Shad r[ach, Meshach, and Abedneg]oe

"... there blazes in my memory like a comet the day when [my mother] came home from Hollins market complaining with bitter indignation that the fishmongers there—including old Harris, her favorite—has begun to *sell* shad roe. Hitherto... they had always thrown it in with the fish. Worse, she reported they had now entered upon an illegal combination to lift the price of the standard shad of twenty inches... from forty cents to half a dollar. When my father came home for lunch and heard this incredible news, he predicted formally that the Republic would never survive the Nineteenth Century." 

—H.L. Mencken, 'The Baltimore of the Eighties' (1940)

So how come I don’t make him squirt? Or, So how squirt I don’t make him come?

 I recognize the movie just as the rookie cop goes to get a cup of coffee: I remember that he’s going to see something amiss over by the coffee maker, something that triggers him because he recognizes evidence of an actual trigger in the hands of a notorious madman and there will be explosive violence that drives the rest of the plot and fuck! I hate this movie, did Paul put it on again? I run down the hallway from the coffee maker scene but I am too late; I see with chagrin that I am closest to the crazy guy with the gun and am therefore the first person he captures as a hostage. There are several others, of course. There is a long, drawn-out section of the movie all about hostage endurance and the crazy’s guy’s craziness. I am not always his focus; sometimes I am barely a walk-on. But this time, it appears, we actually bond.

He’s got all his hostages completely under his thumb now—the gun is ever present—so he settles down on the floor next to where I’m sitting, leaning against a wall of windows in the institutional hallway, just off the confluence of hallways where I first was ta’en hostage. I’ve been trying to remember what happens in this version but, no, wait a minute, this is definitely new: crazy guy settles down to rest under a blanket and he puts his feet up on my lap. I’m pretty sure this is mean as a provocation—See, look what I can do and you can’t do anything about it!—but when it comes down to brass tacks there is no other movie in the universe than Brain Needs Smut, so... his feet, which started stockinged, are bare and he is kneading my (bare) thighs with them. It’s still a provocation, of course: he’s daring me to touch his feet and threatening immediate violence if I do. Also, he’s pushing me down the hallway as he kneads: we’re both sliding along the floor, slowly, against the glass window.

Gradually the original focus on the hostage-taker degrades. By the time we reach the end of the long hallway, there are other people walking around doing other things; we are only one thing among many (and whoever sees that way heals his heart, without knowing it, from various ills—Czeslaw Milosz). He has been villain-talking and it’s gotten more and more explicitly sexual. His feet and ankles and slick with sweat. I finally parry his threatening talk with ‘Oh, come on—I could make you squirt in a heartbeat.’ I still do not touch his feet but the non-touching is now the erotic part. Do I say ‘I know you want me to’ or just rehearse saying it?

This erotic impasse take a weird turn. Not exactly sure how: it must be one of us mentions a mythical-mystical authority figure—say, the Wizard of Oz or Doctor Benway—and as each of us is certain he knows the good doctor (or whoever) better than the other and that the latter’s sympathies would lie with him in this situation, we finally resolve to hie us, as it were, off to see the wizard.

I do not perceive how the change happens, but the crazy hostage-taker with the gun is now very much the embodiment of Kirikou (from Kirikou et la sorcière [1998]). This short, naked, brown baby leads me by the hand out the double-doors at the end of the hallway onto the concrete landing and to the left where a series of stadium stairs lead us up, finally, to the rooftop deck. There are more and more people milling human-herdlike around us as we go; the entire hostage plot is gone but the little boy leading me is still a formidable antagonist—which is one of two reasons, the other being that we’re both naked, I’m wondering why nobody is paying any attention to us.

Anyway: we come up on the roof and follow a bustling crowd of humans around anticlockwise until we see the uber-antagonist we were aiming for: except now it is a woman, a fabulous hipster guru in diamond-encrusted spectacles; and her temple, her throne, her funky-styled, famous-and-infamous oracular headquarters is a wee corner of this roof where she has a barber-type chair in a single booth, garish in red vinyl and pop art. It is clear—it is known—that everyone wants an appointment with this woman: everyone wants in her chair and can’t nobody get there; what is less clear is whether the chair and the booth are for cosmetology, optometry, or dentistry. But despite the impossibility of seeing this fashionista demigoddess, when we reach her she is madly happy to see us. Like she has been waiting for nobody but us. I suppose she is la sorcière in this story—she has a name but it is lost in the waking—only she and Kirikou are now in cahoots and let the fucking nations just quake about that. There’s a crescent moon above and this whole scene is gloriously rad: it’s a perfect cinematic mythmaking moment, the love child of Jim Jarmusch and Keith Jarrett.

Mind you, these are still vicious, violent antagonists; they’re just in a good mood right now, like technicolor Batman villains, whooping it up and having a grand old time. I remind myself of this as this scene morphs to a sort of drugstore counter with an adjacent optometrist office: of the peril that remains, that could be set in motion by any false word or action that spoils the effervescent good mood of our villain (still the hostage-taker only now she is a punkish teenage girl who is too cool for me and everyone else around her). A random, NPC optometrist is chucklingly sharing with us her usual advice for mothers buying their offspring their first pairs of glasses: ‘Buy extra. Buy a dozen.’ I wholeheartedly agree with the advice.

Although I am still, technically, a hostage, I have some wandering space. I happen upon a fanzine—no idea what the publication called because this particular issue consists entirely of a novel called /Snuck 2/ and that title is prominent on the cover. It’s a Buffyverse novel and its antagonist is none other than the young women I have left sitting at the counter just over there (the obvious villain analog here is Glory) whereas I am wending my way through the tall grass and wondering if I can just vanish. I flip through the novel, noticing how ‘Snuck 2’ is printed in gray text in a different font face as the first word on every verso page and the last on every recto—rather than being a headword—and reminding myself of all the evils this malefactor has wrought.

pring straining

We're a third of the way through spring training and I ain't seen shit. Last year this time I had already seen 8 games. I need to get to the Gulf Coast this weekend and use the Pirates tix I already bought. 

Speaking of the Pirates, Jared Jones remains one of the most beautiful men in baseball.

Still in competition though adding a bit seedily, Yoan Moncada—whom CWS omitted to option last fall—got picked up by LAA on a 1-year, $5 million contract.

Many, though not all, spring training stadia are using what MLB has dubbed the 'automated ball & strike' (ABS) system. It does not obviate the home plate ump—yet—but the pitcher, catcher, or batter can challenge a ball/strike call by tapping their helmet immediately. The electronic optics, repaired in animation on the jumbotron, instantaneously confirm or overturn the call. Each team gets two mistaken challenges.  The technology has been there for years, so it's not surprising to see the experiment. I have no doubt this will eventually be adopted in the regular season, though that is not planned for this season.

The word for today is 'inguinal'

 ... as in 'The fungi in our inguinal crease are not the same ones on our heel pad or behind our ear'

All to the what now?

 Chapter VI of Hardy Boys book 10, What Happened at Midnight, begins like this:

"WELL, I guess we're ready to go," Chet announced as he gave his hands a final wipe in an effort to rid them of some of the grime and grease that stuck after the repair job.

"Will she run?" questioned Frank.

"Like a sewing machine!  Step on the starter and see."

Frank did so.

"All to the Worcestershire sauce," he announced.  "Let's go!"

"Gresham?" questioned Chet.

"Where else?"

What in the hell does that mean? Googling the exact phrase 'all to the worcestershire sauce' turns up four references, all quoting this book.

The fuck, Leslie?

Hal Rockland

Gay-for-pay 1990s porn heart- and cock-throb Hal Rockland marks a half century on earth today.

Hardy Hard Hard: A Disclaimer

As you might have noticed by now (for the exactly zero valid values of 'you' that are not also 'me'). I am on a project to rewrite the Hardy Boys books as erotica. Various folks have pointed out this is a risky business, especially inasmuch as the original books (from 1927 to 1959[?])—at least those by Leslie McFarlane—gave Frank Hardy's age as 16 and Joe Hardy's as 15. Despite there being every possibility that two boys in their mid-teens should be well adjusted and mature in their experience of lust—enough to seize sexual agency where and when and with whom they want—it is obviously not legally ok to write pornography about a 15 year old.

By 1959 when the Stratemeyer Syndicate began a systematic 'update' of the original novels (including a number of complete rewrite with new plots), the brothers' aged had been upped 2 years, to 18 and 17. 

I personally feel it is more obscene to insist a 17-year-old is necessarily 'a child'—and that any sex shared with that 17-year-old by someone above 18 is necessarily molestation—than it is to write fiction that includes and celebrates that kind of sex. But I also maintain I have no interest, as I plod along from middle age to old age, in having sex with youngsters. 

What does continue to interest me is the years in my own life roughly between 13 and almost 18 when I was burning for sexual activity and had no idea how to initiate it. In my freshman year of high school (14–15), I spent every second of second period wishing, with exquisite, feverish, horned-up self-torture, that I could figure out a way to get my mouth on Coach Treen. I had never seen a more beautiful pair of thighs in my life. They were like double-wide trailers, only for legs. And had I had the wherewithal to attempt that contact—and had Coach Treen agreed, which seems unlikely—then it would have been an unforgivable insult to me, my agency, and my rights as a thinking human being to arrest him for having had sex with a minor. (A minor in his charge as a teacher—yes, ok, that's valid: he definitely should not have agreed even if I had gotten up the gumption to proposition him.) 

But the point is, that's one of any number of persons/occasions throughout my teen years where I wish to this day I had had some sort of mentor—a slutty older brother, a gay uncle, whatever—that could have advised me on the art of getting my dick wet. Because holy fuck I woulda. That being the case, what right have I to deny Frank and Joe Hardy their own sexual enlightenment, fulfillment, apotheosis?

Anyway, told you that to tell you this: What I'm writing is parody, so it doesn't matter what ages Mr. McFarlane or any of the rest of the Franklin W. Dixon brigade assigned to these two youngsters: for my purposes, Frank and Joe Hardy are of the legal age of consent.

Oh, by the way: when the first episode of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries series aired on ABC on 19770130, Parker Stevenson, who played Frank Hardy, was 24, and Shaun Cassidy, who played Joe, was 18.