Jive Turkey

This has been one of the stranger Thanksgiving Days I've ever seen. Not the worst, but sheesh.

Jamie's parents, after 20+ years of divorce, have become an item again. My initial response to the news is too scandalous for family viewing. Major shock. It's not like the Berlin Wall, but their relationship alternated between cordial and bitter and back again. And when they decided to come here for Thanksgiving--as a couple--that kinda blew our feeble li'l minds.

Jamie got me really keyed up about it a few weeks earlier, hinting--more like threatening--that they might get upset and blame me when we tell them about the bankruptcy thing. The first time she brought it up, it made sense. No one would be thrilled at the news. And then she kept going on about it, repeatedly pointing out that I should expect trouble, that they're bound to blame me for it, on and on. Three or four iterations later, she wondered why I was so tense. (Sometimes I wonder if she thinks tactical nukes are bombs with payloads of tactful plutonium.)

And when the Talk actually came, the worst they did was shrug and sigh. If anything they minimize the hell out of it: "Lots of people file for bankruptcy." They were very sympathetic, even to me.

Damn...I wish my parents were that supportive. They would've beaten the bejeezus out of me, crucified me, and told me to repaint the planks I was nailed onto while I was up there anyway. And then my mother would try to badger me into being an air conditioner technician again.

Still, not the worst Thanksgiving I ever had. That award goes to my father, circa 1986. He did everything short of throwing the turkey into the street and screaming that my family didn't deserve it. He did do the latter, though.

I remember when holidays used to be fun. Then again, I still remember what it was like to be six months old.

People have this attitude that, after a certain age, you're not entitled to enjoy yourself anymore. Work, work, work. Push, push, push. You give. Everyone else takes. Nobody says thanks and everyone says, "What have you done for me lately?" People laugh when you complain of weariness, fatigue, or feeling unfulfilled. "What did you expect?" they say.

"To be totally honest, I expected to be dead by the time I was 30." That's my usual response. Of course I'm the tasteless SOB who dares say what I really feel.

If I wasn't so tired, I'd try to feel something else. That's the funny thing.

I'll Explain Later

I've spent the last few weeks fighting off a really persistent cold, and I'm only just coming out of it. Nasty little bug. For a cold, it took me and Jamie down pretty hard. Almost at the same time.

In a weird way, it was also the best vacation I've gotten in years. Being a writer means no paid holidays. When you're a freelancer, it means no holidays at all. I got a lot of reading done, soaked in quite a few DVD's in bed, courtesy of my laptop and a pair of headphones. And with one carefully worded e-mail, a lot of my job stress suddenly disappeared.

My big project right now is an audio series called "AfterHell," a horror anthology. It feels like my co-producer and I have been playing patty-cake with the pilot script ever since I wrote it a few years ago. And the whole time, he's been nickel-and-diming it to death. It runs too short, can you add a scene here, can you develop this business here, it's still running five minutes short, etc etc. Rinse, lather, repeat. Every time I did a rewrite, he insisted I write more. And when we got two more scripts in, he did exactly the same thing with each of them. So I was stuck rewriting three scripts at the same time, the only explanation given being they were always "too short."

Wait a minute. Two years of edits, additions, and myriad changes--and they're all too short?!

This all came to a head on the third script. He loved it to death. He even went so far to say it was the right length. (It didn't stop him from wanting more scenes, but it was apparently the right length.) Now this didn't make any sense to me. I did the scripting on that one, the same way I did the first story. The formatting and spacing was the same. Until then, his page counts and mine never tallied. I wrote 25 pages for the pilot. He counted 22. But on the third script, we both counted 28 pages. We tried to put our heads together on this over the phone and got absolutely nowhere. He started lecturing me about the page-to-minute ratio on scripts when, ironically, I'd been scriptwriting a lot longer than he ever had. I decided to take another shot at nailing down the page count differential, making sure the format and spacing on the first script was exactly the same as the third one. I ended up with about 26 pages. But when I turned it in, he sent back an e-mail explaining that he "fixed" the spacing again and that it still came out to 22 pages. And he added a smiley.

He might as well have said, "Nice try, now get back to work. :) "

The whole situation was ridiculous all by itself. Two years, no explanations, no progress. My project--my story--has been held up like this for two years. And the best he can do is say the same thing over and over again, except this time with a smug little smiley. He thought he was being nice, defusing a situation with a cute smiley. Sure, smileys are cute. But when I want something and I'm not getting it, ah hates cute.

Man, I wanted to flame him good. Unload both barrels of my modem on 'im, that's what I wanted to do. It took all my willpower to keep myself from char-broiling his butt. And my cold was in full gear by then, so I had about as much patience as a boll weevil in heat. (I was in Yosemite Sam mode, as you can see.) Instead, I went on strike. Time to put up or shut up. Figure out a script format that works.

I told Jamie, "Watch this, he's going to find out I was right the whole time."

Guess what he said five days later. She's my witness.

My co-producer writes back, "No doubt you'll want to kill me by the end of this, but it turns out you were absolutely correct the whole time." I just threw my hands up in the air.

At least it's not my problem anymore. He's working the problem, not me. And it frees up a lot of my time, not to mention a lot of the pressure. I get to work on some stories I've been meaning to write for a while now.

One of them is one of several stories planned for "AfterHell" brings in an old character of mine, a time traveler known to all and sundry as Harlan. I first made up him for some ancient Doctor Who fan fiction stories I did back in the 80's. (A version of him appears in a fanvid I finished only just a few years ago, "The Prisoner and the Time Lord," found here: http://www.theta-g.com/drwho/prisoner/ ) I must've written 20 stories with that characters, but he never got much exposure. Every time I submitted a Harlan fanfic to a DW zine, the zine folded before it ever saw print.

At the risk of sounding like sour grapes, it may be just as well. I'm tired of Doctor Who fandom--just about any fandom, for that matter--and I'm disgusted by the state of the books that tried to continue the stories long after the series ended in '89. I miss Doctor Who a lot, the show and the character I knew. I've watched it go through many changes, adapted to them as best I could, but I don't follow it slavishly like a junkie waiting for his fix. I can see DW just fine. I don't need anyone to describe it to me which, as I said, may be just as well. Very few writers don't envision very clearly or very well at all anymore.

Maybe this AfterHell story will help me get this Harlan character into a form that works without Doctor Who. So much of his identity is based in that universe, because I loved it so much. Now that dream world feels like a stone around my neck. People outside as well as inside fandom don't understand how I feel about DW, or how I perceive it. To the fanboys, it's whatever they're told it is. To everyone else, it's another blip in the background radiation of the world. Whenever this time of the year comes around, the day of JFK's assassination and the first premiere of Doctor Who, that all the unresolved issues I have come back. And part of me wants to be free of the disappointment. The sense of isolation follows me, but that's not going away no matter what I do.

Maybe one day I'll get a fair shot and someone'll listen. A sense of belonging wouldn't come as easily as that, but it'd be nice to be welcomed back into a community I was once a part of. I just have a point of view, one that diverges from the norm.

I'll explain later.

Veteran of the Psychic Wars

If things get any weirder, I'll have to check the water supply. Just when I thought things were going to calm down, this weekend delivered a better curveball than any I've ever seen in Major League Baseball. And I want it all to go away, just for a day.

I had a different attitude about change once. Change isn't necessarily bad. It's the way of the universe. There would be no life without it. Every belief and creed is based on that: God calls forth Light; Vishnu dreams a new dream; a void explodes; the end of a cosmic status quo. Change can be exciting. I can't be the only one to think so.

Still, some people panic. They run and hide, assuming the worst, lashing out. They hold true to the ancient Chinese curse and make it prophecy. May you live in interesting times. So you can imagine what a downer it is when somebody freaks out and you have to spend the next several days picking up the pieces.

I'll bet you've noticed a total lack of hard info in my kvetching here. I won't go into the specifics, not here. I'm tired of that. It's the trend, not the event, that's getting to me. The schtick, not the dialogue.

I've spent the last few days kicking ass and naming names. I never wanted to do it in the first place. I keep getting volunteered to be the pointman in someone else's war, knocking down their personal demons just to defend myself. I want to speak in a soft tone, civil, mature and sensible. I'm tired of shouting. I feel like I ought to carry around a water cannon just to have it on hand in case someone flips out again.

Again. It always happens again. No rest, no peace. The pace and the tension goes up a notch every day. It takes so many energy--sheer willpower--to keep someone under control when they don't want to be. Each day for the last three years, my will gets spent faster than I can recover it. It gets harder to get out of bed. To eat. To write. To care. And I have to keep doing it because no one says it should stop. No one except me, anyway.

Hence the references to Blue Oyster Cult at the top. (No, no fraggin' omlaut. Deal.) The song of that title was based on Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion, the cosmic hero reincarnated again and again to yet another conflict he must resolve. In college I lost my interest in the mordant weariness of the character in all his guises. When my life began to take on the tone of those stories, I finally understood the character. He wasn't morbid or world-weary. He was burned out. The battle between Order and Chaos never ends. In it, ethics become a luxury.

I'm the only one playing by a set of rules. A few entries back, I raised the question of whether preying on other people was the right way to go. It's times like this when the idea seems the most appealing. I feel beaten down, and yet the only time anyone gives any quarter is when I beat them down in return. It happens so much that I wonder whether this is supposed to be Life's Great Lesson or something. I was raised to believe in the Golden Rule. Left to my own devices, that's how I'd do things. But that doesn't protect me...more like the opposite. It leaves me vulnerable to those who won't play by the same rules. I'm forced to fight just as dirty just to make them back off. And the arguments get more brutal, more draining, each time.

Ironically I started the weekend on a very different note...courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Jamie got a copy of the DVD in a steal of a deal, so I filled my brain with webbing for almost 24 hours. It brought up a lot of memories.

Strange as it sounds, I learned more about ethics and morals from comic books and the Bible more than I ever did from my parents. Even now, I see ol' Spidey as a spiritual mentor. A totem, maybe? And while lots of people have written off Sam Raimi's flick as just another soul-sucking, money-hungry Hollywood blockbuster, he captures the heart of that character. For all the garish color and adolescent wish fulfillment, there is a strong philosophical message in Spider-Man. "With great power comes great responsibility." That's the whole point of the character and thus the movie. The script places protagonist and antagonist on opposite ends of the issue of power. The Green Goblin represents a reckless, selfish use of power, the darker and older instinct in humanity. Spidey has realizes that someone else suffers when power is used selfishly. He made that mistake once and, as Spider-Man, struggles and sacrifices to atone. Instead of being a martyr, paralyzed and impotent, he grows into maturity and becomes something greater than he was at the start.

And it's that message that informs my actions, even now, after three decades. I just hope I have the strength to stay in there and...well, keep swinging.

No Fur Flying, At Least...

Yesterday was Nita's Urinary Infection Day. Her problem was still going on after two days, and still no clue and no urine sample, so we turned to the experts. Jamie packed Nita off to the Allen Boulevard Vet Clinic for a few hours and let Dr. Mark Nielsen get it from the source. Of course they had to get off the exam counter before they got it into the specimen cup. After a few drinkee-poos, kitty-kat kut loose.

The diagnosis was a more confident one, but still had a tentative ring to it. Apparently the urinary tract is uncharted territory. (I guess I can't blame 'em. I sure couldn't fit in there.)

But at least every other possibility has been eliminated. It's urinary for sure. That's our number one suspect. We minded our P's and Q's, and that's what it all trickles down to.

In blog space, there is no pun tax.

Jamie and I used to host a local writer's group meeting thingie. I'm starting to wonder if this was ever meant to be. These meetings hardly ever happen anymore. I know everyone's busy and, since we're not exactly rich, these are basically trying times for all of us. All the same, something about people not showing up...it really brings me down. I mean, what's the point to the whole group anymore?

Maybe men really are allergic to rejection. The slightest whiff of it drives me up the wall. I'll stop there before I start sounding all weepy or something. "Oh, the world sucks, no one understands me! Rhubarb, rhubarb, martyr rhubarb...."

I wasn't sure, but I guess a few people have been reading this after all. Every once in a while, someone comes up to me and asks if I'm okay or something. I don't know why that's such a surprise for me. In the last entry, I practically hint at going postal the way most people might talk about going Democrat or Republican.

"And how are you voting this year?"

"Postal." Insert maniacal grin here.

I'm just used to writing and not getting any apparent effect out of an audience. When I write something, no one stands up and applauds. It's just me, a cat, and her tiny tiny bladder in the room. Looking for feedback is a waste of time. Someone says it's good. When I ask for more detail, the answer comes back, "It's really good." It's hard to tell if anyone's there at all. I'm not a TV set; I need to know someone is receiving. I've written things to shock or get people mad just to see if anyone's really listening. It's a waste of time. People don't turn into English lit. scholars when they're massively cheesed.

Dickens would've shot himself with help like that. "Do they say anything about Miss Havisham's wedding cake? A single word about the double irony about Pip, Estella, and Magwitch? No, no, it's just 'really good'! Forget it! I quit! I knew I should've gone into taxidermy...."

So anyway, I've gotten used to working in complete isolation. I didn't show anyone my work for years. I just did it. I couldn't stop. I had words and images in my head, and I had to get 'em out of there. I was convinced that being alone was the best I could hope for. If there was no audience, they couldn't ruin it for me. You don't get applause or cheers either, but after years of people laughing at the wrong parts and nitpicking even my choice in word processor, I stopped expecting any.

And frankly, most people can't see what's in front of them anyway. In high school, I was on self-destruct. For days I would walk around, at home, at school, with my hands coated in my own blood. I know of only five people who took a second glance. OJ gets off scot-free. Posers and corporate shills are lauded as artistes. My prez the Shrub argues with the debating skills of a mummified walrus, and even without evidence, he'll get his war.

And I expect people to wake up half a minute just for me?

So whenever I get a clear and positive response to something I've written or said, I'm stunned. Old habits die hard.

The Rush Hour of Our Discontent

I'm not quite as liberal as Jesus, but I'm not too thrilled with the election results. Locally it's pretty good for my li'l hobbit hole, but throughout the rest of the United States...well, I think the next six years are going to be a long, hard ride. I can only hope the music scene picks up during this Bush's administration as it did for Bush Senior. At least we'd have a cool soundtrack for the disaster movie to come.

Of course we had Kurt Cobain to kick everyone's butts into gear back then. Marilyn Manson (the goth answer to Sideshow Bob) and N*Stinc ain't gonna cut it.

And man, I need something to go my way here. Our cats--all fourteen of 'em--are rapidly turning into the Typhoid Mary brigade. Nita, a dilute tortie introvert/assault vehicle, has some kind of urinary infection. Jamie and I took her to the vet a day or so ago, and we're still puzzled as to why. She keeps bleeding all over the office, so I'm surrounded by puddles of watery blood even as I write. Visitors are going to think I'm a devil worshipper or something. ("See? I knew it! He wears black all the time, he's got heavy metal records! He even does blood sacrifices fergodsakes!!!") Meanwhile a couple of Jamie's Japanese Bobtail kittens, henceforth referred to as "JBTs," keep chunking charlies all over the rest of the house.

We're living in mortal dread that more than one cat might need professional medical attention at the same time. That'd take us instantly into three figures. Even if we weren't in the throes of bankruptcy, it would've hurt plenty.

Anyone who's kept up with Jamie (or her blog ) knows a lot of this BS already. For me, it's a different kind of pain. I never thought I'd ever have to file for bankruptcy, let alone spend enough money to go there. Technically it's not being filed in my name, but I'm about as screwed. All our efforts are being channeled to fix it. We're bleeding money. And frankly it's humiliating. A bunch of strangers show up at my door, demanding that I account for money I never saw. Yet I see all around me things bought with that money. And I didn't want even half of it. The whole situation is ridiculous, at least to me.

I've seen some strange things in my life, courtesy of very strange people, folks who were eager to believe anything, no matter how absurd or outrageous, as long as their consciences or perceptions got an easy out. For a long time I was surrounded by such humanoid creatures, subjected to more personal demons than Max von Sydow, forced to tangle with them just to free myself of them. And I learned, like any victim of brainwashing, that reality is liquid. It changes with the wind. People see what they want to see. Dysfunctional people, even more so. It's taken many years--after the efforts of so many to convince me 2+2=5; that there were five lights when I saw only four; that meddling with my life was their way of loving me; that I was a monster for not letting them get away with it; all because it suited their pathetic ends--for me to trust my perceptions again. So it takes a lot of thought and willpower to override the fear of retribution invading my flesh like an electrical shock when I speak my mind. Part of me wants to hide every time I feel anything. It might not be what someone else wants me to feel.

They say he who dares, wins. I look at all the horrors that happened in my life, at the ones plaguing the world at large, and the kinds of people who profit the most from them. I forget who was it who claimed that a barbarian has the upper hand in any battle because he's willing to do anything to win. Of late, I begin to wonder if that person was right.

And a horrible thought strikes me: Is this what it feels like when someone is about to go postal?

What's In A Name....

I figured I oughta tackle this before I get too deep into anything else. What's with the handle, right?

Like most things on the net, it's the name I could still get and it's the one I'm best known by in cyberspace. It started with a character I had to roll up for a Cyberpunk 2020 RPG. He was a netrunner, a hacker basically, and I was trying to figure out how to translate the Shadow into cyberpunk. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men"--red scarf, black slouch, big schnoz, a .45 in each hand--that guy. Naming my character "Shadow" was too easy in my mind, too obvious and pretentious. I went through various permutations of dark, shade, shadow, mystery, etc etc. Dark Karma was the one that stuck. It sounded ominous and mysterious. And it doesn't mean any one thing. "Karma" as in destiny, spirit, aura? Is having a dark one necessarily bad, and for whom? Anyway it had the feel I wanted. Style triumphs; substance had better keep up.

(FWIW it turned into a interesting character and he has the makings of a cool story: a hacker who had a black-cat rep for making things crash just by walking past them, literally.)

Anyway, when Jamie and I decided to sign up on a friend's BBS back in late 1992, that was my handle. Most of the kids thought it had sufficient street cred (especially when I was able to punt losers offline). Ever since, it's a handle I keep going back to. It makes people sit up and look twice in a chat room. "Kewl, wassat mean?" Now and again, I can someone online...er, borrow it. (Remind me to trademark it.)

And when the thought of my own stupid blog was too big to ignore, I just knew it had to be Dark Karma. I have to be angry, surly, and snide somewhere. I would've sign up on Dead Journal, but they sold out and stopped offering free accounts. (I'll bet the sales dept here at Blogger will love that!) If I'm stylin', whatever. That's okay too, I guess. As long as I leave a mark--something inoperable. Dark Karma isn't necessarily good luck or bad. I'm sure it's bad news for somebody. But the secret, kiddies, is to make it bad news for someone you don't like!

Now there's a thought for this Election Day, huh? Vote angry! Vote to hurt, shoot to kill, aim to maim! The system has failed for a lot of people, but only because they've failed to use it. If you can't vote for something, vote against something else!

And now, to make sure this still fits in with the miasma of narcissism that is blogdom, a Gratuitous Shallow Moment: "Oh, the Backstreet Boys are so the bomb!!!!"

Stink bomb, perhaps. Shaddup, go back to the record store and check out some CD racks full of grown-ups, you dinkette.

And here I was thinking this wasn't going to sound angry enough by the end....

And so it begins....

This is more of a last-ditch effort than anything else. I haven't been able to stay in touch with nearly as many people as I'd like, and as time and work progresses, it's bound to get worse long before it gets better. (Santa, I would like a smaller workload for Christmas. And if I don't get it, I swear I'll blow yer freakin' head off....)

So if you really, really, really wonder what's going on in my labyrinthine psyche in these times of trials, troubles, and tribulations--not to mention alliteration--this is the place. I'll be polite where I can, honest where I can't not, and brutally sarcastic where I slip up. I want to make this space as family-friendly as possible, but you can see the brilliant success I've had in just 40-50 words. Not even a paragraph in, and already I'm convincing the local authorities that it's time to send in the negotiators.

I'm new to this blog malarky. Please bear with me. If you don't, well, the scars will heal in time. (A very long time if I have anything to say about it....)

I certainly don't want this to be one of those silly, self-indulgent things where you see cute little icons dancing around, painstaking descriptions of my trip to the mall, listings for what I'm currently listening to or my current mood. If you can't tell how I'm feeling at the end of each entry, we're all screwed.

Welcome to my world. Now don't touch anything--you'll get fingerprints all over it. ;)