Old Lint
(Y'know, the kind that piles up in corners, and collects in pants pockets, and breeds under the bed, and you never really get rid of it all, it just hangs around and taunts you with your slatternly self-indulgent lack of discipline, and ... oh never mind.)

Current lint is here.
Who needs it? Take me back to the stories!
E-mail Kat.

 
 

March 27, 2001

(Still March 27, still feeling babbly, taking a break from work)

The Interactive Blog:  In which Kat administers big public hugs to various folks she loves--

Forgot to welcome Erica before, because I'm cloth-witted, but I'm delighted to have her here.

And--news flash!--Maygra has a blog!  I'm a little embarrassed to route folks there because she says excessively nice things about me <g>, but whatthehell.  Maygra is, as Sandy H. says, the biggest sweetie in fandom, as well as a major figure in HL fanfic.  She's an amazingly cool human being, she stands to me as an exemplar of integrity, guts, and human decency, and I'm honored by her friendship.  (Plus she has the greatest laugh, and she makes me laugh harder than almost anyone I know.)

And Anna ... aw, Anna <g> ... Anna is being publicly nervous about whether she is exhibiting brain-mush in her blog.  Yeah right.  As if.  Anna is on the short list of people whom I don't even give myself the grief of feeling envious of any more because she's so far beyond me as a writer and a brain ... it's as pointless as watching the Olympics and feeling envious of Jackie Joyner-Kersey, or something.  Beyond which, Anna was the one who really reached out to me, in my first fumbling terrified months in fandom, and pulled me in, and wrote me long amazing letters, and who told me that my first story was good enough to post, when I was curled into a spastic fetal ball of anxiety.  There is no end to what I owe her, and I look forward to the day when she's a renowned and much-published writer, and she'll be on a TV talk show somewhere giving incisive witty responses to the interviewer's dopey questions, and I'll be a shrivelled crone, watching her on the TV in some sleazy back-street beer joint, and I'll be poking everyone in the ribs and cackling "Hah!! I knew her back when she was just an innocent young smut-writing thing!!"  (And then the bartender will cut me off and I'll have to stumble back to my derelict rooming house, with the bathroom down the hall and the milk set out on the window ledge to keep cold...)

Earlier a.m. blither:
Hmm hm.  In a babbly mood this morning, and not a lot of time to babble in (which is certainly lucky for all of you).  A lot of other folks are saying very interesting things about this whole blog phenomenon, both in their blogs and on a mailing list I'm on.  My favorite one-liner about the whole thing is enshrined to the left--that put me on the floor when I read it.  (I'm sternly suppressing, for now, a long ramble about my days hanging out in nudist colonies and nude beaches, in northern California in the 70s--ahh, you kids today, you don't know what you missed <g>).  Then Mia echoed that line with her comment about how blogging feels like "shedding clothes on a public street."  Synchronicity.

Other themes have emerged, synchronistically or contrapuntally, that resonate for me--themes of fear, of invisibility, of audience.  Transgression.  Public and private personae.  Hiding and disclosing. 

One thing that interests me is that all of these seem to relate to:

• our shared status as slash fans and writers--as people who are obsessed, to varying degrees, with cracking the code that our culture uses to encrypt male-male intimacy or affection, and decrypting it in very explicit ways; unlocking the iron trunk and unpacking the baggage and strewing it around, dressing up in it, playing games with it, taking it out onto the street, and knowing that what we're doing is something that a great many people would see as shocking and shameful; 
• and also our shared status as women, as beings semi-invisible except for our bodies, as people who are supposed to defer and refrain and restrain and be graciously mute, who are not supposed to have large loud sloppy public egos.  (Unless, of course, that ego is authorized by being housed in a spectacularly pleasing body, in which case it gets a special pass.) 

However much our heads, schooled by feminism and Textual Poachers and the slow difficult tutelage of our own experience--however much our heads may know better, on some gut level I think a lot of us have an uneasy belief that what we're doing, in our fiction and in our blogs, constitutes Gratuitous Flaunting and is wrong.  It's reckless, it's crazy, it's egocentric, it's pushy, it's not socially acceptable, it's risky.  It's risky. 

And, yeah, sometimes those risks are very real, and it's good to be aware potential danger.  But sometimes, for some of us, they're just mind-forged manacles.  I've lived much of my life in risk-avoidance mode--shutting up, staying small, turning away, pulling back, keeping silence.  Part of that is just my temperament; but part of it is a kind of fear that I really think I need to push harder at, before I die--the fear that, ultimately, what I do is pointless, and what I have to say is stupid or offensive, and what I feel is too much and too embarrassing, and who I am is wrong.

My beloved Zen often uses a lyric from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, as a sig line in e-mails:

"I'm over the eggshells I've been walking on
 My eggshell walking days are done
 I don't give a fuck about the apple cart
 I'll upset every one"

And no, I'm not there yet <g>--I've got way too much Benton Fraser in my make-up to really go around upsetting applecarts.  But I hum that to myself, at those moments when I'm scorched with shame for writing my fiction, or posting this blog, or being who I am.
 

March 26, 2001

Tidings of great joy--Dargelos' Highlander novel White Rabbit, which was formerly only available as a zine, is finally up on line! 

This is an amazing AU, which, as Dargie says, grew out her question:  Just what the hell were Methos and Kronos up to in the '60s?  The answer:  sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, baby.  The novel is the saga of the Old Dead Guys, the only all-Immortal rock band, and it's essential reading for anyone with the slightest fondness for Highlander, or who was around in the '60s, or who wasn't and wonders what the hell that era was all about, anyway.

Re-reading bits of it last night reminded me of how much I love Highlander; for all that I've been immersed in due South lately, HL feels like my fannish home, the place where I really became a writer, and where I've lived most deeply.  And it made me resolve to get back and finish up a Joe and Methos story I started a while back, which is about half done. 

After typing that I thought, "Hm, in this crowd, I should specify Joe Dawson"--and then I thought for a while about how funny it is that I have two Joe obsessions--two Joe D. obsessions, even--and then I started suddenly picturing a crossover in which Joe Dick and Joe Dawson meet up, in some hypothetical AU-ish scenario. 

I mean, they're both musicians; they're both smart hard-nosed no-bullshit guys; despite being on opposite sides of various generational and cultural divides, I think they might actually hit it off, I think Joe Dawson is someone Joe Dick could respect and deal with straight-up. 

One could go all plotty here with a Joe-Dick-as-pre-Immie scenario, but that's not where I want to go.  I just like to think about the two of them jamming together, and talking... maybe during the mysterious five years when Joe Dick was playing acoustic gigs?  Hmmm....
 

March 25, 2001

And a shout-out to ZorroRojo, who's bitten the blog bullet <g>.  Welcome to the madness, ZR.

I've been gripped by Mia's blog entry today, to the point where I feel moved to defer the morning's allotted task (opening up the friggin' WIP) (yeah, like it's a real effort for me to find way to defer that) and respond.

Depression has been a big presence in my life, the large iceberg that floats around in the little pond of my psyche.  I lost, essentially, my entire life from ages sixteen to twenty-four to severe depression.  Though it's never been quite that bad since, I still sometimes feel the hull grind against the sharp submerged edges of that iceberg, even when I'm doing my best to navigate away from the little bits I can see above water. 

It happened this winter; I hit hard, punched a hole and took on some water, and was floundering for a while.  Got things patched up, with the help of some on- and off-line friends, and a big assist from SAM-e, and am now sort of sitting becalmed, a little scared to move again.  (Likely one reason the writing's been stalled lately.)  But at least not sinking.

When the ship's sinking, you really just need to try to stay alive, bailing and patching and sending out the SOS.  Making meaning of it comes later, when you sit down on dry land with a stiff drink and start trying to figure out what happened.  When you're in the middle of pain, there is little meaning to be made of it.  The pain just is, consuming and inescapable, and one's task is to live through it.  (Especially with depression, which is indeed a potentially lethal illness.)  Meaning-making only starts to come with time, as the experience gets digested and assimilated and works its way into one's bone marrow.  And, especially, when it gets shared.

I make meaning of pain by writing about it for others to read.  This is something I hadn't really gotten, until I read Mia's entry, and it helps me understand something that's always puzzled me a bit, which is the reaction people have to my writing.  The commonest feedback I get is that reading my stuff hurts, that it's painful and personally affecting.  And it's always made me feel sheepish, because, hell, that's not what I consciously set out to do at all, and anyway, how in the heck can a piece of silly fiction about a media character's entirely hypothetical angst really make someone hurt?  (And of course I know this is far from universal and that my stuff leaves a lot of people stony cold.)

But I think--maybe--that the "ow ow ow" feedback says that I've somehow been able--by writing about fictional characters' pain, which is of course my own pain--to connect other people, sometimes, with the pain in their own lives.  It's not like writing about Baluchistan and making it "come alive" for someone who's never been there.  It's simply reminding us of a landscape we're all familiar with, in our various ways.  And it makes me think that, for all my work as a "helping professional" (bleagh), the place in my life where I really am able to act compassionately is in my writing. 

See, compassion, to me, isn't about trying to be a nice or helpful person--it's about simply getting clear that everyone suffers and that one's own unique pain is also the common lot of humanity.  When I write out the pain, it reaches other people, it touches their own suffering, and an odd sort of loop is complete.  Connection.  We're reminded that none of us is in this alone.  Meaning is made the only way I think it really can be, as an act of compassion, in the root meaning of the word:  feeling-together.

And it didn't happen fast; it took me twenty years, after I crawled out of the black pit, to start writing again.  But then I'm slow <g>--and I was also pretty isolated, and I kept it all inside.  By writing about her pain in her blog, Mia has at least reached this one other person, sitting halfway around the world from her, whom she's never met, and has enlarged my understanding of my own pain.  An act of compassion.  Meaning is made. 

So hang in there with the sucky revelations, kiddo, and keep writing 'em down <g>.  We're all in this together.

And I'm getting down from my pulpit now.  Gonna go open up the WIP and slap Ray Kowalski around for a while.
 

March 24, 2001

Admin-ish notes:  I've been longwinded enough here that I feel the need to stash some of the older blather elsewhere.  How mortifying.  I've produced far more blog-drivel in the past two weeks than I have fiction in the past three months. 

Clamorous welcoming noises to AuKestrel, who's jumped into the blog pool!  (Hey, girlfriend, dress that metavoice up in some red serge, stick him in the closet, and snark right back at him when necessary.  And when you're at the wall, chisel a niche in it, stick the laptop in there, and keep typing.  And yeah, I know, easy for me to say...)

Also noted:  Shrift's blog has a new location.  (I'm struck suddenly by how much I love the name "Shrift," the way it feels in the mouth, the way it sounds like a small rufous-feathered quick-winged bird.  People's on-line pseuds are endlessly fascinating to me.)

Insanely boring weather notes: Just went out on the back deck for a smoke, and sweet jesus it is cold out there. Twelve above zero, windchill of fifteen below zero this morning; we're getting a big blast of Canadian air.  I am enamored of certain Canadian actors, films, and TV shows, but not of Canadian arctic air blasts, at least not in late March.

We're in the Season of Dirty Crusted Slush, a.k.a. the Ass-End of Winter.  Minnesota has numerous sub-seasons, besides the big four, and this is my least favorite.  The snow, of which there's still plenty, is shrivelled and dingy; everything is gritty with sand and salt, put down in January against the ice; a winter's worth of litter and trash and dog-shit, sedimented into the drifts like dinosaur bones in shale, is slowly beginning to emerge along the curbs and sidewalks. 

Spring, what anyone would think of as actual "spring," is weeks off yet, and we still have sixty-odd days left in the Possible Snow Season.  I do love winter--I have to, or I sure wouldn't keep living here--but after four months of it, enough is enough.

This is actually what I think would be hardest for Ray Kowalski, in a post-CotW Ray-stays-in-Canada scenario.  Not the cold per se--I think Ray could handle an interlude of brutal cold--but the length of it, the way it keeps being brutally cold day after day after week after month.  It takes a lot of patience to outlast a far-north winter; impatience and impetuosity are not good northern survival traits.  You have to be a good plodder, and plodding is not that boy's style. 

I mean, I'm starting to go mental here, and this is just Minnesota, which is tropical compared to Inuvik, say, where the average high doesn't get above freezing until May, and where at this moment [checking website] it's -15 F.  (Have I mentioned lately how much I love the internet?  How much I love the fact that I can check the current temperature in a remote part of Canada, for the purposes of publicly speculating about the hypothetical reactions to it on the part of a fictional television character?)
 

March 23, 2001

So I've been thinking about this whole blog business--what it is, what it could be, and why some of us do it, how and why we unpack our private baggage in this very public space. Witch Queen and Livia have posted pertinent comments lately, and I've also been reading a good essay by Rebecca Blood on the history of weblogs.  It's all interesting, and while none of it nails my own motivations, it pushes me to mull and ponder.

See, what confuses me is that I've always defined myself, essentially, as a private person.  A loner.  Well-shielded, inward-turning, reserved.  An outsider. Not the kind of person to be doing the Dance of the Seven Veils with her character armor on a public web page.  Not the kind of person to be linking arms with a collective of other soul-barers.

But then--I also never thought I'd actually write fiction. Thirty years ago, when I was seventeen and realized that everything I'd written to that point was crap, I gave up the idea that I'd ever write. Entirely.  Put it away, wiped it out, locked it down in the basement. And then, in my forties, to my astonishment, I started writing again, in terror and shame. I was convinced I was simply certifying, once and for all, my own incompetence, but I wrote stuff anyway. And I posted it.

Doing that--taking the insane risk of not just writing something (homoerotic fiction based on television shows, dear lord) but actually going public with it--was life-changing for me.  It's very much like the stories I've heard from friends who came out as gay or lesbian in midlife.  I'm more fully who I am now than I ever was before, even though I'm not sure who the hell I am, who it is who's writing this stuff. 

And I'm pretty damn sure that I never would have written anything, if not for the web, fanfiction, and the slash community. 

So, in coming to re-examine and push at other assumptions I've held about myself, it makes a kind of demented intuitive sense that I'd do so on the web, under the aegis of my fiction-writing self, and clinging to the elbows of my gutsier sisters-in-slash.  Hmm, so maybe I'm not just a walled-off recluse, maybe there's somebody in there who really digs getting up on stage and shaking her booty for the crowd.  Maybe I'm not the person I always thought I was.

It's a good thing--I say this in utter seriousness--a good thing to change your understanding of who you are, in your late forties. 

Or, in the immortal words of the Firesign Theatre: "Everything you know is wrong."
 

March 18, 2001

So P., the boyfriend, was over last night (hate the word "boyfriend," especially since we're both in our forties, but have never found a good alternative--"lover" is far too steamy, "partner" isn't accurate in this case, "SO" feels too cutesy, "this guy I'm seeing" too verbose)--anyway, he came over last night, of course, last night being Saturday, and he always comes over on Saturday night.  We have the perfect relationship, by my lights--he comes over twice a week, Saturday and Wednesday, at 7:30, we have good food, good drink, good conversation, good laughter, good sex, maybe watch some TV or a rental movie, and then he goes home, and in between we only communicate via occasional light e-mails and phone calls.  It's rare for me to find someone who thrives at the same point on the closeness/distance scale as I, and it's worked well for--jeez, is it eight years now?  Golly.

Anyway, P. told me he's thinking about starting a search for a job in music.  He's a fine violist, deeply serious about it, practices for several hours a day after work, but he's never taken the plunge of actually trying to make a living at it.  He's finally got enough money in savings and investments, though, that he thinks he could take the leap, and apparently his chances of finding a gig with an orchestra somewhere are pretty good. 

Mixed feelings, on my end.  If he succeeds, it would certainly mean he'd move elsewhere, and I'd miss him a good deal.  It wouldn't be a crushing blow or anything, but it'd be a loss.  On the other hand, I'm so strongly behind the idea of him doing what he really wants to with his life that I can only support him in this. I want him to go for it, even if it means him moving to Tucson or Tallahassee or someplace. 

Oddly, this feeling coexists peacefully with my own total disinterest in "doing something" with my writing (which I take as seriously as he does his music)--getting published, selling something, earning money or recognition under my real name.  For P., it matters a whole lot to be recognized, in the form of a big paycheck and a title.  For me, all that matters is getting to do it, and having a few readers.  And that reflects some core value differences that, as much as anything, explain why we'll never go beyond the limited closeness we have.  I love the guy and all, but we do live in different worlds.
 

March 17

Well, it was the Night of the Long Knives on Tripod, and the bodies are still falling; Nestra's Weblog, which was still up this morning, is now gone. [3/18 note:  It's here, for the time being.] Lots and lots of folks are left homeless, temporarily at least, and my heart goes out to them.  I'm completely furious with Tripod, of course, for the way they went about this, and cravenly relieved that I moved away last year to mrks.  And I have such mixed feelings about the larger implications: deep uneasiness at being reminded of how vulnerable all of us are in our on-line lives to the small group of corporate greedhead types who hold the power to flip the switches and push the buttons; and yet I'm also heartened by the enormous chaotic multifariousness of the Net, its hydra-headed resilience in the face of attempts at control. 

I thought about all this for a while, while out taking a walk in the (warm! sunny! spring-like, if you can ignore all the snowbanks) weather, and then I came home and backed up all my stuff, yet again, to yet another storage site.  Backing up my writing is the one and only area of life where I act with prudence and caution; come the Apocalypse, I will be found without batteries or generator, without canned goods or bottled water, without gold bullion or clean socks, without a survival kit in the car trunk or a first-aid kit in the bathroom, hapless, feckless, and unready to face a wrathful God or mobs with torches--but I will by god have my fiction backed up.  Of course, once the power grid goes down and the Internet flickers out like an ignuus fatii, that won't matter a whole lot, and in any case I'll be too busy hauling my dirty socks down to the river to beat them on rocks to worry about it.
 

March 16 continued (because I'm apparently feeling mouthy as hell and yet am too lazy to do anything productive, like answer e-mail or open up the dreaded crap-in-progress)

Like most people, I wander through life with an intermittent mental soundtrack playing inane accompaniment to the day's tasks.  I've discovered, though, that whoever is running the programming up there has a slightly skewed sense of humor, and that if I pay attention I'll find the musical selections often form an interesting commentary on my frame of mind at the moment.  A sort of cheap-jack aural Rorschach.

Today, ever since I finished teaching at 2:00 and collapsed in my office, what I've had on continuous replay is the Ramone's I Want to Be Sedated--a fine choice for a Friday afternoon, guiding me homeward toward an evening of Glenmorangie and stuporous re- (re-re-re-) watching of dS episodes.  Wednesday's programming, on the other hand, was the Hard Core Logo soundtrack, in its entirety, with special prominence given to "Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?"  Which was entirely apropos, because Wednesday was spent trying to grind out the dreaded Annual Report of Activities, a wretched exercise in self-pimping that requires one to catalogue, at bloated length and in pompous detail, all one's achievements and accomplishments and awards for the year.  I realize that, as with so many evil things, the original intent was wholly good--to give us peons the chance to make our case for a merit-pay bump, before the budget gets soldered down.  But in my own case that particular lure butters no parsnips, because I feel I'm already ridiculously overpaid for what I do.  (After spending the last ten years living in comfortable grad-student penury, it's very unsettling to be making an actual normal middle-class income.  I don't know what to do with it all, and tend to swing wildly between miserliness and extravagance.)

But anyway.  So there I was, churning out sentence after revolting, oleaginous, self-aggrandizing sentence about my professional wonderfulness, and all the time Joe Dick was howling in my head, "You! You! YOU YOU YOU!!! WHO THE HELL D'YOU THINK YOU ARE???"

Ah yes.  Thanks, Joe. <g>

And that's enough outta me for now.  I wanna be sedated.
 

March 16, 2001

Hey hey, Livia's got a blog too! Who knew? 

I'd actually gone to her site to revisit some gorgeous photomanipulations she's put up recently. The one of RayK just puts me in a happy sweat (and who cares that he doesn't actually have chest hair? not I) but the Fraser one is well worth checking out also. Mm-hmm. Her story covers--heavy on Buffy and Sentinel--are likewise deserving of appreciation. All of which is saying nothing about her writing, which I'm saying nothing about because The Longest Weekend still makes me envious as hell and I'm indulging my inner small-minded jealous bitch today. Instead, I'm going to advise you to read the Crossover Pairings that Never Were, which makes me giggle insanely every time. I'm particularly fond of the bits in Volume 1 (perhaps because I'm more familiar with the fandoms...)

I do wish at times I were a better person, but the fact remains that under my semi-civilized facade lurks a seething and unsavory stew of envy of other writers. (I think a lot of writers are like this, though. Read Virginia Woolf's journals and letters, for heaven's sake. One of many things I love about Anna's site is the way she unapologetically cops to this, in her recs.) This less than admirable side of my nature has most recently been set bubbling by the Speranza phenomenon. She burst upon the scene in--January, was it?--with a marvelously accomplished story, and has by now posted five, each astonishing in various ways. That's in, what, a period of ten weeks? During which time my own accomplishments have been to remove perhaps a half-dozen adverbs from crap-in-progress, smoke several hundred cigarettes, and play 54,783 games of Freecell.

Grrrr. Arrgh.
 

March 14, 2001

Thing that made me laugh like a deranged being today: Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass.  Science!

I've been spending a lot of time lately, when I should be working, either web surfing or playing around with Paint Shop.  (Unsolicited and unpaid ad: does most of what Photoshop does at a fraction of the price, plus you can download a freebie version for a month or two.)  Had fun re-doing a screen cap of CKR from Twitch City that Lori put up on her Photoisland page, and was pleased with the results.  I find this image oddly compelling; CKR's always seemed to me pretty as all get-out, but there's a classic/sculptural quality about his face in this shot that goes way beyond prettiness, and then the eyes .... mmmph.

And then while idling on the web I came across James Lilek's website--he's a columnist for the local paper, a genuinely funny guy rather in the Dave Barry tradition (the Gallery of Regrettable Food is a hoot), but I hadn't known he had all these glorious photographs of my home town as well, historical as well as modern.  I ended up spending a lot of time wandering around when I should have been working on my Annual Report of Activities (bleagh).  What's unnerving is that a lot of the older buildings, ones long since demolished, still exist so vividly in my memory.  It's part of reaching middle age--realizing that there are whole cities, in my head, made up of buildings that vanished long ago, that have far more reality to me than many of the buildings I walk past every day now.  It seems very odd that I'll never again get lost in the Conservatory, or sit down at the Powers' lunch counter for a Cobb salad, or stroll down the old (pre-quake) Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz--I have this childish conviction that if I just took the right turn, opened the right door, there they'd all be.  Contemplating all this makes me want to get back into writing Highlander <g>.
 

March 13, 2001

So...why am I doing this, anyway?  This blog thing, about which I said as recently as a few weeks ago, "Well, there's one thing I'll never do."  (Famous last words...)

• Excellent way to procrastinate on actual writing.  Hey, I can tell myself it does actually involve putting words down on paper.  Heh. 
• Egomania.  As noted in header.  Enough said. 
• After certain fannish upheavals this past winter, I've spent a lot of time reconsidering the ways in which I'm closed and open in the on-line world, and have felt moved to experiment with my self-imposed boundaries a little bit, in the spirit of Living Out Loud. 

So we'll see what happens.  This may be short-lived; one of my lifelong doppelgangers has been Mr. Toad of Wind in the Willows, he of the short-lived sequential obsessions.  But for now, it's a new toy, and I'll play around with it.
 

March 12, 2001

Snow falling, heavy and silent.  Four to seven inches is what the Perky Weatherguy predicted, when the radio clicked on at 5:00.  This is only natural, since March is after all the snowiest month of the year, on average, in these parts.  For all the bitching I've done lately about the length and bleakness of this winter, and for all the ugliness of old dirty crusty snow and ice, still there is nothing in the world more beautiful than snow falling.  The whole world gone monochrome--nothing but grey, shading up to almost white, down to almost black.  Nothing more beautiful.  If I could stage-manage my own death, which is possible although unlikely, I'd like to die while watching snow fall.  Listening to Bach--one of the violin partitas, maybe, as played by Henryk Szeryng.  I imagine walking out alone into the snow, in the far north, far far out into the emptiness, until I could lie down and let go and be covered up and gone; seductive, but then trying to picture doing this with a Walkman and headphones on turns it into farce, of the good kind.  I have to go now and shower and get dressed and go to work.
 

To the current blather.
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