyone scrambled under the plastic carrels that each housed a little MacSE, every screen now showing the little sad Mac face with the X's for eyes that was the device's too-precious way of saying that it was fucked.

I didn't scramble under anything. It was too amazing, the floor swinging that way, the giant plate glass windows bending and warping like giant soap bubbles. I sat and watched and hoped I wouldn't die. I thought of the giant Mexico City quake that had killed thousands.

Obviously, I didn't die. But after the quake I was better than that: I was transformed. It sounds silly and melodramatic now, but the quake was the moment I felt certain psychic fetters break, and I started to pursue my own happiness on my own terms for the first time. It wasn't really the quake itself, or even so much the friendships that solidified after. The quake marked with perfect poetry a transformation that probably would have happened anyway. The two are forever symbolically connected in my mind.

So today is sort of a personal holiday for me (with all respect to those who died, and who lost loved ones).

Happy Earthquake Day!

Hello beasts, I'm wapsie, a cranky old pervy kitty-cat, and I suffer from a new mysterious ailment: PINE MOUTH.

Google "pine mouth", it's hysterical & bizarre. Thousands of people this year have complained of a strong bitter metallic taste in the back of the mouth. This taste makes all food taste awful, like dishwater with lots of soap in it.

The cause: pine nuts. Ever had pine nuts? They're the essential ingredient in pesto, and they sometimes get thrown into salads for Italian-style dinners. Small, slightly greasy feel, mellow taste. They are delicious. Good Italian and Portuguese pine nuts run US$25-30 per pound (=.455 kg). But there are cheap Chinese/Russian/Turkish nuts for only US$8 /lb.

It's these Asian nuts that leave a bad taste in the mouth. (Heh. There's a sentence I don't write every day.) The taste develops 2-3 days after ingestion.

Science has yet to discover why in this year of '09 the cheap nuts ruin your sense of taste. No chemical poisons from poor processing or genetic differences have been detected. Fortunately, it seems to be a temporary effect, lasting for a week or so.

It's awful, not being able to enjoy food or drink at all. Advice: Don't eat pine nuts. (Careful, they sometimes find their way into fancy holiday cookies.) Even the freshest, most delicious pesto isn't worth the risk of losing all good taste for days (and in some cases weeks. I really hope it isn't weeks for me.)

So in Charleston, SC, where I work, there's a third-world infrastructure (not counting the gorgeous new Ravenel bridge). By which I mean when it rains hard, and it's high tide, the streets flood. Not just the back alleys of poor neighborhoods, but major thoroughfares. Now this wouldn't happen, of course, if this weren't the Low Country, where you can't have a basement in your house, because if you dig down just three feet anywhere, you hit water. There are even some streets and parking lots in town with huge puddles on bright sunny days. The puddles wax and wane with the tide.

Still you'd think: Charleston is in the USA, richest country in the world, we ought to have streets that drain properly. At least the main thoroughfares should be safe to drive in a hard rain. But no such luck. SC is backward, has been since the Civil War, and the Low Country is a land of the lost. We are fortunate that some tourists manage to find their way to our beaches and historic sites (once upon a time, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans were America's richest cities -- now they're relics). But otherwise, we're like an exotic Atlantic island, poor and weird.

So twice in recent weeks, we've had a big rain-maker storm system come through at high tide -- and right at the morning commuter rush. In the first one, I gambled on driving my European car through a flooded intersection and lost. I'd made it before, many times. But this time, it was just an inch or two too deep -- up to my knees, as I know from pushing the car backward by myself in my office clothes.

Then the incompetent dickwads at the local AAA service center(*) claimed to have fixed the car to the tune of hundreds of dollars but didn't get all the water out. So the engine was trashed as we drove it toward home, fortunately not before we could coast into the dealer. Insurance bought a new engine and transmission. We got a deal on a new clutch. All the vital organs of the car scooped out and replaced. They could rebuild; they had the technology.

Which rebuilt baby is back at the dealer again today, the "check engine" light blazing, a day after they finished the transplants. I sigh. Life's fine, really, for me, but damn.

A week ago we had an even worse storm coinciding with a higher tide and perfectly timed for the morning commute. The big Euro-car at the dealer waiting for a new heart, I drove the second car, a tiny Japanese thing. A wonderful car, but absolutely the worst thing for deep water. And all the intersections were flooded at least 18" deep. The main route through town -- totally unavoidable -- was a foot deep at its shallowest. Fortunately I knew where that shallow part was.

In the end it took me two hours to get to work (normally it's 20 min.), most of that spent on a grassy knoll in a vacant lot, just above the water, watching others pretend that their automobiles were boats, waiting for the rain to stop and the tide to go down, fighting panic and trying to form a mental map of the rest of the lot, which was under water and being used as a detour around an intersection that was so badly flooded the police had closed it.

The tide went out a little and the path through the flooded lot became clear enough, and I knew that the chance of hitting debris was minimal. I got close enough to work to park in an unauthorized area and wade (in only foot-deep water) the rest of the way. Everyone had squishy shoes with the vague stink of sewage and the sea.

Life is good, but I do wish this city had some drainage.

^^



++++++++++++++++++++++

(*) Do not EVER go to AAA service center. Pay the extra money to get towed to a dealer or a trusted mechanic. Seriously. I've heard similar tales of car-destroying incompetence from elsewhere. Just don't.

The latest The New Yorker has a short story, "Max at Sea," by one of my favorite writers, Dave Eggers.(*)

It's the story of a 9-year-old, boy, Max, living with single mother and her creepy boyfriend -- and to whom the white wolf suit he got for Christmas three years before, one night just beckons to be put on. Wildness ensues, with magical & bittersweet results. You know the rest of the story, more or less, because it's a retelling of Maurice Sendak's _Where the Wild Things Are_. A sacred text to me, but Eggers does it justice, mostly. Eggers knows the soul of the boy in distress, the well of violence and inchoate sexuality that mixes with magic and play, almost as well as Sendak. (Adults want to remember the magic of childhood and forget that disturbing other stuff. I love them both for not letting them get away with it.(**))

Which is why I'm glad that Eggers is the scriptwriter for the WWTA movie by Spike Jonze coming out soon. This short story is apparently a treatment or preparation for the script. I was worried about this movie; I mean it when I call WWTA sacred. Jonze himself, according to a piece in this weeks New York Times Magazine, toyed with making a film adaptation for years, but resisted the urge. When he decided to it, he phoned Sendak, who has evidently given his blessing. So it stands a good chance of not ruining Sendak's work. Actually, if it gets parents to buy the book for their children, great.

As a kid, I dreamed of having my own magic white wolf suit in the closet, ready to transform me, and spirit me away. To furrify me, and sail on the ocean of my rage to the island of the friendly monsters. I still dream.




__________________________________

(*) Consider yourself obligated now to go and read some Eggers if you never have. I think you'll be pleased.

(**) If you've never seen it, try to find a copy of Sendak's _In the Night Kitchen_, once banned for its frank depiction of nascent sexuality (its hero Mickey falls naked into a bowl of milk, and really enjoys it, and spends most of book in a clad in a comfy suit of dough) and thinly-veiled Holocaust imagery (if you grew up Jewish, chances are you've had Holocaust nightmares; but you don't have to be Jewish to feel Mickey's dread of nameless adult-made horrors). It's just fantastic.

The mate and I are into dill-cucumber salads lately, since a friend gave us her week's box of local organically grown veggies from a subscription farm service, which box had some large fat cukes of varieties heretofore unknown to us. A couple of them were spherical! Bio-diversity is awesome.

We're fall subscribers to the service now. A fraction of the cost of buying any vegetables (organic or not) at the supermarket. The only catch is everything's seasonal, so you cook and eat what comes (as people did for millennia before air travel and refrigeration). But it's all grown ten miles from where we live, and it's like getting a big present every week.

We planted some tomato plants in our backyard this summer. We got small but tasty fruits out of them, without really doing much other than watering, and now we a have a freezer full of tomato pulp for pasta sauces this fall. Even with us being total idiots about gardening, with no time to be serious about it, the earth provides. The basil plant in a pot alone is worth its weight in precious metal. It's really cool.

So sometimes I get bored or irritated with the internet, or the furry part of it, and I leave. I remember a time before ubiquitous personal computing devices, and so I can live without the parts that don't have to do with work or money.

But then I come back. Because the real normal world of real normal adults has its own horrors and irritations. Furry world starts to look like a bit of relief. And I want to see & cheer on the art. Folk culture -- in whatever form it takes -- is essential to saving humanity. Yeah, even chubby-hermaphrodite-cheetah-guinea-pig-mashups-in-space art or whatever other weirdness those shriveled souls with too much time on their hands will pointlessly deride. Anything that isn't corporate, sanitized, suffocating. Or, on the other side, that isn't nihilistic eye-rolling capitulation. Folk art will save us. Not in the same direct & tangible way that a cure for HIV/AIDS or an economy determined by social justice principles will. But still to have these good things requires a new mentality. Art creates mentalities.

This all may be nonsense. But still it's just the sort of nonsense we need, I think. Never be so sure you have it all figured out. If you're paying attention, you'll always be surprised.

so I saw this meme-quiz thingy and I thought I'd give it a try

so:

Eye Color: dark brown
Hair Color: originally brown verging on black, now mostly silver
Tan or Pale: Italian skin; I get very brown in the sun
Right- or Left-handed: left for writing, eating, wiping; right for everything else
Heritage: Sicilian, German, Irish, Latvian

Your weakness(es): perfectionism
Your perfect pizza: mushroom
Favorite color: intense, saturated blue
Goal you'd like to achieve: to be known for an idea
Your most overused phrase(s): all the phrases you use when you're pretending to listen to someone
Your thoughts first waking up: it's too early
Your best physical feature(s): I think I have great legs; my butt's not bad either. Everything above the waste is pretty awful.
Your bedtime: midnight
Pepsi or Coke: no soda, unless it's to mix with liquor
McDonald's or Burger King: have been to neither one in years
Single or group dates: I'm married
Adidas or Nike: Adidas for running. Black leather shoes (never brown!) at all other times.
Lipton Ice Tea or Nestea: both are gross
Chocolate or vanilla: Chocolate
Cappuccino or coffee: Huh? Cappuccino is coffee. Shot of espresso preferred.
Do you love someone on your watch list?: If you mean romantically or sexually , no. Happily married.
Love or money?: Love always. Call me a dreamer.
Credit cards or cash?: Cash always. I may be a dreamer, but I'm not a fool.
Has there ever been anyone in your family you wish wasn't?: Both biological parents and my one step-parent
Would you rather go camping or to a 5 star hotel?: Are you kidding? Hotel. And send up some champagne, if you please.
Would you shave your entire body (including your head) for money?: For the right sum, sure. It would have to be a lot, I'm frighteningly, prodigiously hirsute. (We're talking werewolf-caliber hair density.)
Have you ever been in an "adult" store?: Come to think of it, no. Window-shopped plenty of them, though.
Bought something from an adult store?: God, no.
Sex in the morning, afternoon or night?: Skyrockets in flight. But morning has its charms, too.
On which side of the bed do you sleep?: Left and under the cat.
Pork, beef, or chicken?: Pork done right is unbeatable.
Ever have to pull over on side of road to puke?: Not since I was ten.
Mexican or Chinese?: I have to choose? Super spicy Chinese, then.

DO YOU:
Smoke: Never smoked a cigarette or bowl of straight tobacco in my life.
Cuss: Far too much
Have a boyfriend/girlfriend: My wife would kill me.
Take a shower: Yes.
Have a crush(es): Maya Rudolf
Think you've been in love: Yes. It wasn't pretty.
Want to get married: Done. Twice. The first time was practice.
Believe in yourself: Working on it.
Believe in god: Yes, but vaguely.
Believe in your government: Not really. I have some guarded hopes for the current US administration.
Think you're attractive: Sometimes a lot. Mostly not at all.
Think you're a health freak: No.
Get along with your parents: Strangely, yes, now, after years of estrangement.
Like thunderstorms: Love them.


IN THE PAST MONTH, HAVE YOU:
Drunk alcohol: Yes, lots.
Gone on a date: I'm married.
Gone to the mall: Only because it's in the neighborhood.
Eaten an entire box of Oreos: Not in years.
Eaten sushi: Not lately. Wish I had.
Been dumped: Nope.
Gone skating: No. I'm terrible at it, too.
Gone skinny dipping: Well, no. But I wish I had.
Stolen anything: Nothing tangible that I can recall.

HAVE YOU EVER:
Played a game that required removal of clothing: No. I dislike games. But I have stripped and will strip for certain people if asked nicely.
Been trashed or extremely intoxicated: Who hasn't?
Been caught "doing something": By my mom, when I was like maybe 11. Since then I've been champion of the stealth wank.
Been called a tease: Not seriously, no.
Gotten beaten up: Not beaten, but I had my lights punched out in high school by a guy who later went to prison for crack dealing.
Age you hope to be married: When I was younger I had the idea that 30 was about the right age.
Number of children you'd like: No more than two, at least one. Been trying to make one. Will keep you posted.
What do you want to be when you grow up: I'm grown, and I still don't know.


WHAT YOU LIKE IN THE PREFERRED SEX:
Best eye color?: It doesn't really matter, but green or grey is nice.
Best hair color?: Blondes don't do it for me, if we're basing attraction mainly on hair.
Height: No real preference here. A mate taller than me might take some getting used to.

IN THE NUMBERS:
Number of people I could trust with my life: One, maybe two.
Number of CD's: Dozens.
Number of piercings: I personally loathe any and all permanent body alteration. I'm not even circumcised. (In fairness, I have had my teeth straightened.)
Number of tattoos: See above.
Number of times my name has appeared in the newspaper: A few times, for youth athletics, and later for community affairs type stuff.
Number of scars on my body: One dog bite on my inner thigh from when I was seven (I shudder to think what would have happened had I not jumped just the right way), and a thin cat scratch scar on my upper chest.

Go to bed in one sort of country, wake up in another. It's not quite like that, I know, but let me enjoy the feeling.

America you are so frustrating. Then you make me go and love you again.

There's a fun link below to cap things off. There is nothing more to do but smile for a bit. Then come roaring back the hard work, and the hard realities, again.

http://assets.comics.com/dyn/str_st.....22675.zoom.gif

++++++++++

More link fun! It's wrong to keep exotic species... but this is just HAWT:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_thlFYTjJb.....h/andress1.jpg

Aw, crap. Hurricane Hanna is coming right my way, or very close.

UPDATE: Or maybe not so close. Hanna now tracking to the east of Charleston. We'll get diminished storm winds and a little rain.

The real concern is Ike, who's a robust Cat 4 now.

"I remember Stan
he was the village idiot
and though it seemed a pity it
was so....

He loved to burn down houses
just to watch the glow

and nothing could be done
because he was the mayor's son

The guy who taught us math
who never took a bath

acquired a certain measure of reknown

and after school he sold the most amazing pictures
in my home town"

-- Tom Lehrer ("My Home Town")

Meh. Another dull day.

Well, something very nice happened. I sent a nice note to Le Demon sans Visage (LDSV) about one of his fine feline-themed submissions, and he makes me an avatar.

Till I get the avatar installed, you can see the image to your left on my Favorites panel. It's me, paws on the keyboard, waiting for FA to come back on-line.

LDSV makes digital art and is registered in FA as "FrogsBreath" (which is actually the name of his gallery). His work tends toward gothic and fantasy themes, which generally aren't much my thing -- I like my furries cartoony or frankly sexual -- but he works these themes really well.

He also writes smart, engaging journal entries. Go see his work!

====

UPDATE: Avatar received and installed (obviously). My gratitude to LDSV.

so this cub posts a piece of non-art, which turns out to be an opinion that there is no bad art

which is just plain crap, and I, foolish old cat, was compelled to point it out

pretty politely, I might add -- no scatalogical terms were used

seriously, whence comes this insane lack of recognition in some kittens of things like skill and talent?

do I have to spell it out? I suck at basketball. if I try to play, I will not do well. but by this weird cub's logic anyone who points that out -- even politely -- is just a hater

uh, no. and in fact you never see that argument made w/r/t athletics. because it's stupid. it's just as stupid applied to art. some art is plainly better than other art.

then to top things off, he goes and posts a negative shout on my page...

because, you know -- as he preached at me -- FA is about community

nice community there, buddy. way to show me what the fandom's all about, by trashing my userpage.

the fandom I've been connected with since you were six years old, my sweet kitten

anyhoo, silly drama, teen angst, no indignation more righteous than a late adolescent's... you fellow grey muzzles out there know what I'm talking about.

like me, you probably were hyper-righteous pain in the ass when you were 18-19, too. and maybe lacking a certain sense of irony and some critical faculties. they come in time. or they don't, and it's a pity.

a bit of drama, like the storms that passed over the midwestern city I'm visiting today, tornado sirens and driving rain.

and now there's a gorgeous sunset

To judge by recent artwork, the avg. age of the FA 'artist' is maybe 14. Perhaps even younger.

It's nice to see that the fandom has a robust junior division, but it would be nice if juvenile artistic expression could be fairly identified as such, and moved to a kids' section.

Yeah, I'm a cranky old cat. But seriously, kids, that fur-themed doodle that you did instead of paying attention in your fifth-period English class, maybe it's best not to post that. Put a little effort in. At least color the damn line-drawing in. And don't just slavishly imitate the manga comics you've been reading.

(btw, I'm the weird old guy who has to step over you in the Barnes and Noble to get to the paltry selection of Euro "graphic novels" shelved way out out on the end of all that big-eyed, pointy-haired Japanese kawaii vapidity. Damn kids all over the floor, not buying anything. Actually, I approve the not buying anything. I just wish you'd vary your consumption a little.)

okay, so no one can reasonably expect to avoid the extremely silly in furrydom, but a recently posted label for somefur's stroke fiction really struck me --

get this: an M raichu and an M jaguar do things to each other.

hey, great.

what they do, we're warned, is pretty complicated: anal, "light shrinking"(?, paw play, soft(!) vore, non-consensual (i.e., rape/assault), digestion.

this is what I call fetish stacking or fetish multiplication. anthropomorphs getting it on isn't enough. they have to be eating, raping, shrinking, etc., too.

(we should really say zoomorphs, because the sexuality and behavior is primarily human; furry fandom is more often about zoomorphic humans than anthropomorphic non-human animals)

okay. it's a free fandom (that's part of what's so neat about it), knock yourself out. but then, again... please. really, do you need to pack all those fetishes into one little story? why does it seem to me like "furry" to some spells "imperative to import a lot of fairly extreme, rather distasteful fetishes along with the zoomorphism"? is it because the zoomorphism is regarded as distasteful by the yokels, er, the "mainstream", so it's natural to just *extend* our transgression out to ridiculous lengths?

i think furry is enough. should be enough.

but i'm probably not going to get a lot of agreement on that.

(I'm NOT calling for censorship, in case anyone was unsure. don't bunch your briefs. i just think it would be better if everyone shared my good taste and common sense. )

(if anyone pays any attention to this -- highly unlikely -- they'll probably go out and write a story with as many extreme fetishes packed as possible. which might be kind of amusing.)

Okay, so it's the first time I've ever posted something here. Perhaps I'll do something with this space in 2008. It depends. I'm not an artist and I don't have much time for fur-fannish activities, being frikkin old and having a professional job and stuff like that. I don't even have kids and I feel hassled. But maybe I'll pen a little story, throw up a sketch. I've seen and read a lot worse than my scribblings and doodlings.

Probably I'll just end up being a cheerleader for furry artists, as I've been all along.

You'll see about the hassle and horror of age when you get there, cubbies. Isn't that what your parents are always telling you? They're not right about much, but they're right about that. Meanwhile, enjoy being young, as much as this world will allow it.

Write, draw, play. Dare to think.

Happy New Year. Free and Furry.


Love and Peace,

wapsie


war is over if you want it