Oh OK so one of my roles now is to explain to you whippersnappers how we did things in the prehistoric days of the early 1990s

So before Amazon or even the Borders/Barnes&Noble boom we had to get books somewhere

Malls would usually have a Waldenbooks or something, but it would be a single or double standard storewidth on one floor, not the anchor or entrance spur jumbo. So it would have a pretty decent selection of recent stuff and classic staples (and, like, horse calendars) but not much depth.

We actually had 3 places to buy books in the downtown of our small town that grew into a center of development suburbia

• a children’s bookstore
• a used bookstore where you’d take the stuff you were done and exchange it for cash or let’s be real store credit
• at first a newsagent, which was like all sorts of magazines and out-of-region newspapers, but also books like more than a grocery or drugstore pulp genre aisle, maybe about the same breadth of range as an airport bookshop but not so business traveler-targeted
  
• later an independent (but not really indie) bookshop in the old County Linen location

There was also another used bookstore in the weird off-brand ‘70s shopping center a town or so over, and a Christian bookstore I had cause to go to once but can’t for the life of me remember why. And I guess the porn store out by the mall, and the comic book shop that opened in town in the mid-90s.

BUT

The best one of all, pretty much the best one you could get if you didn’t live in a city with The Strand or Powell’s or something, was this one, the Atlantic Book Warehouse

Which spun off from actual warehouse ops of this regional chain, Atlantic Books, they’d have just pallets or cardboard boxes of books hanging out on the floor at wholesale price, you could swoop in and collect a few months’ reading at once

(I realize now that “knowing the relative merits of retail outlets for any given type of goods in a 1-hour driving radius and efficiently scheduling their regular purchase” was a real, impressive, cultivated edge of my homemaker mother that I was undervaluing)

Also by the checkout lines there were bins of like 25¢ floppies, I def. remember seeing Wolfenstein 3D in there but by then like Doom II was out and you’d get CDs full of shareware games with every computer magazine

everyone wants to give the next generation the childhood they wish they had and I spent the better part of my childhood furious that I wasn’t being beaten and and raped and abandoned and otherwise left free, the promise of the ‘70s I picked up on and believed in

The thing as I see it, the thing that’s been central to the development of my worldview ever since I maxed out not believing in gods and assigning things human causes – growing up during the Jesus Seminar –

I had to deal with the fact that when you dispelled primitive myth there was still an actual human that corresponds to the mythic figure Jesus Christ, and there was an actual human that corresponds to the mythic figure Gautama Buddha, and there was an actual human that corresponds to the mythic figure Muḥammad, and closer still there was Joseph Smith and there was L. Ron Hubbard

and even if there weren’t divine powers there – especially if there weren’t divine powers there – that shit is within the range of human capacity and you’ve got to account for that

From the age of six through twenty-six I did what I could to free my mother from caring whether I, she, or anyone lived or died and the failure will always haunt me.

Oh that reminds me, did anyone else see Princess of Thieves, the 2001 Disney TV movie with Kiera Knightley as Robin Hood’s daughter with her father in the Maid Marian role?

It was fucking TERRIBLE.

I got it off Netflix when Netflix still came in the mail because Kiera Knightley with a sword in tight leather, rawr. That was kind of a dry run for her roles in Pirates of the Caribbean, playing a girl who could

1) outfight the male lead and

2) act directly against their commands if she saw fit

Which was hot for the Red Sonja reason that holy shit, she could force herself on you.

Which is to say I totally wanted 2000s Kiera Knightley to rape me. Well I guess “ravish”, which is what it’s called when honestly you really want it. In the butt, with a leather strap-on, maybe. That appeals to me, which is really inconvenient when you’re a straight guy.

(Inb4 the obvious, I’ve got a huge cis fetish. In the original sense of “fetish”, as a necessary component of sexual satisfaction.)

((I remember being maybe 8 and discovering the showerhead massager up my butt feeling surprisingly satisfying, for some reason I mentally glossed this as having a large couch in my living room. When I first got into PiV sex I mentally glossed it as using a wooden crane to offload crates of tea from a sailing ship. DUDE I DON’T EVEN KNOW))

I’m so eyerolling dismissive about people’s youthful sexuality play because I’ve been through that shit a long time ago and come out the other side. I fancied myself Kinsey 3 for a while because…

oh wait this is hilarious. Because back in the ‘90s my first regular porn source was off USENET, I forget even why but alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cartoons(.moderated?). Fuckin’ Milo Manara and Spunky Knight and XXXenophiles and old Tijuana bibles and damn professional-grade (which in retrospect was probably from a professional doing doujin-style sidework) Gen13 fanart with Rainmaker on Freefall while Fairchild schlicked, and this one guy who just loved to draw girls and horses.

And there was one picture I came across that was like, a dude eating a girl out while a guy sucked him off, only they were blue foxes and grey coyotes, and for some reason that made a big impression and stuck with me.

I, Kontextmaschine, spent my teenage years thinking of himself as someone who would TOTALLY suck dick, looking forward to it even, because of a single piece of 1990s bisexual furry porn, maybe 92k and took 3 minutes to download. Truefax.

Then I finally got a chance and it wasn’t repulsive or anything just not actively attractive and without that the sheer physicality of it was just ridiculous and unappealing. Like trying to give someone a massage with your mouth while they choke you. And the reverse did nothing for me, so it was like “welp, guess I’m straight”.

Also you know I identified as female for a lot of elementary school. The classmates (this would be 3rd grade so 199…1? didn’t taunt me that I couldn’t be a girl but rather that how would I afford SRS, because the last Transgender Moment was still in live memory, Renee Richards and Wendy Carlos and all.

Every generation thinks it invented sex, I guess now apparently gender too.

In retrospect I think a lot of it was that I wanted to escape male expectations and be protected and appreciated for my delicacy and vulnerability. Which I look around tumblr now and game recognize game. Game recognize game.

And grass is always greener and now I appreciate that my female classmates weren’t exactly in a utopia, and those who commit to transition God knows that’s not the comforting welcome they get.

But I did go to school once in like 9th grade wearing that first girlfriend’s dress. This teacher who came off as harsh and conservative just stopped me in the hall, looked me up and down, and just said “nah, that doesn’t flatter you”. Which was probably the best counter possible, I realized girl clothes weren’t just culturally encoded but physically draped from tits and hips and butt I didn’t have.

Still for years I would maintain a ~joke~ about ~actually~ being a lesbian because I had declared the space around me to be the Floating Island of Lesbos, and I still default to female avatars in games. Also there’s a few disposable camera pictures of me out there somewhere from my Renn Faire years in full corset, dress, and makeup.

There’s a reason I stayed with moneycat even through her bullshit “political lesbianism + universal MtF transition” year.

Just asked a friend of mine out after too long worth of bullshit and she turned me down but I’m pretty sure we came out of it closer friends. Which for going worse than I hoped was a lot better than I expected.

In middle school there were these two bullies named Rob. I couldn’t remember which last name is which so think of them as Big Rob and Little Rob.

Big Rob was big, in every way except fat. Years later when we’d all gone through our growth spurts he was still big, at the time it was absurd.

Little Rob… never seen a guy that better fits the term “ratlike”. Not scrawny, just wiry.

Little Rob was, well, not the brains but the cunning. Big was the muscle. They made PE a real bitch. (Cuz God knows they weren’t in any of my honors classes.)

(That was the premise of one of my greatest triumphs though. Our teachers - a hilariously stereotypical drill instructor/volleyball butch pair - were running some athlete training program and just left everyone else on the other side of the gym with some balls to freestyle with.

This one kid Joey, who was scrawny, not a bully but a jerk, was going around pegging people with dodgeballs while they talked. Acting naturally, I maneuvered myself between him and a Rob - forget which one - and pretended to look somewhere else. When he released I hit the floor, the ball hit Rob, Rob hit Joey, the drill instructor came and hauled Rob off to the office. Good times.)

Anyway, when we went off to high school we were never in the same classes. Given the firm layout to class track (to, um, class track) correspondence, we were rarely in the same hall.

The last time I saw them was towards the end of senior year. Big Rob came out of nowhere, came up to me, and told me that he’d realized he had been a huge dick in middle school and he was sorry. I forgave him. Given his size I think he’d been held back a year, and knowing no one, having no social place, but being huge I can see how you’d end up that way. That’s how those guys happen.

Little Rob I last saw in the parking lot, surrounded by police cruisers. He’d dropped out years before, done a lot of drugs including meth the night before, and laid in wait for someone with a knife. Some gentle giant of a linebacker walking by saw him with the guy up against a car door, walked over, and dropped him with a single thump to the back of the neck.

Years later I wondered what happened to Little Rob. “Probably in trouble. No, probably in jail. Probably in trouble in jail.”

Looked him up on Google, he was the manager of a franchise restaurant. Only the picture was Big Rob, so I’d fucked up the names.

Looked him up and holy shit did I call it, 2 weeks earlier an article about how he was being investigated in connection with the overdose death of a fellow inmate in county.

Went back for Christmas, in a bar, told this story. Big laughs. Except one guy who calmly said that he’d known Little Rob back in elementary school and he remembered the guy always having burn marks on his arms where his stepdad had put his cigarettes out.

Which yeah. I could see that. That’s how those guys happen.

But still? Fuck those guys.

kontextmaschine:

In arbitrary order

Children of Men (2006)
The Fifth Element (1997)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Sucker Punch (2011)
Human Traffic (1999)

So on one hand visually intense one-off SF-ish action with a lot of worldbuilding-by-implication, on the other British humor about clubbing. Okay, I’ll take it.

(And yes, I was fond of Fury Road.)

HOW did I forget Interstella 5555 (2003)?

I don’t cry at sad things. (Usually. Fried Green Tomatoes is, say, #12, though the frame story blows. Yay Lilith Fair ‘90s.) What reliably makes me cry is

• spacecraft launches
• bravery set to music
• heroic sacrifice

so this movie gets me fucking bawling, every time. And I love it.

So, true story.

When I was starting 1st or 2nd grade, I got a cat. It had shown up as a ~6 month kitten at the patio door of a family friend, had a kink in its tail that the vet guessed was from being run over by a car tire, maybe one it had curled up to sleep under.

This cat was skittish as hell, if it had been socialized at all it was poorly, when I got to this family friend’s house we had to keep picking up pieces of furniture that it would try to hide under. I named it Freely, because “she ran around so freely”, and I was the kind of weirdo kid who would name a pet after an adverb.

She started out afraid of humans and it didn’t help that little kid me was like “pet! let’s play!” in a way that cats don’t really play, so her whole life she was distant and pissy. I went off to college, and then to LA and she stayed with my parents.

One year I was flying home for Christmas and my flight got cancelled because the plane was stuck under a blizzard in Denver or something, I got rebooked for two days on. Apparently I missed my last chance to see her because the next day my dad called to say she’d died, which wasn’t too sad because she’d always been distant and pissy.

So he asked what he should do with the body, options included putting it in the dumpster at his office, cremating it in the incinerator at his office, or burying it out in some woods by the country club, I asked him to do #3 because it seemed the most dignified.

Ha.

So, flew home, did Christmas, flew back, a few months later my mom calls me laughing her ass off. Apparently a cop knocked on her door around noon all seriously asking where my father was, she told him he was at the office and what was this about, cop just insisted he needed to talk to him, so she took a number and my dad called back when he came home.

Cop came back over and it turns out to be this: my dad went to bury Freely but the ground was frozen hard, the softest ground he could find was down by a creek so he dug as deep as he reasonably could (he was in his mid-60s at this point), buried her, and piled rocks on top to keep scavengers away.

But then the snow melted and flooded the creek up to its banks, the rocks and loose soil floated away, and this plastic bag with my dead cat inside floated several miles downstream until this dinky-ass creek passed over someone’s driveway at which point it beached, and this housewife coming out to get the paper encountered this rotten, waterlogged cat corpse stranded in the middle of her drive, freaked out, and called the cops. And as my dad hadn’t had the foresight to take off the collar and tag around her neck, it came back to him.

So there was this cop standing in the living room basically asking my dad if he had murdered my cat, possibly as part of a ritual to cast a spell on this random woman, while my father was just doubled over laughing in his recliner, the cop being all “this is a serious matter, sir”.

He was convinced and went away, and that’s how the best story about my first cat takes place months after her death.

That thing where people claim to be flattered for being carded for alcohol? I didn’t get that.

I’m pretty levelheaded, I’m good at talking my way through tense situations, I’m decently massive, I know how to fight. And I’d love if things were arranged so I could just go out and strangers felt compelled to come talk to me.

People tell me I should be a bouncer. My roommate was a doorman. But when I was 13, I was infuriated by the way adults brushed off kids, didn’t take them seriously, tried to gatekeep them from the world. I swore I’d never take up the position of rejecting people for being too young. And I take my promises seriously.

Just went to Beulahland. There was a crowd outside, younger than usual. Don’t know if it was the holiday weekend, the kids back in town for college, what. Buff dude standing by the door with his arms crossed.

Ask him if he’s the door, he looks confused, then apologetic. No. Guy sitting by the side says he is. Go to get out my license and he laughs. “Yeah, you’re a grownup.”

I laugh, haha, look at us here. Go in. A second through the door, I stop. “Wait, fuck me.”