Category: Politics

Weird World

I’ve been fairly busy since the last time I wrote anything on this blog. The “biggest” news is that An Erotic Life has now been published and is on sale wherever the censors will allow it to be sold (which obviously doesn’t include ol’ Jeff’s place). If you liked the four “autobiographies” I’ve done so far, you should enjoy this. It contains everything that was in those, but rearranged so that it’s all in chronological order, and I’ve added enough new material that I could have just done a fifth book instead of putting it all together.

Something else that’s new since my last post is that WordPress has finally managed to make it so ridiculously difficult to wrap text around images that I’ve completely given up on even trying. I guess I’m just going to have to use larger images and put them inline between paragraphs. Tech people are always trying to “improve” things, but as often as not they just screw them up instead.

Something else that’s new. One Room is now available as an audiobook. If you’re in the US you can get it from Audible here. It’s also available from Audible in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. All of those are in English, of course, they just have separate markets for those countries. Amaya Thompson reads it.

There’s also my other audiobook, Lust for Blood, read by the appropriately British Angela Mannering.

This is also available on the US, UK, French, and German Audible sites, and can also be had in both Kindle and paperback editions from Amazon. You’ll want to use the links, because someone has apparently noticed there’s a lot of sex going on in here and they’re making it difficult to find. When I put my name in as a search term the site just gave me several pages of clothing from some guy named Ralph.

Getting serious here, it seems that my mother still believes there was something funny going on in the last election. So do I, but what I’m inclined to question is entirely different from what she thinks happened. “It was those voting machines,” she says. Maybe, but not the ones you’re thinking of, Mom. I’m a lot more suspicious of how McConnell managed to get reelected, despite being such a miserable excuse for a human being. I don’t see much of problem with the Dominion machines. I really think the Reps dislike them because they’re so freaking difficult to tamper with. If you could somehow rig them to change votes at the input stage, the voter would be able to see it on the printout that goes into the scanner. And if you fucked with the scanners, then the count wouldn’t match the paper ballots. Which they did in all but one case, and that one had to do with some ballots being laid out wrong because of a local race, not with any attempt at fraud.

They want an audit? Okay, but you realize most fourth graders could manage that, right? The machines they like, on the other hand, look like they’re a lot easier to screw around with. Guess who won most of those elections.

On the bright side, even if Fearless Leader doesn’t get convicted in the Senate–and there’s a pretty good chance he won’t, considering the number of Republican senators who’ve essentially said they won’t even consider the evidence, they’re just going to vote to acquit–it looks like Georgia will be hauling his ass into court for election tampering. With any luck they can get Graham as well. I’m not sure if they have him on tape, but they’ve got the big guy, and Georgia is a “one-party consent” state, so the tape is admissible in court.

And, of course, New York will be going after him for a lot of questionable stuff involving his businesses. In the end, it may not even matter whether he’s convicted in the Senate and barred from holding office in the future. There’s a pretty good chance he’ll be living somewhere that won’t let him run anyway.

That’s an interesting legal question. If a prisoner managed to get himself elected President, do they have to let him out so he can serve? Or does he have to try to run things from the Ossining White House? Honestly, I think that would at the very least be 25th Amendment time. Being locked up for, well, in his case, probably the rest of his life (given his age and life expectancy), would certainly constitute a viable impediment to fulfilling official duties.

VOTE

You did know that porn and erotic literature are at stake in this election, didn’t you? The Republicans are in thrall to big business and big religion, and would like nothing more than to present their masters with a chance to accomplish all of their goals. For business, this would include things such as eliminating all defined-benefit pensions, ending anti-pollution measures, and getting rid of OSHA.

For the religious, it would mean making the fundamentalist Christian  version of morality the standard for the entire country. Let’s face it, fundamentalists and evangelicals tend to hew to an old Puritan stereotype, the fear that somehow, somewhere, someone may be having fun. They’ve been trying to get rid of erotica of all sorts for years. It the Republicans can maintain a majority in the House and Senate, they’ll be able to continue appointing judges whose loyalty to Christian mythology is a good bit stronger than their loyalty to the Constitution.

So get your asses to the polls and vote. I’m going to suggest you vote for the Democrat and, for cryin’ out loud, do not vote for a third-party candidate. That’s how Republicans win.

International Darwin Day

In 1859, Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The world really hasn’t been the same since. Darwin’s book laid down the basic principles of evolution. Or, perhaps, it might better be said that he organized existing principles into a unified theory. Evolution wasn’t new with Darwin. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had written on the subject. So had others.

What Darwin did was put it all together. He then sat on it for years, only finally collecting all his ideas into a publishable whole after receiving a manuscript from Alfred Russell Wallace, whose own theory closely matched his own. It has been suggested that Darwin’s tardiness in publishing had a lot to do with his wife, who was quite religious. Concern for his wife’s feelings has also been cited as the reason Darwin was reluctant to make public statements about his own atheism.

If you haven’t guessed by now, this is going to be one of those serious posts. Sex is involved, certainly, for that is the general means through which evolutionary changes are transmitted. It’s just not the main thrust of the essay.

Some people, my own mother among them, hate the very idea of evolution. Their concept of human origins begins and ends with Genesis, so anything that suggests this isn’t how it happened is simply ignored. You can’t entirely blame Christians for this attitude, of course. If Adam and Eve weren’t real people, and the events chronicled in Genesis never actually happened, then there’s no reason for their religion to even exist. The whole thrust of Christian belief in Jesus is that his willing sacrifice served to atone for original sin. If there was no Fall, no forbidden fruit, no garden, no first man and woman, then there is also no original sin to atone for.

Original sin is a weird idea to begin with. It was apparently something Paul thought up, because I’ve spoken to a number of rabbis and they all agree that it’s not a Jewish concept. Neither is hell, for that matter. There doesn’t seem to be any fixed notion of what comes after death, but they all seem fairly sure it isn’t eternal punishment. More of a three-part set of vague possibilities, consisting of heaven (or maybe reincarnation), a one-year or shorter sentence in Gehenna, or complete oblivion and it’s as if you never existed.

Evolutionary scientists today tell us that there was never a first man or woman in the sense of a first male or female member of our exact species. At some point along a scale including millions of generations we gradually evolved from earlier forms. And, while we are presumably a discrete species today, and would be unable to mate with, say, Homo erectus and produce fertile offspring, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some point along the evolutionary trail where the current version of humanity couldn’t have successfully mated with those on either end of the generational trail. There’s no reason, really, to even think that both sexes reached the same stages of development at the same time. As long as they got there within a few hundred generations of each other there’d be no problems with reproducing.

It’s like the chicken/egg question. The only really logical answer is the egg, since whatever chickens were before they became unquestionably chickens was still a bird and still laid eggs.

There are those who like to argue that order cannot arise from chaos. They think of evolution as just a lot of random events, and argue that the odds of them all coming together are simply too high to be possible. The “747 assembled from a junkyard by a tornado” analogy is a common one. But that’s not how it works. Evolution doesn’t just gather up all of these random parts and toss them together. It’s a cumulative process, occurring over thousands of generations. Some mutations prove to be useful and, if they give the carrier a slight advantage over others when it comes to reproduction, they can be incorporated into following generations. If they’re not useful, they tend to die out. There’s none of this X-Men, sudden ridiculous superhuman abilities sort of thing. Several million years ago, our ancestors were as hairy as any modern great ape. Over the generations we lost most of that hair, probably because we didn’t really need it, or perhaps because less hairy individuals were thought of as more attractive and were therefore more sought after as mates.

I can think of several of my female friends who would welcome a genetic mutation that finally eliminated all body hair except what’s on top of their heads. Perhaps, one day, this will come to be. For now, they just have to shave, wax, or use some other technique to get rid of unwanted body hair.

When an anti-evolutionist uses that 747 tale as an argument in favor of “intelligent design,” he’s really arguing against himself. Intelligent Design argues that whatever we see today was made just as it is, by a brilliant designer, who always turns out to be God. The thing is, when they throw in the 747, they’re rather forgetting that if you applied intelligent design principles to the question, you’d expect the Wright brothers would have designed and built a 747 in their bicycle shop in 1903, and not wasted all those years as airplanes evolved from what was, essentially, just a powered glider.

Evolution is a theory. That means it’s been proven about as thoroughly as possible given contemporary scientific capabilities. Theories are, in science, essentially facts. It’s simply that a basic tenet of science is that any theory has to be falsifiable. There has to be something that could prove it wrong, which means that even the most robust theories, like evolution and gravity, are always subject to revision in the face of new evidence. The proverbial Devonian rabbit, for example. This is why God has never risen to the level of a theory. There’s simply no possible way to prove that he exists, or that he doesn’t, because the very definition of God includes being outside of time and space.

By the way, if you get someone telling you a theory isn’t a law, point out that, no, a theory is a higher classification. A law is something that will always produce the same results under the same conditions, so Newton’s laws of motion are laws because they always work, but they’re only a part of the theory of gravity, which includes them and a great deal more.  Science keeps getting closer. Einstein modified Newton, Hawking has modified both, and in the future other mathematicians and physicists will no doubt further refine the theory.

Personally, I accept evolution. Notice I said “accept” and not “believe in.” Evolution isn’t a belief, it just is. You either accept that this is how everything living today came to be, or you don’t. If you don’t, then I suppose you can watch a movie such as Is Genesis Real? without laughing your ass off while wondering where the hell these clowns got their PhDs.

Religious Freedom Day 2018

Some officially proclaimed “days” sound a lot better in the abstract than in reality. For instance, yesterday, in addition to being Martin Luther King Day, was also National Hat Day and National Strawberry Ice Cream Day. Today, January 16, is National Fig Newton Day, National Nothing Day, National Without a Scalpel Day, and National Religious Freedom Day. I  can certainly get behind National Fig Newton Day. After all, observance is easy and tasty. National Without a Scalpel Day sounds a bit odd, but honors one of the greatest advances in medicine in centuries, the modern ability to perform many surgeries without making a large incision. Anyone can do nothing, so National Nothing Day is also easy, if perhaps a little silly.

The big one today is National Religious Freedom Day. It merits a public Presidential proclamation, and some presidential tweeting. It just sounds so essentially American, arguing that everyone should have the freedom to observe their own faith, according to its tenets. That doesn’t stop it from being a horrible idea.

(Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in USA)

President Trump’s proclamation includes the sentence, “No American–whether a nun, nurse, baker, or business owner–should be forced to choose between the tenets of faith or adherence to the law.” This sounds good, but the reality is far from good. What Fearless Leader is saying here is that religious belief should be held as superior to actual law. There has never been a time in history where this has worked out to everyone’s benefit. Civil law made murder illegal, but religious law said burning witches was just fine and the Church used to have the power to tell the civil authorities what to do. (The church, technically, never killed a single witch or heretic, as the ecclesiastic courts that handed down the sentence turned the prisoners over to the local civil authorities for execution.)

The problem is that those religious figures shouting the loudest that their religious freedom is being infringed are almost always those whose real complaint is that their freedom to persecute someone with different beliefs is being infringed. The President’s proclamation repeats the myth that some of our ancestors came here seeking religious freedom, a statement nearly always meant to refer to the Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Oliver Cromwell (Wikimedia commons; public domain image)

The Pilgrims didn’t have the slightest interest in religious freedom except for their own sect. Anyone else could go hang. If you disagreed with the religious/civil authorities in the colony, you either went into exile, like Roger Williams, made a show of outward conformity, or ended up on the gallows. The Puritans weren’t subjected to any real persecution in England, so much as they were expected to support the established church, which they believed to be corrupted. Not that many years after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, their Puritan brethren back home fomented a rebellion, launched the English Civil War, murdered the King, and installed Oliver Cromwell as a religio-military dictator. Things might have improved slightly for Puritans during that period, but they were fairly horrible for anyone else.

The United Kingdom of today, while it still has an established church, no longer tries to enforce conformity to that church. At least, not beyond the rather narrow confines of royal succession, which requires the monarch to be a communicant of the Church of England. Given that the monarch is also the titular head of the Church, it’s not illogical to make membership a requirement for the office.

To modern, militant American Christians, religious freedom today is strongly connected to suppressing gay rights. Christians dislike gays, which is curious, really, since the “prohibition” is Old Testament law, and Jesus never said anything on the topic. The New Testament condemnation comes from Paul, not Jesus. I don’t even find that surprising. If you’re actually paying attention, particularly in the hours before the crucifixion, it’s difficult to miss the gay overtones in Jesus’s life. Here was a man who never married, spent most of his time hanging around with a dozen other men, and, in the final hours of his life, informed the disciple “that [he] loved” that, from that time on, Jesus’ mother was now his mother as well. The final act of Jesus’ life was to die on a cross. The next to last was apparently an impromptu gay commitment ceremony.

James Madison (Wikimedia Commons; Public Domain image)

The religious freedom that the President and his supporters are trying to impose is mostly the freedom to discriminate. They aren’t even remotely in favor of true religious freedom. And they forget that the only true guarantee of religious freedom is a strictly secular government. This is what our Founding Fathers created for us. For all the blather about how our laws and Constitution are biblically-based, even a casual look at the original sources calls that a lie. Probably the closest thing to an influence is the constitutional requirement for two witnesses in treason cases, which reflects a biblical law requiring two witnesses in a capital case. Except the Constitution also allows confession, while Jewish law forbids it. And there’s certainly nothing in American law that requires a perjurer to be punished with the same punishment as he was trying to inflict on his victim.

In any case, the United States wouldn’t even exist if our Founding Fathers had actually been strong Christians, since they would never have violated God’s clear command to just do whatever the hell the king told them to do. Kings got their powers from God, and disobeying a king was exactly the same as disobeying God.

The fact is, religion is incapable of moderation and inherently immoral. Each religion aggrandizes its own members, and denigrates everyone outside its reach. And if the Islamic fanatics of ISIS are being condemned by many American Christians for their actions, it may be as much because the Americans wish that they could do the same thing, not because they think there’s anything wrong with persecuting and even murdering non-believers. Christians have a nearly two thousand year history of doing exactly that, only becoming “civilized” in the last couple hundred years, and only because most Christians live in countries where secular governments have managed to limit their power. Where Christianity is not limited by an effective government, they still like to kill people who disagree with them. There are places in Africa and Oceania where Christians are still burning witches at the stake, or slaughtering neighbors who don’t share their faith. The efforts to impose the death penalty for homosexuality in Uganda were heavily sponsored and encouraged by American missionaries.

The truth is, what we need even more than freedom of religion is freedom from it. I’m not going to say that, without religion, there would be no wars, but there would certainly have been a lot fewer of them in the last twenty years.

And, yes, I know this is after midnight, but only in the Eastern time zone.

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Happy 2018!

So, just what did you expect me to be doing at midnight on New Year’s Eve? Okay, sure, that’s not me in the picture, but I find it inspiring, and I plan to bring in the new year just as naked, and doing pretty much the same thing. I’m not wandering over to Times Square. There’s just too much of a hassle these days, with security check points and all the other nuisances. I suppose they may deter terrorists attacks, but life was a lot easier when you could just walk over there and join the crowd. No, I’ll just stay here in my apartment and play with myself. With any luck at all, when the ball drops in Times Square I’ll be in the middle of a massive orgasm.

What do I have planned for 2018? I’ll be writing more, obviously. I’m currently working on The Erotic Adventures of a Lady’s Maid. This is supposed to one of the books written by Maureen O’Leary, the maid in Lust for Blood. No vampires in this one, obviously; just a lot of sex. Lots and lots of sex.

As you may recall from Lust for Blood, Maureen’s sexual exploits tended towards self-pleasuring and lesbian interludes with her employer and her employer’s best friend. Cecily Margaret Freelove (pronounced Freh’-liv), the heroine of The Erotic Adventures of a Lady’s Maid, isn’t quite so exclusive. She certainly enjoys masturbating, spending a good part of the train trip to her new job with her skirts up around her waist and her fingers working on her pussy, but she also enjoys ordinary, heterosexual fucking. Perhaps needless to say, she also tends to get it on with her mistress, an aristocratic lady who is still quite slim and beautiful at 35.

What lady doesn’t enjoy diddling herself until she’s cum a few times? Sure, you’ll find a few religious types who think the whole idea of an orgasm is something horrible and evil, but, put bluntly, those people are fucking crazy. Women enjoy cumming. So do men, I’m told, but they’re a bit more limited in how much pleasure they can derive from masturbating because men, most of them, can only cum once and then they have to stop and rest, while a woman can just keep going. I figure I’m usually good for a minimum of four orgasms per session, and that’s when I don’t have a lot of time to put into the exercise. 

It’s nights such as this when I sometimes think I might claim my computer has stopped working and call Jim to come over and fix it. There’s nothing wrong with my computer, but Jim has a great dick, and it feels so fucking good when he’s working it in and out of my cunt. I find that, at this stage of life, I enjoy screwing a lot more than I did when I was younger and had to worry about getting accidentally knocked up. Now I can fuck all I like and there’s essentially no chance in hell of getting pregnant.

It might do some Washington people a world of good to get laid more often. I mean, I know a lot of Republicans are like my mother, and figure sex is evil, something foisted upon humanity by the Devil, and to be avoided at all costs. But Republicans also seem to think that poverty is good for you, and do their damnedest to keep everyone except the rich people they work for poor. Maybe if they got laid more often they’d be happier and more inclined to actually give a shit about their constituents.

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Thanksgiving 2017

I decided to skip the parade this year. Usually I go, since it’s only a two block walk from here. This year, it just felt like it would be too much trouble. It used to be, you’d just call up a couple friends, say, “meet me at 45th and 6th,” and you’d show up on the corner, find your friends, and go stand on the sidewalk. You can still do that, but first you have to get through a lot of barriers, and have a cop searching your purse, and, well, it’s just more of a hassle than I cared to bother with. It’s just like New Year’s on Times Square. In the good old days, security meant there were cops wandering through the crowd, not security checkpoints to get in. There are nearly twice as many cops in New York than there are people in my home town, and the general impression today is that every one of them is somewhere along the parade route. Kind of a pity, since it seems to be a nice day outside.

So, with the parade a television event this year, I’m concentrating on the food. I’ve learned to be an efficient cook. My apartment is fairly large, one of the handful of two-bedroom units in this building, but the kitchen is tiny. Still, it has everything I need. Stove, microwave, oven, all that cooking stuff, and a full-size refrigerator, which isn’t always a given in a rental unit. There’s not much counter space. You learn to utilize whatever there is very efficiently.

I went with a twelve-pound turkey. Back home, Mom would always buy the biggest turkey she could find, but back there you’d expect a couple dozen people cycling through on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Here, it’s just me, my brother Sam, and my friend Sarah. Sam’s bringing his new girl friend, who seems like a nice enough young lady. Sarah’s just bringing herself, like every year.

Why did I say “every year?” Strange. Seems like she’s been here a half dozen times for Thanksgiving, which is ridiculous, since I’ve only known her about six months. That’s just Sarah, though. I always feel that I’ve known her much longer than I have. Perhaps because she bears a strong resemblance to a neighbor we had when I was a kid. Both gorgeous redheads in their mid-30s. I have no idea what the neighbor tasted like, since I was a kid at the time and that sort of thing would have been inappropriate, to say the least, but Sarah is delicious.

What is a writer thankful for on Thanksgiving? Family, of course. At least, the ones like Sam, Aunt Becky, Uncle Ralph, Aunt Imogen, cousins Andrew and Eve. In other words, the ones that aren’t certifiable, and don’t think Pat Robertson is someone you should trust, or that our current President was put here by God to save us from the commie socialists. I’m thankful for Sarah, she of the perky boobs, flaming red hair, and talented tongue. I’m thankful for my faithful readers. Particularly the ones who’ve added themselves to the notification lists at the booksellers and buy each new book as soon as it comes out.

I’m thankful for Jim, my proficient, efficient, and really well-hung IT guy. I actually invited him, but he’s off in the suburbs with his daughter and grandkids. I can hardly blame him. I’d be doing the same, if I had either of those.

Of course, with guests over, I have to dress up a little. Well, I have to dress. If it was just Sam and Sarah, I think I’d be fine wandering around the apartment naked, but Sam’s girlfriend apparently isn’t into orgies. She’s not a religious nut, like our Mom, but she’s not a social nudist, either. Neither is Sarah, really, but we spend so much time together naked, and she has so little in the way of false physical modesty, that she’d be just fine with dropping her clothes the moment she walked through the door.

Anyway, have a happy Thanksgiving. It’s time to go baste the damned turkey.

Erotica Writing, Then and Now

Over the years, I’ve written some very strange stuff. Back in college I used to write 45,000-word “novels” on a fairly regular basis. The plots tended to be a bit standardized. The main requirement was that there was at least one sex scene per chapter. Who was getting fucked depended on what the publisher needed. Sometimes they wanted twins, sometimes they wanted incestuous siblings, sometimes they wanted a lot of peeing, sometimes they wanted orgies. They’d ask for it, I’d write it, a check would arrive with the contract, and that was the end of it. They’d slap a pen name on it, print a few thousand copies, and distribute them to smoke shops, news stands, and anywhere else that sold dirty paperback books. It was all work-for-hire, sell all rights, and who cares whether it sells or not type material.

Not a real book, but this is more or less what they looked like.

Okay, I did care whether it sold, obviously, but only to the extent that, if it didn’t, the publisher might stop buying from me and find someone else to write his raunchy little paperback stroke books.  When the emphasis is on action, it can be limiting after a while. There are only so many way you can say, “she sucked his cock.”

Sometimes I wonder if I should consider creating an erotica-writer’s thesaurus. Roget’s is decidedly lacking in that department. It doesn’t even list “penis,” much less supply any alternative forms. Wouldn’t it be nice to just open a book, look up “penis,” and find a synonym list with options such as: Cock, Schwantz, Dick, Schmuck, Member, Prong, Throbbing Manhood, Source of All Pleasure, Rod, Organ, Tower of Passion, Fountain of Life,  Pile Driver, or Sacred Source of Holy Anointing Oil (What Rev. Killjoy called his, more or less, when he was trying to fuck my high school self). Some of those are sort of Victorian, which probably reflects the work I was doing on Lust for Blood. If the story  supposedly consists of diary entries from 1895, you wouldn’t expect to find too many mid-to-late 20th century euphemisms. It did have a few “quims” and “cunts,” both of which were current slang even in Victorian times. Quim goes back to at least the early 18th century. Cunt has been around more or less forever, and the OED cites its use in the street name, Gropecunt Lane, around 1230.

I have a feeling that street name was long ago changed to something less interesting, and it’s a sad loss for linguistic expressiveness. If a street is called Gropecunt Lane, you can likely figure out what sort of businesses originally populated it without too much difficulty.  Even William Shakespeare liked to work a few “cunts” into his plays, sometimes in remarkably clever ways, such as getting Malvolio to spell it out in Twelfth Night. “There be her very Cs, her Us, and her Ts; And it is thus she makes her great Ps.” The “and” is usually elided so that it sounds like an “N,” and the piss joke is pretty obvious. Old Will always liked to give the groundlings something to giggle about.  There was also Hamlet’s “country matters,” with the emphasis on the first syllable of country, and the confusion between the English “gown” and the French “con” in Henry V. (For the last one, you have to remember that some old dialects pronounced “G” as “C,” turning “gown” into “cown.”)

What can I say? Sometimes I just feel the need to make use of that English Literature degree.

In any case, I like to be more creative with my writing these days. I haven’t done any “fuck ’em quick and often” books in years. I write like a 1970s porn film, where you get an actual story in between the sex scenes. Some have more, some have less. Lust for Blood is mostly plot, though I still tried to get in as much sex as I could manage. I’d originally planned to include some incest, then realized I was actually writing a book that might be capable of competing in the general trade book category, so I took out the incest and ended up with something just about everyone will carry.

Amazon is a goal. I love Lot’s Cave and Excitica, both of which are quite happy to carry books with incest, pissing, bondage, or whatever your kink may be in them. But Amazon sells a lot more books. One of my friends told me that, when his book was on Amazon, he sold a couple hundred copies every month, and now, with the more limited distribution, he sells maybe half a dozen a month on a good month. He’d have preferred to stay on Amazon, but somebody apparently complained, or one of their functionaries read the book and found the incest, and that was the end of it.

One Room is one that’s still there, and likely will remain so. There’s fucking, and some masturbation, but nobody is related to anybody else, so that’s all good. One Room is fairly short, and the only reason it’s priced at $2.99 is because that’s the minimum price to be included in Kindle Unlimited. It struck me as the sort of book people were more likely to stream than to buy, if only because it just isn’t very long. Anyway, sometime in December the KU enrollment will run out, and then I’ll drop the price to 99¢. Reading it Free with the KU subscription is still the cheapest way to go, of course, so feel free to take advantage of it while it’s available.

I expect to receive the proof of Lust for Blood in the next day or so. Once I’ve gone through that, publication will be approved and there will be a paperback edition on sale. It won’t start working until after I’ve approved the proof and the printer has sent to files to Amazon, but once that happens you’ll be able to order the paperback by clicking here. It’s also up for production bids as an audiobook. We’ll see if we get anything from that.

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International Blasphemy Day

Today is International Blasphemy Day, so be sure to get out there and insult the god of your choice.

This is going to be one of those serious posts, despite the lead. Because blasphemy is serious. Americans are free to speak against God, or make fun of him, or to simply ignore him. That’s not the case in many other countries. If the evangelicals have their way, it won’t be the case here, either.

In a number of Muslim countries, blasphemy can be punished by death. The same applied to Christian countries until fairly recently, a couple hundred years or so. A long time for individuals, but for humanity as a whole, not that long at all.

A couple posts back, I put up a story about Adam and Eve, after being expelled from the Garden of Eden, figuring out how sex worked, and the idea that this was why God created them in the first place, because he was bored and wanted to watch them having sex. “And on the eighth day, God created voyeur porn,” or something like that.

It’s been said, not always jokingly, that the major passtime for the dead in Heaven is watching their descendants fucking. I don’t personally believe that. I tend to feel that once you’re dead you’re simply dead, no longer exist in a conscious form, and consequently never actually realise you’ve died because you’re no longer there to notice.

In Saudi Arabia, posting that paragraph could get me executed, if I were Muslim. Which I’m not. What I am is, according to my mother, “a poor, lost sinner who’ll surely spend eternity burning in hell.” Christians are so fucking charitable about that sort of thing. What’s the best way to raise your children in your faith? Scare the living shit out them, obviously. Anyway, that would make me a lapsed Baptist, and a former member of the 2nd Baptist Faith in Jesus Tabernacle. Except, I’m not sure “lapsed” is the right word. Lapsed implies a temporary pause, like a lapsed driver’s license, which can be renewed. I find it very unlikely I’ll ever renew that membership, or even encounter any real evidence gods exist.

No, what I am is an atheist. One of the classical ones. I don’t hate God. Sorry, very few atheists do, no matter how big a cliche that is in evangelical belief. We don’t hate Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Jesus, Vishnu, or Odin, either. God’s just a fictional character, invoked to explain a lot of shit that science hadn’t yet caught up with. Where did the universe come from? What is life? Why am I here? These are questions today, and they were questions in the bronze age, too, but with fewer answers.

Science still hasn’t caught up with that last one, but I think philosophy has. The correct answer is probably, “No particular reason. You just are.” Just because you feel like there should be a reason for everything doesn’t mean there actually is one.

Saying that is blasphemy, too, by the way. Believers generally believe that God is actively guiding the world, ordering things, only putting people here with a special reason. When you confront a Stalin, or a Hitler, or a Mao, or a Pol Pot, you do find yourself wondering just what sort of purpose any of them could serve. Unless you’ve read the Old Testament, after which you might just be able to remember what a genocidal asshole God actually declared himself to be.

Saul lost his kingdom because he pissed off God by failing to slaughter the Amalekite king, Agag, and sparing some of the cattle to offer them as sacrifices in the Tabernacle. Notice he was going to kill the cattle in any case, so his crime was not wasting them, not not killing them. So Samuel declared that God had abandoned Saul, then took a sword and chopped up Agag.

Even when we were learning about this in high school, I found this story a little hard to buy. Did Saul piss off God? Or did he just piss off Samuel, who was, after all, the one actually issuing the orders? Just because the old “prophet” intoned, “Thus saith the Lord,” (we were pretty much a King James Bible type of school), that doesn’t mean the Lord actually said it. Maybe God wasn’t a genocidal asshole. Maybe Samuel was.

Or maybe Samuel was just making this stuff up as he went along. Maybe he was a control-freak psychopath who wanted to see just how far he could get the king to go. Because, if you look at that story, it seems fairly obvious that Samuel had the real power and merely used the king to exercise it. Just as the religious right today tries to manipulate any politician they can influence.

And, of course, it’s also possible that Samuel himself was invented by a later writer. The young George Washington never chopped down that cherry tree, or made that “I cannot tell a lie,” admission of his childish misdeed. That was just something Parson Weems made up and threw into his biography because he thought it would provide a good example for young children.

It’s the same with a lot of people in the Bible. There’s no evidence that Moses ever existed or, for that matter, that a huge mass of Hebrews spent forty-years camped in the Sinai. There’s no evidence that the Hebrews moved into Canaan and conquered it, displacing the native people, though there does seem to be a decent amount of evidence suggesting there were always there and simply expanded and took over their neighbors’ countries over the course of several hundred years.

There’s independent evidence that Saint Paul was a real person, as well as fairly conclusive textual evidence that he didn’t write several of the Epistles that bear his name. Paul’s own writings also suggest he was unfamiliar with a living Jesus, and regarded him not as a flesh and blood man, but as a purely spiritual manifestation of God. The Pauline Epistles, the genuine ones, are older than the gospels, and the Jesus of the gospels almost never says anything that isn’t a direct quote from the Old Testament or early proto-rabbinic sources. In other words, he appears exactly as you’d expect a fictional person to appear if the purpose was the “prove” that particular prophecies had been fulfilled.

There may be independent confirmation of Paul, but there is exactly zero non-biblical contemporary documentation of anything that Jesus was supposed to have done, or even that he existed at all.

Even Jesus’ answer to the “greatest commandment” question is a quote from scripture (not to mention the Jewish daily prayers). In Mark his answer is, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, is one Lord.” Matthew’s version starts after that line, probably because someone noticed that what Jesus supposedly said was a flat denial of trinitarian doctrine. It’s mildly embarrassing when a third of your divine trinity doesn’t actually believe there is such a thing and says so in your holy book.

Oh, by the way, Jesus was a Pharisee. His complaints about them were a call for improvement by a member of the group, sort of like the handful of remaining Republicans in the GOP calling for a return to basic principles and an ouster of the plutocrats, fascists, Dixiecrats, and religious lunatics who’ve managed to take over since the 1980s. A rabbi friend of mine tells me that Jesus’ opinion on divorce identifies him as a follower of Bais Shammai, the stricter of the two scholarly schools of the time. The other, Bais Hillel, which prevailed, was a lot more lenient. Hillel (yes, the guy the campus Jewish outreach program is named after) didn’t require the wife to commit adultery before he’d allow a divorce. Burning her husband’s dinner was sufficient grounds.

So, I guess that’s enough blasphemy for now. I don’t suppose you were expecting this from an erotica writer, but I did blackmail that idiot pervert of a preacher into paying for an Ivy League education. Maybe I was paying attention.

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The Conscience of the Nation

That’s one of the things a President is supposed to be. That’s also one of the things our current “leader” isn’t. I frequently doubt that the man even knows what a conscience is.

I suppose I could give him the benefit of the doubt. When he says there are good people on both sides, I could allow that he’s just trying to be fair. I could, but I won’t. The problem with “fair and balanced,” to borrow a phrase from a network that rarely is, is that both terms are highly subjective. Fair to whom? What do you mean by “balanced?”

Conservatives are particularly disposed to argue in favor of presenting both sides of issues that have only one side. Evolution is about as thoroughly proven as anything can be without access to a TARDIS to hop back in time and actually observe it happening. Creationism, on the other hand, can provide no evidence at all in its favor. So the “other side” Conservatives want taught in school turns out not to be a side at all. True, they’re not pushing Creationism any more, since the courts have ruled it to be a religious doctrine, not a scientific one. Now they call it “Intelligent Design,” despite tons of evidence that if we were designed at all, it was done so poorly that it would seem intelligence had little to do with it. And, of course, it didn’t. Evolution puts the esophagus behind the trachea, which is a remarkably bad arrangement for a being who eats while upright, but works sensibly enough in four-legged creatures who eat with their heads relatively inverted.

There is a generally laudable tendency for Americans to side with the underdog. Usually that’s fine. But there are times when it’s stupid. Strictly speaking, both the Confederates and the Nazis were the underdog, since they both lost. But that breaks down when you consider what they were fighting for. The Confederates fought the war to insure they’d continue to be able to own other human beings (or, if they didn’t own slaves, to insure that others still could, because a free white man would still be better than a slave, even if he had nothing), and the Nazis fought to insure they’d be able to continue murdering other human beings. Their causes were lost, but they were lost because, morally, they were unjustifiable to begin with.

Fine, sure, God thinks slavery is just peachy. It says so all over the Bible, both testaments. Most Christian denominations didn’t condemn slavery until after the Civil War. Most of them also put it about that their condemnation came much earlier, and a ridiculous number of people today believe that antedated lie. If you think the mainstream Protestant churches were anti-slavery and pro-integration, ask yourself why there’s an African Methodist Episcopal Church. It isn’t because the Methodists were happily welcoming black people into the church from the beginning.

If you’re marching down the street waving a Nazi flag, don’t be shocked if I call you a Nazi. You’re thirty-years-old, so you obviously didn’t capture that flag while tramping through Germany in 1945 with the 82nd Airborne Division.  You bought the thing because it represents your political outlook, that blacks should know their place, and that Jews should be exterminated, or at least forced to move to Israel. You’re marching to “defend” statues that represent what you think of as your heritage, despite the annoying fact that most of them were put up in the 20th century and sited in front of the courthouse as a reminder to local blacks that the courthouse, and particularly the voter rolls found there, were for the benefit of whites. Older southern courtrooms, city halls and country commission meeting rooms nearly all have balconies. That’s not to accommodate an overflow crowd, but so that any blacks attending trials or meetings could be stuck upstairs where the white people wouldn’t have to see them. The last thing a black man in 1940 Georgia wanted was to be on the main floor in the courtroom, because 95% of the time that meant he was the defendant, and the other 5% probably a witness whose testimony would be accepted, or ignored, more or less in direct relation to whether it supported the prosecution or the defense.

It often seems to me that Conservatives are binary people. They don’t think more than two options can ever exist. Everything is zero sum. If black people gain a right, that means white people lose one. If you let gay people marry each other, straight people’s marriages will become meaningless. If a computer projection on climate change isn’t 100% accurate, then climate change is a myth. If a clerk in a store says “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” it’s because there’s a liberal war on Christmas, and not because the clerk couldn’t reliably identify your religion just by looking at you. If the Bible says the world is only around 6,000-years-old, and science says it’s more like 4.3-billion, science has to be wrong, because it’s obvious a bronze age shepherd who could talk directly to God would know more about it than a modern scientist. (Strange that God stopped talking to people about the same time they started to understand a little about how the world actually worked, isn’t it?)

There are people in this country who would love to bring back blasphemy laws, so that atheists could be punished for their disbelief. Fundamentalist Christians think atheists hate God, which is ridiculous. It’s hard to hate something you don’t believe exists. Most atheists really don’t care about God at all. If they object to Ten Commandment monuments on courthouse lawns, invocations at high school football games, or changing the proper motto of the United States (E pluribus Unum; out of many, one) to the obviously sectarian “In God We Trust,” they’re in good company. James Madison, who wrote the first amendment they claim to be defending, would have happily told them they’re wrong. Madison stated quite clearly that even having congressional and military chaplains was unconstitutional if they were being paid with government funds. He also admitted he probably couldn’t do anything about it, but he still made the original intent of the law clear.

It should be fairly obvious by now that Trump isn’t really competent to be President. Whether or not he’s actually a racist himself, he won’t condemn them, which is just as bad. He doesn’t seem to understand that he isn’t running a real estate company any more, and can’t just tell people what to do and expect them to do it. This is someone who has actually tried to threaten members of Congress who didn’t do what he told them to.

And yet, bad as he is, what’s the solution? The House could vote to impeach him, and if the Senate voted to convict, he could be ousted. But if that were to happen, Vice President Pence would assume the office. Do we really want to go from someone who is merely incompetent and venial to someone who is competent and actually evil?

As Yul Brynner would say in The King and I, “It’s a puzzlement.”

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Always a New Story

Writers, as someone once said, write. With They All Cum at Carlisle’s finished, I naturally started right in on something new. One Room is a bit of a departure for me. There are only two important characters, and they’re not even related. No more related than any other two people, at least, which is generally not that close.

Considering that the last four books all had an incest theme, why doesn’t this one? Simple answer: the plan is to publish it for Kindle, and Amazon doesn’t allow incest. Not once they notice it, anyway. They don’t seem to care if people are screwing everybody in the vicinity, but they can’t be related. But just let them be related and the next thing you know the book is blocked. Worse, they’ve been known to decide to simply close the account and keep the money.

I have mixed feelings about that. I abhor the idea of censorship, but strictly speaking what Amazon is doing isn’t. Censorship is when the government tells you what you can write or publish. If you want to write fiction about incest, the government officially doesn’t give a damn. They don’t even care if you make it about kids, as long as they’re imaginary. I can’t think of many publishers who’d be okay with anyone under eighteen, mind you, except for the big mainstream publishers, when the book is about feelings, and psychology, and a great deal of pretentious silliness and any sex is just incidental, or is going to be massively punished. Actual porn publishers tend to be more responsible.

Unused illustration for The Gods Are Horny. It proved to be less trouble to leave the drawings out.

Anyway, the Canadians do seem to care about how old imaginary people are, and you never know where your customers are coming from, so I don’t put anyone in my stories unless they’re old enough to vote. At one time, I’d have said old enough to drink, but it seems that someone decided drinking required greater maturity and judgment than voting. After the last election, I can almost agree with them, except it was apparently the more mature citizens who acted like idiots and voted in a complete whack job.

The point is, Amazon isn’t the government, it’s a private company, so they get to decide what they want to sell. If they don’t want to sell fiction that includes incest, bestiality, or underage sex, and their stockholders don’t vote to overrule that policy, then anyone writing fiction for the Kindle platform just has to conform. It’s not like we’re really barred from the Kindle itself. Other companies sell books in Mobi format, so they can be easily loaded into the reader. And it’s not that difficult to write sex stories where the people aren’t related. People might be surprised to discover how often “incest” stories are repurposed from non-relative stories. (Back when Amazon was still selling them, I did a few that way, but using a different pen name.)

Every so often, I like to emphasize that I write fiction. I’m arguably fictional myself. It’s my life, but there may be a bit of exaggeration and fantasy involved in the memories. There may be a great deal of it. But sex in an Amtrak roomette, among other things, is definitely something I recommend. At least, as long as you don’t make too much noise. There’s not much in the way of sound insulation into the passageway. And I certainly do love the taste of an excited pussy.

Yum. These two will be in my member’s area once it’s open.

Since One Room is intended for Amazon, it will probably be on sale much more quickly than Carlisle’s. It’s shorter, for one thing. And Lot’s Cave, the publisher for most of my books, does a lot more work getting these ready, since they’re publishing them in multiple formats while Amazon only has to convert into one, and that’s just about entirely automated. I may do several of these short works, just to see if I can get some extra money coming in, while I plot out something longer for my primary market.

What’s One Room about? Well, you know how sometimes you’re on a business trip and there’s a convention in town and the hotel gets the reservation screwed up? Yep, coworkers having to share a room, nobody brought PJs, since they expected to have their own rooms, Marion is a hot redhead, and Bill has a ten-inch cock. What could possibly happen in a situation like that?

(Edited Sep 21, 2017 to add links)

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