::Grilled Cheese, part 2

…in which our Hero tunes his radio off the procastination station and answers the questions that he asked for.  Like a Good Boy.

 

What happened over the last two years?

I could natter on about a lot of fairly unimportant stuff.  But the biggest thing is that, right around the time I quit writing in 2010, I got my wife pregnant.  (Yeah, I’m married, in case you’re new here.  I don’t talk about her much.  When I do, she’s "K".)  In the ensuing two years, she built me a great baby son who has grown into a completely kick-ass toddler.  I love my son, he’s seriously the bee’s knees.

On the other hand, the parenthood grind is driving both of us crazy – the bad kind.  A lot more grousing, bitching, sniping, and resentment.  And a lot less affection, passion, playfulness and joy.  I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.  Most days I feel like I could claw through plate steel from a combination of stress, libido and resentment.  

So, yeah, that’s where I was during that big two-year gap.  Dealing with a first pregancy, birth, squalling infant, and generally learning how to be a parent. 

Which, funny enough, is what about half the diaries on here seem to be entirely about.  I find it ironic and droll that it drove me away, instead.

 

What activity sets you most at peace?

Picture me kneading my forehead and groaning.  The last two years, it seems like I can’t scratch that itch. 

I have memories of being more carefree before the baby:  finding peace in a gab session among fellow geeks in a late-night diner.  In a few puffs off someone else’s joint.  In screaming my head off at a rock show or dancing all night at a techno club.  Of having a thrashing, biting, mindbending orgasm after an hour-long screw and slumping down on the bed afterward, sweaty and glowing and limp and absolutely calm and centered and AT PEACE, feeling macho and wanted and sated.  Or working myself into a quivering lump on the fencing strip, and coming away with pride and bruises.  (Damn, I miss sword-fighting.)

Haven’t done any of that stuff in two years.  The lack grinds away at my calm little happy place and makes it really tough to answer the question truthfully, because I never feel like I’m quite there.  We get away for a couple of hours.  Or have some mediocre, barely-better-than-nothing sex.  Or I see the guys for a quick dinner.  But none of it puts me at peace.

I wrote some solid fiction earlier this month, for the first time in ages.  A commissioned sale, actually, and the longest single piece I’ve ever done.  That put me a lot closer to the mark when it was finally finished.  It felt really good, like the old days when I was a callow youth who spewed words by the thousand at the drop of a hat.  I’d done something important; something I hadn’t done before; something I missed but had forgotten about.  There was a transitory peace that night.

And I spent five days at Gen Con earlier this month — that put me fairly close to peaceful, too.  As peaceful as you can be while rubbing shoulders with all the highlights and lowlifes of the geeksphere, and hustling to game sessions and seminars and food trucks and costume contents and…. yeah, that was pretty great.  I was almost able to forget about all the Other Crap.  If I died and went to Heaven, every week would be Gen Con.  Although in that version, there might be secret orgies in the basement.  Because, yeah.

If you have a personal philosophy, what would that be?

Hm.  I could be trite and claim that "don’t be a dick" covers it.  But, you deserve better.

I’m not religious, in the sense that I wasn’t raised attending a church and I’m not about to start now.  I’m skeptical about the Bible and enraged by judgmental evangelists who want to take away everybody else’s choices because of their blind belief in a millenia-old book.  I don’t believe that a real Deity would care about a lot of the stupid minutiae that people claim.  I don’t think he cares whether you go to a church and sing on Sunday, or if you curse when someone cuts you off on the highway.  Or if you want to kiss someone with the same naughty bits as you.  If that’s really the case, we’re all fucked anyway and I might as well not worry about it.  Not sure I’d want to go to a Heaven where those are the rules.  

Anyway, religion:  color me agnostic.  I’m trying hard to believe that there is Something Out There.  When I write about it here, I usually refer to it as $DEITY.  Which is a reference to old-school, early-80s BASIC programming.  But anyway.  $DEITY basically translates as "God, or Whatever the Fuck It Is, or You Think It Is."  And the idea of life without $DEITY is pretty damned scary.  I abhor the idea that all this that I’ve worked so hard to become is going to click off like a lightbulb.  Thinking about death puts me in cold sweats and keeps me up at night, and has since I was a small child.  I’ve experienced the supernatural once or twice in my life, just enough to give me a little glimmer of hope that there’s something other than cold, empty darkness on the other side.  But not enough to make me a true believer.  I’m totally unsure about $DEITY and the true shape of things.

Personal philosophy?  I think Americans have done a great job of fucking up the world.  Common sense and honesty have been replaced with political correctness and zero tolerance.  The land of the free and home of the brave has been replaced with Guantanamo, the worst wealth gap ever, paranoia and ten colors of spinning bullshit.  And I’m coming around to the realization that it’s only going to get worse.  Everyone’s pumped full of reality television and feel-good news and soundbite politics, and nobody’s getting a good enough education to give a damn.  Our votes mean nothing; we’re secretly ruled by a bunch of rich old men who narrow it down to two candidates for each office, each who is quietly controlled by one or the other cabal.  Democracy has failed, and it happened so slowly that nobody noticed.  We all live to serve the corporation and nobody will really acknowledge it.  The only way it’s going to come down is when our sons or grandsons lead a bloody revolution, or the plague wipes out enough of us to make us start over, or $DEITY comes back and tells us how stupid we’ve been.  Probably with zombies.

We need a better world where people aren’t assholes to each other, and I’m not really sure how to bring it about except by killing all the assholes.  And they have more guns than I do.

Give me a little Buddha and a little Stranger in a Strange Land, and tell $DEITY to bring magic back and

give us some benevolent wizard-kings to sort things out.  That’d all be a good start.  If that’s not possible, let’s start with this:  decriminalize drugs and prostitution, legalize gay marriage and try out group marriages to rebuild some of these broken families (yes, I know, that deserves an entry all its own.  ask, sometime).  End corporate rule and reform the American political process.  Turn war back into terrifying destruction that’s only brought out to fight evil, instead of police-actions used as a political tool.

In the mean time, I try really hard not to be a dick. 

 

What has been your biggest regret?

 

I regret that it took me so long to grow up.  I spent most of my 20s being a slacker, squandering money and learning about life.  I wish I’d had a few more relationships and a lot more sex, and gone to college before I turned 30, and gotten established early with degree/job/finances/etc.  I needed that wild time, but the decade of slack is going to cost me the chance to see my grandchildren before I die, quite probably.  I will probably regret this more strongly the older I get.

Sometimes I have regrets about old relationships long past, and chances I didn’t take.  But truly regretting that would require me to believe that marrying K was a mistake.  I think, anyway.  Does that parse?

runners-up:  not spending enough time with my dying father; getting fat.

 

What has been something that seemed like a regret at the time but turned out to be a blessing/accomplishment in retrospect?

Um.  I’ve really got nothing, here.  Most of the things I admit that I regret are either self-indulgent whinging, or spots where I genuinely fucked up at life and can’t go back to fix it.

If I think of something in the next couple of days, I’ll let you know.

 

explain some of your pet peeves.

Totally not in the form of a question, but… sure.

I’m a grammar and spelling Nazi.  Don’t get me wrong… I love lolcats as much as the next guy.  But if you don’t know the difference between HOARD and HORDE, or ROGUE and ROUGE, THEIR or THERE or THEY’RE… that’s when I just seethe and grind my teeth and narrow my eyes and think about how it’s unfair that you aren’t slaving away in a salt mine somewhere.  And the worst of it is spotting misprints and bad grammar in a ‘professional’ published product and wailing, "I could have done that better, you rubes!  How did you get paid for this?!"

We’ll also lump spoken-word idiocy into this category.  In particular, using words that don’t exist.  I don’t mind you throwing out a little "ain’t" or "y’all."  But — as an example of what I mean — there’s been a plague of sportscasters and athletes (in print and broadcast) using the not-word RESILIENCY.  The word is RESILIENCE.  Just like there is no such thing as PATIENCY when you’re being patient with these buffoons who are supposed to be acting as examples for all the kids out there who are going to grow up saying ‘resiliency’ and sounding like fools.  Nor is there SILENCY when everything goes quiet. 

A final mush into the grammar/wordplay pet peeves:  business-speak.  No, I will not ‘reach out to’ Dave.  I will e-mail him, thanks.  No, I do not ‘leverage a solution.’  I fix things.  Quit trying to sound important and say what you mean.

Another pet peeve:  posting unsourced (wrong) quotations.  When someone tosses up another bogus quote on Facebook, I’m the first guy to Snopes or Google going "Nope!  Mark Twain never said that, and you’re bad for spreading this misinformation."  I am that guy.

If you drive the speed limit and I’m stuck behind you, I quietly shoot laser beams of death into your gas tank.

I hate being read to — I read ridiculously fast and would much rather you handed me the piece of paper and let me fly through it in half the time.  Thanks.  

On Opendiary:  People who keep their entire diary closed off, so that when I click on one of their interesting notes that they leave for someone I read, I can’t go find out more about them. 

There are probably a bunch more than I’m not aware of, but that’s what you get for now.