There are kisses and kisses. Some are given in sport and some in passion. There are formal kisses of greeting and departure, and there are perfunctory pecks of accustomed affection. Once in a great while lips meet and two spirits merge for a time and the universe is right and complete and the planets wheel in their proper places. Once in a while the lonely, broken spirit of man is healed and made whole. For a while his quest is over and his questions are answered.

Monday, December 22, 2003, early on

It was an odd weekend. There’s stuff to talk about, but I’ll doubtless forget half or more of it while I’m typing the first half that occurs to me. That’s just how this often goes.

One annoying thing is that last Saturday’s column, in which I described being rousted on my way home from work, is gone. Apparently I didn’t back it up… not having all the bells and whistles of a paid premium blogsite, I don’t have automatic archiving and have to do it all tediously and by hand, and it seems I forgot to make a copy of that page and then I just typed over it, which is quite aggravating. Even Google doesn’t have a copy of it cached, any more (they update their cache WAY TOO QUICKLY, methinks) so it’s just gone for good.

Let’s see. Saturday was interesting and fun and even adventurous. The useless Bucs played like gomers in the first half of a game against the Atlanta Falcons they should have won handily. With about six minutes left in the fourth quarter, they were down by something like 24 points, so my brothers Sean and Pat and I left to do an errand for my grandmother. No sooner did we stop watching the game, get out to the car, and turn on the radio than the Bucs made a near-miraculous comeback and would have tied the game, sending it into overtime with 12 seconds left, had they managed a two point conversion after their third touchdown in about four minutes. Apparently, all my brothers and I had to do to get the Bucs to play ball was, you know, STOP WATCHING. However, the two point conversion failed, so after being down 30 – 7 and coming back to make it 30-28 with 12 seconds left, the Bucs still lost. Idiots.

However, all this happened while I was hanging at my brother Pat’s house, which is where the traditional family Christmas takes place every year. Some years it’s just the immediate family in the immediate area, which usually means, me, Paul, Pat and his wife and their son, our Gram, Aunt Denise and her current husband if he feels like coming, Chad & Mel (Chad is my cousin, but he’s a close cousin and generally gets treated more like a sibling in my immediate family) and their two boys, and usually my mom and her husband Carl, who don’t live locally any more but who always make an effort to get in for Christmas.

However, this was one of the rare years when things fell together and, well, not the WHOLE family by any means, but vast numbers of the family managed to make it to Christmas, and even better, none of the really annoying relatives that people only put up with because they’re related by blood showed up, so there wasn’t anyone there that everyone really wanted to avoid and only tolerated for the sake of civility. (Well, other than me. I’m pretty much that sort of relative in my family, but, well, I don’t have any trouble tolerating me, and it’s just as well, since I can’t avoid me anyway.)

This year, in addition to the usual core group listed above, my brother Sean and his wife Erica and their FIVE kids were down from Maine. Their kids range from about ten months up to 11 years old, four boys and a girl. My cousin Ashley was there, with her two kids, who are about a year and two years old respectively. My cousin Heather (Chad’s older sister) flew in as a surprise for her mom, so she was there. Adding to the kid swarm, a guy named Joe, who is the fiance of my one time stepsister in law Marykay showed up with Marykay’s three daughters (who are, respectively, newborn, 8, and 9, I believe). Joe was pretty pleasant for a guy who was utterly surrounded by people he did not know and who was only doing it as a favor to his fiance. (Marykay used to be married to my worthless stepbrother Brian, Carl’s younger son. She got divorced from him and a couple of other lousy guys down the line, hooked up with Joe, who seems to be a great guy. Mom and Carl still very much consider Marykay to be a daughter in law and her kids to be their grandkids… which two of them are… and we don’t have a lot of women in the family for whatever reason, so we tend to hang on to the quality ones we luck into.)

I’m probably leaving someone out, but if so, I can’t think who. About the only relative I have that I enjoy who wasn’t there was Ashley’s mom, my Aunt Roseanne (she’s my mom’s sister), and none of the relatives that I loathe showed up. Everybody seemed to enjoy the yard sale presents Paul and I got for them, and it was very pleasant, just hanging out with all my blood relations that I like the most.

As always, I felt a little bit melancholy. I always do when I’m with large gatherings of my family, because even in the one social gathering in the universe where I undeniably and irrefutably have a place and am always welcome, I am always on some level aware that I’m really very different from everyone else there and I really do not fit in, even with as charmingly eccentric a group as my family is.

Adding to the usual slight but inescapable feeling of estrangement, there were all those little kids running around, which was in an odd way pleasant, but which also invoked some sad associations. Invariably it made me remember Christmas gatherings when I was a kid, where me, my brothers, and my cousins made up the screaming, shrieking juvenile hordes. It was very strange, and just a bit of a downer, to reflect that now I was one of the boring old people sitting around watching TV and talking about inexplicable and dull things. Since a good part of the day was spent passing around some photo albums that Sean, Pat and I recovered from Gram’s most recent ex husband (the errand I mentioned in passing previously) the nostalgic associations hung around me thickly, and I couldn’t help but remember times in the past when I was a very small child and I'd watch my elders sitting around doing the same thing… looking at photo albums and talking about people they remembered from their childhoods that I’d never met and never would and who meant nothing to me and never could.

It was sad, because we used to go to my Aunt Hazel and my Aunt Helen’s house for Christmas every year when I was a kid, and they were great aunts (well, that’s a pun actually, but an unintentional one; they were my maternal grandfather’s sisters, so they were great-aunts as well as GREAT aunts) but they’ve long since passed on, and my youngest brother Paul doesn’t remember them at all, and all the little kids who were there Saturday racing around screaming and shrieking will never know them, and, well, that’s just a bummer.

And, of course, there’s something very grim about looking at a bunch of little kids and reflecting that by the time they’re grown up, well, I’ll be rather elderly, and by the time they’re the age I am currently, and looking at a new crop of little kids with the same bemusement I was experiencing, I’ll be wizened and probably senile, if I’m still alive at all… and my god, what will the world be like then?

But despite the minor but palpable sensation of not really belonging even in the place I belong the most, and the various reflections of my mortality that kept flickering around me, it was a very good family Christmas, and I enjoyed it a lot. Sean is a really good cook and did a good job on the feast, and even if we didn’t get to sit around a big table (which I prefer, I’m a traditionalist about these things) and even if the Bucs couldn’t be bothered to beat a goddam 3-10 team they’ve always handled easily in the past, it was a lovely day and I enjoyed it.

In the margins, I discovered a few rather startling and unsavory things about some people I’m close to, but those are their secrets, not mine, and I’m not going to tell them here. (Or anywhere; honest to God, for all my yammer yammer yammer, I’m really very discreet about other people’s shit.) However, I should probably mention a bit more about the errand that Sean, Pat and I ran for Grams:

Grams, like nearly all the Kelly women (in general, our ‘clan name’ is Kelly, as that was the name of our paternal grandfather; in my family, for example, four boys have two different last names to reflect two different husbands my mom married, and since it’s mostly the girls of her generation who reproduced, my cousins all have different last names from my brothers and I, so we just go by our mothers’ common maiden name as a coherent ‘group’ name) has prohibitively dreadful taste in men. She’s had three husbands, and the only good one died about fourteen years ago (her second, Charles Cortright; my grandfather, Arthur Kelly, was to all reports a whirling sonofabitch, and my own experiences with him bear that out to some extent, but he saved my life once when I was five or six, which I clearly remember, so I was one of the only people in my family to cut him slack while he was still alive).

Gram’s latest ex husband, Roy, was always one of those relatives you avoided as much as possible at family gatherings, but it was just because he was obnoxious… he’d obviously never had an original thought in his life, and had a very irritating habit of latching onto some particularly memorable phrase or sentence someone else would say in his earshot and repeating it over and over again, to the point where most of us called him ‘the Parrot’ behind his back.

However, I’d had reports that when the family wasn’t around, Roy was actually much worse than irritating; he was a mean old man who made my grandmother utterly miserable by criticizing her constantly, threatening her, verbally abusing her, belittling her, controlling her in every way he could, and generally simply domineering the living christ out of her. Now, I have little love for my grandmother, who is about as self centered an old bitch as you’re ever going to find, but she’s my grandmother, and I was as happy as anyone else when she finally divorced Roy last year. She’s seemed a lot happier lately too, and if every conversation with her is still all about her, well, she seems generally more upbeat.

However, Roy, simply because he could, apparently kept everything after the divorce… their small mobile home and all my grandmother’s possessions. This has always rankled my family but Grams isn’t all that assertive with people she can’t manipulate (she’s very manipulative with her kids and grandkids, but that’s a different dynamic) and she’s always just told us to let it go. Until Saturday, that is, when apparently the fact that Roy had kept all her traditional holiday decorations, some of which she’d had for decades, just annoyed her so much that finally she asked me, Sean and Pat to go over and see if we could get Roy to give them back to her.

Now I should describe my brothers Sean and Pat. First, if you were to see my mom’s four kids… me, Sean, Pat, and Paul (in respective age order) altogether, you'd have no idea we were related. Sean and Pat have the same father, but look entirely different from each other (Sean takes after the general Kelly male look, while Pat looks like his father, Steve Madigan, another of the many male louses who have briefly married into this family and eventually been kicked the fuck back out again when someone finally had enough of their shit). Paul and I each have different fathers from Steve… Paul is the child of my mom’s second husband Bill, and looks a lot like his dad, while I’m the child of my mom’s first fiance Daniel Pastorek, who is a piece of shit that abandoned me and my mom, and that’s a long story. And I don’t know who I look like; facially I more or less resemble my mom’s brothers but I don’t have the Kelly build.

Pat, like his dad, is slightly below average height, very good looking, and fairly trim, with a mainstream, conservative haircut and stylish greying goatee. Sean has the typical male Kelly build that our grandfather and my mom’s two brothers all have… he looks like an Irish beat cop from a 1930s movie; huge and burly and heavyset with a round, good natured, very Hibernian country boy face. Me, I’m dead average… average height, average looking facial features. I’m overweight so people tend to regard me as large, but not when I’m standing anywhere near Sean. I have long hair past my shoulders that is usually in a ponytail and am growing my own beard back since getting rid of the dishwasher job, and to people who dislike and/or are frightened of the hippie look, I can seem scary.

That’s how we appear. How we act… well, Pat is very successful; he has an MBA and is upper level management for a large local insurance company and has a lot of natural charisma and knows how to calmly persuade and charm people. He’s smart but not overly analytical or scholarly, but he knows people and how to get around them; he’s very very smooth. Sean is at the opposite end of the extreme; although Sean is just as smart as anyone else in our family (my mother is very bright, she didn’t have any dumb kids), he has long since bought into his own image and he acts like exactly what he appears to be… a big good natured redneck lunkhead. Calling Sean ‘roughhewn’ would be only fair. He’s lovable as hell, fanatically loyal to his friends and family, and will die defending anyone or anything he loves, but he makes absolutely no effort to discipline his emotions, control his temper, or school his words. He probably honestly believes at this point that he isn’t really very bright, although that’s nonsense, and he acts that way. He has a very short temper.

And, somewhere in the middle, you have me. I’m certainly not charming, and am certainly no smarter than any of my other brothers, and I’ve been told in the past quite often that I am obnoxiously straightforward and annoyingly honest in my responses to people. However, I’m capable of great emotional control for brief periods when it’s necessary or useful, and while I certainly have little or no natural charisma, I am (in the words of Paul Newman) a ‘student of human moves’ and I’m capable of being persuasive and even manipulative when it’s necessary (a by product of closely observing human behavior all around me, and of being extremely articulate and skilled at semantic manipulation).

So that’s the three of us who Gram asked to go over and see her most recent ex and try to get some of her most treasured personal items back for her.

Something else I should tell the non Zephyrhills natives before we go on: Zephyrhills is almost entirely supported by out of state, northern origin retirees who come down from up north for the winter. Our local economy revolves around and depends upon these itinerant semi-residents, nearly all of whom are elderly folks who migrate from north to south with the seasons. There are a lot of derisive names for these folks, of which the most common are ‘snowbirds’ and ‘Q-tips’, although I’ve never noticed that the common contempt for these aged seasonal migrants has ever prevented a permanent resident from cheerfully taking their money.

Now, yeah, everyone calls these folks ‘Q-tips’ (and geezers, and other things) behind their backs, but the local authority knows which side its bread is buttered on, and you do not mess with these folks, especially ‘in season’, which is to say, in the winter, which is to say, right frickin’ now.

Needless to say, my Gram’s most recent ex, Roy, is a Q-tip, living in Zephryhills, and we are currently in season.

Got all that? Okay. Now:

We head on over there, listening on the car radio in a bemused and somewhat disbelieving fashion to what would have gone down in the NFL history books as the second greatest comeback of all time, had the Bucs managed to make the two point conversion and then win in overtime. We arrive and get out, and Pat knocks on the sliding glass door, and Roy comes doddering out from the depths of small trailer he used to share with Gram, amiably enough, to open the door. I don’t know what he thought we were there for; maybe he was under the mistaken impression we just missed him and had come by to wish him a Merry Christmas.

Anyway, Pat was up front, and that was good; as I say, Pat is the smooth one. And Pat started out smooth, and I suspect that had Pat gone over by himself, or with me in tow, he’d have fairly easily jollied Roy into giving up the Christmas stuff and we’d have left with no hard feelings… Pat’s like that.

However, Roy did get a little belligerent, mostly, I suspect, to save face. Now, if it had just been Pat, or Pat and me, he or we would have worked around that… I don’t much care for Roy, but I can keep my temper in check if it means a peaceful win-win solution for everyone, at least, as long as no one is insulting one of my favorite TV shows or Steve Englehart’s Silver Age writing or something. Pat would have soothed him down and he’d have gone muttering and fuming back to his shed and we’d have got what we came for and Pat would have thanked him kindly and we’d have been outta there.

However, as I say, Roy got a little belligerent… I believe he tried to wave us off when he found out what we were there for and said something like “No, no, that bitch left me and she’s gotten everything she’s gonna get out of this trailer” and tried to shut the door on us.

Now, neither Pat nor I would have accepted that; that wasn’t in the cards at all. But Pat would have been smooth and pleasant, and I’d have been cordial. One or the other of us would have had our foot in that door and our hand on the frame of it and that interview would by no means have been over, but we’d have kept it copacetic.

Not so, my bro’ Sean “The Incredible Hulk” Madigan.

Roy tried to slide that door shut and Sean just grabbed it with a hand roughly the size of your Aunt Mabel’s Thanksgiving turkey and rammed it all the way open again, shooooom ker WHUMP! And then Sean was right in there, filling half that tiny living room and breathing all the damn air in the house, towering like a CGI effect over Roy, who is this little gnome of an elderly man, telling Roy in his deep, rumbling baritone that he didn’t TALK about OUR grandmother like that, and he’d goddam well give up our grandmother’s Christmas shit post haste or Sean would goddam well MAKE him do it.

Now, give Roy credit, he didn’t back down even a little bit. He just stood right there yammering like a particularly deranged and overbred little yappie dog, peppering Sean with choice little phrases like “why you sonsabitches you ain’t gettin a goddam thing that bitch left me and she’s got all she’s gonna get now you just get the hell outta here you sonsabitches I never wanna see any of you again!”

Now, bear in mind, this trailer is in the middle of a trailer park that is ‘deed restricted’, meaning, basically, it’s reserved for elderly snowbirds and other retired folk. We’ve got old folks all around us, and my brother Sean, looking a great deal like something from an old Tex Avery cartoon featuring a mad scientist with a monsterizing serum, is looming in an extremely threatening fashion over a wizened old geezer who to all appearances couldn’t win an arm wrestling contest with a china doll. This is not a good situation to be in ‘in season’ in Zephyrhills anywhere; god knows how many of these elderly sorts have turned down their syndicated re-run of MacGyver in order to listen to what’s happening over at good ol’ Roy’s trailer, and are now reaching for their phones to speed dial 911.

At this point, Pat and I both stepped in and managed to get Roy calmed and soothed down a little bit. I should also note that during this, I was exerting my own extremely well developed physical strength and using all of my big brotherly authority to get Sean calmed down and back out the door, and I was extremely effective in doing so, too, if by ‘extremely effective’ one means ‘not actually accomplishing a damn thing at all and looking really silly while one tries to physically and/or verbally move a being who is to all practical purposes rooted like a redwood tree right there and not going anywhere until he damned well feels like it’.

However, somehow or other… I don’t know how I managed it, but somehow or other, between Sean’s abuse and Pat’s charm and my more measured attempts to persuade Roy to please give us our grandmother’s stuff so Sean wouldn’t tear his arms and legs off and use his torso for a skateboard… I found myself walking along behind Roy, urging him along through his outside screened in porch area (down here we call it a “Florida room”) to the storage shed at the rear of his lot. Roy was cursing me and Sean and Pat and our grandmother with every step, but he was moving with a purpose, and he had his keys out, and he opened up his storage shed, and pointed at one particular plastic storage bin and snarled “Her Christmas shit is in there, take it and get out, I never wanna see any of you sonsabitches again”.

At which point, Sean started in on him again, and Roy turned and starts sonofabitching at Sean again, and I slipped inside like the sneaky little fuck I actually have a real talent for being but rarely am, and started rummaging around in various boxes looking for anything else of Gram’s Roy might have kept out of spite.

Of course Roy noticed me right away, as I discovered that the plastic storage bin under the one he’d indicated was also full of Christmas stuff that doubtless belonged to Gram (Roy’s not a big guy for seasonal decorations), and he rounded on me yelling “That’s all you get the rest of this is mine that bitch left me she ain’t getting another goddam thing outta this place”. But by then I’d noticed a couple of cardboard boxes behind the storage bins that said ‘family albums’ on them, so I asked, rather pleasantly, “Are these your family albums, Roy?” and opened up a box and started going through the stacks of photo albums inside, and Roy was really screaming at me then “Yes all that is mine, it’s mine, you get out”, which I found really amazing, and I said to Roy “Really, that’s weird, you have a niece or someone who looks just like our Aunt Roseanne, and in these pictures she’s getting married to someone who looks exactly like our Uncle Greg, isn’t that the craziest thing”, and then Sean said something again about pissing all over Roy AND his little yappie dog, and Roy turned around to sonsabitch at Sean, and I managed to get both plastic bins and those two boxes of photo albums out by the simple expedient of stacking one box on each bin, handing one bin and box stack to Pat, picking up the other one, and saying “Okay, Roy, we’re outta here”.

At which point Roy started cursing me out directly something terrible, so I pointed my finger at him and I said “Now look here, you old bastard, I have been very nice to you today despite the fact that you’re a completely worthless human being, so you be nice to me.” And we left.

All the way back, Pat was worried Roy might call the cops on us, and it was a valid worry… if Roy had, well, we could have got in some trouble; Zephyrhills cops tend to side with the geezers. However, I know enough about human nature to understand that when someone is wrong and they know they are wrong, they rarely want to involve the authorities, and Roy clearly was keeping stuff that didn't belong to him and that had no real value to him simply out of spite, so I doubted he was going to want to get anyone official in on it. And apparently I was correct, or at least, I haven't heard of any arrests being made in the family since then.

Other than telling Pat that, most of my verbal efforts on the trip back were along the lines of trying to get across to Sean, as diplomatically as possible, that had the cops pulled up and seen Mr. Hyde menacing poor defenseless Bilbo Baggins at the front door of Bilbo’s own modest little hobbit hole, they would have had the bracelets on him in four seconds flat and Erica would have been spending their vacation money posting bail for him.

And I mean, geez. People say I’m the one with no self control.

All levity aside, it was a little disturbing… and it remains a bit troubling… to realize that the nasty, mean, evil tempered, thoroughly unpleasant Roy I saw yesterday is doubtless the Roy my grandmother lived with for years and had to deal with whenever her family wasn’t around. I know many people are two faced, and all of us, of course, are slightly different individuals to all the different individuals in our lives, but honestly, that was rather a chilling experience. I was happy Grams got shut of Roy before, but I honestly had no idea what she’d put up with. It’s rather unpleasantly enlightening.

It was lovely that we got the photo albums, though. We all sat around and went through them and while family photos are things that only have value to those immediately connected to them, everyone there was very happy we’d managed to get those boxes back, which Gram had completely forgotten about. And the rest of our family Christmas was very enjoyable for me too, with the minor codicils (all of which are entirely my fault) I’ve mentioned above.

Today was a come down, though, at least, for Paul. He and Pat go over to visit Paul’s dad Bill pretty regularly at the group home where Bill’s been staying for the last decade or so (Pat goes every week; Paul goes along when Pat reminds him and Paul has had enough sleep the night before) only to discover that through some idiotic concatenation of bureaucratic stupidity, Bill has been moved to some home somewhere near Cape Canaveral. That really bummed Paul out, since it means he won’t get to visit his father for Christmas. This was exacerbated by other stuff… the rest of our family was at Disney World today, and while I quite happily stayed here (I’m theme parked out for the next year or so after our Islands of Adventure trip last summer), I know Paul would have liked to go along. Also, Paul was counting on his buddy Scott to give him a ride into Tampa so he could buy the rest of my Christmas present, but Scott is very sick and couldn’t do it, and last and certainly not least, Paul didn’t have any of his usual mood enhancer all day long and that made him irritable as fuck, too. And underscoring all that was just that, well, we had a really nice family Christmas yesterday, so today was gonna be a letdown no matter what.

Paul’s friend Chad came over to shoot the shit, though, and I managed to talk him into giving Paul a ride into Tampa tomorrow, so that’s okay.

Oh, I suppose I should list loot. I got… er… let me think… a very nice sweat suit from Pat and Janette (us fat folks just love sweat suits, you can’t go wrong giving us one), two nice shirts (both black, my preferred color; it goes with everything and, again, it’s a good color for us fatsos) from Aunt Denise and my mom & Carl, a Bucs mug from Mom & Carl, a $15 cash card for Border’s from Sean & Erica, and… hmmm… I think that’s it. Oh, a loaf of very excellent banana nut bread from Grams. And, you know, I got to go on an adventure and recover the lost Ark of the Photographs from evil Pharaoh Roy’s storage tomb.

I’ll get one more present yet this Christmas… whatever graphic album it is Paul got for me (it’s wrapped under our tree; I can tell it’s a graphic album) and some superhero card game he’s getting me for a stocking stuffer (he talked too loudly to Pat about it this morning when I was half asleep and I heard them).

So, it was a great family Christmas yesterday and hey, I get to have an actual Christmas Day this year, with a stocking and everything! Should be cool, assuming I don’t die first.

I’m planning on spending much of the next three weeks building a new Angelfire site for all Jeff’s artwork that I have scanned, since the MSN group I made for him is rather hard to access (you have to get an MSN account and log in and all that good shit, which is annoying). And I also sent off an email to PublishAmerica with a lot of the questions various people have been asking me (what format will the book be printed in, how much will it cost, where will it be available, etc) so maybe I’ll hear from them soon, too.

I should also probably mention that after finishing Prince Caspian, I put aside Narnia for a time so I could read my ‘new’ Heinlein ‘novel’. As others have noted, it’s not so much a novel as a thinly disguised discussion of various of Heinlein’s youthful notions as to what an ideal future society might be like. There’s not much plot and the characters are little more than talking heads, but it’s fascinating stuff, anyway… at least, it is to me, as a Heinlein fan who is very interested in how stories come into being and how a writer’s talents and skills develop over time, as well as how a person’s ideas, political and philosophical and moral, can change and alter (if not mature, in Heinlein’s case) over a long lifetime.

While Robinson’s foreword (which I have read through, despite my earlier declarations that I wouldn’t) is utterly insufferable (he spends the first half of it showing off how much he knows about Heinlein’s writing canon, around a hundred words discussing the book itself, and most of the last half of his intro kissing Virginia Heinlein’s ass), the afterword by someone named Robert James (who is, I guess, some kind of Heinlein authority) is rather more interesting to the RAH-ophile. James debunks the well known myth of how Heinlein got started, showing that the short story contest “Life Line” was famously written for actually took place a year before the short story was written. Much more fascinating, however, is the fact that apparently, Heinlein and his second, mostly forgotten, wife Leslyn, were swingers… they had an open marriage and frequently swapped spouses with other married couples they knew, and pursued nude photography as a hobby. After Heinlein divorced her, he seems to have made a concerted effort to make everyone forget his ‘wild days’, and this probably contributed to him spending most of the 1950s establishing himself as a premiere writer of children’s books for Scribner & Sons.

I’m in absolutely no position to make judgements, of course, having never met any of the people involved personally, but this most recent intelligence makes me think RAH made a pretty lousy decision and ended up with a pretty bad deal, trading in Leslyn for his third wife Virginia. But then, ever since reading Heinlein’s introductions to his own stories and articles in Expanded Universe, I’ve been very aware that had he and I ever met, he would have almost certainly detested me, so it’s really not surprising that from a distance, I’d be far more enamored of the one he threw back than the one he kept.

Somewhere or other, though… I think it’s in Grumbles From The Grave… there’s a strong indication that Heinlein began his relationship with Virginia before he divorced Leslyn, and that it contributed enormously to the dissolution of the second marriage. Add in this bit about RAH and Leslyn having an open marriage, and you have to wonder just how much pick and shovel work dear old Ginny did on RAH’s second marriage in order to get what she clearly wanted… but… well… never mind. It all happened long before I was born and I never will meet any of the people involved… but what I’ve read about Virginia Heinlein, and of her own writings, makes me think I really would not have liked her at all if I’d ever met her. What little I’ve heard of Leslyn, however, sounds considerably more appealing.

As to the ‘novel’ itself, it’s very interesting to me to see the various political ideas Heinlein held as a rather young man. The guy who wrote this book seems much more idealistic than the crusty prick who wrote all that ranting Red baiting crap in the late 50s and early 60s, or the truculent, near senile old dastard who sputtered out all that incoherent World As Myth drivel at the end of his career, while vowing in his few interviews to always go armed any time he left the house. I actually got the feeling while reading this that if I could have sat down and had a Coke with the younger Bob Heinlein who was married to Leslyn and running for office in California on a rather idealistic platform back in the mid 30s, I’d have liked him quite a bit. Too bad he turned into such a raving nutjob as he got older… but, well, age has an ossifying effect on us all, I’ve found, and an embittering influence on many…

In the meantime, it’s the holidays and my last entry probably alienated many of my regular readers and email correspondents (by which I mean, the female ones) so I’m cutting everyone some slack on the poor comments turn out, but y’all know what’s gonna happen if that keeps up.

It is a mistake to believe that our forefathers came to this continent in search of religious freedom. On the contrary they sought a place in which to exercise their own brand of religious totalitarianism… All forms of organized religion are alike in certain social respects. Each claims to be the sole custodian of the essential truth. Each claims to speak with final authority on all ethical questions. And every church has requested, demanded, or ordered the state to enforce its particular system of taboos. No church ever withdraws its claims to control absolutely by divine right the moral life of the citizens.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man