Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 Sex with Boys and Girls

   by Feather Touch

   File - 4

   Nick gave his uncle a shy smile as he walked through the front door of
the house, then he half leaped across the living room and into the young
adult's lap, straddling his knees and looking him in the eyes.  The twelve
year old tugged at the gym shorts he was wearing, and whispered hello to
his uncle.  "Something happened in the car just before Michael left me
off," the boy said, "and you can feel it on you if you want to come up
inside my underpants."

   The two adjusted their clothing, Nick raising his arms high so Dave
could peel off his polo shirt, then huddled bare-chested together, cradling
each others' face as the tall adult gently probed high between the child's
sleek thighs.

   "I've let you loose with an animal," the uncle said.

   "Jack and Lang came late," the boy explained, "just this morning, so
they rode over with me sitting in their laps to help Michael say the same
thing, or do the same thing, as you did by letting me still be kind of a
virgin when I went to his house."

   "We seem to be establishing a fellowship that might indeed lead to a
club," Dave observed.

   "I hope so," the now panting boy responded.

   "Did you like it?" his uncle asked.

   "I guess I was kind of scared it wouldn't happen, at first," Nick
replied, "because we finished the yard and gardens, then sat in the
kitchen.



   "How are things at home?" the twenty eight year old contractor asked the
boy sitting at his kitchen table.

   "I'm trying to talk Uncle Dave into living with Mom and me," Nick
replied, "and I think it might be a deal."

   "I hope it works out," Michael said, adding that he'd seen the pair the
day before and thought they somehow looked right together.

   "We talked about you a lot," the child responded with a shy smile, "that
was when he first arrived, two nights ago.  Then I wanted to come be with
you yesterday, but he's real big on patience and at, you know, sort of
lingering over things rather than racing along."

   "One of life's more compelling ironies," the man replied: "all through
school it's deadline this and hurry that, then you come to find out that if
you slow to almost a dead stop you achieve a superior product.  And the
most interesting part about that is that once you've learned to excel,
lo-and-behold, you can not only pick up the pace, but you'll become so
good, you'll end up suffering more from not working than you do strain FROM
working, and go on to subdue the dogs of mediocrity with a stick of oak and
lead."

   "We talked about the same things," the now avid boy said, "limits, but
what most people would consider to be extreme behavior within those
limits."

   "They're not built of math," the host replied, "and you have a mix of
the brittle - like rules against hurting anyone - and the flexible, like
gambling and speeding, so, in the end, all you can do is talk about it,
read a lot, and, if you're lucky, be able to live just as you said,
structured, conformist, and run-of-the-mill most of the time, yet with your
own wild, secret garden for other times."

   "I wonder if by taking away the Garden of Eden," the boy mused across
the table, "they actually gave it to us.  By making what happened there
taboo, or at least presenting it as exceedingly unhealthy, they are telling
us therein to dwell, returning lo unto them for salvation at a cost of ten
percent of ye income."



   "If Dave moves out," Michael said, "he's loco."

   "Yeah," the boy said, "we really like talking about things [Note: yes,
we're meant to be back in the WWII era, but you know how it is, working two
jobs, domestic scene constantly intruding, so, lo-and-behold, as I believe
I just said, we're in the here and now.  I'm gonna ride with it; maybe
patch it up later with some editorial nonsense or `tother, and since I do
most of the writing it would be selfish of me not to allow you the
opportunity of writing this little slip off to the charm of reading
unedited copy, raw and alive on the Web]; what we read on the Net, how many
pensioners can dance on the head of a welder, and when the music industry
will realize that its brilliant job is done, it has supplied us with
lifetimes of excellent music, and there simply isn't room in the scheme of
things for more lifetimes of what we already have, which is all new if you
haven't heard it; things like that."

   "Spam's gone down for the same reason," Michael noted.  "Saturation. 
Put enough salt in a glass of water and you get wet salt at the bottom, try
it anytime.  The excess precipitates, something like rain.  Marketing today
is extremely front-loaded; practically bulldozers pushing the stuff through
your front door.  In the old days it was put something truly better on the
market, and advertise it a little.  Now it's the opposite; put nothing new
out, and hype it like it was the Second Coming in an IMAX studio.  Religion
and music have both played their roles, and not all that badly or we
wouldn't be here talking about it, but in doing so they've given us as much
as we can handle, so they should bow proudly and graciously from the scene,
and be replaced by a general level of overall literacy.  Science is passé,
and, bottom line, Mr.  Truman was right when he said the only thing new is
the history you don't know.  That's it in the open-revolutions department,
all others are pointless."



   "Except one," Nick observed in a shy murmur.

   "Yes, yes," his friend said, "a union for boys who help with lawns and
gardens.  Mowers of the world, unite."

   "I guess that makes two," the boy said.

   "What's the other one?" Michael asked after they'd sat looking at each
other for a minute.

   "Freedom," the boy replied, "I mean, we already have a government that
doesn't imprison us so we can pay huge taxes to the politicians, so that
part's taken care of, but we need another kind of freedom.  You know, the
kind where if a boy really likes a man, he can say so, and if he wants to
ask a man that he likes certain questions, he can ask them, and if he wants
certain things to happen with a man, he can be honest about it and not have
it come out all crooked and backwards like some kind of dyslexual
revolution."



   Michael Davis looked at Nick Anderson a long, long time.  "Why were they
keeping his planet secret?" he wondered to himself, "wouldn't it be nice if
there were more boys like this running around loose?  Witty and droll
rather than contentious and adversarial?" He shook his head.  James Dean.
Kooky, recalcitrant and loutish, those characteristics beloved of the
fractious ruling class; the cheap sell of rebellion and conflict with
resolution sweetened with the schmaltz of singing violins.  (Those they
played well.) And that brought up the other side of the coin: what if he
were common?  Most boys, capable of mouthing off a savagely funny pun with
not so much as a sparkle of the eye to lessen the impact of his words, and
who knew?  by extension, perhaps even some dormant facet of his mind.  And
impact it certainly was.  Primal.  Knees to belly.  What had amounted to an
affectionate attraction now a blistering fire.  Would these feelings, held
by the main, result in pandemic dissolution and degeneration?  Taboo in
place and rigorously enforced, laws even unto the penitentiary, wasn't
there dissolution and degeneration to spare?  Seemed to him the matter was
weighty enough to signify mortality as the word was used as an alternate to
immortality.



   "I'm sorry," Nick murmured shyly, wondering at his employer's strained
expression, "I was just trying to be funny."

   "Well," Michael responded, mustering such consciousness he could command
to the exigencies of the moment, "it was a little like the Star of Indian
trying to dazzle.  but that's just a cold stone so it's not much of an
analogy."

   "I told Uncle Dave I really like you," Nick said.

   "Thank you," the twenty eight year old murmured.

   "We talked quite a bit, especially the first night," the boy went on,
"and, you know, he sends me stuff and we keep in touch, so we're kind of
real friends, so it wasn't just about whether I thought it would be worse
to be a doctor or a lawyer and which athlete should be hanged from the
highest yardarm."

   "I see," Michael said, letting the child find his way.

   "And some of it was about rules, like maybe if you obey a lot, you know,
wholeheartedly or something corny like that, well, that maybe other rules
you could interpret or even ignore according to your feelings, you know, if
the feelings were really strong and no one else got hurt in any way beyond
the normal hurts of being out and about."



   "I see," the beleaguered adult repeated, swimming in a whirlpool that
seemed to have something to do with fission at its vortex.

   "And," Nick continued, "I was wondering if like when you were a boy you
broke any special rules."



   If this was drowning, why was there a Red Cross?  Who needed air, when
life without it was dizzying perfection?  How many gods had associated in
his perfect death?  Apparently not as many as were pulling for him, however
marginal the chances of survival had seemed for a minute there.



   "You don't have to tell anything," the child went on, "because a lot of
times things like that are really private and secret, and people are
embarrassed even if they know someone, especially a little kid, might get
really excited if they heard a lot of details about what a man did when he
was learning about the things big boys know about."



   The only picture that came to Michael's mind was of an eighteen-wheel
tanker truck with a four-inch hose connected to a cannon size needle
inserted into his most accessible vein, the lettering on the truck reading:
Elixir of Morphia.



   "Father Patrick had," the man responded, "a considerable artistic flair.
He thought there was great beauty in certain areas of existence that are
normally kept, as you just said, secret and private."

   "Uncle Dave told me a long story about something that happened to him
when he was my age," Nick said, "and he didn't leave out any details."

   "Well," Michael mused, "that brings up the p.  and s.  issue in another
sense, because I don't even want to ask you questions about your
relationship on the chance it might be kind of fishing to find out if
anything is going on."

   "Mostly we talked about you," Nick responded, his voice hardly more than
a rasping whisper, "about my spending more time with you each time I come
over, and how a man can be interested in a boy as more than someone to talk
to and an ordinary friend, and how it's fairly common for the webs of
reserve to be broken, so the man and boy do violate some rules together."



   "I see," Michael murmured, back to the responsiveness of an opiated
swimmer coping with a maelstrom.



   "And," the boy continued, "he said the most important thing for a boy,
if the rules got broken, was for the boy to have a complete experience, not
something just for a couple of minutes, which is why he suggested I spend
tonight and Saturday night with you, and go home Sunday morning, if you
want me to."

   "That's what happened with me," the man said, his voice matching the low
husk of the boy, "Friday until Sunday morning at the Camp of Hades, which
the altar boys nicknamed Perspective City."

   "So it's a long story?" the boy whispered trying to keep urgency from
the excitement in his young voice.

   "'Do we know the devil is all wrong?' was the guiding theme," the host
said, "and how could we know if there was no degree of consort?  He
admitted it was sticking a little intellectual patchwork on things,
rationalizing, but there was enough of a point to it that it seemed to all
and sundry worthwhile to explore the issue in depth, and if it turned out
the devil's playground was entire unto itself, that would amount to a
benchmark when it came to measuring the coercion of religion, while if our
time in Hades released us as foul water into the stream, it would amount to
sanctification, if in reverse, of steeple and altar."

   "Poor church," Nick murmured.



   For more minutes the handsome males were content just to look across the
kitchen table at each other.



   "Uncle Dave asked me some personal questions," the boy finally
whispered.

   "Can you tell me one?" his friend whispered back.

   "It was really personal," Nick said.

   "That's okay," Michael responded, "you don't have to say anything."

   "It was about how I felt," the twelve year old said, "if it was having
any, you know, physical effect on me."

   "How did you answer him?" the young man asked.

   "I told the truth," Nick replied, "and after that he started answering
my questions and telling me about things that might happen if I came and
spent the night with you.  How you might let me wear just my underpants
while we were alone together, and just wear underwear, too, because I told
him you were tall and muscular and I didn't think you had pecs or a six
pack or any of that junk and that you'd look good without your shirt on."



   "Thank you," the man said like a supplicant taken comfort in
incantation.

   "Then we might pretend to wrestle and get sweaty so we'd have to take
showers," the boy went on, "and that I was mature enough so that if I was
in the shower and heard the door click behind me I'd tell you to go away if
I didn't want you to come up close behind me and maybe pretend to wash my
hair or you'd whisper things to me to be sure I really wanted you to stay
with me, and when I nodded that I did, you'd keep whispering and tell me
about how you learned."



   "Nick," Michael said, "I want to ask you something very personal, and
you can ignore it if you want, no offense taken, but I was wondering how
you'd feel about having someone with us if you want to go upstairs with me.
My paperboy's younger brother, Miguel.  He's nine years old.  He comes with
Raul when he collects on Saturday mornings; very cute and soft mannered but
he always asks if he can come and spend the night sometime, and if you were
willing, it would be someone you could play arcade games with."

   "Will you tell both of us about the Camp of Hades when he gets here?"
Nick asked.

   "Yes," the man replied, going to the telephone.



   "We took our clothes off in our bedrooms, then met in the hall in our
underpants," Nick said as he returned to the table, "then he asked if I
wanted to come into his room with him, and I did, but we can come back
downstairs, instead, and wait for Miguel."



   And just moments before he'd felt so alive, his mind focused, the number
dialed correctly first try, coherent, able to understand every word of the
giggling voice on the other end of the line, and, what?  just seconds ago.
Back to mantra-land.



   "Okay," the contractor intoned softly, instinctively reaching for the
hand of the shy-smiling child.  Nick rose, retrieved his backpack, and
hand-in-hand they headed upstairs, the host showing his guest the spare
bedroom and then disappearing into his own, where he was catastrophically
repaid for every ignored snack and neglected dessert of his twenty-eight
years.  He looked like a high school swimming champ as he stripped to his
briefs, waist the thirty-two inches of a panther build, power in his
shoulders dominating a feline rather than primatal torso.  His long legs
rippled modestly; function over delineation, and he bulged, thanks to the
Camp of Hades, hugely in his white briefs, his boy-hard boner thrusting
nearly eight inches to his left where it strained the taut elastic. 
Instinctively, Michael knew the boy would also be waiting, allowing for the
fact that there time together was essentially unlimited, and any rush would
merely be to a closer destination short of the ultimate trip.



   Miguel would take ten minutes on his bike so Michael's reverie lasted
five, then he stepped into the hall and waited.  In half a minute the door
to the guest room opened, and the hundred pound boy merged, hands at his
sides, smiling shyly.  They whispered "hi" and spent the next three minutes
looking at each other, then joined hands and returned to the living room
just in time to see the bike cross the lawn and disappear into the garage.
Michael opened the door.  The nine year old slipped off his backpack as he
arrived and then slowly closed the door behind him, staring at the two slim
athletes standing in the foyer.  The host extended his hand and the two of
them led the new arrival up to Nick's bedroom.  They gave the nine year old
a few minutes to adjust to his vibrantly new surroundings, then Michael
touched Nick's shoulders, bidding him kneel in front of the younger
schoolboy, then kneeling behind him, openly molesting the twelve year old
as the youth began with the buttons on Miguel's shirt.



   The boy was a typical beauty in his white briefs, slim with golden skin,
raven hair and big brown eyes.  He giggled shyly as the older males gently
ran their fingers over him, panting when their hands caressed him high on
his inner thighs while he spread his slim legs in welcome.  They moved him
to the bed and for half an hour play wrestled together, each arching and
panting to the touch of the others as they readied themselves for a nice,
long story.







   Smoking days.  That's when someone wakes me up at nine or ten in the
morning leaving me an hour or two short of sleep.  Once underway I have no
trouble with ten to twenty hour sessions, but any residual fatigue, and the
thought of unfilled pages gets the better of me, so I smoke instead of
writing.  I figure domestic intrusions cut my productivity by thirty
percent, including whole days like today lost.  Stopped drinking for that
very reason, the alcohol interfered with sleeping, and it was easy for a
day or more to slip by before things were back in equilibrium.  A cave
would be the thing, with a sullen wench to tend to the housekeeping; no
clocks, no sun, just sleep and work.  And this is complicated because I'm
not in the least temperamental; once up and running can be talking or have
the television or music on, people coming and going, with nearly zero
impact.  The key thing is being fresh as a daisy at the outset, and I'm
going on about it because I feel it's very good advice to hand on to other
writers; a reminder that the discipline is not - as is often stated in
writing and seminars on the subject - setting a rigid time - five hours a
day is usually suggested - and sticking to it, even if you don't type
sentence one.  More complicated.  Disciplining your life, in general, so
there are times when, yes, you get one hundred percent of the sleep you
need, then pull out the keyboard and crack your knuckles.  With the five
hours a day, I agree, if you sit in a chair.  However, if you can touch
type, and have your `puter beside you in bed, the five hours goes to
eighteen, and I've stretched to thirty and more at a session many times. 
Perfect comfort, no need to hurry because you've got all the livelong day,
no squirming and thinking you really should be comfortable because you paid
eight hundred bucks for the ergonomic eighty-way-adjustable chair with
lumbar vibrator.  Bed.  Head of be raised six or eight inches over the foot
of the bed, because even a few degrees of "tilt" to a semi reclining
position is far more comfortable than trying to operate flat on your back,
so to speak.  It certainly works for me, so even with domestic overburden
I've written and published two novels at an average of ten thousand words a
day.  And the big factor is what I just said; the time factor.  Having all
day.  Instead of rushing for the words, you chill out and let them come to
you, which they will in fits and starts, hour after hour, twenty hours, six
hours sleep, and twenty more hours, and finally, book after book and year
after year.  As in comedy, timing is everything.



   Also helpful is a love of bed.  This I find ironic, because of all
sects, cults, religions and schisms I admire the Shakers the most, but they
deliberately used crude, uncomfortable beds, and hung their chairs on the
wall during the day, anything to do with sloth the original sin, and me? 
Half or more of the reason I am a writer is that I can do it in bed, pillow
in place and a nap five seconds away anytime I feel sleepy.  A morning
commute measured in feet and inches.  Any time.  Almost any civilized
where.



   Added to this is the word processor; the overall beauty of the XP
system, and the words trailing across the screen of Word exactly as they'd
looked in a book.  Quill and inkpot, typewriter and ribbon, fancy desk and
chair, and it would be the cellar for this kid; I'd probably be too lazy to
even bother, though I did once manage an 1,103-page typescript on a
Commodore 64.



   More on the easy way out.  First and foremost, not having to deal with
New York, as I would with any mainstream effort.  Stumping for your work,
hawking and shilling in Dale Carnegie day-tight-compartments, up and at
`em, a big drummer boy.  If I'm too lazy to sit in a chair and work,
imagine showing up at a Des Moines radio studio at six in the morning.  The
second easy out is writing erotica - porn - and, as I've mentioned a time
or two before - not having to think up a plot.  That's huge, because they
do fine at forming themselves as one goes along without the imperative of
sitting down with a notebook and drafting a ten page outline.  Also, no
cycles of conflict and resolution; getting your Bond dude into one pickle
after another.  Time consuming, even if you're good at it.  In the same
vein, no conflict between characters; arguments, fighting, cheating,
beating, lying, killing.  Also huge.  And the cherry on the tart is
publishing on ASSTR, which is ultra click and absolutely immediate.  More?
Well, sticking to a formula is way neat as far as productivity goes.  Adult
meets child.  Shark attacks village.  K.I.S.S.  Same characters, same
voices, same situations; what is left but to indulge in real writing which
is breathing warmth, charm and intelligence into the character, then
cloning away so the common denominator is more than white underpants. 
Another "more" is the spell checker.  I simply wouldn't work without one,
not in this pholish lingo; not without an editor or at least a phreaking
dictionary in the house.



   I associate it with the formation of the planet.  So many events to give
us a stable platform, just for openers, then relative freedom even from the
likes of fleas, which, if logic is used, should dominate the biosphere,
utterly.  On top of the stable platform and lack of any universal life
hazard, we come to issues as disparate as the rare earth elements needed
for modern technology, and the melding of Anglo creativity with Asian
excellence resulting in the vast intellectual power needed to bring
together large groups of brilliant people to create and market the likes of
XP and the Canon Elph.  As many facets go into a writer, or at least this
one; many elements of fundamental luck, for lack of a better word, and the
privileges of at first being able to read and travel, and then in having
the free time to commit to the hundred thousand hours of practice it takes
to make it look easy.  And they'd be nothing without a market, and that
brings us back to ASSTR where the publication of File 3 netted over two
thousand downloads in a few hours, with the other thirty seven titles
settled nicely into a solid week-to-week routine.



   Is there a word for anti-talent?  It's a subject of particular interest
to one coming from a line of acknowledged geniuses in both the arts
(R.W.E.) and commerce and industry (The Bell System, The Burlington Route).
How much was transferred to us two, three, and four generations later? 
Pretty close to squat, based on my observations, though, typically, I'd add
a footnote explaining I got it all.  I mentioned both grandfathers having
steamer trunks loaded with a hundred pounds or more of 16mm movie film. 
Anti-talent.  All pictures taken from twenty to thirty feet away; all
pictures taken as if shaking the camera would somehow add excitement to the
swimming pool and touch football.  Thousands of feet of it, in each case.
As if someone had carefully studied a book on how to take totally
unwatchable films and gone for an A in the course.  Many of the fifty-foot
reels were spliced onto four hundred foot reels, so someone must have taken
some interest after they came back from the lab.  Couldn't they tell?  What
form of anti-talent let them keep making the same page-one mistakes, ad
nauseum?  Not only possessing zero sensitivity to the cinematic obviousness
of holding the camera still and getting in close enough that you could tell
what people looked like, but incapable of learning it even through very
extensive practice?  I've seen the odd few thousand snapshots in my time,
all junk.  As if taking a picture were a matter of snapping the camera -
making it go "click" - at something or somebody, with the act of clicking
both subject and predicate and the resulting photos some kind of weird
dangling participial.  And, again, this is from a family of intellectual
giants and men of towering achievements.  Are most people totally
insensitive and utterly uncreative; aesthetic dodos?  Or could someone have
spent five minutes, each, with my two grandfathers, explained the basics,
and turned them into good, and, with practice, perhaps even fine
cinematographers?  Is it, in the end, even a good thing or a bad thing? 
Sensitivity and artistic flair (often used derisively)?  Or do they set one
searching, rarely and perhaps never to be satisfied with what is actually
available or achievable, with the funny farm a likely destination as it so
often is for religious fanatics with their voices and miracles? 
Historically, many cultures have gone through periods of declaring arts
decadent and offing scholars and intellectuals along with the poets and
painters.  Would that be an idea for the times?  Or should we stick with
the tried and true, under which paradigm our creative geniuses universally
devote themselves to the albeit attractive medium of the half-minute
television ad?  In that this provides a direct link between art and
commerce, enabling the latter to fund the former, it may turn out to be the
one thing that's actually right in our head-over-heels quest for extreme
materialism at any cost, no matter how deferred.  Me?  I'd take my chances
and go for rates of overall literacy bordering on the extreme, nurturing a
vague hope the misfits would be found in the library, not liquor cabinets,
local shooting galleries, or down at ye cop shop.  Of course food is the
ultimate panacea as it performs consistently, always making you fat if you
eat too much, and, presumably, showing the world you are very well fed is
to show the world you are happy.



   And how is lack of talent or appreciation thereof related to general
lack of intelligence?  Methinks with an iron bar.  Look at the way we live,
if you want absolute proof.  Huge, ironically artistic (as in the builder's
diorama), subdivisions separated by miles of meandering (but artistic)
streets and lanes from shop-o-plexes, with nothing in between.  Drive (a
lot) or die (soon).  Correspondingly huge houses, great cob-job barns of
buildings - when all any family wants is a good computer and entertainment
center to huddle around - with the grandparents in a home and the kids at
daycare, to and from which one journeys in a two ton utility vehicle with
six ta-pocketing cylinders burning petroleum prodigiously, even at zero
miles per hour.  If this sketch isn't an accurate delineation of a total
lack of civic intelligence, someone better write and set me straight.  I
say you are absolutely insane, and will pay catastrophically for it, what
do you say?  I say for all your tech wizardry, wealth, and education, with
all media, all day, you have managed to establish the lowest common
denominator of general life quality in human history, and most of it won't
be paid for for decades.  And yes, television now offers pills for both
body and mind, from the heartburn you get from the knowledge you ain't
gonna make it to prescriptions for you dog if the old critter isn't as
responsive as he once was, but are these enough?  I say they just add to
your debt load as do the credit cleaners and refinaciers.  Huff-and-puff, a
mouse could blow your house down.



   Playing with a thing called Picasa, a photo album and mailing
application being promoted by Kazaa.  Comes with a thing called Hello,
which is also a photo mail utility.  Coming to find out the .pdd extension
on PhotoDeluxe images is unbeknownst to the digiphoto world, but I guess
it's just a matter of converting them to JPEGs, which would be easier if I
didn't have 999 images in my "keeper" file.  Lot a nuisance to get
identical results, and a total laugh at you folks who love apple and other
non-Gates software.  This is how it would all be, but for Sir William. 
Entire protocols and execution plans needed for every last thing you wanted
to do, for, in the end, the same result.  A millstone on the industry,
though, in a backhanded way they're reaping windfall earnings because
people have to buy one thing after another to get something that works. 
The Hello program first asked me for a password, then, without my changing
the log-on, went on to inform me it was wrong, and now it won't even open
off the active desktop.  I bought a car but there's not place for the key.
It's all a horrible reprise of getting the Canon drivers sorted out, and in
the end I'll have to pay Dean to teach me to use it, this after at least a
hundred thousand hours on personal computers.  Time and again, it's the
identical problem.  Instructions written by tech staff who assume things
(for example, that everyone knows the Canon S400 is also the IXUS 400), and
leaves out key-in-the-ignition data.  You have to be dead sharp,
financially well off, and able to spend hours clicking at nonsense to use
these systems together, and even then, as with "MSN Messenger," they
sometimes simply will not function (on top of which, this particular piece
of louseware adds two full minutes to boot up, and seems incapable of
learning I want nothing to do with it).  On the bright side, like domestic
intrusion, it does yield up the odd bit of subject matter.



   Message to industry from number one user and heavy consumer: make
everything work together, first time, all the time, and you'll see sales
figures that will blow your mind.  The computer is vastly too complex not
to be an appliance.  The learning curve for advanced features is at a tough
collegiate level requiring high intelligence, great dedication, and
hundreds of hours.





   If I end up in an epic struggle here, you're going to hear about it. 
Good, get me pissed.  I remember downloading a 90M game, then diligently
searching the FAQs until, in the next to last one, at the end of a hundred
or more on technical stuff, was one question: Will you ever release a
single-player version of XYZ?  Answer: when hell freezes over.  Got me, did
you?  My turn.  How about your layoffs; your stomach churning careers in
tech, where age is multiplied by ten and being goofy is a given?  Go to it
you little whizzers, dig your graves deep and square.  Piss me off.  Burn
my time like it was free and make me feel like a moron because I deem the
machine a tool, not a hobby gadget.  I could be getting on with K.C.  this
very moment, but you've cost me so now it's my turn.  You'll suffer along,
bozos, and if it's ten thousand words, tuff luck.  What you do is
demonstrate the latent elitism and brute hypocrisy of anything to do with
democracy and a classless society.  As soon as you have a little whiz kid
knowledge about cyberspace, your first instinct is to obscure it from
non-clubbers, as if everyone had your task-specific IQs and vast amounts of
time to work around your quirky input.  Personally, I'd rather spend the
time peeling your skins off and hanging them on the Net to dry.  You'll be
old faster than you can fart.  Learn to dread it now, and having to cope
with arrogant young bumpkins just like you - WERE.



   All I want to do is send a picture.  By the same random fickleness built
into the Canon installation procedure, I've managed to send two that I
think went out.  Six hours later, at a cost of several thousand words of
engaging fiction, I still can't get my images in PhotoDeluxe to display
anywhere as mailable JPEGs, or anything.  Follow six or seven perfectly
obvious dialogues, then something's missing, and start all over again, time
and again.  Just to send a picture from the Adobe major brand product, over
an XP system updated this very day, and using a Microsoft-sourced version
of MS Messenger.  Blocked at even getting alternate copies to display the
way everyone needs them.  All common, mainstream stuff, swept with updated
Norton.  What else am I meant to do?  Why was I able to, a, upload a bunch
of random test images from the Canon, while I was struggling with it, and,
b, send two pictures, but no others?  Is the secret PhotoDeluxe is an
iron-box proprietary system, only useable with plug-ins and a compatible
recipient, but nobody wants to tell?  Does the image I want to convert
remain in its original file, with a duplicate JPEG, or is it changed?  If I
transfer a picture from My Pictures, does a copy remain in the original
file, or do I then have to delete it?  Simple stuff, and it's like plucking
a chicken from the inside.  Adobe, Microsoft, Kazaa, all huge names, and
all I want to do is mail a picture.  Not only am I going to bore you
fucking stupid with this account, however long it takes, but I'm going to
keep at it through the process of transferring my images onto CDs in a
readily usable format.  Make it tough for me, and you'll get kicked where
it hurts the most.  All of this should have been, three or four years ago,
click, click, click.  Nothing I want to do is a hair's breadth off what the
vast majority want to do.  Take pictures and send them as JPEGs.  Burn
images onto a compact disc.  And if this ends up costing me money, you're
really screwed.  I'll take a sabbatical at the rate of one day for each
dollar I have to spend to bother a tech who has better things to do than
come out and click me through the procedures of transferring, naming,
sizing, reducing, and sending a 4 X 6 photo or short video clip; procedures
a ten year old should be able to accomplish intuitively.  Too bad, because
Word XP works flawlessly and we could be steaming along at flank speed.



   I'm right and you're wrong.  I wrote "Byte Magazine" several times in
the early Eighties, telling them to knock off the "Scientific American"
rejects and orient the magazine toward ME.  They did not respond. 
"Computer Shopper" came along and did.  Turned "Byte" into a half-size
parody of "Popular Mechanics." And look at "C.S.," you wise guys, it's a
shell of what it was in the early Nineties; practically nothing.  Ding-dong
anybody awake?  You've saturated the tech savvy, power user market.  We're
what's left.  Tens of millions who want to know the machine to no greater
extent than we know the automatic transmission in our cars, we just want to
send pictures.



   I remember a softball game from a couple of years ago.  Cute thing;
choose a team, practice, play.  In twenty or thirty tries, my team never
got a man on base, while the computer played like dream Yankees.  To me
such a product is lethal to the self-esteem and psychological comfort of a
child, and, as monarch, I'd deport the designers and marketers.  Games,
particularly, are rife with extremely bad writing.  They do not lead you
in, as a book does, let you keep your place as you work your way into the
story; they have three or four imbecile levels, then become impossible. 
One called "Sam's Sock Works" or something like that, at the seventh level,
gave five seconds to make 126 choices of levers, conveyors, gates and
chutes.  Yes, this particular game could be re-shuffled so this level might
not come up, but it was always lurking, and killed the game as precisely as
I'm killing this story, FOR EXAMPLE.  What goes around comes around, piss
me off and get pissed on; waste my time, and kiss yours good-bye.  No cute
little columns of asterisks, and I'm just the craftsperson to ease back
into K.C.  in long paragraph form, so you won't even be able to seek out
passages of dialogue or quote marks, and, for all you know, my struggles
may go on for twenty pages, or fifty.  I'm going to keep trying, I got
where I am, number one purveyor of fiction in the world, by doing so, and
it's your tough luck to either give up in despair and download someone else
or read on, hoping, at the very least, I see something funny in having my
tail pulled by quirky geniuses.



   Three things, actually; mailing, the CD, and I'd like to do a Web site
on ASSTR.  I have a picture of myself captioned: Thomas Cochran Emerson,
Dangriga Belize, Dec., '03, Greatest artist in history and unassuming
nonpareil.  You really wanna see it.  Also S.  and the gang.  I browsed
through a few dozen the other day and they all had long warnings about
being eighteen and stuff.  Ranged from Big Blue slick to basic typing and
links.  Couldn't understand why they were there, in the first place, since
very few had any content, maybe a third rate photo, and all the stories
were in the FTP section.  But how would I find out?  I couldn't figure out
how to rotate a picture on PhotoShop, then spent two hours online
downloading one guide after another, one of which had the single ugliest
picture I've ever seen in my life, and still couldn't rotate the image from
landscape to portrait.  Since I'm the number one content producer in the
world, I think I'm qualified to say it's always the machine, never me. 
When the machine works, I turn out tons of stuff, copy or pictures.  When
I'm stopped, it's because the computer won't complete some bread-and-butter
task because the geniuses who designed the product can't be bothered with
those who aren't a little, wink-wink, cognizant.



   Spleen vented and bladder, well, you know, discharged, I'm off to try
again, and you better cross your fingers your artist in residence doesn't
go down the tubes leaving you stuck, high-and-dry, on Bitch Island.





   Picasa swears on a stack of bibles it will collect by date all JPEGs.  I
convert from .pdd to .jpg.  The images come up in "Deluxe" labeled as
JPEGs, but, although some are in the Picasa files, it won't take any
others. Uninstalled, deleted and redownloaded and reinstalled Hello. 
Apparently it allows no access while offline, something conveniently left
out of all descriptions.  And they're all such pretty things.  So much time
and effort into the graphics and interface; Picasa has a sort of clock
timeline thing, and swings images by in several ways.  But it utterly
refuses to allow files from PhotoDeluxe, which means you're all but doomed
to a litany fully intended to irritate my subjects as much as they - the
supposed best of them - are irritating me.  I'm not going to get mad and
quit, I'm going to get mad and grind you into dust.



   It's really difficult getting a handle on the intellectual facets of
this syndrome of dumb brilliance; a sort of smart-alecy, hit-the-market
glibness, while forgetting to tie your shoes.



   One bright idea, work-around, after another.  Yes, I can get Outlook
Express to send a photo, but at 2.5M.  As if.  And "Deluxe" has low res
pix, but will neither hand them over to Picasa or Hello, or attach them via
MS Messenger.  Totally refuses, no matter what.  I suppose the next step is
to send the reduced images to My Docs, then insert them from there.  As if
that folder isn't full enough, already.  What a ridiculous hassle.  The
Japanese beat us all but to death, and have actually probably done just
that, but we don't know it yet, by standardizing.  You can plug a Yamaha
into a Kenwood into a Pioneer, and it works for ten years without a hitch.
Not the American way.  Proprietary empires.  The Wright Bros.  hamstrung
developments in aviation for years with endless patent litigation.  And the
exception who proves the rule is our old family friend, Mr.  Bell, who had
to defend his telephone patents six hundred times in court, thus forming
the greatest single entity of all time.  But that was then and this is now.
None of these products are revolutionary, they've been around for most of a
decade, and they don't work, can't be made to work even by a highly
experienced, if not "power" user.  Who wins when you do?



   Well, let me try the My Docs workaround.  Shit.



   No luck there.  This is a whole day gone, for nothing.  For learning
perhaps a dozen things I may not do.  Gee, I guess that means I must be to
stupid to write more stories.  And as a neat little twist, the images that
did - somehow - make it on to Picasa are gorgeous, rich and almost needle
sharp even top-to-bottom on my 19" monitor.  In slide-show mode, they show,
at first, quite fuzzy, but clicking them sharpens them, something that
happens instantly.  Can't, for the life of me, figure out why they don't
pop up sharp, I mean, doesn't it defeat the purpose of an automated slide
show to have to manually click each image?  Kooks.  Fortunately, all my
hours of opening and closing my "keeper" images and dicking around with
them doesn't seem to have hurt the originals, in spite of being stuck on
the starting line.  Save Changes?  No, and maybe that's the whole problem,
but I assume it means save the changes as the image is stored in "Deluxe,"
not in Picasa, and if I click Yes, I may ended up turning a beautiful photo
into a pixilated glob fit only to be mailed - small.



   I just thought of another workaround.  I'll throw the images up on the
monitor, re-photograph them with the Elph, then try saving them in one of
my other editing suites for possible transfer into either Picasa or Hello,
and then mailing or transferring to disk.



   I'm going to post this, as fucking is.  Ball is in your court.  Over two
thousand people downloaded File 3 in a few hours.  Since the piece has a
nice, lurid title, I can assume the same for this File.  So one of you
better grab a racket and write a thoughtful composition on how I get MS
Messenger working and make .pdd files available for mailing as jpegs and
also how I can pack them, at high resolution, onto an accessible CD.  No
more Michael, Nick and Miguel until you cooperate.  (And yes, it will be
acceptable to put "Bonehead" in the Subject Line, as long as you dish the
411.  Bye-bye.)

   Sex with Boys and Girls - End File 4

   xxx