Sex with Boys and Girls

by Feather Touch

File - 4

      
Nick gave his uncle a shy smile as he walked through the front door of the house, then he half leaped across the living room and into the young adult’s lap, straddling his knees and looking him in the eyes.  The twelve year old tugged at the gym shorts he was wearing, and whispered hello to his uncle.  “Something happened in the car just before Michael left me off,” the boy said, “and you can feel it on you if you want to come up inside my underpants.”
      The two adjusted their clothing, Nick raising his arms high so Dave could peel off his polo shirt, then huddled bare-chested together, cradling each others’ face  as the tall adult gently probed high between the child’s sleek thighs.  
      “I’ve let you loose with an animal,” the uncle said.
      “Jack and Lang came late,” the boy explained, “just this morning, so they rode over with me sitting in their laps to help Michael say the same thing, or do the same thing, as you did by letting me still be kind of a virgin when I went to his house.”
      “We seem to be establishing a fellowship that might indeed lead to a club,” Dave observed.
      “I hope so,” the now panting boy responded.
      “Did you like it?” his uncle asked.
      “I guess I was kind of scared it wouldn’t happen, at first,” Nick replied, “because we finished the yard and gardens, then sat in the kitchen.  
      
      “How are things at home?” the twenty eight year old contractor asked the boy sitting at his kitchen table.
      “I’m trying to talk Uncle Dave into living with Mom and me,” Nick replied, “and I think it might be a deal.”
      “I hope it works out,” Michael said, adding that he’d seen the pair the day before and thought they somehow looked right together.
      “We talked about you a lot,” the child responded with a shy smile, “that was when he first arrived, two nights ago.  Then I wanted to come be with you yesterday, but he’s real big on patience and at, you know, sort of lingering over things rather than racing along.”
      “One of life’s more compelling ironies,” the man replied: “all through school it’s deadline this and hurry that, then you come to find out that if you slow to almost a dead stop you achieve a superior product.  And the most interesting part about that is that once you’ve learned to excel, lo-and-behold, you can not only pick up the pace, but you’ll become so good, you’ll end up suffering more from not working than you do strain FROM working, and go on to subdue the dogs of mediocrity with a stick of oak and lead.”
      “We talked about the same things,” the now avid boy said, “limits, but what most people would consider to be extreme behavior within those limits.”
      “They’re not built of math,” the host replied, “and you have a mix of the brittle – like rules against hurting anyone – and the flexible, like gambling and speeding, so, in the end, all you can do is talk about it, read a lot, and, if you’re lucky, be able to live just as you said, structured, conformist, and run-of-the-mill most of the time, yet with your own wild, secret garden for other times.”
      “I wonder if by taking away the Garden of Eden,” the boy mused across the table, “they actually gave it to us.  By making what happened there taboo, or at least presenting it as exceedingly unhealthy, they are telling us therein to dwell, returning lo unto them for salvation at a cost of ten percent of ye income.”
      
      “If Dave moves out,” Michael said, “he’s loco.”
      “Yeah,” the boy said, “we really like talking about things [Note: yes, we’re meant to be back in the WWII era, but you know how it is, working two jobs, domestic scene constantly intruding, so, lo-and-behold, as I believe I just said, we’re in the here and now.  I’m gonna ride with it; maybe patch it up later with some editorial nonsense or ‘tother, and since I do most of the writing it would be selfish of me not to allow you the opportunity of writing this little slip off to the charm of reading unedited copy, raw and alive on the Web]; what we read on the Net, how many pensioners can dance on the head of a welder, and when the music industry will realize that its brilliant job is done, it has supplied us with lifetimes of excellent music, and there simply isn’t room in the scheme of things for more lifetimes of what we already have, which is all new if you haven’t heard it; things like that.”
      “Spam’s gone down for the same reason,” Michael noted.  “Saturation.  Put enough salt in a glass of water and you get wet salt at the bottom, try it anytime.  The excess precipitates, something like rain.  Marketing today is extremely front-loaded; practically bulldozers pushing the stuff through your front door.  In the old days it was put something truly better on the market, and advertise it a little.  Now it’s the opposite; put nothing new out, and hype it like it was the Second Coming in an IMAX studio.  Religion and music have both played their roles, and not all that badly or we wouldn’t be here talking about it, but in doing so they’ve given us as much as we can handle, so they should bow proudly and graciously from the scene, and be replaced by a general level of overall literacy.  Science is passé, and, bottom line, Mr. Truman was right when he said the only thing new is the history you don’t know.  That’s it in the open-revolutions department, all others are pointless.”
      
      “Except one,” Nick observed in a shy murmur.
      “Yes, yes,” his friend said, “a union for boys who help with lawns and gardens.  Mowers of the world, unite.”
      “I guess that makes two,” the boy said.
      “What’s the other one?” Michael asked after they’d sat looking at each other for a minute.
      “Freedom,” the boy replied, “I mean, we already have a government that doesn’t imprison us so we can pay huge taxes to the politicians, so that part’s taken care of, but we need another kind of freedom.  You know, the kind where if a boy really likes a man, he can say so, and if he wants to ask a man that he likes certain questions, he can ask them, and if he wants certain things to happen with a man, he can be honest about it and not have it come out all crooked and backwards like some kind of dyslexual revolution.”
      
      Michael Davis looked at Nick Anderson a long, long time.  “Why were they keeping his planet secret?” he wondered to himself, “wouldn’t it be nice if there were more boys like this running around loose?  Witty and droll rather than contentious and adversarial?”  He shook his head.  James Dean.  Kooky, recalcitrant and loutish, those characteristics beloved of the fractious ruling class; the cheap sell of rebellion and conflict with resolution sweetened with the schmaltz of singing violins.  (Those they played well.)  And that brought up the other side of the coin: what if he were common?  Most boys, capable of mouthing off a savagely funny pun with not so much as a sparkle of the eye to lessen the impact of his words, and who knew? by extension, perhaps even some dormant facet of his mind.  And impact it certainly was.  Primal.  Knees to belly.  What had amounted to an affectionate attraction now a blistering fire.  Would these feelings, held by the main, result in pandemic dissolution and degeneration?  Taboo in place and rigorously enforced, laws even unto the penitentiary, wasn’t there dissolution and degeneration to spare?  Seemed to him the matter was weighty enough to signify mortality as the word was used as an alternate to immortality.
      
      “I’m sorry,” Nick murmured shyly, wondering at his employer’s strained expression, “I was just trying to be funny.”
      “Well,” Michael responded, mustering such consciousness he could command to the exigencies of the moment, “it was a little like the Star of Indian trying to dazzle. but that’s just a cold stone so it’s not much of an analogy.”
      “I told Uncle Dave I really like you,” Nick said.
      “Thank you,” the twenty eight year old murmured.
      “We talked quite a bit, especially the first night,” the boy went on, “and, you know, he sends me stuff and we keep in touch, so we’re kind of real friends, so it wasn’t just about whether I thought it would be worse to be a doctor or a lawyer and which athlete should be hanged from the highest yardarm.”
      “I see,” Michael said, letting the child find his way.
      “And some of it was about rules, like maybe if you obey a lot, you know, wholeheartedly or something corny like that, well, that maybe other rules you could interpret or even ignore according to your feelings, you know, if the feelings were really strong and no one else got hurt in any way beyond the normal hurts of being out and about.”
      
      “I see,” the beleaguered adult repeated, swimming in a whirlpool that seemed to have something to do with fission at its vortex.
      “And,” Nick continued, “I was wondering if like when you were a boy you broke any special rules.”
      
      If this was drowning, why was there a  Red Cross?  Who needed air, when life without it was dizzying perfection?  How many gods had associated in his perfect death?  Apparently not as many as were pulling for him, however marginal the chances of survival had seemed for a minute there.
      
      “You don’t have to tell anything,” the child went on, “because a lot of times things like that are really private and secret, and people are embarrassed even if they know someone, especially a little kid, might get really excited if they heard a lot of details about what a man did when he was learning about the things big boys know about.”
      
      The only picture that came to Michael’s mind was of an eighteen-wheel tanker truck with a four-inch hose connected to a cannon size needle inserted into his most accessible vein, the lettering on the truck reading: Elixir of Morphia.  
      
      “Father Patrick had,” the man responded, “a considerable artistic flair.  He thought there was great beauty in certain areas of existence that are normally kept, as you just said, secret and private.”
      “Uncle Dave told me a long story about something that happened to him when he was my age,” Nick said, “and he didn’t leave out any details.”
      “Well,” Michael mused, “that brings up the p. and s. issue in another sense, because I don’t even want to ask you questions about your relationship on the chance it might be kind of fishing to find out if anything is going on.”
      “Mostly we talked about you,” Nick responded, his voice hardly more than a rasping whisper, “about my spending more time with you each time I come over, and how a man can be interested in a boy as more than someone to talk to and an ordinary friend, and how it’s fairly common for the webs of reserve to be broken, so the man and boy do violate some rules together.”
      
      “I see,” Michael murmured, back to the responsiveness of an opiated swimmer coping with a maelstrom.
      
      “And,” the boy continued, “he said the most important thing for a boy, if the rules got broken, was for the boy to have a complete experience, not something just for a couple of minutes, which is why he suggested I spend tonight and Saturday night with you, and go home Sunday morning, if you want me to.”
      “That’s what happened with me,” the man said, his voice matching the low husk of the boy, “Friday until Sunday morning at the Camp of Hades, which the altar boys nicknamed Perspective City.”
      “So it’s a long story?” the boy whispered trying to keep urgency from the excitement in his young voice.
      “’Do we know the devil is all wrong?’ was the guiding theme,” the host said, “and how could we know if there was no degree of consort?  He admitted it was sticking a little intellectual patchwork on things, rationalizing, but there was enough of a point to it that it seemed to all and sundry worthwhile to explore the issue in depth, and if it turned out the devil’s playground was entire unto itself, that would amount to a benchmark when it came to measuring the coercion of religion, while if our time in Hades released us as foul water into the stream, it would amount to sanctification, if in reverse, of steeple and altar.”
      “Poor church,” Nick murmured.
      
      For more minutes the handsome males were content just to look across the kitchen table at each other.
      
      “Uncle Dave asked me some personal questions,” the boy finally whispered.
      “Can you tell me one?” his friend whispered back.
      “It was really personal,” Nick said.
      “That’s okay,” Michael responded, “you don’t have to say anything.”
      “It was about how I felt,” the twelve year old said, “if it was having any, you know, physical effect on me.”
      “How did you answer him?” the young man asked.
      “I told the truth,” Nick replied, “and after that he started answering my questions and telling me about things that might happen if I came and spent the night with you.  How you might let me wear just my underpants while we were alone together, and just wear underwear, too, because I told him you were tall and muscular and I didn’t think you had pecs or a six pack or any of that junk and that you’d look good without your shirt on.”
      
      “Thank you,” the man said like a supplicant taken comfort in incantation.
      “Then we might pretend to wrestle and get sweaty so we’d have to take showers,” the boy went on, “and that I was mature enough so that if I was in the shower and heard the door click behind me I’d tell you to go away if I didn’t want you to come up close behind me and maybe pretend to wash my hair or you’d whisper things to me to be sure I really wanted you to stay with me, and when I nodded that I did, you’d keep whispering and tell me about how you learned.”
      
      “Nick,” Michael said, “I want to ask you something very personal, and you can ignore it if you want, no offense taken, but I was wondering how you’d feel about having someone with us if you want to go upstairs with me.  My paperboy’s younger brother, Miguel.  He’s nine years old.  He comes with Raul when he collects on Saturday mornings; very cute and soft mannered but he always asks if he can come and spend the night sometime, and if you were willing, it would be someone you could play arcade games with.”
      “Will you tell both of us about the Camp of Hades when he gets here?” Nick asked.
      “Yes,” the man replied, going to the telephone.
      
      “We took our clothes off in our bedrooms, then met in the hall in our underpants,” Nick said as he returned to the table, “then he asked if I wanted to come into his room with him, and I did, but we can come back downstairs, instead, and wait for Miguel.”
      
      And just moments before he’d felt so alive, his mind focused, the number dialed correctly first try, coherent, able to understand every word of the giggling voice on the other end of the line, and, what? just seconds ago.  Back to mantra-land.
      
      “Okay,” the contractor intoned softly, instinctively reaching for the hand of the shy-smiling child.  Nick rose, retrieved his backpack, and hand-in-hand they headed upstairs, the host showing his guest the spare bedroom and then disappearing into his own, where he was catastrophically repaid for every ignored snack and neglected dessert of his twenty-eight years.  He looked like a high school swimming champ as he stripped to his briefs, waist the thirty-two inches of a panther build, power in his shoulders dominating a feline rather than primatal torso.  His long legs rippled modestly; function over delineation, and he bulged, thanks to the Camp of Hades, hugely in his white briefs, his boy-hard boner thrusting nearly eight inches to his left where it strained the taut elastic.  Instinctively, Michael knew the boy would also be waiting, allowing for the fact that there time together was essentially unlimited, and any rush would merely be to a closer destination short of the ultimate trip.
      
      Miguel would take ten minutes on his bike so Michael’s reverie lasted five, then he stepped into the hall and waited.  In half a minute the door to the guest room opened, and the hundred pound boy merged, hands at his sides, smiling shyly.  They whispered “hi” and spent the next three minutes looking at each other, then joined hands and returned to the living room just in time to see the bike cross the lawn and disappear into the garage.  Michael opened the door.  The nine year old slipped off his backpack as he arrived and then slowly closed the door behind him, staring at the two slim athletes standing in the foyer.  The host extended his hand and the two of them led the new arrival up to Nick’s bedroom.  They gave the nine year old a few minutes to adjust to his vibrantly new surroundings, then Michael touched Nick’s shoulders, bidding him kneel in front of the younger schoolboy, then kneeling behind him, openly molesting the twelve year old as the youth began with the buttons on Miguel’s shirt.
      
      The boy was a typical beauty in his white briefs, slim with golden skin, raven hair and big brown eyes.  He giggled shyly as the older males gently ran their fingers over him, panting when their hands caressed him high on his inner thighs while he spread his slim legs in welcome.  They moved him to the bed and for half an hour play wrestled together, each arching and panting to the touch of the others as they readied themselves for a nice, long story.
      
      
      
      Smoking days.  That’s when someone wakes me up at nine or ten in the morning leaving me an hour or two short of sleep.  Once underway I have no trouble with ten to twenty hour sessions, but any residual fatigue, and the thought of unfilled pages gets the better of me, so I smoke instead of writing.  I figure domestic intrusions cut my productivity by thirty percent, including whole days like today lost.  Stopped drinking for that very reason, the alcohol interfered with sleeping, and it was easy for a day or more to slip by before things were back in equilibrium.  A cave would be the thing, with a sullen wench to tend to the housekeeping; no clocks, no sun, just sleep and work.  And this is complicated because I’m not in the least temperamental; once up and running can be talking or have the television or music on, people coming and going, with nearly zero impact.  The key thing is being fresh as a daisy at the outset, and I’m going on about it because I feel it’s very good advice to hand on to other writers; a reminder that the discipline is not – as is often stated in writing and seminars on the subject – setting a rigid time – five hours a day is usually suggested – and sticking to it, even if you don’t type sentence one.  More complicated.  Disciplining your life, in general, so there are times when, yes, you get one hundred percent of the sleep you need, then pull out the keyboard and crack your knuckles.  With the five hours a day, I agree, if you sit in a chair.  However, if you can touch type, and have your ‘puter beside you in bed, the five hours goes to eighteen, and I’ve stretched to thirty and more at a session many times.  Perfect comfort, no need to hurry because you’ve got all the livelong day, no squirming and thinking you really should be comfortable because you paid eight hundred bucks for the ergonomic eighty-way-adjustable chair with lumbar vibrator.  Bed.  Head of be raised six or eight inches over the foot of the bed, because even a few degrees of  “tilt” to a semi reclining position is far more comfortable than trying to operate flat on your back, so to speak.  It certainly works for me, so even with domestic overburden I’ve written and published two novels at an average of ten thousand words a day.  And the big factor is what I just said; the time factor.  Having all day.  Instead of rushing for the words, you chill out and let them come to you, which they will in fits and starts, hour after hour, twenty hours, six hours sleep, and twenty more hours, and finally, book after book and year after year.  As in comedy, timing is everything.
      
      Also helpful is a love of bed.  This I find ironic, because of all sects, cults, religions and schisms I admire the Shakers the most, but they deliberately used crude, uncomfortable beds, and hung their chairs on the wall during the day, anything to do with sloth the original sin, and me?  Half or more of the reason I am a writer is that I can do it in bed, pillow in place and a nap five seconds away anytime I feel sleepy.  A morning commute measured in feet and inches.  Any time.  Almost any civilized where.
      
      Added to this is the word processor; the overall beauty of the XP system, and the words trailing across the screen of Word exactly as they’d looked in a book.  Quill and inkpot, typewriter and ribbon, fancy desk and chair, and it would be the cellar for this kid; I’d probably be too lazy to even bother, though I did once manage an 1,103-page typescript on a Commodore 64.
      
      More on the easy way out.  First and foremost, not having to deal with New York, as I would with any mainstream effort.  Stumping for your work, hawking and shilling in Dale Carnegie day-tight-compartments, up and at ‘em, a big drummer boy.  If I’m too lazy to sit in a chair and work, imagine showing up at a Des Moines radio studio at six in the morning.  The second easy out is writing erotica – porn – and, as I’ve mentioned a time or two before – not having to think up a plot.  That’s huge, because they do fine at forming themselves as one goes along without the imperative of sitting down with a notebook and drafting a ten page outline.  Also, no cycles of conflict and resolution; getting your Bond dude into one pickle after another.  Time consuming, even if you’re good at it.  In the same vein, no conflict between characters; arguments, fighting, cheating, beating, lying, killing.  Also huge.  And the cherry on the tart is publishing on ASSTR, which is ultra click and absolutely immediate.  More?  Well, sticking to a formula is way neat as far as productivity goes.  Adult meets child.  Shark attacks village.  K.I.S.S.  Same characters, same voices, same situations; what is left but to indulge in real writing which is breathing warmth, charm and intelligence into the character, then cloning away so the common denominator is more than white underpants.  Another “more” is the spell checker.  I simply wouldn’t work without one, not in this pholish lingo; not without an editor or at least a phreaking dictionary in the house.
      
      I associate it with the formation of the planet.  So many events to give us a stable platform, just for openers, then relative freedom even from the likes of fleas, which, if logic is used, should dominate the biosphere, utterly.  On top of the stable platform and lack of any universal life hazard, we come to issues as disparate as the rare earth elements needed for modern technology, and the melding of Anglo creativity with Asian excellence resulting in the vast intellectual power needed to bring together large groups of brilliant people to create and market the likes of XP and the Canon Elph.  As many facets go into a writer, or at least this one; many elements of fundamental luck, for lack of a better word, and the privileges of at first being able to read and travel, and then in having the free time to commit to the hundred thousand hours of practice  it takes to make it look easy.  And they’d be nothing without a market, and that brings us back to ASSTR where the publication of File 3 netted over two thousand downloads in a few hours, with the other thirty seven titles settled nicely into a solid week-to-week routine.
      
      Is there a word for anti-talent?  It’s a subject of particular interest to one coming from a line of acknowledged geniuses in both the arts (R.W.E.) and commerce and industry (The Bell System, The Burlington Route).  How much was transferred to us two, three, and four generations later?  Pretty close to squat, based on my observations, though, typically, I’d add a footnote explaining I got it all.  I mentioned both grandfathers having steamer trunks loaded with a hundred pounds or more of 16mm movie film.  Anti-talent.  All pictures taken from twenty to thirty feet away; all pictures taken as if shaking the camera would somehow add excitement to the swimming pool and touch football.  Thousands of feet of it, in each case.  As if someone had carefully studied a book on how to take totally unwatchable films and gone for an A in the course.  Many of the fifty-foot reels were spliced onto four hundred foot reels, so someone must have taken some interest after they came back from the lab.  Couldn’t they tell?  What form of anti-talent let them keep making the same page-one mistakes, ad nauseum?  Not only possessing zero sensitivity to the cinematic obviousness of holding the camera still and getting in close enough that you could tell what people looked like, but incapable of learning it even through very extensive practice?  I’ve seen the odd few thousand snapshots in my time, all junk.  As if taking a picture were a matter of snapping the camera – making it go “click” - at something or somebody, with the act of clicking both subject and predicate and the resulting photos some kind of weird dangling participial.   And, again, this is from a family of intellectual giants and men of towering achievements.  Are most people totally insensitive and utterly uncreative; aesthetic dodos?  Or could someone have spent five minutes, each, with my two grandfathers, explained the basics, and turned them into good, and, with practice, perhaps even fine cinematographers?  Is it, in the end, even a good thing or a bad thing?  Sensitivity and artistic flair (often used derisively)?  Or do they set one searching, rarely and perhaps never to be satisfied with what is actually available or achievable, with the funny farm a likely destination as it so often is for religious fanatics with their voices and miracles?  Historically, many cultures have gone through periods of declaring arts decadent and offing scholars and intellectuals along with the poets and painters.  Would that be an idea for the times?  Or should we stick with the tried and true, under which paradigm our creative geniuses universally devote themselves to the albeit attractive medium of the half-minute television ad?  In that this provides a direct link between art and commerce, enabling the latter to fund the former, it may turn out to be the one thing that’s actually right in our head-over-heels quest for extreme materialism at any cost, no matter how deferred.  Me?  I’d take my chances and go for rates of overall literacy bordering on the extreme, nurturing a vague hope the misfits would be found in the library, not liquor cabinets, local shooting galleries, or down at ye cop shop.  Of course food is the ultimate panacea as it performs consistently, always making you fat if you eat too much, and, presumably, showing the world you are very well fed is to show the world you are happy.
      
      And how is lack of talent or appreciation thereof related to general lack of intelligence?  Methinks with an iron bar.  Look at the way we live, if you want absolute proof.  Huge, ironically artistic (as in the builder’s diorama), subdivisions separated by miles of meandering (but artistic) streets and lanes from shop-o-plexes, with nothing in between.  Drive (a lot) or die (soon).  Correspondingly huge houses, great cob-job barns of buildings - when all any family wants is a good computer and entertainment center to huddle around - with the grandparents in a home and the kids at daycare, to and from which one journeys in a two ton utility vehicle with six ta-pocketing cylinders burning petroleum prodigiously, even at zero miles per hour.  If this sketch isn’t an accurate delineation of a total lack of civic intelligence, someone better write and set me straight.  I say you are absolutely insane, and will pay catastrophically for it, what do you say?  I say for all your tech wizardry, wealth, and education, with all media, all day, you have managed to establish the lowest common denominator of general life quality in human history, and most of it won’t be paid for for decades.  And yes, television now offers pills for both body and mind, from the heartburn you get from the knowledge you ain’t gonna make it to prescriptions for you dog if the old critter isn’t as responsive as he once was, but are these enough?  I say they just add to your debt load as do the credit cleaners and refinaciers.  Huff-and-puff, a mouse could blow your house down.
      
      Playing with a thing called Picasa, a photo album and mailing application being promoted by Kazaa.  Comes with a thing called Hello, which is also a photo mail utility.  Coming to find out the .pdd extension on PhotoDeluxe images is unbeknownst to the digiphoto world, but I guess it’s just a matter of converting them to JPEGs, which would be easier if I didn’t have 999 images in my “keeper” file.  Lot a nuisance to get identical results, and a total laugh at you folks who love apple and other non-Gates software.  This is how it would all be, but for Sir William.  Entire protocols and execution plans needed for every last thing you wanted to do, for, in the end, the same result.  A millstone on the industry, though, in a backhanded way they’re reaping windfall earnings because people have to buy one thing after another to get something that works.   The Hello program first asked me for a password, then, without my changing the log-on, went on to inform me it was wrong, and now it won’t even open off the active desktop.  I bought a car but there’s not place for the key.  It’s all a horrible reprise of getting the Canon drivers sorted out, and in the end I’ll have to pay Dean to teach me to use it, this after at least a hundred thousand hours on personal computers.  Time and again, it’s the identical problem.  Instructions written by tech staff who assume things (for example, that everyone knows the Canon S400 is also the IXUS 400), and leaves out key-in-the-ignition data.  You have to be dead sharp, financially well off, and able to spend hours clicking at nonsense to use these systems together, and even then, as with “MSN Messenger,” they sometimes simply will not function (on top of which, this particular piece of louseware adds two full minutes to boot up, and seems incapable of learning I want nothing to do with it).  On the bright side, like domestic intrusion, it does yield up the odd bit of subject matter.
      
      Message to industry from number one user and heavy consumer: make everything work together, first time, all the time, and you’ll see sales figures that will blow your mind.  The computer is vastly too complex not to be an appliance.  The learning curve for advanced features is at a tough collegiate level requiring high intelligence, great dedication, and hundreds of hours.
      
      
      If I end up in an epic struggle here, you’re going to hear about it.  Good, get me pissed.  I remember downloading a 90M game, then diligently searching the FAQs until, in the next to last one, at the end of a hundred or more on technical stuff, was one question:  Will you ever release a single-player  version of XYZ?  Answer: when hell freezes over.  Got me, did you?  My turn.  How about your layoffs; your stomach churning careers in tech, where age is multiplied by ten and being goofy is a given?  Go to it you little whizzers, dig your graves deep and square.  Piss me off.  Burn my time like it was free and make me feel like a moron because I deem the machine a tool, not a hobby gadget.  I could be getting on with K.C. this very moment, but you’ve cost me so now it’s my turn.  You’ll suffer along, bozos, and if it’s ten thousand words, tuff luck.  What you do is demonstrate the latent elitism and brute hypocrisy of anything to do with democracy and a classless society.  As soon as you have a little whiz kid knowledge about cyberspace, your first instinct is to obscure it from non-clubbers, as if everyone had your task-specific IQs and vast amounts of time to work around your quirky input.  Personally, I’d rather spend the time peeling your skins off and hanging them on the Net to dry.  You’ll be old faster than you can fart.  Learn to dread it now, and having to cope with arrogant young bumpkins just like you – WERE.  
      
      All I want to do is send a picture.  By the same random fickleness built into the Canon installation procedure, I’ve managed to send two that I think went out.  Six hours later, at a cost of several thousand words of engaging fiction, I still can’t get my images in PhotoDeluxe to display anywhere as mailable JPEGs, or anything.  Follow six or seven perfectly obvious dialogues, then something’s missing, and start all over again, time and again.  Just to send a picture from the Adobe major brand product, over an XP system updated this very day, and using a Microsoft-sourced version of MS Messenger.  Blocked at even getting alternate copies to display the way everyone needs them.  All common, mainstream stuff, swept with updated Norton.  What else am I meant to do?  Why was I able to, a, upload a bunch of random test images from the Canon, while I was struggling with it, and, b, send two pictures, but no others?  Is the secret PhotoDeluxe is an iron-box proprietary system, only useable with plug-ins and a compatible recipient, but nobody wants to tell?  Does the image I want to convert remain in its original file, with a duplicate JPEG, or is it changed?  If I transfer a picture from My Pictures, does a copy remain in the original file, or do I then have to delete it?  Simple stuff, and it’s like plucking a chicken from the inside.  Adobe, Microsoft, Kazaa, all huge names, and all I want to do is mail a picture.  Not only am I going to bore you fucking stupid with this account, however long it takes, but I’m going to keep at it through the process of transferring my images onto CDs in a readily usable format.  Make it tough for me, and you’ll get kicked where it hurts the most.  All of this should have been, three or four years ago, click, click, click.  Nothing I want to do is a hair’s breadth off what the vast majority want to do.  Take pictures and send them as JPEGs.  Burn images onto a compact disc.  And if this ends up costing me money, you’re really screwed.  I’ll take a sabbatical at the rate of one day for each dollar I have to spend to bother a tech who has better things to do than come out and click me through the procedures of transferring, naming, sizing, reducing, and sending a 4 X 6 photo or short video clip; procedures a ten year old should be able to accomplish intuitively.  Too bad, because Word XP works flawlessly and we could be steaming along at flank speed.  
      
      I’m right and you’re wrong.  I wrote “Byte Magazine” several times in the early Eighties, telling them to knock off the “Scientific American” rejects and orient the magazine toward ME.  They did not respond.  “Computer Shopper” came along and did.  Turned “Byte” into a half-size parody of “Popular Mechanics.”  And look at “C.S.,” you wise guys, it’s a shell of what it was in the early Nineties; practically nothing.  Ding-dong anybody awake?  You’ve saturated the tech savvy, power user market.  We’re what’s left.  Tens of millions who want to know the machine to no greater extent than we know the automatic transmission in our cars, we just want to send pictures. 
      
      I remember a softball game from a couple of years ago.  Cute thing; choose a team, practice, play.  In twenty or thirty tries, my team never got a man on base, while the computer played like dream Yankees.  To me such a product is lethal to the self-esteem and psychological comfort of a child, and, as monarch, I’d deport the designers and marketers.  Games, particularly, are rife with extremely bad writing.  They do not lead you in, as a book does, let you keep your place as you work your way into the story; they have three or four imbecile levels, then become impossible.  One called “Sam’s Sock Works” or something like that, at the seventh level, gave five seconds to make 126 choices of levers, conveyors, gates and chutes.  Yes, this particular game could be re-shuffled so this level might not come up, but it was always lurking, and killed the game as precisely as I’m killing this story, FOR EXAMPLE.  What goes around comes around, piss me off and get pissed on; waste my time, and kiss yours good-bye.  No cute little columns of asterisks, and I’m just the craftsperson to ease back into K.C. in long paragraph form, so you won’t even be able to seek out passages of dialogue or quote marks, and, for all you know, my struggles may go on for twenty pages, or fifty.  I’m going to keep trying, I got where I am, number one purveyor of fiction in the world, by doing so, and it’s your tough luck to either give up in despair and download someone else or read on, hoping, at the very least, I see something funny in having my tail pulled by quirky geniuses.
      
      Three things, actually; mailing, the CD, and I’d like to do a Web site on ASSTR.  I have a picture of myself captioned: Thomas Cochran Emerson, Dangriga Belize, Dec., ’03, Greatest artist in history and unassuming nonpareil.  You really wanna see it.  Also S. and the gang.  I browsed through a few dozen the other day and they all had long warnings about being eighteen and stuff.  Ranged from Big Blue slick to basic typing and links.  Couldn’t understand why they were there, in the first place, since very few had any content, maybe a third rate photo, and all the stories were in the FTP section.  But how would I find out?  I couldn’t figure out how to rotate a picture on PhotoShop, then spent two hours online downloading one guide after another, one of which had the single ugliest picture I’ve ever seen in my life, and still couldn’t rotate the image from landscape to portrait.  Since I’m the number one content producer in the world, I think I’m qualified to say it’s always the machine, never me.  When the machine works, I turn out tons of stuff, copy or pictures.  When I’m stopped, it’s because the computer won’t complete some bread-and-butter task because the geniuses who designed the product can’t be bothered with those who aren’t a little, wink-wink, cognizant.  
      
      Spleen vented and bladder, well, you know, discharged, I’m off to try again, and you better cross your fingers your artist in residence doesn’t go down the tubes leaving you stuck, high-and-dry, on Bitch Island.  
      
      
      Picasa swears on a stack of bibles it will collect by date all JPEGs.  I convert from .pdd to .jpg.  The images come up in “Deluxe” labeled as JPEGs, but, although some are in the Picasa files, it won’t take any others.  Uninstalled, deleted and redownloaded and reinstalled Hello.  Apparently it allows no access while offline, something conveniently left out of all descriptions.  And they’re all such pretty things.  So much time and effort into the graphics and interface; Picasa has a sort of clock timeline thing, and swings images by in several ways.  But it utterly refuses to allow files from PhotoDeluxe, which means you’re all but doomed to a litany fully intended to irritate my subjects as much as they – the supposed best of them – are irritating me.  I’m not going to get mad and quit, I’m going to get mad and grind you into dust.
      
      It’s really difficult getting a handle on the intellectual facets of this syndrome of dumb brilliance; a sort of smart-alecy, hit-the-market glibness, while forgetting to tie your shoes.
      
      One bright idea, work-around, after another.  Yes, I can get Outlook Express to send a photo, but at 2.5M.  As if.  And “Deluxe” has low res pix, but will neither hand them over to Picasa or Hello, or attach them via MS Messenger.  Totally refuses, no matter what.  I suppose the next step is to send the reduced images to My Docs, then insert them from there.  As if that folder isn’t full enough, already.  What a ridiculous hassle.  The Japanese beat us all but to death, and have actually probably done just that, but we don’t know it yet, by standardizing.  You can plug a Yamaha into a Kenwood into a Pioneer, and it works for ten years without a hitch.  Not the American way.  Proprietary empires.  The Wright Bros. hamstrung developments in aviation for years with endless patent litigation.  And the exception who proves the rule is our old family friend, Mr. Bell, who had to defend his telephone patents six hundred times in court, thus forming the greatest single entity of all time.  But that was then and this is now.  None of these products are revolutionary, they’ve been around for most of a decade, and they don’t work, can’t be made to work even by a highly experienced, if not “power” user.  Who wins when you do?  
      
      Well, let me try the My Docs workaround.  Shit.
      
      No luck there.  This is a whole day gone, for nothing.  For learning perhaps a dozen things I may not do.  Gee, I guess that means I must be to stupid to write more stories.  And as a neat little twist, the images that did – somehow – make it on to Picasa are gorgeous, rich and almost needle sharp even top-to-bottom on my 19” monitor.  In slide-show mode, they show, at first, quite fuzzy, but clicking them sharpens them, something that happens instantly.  Can’t, for the life of me, figure out why they don’t pop up sharp, I mean, doesn’t it defeat the purpose of an automated slide show to have to manually click each image?  Kooks.  Fortunately, all my hours of opening and closing my “keeper” images and dicking around with them doesn’t seem to have hurt the originals, in spite of being stuck on the starting line.  Save Changes?  No, and maybe that’s the whole problem, but I assume it means save the changes as the image is stored in “Deluxe,” not in Picasa, and if I click Yes, I may ended up turning a beautiful photo into a pixilated glob fit only to be mailed – small.  
      
      I just thought of another workaround.  I’ll throw the images up on the monitor, re-photograph them with the Elph, then try saving them in one of my other editing suites for possible transfer into either Picasa or Hello, and then mailing or transferring to disk.  
      
      I’m going to post this, as fucking is.  Ball is in your court.  Over two thousand people downloaded File 3 in a few hours.  Since the piece has a nice, lurid title, I can assume the same for this File.  So one of you better grab a racket and write a thoughtful composition on how I get MS Messenger working and make .pdd files available for mailing as jpegs and also how I can pack them, at high resolution, onto an accessible CD.  No more Michael, Nick and Miguel until you cooperate.  (And yes, it will be acceptable to put “Bonehead” in the Subject Line, as long as you dish the 411.  Bye-bye.)
      
Sex with Boys and Girls – End File 4

xxx 
      

