Dorien Grey and Me

Monday, March 10, 2014

Little Boy Lost

I have never grown up—a combination of circumstances and deliberate effort. When I was five I had no desire whatsoever to be six. I even now pay only lip service to the fact of being an adult.

I’ve always been acutely aware that life is a precious gift I could not have forever, and I suppose I’ve believed that if I stayed a child, I could indefinitely put off having to give it back. Yet even while I refer to life as a party, I’ve never felt that I was particularly welcome guest; I’ve always been the one standing awkwardly in the corner, watching everyone else enjoy themselves.

Reality and I have never cared for one another. Even as a child, while my parents and close relatives served as my anchors and made me feel loved and physically comfortable, I felt somehow detached. Thanks in large part to my mother, who read to me constantly before I learned to read for myself and fostered my fantasies, I was able to build a fortress against reality Its walls and battlements were made of materials I found in books and movies and stories and games. I developed the ability to view myself with an odd detachment, as though I were a character in a book I was reading. I slowly became my own book, my own movie. This is still the case today. I sit in the armchair of my mind and watch/read in fascination as my story—and my books—unfold.

And though there are advantages to holding tightly to a child’s mind, eyes, and heart beyond physical childhood, it becomes more and more difficult as the body ages and reality’s armies march relentlessly forward to besiege my fortress.

So many factors make each of us who we are as individuals, and we are all different because no two people have identical life-shaping experiences. My personal unwillingness to “grow up” has been neither easy nor, often, pleasant. It is based, again, on the my acute awareness of not “belonging,” of never really having been or being totally sure of how to respond to “grown-up” situations. It has left me eternally confused and frustrated, and. I cannot remember a time when I have not felt like a lost little boy.

Interestingly, however, though I have always felt alone, I very seldom feel lonely. I have also fairly well developed the ability to avoid feeling overwhelmed by simply refusing to think about things which I know might well cause those feelings. I’m very well aware that the possibility for physical and romantic love—sharing my life with someone whom I can love with all my being, and who could love me equally in return—have long been lost to me, and this could be a source of true sorrow and regret were I allow it to. So I simply do not let myself think about it. But it is clear notice that I have been at the party a very long time and cannot expect to stay forever.

Having retained a child’s romanticism and firm belief in a happily-ever-after, I’m even now constantly trying to accommodate what I want and expect life to be with what it is. My fortress is surrounded, and even my lost little boy knows it.

While the mind may be able to resist reality, the body cannot. My little boy’s body has long, long ago vanished, to be replaced by one I simply do not recognize and which could horrify me if I were to allow myself too much access to reflexive surfaces. I am slowly losing control over it and I fear it has made a pact with reality which I would never allow it to even consider.

And as I view, with truly detached objectivity, the fact that I am closer to the end of my journey than to the beginning, I fool myself by thinking of it a “logic” rather than “reality.” And you can be sure I will remain in my fortress, thumbing my nose at Reality’s armies as long as I possibly can. And then, hopefully, my mother may come and read me a story.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday and Thursday. Please take a moment to visit his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, you might want to check out Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1), which is also available as an audiobook (http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_1?asin=B00DJAJYCS&qid=1372629062&sr=1-1).

Thursday, March 06, 2014

The Spider's Belch

Okay, I admit it: I have what even I consider to be an unnatural obsession with internet spam, and though I had been fighting with considerable success of late to resist, the temptations are just too great. Internet spam is, metaphorically, an intricately woven spider's web, at the center of which a deadly predator awaits. My fascination with it stems from the fact that while I can understand a fly or insect getting caught in a spider’s web, I simply cannot comprehend how human beings can become ensnared by spam. Those who do so because of their own greed deserve to get caught, and I have no pity for them. But far too many innocent people…the decent though incredibly naive and gullible…are also ensnared, and this infuriates me.

While spiders and their webs are a part of the balance of nature—the the predator takes the victim’s life in order to survive itself—internet spammers have no such logical reason to exist. Their only motive is greed, and like the spider stalking the fly, they do so without conscience, morals, or compassion.

The creators of spam are, all evidence to the contrary, not totally stupid. But they don't have to be smart. They are predators. They may have about the same I.Q. as a black widow spider, but they spin their webs with the same determination and for the same purpose. And they know if they make their webs large enough (something the vast size of the internet makes relatively easy to do) they’re bound to catch something.

Let us take one single, all-too-typical spam message/web and lay it out upon the examining table to dissect it, piece by piece. First, here is the message in its entirety:

Order Request

Thanks for your continous response to our email and your diligent work in getting our order supplied, we have three other suppliers and at we have to select only one. Register your company profile on our supplier Portal and fill the datasheet after logging in.

Click to download

Thanks for your cooperation

Hussein Safwan

Purchase Manager

The first thing we observe is a “Second Coming”-size boldface “Order Request,” a much smaller font used here, implying that what follows is of vital importance. That it not only not important but makes absolutely no sense is irrelevant. (Does “order request” mean they asking you to place an order, or are they referring to an order that has, supposedly, already been placed? No matter.)

“Company profile”? What company? Do you have a company? They hope the fact that they apparently assume you do will let you make one up. “Supplier Portal”? “Log in”?

How the recipient…any recipient…can so totally set aside everything they have ever known or felt about logic and the fact that not one single thing in the entire message makes even an iota of sense is totally beyond my comprehension.

“Thanks for your continous [sic.] response to our email…” One might wonder, if one were the wondering kind, which the spammer counts on the recipient’s not being, how one can “continuously” respond to a single email which the recipient knows full well was never sent in the first place? They either feel safe in assuming the recipient is not smart enough to remember that he/she has never in fact heard from these people before, or that they will find the dangled carrot irresistible.

Of course the spammer depends heavily on the recipient’s duplicity in blatantly obvious illegal schemes…spiriting large sums of money out of the spammer’s supposed country, for example, or claiming to be related to someone the recipient has never heard of in order to “claim the deceased’s inheritance,” etc. It is the (intended) impression that the recipient is somehow getting away with something even the slightest degree of conscience would declare unethical that makes the prospect exciting.

All leading you to the spider in the center of the web. “Click to download data sheet” in big, bold letters. Click and they have you. You are doomed.

The note is signed by “Hussein Safwan,” an exotic-sounding name that is sure to instill confidence. And we learn that Mr. Safwan is a “Purchase Manager.” Did it occur to the recipient—you—to wonder what he purchases, or for whom he works? Who cares? You...and you can be sure your money...are toast.

Now all you have to do is to sit back and wait for the spider to belch. But you won’t be around to hear it.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday and Thursday. Please take a moment to visit his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, you might want to check out Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1).

Monday, March 03, 2014

On Thinking

I do an awful lot of thinking. ... No, let me rephrase that: my mind is like a car with the engine turned on, the gas pedal pushed to the floor, and the gearshift in neutral. This is to “thought” what a table full of baking ingredients is to a pie. Actually grabbing one single thought and holding onto it long enough to do anything of value with it is nearly impossible for me.

I’d actually finished this blog before it dawned on me that it probably made little or no sense. I’d originally intended to address the various aspects of thinking. I was planning to delve into the subject at some depth...or what passes for depth with me.

We think from the day we are born. Even before we engage in what might be considered rational thought, we as babies begin thinking as a way of learning how to use our bodies, familiarizing ourselves first with the purpose of our various appendages, then with the voices and faces of our parents, and exploring our senses—taste being the first. Having established the basic knowledge of the our physicality, rationality and logic then slowly enter the equation.

To return to the car analogy, the mind is the driver, the body the car. They generally work flawlessly as a team throughout childhood, youth, and well into adulthood. But there inevitably comes a point where the two begin to part ways. It seldom if ever occurs to the mind that while it has no major physical components to wear out, the body is constructed totally of components that do. We’re at first confused by the physical slowing down of the body—it’s unwillingness and eventually inability to do what it had always done before.

Life has been compared to a highway, and while the mind assumes it should always be able to maintain the speed limit, all the thinking in the world can’t change the fact that the body/car is being increasingly overtaken and passed by sleek, newer models with shinier paint and more highly polished chrome. The mind may still be in the race, but the body is inexorably forced into the slow lane. As the situation becomes more and more apparent, it’s not uncommon for the mind to experience a mixture of anger at the body and fear for itself.

But for all the benefits of thinking in the body-and-mind union, I’ve always wondered why, since thinking is one of the greatest of all the unique gifts bestowed upon Mankind, so many people don't seem to bother with using it, and are content to let other people do their thinking for them.

I just had the mental image of a nest of baby birds, mouths agape, waiting for their parents to regurgitate nourishment, and the thought that when it comes to thinking, too many humans never get beyond the baby-bird stage. They willingly swallow anything they're fed and accept as gospel anything they're told. Why bother to chew on a thought when you can just swallow someone else’s whole?

A terrifyingly large number of people one might assume to be rational human beings have been somberly telling us that our President is an usurper to the office he holds; the fact that he was elected to the office…twice…means absolutely nothing. He is, to those who never met a conspiracy theory they didn’t like, a Kenyan-Socialist-Marxist-Muslim-terrorist Antichrist who drinks the blood of Christian babies for breakfast. He is E-vil incarnate. Really? Gee, that sounds terrible. But I'm not going to spend any time thinking about it for myself. If people say it, it must be true, right? So that's proof enough for me. I'll just go along with it with no question.

I can't help but wonder how much of the anger and hostility sweeping the world today is based on independent thought and how much on our willingness to be carried along on the sheer, unreasoning tsunami engendered by accepting what we’re told without question.

And I have just realized, upon rereading all of the above for the fourth or fifth time and trying to smooth out the lumps, that at the rate I’m going, this particular blog has the potential to be only a few pages shorter than The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. So I think I should just call it a day. Maybe I'll try to talk about thinking again sometime. You know, come up with a bunch of analogies between cars and drivers and minds and bodies and…. Well, we’ll see.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Flotilla

You may have noticed that I’m rather fond of similes and metaphors for life and the human condition. They are constantly bubbling to the surface of my mind, unbidden.

Some time ago, I posted a blog comparing life to a leaky little boat, with each of us bailing frantically to stay afloat. Today, perhaps more inspired by my Navy videos than the leaky boats blog, another bubble broke the surface. I suddenly found myself envisioning stock footage from a WWII era newsreel, looking down through the clouds on a huge flotilla of naval ships. Carriers, destroyers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, battleships, support vessels of every description, tankers, troop ships…hundreds of them, spread over miles and miles of the ocean’s surface, each individual vessel moving in the same direction and at the same speed, toward the same destination with the same goal. It was also one of those optical illusions where one moment you see it as a unit (the flotilla), and the next you see the individual ships which constitute it.

And that, I thought, is a pretty good analogy for how humanity works. We are as diverse as the ships of the fleet, yet are all sailing through the sometimes stormy sea of life, each one a totally unique individual, operating both individually and as part of a vastly larger whole.

In a wartime flotilla every ship in it is subject to attack and sinking by things we can see coming, the equivalent of air strikes, or those we cannot, like the torpedo from a submarine. And when one ship is stricken, the others steam on, not oblivious, but unable to do anything. We sail on together toward a horizon which none of us—no matter how big or small—will ever reach. As those who have sailed beside or at various distances from us for years slip beneath the waves, we sail on because we have no other choice than but to do so. And as we ourselves are torpedoed and sink, as inevitably must happen, the rest of the fleet continues on, our place in the flotilla taken up by another ship.

I’d like to think of myself as a carrier, of course…a proud, awe-inspiring, majestic flagship of one of the many battle groups of the fleet. But I am probably, in reality, a little grey destroyer paroling the perimeter of the fleet, cutting resolutely through the turbulent seas, plunging headlong into gigantic waves only to rise up in a huge spray of water washing over my bow, then plunge down into another trough to repeat the process.

There are, both in naval fleets and in life, priorities—probably more clear in ships than in people. In the navies of the world, it is the carriers which must be protected at all costs. The rest of the fleet is expendable. In human terms, world leaders…rightly or wrongly…are the carriers: the people they lead are the rest of the fleet. But regardless of our designation, place, or rank in the fleet, the important thing is to recognize that we each do have an important role, and each of us has a purpose it is our responsibility to fulfill with dignity and honor.

Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!

Monday, February 24, 2014

Simple Rules

It somehow always comes as something of a surprise every time I'm faced with the fact that life ain't easy, and that the passage through it is frequently chaotic. To bring some semblance of order, rules were invented. Since life is a cumulative learning experience, the rules each person sets up for himself/herself tend to be far more varied and flexible than societal rules. I have come up with a few simple rules to help my passage as smooth as possible.

Many of my own rules are in response to the fact that I've always been excruciatingly aware that life is far too short under the best of circumstances to meekly accept those wrongs and unnecessary injustices over which I have any small degree of control.

In no particular order of importance, here are a few of them:

1) I will never vote for any politician who will not say what he is for, only what he is against. If he hasn't any positive, constructive things to say about what he plans to do to while in office, he doesn't deserve to hold it.

2) I refuse to buy any product whose ads include the words "for well-qualified buyers" (which is a subtle way of saying "not you") or "emerging science suggests" (I don't want "maybe in the future," I want "now").

3) I never tolerate rudeness or neglect from anyone I am paying to perform a service for me. I do not hesitate one second in asking to speak to the person's supervisor and relating my unhappiness directly to him or her. (Often, in restaurants and retail establishments, the manager is not aware of the employees' actions unless told.)

4) I will not subject myself to any situation/play/movie/book in which I know I will find myself uncomfortable or upset simply because someone says I should. I witness and experience enough sorrow, trauma, and injustice in the day-to-day world without willingly exposing myself to more—and I certainly should not have to pay for the privilege.

5) In any disagreement, I will decide if winning is worth the effort put into it, and at the point where it is not, I will simply walk away.

6) I do not hesitate in defending those who cannot defend themselves.

7) I refuse to spend time in the presence of bigots and proselytizers.

8) I know the difference between ignorance and stupidity, and act accordingly.

9) Though it is often not easy, I do try to see both sides of every issue.

10) I never, ever, under any circumstances, allow myself to be suckered into opening any message in my spam folder unless I recognize the sender's name and can tell from the few opening words that it got into the spam folder by mistake.

11) While I often fail, I do my best to live by the golden rule.

12) I avoid like the plague anything I am assured that "everyone is talking about". If I'm not talking about it, it doesn't matter.

13) Even in those times when I am depressed or enraged by my own stupidity, I never, ever take myself too seriously.

14) I listen to what others say, respect their right to say it, but only do what my mind and heart tell me to do.

As indicated in some of the rules above, I don't always succeed, but that doesn't mean I don't try.

Now, sit down and make a list of your own rules. You may find it very interesting.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Titan Arum

There is a rare plant, a native of Sumatra, called the Titan Arum. It can grow in excess of five feet high, is shaped very much like a phallus, and emits an odor like rotting flesh, which has given it the common and charmingly appropriate name of "corpse plant." It is both fascinating and repulsive, and I have decided to launch a campaign to rename it the "spam plant" for its strong similarity to the endless stream of effluvia clogging the in-box of nearly every computer on earth. Like the spores of the Titan Arum is carried by the wind, internet spam is carried on the winds of cyberspace to every corner of the world.

And yet, as utterly repulsed as I am by this internet effluvia, I cannot resist reading the opening words of each message as it appears on my monitor, and reacting like one of Pavlov's dogs. The following examples are reprinted exactly as received, and followed by my "Dear Lord, I can't help myself" responses.

"Put your donut in her oven" (Excuse me? If you are making an oh-so-subtle and clever titter-hee-hee-smirk reference to intercourse, may I point out that donuts are round; the penis--like the Titan Arum--is tubular. And donuts are cooked in hot oil, not baked. But what in hell did I expect from a spam message?)

"How please knocking-out hottie" (How please learn speaking English?)

"Little humble Celanding - Beggard and outragedMany hearts deplord...." (Well, that certainly convinces me you're a totally above-board representative of an august and respected company. Send me a dozen of whatever in the hell it is you’re peddling.)

vivatcell: "Like a drilling machine in pants - Wanna act best with your wife...."

justin: "Fill rod with power - Wanna act best with your wife...." (Justin, meet Vivatcell. The answer to your identical question is a resounding "NO!," and I consider you both to be seedlings of the Titan Arum.)

"Give more banging to your beloved." (What a charming, charming sentiment. I thought for a moment I was reading a Hallmark card.)

"Lose 49lbs Obeying 1 Rule" (Yeah: don't eat.)

"Your Email Won ￡1,000,000 Pounds!" (Of course it did! And as King of Romania, I shall distribute it among all my worthy subjects.)

"Do you have a flare for designing?" (No, I usually use flares to attract passing ships at night when I'm lost at sea. But I do have a flair for spotting ignorance.)

neilread 07 "Wrong - Hello. My name is Victoria. It's about you or no?" (You're absolutely right: you're wrong. 1. Your name is not Victoria, it's Neil. 2. Your 'question' makes no sense--not that I expected it to--and 3. You're definitely wrong if you think I have any interest in whatever you're pitching.)

"Cheap women's clothes!" (My first reaction was that they were hoping to attract the Chippy/Bimbo crowd, but then realized they were undoubtedly using "Cheap" to describe the quality.)

"Russian wives. Are you ok?" (I'm fine, thanks. What the hell are you talking about?--Not that I have any intention of opening your toxic waste email to find out.)

WESTERN UNION TRANSFE (no subject) - "My associate has helped me to send your first payment of $7500 to you as instructed by Mr......" (Western Union's sending money by email now? Please tell your associate it has not arrived. Perhaps Mr......stole it. I wouldn't put it past him.)

Breathe deep.

Monday, February 17, 2014

A Book's Tale

One of the many fascinating things about being a writer is, after a book has been written, to be able to look back on its history…not just on the steps it took to being written, but what consciously or unconsciously prompted those steps. My very first published book is a case in point.

In 1973, I was working as an editor at what I referred to as, and in fact was, “the largest porn mill on the West Coast.” It was the height of the “sexual revolution,” and the owners of the company took full financial advantage of it, churning out dozens of magazines with sexually explicit photographs, 99.95 percent of which were unrelentingly heterosexual. The company avoided prosecution by donning the protective cloak of “socially redeeming value.” Every photograph was justified by a clinically-worded caption and incorporated in a heavily-footnoted article based on recognized research in human sexuality. Nobody who bought the magazines bothered to read the words, of course, but in case anyone did, that’s where I came in as editor.

When, for reasons never made clear, the company decided to branch out into the publishing of paperback mainstream fiction, they thought it would be good to start with a western. Since they’d never published “regular” fiction, there were no submitted manuscripts from which to draw. I was asked if I’d like to write one.

Of all literary genres, westerns had always been my least favorite, but I took it as both a challenge and a way to make a few extra dollars, and agreed. Knowing that they would not go for a story with an openly gay cowboy, I wrote it to be as ostensibly heterosexual as I could. Fortunately, no sex scenes were required, so crammed in every Saturday kids’ matinee cliff-hanger cliche I could think of except for a fight between cowboys and indians…only because there weren’t any indians. The result was Stagecoach to Nowhere—not my title—which was all well and good, except that there were only two stagecoaches even mentioned in the book, and neither of them had any significant relation to the plot. My efforts were compounded by the melodramatic cover blurb, with which I also had nothing to do: “Cursing the law, he rode for justice.” While the hero did seek justice, there was no cursing of the law involved.

At any rate, it did quite well, and as a result manuscripts started flowing in to the fiction department, thereby eliminating the necessity for me to write another book for the company.

Fast forward almost 30 years. When the copyright reverted to me, I set about to rewrite it as I’d like to have done it originally—as a western-romance-adventure-mystery centered on a gay cowboy and his young charge—the male half of a boy-and-girl set of twins Calico was guiding, for complex reasons, across the wild wild west to their aunt in far-off Colorado. Retitled Calico, which I had originally called it until the stagecoach came rumbling in, I had the chance to make it what I wanted it to be, and I was rather pleased by the result.

Writers tend to become emotionally involved with the characters they create. Those like me, who are able to turn the story over to the characters, often just sit back and watch the story unfold with little conscious direction. In developing and expanding the relationship between Calico and Josh, I found it had transitioned from a string of potboiler cliches into what I consider to be a very sweet love story. And again without having thought about it in advance, I realized I was hopefully opening the door to a Young Adult market in which gay role models are extremely scarce for those who may be having problems accepting their orientation. Josh, who at 17 knows exactly who and what he is and what he wants out of life is, I hope, such a model.

So my very first published book transitioned, for me, from an opportunity to make a quick buck to a good, old fashioned romance/adventure with a twist, and set me on a path I follow today. Sort of gives new meaning to riding happily off into the sunset.

For a writer, it don’t get much better than that.

[For anyone who might be interested, the first chapter of Calico can be found and read on my website, www.doriengrey.com, and/or you can listen to an excerpt from the audiobook by clicking http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Calico-Audiobook/B00CME09AS/ref=a_search_c4_1_6_srTtl?qid=1392515547&sr=1-6 )]