Category Archives: Relationships

The Problem of Writing a Romance When There’s No Romance in Your Life

Relationships, Writing, , , , ,

 I found myself thinking back on one of those great romance stories, specifically the one that plays out really well in Romancing the Stone, with Kathleen Turner. In this movie, Turner plays a romance writer who stumbles while realizing she doesn’t know what her romantic hero would look like, but has a basic idea of his characterizations only, and then goes on her whirlwind romance where she finds the “hero” to become her shining knight (as that kind of story generally requires). Well, recently, while working on my novel in progress, I’m come to a similar situation.

Okay, not exactly like the movie, in that I’m some romantic novelist looking for my knight in shining armor, or even my knightess in shining armor. But as I put together the basic framework of the novel and built the edges of what would need to be filled in, I’ve come to a horrible conclusion that is making this novel very difficult to write. You see, romance has never really been a part of my life.

Adventure? Yes, there’s been a lot of that. Intrigue, conspiracies, espionage, and action? Yes, those have all been a part of my life at one time or another. And I’ve written extensively about those sorts of subjects. I’ve even used the elements of adventure and crafted science fiction and fantasy tales of great imagination.

But romance? Well, that’s really never been a part of my life.

Sure, I’ve been involved in relationships, but to be honest, most of my relationships have been a lot more Woody Allen-ish than Jame Bond-ish. To be even more honest, the kinds of romances I’ve lived in my life would fill a bunch of comedy novels and screenplays, and that’s fine, but that isn’t what I set out to write this time around. I was trying to write what would end up being a powerful romance of a completely tragic nature. There’s very little comedy in that area of what I’ve been trying to capture.

Which leaves me with the dilemma that hits a lot of writers, in that it is often very difficult to write about what one wants to write rather than what one knows. People who know a little bit about writing (and quite often those who know very little bit about it) constantly harangue writers about “write what you know”. And that can be very good advice for when you’re starting out. The usual journey of a writer goes like this:

Novel 1: Write out that unique idea you’ve been thinking about for ages.

Novel 2: Write about killing off your family/parents/friends (either physically or metaphorically).

Novel 3: Rehash an idea that’s been bothering you for awhile (and complete the requirements of Novel 2 if not already done so in Novel 1 or 2).

Novel 4: Reinvent Yourself as a Writer

And every novel after that serves as a reawakening as a writer, in which you learn new techniques to try to build upon the skills you already have, so that each new novel becomes the reinvention of you as a writer, writing something you could never have achieved in a previous novel because you just weren’t ready.

Working on my 13th or 14th novel (one of them is always hard to quantify), I’m way past the stage of killing off one’s parents. In each new novel, I find myself trying to reinvent the very idea of writing, tackling new techniques I never would have attempted before but now feel ready to attempt.

This one has been no different, in that the chronology of the novel serves as a mechanism for revelation and storytelling, to the point where it’s not a gimmick, but a necessity. However, with that in place, I now find myself in the earlier period of the courting stage of two of the main characters, and I realize how little experience I have in this area. Sadly enough, I even had to delete a few chapters because I found myself mimmicking old movies that had dating scenes in them because it was easier to fall back on past remembrances that weren’t mine than to orchestrate them myself from a fabrication that is completely unfamiliar to me.

It would be different if I had participated in dating rituals when I was younger, but I never did. Going to a club or something like that was never my thing, and my first experiences along this line didn’t happen until I got to the Academy. But that was so different an experience from what an average person would experience, as young cadets dating in a club environment does not equal what happens when college students meet each other in that same kind of environment that occurs around a university setting (not an Academy setting). The rituals of dating were never really something I participated in either as I tended to date very unique women over the years who definitely did not fall into the “normal” categories of dating. To explain the quandary further, let’s just say that when I find myself trying to describe a dating ritual for my main characters, I find those types of encounters somewhat simple and almost cliche, in that nothing I ever went through fell into such normal parameters. But to try to integrate the kinds of relationships I’ve had over the years into a story that requires a solid, normal foundation is somewhat bewildering.

But I did go into this project hoping to stretch myself as a writer. I guess it’s doing just that.

50’s and 60’s Feminism and Revisionism On Television

Relationships, Social Networking, Television, , , , , , , ,

There seems to be an interesting dynamic showing up on television these days. The claim is that it all started with Mad Men, and then led to shows like The Playboy Club and Pan Am. However, I think reviewers are being a bit lazy in their approach, in that this revolution in programming started earlier than that, and we’re only see the second wave of what is most definitely going to be a norm in storytelling.

Some years ago, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) developed a brilliant show that dealt with storytelling by looking at the “earlier” days through the lens of someone from today. The show was called Life on Mars. It dealt with a police detective of today’s time who is thrown back to 1973, a time where Manchester was just beginning to experience its sexual revolution, where women were still police assistants, and cops beat up suspects to get confessions. Shortly after this, an American series, of the same name, arrived and tried to tell the exact same story but in New York of 1973. Almost identical, the American series dealt with the trammels of unrealized feminism and a new era that was about to emerge in America (or the world).

Then came a few other shows, which were rehashes of previous shows from the mid-period of television history, that somehow tried to incorporate this new sense of feminism with modern day thinking, which for some reason has never really worked. I’m talking shows like Charlie’s Angels (movies and then a very recently bad television show), Dukes of Hazard (a movie), Starsky & Hutch (a movie), the various remakes of Star Trek and then the brilliant redesign of Battlestar Galactica (which had its own sense of dealing with feminism in the 1970s).

But Mad Men is obviously the biggest elephant in the room when it comes to discussing reviving history (or rewriting it). The show is sometimes brilliant, and other times it is somewhat annoying. It deals with feminism by showing how badly feminism was actually dealt with, and strangely enough it gives the biggest womanizer Don Draper the venue to somehow be the launching pad for the first woman to be a Manhattan advertising professional. Meanwhile, it sticks us directly in the 1960s and shows us that America had a long way to before it was going to get much better (if it ever did).

Because of the success of Mad Men, it was only a matter of time before the major networks attempted to duplicate it themselves. The first entry into the new era was The Playboy Club, which has essentially been receiving nothing but bad reviews, mainly because it tries way too hard to be both sensational and a platform to reinvent history by making it somehow appear that Playboy was a part of the feminist movement, rather than a direct impediment to it. Playboy ushered in the sexual revolution that would come in the 1970s, but it did very little for women, other than produce a platform for women to be seen as sex objects and a vehicle to produce masturbatory fantasies for young boys for several generations. While history wasn’t being all that helpful for the women’s movement, Playboy didn’t exactly empower anyone either, although people like Hugh Hefner would love nothing more than to leave his mortal coil believing he convinced more than a few peolpe that he was the progenitor of women’s liberation rather than the abuser of it. Coming from a man who spent his entire adult life cultivating young women to be his sexual playthings, I’m sorry but I just don’t see the positive role he wants to inhabit.

Pan Am is the next development in the attempt to detail women moving forward in the 1960s. My first quibble right off the start is with history itself and the television show’s attempt to place itself in it. The story starts off by talking about an event that occurred during the Bay of Pigs, shortly before the events of the first episode. The whole aircraft on the ground scene seemed a bit odd as the events of that day detail something much different occurring than what the authors tried to make happen, that somehow Pan Am pilots were more involved with the evacuation than may have been. But again, it’s fiction, so that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. There’s also another moment where one of the pilots talks about a scientific principle that wasn’t really a part of common vernacular usage in the 1960s (and wouldn’t actually be used until about 2004), but that’s more a complaint about continuity and nitpicking than anything else.

Where I have the biggest problem is with Pan Am’s attempt to reinvent feminism as some very present dynamic during the very early 1960s, when it basically wasn’t. The main character, the purser, seems to be the feminist “rebel” of the group, yet as much as they try to make her out to be that, she most likely would have been unemployed rather than the main player she is going to be written to be. And then there’s this whole espionage thread they have written into the series that seems kind of bizarre, as if the CIA was actively recruiting flight attendants to be their secret agents on flights. Okay, it could have happened, but it just seems a bit bizarre, knowing how the CIA works, or at least how it worked back then.

What concerns me most about this show is it is yet another attempt by Hollywood to rewrite history as being a lot more proactive towards feminism than it really was. As a matter of fact, Hollywood STILL has a long way to go as it would not surprise me if a number of actresses ended up having to sleep with someone to get the jobs they get on some of these shows, because that’s how Hollywood has ALWAYS acted. It would make me wonder how someone might feel pretending to be some enlightened feminist on a television show when she may have had to have done some very unenlightened things to get on the show in the first place. Yeah, there’s no evidence this ACTUALLY happens, but it is so engrained in the morality of Hollywood business that everyone somewhat expects that to happen, so it’s rarely even questioned.

What I would like to see is a show come along, like Life on Mars (the BBC version), that really examines the issues and doesn’t try to make it seem like we were historically more proactive than we really were. We did some crappy things in the past, and if we ignore those things, it only means we learned nothing from the experience, and we’ll probably do crappy things again in the future.

Facebook Offers Brand New Stalker Feature

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I figured it was only a matter of time. One of the things that Facebook had going for it was that all other things considered, that crazy ex of yours wasn’t going to be able to follow your updates because you were way too smart to ever accept his or her Facebook friend request. Now, Facebook has decided, most likely because Zucker-dude probably likes to stalk cute females who think he’s kind of creepy, that even if you’re not friends with someone, they can still get updates to your status.

The reason behind this, according to Facebook’s PR, is that now celebrities can use Facebook like they’re supposedly able to use Google +, even if they’re not really using Google + because it’s not popular enough yet. However, the main benefactors of this sort of thing is anyone who has wanted to friend someone they want to get close to but that other person thinks you’re just a bit too creepy to be following them. Now, you and your creepy self can follow her no matter how many restraining orders have been issued. Facebook feels that getting you closer to that crazy guy is a feature that you really shouldn’t be able to opt out of.

Oh, I’m sure you’ll be able to opt out of it (if you can figure out how), but a few weeks into it, once Zucker-dude realizes that he’s not getting enough money from ad revenue to build another island to house his army of fembots, they’ll make it mandatory, because Facebook really knows better about what you want than you do. You just don’t know it yet. It’s kind of like the whole, “please post your pictures on Facebook because then we kind of own it, even though we don’t really own it, but we’re going to use it regardless of what you think cause we’re richer than God, and you can’t afford an attorney to sue us anyway” thing.

So, if you have an old ex who just doesn’t want anything more to do with you, Facebook has your back. As for that ex, well, it’s her fault for not realizing how we’ve changed and how much we mean it when we promise not to a) “cheat on you again”, b) “hit you when we’re drunk”, or c) “bring home another floozy from a bar because we thought you always wanted to do a threesome but were too shy to say it out loud”. Come on, baby, you know we love you. I mean, just ask our best buddy, Facebook. Facebook would never lie to you, right?

Now open the damn door and let me in!

It Doesn’t Matter Who Wins Miss Universe–She’s Still Not Going to Date Me

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"First the crown, and now the possibility of a date with Duane? Does the wonderfulness never end?"

The news is in this morning. Miss Angola Leila Lopes is now Miss Universe. For those of you from the United States, which means we have trouble finding the United States on a map of the United States, Angola is located in Africa. That’s right underneath Europe, which is right next to a large body of ocean called the Atlantic, which is named after the record company of the same name.

I’m sure a lot of you are wondering how someone from Angola won the Miss Universe pageant, while a lot more of you are wondering who the hell even cares about the Miss Universe pageant any more. You see, for most liberal women, the idea of a pageant is horrific, a place where Neanderthal men point at women with boob jobs and measure their respect by how well they fill a swimsuit, pretending to care about their answers to important philosophical questions like, “And how would you make world peace happen in our life time?” Most people have stopped finding the Miss Universe pageant to be socially and intellectually relevant, even as the pageant swears the whole institution is a scholarship competition designed to “enrich” women.

Now, I don’t really care about the argument any more than I care whether or not Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine is a good or a bad thing, mainly because the magazine, and its dinosaur of an owner, stopped being relevant sometime back in the 1960s, when other thinkers came along and proved that you could make the same point without requiring a girl to take off her clothes so guys would pay attention to what someone might have to say.

Beauty pageants have stopped being relevant a very long time ago, yet they still maintain a presence in our society because people are still Neanderthal enough to think they’re important. And unfortunately, you can’t just blame horny guys for keeping them active. Whenever some woman thinks to herself that “I’m pretty enough” to be in that magazine, or on that stage, then you automatically set up a paradigm where other women will find themselves having to compete with them, even if they swear they’re not interested. You see, the whole human race is built on the concept of competition, and as the players in this race, or game, we all are active in deciding what contest is the one that maintains relevance. I’d like to think that we’ve evolved far enough that the Miss Universe competition is outdated, but we still maintain an importance on this event so that the woman who wins will still manage to maintain a career of successes based on her placement in this contest. Forever, she will be linked by how she sashayed down the runway in her swimsuit, and the rest of us our responsible for how that continues to play out.

What we really need to decide as a society is what do we consider to be relevant enough to put one person above another when it comes to our social Darwinist ideals. If we consider intelligence the most important, than our supermodels should be the smartest men and women available. But let’s be honest with ourselves. We don’t put smart people higher than anyone else. We put rich people (usually men) on a high pedestal, and even if their ideas are idiotic, like those spewed out there by Donald Trump every time he tries to pretend to be significant, and we put at the top of the spectrum attractive women who throw their sexuality at us on a constant basis. And it’s not just at the top of the pecking order we do this because think of every time you’ve gone to a bar, social club or any place where mating rituals occur. Those were the dynamics that fed the engine that caused most of the hooking up to happen. I see it on social sites all of the time, and so do you.

Which means that when it comes down to it, no matter how smart I might be, no matter how many great ideas I might have to make the world a better place, or even how many great novels I might churn out for the masses. In the end, because I’m not filthy rich or insanely attractive, my place on the pecking order is pretty damn low. Yet, because I am part of this human race, I am required to try to fit into the competition as well, even though I recognize that for the most part the dynamic offers me table scraps and a continuous series of disappointments, as not everyone is born with the attributes that gives them immediate success and gratification.

So, having said that, let’s give our congratulations to Leila Lopes, whose name we will not remember in a few days from now (or a few minutes after I press SEND). With that said, she’s still miles ahead of the rest of us in the grand scheme of things.

Chicago, Moving, and the Process of Reinventing Writing

Books, Memoirs, Relationships, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , ,

Not much going on, so I thought I would do another recap of what might actually be going on. So, here goes:

1. Took a trip to Chicago this weekend.

I have to admit that I’ve never really given Chicago a fair shake. One of my friends, Kevin, is from Chicago and always talked up the place in a positive way. Having been there a few times, I never really found myself enamored with the place. So, I went there specifically to meet up with someone, and while I had a good time meeting her, the place itself met the expectations I had going into it. I found the place to be mostly dirty, kind of like you’d expect from any large downtown city. I was in the Chinatown area of the city (or at least one of them), so the people were generally friendly, but there wasn’t really that much more to say about it.

Getting to Chicago kind of sucked, and it wasn’t really the fault of Chicago itself. It was the fault of Indiana. And then Chicago. At one point, I went through what seemed like an endless series of toll booths. I’m not kidding. I drove less than a half a mile after a toll booth, and I was driving up to another one. It’s like the government workers had their hands out nonstop while traveling through their mecca. And the first toll booth person I dealt with was one of the more rude ones you come across. She was hostile, scowling, and she held her hand so far back in her booth (to provide change for the bills I gave her) that I had to open my car door and practically walk over to her to get her to give me my money back. I noticed that she didn’t have a problem taking my money; she just wasn’t all that excited about having to stretch her hand out to give any back. That’s HORRIBLE customer service, and obviously she doesn’t care, which means her bosses don’t care, and thus, neither does its government. I started to immediately hate Chicago, and I wasn’t even ten feet into the city.

Leaving Chicago was a lot easier. And a relief. Did I mention I don’t really like Chicago? I guess you have to have been born there, or really like big cities with rude people in them. I guess a New Yorker would love Chicago. A San Franciscan? Not so much.

2. School is back in swing.

I’m starting the third week of school, and everything seems to be going well. I’m kind of apprehensive about continuing this job in the future (after this semester) as I really feel like I’m being taken advantage of. The place they have me teaching is in Lowell, which is pretty far away (another city), and the main point they made is they don’t pick up mileage for having to drive my car twice a week twenty minutes to half an hour. You’d think if they really wanted someone to fill this type of position, they’d be somewhat responsive to the fact that it’s costing me money to actually make it to this place twice a week. This school has a tendency to be pretty cheap when it comes to covering certain things, and sometimes I wonder if it’s really worth it. I mean, the pay isn’t stellar, and it does take a great deal of chunk of time out of my normal schedule. Again, this is one of those cases where a teacher is kind of left with a thought of how much do I really want to teach versus how much I’m willing to sacrifice with getting very little in return. I’m already at a loss from a simple economic perspective as my text book for one of my classes went missing after the very first day (when I know I had it in class with me); that never makes one feel really good about things.

3. Moving.

I’ve been trying to find a larger place for myself within my own housing complex, and I’ve been disappointed at the experience. On Friday, I spoke with the woman at Wyndham Hill, and she told me that a two bedroom apartment (pretty close to where I wanted to move to) would be available at the end of October, but that the people were still in the apartment, so I couldn’t lay any claim to it until they vacated. Today, I called to verify the time frame, and she told me that the apartment was already given to someone else over the weekend. Which, if you think about it, means that someone else came along and picked up the apartment, EVEN THOUGH she told me that there was no way to ask for it until the other family vacated, which they have not. In other words, I got screwed, and there was no way I could have done anything about it. One of the problems with the place where I live is that no matter what I try to ask for, something always seems to prevent me from getting it. A garage opened up closer to my apartment (I’ve seen it open and empty) but when I asked if I could switch to it, I was told no garage was available. It’s still empty. I kept asking for a den apartment, but was told it was a hard commodity to get, so I asked to be put on the waiting list for when it became available. Each time it became available, it turned into a first come, first serve situation where no one let me know it was available, and obviously there was no list or line. I just got ignored yet again.

So I may just move out completely. I hate moving over stupid shit, but what can you do? I’m currently looking at a series of apartments near 28th Street, which would put me in walking distance to shops and a potential social night life. Where I live now is conducive to feeding ducks, and that’s about it.

4. Writing

I haven’t been doing much writing lately, mainly because I’ve been completely discouraged by the whole writing industry. I had an agent at one point who just kind of disappeared, had another agent after her who sort of just, well, disappeared, and getting a new one after him has been a continuous series of failures. And no, they didn’t disappear because of anything I did. Honestly. I have an alibi. Really.

Part of the problem for me is that I have such grandiose projects I’m working on with my writing that no longer consist of “Get an idea, tell a story and then revamp it.” Instead, I’m focused on analyzing a genre, trying to turn it on its head completely and do something that seems almost impossible for me to do, and every writing project has felt that way, until I finish it, and then I feel as if I’ve learned a whole new chapter in my writing, so I have to go out and break new ground for the next one. I’m not sure anyone understands what I’m saying here because most people when I tell them I’m a writer, still think that I’m referring to sitting down and writing a cute story. I’ve even stopped telling people what I’m writing because they tend to stare at me blank-faced and, if I’m lucky, they’ll ask, “Okay, but what’s the story about?” In other words, there’s a miscommunication thing going on, and a lot of it is due to my impatience with explaining the process of writing something from a completely different perspective of normal literature. I’d say that someday people will understand what I’ve been trying to do (as they analyze it in post-modern literature analysis courses), but part of me (a large part of me) suspects that most people will never hear of me because I’m doomed to writing for myself, having given up on the publishing world already as too sporadic and celebrity centered for someone like me to ever make it. Yeah, I know there’s the cynic out there thinking, “Or maybe you just suck, Duane.” And the part of me that’s most concerned is the part that thinks that cynic may be right, and I’ve been wasting my time and energy when I could have been a lot more productive if I would have focused all of my energy on getting my mage to level 85 in World of Warcraft.

5. Dating.

What’s that?

That’s all for today. I keep plugging forward, thinking that Einstein’s theoretic is wrong, and that perhaps if you do continue to do the same stupid thing over and over again, you WILL get different, better results.

Fired Yahoo Boss Needs to Put Firing into Perspective

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"I love you Duane, but I've decided to date the football team instead of you"

I’m always amazed at the outrage people can purport to feel over very minor things. Years ago, I was working for a major hotel chain, owned by a name that just so happens to be similar to a bar hopping floozy who is famous for being famous (and a conveniently released porno tape of her having sex with a former boyfriend). The company decided that it wanted to get rid of its union employees because it couldn’t come to an agreement with the union over how to screw over the people in the union and take money from them that the union employees were getting for doing work that the hotel couldn’t figure out how to profit off of. So, it fired the employees. And it did it by setting up these employees in a “sting” operation that consisted of the employees doing what they did every day and then telling them they were “stealing” from the company for doing what was already established procedure. So, when it came to applying for unemployment, the hotel chain decided to be even more greedy and try to challenge the ex-employees (not wanting to pay a red nickle to them whatsoever). The employees threatened lawsuits against the hotel for wrongful termination, so the hotel backed down. The employees left, forever pissed at the shitty company they used to work for, and the company walked away, thinking that somehow it managed to accomplish something by losing long-term employees who had made the error of letting their union stand up for their rights.

So, when I hear this Yahoo boss complaining that she got fired from her job over the phone, I want to kindly tell her, “go fuck yourself”. Things could be a lot worse, and they’re not. You got fired because you did a crappy job, knew it was coming long before it happened, and got a SERIOUS severance package as a consolation prize. Yahoo won’t show up to the unemployment hearing and try to pretend that you are pond scum and so beneath them that you don’t deserve your $200 in UI compensation while you try to find another job, scrounging up on pork n beans because you can’t afford anything on the dismal wages you were getting previously (and now are barely receiving). No, you’ll be eating in fancy restaurants, probably courted by major corporations that will ofer you golden parachutes to grace them with your presence. You’ll probably be offered a huge publication deal with some book company to write a book about how to run a billion dollar company into the ground, and you won’t even have to write it. No, they’ll hire some minimum wage wannabe writer who is looking to get his foot in the door (or her foot in the door) at some publishing empire. And you’ll collect money just for putting your name on the cover.

So, stop complaining. So they fired you over the phone.  A girl I was dating once broke up with me over the phone, said we weren’t really compatible any longer, which was a translation of what she was really trying to say (“I found someone else while I was dating you, and it was easier to lie to you than tell you that I was fucking him behind your back, and I definitely couldn’t have told you this with a straight face if you were standing in front of me, you great stud of a man you.”) Okay, the last part she didn’t say, but I’ll remember the break-up my way, thank you very much.

For those of us without superpower jobs like Carol Bartz, we’re kind of stuck with the realization that respect doesn’t come to us in our world. Therefore, you should try living in our world for a bit before you try to gain our sympathy for the insults you perceive that you received. You had a pretty good thing going, and you didn’t live up to the expectations that were placed on your plate. But you got out with a pretty nice bonus. Be thankful for that. Not all of us have always been so lucky.

XXX: The Domain That No One Wants

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An interesting thing has happened to the Internet. It’s adding porn. Yes, in case you didn’t know it, porn has not existed on the Internet until someone decided there was a need for it. Up until now, anyone involved with porn has been required to keep in off line, but some kid with a dream (supposedly a wet one) came up with this pie in the sky idea of creating a web domain so that all of the poor porn purveyors could one day experience pornography on the Internet. So, the government decided to invent XXX as a domain suffix (affix?) that now leads people directly to whatever their heart’s desire, as sick as that might be.

Okay, all sarcasm aside, porn has been on the web as long as the web has existed. You might even say that it led the growth, so to speak, of the Internet. But for the longest time, pornography has been integrated with non-porn sites so that quite often you ended up on a porn site instead of the one you were trying to get to. At least that’s the excuse I’ve been using, but that’s probably another issue. Anyway, the government decided some time ago that if they could create an area of the web where porn could be “controlled”, then everything would be great. So the idea of a XXX suffix was designed. And of course, because porn makes a lot of money, they decided they would charge $100-200 for the usage of the XXX domain.

Here’s the problem with their plan. No one wants it. And I mean “NO ONE.” The pornographers don’t like being separated from the rest of the web because they realize that most legitimate Internet providers will be cajoled into just blocking any XXX area. I’m sure someone will say “it’s for the children”, but whatever the reason, someone is going to make sure that people are unable to access this area of the web. The people who don’t like porn don’t like it either because they think that all of the bad people will suddenly come to the web (like they weren’t on it before). And I’m sure they’re convinced that because “of the children” they’ll need to somehow shut down this cesspool of depravity.

And no one else will like it either because it will mean more crap on the web that they don’t want to deal with. You’ll probably have all sorts of privacy issues and scams and whatnot because of this. What will end up happening is that the porn people will continue creating and making porn on the regular sites, and XXX will be relegated to a few choice names that most people won’t pay attention to. The government will probably step in and surreptitiously design some kind of monitoring system so that they can see who accesses pornography on the web (which they’ll argue is for good reasons, but will eventually be used to shame, humiliate and then blackmail people), so that the only people who use XXX will be those who are clueless at the problems they’re causing by accessing porn the “right way” instead of the logical way.

In the end, the whole project will be abandoned, much like the old newsgroups were destroyed when they were spammed to death by, well, porn. What started out as a great idea always ended up being destroyed by someone trying to make a quick buck, doing whatever he can do to scam you before you figure out what’s happening to you. The only victims will be the ones who went into it innocently because they felt it was the proper way to do things. The bad people, the criminals, and those smart enough to realize the value of anonymity, will continue to do things the way they have always done it. In secret and not where government and censors can find them.

(Update: Turns out I was incorrect on the price of the domain registration. According to Daily Tech, it is $200-300, not $100-200 as I thought).

Finally an app for studs like me who get way too much sex

News, Relationships, Social Networking, Technology, , , , , , , ,

How many times has this happened to you? You’re in the middle of a series of dates, just ran out of condoms during the last orgy you were attending with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, and suddenly Angelina Jolie turns to you in the heat of passion and says, “Duane, please tell me you have a condom on you right now, you great big sexy beastyly man of a stud.” And you do the math, remembering that the pack of Trojans you bought that had 30 condoms in it was supposed to last all day, but you’ve already used up 20 or so during that run in with the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders when their bus broke down and only you, in your Penthouse letter-like encounter, required you to service them, which should have meant changing their tire, but you know how these things get out of hand. Anyway, as I was saying, you suddenly do the math and realize that you had planned to save one condom, but Paris Hilton kind of went nuts and then Bjork showed up and needed one to make balloon animals (or whatever the hell she was doing in the corner by herself), so you now have to turn to Angelina and say, “I might not have any condoms left.” And of course, Brad Pitt didn’t bring any, even though he knew he was bringing the two of them to a wife-swapping orgy party you were throwing this weekend, and he had all week to prepare beforehand. So, now you’re left without options.

But out of nowhere a solution has arrived. It turns out that MTV has always had my back. First there was that whole explanatory video about how video killed the radio star, and now they’ve come along and created an iPhone app that tells you where the nearest place is that you can find a condom. So, thanks to MTV, you can now make sure that you never have to say these tragic words: “I’m sorry, Angelina Jolie, but I have no more condoms.”

Too Much Information About the Sex Lives of Creepy People

News, Relationships, Religion, Television, , , , ,

Today, on the front page of CNN.com, I saw stories that wanted to tell me that Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend reveals that Hugh could only last two seconds, and then a follow-up story where Hugh says women think he’s a great performer in bed. Uh huh. Right under that, there’s an in depth interview with a young 16 year old girl who talks sex with her 51 year old, creepy husband actor who dated her when she was way too young to even know how to spell the word “consent”. Personally, I think she probably still can’t but that’s another story completely.

Why is the news constantly trying to push stories on me that are designed to creep me out? Yeah, I can ignore these things, but I can’t seem to escape them because they come on the news constantly, and they show up everywhere else I look. And then people want to talk about them. At what point do people start to realize that an aging, oversexed man whose claim to fame is smut magazines isn’t a story because he somehow bamboozled yet another 21 year old blond bimbo into thinking he’s the cat’s pajamas, or that he wears cat’s pajamas, or she wears cat-like pajamas because they turn him on, or whatever.

Look, I understand the media in the United States is overly consumed with sex information and somehow thinks that the fact that they don’t have any relevant news to report means that somehow they’re going to have to run with the “sex sells” as a substitute. But some of this stuff is really inappropriate, and I don’t even mean on a prurient level. I just mean that some stuff really should be private and left in that area. When I first discovered that some aging actor married a 16 year old girl, I was somewhat disgusted, but I pushed the story aside, thinking, “well, it really doesn’t have anything to do with me, and people do what people do.” But then the media keeps throwing it back at me, as if I’m supposed to care, or that somehow because I’m human I’m supposed to be involved, or get involved.

Please stop. I don’t care. I don’t want to be an accomplice to this story. I understand that sex sells, but at some point somebody in the media has to be able to tell a colleague, you know maybe we shouldn’t be running this trash as news. If it’s news, great. But if the purpose is to try to shock people who were minding their own business, it’s the news equivalent of terrorism. It’s done to disrupt, shock and cause people to change their normal routines for the sake of some hidden profit. If I was interested in stories about older men with children, I’d seek it out on the Internet like everyone else, at least until Chris Hanson caught me and embarrassed me on national television. If I seek it out, let me be ashamed. If you throw it in my face, don’t be surprised if more and more people who were oblivious don’t start seeking it out themselves because you helped them get used to it.

A Creature of Habit

Memoirs, Relationships, Uncategorized, Writing

I’m what you would call a creature of habit. Well, other people have lots of other names for me, but I’m going to go with that one for now.

You see, I kind of like things stabilized and normal. Yet, at the same time I tend to have a habit of picking up and starting over from scratch because I get tired of the same kind of life after awhile. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.

However, I was getting lunch today, when it dawned on me that I get the same thing for lunch every day. And it didn’t dawn on me because I’m really cognizant over those kinds of things. It dawned on me because the cashier remarked “I’ve noticed you get the same thing every day, except for Fridays. That’s when you switch chicken strips for wings.” And she was right. Come Friday, I will get the exact same lunch at work I get every Friday because I’m what I’ve already called a creature of habit.

On the weekend, I will eat breakfast at Burger King. I don’t even order my meal any more. I walk up to the counter and whoever is working there will charge me $6.87 and eventually someone will bring me EXACTLY the same breakfast I get on Saturday and Sunday. It doesn’t change.

I don’t date, which is why I don’t really have to worry about someone else deciding, “You know, I’d like to eat at some strange restaurant we’ve never tried before.” I’d like to date, but I can’t find anyone interesting in my neck of the woods. And I gave up looking. Besides, someone new might want to eat somewhere other than where I normally eat.

The problem is I’m not sure if it’s a problem or not. I guess it could be, especially because I’m a big fan of making abrupt, huge life-changing changes. But I haven’t changed anything in a long time. Aside from socks and underwear. And a couple of months ago, I changed the oil in my car. But right after I did so, I drove to Burger King and had breakfast.

Something don’t ever change.