I loved the Mists of Avalon movie on TV last night. Just for fun I started reading my new book called the "The Mammoth Book of British King and Queens". It mentions King Arthur and even Uther Pendragon but the book's authors doubts whether Arthur really existed. For a king that scholars say never really existed, it's fascinating how centuries later Western culture still talks and makes movies about him.

What's interesting in the Mists of Avalon is the conflict between the Druid/Goddess religion and the Christians. At the end of Mists, the christians adopt some of the Druid/Goddess elements into worship, their mythology.

I don't think the TV critics like the TNT movie, but I like it alot. The costumes and scenery are impressive and all the american actors are speaking in their best coached Brit dialects. Even Kevin Costner wouldn't attempt it when he did Robin Hood. I hated Jodie Foster's Brit dialect in Anna and the King, but these actors are really quite good.

Why do people lie? Why do they make up lies about themselves? Don't they know they'll get caught? I don't get it. If you lie and get caught then the person you told lie to gets even more upset, or at least that's how I get. You know, I don't mind petty white lies and exagerrations as long as you have the stuff the get away with it. But if you don't, it just makes me mad. Why play the game if you don't got game?

I've deleted all my ads from the the online personals. I kept meeting men who were content to tell me little white lies about themselves. I kept meeting men who withheld vital pieces of information that I needed to have so I could make an informed decision about whether I wanted to go out with them or not. I feel sorry for these men, I feel pity that they have to lie about themselves to get women to go out with them. It's sad really that they have to resort to that. And what's worse, although a nice part of me feels sorry for them, another meaner part of me says that they deserve to not get dates if they decide to lie or withhold information. I mean, come on, why lie especially this early on in the game when everyone is supposedly on their best behaviour. It's just plain rude and it leaves a very, very bad impression. Maybe they think that women who put ads out to meet people are so desperate that they'll ignore the white lies, the withholds of vital information, just to go on a date. Well, I'm not one of them. I'm not that desperate for a man that I give up common standards of civil behaviour in polite society and accept this kind of behavioiur. I'm sure there are plenty of women who will overlook such indiscretions on the part of thier partners. They're the ones probably dating these people. Not me, not now, not ever.

I think the best thing I like about writing fiction is that you can have your characters say things, do things that you normally wouldn't say or do. You can make them experience situations and people that you're curious about, wondered about, situations that you wouldnt' get into, people that you wouldn't talk to. There was a repeat of that Joyce Carol Oates Interview at the Herbst Theatre on Channel 35 last night. Joyce is a very interesting writer. She said she gets a lot of flak from feminists about her work saying it's offensive, other people say her work is depressing. Joyce was cool. She said something like, "If you don't like my work, don't read it. I'm not forcing you to read my books."

Some of Oates' work is totally depressing and has an amazing amount of violence towards women. Some of her characters are also totally weird and strange, I mean people you wouldn't sit next to on a totally crowded MUNI bus like the 30 Stockton. But her stuff is great because they are written so well and brilliantly crafted. She writes what she wants to writes. It doesn't mean she advocates violence against women or advocates anything for that matter. She's just a writer.

I read somewhere that Checkov told critics not to read anything into his work as reflection of his life, that his work had nothing do with his real life. And I think he's right. Sometimes writers just write about what they're interested in exploring and it doesn't mean they have certian opinions. A character in a piece of fiction might say something totally offensive and god forbid in NoCal totally non-PC, conservative and republican, but that doesn't mean the writer shares the views of the character. That's just the character talking. But in our so politically correct world, which I'm beginning to believe that Rush is right when he says is being Opraized and feminized, you can't say anything without offending somebody somewhere especially in the Bay Area. The problem with political correctness is that on some level it is a denial of free speech. You have the right toyour opinion about a piece of fiction, you might like it, you might hate it, you might think the author hocked a lugey on 300 pages and is now getting paid for it or you might conversely think that the author is Shakespeare reincarnated. But what you don't have the right is to ban it because it offends you, you don't have the right to burn the book, shut the author down, say the author is offensive when it's the work that's offensive. You don't have to right to do anything but have an opinion about the piece of fiction and that's about it.

And if you don't like it, don't buy it and don't read it. Use your freedom of choice but don't take away someone else's freedom as well, the author's or the other readers'.

I cannot get that novel I am thinking about writing out of head. It keeps wanting to get told and it keeps nagging me to write some of it down. I wrote the opening today, at least it feels like the opening to this novel. I will definitely put a scene in the novel involving listening to Mozart's Requiem for the Dead live in a church. This character has lots of catholic school girl religious guilt, lot of strange catholic school religious horror fantasies of the religious statues coming to life, listening to God's voice. Kind of like Emily Watson in that movie "Breaking the Waves". I think writing about a person's views about god and religion is so subversive, so perverse, so damaging, so un-PC and so much more interesting than any other controversial object out there.

Following in the Dark - opening paragraph.

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Pain is an odd thing. I like pain, physical pain. Emotional pain I can do without. Emotional pain tortures you 24/7. You can’t drink yourself out of it, you can’t watch TV yourself out of it, you can’t play music loud enough and long enough to drown it out. It’s an endless voice that drones on and on. That scene that keeps replaying over and over and over in your head. You know, like at Friday evening Easter mass when you do Stations of the Cross. But it’s like Stations of the Cross every day in my head. That’s emotional pain. But physical pain … ah the beauty and ecstasy of physical pain is it has a beginning and an end point. You know when it stops and you can pretty much tell when it ends. Finite pain. All those philosophers I read in school were wrong about infinity. Finite is definitely better at least for pain. And physical pain is really the only thing that stops emotional pain. It’s a displacement thing, one pain replacing another. But physical pain has its price like everything else in this world. Was it worth the price? After everything that happened, I don’t know. You be the judge.

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I must be in a publishing mood tonight. I found this ending to a story in my files. The beginning is finished, the middle needs to be written but I wrote the end because I know how this story is going to end. When I read this I cried and thought of my friend B from Dallas. Although this story is completely fictional, I imagine us having this kind of ending if we ever got into a relationship.

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I looked at him. I was confused, terribly confused. I knew he was right and that breaking up was the right thing to do but I was disappointed somehow. How can you spend your whole life wanting something and then when you finally get it, you give it up because it doesn’t make any sense to want it when you finally get it. I felt a lump in my throat that I knew was a silent scream that I felt too embarrassed to make. I was having a hard time thinking because when I get upset I can’t think straight and I desperately needed to think straight now. I kept searching my feelings like a desperate man in search of water. I felt all the frustration of the last two years creating anger in my heart and at the same time I felt teary eyed. This can’t be happening to me I thought, this can’t be happening. I looked over at him, sitting there calmly waiting for me to compose myself. He looked sad I thought, there was none of that exciting Texas spirit I always saw in his eyes, just the look of a man who has just made a gut wrenching decision and was now trying to live with the consequences.

I looked out the window staring at the flat dry landscape before me. Our whole relationship played through my head like a video on fast forward. I knew we had been happy for a time, very happy but I also knew that the happiness had been brief and short lived and the rest of the time we were together, we waged a constant but silent battle of wills. Was marriage worth this battle? His explanation kept playing in my head like a bad song that you can’t get out of your head and deep deep down in the recesses of my heart, I knew he was right and part of me kept trying to whisper that this was all for the best, but I couldn’t just accept it, not yet, not just yet.

I felt him pick up my left hand on the table and squeeze it. I wanted to wrench my hand away and slap him but I couldn’t. I knew he was trying to comfort me, to help me, and I felt a pang of guilt that my first instinct was to reject him. This is what I hate, I was losing a good friend, a best friend, who knew me sometimes better than I did. I knew we would always be friends, friends till the end of our lives, but I also knew that we would both avoid the intimacy that we had developed over these last two years so as not to open old wounds. Then I realized, it wasn’t so much breaking up that hurt, it was losing the attention of this wonderful man, this urban cowboy that I had grown to love very much, this connection to a part of my soul that this man had opened up.

I finally turned my head and looked down at his hand covering mine; even our hands together looked mismatched somehow although there were on top of each other. I let my eyes wonder up his sleeve, over his shoulder, over his face and finally straight into his eyes. Kind eyes, I thought to myself. There was always kindness in those eyes despite the pain and sadness I was seeing there now. I found myself drowning in those hazel green eyes of his and feeling like I had somehow secretly landed into his soul. There was comfort there as well sadness, a sense of failure, and pain, lots and lots of pain. My heart went out to him and I knew that I could now live with our breakup.

I turned my hand over and squeezed his hand back and smiled.
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Tear jerker of an ending, I know. I think alot of relationships end like this ... in silence ... with a single touch. Sometimes there are no words to express pain, sadness and longing. Sometimes there's just silence and the touching of skin and then silence again.

I keep thinking about this novel that I want to write. I don't see myself as the kind of writer who writes novels. They seem way too long and way too involved. But this one particular story I think, will be so long, it will have to be a novel. I have a title. I seem to be great at coming up with titles for my stories. The title for this novel is called "Following in the Dark". I like it. It's a little strange but it seems to make sense at least to me. I think I am back in what I call "my twisted sister" mood. I have weird stories in my head that keep wanting to get out. And yes, stranger than my elf girl story. The stories are dark, twisted, tending to the shadow side of personhood. That's why I call them my twisted sister stories. They're usually about the dark think I keep hidden away, that nobody knows about, that sometimes even surprise me. I think everyone has secrets, a dark side, a sinister and gleeful side that even their closest friends don't know about.

It's the side that gets turned on by lurid and lewd things. Things which in SF are so politically incorrect but which are so deliciously evil and very funny in their own way.

This novel is about a woman who has this dark side, this sinister, closet evil slut side. She meets a man, Jake, who introduces her to the darker side of sex and lust. I don't think the story is about S&M, although some of it takes place in that world. The story is more about embracing your dark side and at the same time embracing your light side. I think you have to be both, to be normal. You can't embrace one without embracing the other, although most people do embrace only their light side. When you only embrace one side, the other side tends to leak out, spill out, spew out in the most surprising ways. I think the novel also has alot to do with pain. I think pain can be an interesting thing to think about. People have so many associations with pain. It's a loaded topic, so loaded that it starts to take on a life of its own. Pain can either be your guide or it can rule your life, it's your decision. And I mean pain of any kind, emotional, physical, sexual, whatever. Sometimes pain takes you on a dark and winding path that sometimes leads to transformation and other times lead you to pure hell. But I don't think you know until you go down the path where it's going to lead and even then and it's a 50/50 split either way. But again, it's that whole ying and yang thing. Heaven/hell, pain/pleasure. What is someone's pain can also be someone's deep, deep pleasure.

I got bored posting so I stopped. Went on vacation to Hawaii, supposedly where Lemuria was before the earthquake broke it up and sank most of it except for the Islands. It was very hot, 85 degrees with 80% humidity. Did not run into any elves there but saw lots of pretty hula girls with very long hair. Growing long hair can be such a pain. I grew my hair down to my butt once. It wasn't very attractive. It thinned out and became stringy and even though I spent fortune getting it trimmed, it always looked witchy.

I know men fantasize about women with long hair but it's really not that great. Once while on top, my hair kept getting in my then boryfriend's face and he kept spitting it out of his mouth. Very romantic. Then at night, he would wind his hands around my hair and when he turned over he would take me with him. Yikes! I keep my hair shoulder length now. It's still long ut not too long and it's better than that butchy dikey short dorothy iceskater hair from the 70's that so many women insist on wearing. It's looks so dated, so unfashionable. Go to any town between the coasts and you'll finds heaps of women with that old lady hair. Nobody fashionable wears their hair short like that any more. Don't these women know? Women over 50 love that haircut. It's their teenage form of rebellion in their golden years coming through. Like didn't they already work out those issues when they were younger? Go to any mall and count how many women over 50 have that short iceskater 70's hair? You'll see. It's the mullet for women.