Background: "Proteus Rising"

We continue this sordid tale of scriptwriting and fanboy intrigue. Reader discretion is advised.

For the sake of context and clarity, we'll briefly cover the history of the project. Details behind the BBC writer/producer story-protecting jump:

Intro to "Proteus Rising"

Let me start with profound apologies to anyone who cares about this here empty space of mine, my personal blog. The last few years have been turbulent, full of all those things, as John Lennon once wrote, that happen while you make other plans. Personal and professional conflicts. Illness. And family losses, including my father. I wish I knew how to juggle blogging and all those other things at the time. But I'm here now.

And Facebook is one hell of a time sink. Hello, Facebook, by the way.

I return with a mission. I'm stuck with a story that probably won't ever be produced. Two reasons. One, it's a Doctor Who story and their writing assignments are by invitation only. The second reason: The exec producer of this fanfic project, Neil Marsh (not the showrunners of the actual BBC production), is into passive-aggressive behavior. He has run away. Rather than abandon this project yet again, I intend to finish it -- here on this blog.

The next several postings will feature the work in progress. If you were ever curious how a story or a script is written (or how I write them), maybe they'll be interesting. Normally, copyright concerns would keep me from doing something like this. But Doctor Who is a BBC property and I wouldn't claim otherwise. This is partly an exercise to begin with, playing with somebody's else concepts to see what can be done.

But I also wanted to prove the work was being done -- and that it's worth doing. Enablers and apologists can dismiss the work and the worth out of hand, I'm sure. They almost have to. Otherwise they'd have to re-evaluate who and what they're enabling and excusing.

Therefore, all and sundry are on notice: If Neil insists on abandoning this project, it won't be for lack of a great story.

Because it'll be here, true believers. Stay tuned.

Kill The Senate Health Care Bill?

Bamf. Materializing here on the blog. Why away so long? I'll explain later.

Here's one reason. Facebook. It's been a fun little timesink. And buggy as hell.

One major plus to Facebook has been the opportunity to share news items with many people -- covering a lot of social ground, through different demographics, cliques, and gaggles of online folk -- with just a click.

But the news story of health care reform is so big, so crucial, and today so unpredictable that sharing one link isn't enough.

Case in point: Howard Dean, a major booster for health care reform and the US Senate's efforts, has come out against the Senate bill in draft now.

There's plenty of news coverage on the politics of it, the great and superficially entertaining bruhaha around it. But very little about what it means.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com best summarizes the pro side: that it will help some folks now and you'd be crazy not to.

Howard Dean's complaints boil down to, "It will do more harm than good." He claims:

• Under this bill, patients with pre-existing conditions can get health care, but at three times the cost. Health insurance companies can't deny them care. They can simply price gouge, especially if they're older.
• People will be forced to buy health care insurance or they will be fined.
• 27 percent of that money goes to health care CEO's, not to the cost of health care.
• A small percentage of the US will qualify for this coverage.
• The coverage under this bill would last for only a few years -- until 2014.

A private sector solution. No controls on the market. No universal coverage. With price hikes aimed at the old and the vulnerable.

Is Howard Dean correct? If he was, I'd hate this bill too.

So now I'm posting this to my personal blog and setting Facebook to import it. Please read. Think it over. Keep everyone talking.

A Victim of Internet Memes: 25 Random Things

Recently I've been tagged with one of those get-to-know-you gags online. The rules read as follows:

"Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you."

Tag. I'm it. I got stuck with a smaller version of this when I got a mild cold during a snowstorm. I got the 25-random-things version while recovering a nasty cold. If I wait for a bigger list, I fully expect to be struck down with an Ebola virus.

But I'm not tagging anybody. I might be a wuss, but I'm not a rat.

Here I go. I suggest you start running now.

1. I never learned how to drive. Car insurance in California was too expensive. And my wife always has the car (bah-dump-bump CHING.)
2. I once shattered a malfunctioning typewriter out of sheer frustration. It was a cheap, creaking piece of crap anyway.
3. Halloween is my favorite holiday because it feels more positive than all the others so far.
4. I know how to make a few dishes (chicken in marsala seems the most popular, but I don't think I'm much of a cook.
5. I once had a black cat called Lilith. I still miss her.
6. My father was a US Marine at the Battle of Iwo Jima.
7. I still dream of writing and directing feature films.
8. I have nervous tremors in my face and hands. I do my best to conceal them in public.
9. The first thing I ever saw on a television screen was the laser room scene in "Goldfinger."
10. I'm a Christian who supports the theory of evolution and despises creationism. (Hey, I thought it was a sin to tell a lie....)
11. To speed up the process, I used polyhedral dice to figure out which items went on the list.
12. Black isn't my favorite color. But for some reason, it has a relaxing effect on me.
13. The streak of silver in my hair started as a big spot when I was 23.
14. For some reason, I rarely recognize actors in person, no matter how famous or distinctive they are... even when they're friends of mine.
15. I'm rather shy. I was brought up to be seen, not heard. The fact that I've dealt with a lot of really screwed-up people didn't help.
16. I based my penmanship on those of my father and JRR Tolkien's Elvish lettering.
17. I got chicken pox when I was a teenager. I've had dry skin problems ever since.
18. The backs of my hands still bear scars I gave myself from high school.
19. I'm learning how to shave with a straight razor. Rather nice, actually.
20. I once suffered with insomnia for four weeks straight because of nightmares.
21. My ankle has been sprained at least six times.
22. I don't tell my mother what I do for a living. She thinks I'm going to Hell as it is.
23. I'm Hispanic, a Mexican-American born and raised in Silicon Valley. I've been erroneously labeled white, Arabic, Filipino, and God knows what else.
24. My cognitive memory started when I was about seven months old.
25. This is one of the hardest things I've ever worked on.

Under The Pendulum, Over the Pit

Bloody typical. Just when I sit down to write my first posting in months, my stomach flips out. This year, par for the course.

This summer has been truly strange, a special brand of karmic brutality. Shouting "ew, ecky thump!" the way folks do (in northern England, apparently), and shouting it at the top of one's lungs (as we often with just about everything here in the US) seems like the only sensible response. Or just typing WTF?!?!? a lot... but where's the reading pleasure in that, y'know?

At the rate things have been going this year, I figured I ought to sit down and fill every last one of you out there on the innur-nets. Before something else happened.

Shortly after my last posting here, my wife and I had a sudden medical crisis. It had been building for a while. We'd been trying to have a baby. No success. That in itself hurts to admit, but only because I have the time to consider it. (Sometimes I wonder whether regret is a luxury, like pet peeves and celebrities.)

July didn't give us that option, not when it dropped Jamie on the floor of a restroom, knocked down by mortal pain. Sounds urgent, don't it? Hence her trip to Urgent Care. So you can probably appreciate the sheer incongruency of waiting for two weeks for a diagnosis, a clue, a recommended course of action, little things like that. The most we'd gotten was an effective 'scrip of pain-killers for Jamie. A way to dull the pain, not to end it.

We had to take the initiative ourselves, demanding to see someone about her condition, and managed to shake a referral for a specialist out of our HMO. Even seeing him involved some hurry up 'n' wait. And once we see him, it was instantaneous crisis (just add speech). Jamie's ovaries had to come out.

Four days later (I think), we were in the hospital with friends and fears in tow. I sat with Jamie during her prep in a tiny, tiny room. After hours of waiting, she was drugged up and rolled out. I was sent into a swanky waiting room.

I called friends and family, telling everyone surgery had finally begun. Flip the cellphone open. Dial. Talk. Focus on the words, not how to say them. Hide the crack in your voice. Close the line. Do all it again. And again. And again.

Sit down. Wait. Pretend you know how to get up again.

Two and a half hours later, I get the good news from the surgeon himself. The procedure went well and not a moment too soon. Jamie was doing fine. A half hour after that, the staff let me sneak upstairs to her room, so I could wait for her there. An odd sense of relief came over me. It simmered while I waited a bit longer for her to arrive. And it grew when the nurses rolled her into the room.

I didn't expect her to be awake. Then she looked over the railing of her bed, tape and tubes trailing over her face and arm, and croaked out a surprisingly energetic, "Hey."

I tried to conceal my stark horror when I saw the blood on her gown. On her thighs.

My God, what have we done.... No, think. She's alive. Responding well, blah blah, endo-mee-tree-something gone.

My brain was almost useless that week. I was in a state of near-panic the whole time, terrified and exhausted, fully expecting more grief from somewhere. I went on like that for days. I didn't think of calling a cab, only the cost and how the in-laws would love to pounce on me for it. Instead I took public transit -- stuffing coins into ticket machines, shambling, staring through the road ahead. I got more numb every day. A woman pulled me off a train track before a light rail train could flatten me. Didn't see it. Didn't care. Scattered on the inside, dead on the outside.

Fortunately friends and family stepped in, helped us get home and well situated with a BBQ party that weekend. They kept us going, no matter how much or how little we asked of them. When they heard I hadn't seen it yet, they even offered to take me to see "The Dark Knight." I said thanks, but no. My mind was on Jamie, not Gotham City.

And cats. I still had the radioactive cat to take care of. Kyouju was still locked up in a cage, not exactly glowing like Dr. Manhattan, but about as hard to avoid with his wailing for release. Curiously enough, his last day in the cage was also Jamie's last day in the hospital.

All that was months ago. Jamie is better. Jamie is home. Jamie is busy taking over the world again. I try not to give her a hard time, much more aware of what that time is worth.

So yeah. Weird-ass summer.

Why didn't I just say that in the first place? Beats the hell outta me.

No Enemies In Science

Snarky remarks have been made about my recent cat-related blog postings. Awfully sorry to whine about friends dying around me. And on my own personal blog. How selfish of me.

Here's a little change of pace. Let's talk about global warming.

A few months ago, I worked on a radio adaptation of John Campbell's classic short story "Who Goes There?" Most people remember it as The Thing From Another World and The Thing. I set the script in the modern day, which referred to a frozen island that was now a mile further away from the coast of Antarctica than it had been a year before the story began.

I was never sure how controversial that little snippet of backstory was -- within the cast or the audience. There were questions about some other science bits, but not that.

This afternoon I stumbled on a news item. Here are three articles:

Antarctic ice shelf 'hanging by thread': European scientists

Antarctica's Wilkins Ice Shelf eroding at an unforeseen pace

Antarctic Ice Shelf Disintegration Underscores a Warming World

Here in the fact-based world, the Wilkins Ice Shelf didn't lose one or two measly square miles. It lost 160 square miles.

And the audience at the live show thought we were scary. Sleep tight, kiddies.

I Can Haz Raydioakitv Kat?

We interrupt the unexpected project that has become Lilith's biography to bring you this news bulletin.

There is a radioactive cat in my apartment.

No, really.

(I feel like the opening credits of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." A møøs once bit my sistur... no, realli!)

Anyway, so soon after losing Lilith, we have another feline with health problems, a precociously ingratiating Japanese Bobtail named Kyouju. He's the Welcome Wagon of our humble abode, worshipped by gorgeous females everywhere. Some of them are even cats.

Kyouju's problem these days has a hyperactive thyroid. It sent his metabolism into high gear, burning through calories faster than normal. He's been wasting away. And he's a little guy to begin with.

Our best option, whenever mentioned, makes most people nervous. A vet specialist injects radioactive iodine into the cat. The thyroid absorbs the iodine and the radiation right away. The iodine gets absorbed and processed by the thyroid. Meanwhile the radiation does the real work, killing the abnormal thyroid cells.

Hence the radioactive cat. We left him with the vet specialist for a few days, so the worst elements of the treatment are long gone, literally flushed away.

We have to take precautions. Kyouju isn't glowing, but we still have to keep a discreet distance. One foot away, slightly less than a meter. He stays in a cage at the far end of the living room. We have to flush his waste everyday, so he has to use his own litter box. We can touch him, but we must wash our hands before we touch anything else. And for the next two weeks, we must restrict our close contact with Kyouju for one hour a day.

Now Kyouju is a major love bug, demanding that he petted and hugged and snuggled. So imagine his enthusiasm. He can't bump our hands, slobber on us, sit on us, sleep on us, roll all over us, pounce on us, or hide in our bed.

Yesterday, he spent the afternoon wailing like a mourner. This morning I found him with his head propped up on a little pillow toy we gave him, silent and glum. Gloomy cat is gloomy.

The good news is that he's already better. The beauty of this radioactive iodine treatment is its effectiveness. Ninety percent effective. Feline bodies handle radiation much better than humans do, so we don't have to worry about his fur falling out or anything like that.

The vet said Kyouju was responding to the treatment beautifully. And we can already see an improvement. Kyouju is still skinny, but his fur is in better shape.

With luck, we will never have to do this again.

This will be a long four weeks, though.

Sympathy for the Chirping Hellbeast, Part 2

Continuing the tale of Lilith, in which a little black kitten rocked harder than any boy band.

May 1998. We adopted and took her home early on a Saturday. Lilith was tough, but in bad shape when we got her.

Her black fur was dry and brittle. Strands fell and broke like twigs. She had parasites, a wide array of them, so many that the thought makes me itch to this day.

The animal shelter folks suggested that we limit our exposure to her until she got a check-up. We had to keep Lilith isolated from the other cats in residence (more on them in a second), so we kept her in the bedroom with the door shut.

Limit our exposure? Were they talking about the same supposedly feral kitten who had just glommed onto me? Tiny Lilith pounced on me, purring and kneading her paws into my torso, at every opportunity without failure or mercy. I washed up a lot and brushed her fragile splinters of hair off me every chance I got, all the while thanking God for not making me a hemophiliac.

Our regular vet wasn't available till Monday. But she did do house calls. A little more pricey, but really convenient when you have temperamental kittens. Or just one with a hell of a right hook.

The vet ran a full battery of tests. Lilith was fairly cooperative until the very end. When the vet drew some blood, Lilith threw the hypodermic out of her leg, clear across the room, bounced it off a wall. Thump. The vet and her assistant scrambled for it. The vet found the hypo... with a 90-degree bend in the needle.

"Did we get enough?" the vet assistant asked.

The vet stared at the bent needle, either horrified or impressed. "I think we have enough."

Ph33r the kitteh.

Now if that wasn't funny enough, let's cut to the cats already in residence, Mina and Nita. Their first encounter with Lilith was priceless.

Mina was the blue-eyed mom cat, a stern and downright aloof Birman and self-appointed queen of the household.

Nita was her retiring daughter, a flashy-looking dilute tortie with a long, long tail and a shy personality which was in total contrast to her eye-catching paint job.

At first Jamie was looking forward to introducing them to one another. The more we talked about it, all the science and behavioral stuff, the more nervous we got. Cats that don't get along can respond two possible ways. They establish a pecking order and enforce it brutally, with one terrified weakling become the pariah of the litter. Or they could simply tear each other apart. Or both.

All through the weekend, little Nita kept howling and hissing at the bedroom door.

On the following Monday, the vet gave us the all-clear to introduce Lilith to the others. We shoved squirming Lilith in the pet carrier and let the other cats enter the bedroom, holding our collective breath.

The resident felines approached the strange new cat in the pet carrier. Nita came in slow and close to the box, chancing a sniff. A warning hiss. Then she walked out.

Don't mess with me. A typical cat greeting. Sort of Klingon, in a way. Nuqneh.

Mina sauntered to the carrier. She took a dainty sniff. Then shrugged. Her fluffy grey shoulders went up a fraction and went right back down, lacking any tension whatsoever. An actual shrug. Not impressed, still in charge. Mina usually didn't care about intruders anyway. I've seen cats full of confidence, but never like this. Regardless of the threat, she could take 'em. She was the queen and she knew it. So for Mina, after motherhood and her own adventures out in the mean streets, a new kitten was strictly small fry. Completing her aloof tour of the outer marches, Mina went on with her royal day.

Wow. Lilith was officially in.

And yes, they all got along very well. They were the Three Who Ruled. Mina, She Who Must Be Obeyed, had executive power. Nita was the heir apparent. And Lilith was in charge of security.

No, really. Lilith did regular patrols of the perimeter, namely the edges of our apartment. She took positions at every other window in the place, watching for intruders. Once in a while, she would make a quizzical squeak (presumable catspeak for "How long have you had these 'droids.") A rare facedown with an outdoor intruder (usually some other curious feline) ended in Lilith baring teeth and emitting an ominous hiss. Kids were welcome... though watching them play got Lilith riled up.

And she was tough. Can't be stressed enough. The strength of her "rejection" of the vet's hypo wasn't a fluke. Lilith was built like a tank, bearing a musculature that often made even professional cat show judges wonder about her gender. And she had grace as well as power.

She just didn't use it climbing on our shelves and counters, that's all. It became a running gag. She traveled through our place just like Godzilla stomping through Tokyo.... only not as many fires.

That was how she earned one of her many names. (Being a cat, obviously she had several.) I'm a little embarrassed by this one. But it's my fault. I started calling her "Godzilla-head." I'd pet her and talk to her, calling her names. And in my head, I heard the goofy baby-talk of Elmyra from "Tiny Toon Adventures." It sounded like the sort of thing Elmyra would've said.

But that wasn't the only reason. Through all her patrols and furniture stompings, she still liked to pounce into my lap and knead her front paws on me. Lilith and I often found ourselves face to face, especially when I was in bed. Hell of a wake-up, let me tell ya -- staring up at her dark feline countenance which was wrought with concentration, loudly purring, head low. Lying down and looking up at her like that -- often -- I noticed a resemblance to the 1970's Godzilla.

She had the tail too. I can feel her whacking me in the face with it, whenever she insisted on quality time with me, kneading her paws, turning around (whack) three (whack) or four (whack) times. Then she'd sit down in my lap, piling herself up my front until we were face to face again. Maybe she'd sit there and purr for a while. Sometimes she'd nap.

So yeah. Godzilla-head.

The other names? More on that later.

Sympathy for the Chirping Hellbeast, Part 1

I've been putting this posting off for a while, waiting for a better time that'll never come... for bite-sized memories that deserve more scope.

Thus begins the story of Lilith. Not the mythological figure, any of them. Or the uptight, but strangely cuddly psychiatrist from Cheers. Those things figure into the story, but the dark, warm enigmatic presence at the heart of it eclipses them all.

Lilith was a cat.

Let's set the Tardis flight computer for May 1998. My wife Jamie had been haunting a local animal shelter, pining away at the various cats in lock-up.

"Haunting?" Does that sounds bad? To be fair, we were both coping with a slight case of empty nest syndrome. We'd just given away a litter of kittens which we'd had for months. But we'd just moved into some new digs. A whole litter of bouncy, wacky kittens was more than we could manage, even in a two-bedroom apartment. So we found homes for them. But going from five kittens to one with one mom cat, sometimes the place felt empty. Most of the time, it felt like peace and quiet, but I understood the other feeling too.

Like I said, Jamie had taken to visiting the neighborhood animal shelter. One day, she came home with great things to say about a particular cat she found there. I tried talking her out of it. And if I had succeeded, we'd have never met Lilith.

We went down to the pet shelter to check out the other cat, but he'd already been adopted. Amused at the irony, we figured we might as well look around. The shelter had a lot of kittens that day.

One of them was a loud, squeaky-voiced black domestic shorthair. She couldn't have been more than five or six months old. I checked her out, reminded how I'd always thought black cats were cool, feeling sorry for the little one in the cage in front of me. I wanted to make that one feel better.

In cat body language, the right blink can be a friendly gesture. It could mean anything from "don't hurt me" to "lemme be yer pal." I met the kitten's gold-green eyes and gave it a careful blink.

The kitten freaked out. She started yowling, screaming bloody murder. Locked in a wall of cages full of noisy kittens, that kitten managed to outcry the rest. Jamie came over. I pointed the loud one out, telling her what happened. And I felt like a jerk. Duh, I thought I was helping.

Curious, Jamie got the story from the folks at the shelter. Apparently someone had skipped out on their rent weeks or even months earlier. The landlord went to the abandoned apartment and found the apartment full of cats -- an entire litter of over fifteen starved, half-feral, sickly kittens. By the time the shelter picked them up, five were DOA. The shelter took the surviving ten, who were now caged up in the wall before us, including the dark-haired little screamer.

We really felt for them. And Jamie could tell I was interested. We decided to take the screaming kitten into a visiting room. (Some room. It was a transparent walk-in closet made of Plexiglas.)

Anyway, the shelter folks sat us down in the visiting room. Then they put the kitten in with us. She scanned the room, gaping. The little thing crawled to Jamie's feet, sniffed with deliberation, and rubbed herself about her ankles. When the kitten was done, she turned around and looked at me.

Hm, pretty friendly reception. Maybe she wasn't so feral, I thought to my SHIT!!!!

I wasn't sure I still had a face. The kitten suddenly launched herself, running up my outstretched legs, bounding onto my left shoulder, and started kneading her paws -- hard like fuel-injected pistons -- into my upper chest. Purring. Loud. I tried not to move.

Jamie watched, clearly amused. "So what do you think?" she said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I peered at the black kitten loving me to death. "Well, I don't know about the cat. But I've been adopted."

When a pet shelter person came to check on us, she found the drowsy black kitten purring and resting inside the crook of my arm. She was about as stunned as I was. This cat was feral? Maybe someone said "furry" and misheard? Either way, the only damage I'd gotten from the kitten's attentions were minor perforations.

Gladly we filled out the forms and paid the fees. Then we took her home... before she could drag us there.

On the drive home, Jamie and I are asking each other what to call our new kitten. We were at a loss. Scary names didn't really fit her any more than cutesy names did. This little black cat was a mystery. Finally I suggested Lilith.

I was aware of the various mythological permutations. And the Lilith Fair concert tours were in high gear at the time, of course. But more than anything, I was struck by the figure in Jewish folklore.

Adam's apocryphal first wife wouldn't submit to him. Truth be told, she wasn't "bad" until she declared herself his equal. Well, that and she wanted to be on top once in a while. Uh oh. Suddenly she was storm demon, baby strangler, and part-time crank caller. I'd always felt that she wouldn't have been so bad in that legend if someone had given her a chance.

Now that fit our new cat. Fiercely independent. Loving, but clearly on her terms. Down on her luck, in need of a friend.

I addressed the silent black cat behind us, in a pet carrier nestled in the backseat of our car. "What do you think, Lilith?"

Instantly she let out a telltale squeak.

So her name was Lilith.

Ten years ago. And so help me, she's got a big piece of my heart even now. Even though she's gone.

More on that later.

Coming Full Circle

This is it, folks! The official grand re-opening. As of this date, this place is the cyberspace for those curious about my teeny-tiny sector of the cosmos.

Welcome one and all! And my apologies to anyone who's been (trying to) follow me back and forth from one blog to another. I'll do my best to keep it entertaining.

Is This Thing On?

[thmpthmp] Hello? Just checking the mike here. Yet again, Blogger announced a revamp. Would that be a revamp for their revamp, or a re-revamp? Not an ubervamp, by any means. Anyway, they promise a WYSIWYG interface which would've been nice at the start. And they're allowing comments too. Oh yeah? We'll see.

One thing in their favor right now. My uJournal account has been down for over a week, which is really unusual, not to mention effing annoying. I'm not leaving uJ necessarily, but I've already got this one, so what the heck.

Dive-dive-dive....

Okay, heard about the new Blogger. Stayed away from the old Blogger because I got tired of struggling with it. I'm not a web-code maven. Never pretended to be. I got a feeling it'll have nothing to do with a cure for cancer.

I was thinking about coming back here to my old blog. A little revamp, add comments, keep this for my private circle of friends. So far I haven't had a lot of luck here.

Follow Me, Friend, Towards The Danger!!!!

http://www.ujournal.org/users/darkkarma0/

Somebody Holds The Key

This weekend is a hard one. I don't want to dwell on it or drag anyone else through it, but.... Well, here goes.

One of our cats has passed away. We called her Nita. I knew we'd lose her one day, but this isn't at all the way I wanted it to happen.

Nita was a dilute tortie, basically a calico where all the colors in her coat came out in smears instead of patches. It was as if God had painted her in a fit of passion-- slapping handfuls of red, black, and white on her--and let the colors run. She was with us, demure and loving, for over 5 years.

She was born practically in my lap, on the floor of what was then my home office. Seeing it happen right in front of me changed my world. Dragged down in the drudgery of moving to a new place, I watched a kind of magic. Mina, her mother, chose to give birth close to me and Jamie when she could've run for cover. She shared that moment and her newborn children with us. I had never been invited to share a miracle before.

After several days, Jamie and I picked out names for Mina's kittens. Nita was named after Nita Van Sloan, the tough girlfriend of a pulp hero called the Spider. Like her namesake she was loyal and cautious, guarding her secrets very closely.

She didn't talk much, but when she did, oh man. What a wail. It sounded like she'd taken some lessons from Jimi Hendrix and got herself a twang bar. Her voice had range.

Unlike the Spider's main squeeze, she wasn't a social butterfly. At the first sight of strangers, she'd run for cover. Her siblings liked to scrap and play around, but not her. She'd have sooner slipped off to a far corner, sought out a warm lap, or snuggled close to someone she knew (often her mom, sometimes me or Jamie).

So you can imagine how thrilled she was to go to cat shows. We tried it for a while, but she was downright terrified. The slightest change in her lifestyle made her nervous. And when that happened, she got sick. She just couldn't handle stress.

It became a real problem when we brought Kyouju and the other Japanese bobtails into the mix. Before she knew it, she was a token introvert in a house of feline extroverts. They loved her. She hated getting picked on.

A year ago, Jamie and I decided to put her in my home office. As long as we kept the door shut, she could eat or sleep without getting pounced on. It did help her mood, but it triggered a new batch of problems. She couldn't get as much exercise in the office, so we got fat really quick. We switched her to diet kibble, and that worked a little. And if the smell of her litter box wasn't enough to put me off my work, Nita would sit on my hands. She wanted affection and lots of it. Maybe she got lonely in there.

Nita became more talkative, more demonstrative. If I leaned back too far in my chair, she'd jump onto my lap or my chest and sleep. (Bloody catnaps....) And when she wanted attention, she learned quickly that if she turned up the kcat talk, she'd get plenty.

That all changed Friday morning. I walked into the office and found her spitting up and drooling, tense and miserable, but not moving much. Jamie and I discussed it on the phone. We didn't have a lot of cash, but we had to take her to the vet. That was how we got the bad news. Fatty liver disease. She hadn't been eating, so her liver was going into overtime. Our vets kept her overnight to work on the problem, but they were upfront. Nita's condition was severe. They weren't sure if she'd even survive the night. Jamie and I sweated bullets. It took us a while to sleep.

Saturday morning, Jamie got the call from the vets. Nita had died in her sleep. There was another infection, possibly the reason why her liver failed. She was responding to preliminary treatment, but she just didn't have the strength to keep fighting. The vets reassured us we had done everything we could've done. Nita hid her ailment very well, as most cats do, so there were no warning signs for us to catch.

But I keep going over it in my head, even now. Did I do enough? Why didn't I see this coming? Maybe the warning signs were right in front of me the whole time. Or I could've found more time to spend with her--played with her, held her for just a minute--instead jumping right into work.

You can see how easy it is to button up the little things and tuck 'em away.

Jamie and I have decided to cremate her. I don't know if we'll keep her in a funeral urn (the thought of which feels a little weird for me) or bury her ashes in our garden.

Nita's death was completely the opposite of what I wanted. I had set my hopes on her dying fat, happy, and with us at her side. She had lost at least 5 pounds. In unspeakable pain. And alone.

Every time I walk into a room, part of me wants to tear it all down. Another part makes me weep when I don't want to. I want to move on. I don't want to carry this. But it's like a halo of sadness right above my head. Just when I think I've got a handle on my emotions, I shed some tears and feel some despair.

Jamie and I are coping with the loss. Or trying to. Every once in a while, we start to talking about it, comparing notes on what happened. Then we're back where we started.

On our way out to get some breakfast somewhere, a song came on the radio. I couldn't bear it. Jamie couldn't either. One day I'll hear again and it won't hurt as much.

One day, losing Nita won't hurt as much.

Come down on your own and leave your body alone.
Somebody must change.
You are the reason I've been waiting all these years.
Somebody holds the key.

But I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home.

Steve Winwood
"Can't Find My Way Home"

Flashfeed

Yeah, I know. It's been a while. I've been meaning to get back to the dreaded blog thing, only to be undermined by circumstance. The modem is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Anyway, I've been saving up several things to post here. I might rush through 'em a bit, so keep up:

Afterhell
We've made a lot of progress since we last met; some of it, of a dubious nature. (Ooh! Cryptic. That'll keep him in their seats for another second....)

All the roles were cast at the end of April, and we've had two rehearsal sessions. And at each one, we were short one actor. The first time, I guess one guy got tied up with work and schedules and things. I don't think he deliberately flaked. He was sufficiently apologetic when he joined the second rehearsal, so I didn't glare at him too hard. On that rehearsal, I knew we were going to be short one actress, so I was ready for that.

Either way, all our local actors haven't had a single rehearsal together, as a unit. A moment while I mumble and get the frustration out of my system....

On the bright side, the performances have been fantastic. The actors we got are wonderful. On the second rehearsal, we got yet another actress sign on to play a bit part and fill in, basically a glorified understudy and utility infielder. But the minute I heard her, I really wished I had a bigger role for her. She ran some lines for our missing Assistant DA who goes mad in this ep, and delivered an impish, bloodthirsty psychopathy. Man, she knocked everyone's socks off.

Frankly I was tempted to sack the lady I'd originally cast. But that actress put up with some of my rantings on things almost totally unrelated to AH during her audition, even as her allergies were kicking. If nothing else, I keep her in the role by way of thanks and politeness. I couldn't live with myself if I screwed someone over for my own profit.

Screwing someone over because they're jerks, I can do....

Anyway, AH now enters an awkward phase. Our studio date has gotten pushed back to June 28, so we have to sweat through the next five or six weeks. Jamie and I are trying to put together a few pick-up rehearsal sessions for any castmembers. She's combing through dates and e-mails, looking for times where more than two actors are going to be at the same place at the same time. It'll keep them focused and it'll give our sound engineer a chance to get a feel for the voices and performances.

Oh great, now he shows up. He never made it to any of the other rehearsals. We made damn sure he was in the loop for those, too.

I suppose now I'll have to show how adaptable and quick-thinking we are. If I knew there was gonna be a pop-quiz, I'd have cut to the chase and just flunked.



Monkey's Audio
Goofy name, amazing tech. Monkey's Audio is audio compression freeware. I tried it a while ago, wasn't thrilled with the results, but I think it's improved a lot.

It doesn't always compress audio as tightly as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis, but it has one advantage over them. It's loss-free compression. It doesn't shave data off the original sound to conserve space. You lose neither quality nor data. Not only is it great for archiving, but it sounds exactly the same compressed as uncompressed. You can save hard drive space and keep the original sound quality.

Anyone who knows me for more than a few days knows I'm a music junkie. I listen to MP3's made from my CD collection while I work, but if I know a certain song by heart, it doesn't sound right in that format. The music's been changed. That little bass thump at the start of the third chorus feels wrong. Stuff like that. Monkey's Audio has provided a handy compromise.

I just hope iPods can read it....

Beware of Trojans Bearing Crap
Lastly, I've had the ignominous pleasure of working all day yesterday to get a stupid virus off my computer. This time, there was no pimply-faced sex-starved script kiddie behind it. It was from a corporate entity. Yahoo/Geocities. You can find a brief description of it here: Boycott Yahoo/Geocities

On the bright side, I was able to beat the little bugger and get it off my system. I'd downloaded five or six different anti-trojan programs that day. Only one did the trick: The Cleaner by MooSoft.

Blogging tools
Well, can't get much more self-referential than that. For the last month or so, I've been using a blogging client that lets me access my hideous manifestation of net-presence with a double-click and nothing more. It's called w.bloggar. Very nice. And freeware.

Frequent readers of this blog (all four of you) will notice the changes I've made to the look of the ol' blog here. w.bloggar made it easier, but what made this change a real breeze was StrangeBanana. It's a webpage that randomly generates new styles suitable for any blog. Refresh the page and you get a whole new look. If you like it, copy it.

Hence, Dark Karma get a face lift and my lazy little teeny-weeny brain didn't have to crunch nearly as much code as it first a-feared. As for whether the new look sucks....

Honey, I'm Home

Now that I laid a whole dire and cryptic attitude on all and sundry, I think I have good news to report. I'm back at the homestead, and so help me, I actually think Jamie and I are better for the gloom and doom.

I had to see her again either way, so we could get our taxes filed together. And much as I wanted to go home, reviewing the finances on my own gave me a brutal reminder why I had to walk out in the first place. Jamie called and we talked things over in the morning. I'd read her the riot act the day before, many times begging her to give me a reason to stay. That morning, on the phone, I got the reasons I wanted. And when we came home, she lived up to them.

I haven't felt this good about our future together, not in years. We put our hearts on the table for a while, clearing the air between us, and then crunched the numbers at the same table. I expected them to get grim. That was no surprise. After discussing options and the incoming cash flow, there was the slightest hint of a light at the end of the tunnel. I gave her my interpretation of the numbers, and also my reluctance to accept them so readily. Adding numbers up tells you how much you've got, but it doesn't tell you when and for how long. But to my relief, Jamie practically thanked me for pointing that out. None of those things had occurred to her before, and she wanted my input on how to nail those questions down. My God, we're actually a team.

When I came home, I begged--crying openly without shame or a shred of peace--that she wouldn't make me regret my decisions. I didn't want to go back to the old ways. No more power trips, secrets, or games.

And she didn't offer to change. She made the change.

I'd actually forgotten what hope felt like. I knew struggle. I know heartbreak. After yesterday, I know a hundred more nuances lie inside that one horrible sensation. And hope seems alien, almost an anticlimax, at the end of 24 hours. But I'll take it.

I knew there was a reason I love this woman....

Expect Me When You See Me

Just a quick note to let everyone know what's going on. I'm afraid you won't be seeing much of me for a while. I'll try to keep in touch.

I feel as if I've already fallen in shadow, and I don't intend to fall any farther.

This is the hardest thing I've ever done. I don't know if I'll ever forgive myself for daring to live on. I'm leaving the woman I love.

Shock Treatment

I'm trying to calm down. I just did something that makes me nervous, and I need to let it go or it's going to be with me all day.

I just wrote something dangerous.

Oh, I'm glad I did it. Well, maybe not glad. I've just done something I've never done to one of my characters before. I've killed plenty, driven a few mad, subjected a couple to utter despair. But not this. It took a tall glass of Guinness, but I did it.

Now I know how Anthony Burgess and William Peter Blatty felt. Burgess relived the murder of his wife to write A Clockwork Orange. Writing The Exorcist, Blatty had to do something to sweet little Regan so horrible that even he thought it was too much. I frown on the idea of an artist needing to chemically mood-alter to accomplish anything, but creation is just as much a grey area as it is green. You survive however you can.

The story I wrote is a script outline for my Afterhell audio project. I wanted something disturbing, but above all, thought-provoking. No answers, just a lot of disturbing questions. The working title is "Damning Praise." The story is a blatant indictment of SF fandom, relentlessly so. And in it, a couple of fanboys...assault...an elven princess.

It happens in real life, with real people, sometimes at conventions. I remind myself of that. It happens. But nobody talks about it.

It can be taken as symbolic of fandom's treatment of their flesh-and-blood heroes, the writers and the actors, but it's more than just a metaphor for me. I deliberately slapped fandom in the face. They say they protect their own, but they don't. Women get hurt, harassed, abused. Nobody protects them at the cons. Con security can only do so much. For all the flames, fanboys look out for each other. They rarely speak out unless they have a stake in what happens, an axe they'd like to grind...preferably on their rival's skull. They hide each other's dirty laundry when it suits them. They air it when it doesn't. Good people suffered because of it. And I hate them for it.

Maybe it's naivete on my part. I never bought the party line that fans were intrinsically better than mundanes. But I wanted the proof. I wanted to see us make some of our dreams come true. Instead I saw a lot of dreams getting held back. A lot of "don't rock the boat." A lot of head games and sexual harassment.

So I did something to a character that they've been doing to themselves for God knows how long. Part of me is defiant, proud to push the envelope, even if it's only my own. Part of me feels sick inside. Elven princesses aren't real, but this one is real enough to me.

And I know that I'll have to go back into that dark place again. Not because it's fun. Because it's true. Because I'm angry, aching to lash out at the human race and its apparent lack of humanity. At the fanboy ubermensch wannabes who failed to be worthy of their passions.

This story is bound to tick people off. Even I think I've gone too far.

Someone might accuse me of only trying to shock people, resorting to cheap tactics. Duh. Of course I did! And I want this to hurt.

Well, it hurts me. Disturbs me. I can only assume that means I did my job well...and hope it does more good than harm.

Meanwhile I wait for my friend Neil to give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Is he going to be too shocked, too outraged to sanction this?

He takes forever to answer mail these days. This is gonna be a long wait.

I'll Explain Later, Part 2

I'm awake on the first few hours of my birthday, and I'm confronted by two of my great obsessions-- Charlie Chaplin and Doctor Who. Don't worry; I can explain.

For those not familiar or not aware, Doctor Who was a science fiction TV produced in the UK, which ran for nearly 26 years. It was essentially a kid's show, intended to teach science and history through the eyes of a time traveling scientist. Yup, the BBC beat Carmen Sandiego to the punch by 30 years.

The main character is known only as the Doctor. He had no name to speak of, many faces, and a mysterious past. Except for his two hearts, he seemed quite human. He travelled the cosmos with his time machine...or to be more precise, his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension in Space.)

Most people think of a futuristic car or a Victorian buggy-type thing when you say "time machine." But the TARDIS is a universe in a box, bigger on the inside than outside, capable of going anywhere in time and space. The Doctor's TARDIS didn't work all that well, though. It was in for repairs when he stole--er, borrowed it, so it's hard to tell where you might end up. Or maybe the Doctor is a bad navigator. It's anyone's guess. The TARDIS was also supposed to disguise itself, but it got stuck in the shape of a British police public call box. So as you can see, it's a mess.

Like the Doctor, the show went through many changes. It went from educational kid's show to science fiction adventure after just one trip through time. Instead of wandering into living history lessons, he started confronting alien monsters. The first time we see him, he's a cranky old scientist who doesn't seem to have a lot of scruples. Several stories later, he demonstrates compassion and a sense of fair play. If a tyrant or an alien invader starts throwing his weight around, the Doctor does something about it.

Here's where the character really stands out. Unlike most science fiction heroes, his wits are his weapon of choice. The Doctor doesn't need a phaser, a lightsaber, or an attack fleet. He outthinks his opponents. He wins his battles because he's smarter, not stronger or well armed.

His face and his costume changed, but his character remained the same. The Doctor was a brainiac who was cool. He was a hero because he was compassionate. He didn't try to fit in. He was a free thinker who embraced his eccentricities. He did and said what he thought was right...even if it cost him his life.

And it did. Several times.

Remember, he wasn't human. When his body grew old or close to death, he regenerated. He'd in effect be reborn as a new person, with a different appearance and a new personality.

Unlike most other TV shows, this hero could die at any time. Basically it was an excuse to get a new actor every once in a while, but each time it happened, it was suspenseful: What will the new Doctor be like?

The stories themselves were as clever as the Doctor, throwing occasional digs at other science fiction or even real-world politics. A Doctor Who adventure could spoof "King Kong" one minute and make a dig at the CIA the next. The effects were cheesy, but hey, the show had cool stories. Mix "Phantom of the Opera" with "The Machurian Candidate." Why not? Doctor Who could go anywhere, do anything.

When the TV show ended, it all changed. Some well-meaning folks took Doctor Who into a new arena. Paperbacks. They were called "Doctor Who: The New Adventures." They claimed to be true science fiction novels, solid stories with a modern outlook, tackling themes and situations the TV show couldn't do.

That was true enough. There were grand vistas and epic confrontations between the Doctor and the latest galactic baddie. Darker tones and dystopic themes came into play. Fine with me. I'd written DW fanfics that were plenty dark.

Then the writers started screwing it up. Isn't it the way of the world though? There's always some dork who want to fix that which ain't broke.

They seemed to have an inferiority complex about being grown-ups writing about a kid's show. They wanted to prove they were sophisticated and clever and stuff. So they start pulling Mary Sues where the Doctor's sidekicks know better than he does. The Doctor became callous and deadly. Smartmouthed twentysomethings upheld the cause of humanity by whining, stomping off in fits of pique only to rejoin him later. This was supposed to be complex characterization, but smacks of ego, shallowness, and artistic laziness. The Doctor later conspires to kill off one of his earlier incarnations so he can come into the world that much sooner and become Time's Champion. (Huh?) And we get incompetent depictions of graphic violence, tons of sex, and drug abuse totally out of nowhere. Instead of developing plot, character, or these brave new themes, they riddled the stories with plot holes. There was no Grand Guignol, but plenty of "Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf" crap. And every once in a while, the writers would steal liberally from William Burroughs, Michael Moorcock, H.P. Lovecraft, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Jack Chalker, Jorge Luis Borges, even other TV shows...and claim these stories were not only unique, but works of artistic genius.

Genius. Closer to plagarism, if you ask me. At best, they're pale imitations, about as sophisicated as a grade-Z teeny bopper flick. I half expect Phoebe Cates to show up.

They even went as far as to blowing up the Doctor's home planet just to keep themselves from overusing it. And we're expected to believe that he'd wander the Earth for centuries, carting his TARDIS around even though he doesn't know what it's for, never opening it just to find out what it is.

Get me the hell out of here. They ruined a perfectly good dream.

So where does Charlie Chaplin come in? Whimsy. Charm. A heart of gold. Intelligence. They were the things they had in common.

Had. Past tense. Doctor Who is a confused, base and menial thing now. It makes money for the BBC and it keeps several thousand white kids busy every month.

I'm practically preaching to the choir at this point, but I'm fed up. For the last decade, neither ham-fisted New Wave SF impersonators nor their toadies ever managed to sway me with their third-rate goods. I've seen a few good books out of the new DW line. There are also tons of bad ones. Mediocre ones. Stories that lie, that tell the readers what they want to believe about the world around them.

Sometimes I hope the DW booklickers see me or hear me go off like this. It makes them angry, almost as mad as me. I'm not playing along. I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid.

I don't need to. I got my own dream. In it, there's a guy who helps people because he can, who's brilliant, who's joyfully and unrepentantly eccentric, who's...well, Doctor Who.

If anyone cares, I'll be shocked rigid. If someone actually listens, not just laughs or blows it off...I'll be impressed.

There. So I explained. What're you gonna do about it? ;P

Keep Your Hands Off My Stack

The last three days have been spent in soul-draining, brain-sucking tedium. It's given me new insights into the economy.

I'll back up a bit. Jamie and I were at a local Christmas bazaar, basically a huge convention hall full of the intrepid soldiers on the front lines of the free enterprise system. Trinkets, tools, food, hats, books, toys, T-shirts. Just oodles of stuff. Jamie and her parents toughed it out last weekend, and Jamie and I took on the second weekend. She had lots of her handmade jewelry and some contributions from her folks (solid oak ruler racks and a small garden of quilted Christmas trees.)

And from Friday morning to Sunday night, we sold squat. I sat there watching people go by, wondering if I had a funny look on my mug or something, because hardly anybody bought anything. Tons of people passed our booth, glared at Jamie's work, doted over the quilted trees her mother made...and almost never bought anything.

"Oh, it's so cute!" Women of every shade and age said something along those lines. And they moved on empty-handed. For the hell of it, on Sunday Jamie and I decided to count how many of these "oh, how cute" dorks came by without slapping cash down. I bet on 50. We counted 48.

There were even folks who tried to buy things that weren't for sale. Everyone loved Jamie's maneki-neko, a ceramic lucky cat. A few idiots came offering to buy it. It was the only thing on that damn table without a price tag.

Jamie and I were practically banging our heads together. We didn't understand any of it. We sat there, greeting people, watching them walk by, reading, talking, kvetching as quietly as possible, freezing under the El Nino airflow of an industrial air vent, trying to keep each other from eviscerating middle-class forty-something gold-bricking bloated Twinkie molesters as our brains slowly turned to mush over the course of three days.

I got kinda punchy after a while.

No one got much business at the show, it turns out. Every booth took a bath. Small consolation.

And it was while I was sitting there--trying to keep busy with my little projects, reading, and notetaking stuck in the tiny space between our tables--I started looking at economics and the American right-wing.

This time last year, Darth Cheney and the Shrub tried to coax the country into spending money in the middle of a recession. Many corporate giants in this country, Enron being the most notorious nowadays, went out of their way to bilk millions out of millions of people. They did more damage to the country's economy and morale than al-Qaida. (Think about it. We grieved, we rallied, and we got on with our lives. Thanks to all the corporate corruption, we practically fear the economy.)

I shook my head at all this lunacy and greed until this weekend, when it was all about my money. The economy sucks just as much for the shoppers as it does for me. And still, I wanted to take their fraggin' money away from them. I didn't care whether they had bills or a mortgage, or if they had kids to feed. I have major financial problems. I have a negative cash flow. Maybe they didn't need the junk I was selling, but once I took on the role of capitalist running dog, anyone's wallet seemed like fair game. And I was competing with hundreds of other people for it.

Once I could step back and look at it all, I think I understood better the corporate fixation on money. It's like trench warfare. You're either digging a foxhole or charging into no-man's-land, desperate for a better position. More money means less vulnerable. More money feels safe.

Hunger and fear give you greed, so reactionism is an easy fit. I think now that right-wingers are out there glomming onto all money and power they can find, and try to help everyone else do the same under the assumption that they're helping everyone makes themselves more safe. But economics isn't about making everyone safe. It's about the distribution of limited resources. And there's never enough safety to go around. To give one person safety, it must be taken from someone else. The rich don't hate the poor, but they do fear poverty.

Pink Floyd weren't kidding. "Money...it's a gas."

Use it, sure. We all gotta breathe. Just don't sniff the fumes.