Mehitobel Wilson: writer, reader, chronic curmudgeon.

Tomboy bombshell cowgirl; lover of funk, attracted to roadsides.

Besotted with spots.

Friend to sleaze.

Admirer of filthy films, fleshy steaks, Hong Kong rap, new felt and pocket-knocking 8-balls; prefers 10 gallons of hat and 4 fingers of Jack.

Procrastination here breeds urgency there. Urgency begets sharper fiction. The dream: hone it to a splinter, and sink it deep.

So I'm here.

Not Too Old for This Shit?

Today I turned 28. That's such a nice, curvy number. It seems like a nice adult number, too. Though I wrote fiction all along, I didn't want to start publishing it until I was 25 (so said the little writing schedule I made myself when I was 20 or so) because - I was a kid, what the hell could I say that was at all applicable? Even my big adventures, stuff that screamed "I shall someday be story fodder," needed, I figured, a few years' worth of reflection before I could fairly approach them in fiction. Now I'm starting to feel like I'm old enough to justify my viewpoint of How The World Is, and therefore take myself a bit more seriously. (Never TOO seriously, of course - but at least I no longer feel like I have no right to say anything.)

Stay tuned - in a couple of weeks I'll have scads of photographs for the curious. Photos of my junkyard (literally) dawg, photos of my Atlanta adventures, and maybe, just maybe, photos of myself - but don't count on that last.

My last issue of Gothic.net will contain KICKASS content. I'm psyched as shit. I hope y'all dig it.

And away I go.

posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 2:01 AM

Relaxiomatic

In 1995, I had a vacation, kinda. I went to LA for a week and had an interesting, if not pleasant, time. In 1997 I had another vacation, in a manner of speaking: I'd just gotten divorced and moved back South, and my friend Alison flew down to visit. We went to Charleston jazz clubs, met Mel Torme, gorged on seafood and boiled peanuts, and painted my parents' barn.

Then I reentered the work force, and have had one (1) week off since then, during which I went to San Francisco for Thanksgiving 1999 to visit my best fiend (fiendish indeed), Julian Danger, and be a bum. Damn, that was a good time. I spent most of my time lounging on his Market Street porch and catching up on Ramsey Campbell novels during the day, and hanging out with shaggy, beautiful strangers at night. Jul's roomates and I watched movies and chased cats. The Gothic.net posse held a dinner party and Copyeditrix Allegra had me over to her house (which meant I got to walk home, slightly liquored and very tired, alone at 3am in a strange city. I loved that part, too.)

"You just laid around and read? You slept until the afternoon most days? You hung out at people's houses and watched cable, you went to the movies, you saw a couple bands - and that's it? You wasted that whole vacation!"

Hell, no. I reveled in it. As you can tell, it's been nearly two years and I'm still sucking the last scraps of relaxation from my teeth.

Since then I've taken a day off here and there to go to conventions, but conventions aren't vacations at all. One still must get dressed and present oneself. One really can't just blow off the convention activities in favor of floppiness: hell, the expense is too great to justify floppiness. When I'm paying that much money for anything, I'm damn well going to be out of my room. In Seattle I once locked my key in my room on purpose so I couldn't easily go back and hide/flop/wind down.

Weekends, I catch up on sleep and on non-office work. Weeknights, I take a nap, then wake up and work. Any time spent not working is time spent fretting about not working. And since I'm such a capable employee at the office, when my boss left last year, they didn't see why they should hire anyone to fill her slot: I do it all, run the whole department. I AM the whole department. It's hard to cross the hall for coffee, much less leave the area for any useful amount of time. I have 29 unused vacation days racked up at this point.

The miserable thing about this situation is that it seems normal: hordes of American workers are "given" vacation days that they aren't actually allowed to take, or, if they are (grudgingly) told that yes, they may leave for a week or two, they won't allow themselves to do it. They'd either fear that their jobs would fall to shit while they were absent, or that they wouldn't be missed at all, and their jobs would suddenly be seen as irrelevant. So we all work ourselves to death.

Is it worth it? I guess so, if "worth it" means keeping a job. Past jobs I've worked, warehouse jobs and manual labor gigs, haven't had such lovelies as "vacation days" and "insurance." But I'm starting to really wonder: what good are benefits that you can't use? What good is my dental insurance when I can't leave the office for an appointment? I had a wisdom tooth plucked last holiday season and was back at work the same day - bleeding everywhere and drooling on my keyboard, but saving the day nonetheless.

Oh, Americans, what the fuck is wrong with us?
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 1:45 AM

Much too much, much too young

I exhausted all my essay-writing skills on a real live essay, so this is just a wonky little journal-entry thing.

August! This is an awfully exciting month. I'll be 28 this month, which isn't very exciting at all, because I never know how old I am and thought I'd been 28 all year long already.

This month I get to turn in my last-ever content for Gothic.net, which means that fiction is on the horizon: I sold porn to the Brits and nasty vicious fiction (and accompanying ranty nonfiction) to Brainbox 2: Electric Boogaloo, and some imaginary Brooklyn man is angry about mustard and Arlo Guthrie. Things are looking odd, if not up, and odd is often more entertaining.

In the space of a single week this August, I (then legitimately 28) shall be engaged in a variety of disparate activities. More properly, I shall point mine eyes at an array of wildly varying entertainments. I shall see Cats! The Musical, and will shackle myself to the mezzanine so as not to accidentally join the feline fray. (The Rum Tug Tugger doesn't care for a cuddle.) Shortly thereafter I shall see Arab on Radar play. Then I shall lay flat on my back in a hotel room for a couple of days, staring at cable, sucking expensive Mountain Dew from my ice-filled sink, and wait for my compatriots to arrive.

Once they do, we shall sally forth and be absorbed by the mighty Green Room at DragonCon, whereupon I shall sit on my ass for endless hours while sweet gentlemen deliver all manner of unidentified liquor items to the recumbent Bel Beast. At some point during this time I shall, experience has shown, do the following things:

1. Become deeply appalled at the behavior of everyone else
2. Eavesdrop so hard that I get caught
3. Demand that they turn off HBO's Real Sex and find me MonsterVision instead (even though it's now cancelled)
4. Storm out of the room in search of MonsterVision my ownself
5. Get pulled off-course by the devastating pheromonal draw of menfolk dressed as Stormtroopers (don't ask, I can't answer)
6. While in stealthy pursuit of Stormtroopers, get thrown over the shoulder of at least one Klingon
7. Draw blood. I've drawn blood every year so far. I wish I had photos of Robert's cherry-tomato eyeball.

Somewhere in there I'll make an attempt to be professional but everyone will be too drunk to notice, and I'll give up and answer questions about my tattoos.

Speaking of tattoos, I have this cruddy self-poked owl on my left wrist. It needs to be covered, but I've spent ten years trying to figure out what ought to go there. Yesterday, when I realized I'd left the house without a single Karloff-Monster totem, it occurred to me that I could ink a monster right there. I could even have this stupid sight gag wherein I tattoo the image from my Karloff watch there, and I could take off my watch and the face would remain. Ho ho ho.

Ages ago I bought a book from this Ebay seller; his ID is Frankenstein (yay!) and I have a crush on his arm. And his tattoo artist. Sweet goddamn, how fine is that?

If I spent more time working and less time being such a dork, somebody somewhere might respect me.

Yes, I need a vacation. Naps and seafood just aren't cutting the Arlo, here, are they.

posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 11:21 PM