vituperation

February 16, 2004

You know what sucks? Sitting down to write an entry with the distinct notion that there was something funny you wanted to write about, but can’t for the life of you remember what it was.

Instead, I’ll give you a few random thoughts.

I left a chunk of the conversation with Ms. Big West Coast Agent out of the last entry. She asked me if I’d be willing to add a section about how my views of myself as a sexual being changed while I was physically changing.

I’m a guy. Never in my life (until that conversation) had the words "sexual" and "being" been put together in a sentence or thought by me. So I told her that. I also pointed out that I addressed the physical aspects of sexuality that were changed as a result of losing weight, and that was pretty much as deep into it as I got. Guys like sex, period, and we don’t think of ourselves as any kind of "being".

We’re guys. Depth isn’t part of our makeup.

I suspect the 99.7% of my readers who are female know what she’s talking about. My three male readers know what I’m talking about.

She also hemmed and hawed about my use of Bible passages in the book, but she didn’t want to come right out and say anything negative because she’d assumed I was a thumper.

Heh.

When I set her straight on that, she wanted to know why I used the Bible quotes. I explained that (a) just because I don’t subscribe to the tenets of Christianity doesn’t mean there’s no good information to be found in the Bible (for that matter, I also quoted from the Koran and Buddha later in the book) and (b) since the vast majority of Americans do subscribe to the tenets of the Bible, wouldn’t it make sense to use that as a base point to explain something?

I don’t think I got my point across.

Oh yeah, she also told me she thought she could get my book sold within 90 days. While part of me knows that any agent who can sell a book in three months is doing good, another part of me says Holy shit! Three months?

Have I mentioned before that I’m an impatient bastard?

Mr. Big East Coast agent suspects that my referral to Slim-Fast as "sugar-water" might scare off big publishers. I told him I could tone it back a notch, but that I stood by my belief. Note the number of celebrity Slim-Fast pimpers who never do a second commercial.

I’ve found that even though no face to face interaction with a person happens when you buy a book on half.com, I still managed to feel like a dork yesterday when I ordered The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. Just to make me seem a little weirder, I also ordered a book about a particular concentration camp in Lublin, Poland.

How is it that I manage to do so many things that make me feel like a freak?

Speaking of books, though I’m currently reading The Haunted Air (go, Repairman Jack) on the fiction side, I’m also reading The Holocaust on the side.

Those Nazis were some bastards. Seriously.

You get a feel for the Holocaust from the movies, sure, but nothing hits you like reading the diaries of and interviews with people who lived it. It’s stunning in its scope.

Two thumbs WAY up for the book, even though I’m only up to 1940 (about 120 pages into 800+).

Saturday morning I took Stanley to the vet for a [insert long name of steroid that helps allergies here] shot. While there, they weighed him (8.5!) and checked his temperature. He was a sport about both, even having a greasy thermometer shoved rudely up his ass. He purred through it all.

(Note: mentioning that Stanley has allergies was not a solicitation for advice on how to treat them)

Back home, I picked him up, pressed him against my chest and carried him upstairs to tell Robyn what a good boy he’d been. I set him on the bed.

"What’s that?" Robyn asked, pointing at the front of me.

I looked down. Centered on the front of my white t-shirt like an obscene third nipple was a brown ring about the size of a penny. It looked like an eye staring back up at me.

A brown eye.

I had a greasy poo ring (one ring to rule them all!) on my shirt, a Stanley special ass stamp.

I guess I should feel honored, but for some reason I don’t.

The asstigator. I hope he feels as mortified as he looks.