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.

Flights of Fancy

I went to Providence, RI over Thanksgiving, and flew into (and later, out of) Boston. Now, know this: I put down roots in about 3.4 seconds, and get mighty territorial. I settle in quickly. However, I also - probably as a balance to this - like to travel. I like the process of traveling. Seeing other towns, other cities - that's not important, really, because I'm now certain that it's all the same everywhere, and that the only real reasons to pick a city in which to live are the weather and the food. Folks is folks, right?

But the transit itself, and watching other people in motion, is always fascinating. (Of late I've had a disappointing habit of conking out on at least one leg of whatever flight I've taken, which sucks, because I'm missing stuff. Plus I could get licked in my sleep. Trust me, it happens.)

You already saw, an entry or two ago, how I feel about Greyhound. I didn't get into how I feel about airports, though.

It's not a trip without something getting fucked - the worst time was when my car dropped an axle on the way to catch a flight to LA. I abandoned the car in, literally, the middle of the road, and hitched a ride to the airport. Missed the flight anyway, and lost the car.

Eh.

This time, things went fine for me, though my esteemed host, Jeff, was two hours late to work after retrieving me from Logan because the traffic was berserk. I'll forever be guilty about that, ya know.

Anyhap, airports. Aaaaiiirrrports. I always liked - or rather, was intrigued by - the vibe in the terminals. There was anxiety, depression, hope, love, irritation. There were lone wolves on missions, there were couples sitting sadly silent while waiting for the moment of separation, there were reunions at the gates, and weepy goodbyes. There were businessfolk who knew all the support personnel by name, local barflies macking on chicks, hookers gone fishing, college kids with Guatemalan satchels picking their toes, and folks crashed out, waiting for their next flight.

I liked the strange anticipation. I liked the comings, goings, stayings, and leavings. I liked the droppings-off and pickings-up.

Now, of course, only ticketed folks get past security.

[Digression: I dig seeing men with guns galore. I dig that the guards made me take off my boots so they could x-ray them; only the zippers or the shanks were setting the thing off, but I've worn high-shaft steeltoes through security before and always wondered, they didn't even check for a knife. I will always laugh about the close call I had after the pat-down - I nearly had to go to a little get-nekkid room, thanks to my truly dangerous underwires. There's a special jiu-jitsu move called "folding the fox" in which you grab a pilot's head with your chest and pop his throat with underwires... nah. Besides, I always thought the "wires" were actually nylon, like dog bones. Guess not. And my ego is pleased that every single person who checked my ID slitted their eyes and said, "This doesn't look like you at all." I usually have to pay people to say that. This time it almost kept me off a plane, though.]

Only ticketed folks get past security, yeah. This changes the way the terminals feel, and I really believe that much of the strangeness people sense in airports now is as much due to that as it is to any travel/death anxieties.

It's also much harder to run out for a cigarette.






posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 12:02 PM

Wow

Let's see, a few announcements are in order:

1. My website, mehitobel.com, is undergoing some changes, and may be wonky for a few days. I'm hoping that the changes will be seamless and invisible, but if it does go down entirely, come back in a day or two, if you were looking for something in particular.

2. Robert's website, nomoreromeo.com, will also be impacted in the event that my site goes down. By the beginning of December, however, not only will he be running smoothly, but he'll also have a kickass emporium.

3. While I'm newsing, I'll remind you to: buy Brainbox!

4. Also, buy Peepshow #2! It's got porn by moi! And an excellent story, "Holiday," by the overly-cool David J. Schow!

Sometime during the interminable holiday season (after I get nomoreromeo.com and the Imp-orium under control) I also intend to post all the interviews that I did for Carpe Noctem and Gothic.net to my own site, since they aren't available anywhere anymore, and the authors all gave great interviews.




posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 1:50 AM

Home Computing for the Ultimate in Procrastination

There comes a point when procrastination becomes outright fucking off, when "just dicking around" becomes pure-D avoidance. I'm there.

For a couple of months I've also been looking for a video game, Thrill Kill, that was cancelled just prior to its release. It's a crazed 4-person fighter, nice and gory and depraved. Obviously, you can't buy it, since it wasn't ever sold. You can try sending money to pirates, but those are folks that deal in illegal wares, and you shouldn't trust them. Instead, I decided, my best option was to pirate it myself. It took an afternoon's wandering the net to find out how, another couple of hours to download, decode, and burn the files, and that's it. Voila, playstation game pour moi. Robert and I drank beer and proceeded to light one another on fire, bathe in each other's blood, yank limbs off hither and yon, climb down the throat of the loser and explode out in a cascade of chunked flesh, and so forth until the wee hours.

Got that sucker online, and learned how to get it online.

I got my first computer three years ago. Three years, and now I use it for everything - all shopping is via computer, all bill-paying (or shirking), all tax-filing, all writing, interviewing, selling, research, interpersonal communications, travel arrangements, recipes, job seeking, learning languages, dreaming.

Madness.

I honestly can't tell, at this point, whether I get more done with the computer or not. Would I write more or less without it? Would I still learn how to do strange things without it? Would I be more productive, and if so, what would I produce?

Dunno. But my cat would have one less warm thing (the monitor) on which to lay, and I'd probably be a bit more physically fit.



posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 10:39 PM

Littermates

Today I heard, on the radio, concerns about the safety of Greyhound buses. The speaker said that there have been three "incidents" on Greyhounds since September 11th. Yesterday a passenger yanked the wheel (after being asked to put out his cigarette) and caused the bus to tip over, which, of course, injured lots of folks. The speaker was possibly being ironic when he asked why extra security on Greyhounds wasn't forthcoming, why there were no devices to detect weapons on passengers, etc. He said that now, with more people taking buses because they are afraid to fly, there should be more security at depots, and perhaps marshalls on buses.

Rarely do I bother to bitch and rant about class. This, though, annoyed the piss out of me. I fly now, because it makes more sense - I'm very rarely allowed to take any time off of work, and when I do get to leave, I want to spend as much time as possible with the people I'm visiting. I'd rather take a train or a damn steamship - I love trains, love boats - but such things take days, I haven't got days.

But I used to have all the days in the world. I used to, even, appreciate the travel time of the Greyhound: when you haven't got anywhere to go, at least the bus is somewhere. There's this Zen of the Mama Dog, this travel chill - you're packaged with strangers. Nobody gets to stretch out. You all eat at the same time (if you have money) and you all smoke at the same time on the side of the road, and everyone sleeps at the same time, for the most part. There's something strange and neat about being surrounded by sleeping strangers.

And there's something feral about the whole Greyhound experience, too. You have to be on guard at all times. You have to be as unattractive as possible. You have to attach things to you in such a way as to feel any tug on them when you sleep - pin your zipper closed, rope your knapsack shut, keep your hat over your eyes so nobody's sure if you're awake or asleep. In the station, during long layovers, you sit on the floor with your luggage, with hordes of other people, everyone with their luggage between their legs and their tickets safely hidden. You're like dogs guarding your meat.

I joke a lot that the only way to avoid The Crazy Guy on the Greyhound is to BE that guy. It's like the alley rule: bad people walk in alleys, and everyone fears bad people, therefore, in order to keep bad alley-walkers from getting you, YOU must be the bad person in the alley.

I carried a variety of weapons on every trip, too. Buses and stations are the habitats of the lowdown and the innocent, and that's never a good combination. You know you aren't in safe territory when even the police posted to the station flirt with you.

The parents of college students didn't seem to know any of this. They sent their little girls and their hippie sons on bus trips all the time.

But now it seems, at least to this radio fella, that those parents are taking the bus themselves, and hooboy, they've entered a whole new world - and they are scared to death.

Three incidents since September 11th, my ass. There are incidents every damn day. I haven't been on a single bus - and I've crossed the country a number of times - that didn't have some sort of altercation. Half of them involved us sitting on the side of the highway until the sheriff came to take the evicted passenger away. You could tell who'd ridden the bus before: we were the folks who barely looked up from our notebooks, our magazines, our William Gibson novels. "Huh, guy tied a plastic bag around his head and is smoking a cigarette inside it. Huh, guy's beating his face against the window, will ya lookit that blood."

Granted, nobody slit my driver's throat or flipped the bus, but I'd never have been suprised if it happened.

But now that the frequent-flyer crowd is on the bus, holy crap, let's PROTECT THEM. Let's worry NOW. Those people actually carry cash, credit cards. Those people probably expect toilet paper and hand soap in the bathrooms. Quick, get metal-detection wands, x-ray their (our) baggage, and give those people sanitary bathrooms! Because THOSE people are OUR people, and THOSE people shouldn't have to bear up under the shit that financially-challenged people (and the Amish - I only turned guard-dog on buses when the Amish were threatened) have had to deal with all along. Those poor folks don't have to be anywhere on time, don't have to wash up, and shit, we've all seen trailer trash on COPS, and that bus is just another trailer - let 'em yank their dicks from Cincinnati to Buffalo, let 'em bring their knives and guns, let 'em shoot heroin on that big back seat. Let 'em, until the guys who buy tickets on their Visa cards need to make it to next Thursday's board meeting.

And whatever you do, don't let that guy bashing his face against the window bleed on your good suit.

A little more security wouldn't hurt, of course, but it infuriates me that nobody gave a fuck before. It wouldn't have hurt US, either, but heck, if we deserved it, we'd have been able to afford a plane ticket, huh.

Dicks.


posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 1:27 AM