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It’s Sort of Been that Kind of Day!!

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I went into town early this morning to get the groceries, and then came back home expecting to post to the blog, but then the whole day romped away from me! Followed by a deep need to nap.

The lawn guy was here earlier, informing me that baseball season is officially over for the local kids and now football season has begun. (This is, of course, assuming that none of the kids develop COVID symptoms, because as soon as one of them gets it, the whole team goes into quarantine, etc., etc.)

Well, this switch from baseball to football is an indicator that the summer is as good as gone here in the Hinterlands! How the fuck does that happen, gang?! I mean, come on.  4 seconds ago, it was early June and the world was my (COIVD-19-infused) oyster.

Time indeed marches on. Even though I’m not happy about it.

Okay. Well.

As loyal readers of this lofty blog no doubt recall, Mondays are now my days to catch up on other writers’ works, give them feedback, etc. Today, I am still focusing on the Netherlands travel guide that my friend, Roger Gaess, in Brussels wrote. (Whatever Comes My Way: Travels in the Netherlands.) I really love this book. I’m learning so much about places in the Netherlands. And also a lot about the beer he likes to drink, how frequently he likes to drink it, when & where he likes to smoke weed (and how much), and what he thinks about while doing these things in various locales in the Netherlands. (I haven’t even gotten to the chapter on Amsterdam yet. I imagine that will be of great interest.)

He also notes architecture a lot, which is really interesting, but then it makes me wish he had photos accompanying his comments. (He’s a photo journalist by trade, so he must have photos somewhere!)

But, seriously, I am really enjoying the book. And I am sort of marveling at his bravery — to just go wandering, with only a general idea of what he hopes to find and then usually finding it.

For whatever reason, whenever I am in Europe or the UK, I am almost always staying at the homes of colleagues. And here’s something important to know about me: I have no sense of direction. None. Even all those decades that I lived in NYC, I had to pay extra special attention to which river I was heading in the direction of in order to know for sure that I was almost always going the wrong way.

ME (thinking anxiously): Shit. That’s the Hudson River. I’m going the wrong way! Now I’m going to be late for my fucking meeting!

OR

ME (thinking anxiously): Shit. That’s the East River. I’m going the wrong way! Now I’m going to be late for my fucking meeting!

Always. One time, while staying  at a colleagues house in London, I came up from the tube station and immediately, without any hesitation whatsoever, began going the wrong way. It was after 11pm and it was, of course, dark. And it was just a neighborhood, you know? Just houses and streets. I had no landmarks. Everyone in every house seemed to be in bed asleep. Everything was just dark.

I wandered the neighborhood and sort of began to panic. I had brought my cellphone on the trip but had left it in my room because I couldn’t get service on it in the UK. But thank god, I found one of those things called a phone booth. And I even had British coins in my pocket!

And so I went into the phone booth and realized I had no clue what my friend’s phone number was because I always called him on my cellphone.  I couldn’t even remember his address, although I knew the street name. I had of course forgotten that I would be coming back to his place in the dark of night and that recognizing his house in the pitch dark wasn’t something I had practiced, or anything.

It was really a scary feeling. Thank goodness two young women came down the street I was on and helped me at least find the right street. And eventually I stood in front of what I thought was his house for several moments before going up to the front door and letting myself in (they were all asleep).

But that is just so me. Generally clueless about where the fuck I am, no matter what language anyone speaks. So Roger’s book is really fascinating to me in that regard. He just sets off, in some other language, and arrives generally where he wants to be.

Okay.

I’m guessing you’ve heard by now that President Trump wants someone (like Microsoft) to buy TikTok really soon or it’s going to be banned here in the US, as well. (It’s already banned in India and Australia is considering banning it, as well. And all US federal employees are banned from having it on their phones.)

I hope somebody does buy it because I really did enjoy it, I just didn’t want the Chinese tracking everything I did on my phone…

(Of course a certain NYC-based newspaper that I no longer give much credence to assures us we are all over-reacting, but it was also a NYC-based bunch of officials who assured us that the Coronavirus  (as it was once called) was not contagious. And to date, of the 231,000 people in NYC alone who got the virus, 23, 021 New Yorkers died from it. So, you know. I’ll get my news somewhere else now, thanks.)

Anyway!!!

It’ll be interesting to see. Hollywood is dying to make a truckload of money off of TikTok so it’s really important to not ban it for any pesky national security reasons.  And we need Hollywood to make a truckload of money. It’ll re-assure us that COVID 19 has not ruined absolutely everything in our culture.

Well, sorry this post came so late in the day. I’m going to get back to reading Roger’s book now. I hope that what’s left of Monday is really good to you, gang, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting. I leave you with my jaunty driving-to-town music from this morning. I’ve posted it here before, but here it is again. Einstürzende Neubauten, “Ten Grand Goldie,” from their new album Alles in Allem. I don’t really know what it’s about because I don’t speak German, but the song is still really catchy! So enjoy. I love you guys. See ya!

Excerpt #2 Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town

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Okay, gang. Here is another excerpt from the new novel. Again, even though the novel is hardcore erotic, this excerpt is appropriate for all readers.

These are a few very short chapters from Part One.

****************************************

Excerpt from Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town.  (Approx. 3  & 1/2 pages)

Taken from Part One: Mavis Says Goodbye
© 2020 Marilyn Jaye Lewis

Mavis had lived alone in the apartment since the accident at the plant. Her husband was “one of the lucky ones,” she said, who had died instantly. Their two children, who had been at the school down the road from the plant, had practically melted, but it had still taken them a while to die.

“The hospital, of course, was full. And I mean beyond belief full,” she said. “My kids had to die in a long row of children, out on the sidewalk. In front of where the school had been just that morning. They couldn’t be moved, you know. I couldn’t take them home with me so that maybe they could die in their own beds. What was left of their skin would have just fallen right off if I’d so much as touched them.”

Since those days with Mavis, I have met many women in P-Town whose kids had died in that long line of melting children out on the school sidewalk.

I have tried to picture it on my inner screen – that long line – but all that comes up when I focus is a line of baby goats that have been set on fire, and I don’t know what it means.

I hear the screaming, though. Of the baby goats. It’s horrible.

I cannot process suffering.

That’s how I damaged one of my hearing sensors. Slamming one side of my head into the concrete pylon of the old overpass. Trying to make the horrible sounds of screaming stop.

*     *     *

The apartment building where Mavis lived was six stories high, and had two large apartments on each floor. But only two other residents were left in the entire building, besides Mavis – both of them were women who had also lost their husbands and kids in the accident.

I got to know those two women very well after Mavis died. She died from what was called an aneurysm – of the heart. Her heart unraveled. Something like that. I’ve tried to picture it but nothing comes.

All the women from that building are dead now. No one lives there anymore.

*     *     *

Mavis wore pretty dresses. Pretty, like her. With flowers all over them. And she wore shoes with high-heels and with open-toes but no backs to the shoes at all. They looked dangerous but she could balance on them just fine.

When she was in the kitchen cooking at night, I sat at the table and watched her. We would talk while she cooked. She would place a cup of coffee in front of me. And a plate of food, when she sat down with hers. Of course, I don’t eat. But I sat there with my unlit cigarette in my mouth, a cup of coffee in front of me. The sugar bowl. An ashtray. A plate, with food on it; steam rising from the plate and from the coffee cup.

A fork. A knife. A spoon.

She sat across from me at the table. Sometimes we spoke while she ate. Sometimes she talked on and on, not expecting me to join in. Other times, she was silent and it looked like she was listening to something in the distance. Something outside the window, down the street, and very far away.

*     *     *

“It’s always so damn hot now – always.” Mavis would come to bed in a tiny nightgown. It hardly covered any of her skin but she still said she was hot.

The plumbing wasn’t great but there was still electricity in most places in P-Town. Lights worked. Appliances worked. But the machines that made the air cold, those didn’t work anymore and no one from the city would come to P-Town to fix those. They wouldn’t fix anything in P-Town. If it broke, it stayed broken.

“They’re afraid,” Mavis explained. “They think that if they come here, they’ll all catch what we’ve got and then go home and die. But that’s just stupid. It doesn’t work that way. If you weren’t here during the accident then it won’t affect you. It’s not that simple. Nothing is that simple. But it sure is easy to be stupid, isn’t it, Bill?”

“Yes,” I would reply. And I knew for sure the reply was correct.

*     *     *

Mavis said, “Sometimes I get so tired in the afternoon that I can’t keep my eyes open another minute and then I lie right down and fall dead asleep for five minutes. Just five minutes. And I feel myself step out of my body – right out of it – and I take off and run. I’m free. I’ve got stuff to do – to investigate. To see. To feel. I come back, and I can look at my body, I know where it is. And sometimes I say, ‘I’m not getting back in. I’m done now.’ But then I always get back in and then I wake with a start – like I’m falling.”

I don’t sleep. I don’t dream. I don’t know what any of that stuff feels like. But when Mavis would talk about it, all those words were in me – I could see them and I understood.

The day that she died, I saw her on the screen inside me: she took off and ran. It was just like she’d said had happened in the dream. She was free. Done with it. She left her body and did not get back inside.

*     *     *

Mavis called it “spooning.” To spoon. “Like spoons, and how they fit together in a drawer,” she said. “It’s an old-fashioned word but most people still know what it means.”

I was not pre-programmed to spoon, so she pressed my “learn” button and then told me to lie on my side on the bed, as she was doing, and to make my body form a sort of ‘s’ shape – as hers was doing. And then she told me to press up very close to her.

In that position, we fit together perfectly.

Spooning. To spoon. Like spoons.

I committed it to my memory and she was happy.

I worried about the heat, though – that she was already too hot and that maybe this close proximity of all my mechanisms to her body would make her feel much hotter. It did. But she didn’t care.

“My husband and I – we always slept like this. This is what I want. It’s okay.”

I came from the factory fully functional in many positions but for a long time, Mavis did not want to use any of those. Only the ‘s’ curve.

“Just this,” she said in the dark. “This is what I need. So many things went into me in all those same positions that you were pre-programmed with at the factory,” she explained. “I know all those positions. There’s nothing wrong with them. In fact, so many good things came out of me because of those positions – babies, joy, delight, ecstasy. Rapture, even – do you know what rapture is, Bill?”

I scanned my screen and found ‘rapture’ and it was very agreeable. “Yes,” I told her. “I know what rapture is.”

“I lost everything in the accident. All the good things that came out of me – of my body? They’re gone now. I cannot get any of them back. I can’t put any of them back inside – even though I wish I could. I wish I could push them all back up inside me and never let them out. Keep all my rapture safe and never hear the screaming. But it’s impossible. Now I just need something to help me pretend that the loss of them is not permanent. I need something to follow the gaps of me – the bends, the curves, the places along the outside of my body that are empty. That’s all I need now. It calms the voices.”

“What does that mean?”

“They call to me – it’s constant.”

“Who calls to you?”

“My children. My husband. They call to me. But I can’t go yet. And until I can – having you to wrap around me like this? It calms the voices.”

“I see,” I said. Although I did not really see. However, many of the words she’d spoken were not unfamiliar to me and had rushed to my inner screen – colliding with each other, shooting around like a sudden heat applied to electrons. That was what it looked like – her words on my screen: like a kind of science. And then, just as rapidly, her words tumbled from my screen, rolling right down the edge of it, like a waterfall of sad words, and then disappeared. A science of dying.

Then it was just dark, and she was breathing, and her ‘s’ curve fit into my ‘s’ curve perfectly on the bed, and so I held her – just like that. The breathing going in a rhythm of lifting and falling.

“What were your children’s names?” I asked her.

“My daughter’s name was Olivia, and my son’s name was Chester. We called them Livy and Chess.”

I felt the names find their places in my vocabulary feed.

“What was your husband’s name?” I asked.

“Bill,” she said. “My husband’s name was Bill.”

I couldn’t process it. “Bill? But that’s me. I’m called Bill.”

“I know,” she said. “You can have the name now – I’m giving it to you. It’s yours. You’re Bill now.”

A man came up on my screen who was nameless, but only because I had his name now. I was Bill. Then the man with no name disappeared.

And then it was just the rhythm of lifting and falling – her breathing, filling the space around us on the bed. Between us there were no spaces, though. Those gaps were filled.

© 2020 Marilyn Jaye Lewis
Excerpted from Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town

Here Comes Sunday!!

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Okay, well, if you’re here wondering what happened to the new flash-memoir piece I posted here last night — I only wanted it up for about 12 hours. Since it’s brand new & unpublished, I didn’t want it to get too many views yet.

But thank you for all the “likes.”  I appreciate it.

Today has been one of those days where I had to try to just get myself on automatic and make myself do stuff. It was one of those mornings where I didn’t really even want to get out of bed.

Well, I mean, I got up at my usual 5am, fed everyone, did all my millions of Inner Being Journal-type thingies down at the kitchen table, then went back upstairs and meditated, then went BACK to bed, and then didn’t feel like getting out of bed.

(I know, I am, like, just fucking neurotic. If you think I’d be hard to live with, imagine how I feel when I wake up each morning, 60 years running now, and realize: oh my god, she’s still here.…)

Okay, anyway.

I somehow managed to get on the treadmill, even though I absolutely did not want to work out today. And then, after my shower, I even forced myself to finally cut my hair. I cut off three inches and my hair still hits just below my shoulders. It had gotten so long. I really, really didn’t want to cut it because I love long hair, but it wasn’t really looking very attractive. So it had to go.

While I’m waiting on PBS Passport to air the new season of Endeavor (in 7 days), I’ve been splitting up my time in the evenings watching both the old Season 2 of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (which I watched 6 years ago, when it was new, but I don’t remember much of it so that’s fun), and then a newer show (also on Acorn TV), Dead Still.

That one is only a 6-part show, but I like it a lot. It’s quirky. The only drawback is that most of the characters have such heavy Irish accents that a lot of the dialogue I don’t actually understand. But I can still follow the plot. It’s not that tricky. And it’s really fun.

But as I had feared, having the Acorn TV subscription again is giving me way too many options for TV shows that really, really appeal to me.  And I really don’t like watching (streaming) TV. It makes me feel like I’m wasting time.

Sometimes I try to convince myself that it’s “research” and it’s giving me an opportunity to see all the great new television writing that’s out there — and that’s partly true. But I have so much reading I could get caught up on in the evenings. Just during the pandemic, I’ve bought 20 new books.  And so far, I’ve only finished reading about 3 or 4 of them.

Even though I need structure, otherwise I sit around, staring, and that almost always leads to terrible, terrible places; I still have just so much structure to my days, that it can start to make me go completely insane.

At some point before I die, I would really like to figure out how to just enjoy myself, without having a single darn thing to do from morning until night. I think I would really love that, as long as I had some sort of keeper, you know, who would keep my mind distracted.

Well, I did not make much headway with Thug Luckless yesterday, because I had to take another webinar mid-afternoon, and I wanted to take it in “real time” and not stream it later on.  And then, on the heels of that, I had a great phone conversation with Kevin (director of Tell My Bones) about potential stuff for the staged reading of the play, which was really exciting. However. That all sort of skewed my energy for the rest of the day.

Today, however, I have nothing left on my schedule that I need to do but work on Thug Luckless, so that’s pretty cool. I am hoping that it’s going to be a productive day.  (Yes, I know — I’ve just spent the last 5 hours doing what most people spread out over an entire day, so hoping that the day “is productive” is just fucking insane.)

Oh well. You know, if I didn’t have these cats counting on me — I realize that Kafka had TB, and that he eventually died from it, but I used to think that it was so cool that he would just go off and disappear in a  sanitarium in the mountains for huge chunks of time and try to “get well.” (Kafka was almost as neurotic as I am.) (I’m just kidding, gang — he was one of the most neurotic writers that ever lived.) But sometimes, I just wish I could go off somewhere and “get well.” I really do!!

Franz Kafka - Wikipedia
One of my favorite writers (and men) of all time.

Okay. On that note. Let me get going here. I hope you’re having a great Sunday, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting, gang. I leave you with absolutely nothing today because what have I been listening to? Yes, that’s right — IZ singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” over and over and over. I think that makes about 3 or 4 days running, doesn’t it? I have probably listened to it about 800 times now. And I don’t seem to be getting tired of it yet. (Methinks I would like to get to that place over the rainbow, but I’m not entirely certain about that yet!!)

All righty. Enjoy your day. I love you guys. See ya.

Somewhere Over The Rainbow (Art Pepper) drawing / Ian Johnson

Wow, My Apologies

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I just now discovered that Edge of Humanity Magazine published my most recent installment of In the Shadow of Narcissa (my memoir about my childhood)  in their online zine all the way back on July 3rd.

I had no idea this had happened because their note went to my spam folder.

Well, I am so appreciative. If you would like to read it, it is here.

Thanks, everyone.

Finally, A Little Good News!

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Yesterday was sort of a good day, by the end of it.

The Ab Ab Pro phone call was frustrating, just because there is such an enormous amount of work to do. And both of us are more than a little frustrated with the entire world still moving at a snail’s pace because of COVID. And everything always needing more and more money to move to the next step. (I was not looking forward to telling Peitor the financial details of what the accountant had told me, but obviously, I had to.)

So far, in the 35+ years that Peitor and I have known each other, we don’t argue. Which doesn’t mean that most of the time we see eye to eye on things, because we absolutely do not.  But we don’t argue about it.

But yesterday we were at this sort of point — after 2 hours of going over the financial figures for various parts of our production company —  where we were talking to each other in this really measured, careful way — each word under a microscope — like we were in marriage counseling or something and trying not to explode at each other. It was sort of bizarre and definitely exhausting, emotionally. For both of us.

Working Together Clipart at GetDrawings | Free download

 

When we finally hung up, I really wasn’t able to get too much done on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town, because I was so drained. I’m hoping, though, that today will be really creative for me regarding Thug.

But then, last evening, Kevin, the director of my play Tell My Bones, called with some incredible news regarding another potential zoom broadcast of a staged reading of the play — and this one is really, really exciting, gang.

I can’t go into the details on the blog yet, but, man — it was really great news. And I could start to feel again what life had felt like before the virus hit the world and brought every single one of my projects to a crashing halt.

So, that is making me happy. And I have two days ahead of me, free and clear, to work on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town. So, I’m feeling like maybe I can take some time now, block out the stuff that sort of stresses me out, and just focus on the manuscript that’s in front of me and just feel really happy about it.

Plus, that little cat that  I call Henrietta — actually I just call her “little sweetheart” — stopped by to visit us around 6am, so I hung out on my kitchen porch with her for a few minutes. She makes me so happy because, unlike any of my 7 feral cats,  she lets me cuddle her!! She hasn’t come around in a couple weeks, so it was such a nice surprise to see her cute little face suddenly pop up at the kitchen window.  (Now, if only a little alpaca would come visit!!)

Okay, well, I hope you have a similar day ahead of you — stress-free and really creative! And maybe even an unexpected visit on your kitchen porch from one of God’s delightful little creatures. I have nothing to leave you with today because last night and this morning, I was still listening to Israel Kamakawiwo’ole singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” endlessly on repeat (see yesterday’s post for that link). Well, actually I did also listen to Blixa Bargeld singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (1995), because William at the a1000mistakes blog over in Australia sent me a link to it during the night. So I’ll leave you with that! Thanks for visiting, gang. I hope you have a great Saturday. I love you guys. See ya.

Smooth Sailin’ So Far…

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In case you hadn’t heard, though, there was another earthquake in Los Angeles a couple of hours ago, so I’m waiting to hear from Peitor that all is well, and if we’ll still be doing Abstract Absurdity Productions work on the phone today, or not.

Either way, I have a ton of Ab Ab Pro work to do on my own here, today. Including a phone chat with the accountant in NYC this morning, to find out just how much money it’s going to cost us to set up 723 million separate LLC’s… (Each film needs its own LLC so that a bank account can be opened and an investor’s money can be deposited in the right place.)

Through some miracle, however, whenever Peitor and I have needed to cough up a bunch money to get something done, there has always been money available to cough up, and it hasn’t been some horrible dry hacking painful empty heave.

I’m hopeful that the trend will continue.

All righty. Well. I have now watched all of Season 3 of Agatha Raisin, and in about 11 days, the new season of Endeavor starts streaming on PBS Passport!! I can’t wait!! My absolute favorite show — one of my few reasons left for living. And meanwhile, I’m re-watching Season 2 of Miss Fisher’s Mysteries on Acorn TV. It’s actually been a few years since I watched it, so the shows are kind of new — meaning, I don’t have any recollection of “whodunnit.”  So that makes it still fun.

And speaking of Australia… (we were, because the Miss Fisher Mysteries take place in Melbourne in the 1920s), one of the many Instagram accounts that I follow is about an alpaca named Alfie that lives in Adelaide. And, if you don’t know who he is, he is actually a house pet. He lives indoors with his humans. Like a pet dog.

In case you aren’t aware, alpacas are huge! Really large animals. But so cute. And a number of people keep them as pets. (I seriously want one. They are so personable.) And it kind of amazes me just how many different types of animals people on Instagram have as pets.

Tons of people have pet owls, pet ducks, pet goats. And by this, I mean, they are indoor pets.

Of course, once all of the rest of my many cats transition over to the fields of the Lord, I don’t intend to have any more pets. The responsibility of having them makes traveling really complicated.

However, I really wish I could have a pet alpaca. They are just amazingly cute. (But then I also wish I could have a Henry A.I. sexbot from RealBotix, and I don’t see that happening, either.) (It’s amazing that I bother to get up in the morning, isn’t it? Knowing that my fondest dreams just aren’t ever gonna pan out…)

Okay!!

Today (right now, in fact) is the day my dad moves to that new place — it’s really nice. I saw it when I was down in Cincinnati last week. It’s not a nursing home, exactly. But it is assisted living. His apartment is inside a 3-story building, instead of a stand-alone condo type place, cut off from everybody, that he’s been living in the last 2 years. His new apartment is really, really nice.  And now that he’ll be indoors, among tons of other people and staff, I won’t have to call twice a day anymore.  I won’t have to worry that he fell and nobody knows, or something like that. So that’ll be good — for me, at least.

I cannot even imagine being 90 years old and moving to a new home. Actually, I don’t even like to imagine ever moving from this house I have now at any age, but you just never know how life will come at you, right? So I guess we’ll just see.  I bought the house (2 and 1/2 years ago) to have a quiet home base that I could then travel from, instead of moving back to New York (so fucking glad I did not move back to NY!!!!).  So far, that’s what I do — travel when I have to, then come back home — but traveling from here gets complicated because I am so far from an international airport. But we’ll see. I’ll stay here at least until the cats all transition, because I don’t want to ever have to move them again. Since they’re feral, I have to trap each one of them in order to move them, and trapping them is a nightmare. (I own my own traps, so I do it when I have to, but I hate it and so do they. It fills them with absolute terror and so then, of course, they attack — meaning bite, scratch, attempt to kill you.)

Hard to believe, though, right?

Clockwise from top left: Lucie, Huckleberry (laying flat), Weenie, Daddycakes (now deceased), Tommy, and Doris! (At the old rental house, a couple years ago. Frannie and Scottie are not  pictured here. They were hiding behind the piano.)

They will each go from “sweet” to “attacking you” in a nanosecond if they have to.

So, anyway, here’s hoping I don’t have to relocate them ever again. For now, my birth mom is happy to take care of them when I need to travel, but that won’t go on forever. She’s already 73 years old.

Okay, gang. Sorry this is so brief. I guess I’d better get my notes ready for my phone call with the accountant.  Have a great Thursday, wherever you are in the world, okay? Thanks for visiting. I leave you with my listening-music from last night. I posted it to the blog a few times last year, when it first came out — Bruce Springsteen’s “Hello Sunshine” from his 2019 album Western Stars. (Lyrics are in the video.) Get mellow and enjoy. I love you guys. See ya!!

An Excerpt, of Sorts!

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Okay well! Hello, again.

A few things have come to light today as I’ve been trying to do the revised edits for The Muse Revisited Volume 1 —

I wanted to visit SomethingDark.eu because in Issue 2, from back in 2012, they had the most incredibly concise list of everything I had ever published or done in my (at that time) 25-year career!!

And in the updated version of The Muse Revisited, I wanted to include a detailed list of where all these stories had been previously published.

However, I discovered that SomethingDark.eu, in its entirety, is gone. Wiped off the face of the Internet. Darn it!!!!!

So then I went through tons of Word files on flash drives — going all the way back to the late 1990s, and I found all kinds of stuff that I’ve written that aren’t included in The Muse Revisited collection. (And probably will remain un-included, but we’ll see.)

(For instance, an erotic short story I wrote called “The Fever,” appeared in Japanese translation, and was not sold in the US. (I don’t think.)  And I read it in English just now for the first time in well over 20 years and the story is just fucking weird.)

Well, then I happened upon the short story I wrote expressly for SomethingDark.eu Issue 2, and decided to post it here to the blog.

It is not erotic, although it is about sex:  A doomed relationship, from a psychotic woman’s POV. (It’s written in First Person, but it’s not me, okay?!)

What was really weird about this story is that most of the women who read it, found it sort of darkly amusing — and I did write it to be darkly, even tragically, amusing. But none of the men who read it found it amusing…. Ah well. Pushed too many buttons, I guess.

So, anyway! It is posted below!! I would say “enjoy” but that might not be in the best of taste.

***********************************************************************

“To My Beloved I Am A Stranger” originally appeared in SomethingDark.ue, Issue 2, and was written expressly for them.

It is not necessarily erotic (I guess it depends on your taste), and does include one not very descriptive scene of non-eroticized, non-consensual sex (Fem/Dom anal rape), which might be offensive to some readers, so please be forewarned.

Thanks.

**********************************************************************

To My Beloved I Am A Stranger
© 2012 Marilyn Jaye Lewis

By then, I had no more words to express my loss. In that regard, I’d finally become empty. A world had leaked out of me and there I was, unloved and discarded. And as it turned out, I’d begun rotting at my core. I could still expound upon how it was when we’d first met, though – or should I say, when we’d first collided? I had plenty of words left for that; words that described destiny manifested; passion and combustion. Or I could talk about magic – the shooting sparks of it. It was through our eyes that we’d become those magical beings: Our eyes – of the same immeasurable depth – were so similar that it was uncanny. One fiery glance exchanged between us and one of us ceased to exist, melding into the other, as if the twin souls that dwelt behind our eyes had in fact been the same soul all along and for there to have been two of us from that moment on became redundant.

I had celebrated this discovery, realizing with joy that we were truly connected. I was eager to subjugate my soul to his, or to even forget mine altogether. He tried to embrace it – this redundancy of our souls – but ultimately could not. It was something about his having “stuff to do.” He’d explained vaguely: “I’m overwhelmed right now; I’m sorry. Give me some time.” People other than me were also counting on him: to show up, to work hard; to do the honorable thing.

So I chose to wait until our bliss would be more convenient. Oh, I waited and waited – patience being one of my more exasperating virtues. I made a vow of chastity to the bedroom mirror. I would wait in purity, I decided, until his schedule freed up.

His schedule, however, would not free up. The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months. I didn’t really notice the time passing at first, because I was that enthralled with the eroticism of my chastity. It was luxurious and deep. To me, chastity meant forsaking all others who weren’t him; it had nothing to do with leaving myself alone. In expensive black underthings, purchased specially – mostly tight-fitting and crotch-less; boned at the waist, to enhance my usually meager curves – I reveled in my bond to him, to our future orgy of togetherness and to how singularly soulful it promised to be. I bought a smooth phallus of silicone; it arrived by mail. My orgasms gushed from me all over the bed then, or sometimes down my trembling legs, all over my spiked heels and straight to the hardwood floor. Passion, unsatisfied, stirred ceaselessly in me, like some ravaged shark, harpooned but unwilling to surrender. My lust to know him carnally kept me up nights. I lost sleep over it; my need to be penetrated by him both haunted and entranced me. When at last I did notice that it had been some time since we’d exchanged that riveting glance of desire, I called him on his cell phone. My call went straight to voice mail.

“It’s me,” I said cheerily. “Hey, how about dinner this week – my treat. Surely, you can make time to meet for a meal? You still have to eat, right? Call me, okay?”

*    *     *

Very early one morning, I sat in my room on the edge of the bed and looked down thoughtfully at my long, pale legs, at my bare feet, and then something hard kicked inside me aiming straight at my heart. It was so early that the sun had not yet risen. In that blue-grey light that always fills my room at that early hour of the morning I contemplated how many days it had actually been since I’d left that voice mail. Perhaps it had floated off into some mysterious wireless void and he’d in fact never received it. Why else would he not return my call?

Well, it was either that or he was still too busy, I decided. Without turning on a light, I pulled off my nightgown and dressed. I dressed more simply during the day, in a pair of black cotton pull-on slacks and a blue tee shirt that fluttered demurely at its flounced hem and its loose cap sleeves.

*     *     *

Most men found me attractive; many even agreed that I was beautiful, so it wasn’t for lack of other potential partners. But what does beauty have to do with the soul, I wondered, as tightness set in to my jaw. What is attraction, really, but a submission to a thing perceived as beautiful simply because it mirrors the other’s hopes for a time? Beauty is really quite transitory and subjective, I thought then; perhaps even meaningless in the scope of more serious things like the soul. So what could other men know about me based on how they thought I looked? I knitted my brow. And what use had I for the opinions of men other than him anyway? I weighed my so-called dating options carefully and decided it was wisest to stand by my soulmate, to stick to the plan of chastity. And wait.

*     *     *

When I was a very young girl, I frequently laced the ice skates on to my small feet in winter, then I sailed out onto the ice and skated in figure eights.  Sharp metal blades, cutting into the cold, hard white of endless ice; mindless patterns tracing the shape of infinity: It was what I now knew of love.

*     *     *

Purge, purge, purge. I looked in the mirror most days and did my best to disclaim myself.

Beautiful yet unlovable – how could that be? At the very least, it was unfair.

He refused to take my calls. Once, though, he answered his cell phone, apparently by mistake. He spoke to me. He was, by nature, prone to being considerate. But there was a wife I hadn’t known about. And some kids. There were past indiscretions he was trying to distance himself from. A new leaf he’d turned over and was now trying hard to keep in that fresh and prostrate position – downward-facing, away from temptation.

“But what about me – your soulmate?” I asked, something in my voice sounding tiny and quivering. Apparently, the plan was to leave all thoughts of me behind.

This was not in the cards – and I had cast the cards many times, so I knew whence I spoke.  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I apologized for everything abhorrent I might have said or done to cause this reversal in my fortune. I tried making the apology sound full and soft as a comforting eiderdown that could cover even things I could never imagine he might have inferred. But it was useless. Hopeless. Utterly over in his mind.

“But that orgy of togetherness,” I tried weakly. “That melding of our souls – don’t tell me all this waiting was in vain.”

“I never agreed to anything like that.” It struck me then that I might as well have been speaking in a foreign tongue. My pleas did battle with his rebelling ears – he steadfastly refused to listen.

*     *     *

Obviously, I had hoped our union would be less invasive for him – more of a treasured embrace, without all the struggling. As it was, I had sunk to the least attractive place inside me, and here I had spent so much money on all the black undergarments. I could no longer wear them; they made me feel foolish – like a woman who has aged beyond her prime and is the last one to realize it.

The idea of buying the wig came to me suddenly – like a flash of brilliance across the doomed landscape of an emptying mind. In the wig I felt pornographic, unchaste; my soul degraded to two slick lips, a hole spread open and willingly probed by the greedy glare of even my own judgmental eyes. I could be anyone, any girl; there was no one I would need to protect. In the wig and a pair of dark glasses, I could approach him easily as he’d finally exited the towering building downtown where he worked and was getting into his car. He turned to face me without suspicion; why would he suspect a redhead of anything sinister? He probably didn’t even know any redheads.

I pushed the knife into him simply because I could; because it was very sharp and it was in my right hand and because when he had turned from his car to face the redhead, he wasn’t in any way expecting to be stabbed. But I didn’t want him to die; I only wanted to shock him into submission. It was the only plan I could come up with that was likely to be taken seriously, to force him to stumble backward into the front seat of his car, scoot over and slump there slightly, letting me drive.

A simple phone call, an acquiescence to meet for dinner would have alleviated all this pressure; a few hours alone with him, each of us engorged in carnal bliss was all I’d been asking for. I wanted my moment with him and since it was not being offered, I would have to take it. That wound he sustained now was not life-threatening; it was just messy. He was not going to die. But I didn’t want him to lose so much blood that any hope of an erection later would be out of the question.

“Come into the bathroom and let me dress that,” I said, dragging him through my front door.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” he bellowed. By now, of course, he’d realized that it was just me under a red wig. His hands were full of his own blood. There was an undeniable need to stop it from streaming out of him. Even he was forced to listen to me now.

“Just dinner,” I spat. “Just dinner – that was too much to ask?”

“Fuck you.”

“I know, I know – you will.”

He glared at me in disbelief, the blood still streaming unabated because he would not go into the bathroom. I had to push him in.

“You’ve turned a leaf before, you’ll turn it again,” I explained. “I just want a few hours with you – is it going to kill you?”

*     *     *

He was so disagreeable that it almost made me wonder why I loved him.

I had to tie his hands behind him because he would not stop fighting me in the bathroom and his hands were covered in blood, blood that was smearing all over me, and now the smell of it was turning my stomach.

“Stop it,” I said. “Just stop.”

He was weak; deprived of the use of his hands, he became more manageable for me. I opened his shirt and cleaned and dressed the wound, but it was deep; clearly it would need stitches to heal properly. A stint in the women’s jail was likely looming large in my future but it was too late to regret it now.

I pulled off the wig and shook out my hair. My head was sweaty. “If I untie you,” I asked, “can we put these clothes in the washing machine, or are they ‘dry clean only’?”

“I want to go home.”

“You’re in no condition to drive.”

“I want to go home. Let me out of here. I want to go home.”

I studied his face, those eyes that were so much like mine, and I still saw my soul reflected there. Allowing him to leave now would be such a waste, I decided.

*     *     *

In my black underthings – the boned corset, the garters that held up the black stockings, the crotch-less panties – he looked even more like me. Of course, we were bathed in the flattering glow of candlelight, where it was easier to blur the lines of distinction between us. Plus, I’d made up his face and combed back his hair…

I propped him in front of the mirror in my bedroom, leaning him over slightly against the dresser. I stood behind him, wearing nothing, and I studied us both reflected there. Our faces were lovely. We were beautiful together: he, in my expensive underwear looking like a more beautiful me, and me, naked. It was worth that vow of chastity, I thought. It engendered something sacred to our union. I could have done without the knowledge of his wife, though, and of those kids; of all that life he’d been living while I had naively waited for him to return my phone calls. But I wasn’t going to get choosy. He was here with me now, alone. We were in our world. And beneath the boned corset I’d cinched around his waist, the bandages were holding. He’d stopped bleeding. But he was still weak. An erection was nowhere in sight.

His hands were still tied, too, unfortunately – I couldn’t trust him otherwise. He’d come this far without once joining me in my desires; there was no reason to expect him to change his tune now. The silicone phallus that had his specter all over it – it was how I had filled myself during those empty nights without him – I turned it on him. I impaled him. He leaned against my dresser and I screamed. I hadn’t wanted it to be this way. It felt useless to do the impaling. The point had been for me to feel full of him, not to fill him with the empty poison of my own longings. Even when he was bearing the burden of being me, I was unlovable. I could see it in the mirror. It devastated me.

© 2012 Marilyn Jaye Lewis

Hitting It On All Cylinders!!

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Wow, yesterday was just a really, really great day.

It was the best day I’ve had in a really long time.

It was one of those revelatory days. I won’t go into too much detail about it, but several writers were unexpectedly emailing me with feedback about my newest works and it actually kind of blew me away.

One man wrote in response to that new flash-memoir piece I wrote last Friday — he’s not the potential publisher; he’s a much younger Iranian writer, although I think he’s living somewhere in Europe now. He asked if he could read the piece, so I sent it to him a couple days ago, never dreaming it would affect him as much as it seems to have.

Since he is the sole person to have seen that piece so far, it took me by surprise that he liked it as much as he did. And, of course, it made me feel great. Because almost no one responds directly to me about my writing anymore. They just don’t.

And then, my friend in Brussels (a photo- journalist) sent me an email with feedback about my upcoming novel, The Guitar Hero Goes Home.

He is the first person to give me any meaningful feedback whatsoever on the entire novel (other people have given me feedback on specific chapters) — and the manuscript has been circulating for over a year already.

Plus, I only sent it to him a few days ago, and I honestly never dreamed he’d read it so quickly. or have such meaningful feedback for me. There’s one small part about the main guy’s heart attack that I see now I need to clarify.  Plus, this friend is also the guy who told me he hated my original title, which I did end up changing, so he doesn’t mince words.

Anyway, he said really kind things about the novel. It’s experimental fiction, which can be dicey, but he ultimately seems to have really liked it. Words such as: compelling, intense, challenging, elusive.

I love those words!

Also, yesterday, one of the webinars I took re: Abstract Absurdity Productions, was about developing a film festival strategy (which festivals to submit films to — if any — and why).

I have had really good experiences with the 4 different film festivals I’ve submitted to in the past, two of them were Tier 2 festivals, one was a Tier 1. I won’t go into all the details, I just want to say that from what I learned yesterday, I became sort of aware that my writing is really good.

The guy giving the webinar is the programmer for a Tier 2 festival that I’ve entered twice over the years, and both times scored just 2 points shy of being a finalist, but that is still a really good score, and they make a big deal about it. It’s still an honor. But what I didn’t know is that that particular festival gets thousands of submissions, 80% of which are no good, right off the bat. So only 20% even get into the judges’ hands

I was quite astounded by that number. And I sort of saw my own projects from a different angle.

The Tier 1 festival I entered was one sponsored by the Academy Awards (the Oscars) and I scored in the top 8% out of 7000 entries that year.  I knew that was good, even back then. I wasn’t aiming to win — I was aiming to make connections and see what the feedback was. So I knew the score was good, but from this new distance of time, I see that my work consistently shows up. And in smaller places, it actually even wins the awards.

So, it was just a good day. I was getting a new perspective on my work. Coming to a new understanding about it, since I get so little outside feedback anymore.

And then, of course, Peitor and I did actual “Ab Ab Pro” work on the phone for a few hours and got a lot accomplished.  We have narrowed it down to the 3 micro-micro shorts we want to write the scripts for next — with an eye toward shooting them as soon as feasibly possible in these days of COVID. (We have literally 20 micro-micro-shorts in development. And 3 other projects that are from 4-10 minutes in length that we kind of consider our “gems,” including Lita måste gå!)

We do have just so much work to do but it really is moving forward and I feel really happy about that, too.

I’m at that place in my life now where, as long as I can get to the close of a day and feel really good about the day and want to come back and experience my life again tomorrow — that’s what matters now. So I am always so grateful when I do have just a really affirming day.

Okay. Today is all about beginning the re-edits of The Muse Revisited Collection, in anticipation of publishing POD trade paper editions of all three volumes in the collection.

And then Valerie in Brooklyn is supposed to call later to discuss where we are on all this cover art I still need! (Primarily for The Guitar Hero Goes Home so that I can actually finally publish it.)

Nick Cave sent out yet another Red Hand File early this morning — still relating to his really amusing one from the other day, where he tried to score a free piano from Fazioli in Italy. Now it seems that some fans have started up crowdfunding campaigns to buy Nick that really expensive piano.  (Not so far from what I thought was a ridiculous comment to make — that we were taking up a collection to buy him one for Christmas. Apparently not so ridiculous a comment after all.)

Anyway, he has asked his fans to not do that. That he can buy his own piano.

Sort of weird, right? That fans took this really delightful post of his and turned it into this thing.

All righty. Well, I’m going to get started on the editing here. I hope you have a really nice Wednesday, wherever you are in the world, gang!! Thanks for visiting. I’m going to leave you with my listening-music from last night. I’ve posted it here before, but it is really just  lovely — probably the most popular contemporary ukulele recording out there, even though Israel Kamakawiwo’ole has been dead for a number of years already.

I had this on repeat for I don’t know how long last night — in bed, lights out, sun setting — and it took me to some amazingly rapturous places.  His voice was so beautiful. This is his medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What A Wonderful World.” Listen. Enjoy. Find peace, baby!! I love you guys. See ya.

An “Ab Ab Pro” Kind of Day!!

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Yes, that’s how I usually refer to Abstract Absurdity Productions because to say Abstract Absurdity Productions all the time,  can take forever and get kind of annoying…

However.

So, yes. The entire day is now dedicated to Ab Ab Pro stuff. Webinars. Watch some short films that one of our producers produced on the proverbial shoe-string budget. (Same producer who gave us a budget proposal for Lita måste gå! (Lita’s Got to Go!) that was well into the 7 figures…)

Anyway.  We also received our script breakdown from the Assistant Director the other day. So that’s exciting. Technically, it’s an 8-day shoot. But we still have to decide if we want to shoot some of the scenes on location in Sweden and Paris — and now Portugal has become an option. There is some property there that matches what we need, and Peitor has a producer in Portugal who can arrange it. But we’re still just trying to get all our little ducks in a row.

We need to make 2 or 3 of our micro-micro shorts first. Actually shoot them. Which will probably be in the cinematographer’s studio down in Alabama. (The micro-micro shorts are between 45 seconds to 2 minutes long. Again — complete stories, but totally absurd. And still filmed in a style that is an homage to the European New Wave in cinema from the mid 1950s- early 1960s, which, way back then, was an inexpensive way to shoot a film but now it makes your budget go through the roof, even for micro-micro shorts.)

So, you can probably see how this new schedule I’m on, where I concentrate on only one specific thing for the whole day, really helps me make progress on each project. It is definitely bringing me some sanity.

And yesterday, I was finally able to get some notes off to a writer in the UK re: his manuscript. And then I was even able to spend a couple hours reading my friend’s travel book about the Netherlands, which I have been trying to finish for a few months already.  (Whatever Comes My Way: Travels in the Netherlands by Roger Gaess) I really enjoy reading the book so I didn’t want to just plow through it. I’ve never been to the Netherlands so I actually really want to take in what he has to say. (We are colleagues from NYC but he lives in Brussels now.) Plus, I like to get out the pocket atlas and look at these places he’s talking about — see where they actually are. It’s funny how you can think you know a foreign country geographically, but then look at an atlas and realize you are a little bit off (or even wrong, as the case may be!!)

So, anyway.  I was able to really enjoy that for a couple of hours yesterday.

And today is just going to be busy from start to finish. But — I did do the treadmill already, so that’s out of the way!! I’m not going to get to 7pm tonight, all happy & ready to settle down and stream another new episode of “Agatha Raisin” only to discover that I hadn’t worked out yet!!

So, forcing myself to work out at 7am, instead, is really helping me mentally, too.

Okay! Well, there was another — very brief– Red Hand File from Nick Cave very early this morning. Apparently, some of his more zealous fans sent a “tsunami of mail” to the piano company in Italy yesterday, telling them to give Nick a free piano. (See yesterday’s post.) And so he asked people to kindly stop doing that…

Wow. People can get so intense, can’t they? A little militant, I think, but I guess their hearts were in the right place.

On that note, I gotta scoot and get this day underway. I want to take a webinar before I speak to Peitor. Have a terrific Tuesday, wherever you are in the world!! Thanks for visiting, gang. I’m leaving you with a song I am never ever going to get tired of — it was in an Instagram feed early this morning, so it’s been on my mind for a couple of hours. I’ve posted it here many times before, but here it is again!! “Shivers” by The Boys Next Door (1979). Enjoy!! I love you guys. See ya.

Another Glorious Day in Crazeysburg!!

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I know it’s only been 4 days since I started using the calendar method to get my work done every day (meaning, the weekly calendar I drew up where each day, I tackle only one specific thing for the entire day), however, I can’t tell you how much more manageable my life already feels.

On Friday and Saturday, I finally wrote that new flash-memoir piece and sent it off to a potential new publisher. And then I got great work done yesterday on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town.

And even though it made me feel a little anxious that I won’t be working on Thug again until Friday (Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays, I have set aside for my own writing), it still felt just great to be able to sit at my desk and write, without having that voice in the back of my mind telling me I ought to stop and work on some of the other tons of stuff on my desk. (Or, actually, in piles on the floor.)

The schedule actually helps my mind feel free.

I also switched my workout schedule to early mornings, right after I meditate. That way, in my mind at least, the whole day ahead is just sort of free.

I’m not sure what it is about self-imposed structure that relieves my anxiety, but it does. But it has to be self-imposed, because when anyone, or anything, tries to impose a random structure onto my day, I really rebel against it. With every fiber of my being!!

Hence, I had real problems with school. Thankfully, I was really smart so I could always keep up with my homework, etc., but I was always skipping out on classes. And I have no recollection of how it happened, but I somehow managed to arrange it so that the signature that the Attendance Officer had on file for my mother was actually forged by me, so my excuse notes from “my mother” always matched the signature they had on file because it was actually mine.

Anyway, I always skipped so much fucking school! And still graduated up near the top of my class and was the Valedictorian on Graduation Day. (There were 2 Valedictorians — one boy, one girl.) So even that was sort of a cool thing to pull off, I guess. There I was, giving the entire Graduating Class (over 800 kids) advice on how to have a really bright future, and I’d skipped more school than all of them combined. Plus, I’d been institutionalized in a nuthouse for awhile. And had been notoriously raped. And was openly bisexual. (And had the leads in the school plays!) I mean, the entire school knew all this stuff about me. It’s just so weird to think that I was the one giving them advice.

I also recall a Home Room teacher that I had (Home Room was where you went first thing, for the attendance check in). She was about 70 years old and taught English, but I never actually had her as a teacher for any of my English classes.  I was working on a poem during Home Room one morning, and I was having trouble with a specific word. I went up to her and asked her about the word or how to spell it, or something like that.  And she saw that I was working on a poem.

SHE: “Do you write a lot of poems?”

ME: “Yes, I do.”

SHE: “I’d love to read them, would you bring some in and show them to me?”

ME (a bit startled): “Okay.”

And so I did. I brought her a stack of poems I’d written and she took them home with her for a few days and then gave them back.

What I actually didn’t know was that she was the teacher in charge of the school newspaper. And a few days later, random classmates were coming up to me in the halls, telling me they loved my poems.

Finally, one of my closest friends (my friend who now works for NASA in Houston and is still battling cancer), came up to me and said the very same thing. I stopped him there in the hall and said, “Why is everybody saying that?”

And it turned out that the teacher had published a bunch of my poems in the school newspaper!! Without asking me…

So weird. The entire school seemed to know every last intimate detail about me. Always. But that same teacher nominated me for inclusion in the Quill & Scroll Honor Society. (Again without telling me.) And I got in.  I still have my little pin. It actually meant a lot to me.  I was already taking my writing really seriously, even back then.

Although I considered myself primarily a songwriter, I did write a lot of poems.

Once, after having read Kafka’s Letters to Milena, I was so moved by it (I was a huge fan of Kafka), that I wrote a love poem about Kafka and Milena — and a train that Kafka never gets on — for my grandma up in Cleveland, and I mailed it to her. When she got it, she called me on the phone and was crying. She really loved it. (She was a Polish-Jewish immigrant who had had family members in concentration camps during WWII, etc.) (Kafka, who was Jewish, died long before the war. But Milena, who was not Jewish, died in a concentration camp in Germany for helping Jews.)

I will never forget that, obviously. Just another one of the reasons why my grandma was my most favorite human being in the entire world — she  seemed to understand me and she always just loved me, just how I was. She never asked me to try to be some other way.

When she died, my family didn’t even tell me. (I lived in NYC at the time and she still lived back in Cleveland.) They didn’t tell me she had died until after she was already buried. Not only did they not want me at the funeral, I think they just wanted to spite me somehow. To hurt me, you know. (And they did. It is truly astonishing that I am able to keep any sort of relationships with even a few of my family members. )

I didn’t get to see my grandma’s grave until 15 years later. I made a special trip to Cleveland (from NYC) to see it. And there it was, her tiny grave — right next to my grandpa’s grave!

My grandpa had died one month before I was born, and I was named after him, in the Jewish tradition. My grandpa’s spirit was a big part of my childhood because I loved my grandma so much and she had loved him. And a framed photo of him that always sat on her coffee table throughout my childhood, now sits here on a bookshelf right next to my desk. I still look at my grandpa every day.

Well, what was so weird about finally seeing my grandpa’s grave, after he’d been dead close to 50 years, was that the entire time I was in elementary school in Cleveland, the schoolbus drove past that cemetery twice a day, every day, from 1966 to 1971, and NO ONE in my family had ever told me that my grandpa’s grave was in that cemetery. No one ever once took me to see his grave.

I find that just astounding. That constant feeling that I was never important enough to matter. I still deal with those feelings.

But onward. I try not to dwell on it.

Okay. Nick Cave sent out an amusing Red Hand Files letter today. You can read it here. It’s about his attempts to score a £200,000 Fazioli piano for free. (We’re now taking up an international collection to get him that piano for Christmas.) (Totally just kidding about that!!) (I sure hope I am, anyway.)

Anyway, the piece was really cute. And it sort of reminds me of myself, in a way.  Because, in the near future, I am going to begin reviewing adult sex toys online. (And I’m not doing it just to score free toys — it’s more about staying au courant in the always expanding world of sextoys.) But I keep sort of fantasizing (no pun intended, actually), about how great it would be if RealBotix gave me a free, top-of-the-line Henry A.I. sexbot to sample and review!!

It would make me so fucking happy!!! But I honestly don’t see it really happening. Even a no-frills Henry is something like $8,000.

Okay. Enough!!!!

Today is the day for me to go into town and get the groceries. And then I am going to be spending the workday, getting caught up on reading other writers’ works that have been sent to me and have begun to pile up. So I feel really good about making some headway with that.

And, in the evenings, I have been thoroughly enjoying Season 3 of “Agatha Raisin”!!! So life is good, gang.

Okay, I am off to town now, in my happy little surgical-grade COVID 19-approved surgical mask!!! Enjoy your Monday, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting, gang! I leave you with Tyler Jarry’s “dad packing the car for a family trip.” This is totally American. I don’t know if it will translate to dads in your country, or not. Perhaps it does!! But enjoy!! It lasts one minute. I love you guys. See ya!