I miss her like that as I fall through my life

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

There are pieces of writing that make one stop – full stop – and put down a book, because they are so beautiful, or so well said, or so evocative, that the passage needs to be left to ring out, to resonate in the mind.

Sometimes they need to be re-read, sometimes they just need to not be followed with anything, until they have sunk fully in to one’s mind.

I’m lucky enough to have engendered this feeling in others, or so i’ve been told, though I can’t say I know which passages, either because I was never told, or have long forgotten.

I have encountered that feeling a few times as a reader; some I likewise can’t recall, today, but one, I revisit often.

This rings in my head not just because it is beautiful, but also because it is so true and deeply felt. For you, a reader, it may not strike this way, but for me, itt describes a particular ache and longing, for something long ago.

 

The line – from Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Brightness Long Ago, is:

 

The sailors say the rain misses the cloud even as it falls through light or dark into the sea. I miss her like that as I fall through my life, through time, the chaos of our time. I dream she is alive even now, but there is nothing to give weight or value to that, it is only me, and what I want to be true. It is only longing. We can want things so much sometimes. It is the way we are.

Kay is one of our greatest living writers, transcending genre (his work is nominally fantasy, but is such only in that it exists in analog of historic time and place, and in that it exists ‘a quarter turn to the fantastic’, as Kay has described it. His work exists in a exists of quasi-historic settings, akin to renaissance Europe, Byzantium in the time of Justinian, England during the viking era, medeival china, Spain in the time of El Cid, as well as one foray into modern day Aix en Provence,  and one into other-worldly high fantasy.

Each setting exists as a backdrop for variations on our own histories; analogs of historical figures or events server as a stage for his own stories, filled with intrigue, adventure, politics, romance, and in some cases, music and art.

I’m hard put to pick a favorite of Kay’s books; all are brilliant, and while I have my own picks for his best and least great, even my least (The Last Light of the Sun) is some readers favorite.

The book in question, A Brightness Long Ago (which is set in 15th century Italy leading up to The Italian Wars), begins with this passage, below. I can’t stress this strongly enough, though; if you love this, you should read all of Kay’s work, it’s all worthwhile.

 

Read more “I miss her like that as I fall through my life”

need, love, longing

Karl Elvis1 Comment

“You should be inside me right now,” she said, and I agreed.

“I just need to be crushed beneath you tasting only your kisses and being filled and consumed by you.”

Words like these will light a fire in me, will make me forget anything other than a need to be there, now, doing exactly as described.

But a message like this from far away, in situation not just in distance, bings with that fiery, burning need, also a melancholic longing.

Love and desire are something most of us well understand, but it’s that ache of the forbidden; Juliet on a balcony, a barrier both physical and metaphoric (and then later, Juliet across the gulf, seemingly, between life and death.

Rapunzel in her tower, Ned in Pushing Daisies, Guinevere unavailable first to Lancelot, and then, as it turns out, unavailable to Arthur. Buffy and Angel, Tony and Maria from West Side Story; Literature and pop culture are filled with tales about loves forbidden, somee fulfilled with consequence, some unfulfilled and tragic, some ending, against odds, well and happily. Because any trope that common is explored in all its variations, both in life and in fiction.

But common themes always are both the pain of longing, and the burning need.

Burning need is something i’m all too familiar with; i’m a creature who feels needs with huger intensity, but also, a creature who loves, when I love, with complete commitment.

So yes, indeed, I should be inside you, now, and always. That thought is present in my mind more and more, as time passes.

 

Fresh Ink

Karl Elvis1 Comment

First tattoo since well before pandemic, and I could not be more pleased with it. This is a tribute to two dogs gone too soon – mine, Thela (named for a King Crimson song, Thela Hun Gingeet), five years ago, and my friend’s, (Otis)  two or three months ago. Both far too young and much missed. 


Also though, it’s for my current dogs, Vera (named for a Blue Öyster Cult song), and Levon, named for Levon Helm. 

Really though it’s for all the frenchies, because they’re awesome dogs and I love them all. 

 

 

done at Fog City Tattoo in Santa Cruz CA, by my friend  Blake Brand. 

 

 

Tattoo Future

Karl Elvis1 Comment

So much for writing every day (it’s been almost a week now) but, I do my best. Fuckin’ life, you know how it is. It has a way of interfering even if you’re getting fuck all done.

That said, i’m feeling a bit more positive than when I wrote this a week ago. Conversations with my employer are progressive but things felt less adversarial.

Meanwhile, i’m scheduled to get tattooed on Tuesday the 11th, which i’m looking forward to. It’s been more than 3 years, and that’s a long time, for me.

My last piece was a walk-in on a whim, at my friend’s shop (since closed, a victim of pandemic), Samuel O’reilly’s in Santa Cruz, CA. It’s a old school ‘cut throat’ straight razor with the latin translation of Occam’s Razor engraved on the blade (ergo, Occam’s Straight Razor).

This one is a long-planned neck tattoo; i’ll put a pic up after it’s done. My first neck tattoo, though most of the rest of me is pretty covered. So this will be a slightly new experience.

This site used to be FULL of tattoo pix, but as i’ve mentioned, loss of my server a few years ago wiped most of the pics, so i’m slowly fishing them out of my backups and replacing one by one.

I’ve mentioned in the past; it’s common for people to ask, how many tattoos do you have. But at some point the question stops making sense; as tattoos merge into, say, a full sleeve, how do you count? Sessions? The whole as one? How many there were? It’s meaningless, so you go to a point whee it’s percent coverage.

I put myself somewhere north of 60%; full back, arms filled shoulder to fingertip, lower legs mostly full, feet partly full, chest and stomach mostly full. My sides, thighs, hips, butt, head and neck remain mostly empty. So those are the areas I count as 40%, though of course those numbers are rough.

I have a number of larger pieces planned, which will go on thighs or sides, and after that, it becomes fill-in of smaller things where they fit.

I may never get close to 100% coverage; we’ll see. But at 60, my skin is less good for tattooing than it was 20 years ago, so i’m not waiting on anything other than finding the right artist for the next couple things I have planned. Meanwhile, my neck is going to be largely filled soon (I have another piece planned there, before end of 2022).

The face, I have a plan, but, the artist I want to work with is in Berlin, and as yet i’m not feeling like going to Europe (i’m in California). When I do feel like making that long trip, the artist I want to have tattoo my face is Durga Siapati (that last name may be wrong it’s from memory). I do not expect to do that in the next year or so, but, unless I wind up opting for something else meantime (perhaps Maori inspired), Durga remains the plan.

I do, though, feel a bit of a ticking clock on these things. At 60, i’m now all too aware of life expectancy questions, not to mention some risk activities (scuba, mortorcycles, etc). My health is good, but, my family history is full of heart disease and cancer, and of course, in pandemic area, there is also the looming virus question, which, despite how we’re action, is far from settled.

My philosophy has alwayts been, and remains, don’t put things off, do them while you can. That is very much how i’m looking at tattoo decisions in next couple of years.

In the pandemic era, faces are mysterious

Karl Elvis2 Comments

A funny thing about the pandemic era is that we now (in some places/cases at least) now have people we routinely see, who in effect have faces that stop below the eyes 

This makes the rest of the face a mysterious, intimate place, much as things must feel in cultures that routinely veil. 

There is a young woman at my physical therapist’s office (one of two who run the front counter) on whom I have a wicked crush. Pink hair, glasses, lots of very well done tattoos. She’s bubbly and friendly, relentlessly enthusiastic. We talk, at least every other session (I do PT twice a week, rehabbing a shoulder surgery), about tattoos, and she can’t wait to tell me about her last piece, or next piece, or pieces she’s planning for future. I’ve told her about piece i’m getting next week, and again, she can’t wait to see it. 

We’ve never seen each other’s faces, in all the months we’ve been chatting. 

Today, we were talking about coffee; someone had just brought her some fancy pour-over latte thing from philz coffee, and she was complaining about it, meanwhile laughing and telling me in great detail about whatever was wrong.

And then she tuned partially away, pulled down her mask and sipped.

Seeing the whole of her face, lips parted as she brought cup to her mouth, was as thrilling as catching a glimpse of accidentally exposed underwear, and to be honest, was nearly as thrilling as a brief glimpse of nipple. 

Because i’ve now been chatting with this beautiful young woman for about three months, twice a week, and never gotten her whole face, it was a wildly intimate feeling. Her face seemed too beautiful to believe, but I think that’s entirely the veil idea; the fact that I should not see it, made it intensely wrong, which is hotter than hell. 

I’m not, to be clear, saying anything positive about cultures that enforce veils/hijabs. It’s indefensible to enforce any such rule on a woman.

What i’m saying instead, is that the side effect of a practical need to protect each other with masks during a deadly plague, has produced a side effect that never occurred to me; faces have become a hidden, intimate place, a mystery. And I do love a good mystery.  

I already wanted to kiss this young woman. But this glimpse makes it a hundred times worse. 

Let’s talk about ADHD

Karl Elvis1 Comment

 

I’d rather be telling filthy stories but i’m kind of fighting with an (unusual for me) anxiety issue.

This is a long story and I would rather not tell it all right this moment, but we’ll see, these things grow as I go one sometimes.

I’ve worked in high tech for an absurd number of years. I had an aptitude with computers from the time I first encountered them in the late 70’s; I learn things hands on, and pick them up quickly. So when, for example, the poster/plant department of Tower Records needed a person to take over ticket sales when we first got a terminal, my boss tapped me because he knew i’d be all over it.

It’s always been that way. I don’t have patience with manuals and instructions, but things I can learn by getting hands on and problem solving, I launch at. My first high tech job was as a shipping clerk, but I quickly found my way into a test department (at Seagate in Scotts Valley), moving into engineering on hard work and fast learning.

This got me every job since, going through most of the top tech companies of the 80’s and 90’s. I won’t mention my current employer by name, but Sun and Cisco were both great for me, allowing me to keep learning and growing as an engineer as well as a technical expert in non-engineering teams.

It’s the same story throughout; aptitude, work ethic, intelligence, and extremely good communication skills.

The fact that I didn’t always excel at deep focus tasks was balanced by all the rest; if I could not solve a deep technical problem, I knew how to diagnose the issue, and collaborate to get it solved quickly by people who had the specific skill I did not have. I compensated for certain difficulties, by multi-tasking exceptionally well. Yes, I have had phone sex while programming perl code, and did both well, thank you.

 

Read more “Let’s talk about ADHD”

More stupid housekeeping and moronosphere history

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

As long time readers will know, xmas eve, 2013, my friend Brandon Dawson died of an overdose.

Brandon – despite the obvious – was a kind and generous human being, and a good friend, and i’m forever grateful to him for hosting so many of my (and my friends) blogs, free.

However, his demons won out, and when he passed away, he left me locked out of our server (he’d recently updated passwords, and didn’t give them to me, or did, and I didn’t write them down). I struggled to get access to our server, but was unable to do so.

Several friends lost blogs when the server was taken down; I was lucky to be able to export all my writing from THIS blog, though I lost a few others (one that was sort of a secret, exorcising the demons and confess the sins sort of thing which is probably better gone, anyhow).

As i’ve mentioned, I was able to recover nearly 1400 entries; everything, basically. But in rebuilding all of this, i’m finding a vast number of broken links, including internal links (my direct links used to be at site/blog/archives/<title>.php, but is now site/title), lost images/songs/etc, as well as the simply outdated (links to news articles, links to now-gone blogs, etc)

All in all I had more than 1500 broken links. I’m gradually repairing all this (sometimes by deleting no longer relevant entries, sometimes by just un-linking, and going forward, sometimes updating links). But, it’s quite a bit of work.

Why do this? Well, first, broken links hurt SEO, which I am trying to improve to bring in more readers (and by more, I mean, higher single digit counts; i’m keeping expectations low here). But also, for the couple of friends who may delve into archives (Hi Liz!), broken links are annoying (and annoying for me as well).

I’m down to 1350 broken links as of this writing, but I think it’s just going to take weeks of a-few-at-a-time to get through it all, with the image posts being hardest (trying to figure out if I have the original images someplace, and then uploading, or replacing, or just un-linking).

or i’ll give up and quit dickin’ around and just wrote porn instead.

Mmm. Porn.

By the way I now have ‘subscribe’ option for new updates, when you comment, so if you’re aching to know the second I put up something new, comment and look for subscribe options.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

It’s been interesting to look at stats since I got more active.

I used to be able to judge engagement by comments, and had sitemeter (I think it was called) to measure hits. I learned a lot as to who was hitting from where, and how much, and when someting had gone viral (as when I blogged about Snakes on a Plane, back before it was actually made, and my post went viral when the whole SOAP thing took off).

However, in the last 10 years or so, things have changed a lot. Far more users have privacy blocks of various sorts, including what’s built into IOS and MacOS, as well as various browsers.

The tracking tools I have are vastly less informative than in the old days. Thus is a good thing in privacy terms, obviously, but, as a blogger who wants to know if anyone is reading, the whole thing is a bit of a mystery.

I had a burst of hits a week or so ago, which I took to mean a combination of SEO and frequent updates (and a big increase in my activity on Twitter) were paying off, as was my own increase in activity on blogs; i’ve been liking and commenting anywhere I can find, and was seeing increase in activity in logs. But, no increase in comments, which is the only way I can actually tell if I’m getting read, and, after that burst a week ago, there’s a sudden drop both in stats data, and in ‘like’ activity.

It’s all a bit of a head-scratcher at this point, and i’m back to assuming that, aside from one (new) friend i’ve made, i’m not actually getting much readership, even if something hits my posts and pages.

But, the point isn’t just being read (though it helps), the point is to write more. For me at least, shark-like, I have to move or die. If I stop writing, I fear I won’t start again for years.

So as much as possible, daily updates will keep coming.

It’s not that I lack things to write about; it’s that I lack time to write about all the things I wish to, and often don’t start for fear of doing a half-assed job.

As always though, if you read this, please comment. I don’t need a real name, or a real email, you can put junk in there. But I do like to know someone got this far down the page.

Love will have to do

Karl Elvis2 Comments

I I’ve spent of a lot of my life, a lot of my time, thinking, and writing,  about love.

Love is a wholly inadequate word, in english, to express all the dozens of things we mean when we say love.

I love a good sandwich, my favorite bourbon. I love my favorite band, my favorite song.

I love to cook. I love my favorite teevee shows. I love riding mortorcycles.

These are all true, without being metaphoric. Because these are loves.

I love my kids, my dogs, have loved a dozen rats, mice, guinea pigs. I loved a parrot my daughter had. And these are loves, true and heartfelt.

I loved my parents, I love certain friends. I’ve cried over the heartbreak of loss, because love can mean heartbreak.

One word, Love, isn’t enough for all of that.  It’s the same word; each one of those things is a love, but each one is wholly different. The love for bands or books or art, isn’t the same as the love of a friend. The love of a pet, and the love of a child – while in many ways almost the same – isn’t the same.

We need at least three words to cover the above. Love-of-object, love-of-activity, love-of-friends/family/pets. Really that could be 5 words, and I could keep subdividing, like kids today will with gender/sexuality identity, or musical genres.

But however many we end up with, it’s not one. Love won’t do it.

And then there’s another kind of love, which is not at all like the above. And we could have the same conversation, because it’s not just one thing, when we discuss it.

Read more “Love will have to do”