c h a p t e r 1 3
The Electric Adventures of
A Novel of Erotic Satire
Chapter 13
c:/excerpts/mnnie20
Minnie glanced at the clock on the wall. Five-fifty. Darryl’s alarm would awaken him in ten minutes. Then he’d start waking the boys. Where had the night gone? She didn’t like to be rushed, but she liked even less having to start the day without her morning relief.
She leaned forward and typed: ``i’v only got 10 min.’’
A moment later,
She smiled, and brought her right hand up to her left breast, letting her fingertips brush the shape of her rigid nipple through her nightshirt. She was braless, and her soft heavy beasts had been moving liquidly again the cotton fabric for the hours of their conversation, the sensation teasing her nipples to insistent hardness, and now the sensation of her fingers there sent that familiar thrill running down through her stomach like warm water from a faucet, pooling between her clenched thighs. She wore only cotton panties under the shirt, and when she leaned to one side and then the other in the hard wood chair, rocking like that, shifting her weight between each of her full, womanly hips, the movement and pressure from underneath was like a smooth flat hand, the polished wood of the chair pushing upward against the center of her.
Pressing her thighs deliberately downward now, feeling her own wetness infusing the cotton of her panties, she momentarily took her hand off her breast, just long enough to lean forward and type: ``i’m ready for you, alvin.’’
And back across the miles came the four letters that told her he, too, was ready:
``TK&BK.’’
Now her hand rose back to her chest, sliding up inside her shirt this time to take her soft warm tit fully in her own palm, her fingers and thumb pulling, tugging at her dark swollen nipple. She leaned back in the chair and let her legs fall open and let her other hand slide downward and burrow into her panties, into the soft thick bed of hair there, running her fingers over her stiff clit and probing at her own parted lips and then eagerly sliding her middle finger up into herself, quickly finding that inner button, that little knot of texture inside her, to press and hold pressure there while Alvin reached across the miles and whispered into her ear through the scrolling words on her screen: `` . . . mmm, there, thats it, min, open them wider for me, please, oh, yes, there – you’r so wet minnie, o, i LOVE how wet you are – just hold still now & let me touch you . . . . ’’
As Minnie worked her motherly hands over her womanly body – moving her full round ass against the hard wood of the chair, tugging at her own fleshy bosom, reaching down again and again to probe her hot wet lips, working herself in rhythm to the rising crescendo of Alvin’s scrolling words – she went where she always went in those final moments: To a noisy high school hallway, where stood the young girl she’d been, books held loosely against her side, taking care not to obstruct the view of what were then her small high firm breasts, straining against the inside of her favorite blouse, as she smiled innocently and watched a pimply, awkward, impossibly young Alvin watching her, watching him try in vain not to drop his gaze repeatedly to the buoyant shape of her budding bosom. Watching him adjust his jeans uncomfortably as he attempted to talk about the homework assignment . . .
c:/notes/clarence68
Clarence’s problems with the book, he told me not too long ago, were partly about the Internet-chat passages. ``Intelligent people don’t talk like that, `l.o.l.’ and `o.m.g.’ and all this artless jumble of disassociated letters,’’ he told me, as we were sorting the mail one morning. ``Also, what’s with all the misspellings? Why do people think that just because they’re typing on the Internet, they don’t have to use the Queen’s English anymore? Is this what the `Internet Revolution’ hath wrought? Willful misspellings and incomprehensible acronyms?’’
I don’t argue with him on these points. I’m not inclined to defend the literary value of The Electric Adventures of Alvin the way I imagine other authors defend their work, because, as I’ve told you, the point was never literary, but masturbatory. On that front, I wouldn’t have expected Clarence, as a male and a homosexual, to find anything there that he liked. As you know, the few male characters aren’t what you’d call likeable. Notwithstanding many feminists’ savage (and probably accurate) assessments of my book, I can tell you that it was written entirely with female readers in mind. It’s never surprised me that men in general seem not to get it, and that applies especially, I suppose, to gay men. Clarence occasionally harangues me on this issue (``You couldn’t have just thrown us a bone? So to speak?’’). I’ll tell you what I tell him: The book is what it is.
c:/notes/mindynotes34
Mindy and I chatted almost every night for months after our chance reconnection. The moment Beth left for class, I would sign into wherever we’d agreed to meet, and MinnieMouse would be waiting there for me. Her busy life clearly was swirling around her the whole time – she was constantly breaking off to deal with kids or the phone or Darrin coming home or awakening upstairs – but she always reappeared.
We talked about the lives we’d led since that last day in the hallway at school, when she’d handed me back my yearbook, blowing me a kiss over her shoulder and telling me she’d see me later (which turned out to be much later – and then ``see’’ only in a sense of the word that didn’t yet exist when she’d said it). We talked about our spouses, our jobs, our homes. I found myself somewhat embellishing the reality of my job and my home, rendering both more impressive than they actually were, while downplaying the reality of my spouse, downplaying her startling beauty and her head-turning shape and her smart, sobering charm. I’m not sure why. I think my unlikely success at landing a spouse that most men would have envied made the modest accomplishments of the other parts of my life look that much more modest.
She asked if I’d pursued my writing, and I embellished that, too, telling her about the stories I’d written, going on about the big one, The Nudge, about the man, Simon, who can use his mind to peel away the veneer of civilization in others and make them act out their most base instincts. ``A metaphorical device tht took it in all sorts of interestng directions,’’ I explained, loftily, while failing to mention that the direction it mainly took it was toward lavish descriptions of various women’s breasts as they disrobed at Simon’s mental command.
c:/chattext/notes9987
Alvn: have you ever thought that maybe we should be more careful
Alvn: when we write here?
MinniMous: i think it all the time.
MinniMous: i know Darrin wont figure out the passw3ord
MinniMous: but i stil worry that maybe some copy of the chats
MinniMous: will show up in the computer somewere
Alvn: no, i mean the way we write. The mispellings, ect.
Alvn: Should we be more careful about that?
MinniMous: ???
c:/mydocs/adam230
As time went on, we talked more and more about things that you don’t discuss with casual acquaintances. I reminded her how she’d told me so many of her feminine secrets back then, in high school – about her periods, her sore breasts, the few things she’d let the boys do with her – and she’d laughed (digitally). ``did i really tell u all that?!’’ she wanted to know. I assured her that she had, and that I’d remembered all the lessons warmly in all the years since.
Incrementally, over the nights and weeks, she resumed telling me her secrets, not the secrets of girlhood now, but of womanhood and of motherhood. She told me she’d actually kept her virginity throughout college, finally giving it up to Darrin, her future husband and to this day the only man who has had her. (``not counting u, adamski – alvinski – whatever
``i don’t know,’’ I answered. ``maybe u need to tell me more about them ;)’’
c:/notes/minchat233
Alvn: smthing i’ve want to ask u for years.
MinniMous: *sigh* more about the boobs?
Alvn: no, serious.
MinniMous: ask
Alvn: *tk&bk* ?
MinniMous: ?
Alvn: u wrote that in my yrbook. & in the notes you passed
MinniMous: oh, yea
MinniMous: u didnt know what it meant?
Alvn: no
c:/miswriting/milfnotes
I haven’t seen Mindy since high school, but I have a vivid image of her in my mind, the Mindy of today, patched together from her typed words and her online secrets.
Her petite little high school frame, as I perceive it across the years and miles, has filled out around the edges, especially in her hips. Her pregnancies have shaped them into her center of gravity. She thinks they’re too big, but in fact they look like a woman’s hips are supposed to look: prominent, bold, refusing to be hidden. When she walks, she can’t stop them from shifting dramatically back and forth no matter how much she tries. When she sits down while wearing slacks, there’s a sharp little crease that forms at the top of the outer edges of her thighs just below her hips. When she attends her kids’ soccer games, the dads tend to sit behind her on the bleachers, and she knows it, and it makes her uncomfortable but she secretly likes it.
c:/notes/minchat234
MinniMous: all those times i wrote that and u never asked what it meant?
Alvn: ?
MinniMous: you dont remember me telling you why i liked tlking w/ u ?
Alvn: i assumed it was my stunning looks and towering intellect. :~
MinniMous: no it was cuz you wanted to know about me
MinniMous: and let me know u (a little, I think)
Alvn: *tk&bk* ?
MinniMous: *to know & be known*
c:/miswriting/milfnotes02
Mindy’s breasts, as I imagine them now, are heavier, fuller and lower than the breasts I remember discreetly (or not so discreetly) ogling through the fabric of her blouses back in school. They move with their own pendulous gravity now, another gift from the pregnancies. She used to push her chest out, showing off what little there was to show, back then; now she tends to slump and tuck and pull and adjust and generally try and rein them in, but they’re unruly now and they won’t be controlled.
She doesn’t try to show cleavage – as I envision her now – but some of it often spouts up below her collar anyway. The men at the office walk by her desk a lot. It makes her uncomfortable. She secretly likes it.
There are, in my mental picture of Mindy today, little lines at the outer edges of her hazel eyes, roadmaps of the years. Her mouth, too, has some character at the edges of it now, no longer the prim little virgin mouth that used to talk with me about homework.
Her voice now, as I imagine it (I’ve not heard it since high school) is textured and contoured and a shade deeper than the girlish squeal that used to entertain me. She has (I imagine) that calm and knowing tenor to her voice that mothers tend to acquire after awhile, the result of softness crusted with experience, of having been the supposedly weaker gender, but called upon to carry out the harder lives, the greater demands, the more numerous and disparate roles; of having had men inside them, and babies inside them, their bodies vessels for both pleasure and life, even as they calmly and competently clean up the messes of both the babies and the men.
A mother’s voice is, at its core, a kind of sigh – not a dreamy or sad or frustrated one, but one of calmly sorting out the layers of life. Does anyone really doubt that women’s lives in general – mothers’ lives in particular – have more layers to them than those of men?
Anyway, that’s what I imagine Mindy to be like today.
c:/documents/writing/miscnotes/gem-early
Gwen remained a regular fixture in my nightly cyber-explorations during this time, though now she was at the periphery of it rather than at the center. She’d accepted, with little discernible reaction, the increasing amount of time I spent huddled at that digital corner table with Mindy, rather than helping Gwen seduce the faceless hordes. If it hurt her at all, she didn’t let on.
c:/miswriting/gwenonmin
Gem4U: she’s a milf, is what yor saying
Alvn: jesus gwen.
MinniMous: i’m sorry – `milf’?
Alvn: never mind
Gem4U: he thinks yor a mother
MinniMous: well, i AM a mother
Gem4U: a `mother i’d like to’ --
Gem4U: . . .
MinniMous: ??
Alvn: min, let’s go chat in the indy room
c:/documents/writing/miscnotes/gem357
Gwen continued her nightly routine, pulling the men and women of the rooms into increasingly detailed and breathless conversation about her body and theirs, and what they could do together right now if not for the empty miles between them, and then working from there to cross the miles. She’d gradually become bored with her camera and stopped sending out pictures of herself, and now what she mostly offered was a written version of slowly stripping off her clothing for them – better, getting them to ask her to strip off her clothing, getting them to beg her for it – running her finger (digitally speaking) up and down the zipper of her jeans and raising her eyebrows at them and getting them to shake the room with their enthusiastic demands for more (or at least that’s how my mind’s eye saw it). Night after night, they gathered around her like patrons at a stripclub; like worshippers at an altar.
Gwen made a nominal effort to keep me involved, and to pull Mindy into it, with limited success. Mindy was a good sport at first about the various attempts by Gwen to get her to virtually disrobe and participate – polite is how I would characterize Min’s patient reactions to Gwen’s various attempts to get inside her digital panties – but as she got to know Gwen better, she became more comfortable telling her to bug off and let us talk when she didn’t feel like participating.
Min would, in the right mood, let herself be pulled in, playing with Gwen and even with the other regulars that Gwen or I or both had brought to the increasingly defined groups – JaneyX and Amy69 and Mikey00 (He was Gwen’s guest; I’d have been content to remain the only male there) and Sindi (my contribution to the group, before her ``post-mortem’’ program malfunctioned and she was forced to go into hiding). But Mindy and I talked mostly to each other – about sex, about our marriages and our jobs and her children and our lives – while Gwen’s nightly orgy writhed in the digital background.
c:/chattext/notes9993
Alvn: what wuld darrin do?
MinniMous: if he knew?
MinniMous: hmm. I have a little fantasy
MinniMous: where he finds out
Alvn: um – u fantisize about darrin finding out??
MinniMous: he finds out & is mad at first, really pissed
MinniMous: but then he starts to think he needs to compete w.you
MinniMous: and then he gets turned on,
MinniMous: and takes me hard
MinniMous: like he hasn’t in years
c:/mydocs/documents/adamfiles/writing/clarence2
I’m guessing that Clarence weighs four-hundred pounds. I’ve never asked him, but now that I’m thinking of it, I suppose I probably could; I think he probably would tell me, without too much fuss about the question. Maybe I will, if only for the sake of accuracy.
Clarence has thick, bristly, dark hair and a close-cropped beard that is beginning to gray. He trims the beard too small for his face, a common mistake I’ve noticed with heavy men who wear beards – an attempt, I would guess, to create an optical illusion that will make their faces look smaller than they actually are, but which, in fact, tends to just look like the beard is hanging there out front, a too-small mask on a large face. Maybe it’s a heavy man’s answer to the balding men who let their hair grow long on one side and then sweep it over to make it look like they’re got full coverage on top – another attempt at subterfuge that I’ve never understood, even though my own hair has been thinning on top for a few years now. Maybe it’s not an issue for me because most of the women in my life never actually see me.
c:/chattext/notes026
Alvn: wow.
Alvn: let’s not live out that particular fantasy, ok?
MinniMous: not to worry
MinniMous: darrin doesn’t get mad, or jealous
MinniMous: about anything, except maybe his cases at work
MinniMous: don’t think i’m quite at that level to him
c:/notes/micsnotes/clrnce
I didn’t meet Clarence for the first few weeks I worked in the mail room, though I saw him there every day. He’s hard to miss.
c:/notes/adamnotes/miscmailroomnotes
Almost all the mail-room workers are graceless males. There have been just a few female employees through there in the time I’ve worked there. I could describe each of them to you, in great detail, and I’d very much like to, but I’m going on stay on topic for the moment.
c:/adamnotes/LHRmailroom/thoughts
The Lawrence, Hardy & Robinson mail room is in the basement of the advertising firm’s building downtown, a maze of a basement with blank white walls that are dingy and marked up and a waxy gray floor and a few windows up near the ceiling, and bright fluorescent lights that make the whole dreary setting far too easy to see. We used to sort the mail on countertops that were situated around the place in no particular pattern, so we weren’t in a line next to each other, but kind of scattered all over several skinny white connected rooms that make up the place. The first time I looked at the rooms, I was sure I couldn’t work there, it was too blank and dreary and depressing, but circumstances being what they were, I had no choice, and after awhile it wasn’t too bad. I live largely inside my head – you, reader, know this as well as anyone – and the work is mindless enough that it’s easy to escape into my Inner Life while I’m doing it, especially if one of the few women who has worked there happens to be anywhere in sight.
Clarence employed a different escape strategy. He would arrive at work each day carrying a cardboard box full of the kind of stuff that people who work in actual offices (like the ones upstairs) might bring in to decorate their offices on the first day of work: a big colorful coffee mug and a couple of picture frames displaying photos of relatives and book to read on his breaks and little decorative mirror with stained glass edging that you could stick to the wall and a fake potted plant the size of a loaf of bread. We didn’t have permanently assigned work spaces at that time; we moved around to different areas of the small white rooms depending on who was working and what needed to be done. Your work space today probably wouldn’t be your work space the next day. Thus Clarence’s cardboard box. Each morning he set it on whatever counter he was working that day, and he would take a moment to unpack it, setting up the picture frames and sticking the mirror to the nearest wall and setting the plant somewhere nearby – on a windowsill if he happened to be near one, though the plant didn’t need sunlight because it was plastic – and then he would set about work (sorting the mail) as if he’d just settled into his permanent office.
Men seldom do anything that interests me, but I was mildly interested the first few times I watched Clarence’s morning routine. Going to that much trouble to bring a little color to these blank white surroundings – there was something intriguing, almost admirable about it to me. Maybe because it struck me very much as something a woman would do, more than a man.
The graceless males on the floor clearly had, in their male-brained way, reached the same conclusion – that this routine of Clarence’s was a womanly one – but of course they didn’t view that as a good thing. ``You’ll want to steer clear of Little Miss Goodyear Blimp over there,’’ one of them muttered to me on my first day as I was getting the orientation tour.
c:/misc/wikimilfs
MILF (slang)
Mother I'd Like to Fuck (M.I.L.F.) is a common American colloquial term generally regarded as vulgar. While there are slight variants of the term Mother (Mom) I'd Like (Love) to Fuck they all conform to the acronym 'MILF'. . . . The term designates a sexually attractive older female (generally but not necessarily a mother), usually between 35-50 years of age and was popularized by the
c:/mydocs/mailroom notes/misc
Contrary to my initial assessment of a bunch of human sheep silently and sullenly pawing at envelopes hour after hour, there was, actually, something of a little element of communication and camaraderie to the males of the mail room. If you watched for awhile, you’d see that they actually did converse with one another, somewhat, in a terse, limited language, one that came mainly in the form of brief but heartfelt commentary on sporting events and the relative abilities, or lack of abilities, of the athletes employed by the various Indianapolis teams. And severely compressed reviews of television shows, discourse that always seemed to boil down, in the end, to an informal survey of who in the mail room had watched which shows the previous night. And shared dissatisfaction with the working conditions in the mail room – not enough dissatisfaction to even hint at any kind of organized rebellion, but merely expressions of wistfulness for better lives, generally expressed in one- or two-word expletives.
And they talked about women, in the way that men do, dialogues and monologues that boiled down almost entirely to merciless assessments of various women’s physical characteristics (an amusing ritual to witness, given that the physical characteristics of the men of the mail room were, to say the least, wanting). I noticed that they never talked about a female mail-room employee if she happened to be present at that moment, which was, frankly, the only concession to civilized discourse that I’ve witnessed there. But it was quickly clear that the presence of a woman in the room, while it might shield her, personally, from becoming the topic of conversation at that very moment, didn’t tamp down the merciless conversation about other women, nor about women in general, and in fact seemed to spur it. The women themselves, the few that have come through the line while I’ve worked there, were never participants in the conversation.
Nor was Clarence. I noticed from the start that he was, at best, invisible to the males of the mail room. All four-hundred (or so) pounds of him.
c:/misc/wikimilfs02
. . . In 2007, Spirit Airlines ran a promotional campaign titled "M.I.L.F.", an acronym which the airline described as meaning "
c:/notes/tv90456900
Television doesn’t hold my interest. Nor does sports. Nor, certainly, does televised sports. Nonetheless, I briefly became an avid student of NFL controversy that winter, when Janet Jackson bared her right breast during Super Bowl 38.
I heard about the episode in the only way that I ever hear about sports or television: by overhearing it in the grunted conversation of the males in the mail room. They were all worked up one Monday morning about the clearly intentional ``wardrobe malfunction’’ that had uncovered
Upon returning home, it took me about forty seconds to find the imagery on the Internet, including a remarkably clear close-up shot of the nipple itself, partly obscured by that silver sunburst thing she was wearing on it, but otherwise displayed to the world.
c:/my documents/jjsunburst
The silver sunburst thing was unfortunate. Nipple-jewelry, like vagina-shaving, is, in my view, a doomed attempt to improve upon natural perfection. It invariably diminishes what it was meant to enhance. Still, as you might recall, you could see enough through the jewelry to ascertain that Ms. Jackson has a prominent round-topped right nipple surrounded by a dark, very circular areola, approximately two inches wide.
c:/notes/adamnotes/jjnip
It’s a pretty nipple, but what seized my mind for many nights afterward was my mental analysis of the intent she demonstrated in displaying it. We tend not to know much about what goes on in the minds of our celebrities, so ensconced are they in their deliberately constructed public images, but occasionally something human slips through. I viewed this as one of those moments. I don’t know much about Janet Jackson – I couldn’t identify any of her songs – but I know this much: She has a two-inch-wide circular dark areola, and an Inner Life that drove her to display it to an audience of millions.
c:/notes/micsnotes/clrnce
MinniMous: wait a minte – u LIKE big hips?
Alvn: so surprizing?
MinniMous: what u like about them?
Alvn: not sure i should tell u. I dont really know you well emough :)
MinniMous: >:(
MinniMous: tell me!
Alvn: hmm
MinniMous: tell me!!
Alvn: :)~
MinniMous: cmon tell me!
c:/clarence/misc
I talked to Clarence for the first time about three weeks into the job, on the same day that the rest of the male mail-room employees stopped talking to me.
There was a new supervisor that week, a graceless male whose name I didn’t catch and who didn’t remain there for long. He was there long enough to decree that the way we were doing things – workers scattered all over the maze of white rooms, no coordination between them, no one working together – was not going to continue under his watch. ``We’re going to get organized,’’ he said, clasping his hands together in front of him. ``We’re going break you up into teams of two. Each team is going to have an assigned task, and will work with each of the other teams. We’re going to get organized, folks. Now, first for the easy part: I want each of you to choose a team. Teams of two.’’
c:/mailroom/mailroom notes/miscnotes
I resisted the urge to raise my hand and say, innocently, ``Um, excuse, sir, technically, two people aren’t a `team’ – they’re a `pair.’ ’’ I couldn’t resist the urge, however, to roll my eyes.
c:/minchat/Minnie/chat23557
MinniMous: tell me pleeeez?
Alvn: its not obvous?
MinniMous: no. tell me.
Alvn: five little words:
MinniMous: ??
Alvn: `more cushion‘
Alvn: `for the pushin‘ . . . . . ‘
Alvn: ;)
MinniMous: lol!
MinniMous:
c:/notes/jj57
Does Janet Jackson masturbate to her memory of that moment on stage when, in front of a global audience, she felt open air on her right nipple?
These are the kinds of questions that keep me up nights.
These are the kinds of questions that created
c:/adamnotes/mailroom/misc
If I were a psychologist looking for an interesting experiment – or just a funny one – I’d go into a mail room full of boorish, ignorant, perpetually insecure graceless male employees and order them to form ``teams of two,’’ and then record what happens.
The men stood looking around at each other in silence. For most of them, this was the hardest task of their professional lives. There were no women there that day, no way for any of them to demonstrate how reliably male they were by pairing off with a female. There were just other males, and each of them had to pick another to stand next to at the counters. And they had to do it right in front of each other.
For awhile, it looked as though inertia alone was going to kill the whole enterprise; no one, it seemed, was willing to make the first move, take the first step, risk the first overture. Then, gradually, a few of the men who possessed what passed for foresight began to realize that, eventually, they were all going to be paired, and if they didn’t make a decision, someone would make it for them. You could almost see the calculations being made in their heads. The oldest and grimmest-looking of the men were chosen first, apparently on the belief that, by choosing an old man, no one could accuse you of being attracted to him. The younger, less repulsive of the bunch were in for a long wait, because no one wanted to create any suspicion that they had chosen a partner based on good looks.
When one or another of the men did move to make an overture, the mechanics of it were torturous – a disinterested glance, a barely perceptible nod, a shrug of such forced casualness that it looked like parody. The men were all adults, but in those few minutes, I was sharply aware of being in a room full of unusually tall fifth-graders, hemming and hawing and assessing and circling each other as if from across the floor of a decorated gymnasium.
And there was Clarence, standing at his counter amid his picture frames and his decorative mirror and his plastic plant, continuing to sort his mail, trying to act as if he wasn’t even aware of social drama that was rippling through the mail room. He’s a bad actor, though. It was obvious from his downturned eyes and the stiff motion of his hands that he was in a deep panic, one that no doubt went back to childhood, to a hundred school dances and gym class games and birthday parties, the fat kid with the lisp standing motionless amid the swirl of pairings going on around him, knowing full well how it was going to shake out, pretending not to care, pretending to care about anything else.
c:/notes/chat/mnnie772
Alvn: serious question:
Alvn: Why is monogamy so important to people
Alvn: (espcially women, it seems)?
MinniMous: are you throwing that question in my face dear?
MinniMous: Since Im here talking with you
MinniMous: wile my husband is asleep upstairs?
Alvn: not throwing in your face. Serious.
Alvn: this notion that pairing off is the only legitimate way to do it –
Alvn: no one argues with that
Alvn: Even people who cheat don’t argue with the premise
Alvn: that they should be with one person their whole lives,
Alvn: that not doing that is an aberration. I don’t get that
MinniMous: what dont you get?
Alvn: Seems unnatural
Alvn: Like being told u can only have one food for yor whole life.
Alvn: Try anything else on the menu, and you’r cheating.
MinniMous: what is it with you and comparing women to food?
Alvn: seriously. If you landed here from outer space,
Alvn: and saw the trouble this insistence on monogamy has caused,
Alvn: you’d wonder why we deem it so important. why is it?
MinniMous: why do YOU think it is?
Alvn: i think its religion’s fault.
MinniMous: what else is new?
c:/misc/unclemartinspider
The first time I was ever touched by something a man did was when I was a boy and I watched my uncle Martin take a spider from the bathroom and put it out in the yard rather than killing it. The second (and, I think, only other) time was watching Clarence standing there at his counter, sorting the mail, pretending not to care.
c:/notes/chat/mnnie773
MinniMous: well, YOU”RE married to one person.
Alvn: because she wouldnt put up with any other arrangement.
Alvn: Few people would. That’s the whole point – why is that?
MinniMous: maybe pairs just work best.
Alvn: lololol
MinniMous: no, really. Maybe its our natural inclination.
Alvn: says the woman whose husband is asleep upstairs.
c:/mydocs/mailroom/notes/notes3
There being no women in the mail room that day, I, of course, couldn’t have cared less who I was paired with. It didn’t matter who it was going to be, because it was going to be a graceless male. To ask me to choose would be like asking me what color floor tile I’d like under the soles of feet as I stood at my countertop. Each of the males in mail room that day affected an air of nonchalance and lack of concern with the outcome of the pairings, but I can tell you for a fact that I’m the only one among them for whom that air was real. I didn’t bother assessing. None of them owned breasts; that much I’d assessed during the first moments of the day, and no other criterion mattered. As they assessed and circled and silently agonized over their choices, I leaned against one wall, bored, and waited to see which of them I was going to be stuck with.
It came down to two of them: A fifty-ish male with an oversized mustache that was graying more than the hair on his head; and Clarence, still sorting the mail, panic-stricken, pretending not to care as much as I genuinely didn’t care.
The Mustache was immersed in his own panic; he’d failed to make any choices, and now he had no acceptable choice left to make: I was younger than many of them, not as bad-looking as most of them, just good-looking enough to raise suspicion about any man who sought to pair off with me; and Clarence was, well, Clarence. Little Miss Goodyear Blimp. The blimp part wasn’t the problem. (He was the heaviest man on the floor, certainly, but not by that much; several others were in contention.) The ``Little Miss’’ was the problem. And the picture frames. And the decorative mirror and the plastic plant. And the way he talked, that precise, clipped cadence that wasn’t quite a lisp, but was close enough.
As the Mustache puzzled over his social dilemma, the supervisor was pondering his mathematical problem – three left, meaning someone wouldn’t have a ``team of two.’’ He breathed deep, making a decision, and announced: ``Okay, I guess this last team will have three.’’
Both Clarence and the Mustache looked as if a reprieve had been granted. The Mustache, especially, looked elated. Either Clarence or I alone were unacceptable to him, but both us at once was no problem at all. A team of three! Not a pair! No implication whatsoever – not with three! – no matter how not-ugly I looked, no matter how many plastic plants Clarence brought in. As the other men looked on sullenly from their tense pair-dom, cursing themselves for having chosen too quickly, the Mustache smiled like a man who’d just avoided a prison term.
Then it all fell apart. Another male mail-room employee suddenly appeared, apparently having returned from the bathroom. Clarence and the Mustache both froze, their relief retreating, panic returning. The supervisor smiled. The math would work after all. Two more teams of two! ``Okay,’’ he said, pointing randomly to me and to the newly arrived male. ``You and you.’’
Now the Mustache looked like a man who’d just been sentence to hang, and he wasn’t going quietly. He glanced at his new partner, Clarence, then looked away, shaking his head, then looked around the room, seeing that all eyes were on him. Clarence had gone back to sorting his mail, his movements stiffer and more panic-stricken then ever. Finally, the Mustache grimaced, glared directly at Clarence, and said, loudly: ``This is bullshit!’’
Clarence looked as though he’d been kicked, hard. He tried to continue his sorting, but he dropped several envelopes and now was forced to bend heavily down to the floor to retrieve them. The Mustache was continuing to press his argument in the same rational and thoughtful manner he’d opened. ``No fucking way!’’ he said, directing his reasoned appeal to no one in particular. The supervisor, whose powers of perception apparently were on par with those of Clarence’s plastic plant, appeared genuinely confused about the source of the conflict. Clarence was looking like a man who wanted to disappear, and the Mustache was looking like a man who might well make him disappear, and the other men were watching the growing impasse with giddy anticipation.
c:/mydocs/mailroom/notes/notes4
You could have heard an envelope drop after I said, loudly, ``Jesusfuckingchrist,’’ and I stepped over to Clarence’s counter and scooted one of the picture frames over to make room for myself next to him, and began sorting.
c:/programs/fcc75
During a few weeks that winter, I reviewed everything I could find in the media about the Janet Jackson episode. I was hoping for further hints of her Inner Life. So I became very familiar with the case of CBS Corp. vs. The Federal Communications Commissions. The FCC imposed a half-million-dollar fine on the network as a result of those roughly six seconds of nipple-baring that slipped through the television censorship net. CBS appealed, and got a court to set aside the fine. The FCC appealed to the Supreme Court.
c:/programs/fcc76
I’m going to type that again, right now: The FCC appealed to the Supreme Court. Appealed to keep their half-million-dollar fine imposed on the network. Because Janet Jackson showed her right nipple. For six seconds.
c:/notes/chat/minnie346
MinniMous: my nipples got bigger and redder w the pregnancies
MinniMous: never really went back to their original size after the 2nd
MinniMous: you sure you want to hear all this?
Alvn: how big?
MinniMous: big, wide around the base. a few inchs. and very red
MinniMous: (used to be more like pink)
Alvn: red. mmhmm
MinniMous: now theyr lower on my breasts. They used to point a little upward,
MinniMous: now they point a little downward
Alvn: and?
MinniMous: what, are u writing a book or something?
MinniMous: (actually, u SHOULD write a book – a porn book, obviously!
c:/adamwriting/clrnce/notes0235
I just re-read the earlier file, and I need to clarify this right now: I didn’t go stand by Clarence in order to make some kind of statement. It just seemed to be the easiest way to diffuse the conflict I’d seen building, which in turn seemed the easiest way to get through my shift and get out of that place each day. Yes, I was aware that in doing this, I was automatically putting myself on the outs with the rest of the males in the place, that I was putting myself in the crosshairs of their unkind whisperings and glares right alongside Clarence, and yes, I did it anyway. But it wasn’t a matter of courage, just ambivalence. So, the men would think ill of me; so fucking what? If you’ve read The Electric Adventures of Alvin (don’t deny it), you know that the opinions of men mean about as much to me as the opinions of that dog I hear barking down the street as I’m typing this. The truth is, it was fine with me to be ostracized from the males of the mail room. It meant I didn’t have to pretend to be interested in their grunted conversations.
c:/notes/chat/minnie347
MinniMous: the nips tend to be harder than they used to a lot of the time,
MinniMous: maybe cuz theyr always moving against my bra.
MinniMous: boobs heavier and lower now, move a lot more than they used to
MinniMous: even when wearing a bra
Alvn: mmhmm
MinniMous: alv, you there? What are u doing?
Alvn: what do you THINK I’m doing? (keep talking please)
c:/notes/sb38
It was while I was flipping channels, looking for news about ``NippleGate’’ (as the Janet Jackson episode came to be called, to my great delight), that I encountered what little commercial television I’ve viewed in my adult life. I suppose this sounds strange to anyone who watches television on a regular basis, but I’ve simply never found much there to hold my interest. The women there seem almost all of a type: overly thin, overly blonde, lacking life in some vague but fundamental way. There were times, during the channel-flipping in the wake of Super Bowl 38, that I got the surreal impression they were all related to each other – all third-cousins or something (perhaps members of a family of cosmetics manufacturers). If there was an Inner Life among them, it was slathered in so much makeup that there was no seeing it.
Also, they were always fully clothed.
Well, except Janet.
c:/micsnotes/webnotes/slate623
. . . Even the most skeptical view of religion would have to acknowledge a legitimate original purpose to it in girding our the darkest natural impulses: If nothing else, the notion of divine punishment and reward gave earliest man a reason not to kill and eat his neighbors.
The question raised today by so many skeptics – and, I would argue, the central query offered by our horny friend ``
Today, the strictures of morality as laid out in Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other mainstream faiths are so heavily geared toward repressing sexual impulses (as opposed to, say, the impulse to burn crosses on lawns, or detonate bombs in market squares, or fire rockets at neighboring cultures) that one would think the act of intercourse was an atrocity worthy of the most fervent United Nations condemnation, with lesser outrages like war, starvation, genocide, etcetera, lagging far down on the list . . .
c:/programs/tvnotes/misc
Given how much the people around me talk about television, I guess I’d always assumed there was a wide, deep, varied pool of stuff there. How else could it appeal to so strongly to so many different people? So I was surprised, during my Janet Jackson-inspired channel-flipping, to see what little range there actually is – at how many of the shows appeared to be of the same theme. Sometimes, during my post-Super-Bowl forays into television-land, it seemed the same plot was playing all the time, on every channel: A person is murdered. A team of forensics experts (including, always, it seems, a thin blonde woman with mannequin-like makeup) scrambles to find clues as to the murderer. They look at stuff through microscopes, put stuff in test tubes and under florescent lights. Sometimes they cut open bodies in grimly antiseptic-looking rooms. They do all of this while speaking lines to each other that often reminded me of the utilitarian dialogue I used to hear in pornographic films, except instead of ``oh, baby’’ and ``suck my tits’’ and ``fuck me,’’ they would say things like, ``The tests are back from the lab’’ and ``The killer was wearing gloves’’ and ``We’re running out of time.’’ (They were always, it seems, running out of time.)
Something else I noticed about television culture – something that was less surprising to me – was how universally it accepted the notion of religious faith. Often it was explicit in the plotlines of the shows, with specific references to God and church and the notion of morality being defined on religious terms. Even when it wasn’t explicitly stated, it was unmistakably implied, in almost everything that was presented there. These characters – the forensic experts, the murder victims, even the murderers – were church-going people, no question about it. The default philosophy in television-land, I could see, reflected the default philosophy of society as a whole, with a central pillar being a widespread, unquestioning, knee-jerk belief in the supernatural. If any voice of reason ever spoke up in opposition, I didn’t come across it during my channel-flights.
I sometimes wonder if those who accept the fiction of life after death are, at some level, more apt to be dismissive of life before death – if only because they see it as merely one stop on a longer route. For myself, knowing that this life is all there is, the notion of a life ending is its own incomprehensible void, its own apocalypse, every time it happens. Maybe that’s why atheists don’t fly airplanes into buildings.
And maybe it’s why I was so squeamish about those television plots. I never could get my mind around it, this notion of blithely acting out the ending of a human life – the lights going out, once and for all, no more intake of air, ever, no more fantasy or reality or dreams or goals or desires, no more consciousness or subconsciousness, no more life or Inner Life, a unique and irreplaceable thing utterly gone, forever – all so that someone could later say, gravely: ``The killer was wearing gloves.’’
c:/my documents/misc/clarence9355
``What’s with the plant?’’ I asked Clarence one day as we sorted the mail, about two weeks after we started working next to each other.
Our conversations until then had been mostly brief and obligatory, which was fine with me. Unlike the other males of the mailroom, I had nothing particularly against Clarence (other than his maleness), but that didn’t mean I was looking to be pals. I was just curious about the plastic plant, and the picture frames and the little decorative mirror that he stuck on the wall each day.
``You don’t like it?’’ he responded, defensively.
``No, it’s fine. I’m just curious,’’ I said. ``The plant and all this other stuff that you unpack every day – I’m just curious why you do it. It just seems like a lot of trouble to go to.’’
He looked at me skeptically, looking for a trap, it seemed. Or looking for a smirk. It occurred to me in that moment that this large, haunted man spent most of his life sifting through the comments of others for implication or insult – that a straightforward question asked of him, asked out of neutral curiosity and nothing more, was a rarity.
``It’s not that much trouble to go to,’’ he finally answered, and he went back to his sorting.
c:/micsnotes/webnotes/slate624
. . . For all the laughable outrage spawned by The Electric Adventures of Alvin lately, the protests and the bans and the Hillary Clinton comments and the surreal spectacle of last fall’s Senate hearings (I went out and tried to buy one of those Marilyn Monroe masks at the time, just for fun, and I couldn’t find one place that wasn’t sold out of them) – for all of the silly furor inspired by that silly little book – it seems to me that there is, in fact, a serious point here.
The fact is, it was the so-called ``mainstream’’ religions that long ago decided, in their role of defining truth for us, to focus so heavily on what’s going on between our legs. Of course, the purveyors of that focus didn’t intend for anyone to take it and put it on an altar and start worshipping it, as
c:/notes/thoughts/crimetvshow436
I caught part of one television plot in which the murder victim was shown before the murder. She was a woman – blonde, skinny – and she was trapped in a well by the killer. (I don’t know if he was wearing gloves.) She was crying; she knew she was going to die, and we knew it, too, because the show jumped forward and backward in time, interspersing the image of her crying in the muddy well with the image of her corpse on a slab in the morgue. The forensic team gallantly rallied around to find her killer, but they were running out of time.
I know she was merely an actress in a fictional rendition, of course – that as soon as the director yelled ``cut,’’ she would arise from the slab and head out to be murdered on some other show next week – but those few minutes of fictional plotline disturbed me more than any of the most explicitly real porn I’d ever viewed back in my porn-viewing days. For a long time, I couldn’t get it out of my mind; not just the plot of the show, but my notion of what kind of people put the show together, and what kind of people watched it, and what it was that they thought about the nature of life. And the fact that they are all, as whole, closer to ``normal’’ than I am.
I am, after all, a pornographer, and an atheist – two strikes against me in a society of religious believers whose beliefs include the certainty that the commercial presentation of sex is intrinsically immoral.
c:/breakfastofchampions
In the book that Beth lent me back in college, ``Breakfast of Champions,’’ one of the character’s tombstones contains this inscription: ``We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.’’ That’s true, isn’t it? I mean, could anyone really argue with that? (The book was banned in some places, because of the drawing of the vagina.)
c:/my documents/misc/clarence9356
``This is an ugly place,’’ Clarence said one day, suddenly, apropos of nothing, motioning with his eyes around the mail room. (This was a few months after I started there.) ``We can’t eliminate ugliness from all of our settings, but we can bring beauty into them. If we don’t try to do that – if we just accept the ugliness around us without making even the most meager attempt to soften its edges with whatever beauty we can find – then what the hell’s the point? We have to stand up to ugliness.’’
I looked at him silently. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
``The plant,’’ he said, finally, in response to my questioning silence. ``You asked why I bring in the plant. That’s why.’’
c:/notes/chat/minnie98725
MinniMous: am I one?
Alvn: one what?
MinniMous: you know –
MinniMous: ``m. i. l. f.’’
Alvn: oh. i am sorry about all that.
Alvn: Gem and her f’ing mouth.
c:/notes/thoughts/crimetvshow438
A televised peek at Janet Jackson’s right nipple justifies national controversy and federal litigation and a Supreme Court review and a half-million-dollar fine. But the representation of a crying, terrified woman being trapped in a muddy hole prior to her torture and murder is perfectly legitimate primetime entertainment. So long as she keeps her shirt on.
And they call me a pervert.
c:/notes/thoughts/crimetvshow437
The woman in the well was wearing makeup. That part bugged me more than anything.
c:/notes/chat/minnie98726
MinniMous: so. am I one?
Alvn: hmmm.
Alvn: Let’s see . . .
Alvn: . . . .
MinniMous: !
MinniMous: >:(
Alvn: lol!
Alvn: oh Minnie . . .
Alvn: u are the ULTIMATE milf, dear.
MinniMous: : )
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