July 4th -- Independence Day

Happy 4th of July.

Independence Day.

A day in which the United States celebrates breaking off from England to become our own country. At the time we were pissed off that we were being taxed but not getting a say in the way things were done. King George made the decisions and we paid taxes but had no voice.

This year there have been lots of voices raised as people feel like they're not being heard. They feel like they have legitimate complaints about the government of our country that they feel isn't fairly representing them or speaking for them.

From the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence, a declaration of war against our then legitimate rulers:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Our country wasn't founded by perfect men. Some signers of the constitution didn't recognize black people as actual people, but as chattel, property. And it wasn't until the 13th Amendment that slavery itself was outlawed. They weren't perfect. The country they built wasn't perfect and still isn't.

But it has, built into it, a system by which we the people, are able to make it better; not just better for us, but better for all of us. We are at our best when we are doing great things in the world. We went to the moon in under ten years. We fought a war on two fronts, and won with help from allies, chief among them, the country we had broken away from 200 years before! We are a country that builds things that are testaments to the human spirit. The Hoover Dam, The Twin Towers. Cape Canaveral.

We are at our best when we try and make things better for ourselves and for the world at large.

Sometimes we lose our way. Sometimes we hear that we aren't the best and we lash out at the person who says it. We get defensive of our country because we genuinely love her, for all her flaws. She's ours and we love her. And we can talk shit about her if we want to, but if someone else does... well... the gloves come off.

Sometimes though, sometimes, maybe we should listen. Sometimes it's okay to admit that while we're a great country full of great people who do amazing things every day... there are those among us who could do better. And we, as Americans, are at our best when we help people become better versions of themselves.

Independence day. It's about freedom. It's a celebration OF that freedom and why we have it. Think though, between now and next year's 4th... are we doing our best to help others be their best? I'm not saying we can't defend our country from legitimate attacks. I'm not saying Al Qaida has a point. I'm saying when enough American voices cry out that there is a problem... perhaps... as good Americans who love this country... we should do what we as Americans do best... perhaps we should try to make it better.. for everyone.

It's not unpatriotic to wish to do better. It's unpatriotic to tell those who are brave enough to tell us when we're falling short of our aim at being the best we can be to shut up and sit down. When we quit looking for ways to get better, when we quit trying to improve, we're done.

It's not about making America great again. It's about every day trying to be better people and a better nation than we were before. That's our job as Americans. If you don't leave your country BETTER than you found it you're doing it wrong.

She's given you a lot of opportunities here. We're a country of great wealth, great resources, and the freedom to exploit them in a way that can improve things for now, and for the future for me, for you, for everyone... but only if we make a point of doing it. Only if we value what our founding fathers valued... what they outlined in the Declaration of Independence when King George wouldn't listen to their concerns the founding fathers had this to say on July 4th, 1776...

"when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

We need to listen to these people who are unhappy. We need to pay attention to how we can get better and work to get better. It's what we, as a country, have done for generations. We don't do it quickly sometimes, and we don't do it painlessly sometimes. But we have been a nation of people who strive to be moral, honest, and to help ensure the freedom, liberty, and opportunity for ourselves, and for people all over the world.

We didn't do that by shutting down those within the country who expressed a dissenting opinion. Those times in history were not us at our best. McCarthyism wasn't our best day.

Don't take a criticism as an attack. Take it as an American duty to constantly be better than we were before. Take it as love for the country we all live in. It's okay to love something so much you want to help it be better when you think you can.

I know a lot of people won't like this post. It'll appear political and we, sadly, have reached a point in US Politics where disagreement is seen as unpatriotic, as treasonous, as "if you don't like it get out." That makes me sad. Women didn't get to vote. Black people were originally property, like a suitcase or a walking stick. But we saw that and we tried to be better. It's not unpatriotic to want to be better. It's American.

This picture was taken at my parent's house. I typically go there this time of year to sweat my ass off in Tennessee, see the flowers Mom has blooming everywhere, and eat delicious fried Southern food. I couldn't this year because of the Corona Virus. I wish I could be there. I wish I could have seen my nephew graduate from Navy Bootcamp in Chicago this spring. But, that's not where we are at right now as a world.

These opinions are just mine, they're long-winded as usual, and I doubt anyone will read them if you made it this far Happy Independence Day. Try and do better tomorrow and the next day at making our country better, more free for everyone, and a place the world looks to again for leadership and guidance, and inspiration. That's the America I fell in love with. That's the America I joined the Navy to defend.

Ugly -- it isn't a bad thing...

I wrote someone a letter in which I referred to myself as ugly and they called tonight to assure me that I wasn't and I shouldn't feel bad about myself.

I don't know if I ever got my feelings about it across because I was taken aback by the call. I hadn't meant it in a bad way.

Beauty is frequently something people talk about, a symmetrical face, slightly larger than average eyes, smooth features, nothing TOO big or TOO small, proportional to itself and each other, a lack of blemishes or wrinkles, but that last one's not an absolute. We, as a society have an opinion on what beauty is.

Beauty is often talked about and studied, and I'll say I appreciate beauty in a person and beautiful things as well, but often things and people that are considered beautiful lack what I would call character. They're a bit bland. It's not that they're TOO pretty... although, some people are... it's that they're simply beautiful and there's nothing that memorable about beauty.

My nose is too big, too long, too broad. It doesn't go straight, it's a bit off-center. I have thought wrinkles, permanently over my nose that give me something of a scowling appearance. My lips are to thin. My chin too wide. My eyes, when I smile practically vanish. My forehead doesn't know when to stop and I have spots. I'm NOT beautiful. Enough is wrong that I'd say it's ugly. I'm no Quasimodo, but I don't have any delusions about how I look objectively.

That being said I don't think that's an insult. I don't think it's a bad thing. People say, "Oh, you can't say someone is gay because it's an insult..." Well, only if you think being gay is bad which says something, doesn't it? Calling someone who is fat, fat isn't insulting. Calling someone who is ugly, ugly isn't an insult. (I wouldn't do any of those things. It's rude.)

I don't think how ugly a person is exactly related to how attractive they are. That's the confusion. The assumption that an ugly person can't be attractive is common and wrong. I know people find me attractive. I know I find people who aren't by any definition of the word "beautiful" very attractive.
There's a lot involved in how someone looks. Me? I look different in a photograph than I do in real life when I'm talking to someone. The photo shows all the ugly fixed on paper, or on a screen, and that's fine. It's objectively true and it's definitely there.

What a photo doesn't show is me leaning forward to hear something someone is saying when I'm interested in them or what they're saying. It doesn't show me laughing. It doesn't show how my whole body moves when I laugh. It doesn't show any of the stuff that is actually me. My personality is animated. It's broad gestures and lots of laughing. That's who I am. That's what people find attractive. My face? Not so much. A dating app where all I had to show someone before they decided to swipe left or right? I'd be doomed. But, put me in a room of people and generally, I'll do okay. They don't notice how I look, and later, when they saw a picture of me at the event, they'll inevitably say, "Oh, that's not a very good picture of you is it?"

Well, sadly, it is... that's how I look, but it's not what people tend to remember about me. And, honestly, I'm okay with it.

The Vampire Armand -- A Thought Piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand, by Anne Rice was the last of the books I could remember having read in her Vampire Chronicles series and I wanted to re-read it before reading the next in the series. I had no idea it would generate this sort of line of thought for me as I read it. That is one of the things I enjoy about reading. It's not just the escapism a book can bring, but the thoughts it can generate... and those thoughts, ideas, and feelings can vary as we read or re-read the books at different times in our lives. Thank you for making it through my thought piece inspired by this book.

What has The Vampire Armand to do with us as a modern day fairy tale? It's a reminder to us that there are things that go bump in the night; sometimes that movement in the shadows of our rooms may not be just a curtain in the wind of the ceiling fan. The bogeyman is very much real... very much alive and well in our modern day iWorld. He isn't a snarling drooling monster with fangs that glisten with venom, at least on the outside he's not. But when he's hungry, when he has needs he does what he has to do, what he needs to do to get what he wants, to sate his appetite.

When Armand is captured and imprisoned and starved for days he is crippled with hunger, his desire to feed has gone from the mere appetite that most modern Americans confuse with hunger to the ravening beast that consumes his every waking thought. When a strong young man is thrown into the cell he's in he tears into him with no regard for anything other than sating his need... his hunger. It isn't until he's fed, killing the person thrown in there with him, that he looks to see who it is and recognizes it as Richardo, someone he saw as a brother, someone he said he'd die for. At which point his guilt at looking at his victim causes him tear his now dead friend to pieces and shove him through the bars of his cell a piece at a time. These are the appetites and the strengths of the appetites of the modern bogeyman. It's not that they do the things because they want to, or because they choose to do them... it's because they need to do them and in spite of their love for us, or all their best intentions, they can't help themselves. When their appetites consume them they're blind to who their victims are and it isn't until later, when their appetite is sated that they look down at what they've done and feel remorse... and even feeling it they know that it will happen again... and again... and we, their friends and neighbors never know who they are or what they're feeling.

We invite them over for coffee, have them come mow our lawns for us while we're on vacation, give them keys to our houses to water our plants and they walk among us, always telling themselves that they've got it under control. They can, like Louis tries to do in Interview with a vampire, live off the blood of rats or lesser animals... that they can get by with dribs and drabs of what it is they want... But as we invite them closer, make them more a part of our lives the clock is ticking, and the needs are building, the appetite growing and we go on with our lives blissfully unaware of the ravening beasts that inhabit the skins of our friends and neighbors just waiting for the right time to come out... for the figurative full moon to trigger the change to mix monsters here.

That's the fear, the scary part of the lessons in The Vampire Armand... it's that the people you know and trust can be something so profoundly other than you believe them to be... and that within us is an appetite, a desire, that if not met for long enough could cause us to fall on our brother and feed on him until we are shoving bits of him away from us because we can't bear to look at the evidence of the bogeyman that lives inside of us.

It's a double-edged scary story in that the bogeymen are beautiful on the outside and are capable of hiding among us... and that the bogeyman could be, if the conditions were right, us.

I started this thought piece series with the quote from G. K. Chesterton:  "Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten." And that is part of this book as well... only the dragons in The Vampire Armand aren't beaten by an external force. There's no knight in shining armor that saves the day. They endure... they continue to exist, with their appetites intact and ever-present. Today's dragons aren't beaten so much as they're subdued, held in check. And that's how this book presents itself at first. There are two endings, the first shows the hope of Armand holding his desires, his needs, his cravings and appetite in check for the good of his children that he intends to take care and the second ending... the second ending shows that his children no longer need his care. The second ending... the final ending, is a wail of despair and fear and anguish, and anger as the appetite wins... the monsters continue to perpetuate themselves in spite of his swearing to keep his own appetite in check. The dragons aren't slain after all, and they're still out there. Sometimes the dragon wins.



The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand -- A Thought Piece: Part 3

Anne Rice's Vampires are similar to other modern vampires in that they drink human blood and are creatures of the night. They don't go out in the daytime and are instead asleep when the sun comes up. They die by either exposure to the sun or fire. A stake through the heart won't do it, and religious icons like crosses don't do anything to them. The Vampire Armand is very religious and visits churches often, having been a painter of religious icons before he was made a vampire.

Rice's vampires are described as beautiful creatures who tend to create vampires they love, also beautiful people. They tend to the emotional as well. When they sleep if they've cut their hair it will grow back to the length it was when they were created. They don't have to feed every night as they get older. The younger vampires, more newly created ones, need to feed more often than the older ones. All her vampires are incredibly strong and fast, preternaturally so. As they get older their powers increase, and some vampires get some gifts while others gain other powers.

They live forever or have the ability to. It seems the number one killer of Vampires is boredom. As the years and decades go by they grow weary of the repetitiveness of their life and they choose to go into the sun, or as in the case of Lestat's maker, into a giant bonfire. Marius says to Armand that the way to live longer is to only feed on evil men because feeding on the innocent will lead to madness, despair, and eventual self-immolation.

Which brings us to the main characters in The Vampire Armand. Armand was raised in Kiev, Russ in the fifteenth century and was raised Eastern Orthodox Christian and, after praying, he was able to paint beautiful icons of the Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. Kidnapped by tartars he was sold into slavery where he was abused both physically and sexually. The abuse was bad enough that he got blocked the memory of it completely. He was sold again to Marius, an ancient vampire, 1500 years old at the time he fell in love with the boy Armand and renamed him Amadeo, "beloved of God." Marius took him to his home, a home for misfit boys of indeterminate age. Marius cleaned him and educated him, and showered him with all the benefits of being raised as a wealthy person in Venice... a VERY wealthy person. While Amadeo nee Armand lived there and grew up he was Marius' lover as well as pupil. Eventually, to save Armand's life, he was turned into a vampire at seventeen by Marius.

Looking at this abbreviated version as a fairy tale we see the exaggeration of abuse and the exaggeration of the savior who saves the hero of the story. It's not a simple bad life with a simple better life at the end of the story. The bad life is horrific, beatings, rape, even his childhood in Kiev, Russ wasn't remembered as a wonderful place, but a place where if things had gone as they had been going he would have finished his life as a penitent saint buried in the ground alive and fed and watered by people who kept him alive, just barely, until he finally died buried in the Monastery of the Caves. From this he was delivered into a life of fabulous wealth, beauty and culture by a fabulously wealthy, beautiful man who, all he asked for in return was Amadeo's love... both emotional and physical.

One of the parts of modern vampire lore is that vampires can't come into their victim's home unless they've been invited in. If you look at the parallels between the monsters of vampire stories and the modern monsters who prey on people, victims, children... they too are more often invited in than not. Statistics say random acts of violence between strangers are rare when compared with the violations of trust by friends and family who use their victims for their own desires. The invitation of a vampire's victim to the vampire into their home is akin to the extension of trust by people to others. The vampire's feeding on the people who have invited them in is akin to the modern predator's use of his victims' trust against them to gain what they're after.

In Interview With a Vampire Louis' relationship with his maker, Lestat, isn't as easy as Marius' and Armand's (Marius & Armand both appear to genuinely love each other whether in spite of or due to their age difference I have no idea and don't care about in the context of this article.) Children, victims, are able to do something wonderfully amazing... or at the very least, interesting. They are able to hate and love their predators at the same time. I don't suggest that Armand and Marius did, I'd like to be very clear on that point. They appeared to love each other from start to finish... even though in time they grew apart. But when watching Cops or some other police drama how often do we see the victim of a domestic assault come screaming to the defense of the person who beats them? It's not necessarily a defense mechanism or an untrue love, but a complicated thing where it's possible to hold both emotions in their mind at once, loving the person who does things they may or may not love... and hating them when they do it perhaps. Loving and hating combined into an emotional web that holds them together. Is it any wonder that many vampire stories say that the only way they can be killed is a stake through the heart? (Not Anne Rice's Vampires though... that won't kill them.)

The relationship between Armand and Marius is an example of a complication I talked about in a previous article. At first, the physical intimacy they shared was, I believe, a different thing for each of them. The act of sex is a pleasurable thing ofttimes. At first, I believe for Armand, Amadeo at the time, was a hedonistic act of pleasure, something he liked for the sheer pleasure of it. I don't believe there were, for him, any strings attached as it were. He enjoyed the pleasure it gave him while Marius, who was in love with the boy, was engaging in lovemaking with someone he loved. The desperation of Marius' kisses and hugs betray an emotional tone that Amadeo didn't share at first. He grew, with time, to share it however and the relationship became one of equals inasmuch as such a relationship can be when the ages and powers are so wildly disparate... and always there was the Master/Student dynamic as well as Marius tried to make Armand more than he would have otherwise been.

What do we learn from all of this? What do I learn? Surprisingly little about vampires.

The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand -- A Thought Piece: Part 2

The Introduction and Part I may be helpful for understanding this part... or maybe not. This may be off the deep end. You tell me.

"Loaded words and phrases have strong emotional overtones or connotations, and evoke strongly positive or negative reactions beyond their literal meaning." from Wikipedia on "Loaded Language"

One of the things with words is they only have strict dictionary meanings in dictionaries. Once they leave our mouths or enter our ears they start to accumulate baggage. Our personal feelings change the meanings of the words beyond what they mean in a dictionary. Just like someone who is allergic to peanuts doesn't look at a peanut butter and jelly sandwich the same way I do. Word allergies, and even thought allergies, temper the way people encounter words and thoughts in a way that wouldn't be indicated just by the pure definitions of the words on the page. (Yes. I believe there are words and thoughts people encounter that cause them to react violently in much the same way a person reacts to exposure to say, poison ivy.)


Writers use words on purpose to get a reaction from their readers. I'll talk about one of Anne Rice's word choices later. Right now though I want to talk about "sex." The word and our relationship with the word. Not the act itself.  Sex is something I'm going to say almost all animals have. It's how almost all animals reproduce. I'm hedging here so I don't have to list all the exceptions. But sex happens. I just described it as an act four sentences ago and you went along with it without even stopping at the idea of sex as an act. But that's not all sex is when people are involved.


I'm going to posit that there are different kinds of sex. There's the kind of sex that is the act of having sex with the intent of making a baby. There's sex that is something done between two people as a way of expressing their love for each other (with or without baby expectations/hopes). There's the fun sex-play of people playing at sex. There's the violent sex that is less about the act of sex than about the domination or violence of one person over someone else. All those things are sex. There's the sex of the willing who are talked into it and later regret it. There's the sex of the unwilling who are unwilling to say no. There's a LOT of different types of sex and how does one know what is meant by the word? What baggage do we bring to the table when we see the words used? What preconceptions do we bring to a passage like:

"Give me your mouth, give me your arms," I whispered. My hunger startled and delighted him.

He laughed softly as he answered me with more fragrant and harmless kisses. His warm breath came in a soft whistling flood against my groin.

Now, what if I told you the people involved there were of vastly different ages and Anne Rice describes the one saying "Give me your mouth..." as a boy, not a young man or man, but "boy." Does it change your perception of what's happening here? Or what's being done? What if the "boy" being described is 17 years old? In medieval Europe when the average life expectancy was 35 so he'd be middle aged?


People have sex and I believe it's possible for a person to have sex, playful sex that doesn't mean anything... but for other people to believe that it has all the baggage they bring to the idea of sex. Just because professional baseball players take the game seriously and make millions of dollars playing it doesn't mean that a pick-up game in a schoolyard in summer is also a serious affair as well. Sometimes a baseball game is just a baseball game. And sometimes sex doesn't have baggage attached to it whether you or I think it would or should or not. Our expectations of what's going on in any sex act between other people brings our baggage and expectations into it in a way that we can't remove ourselves from. We know we're doing it and we do it anyway. If we asked them what they thought of it and their answers weren't in line with what we thought their answers should be would we believe them or believe they were wrong and self-deluded? How many people believe that Anna Nicole Smith loved her rich husband and happily, lustily, excitedly did the dance of the two-backed beast with him? It's possible... but how many people bring their own baggage to the table and say "No. She's wrong. What I know from my house in Podunk, Iowa having never met or seen them in person is more correct than what they say." We do it all the time when sex is involved.


We've, as a society, seen sex become some weird schizophrenic thing alternately glorified by Hollywood as the goal of all relationships, no matter how brief... and demonized on news-shows, talk-radio, and daytime TV as the cause of all ills in our culture, whether it's due to too much sex on TV or because as some would have us believe, all sex is an act of violence by its very penetrative nature. But sex, even when it's alluring, it must have terrible consequences... All slasher movies worth their salt when I was growing up involved teen-agers trying to have sex and whenever they would be close to it... an ax or machete would come through the bed or wall at them. Sex is bad! But WOW is it fun! If only you can survive it.


Anne Rice talks about sex a lot in this book, and describes it, and doesn't really beat around the bush too much about whether or not the participants are willing or not. There are a variety of different sex acts in the book with a variety of willing and unwilling people involved in them. It's the whole range of sex. It's not pornographic. Marius and Armand are far too classy for that even if Anne Rice isn't. ;^) 


When she talks about sex she's counting on us readers bringing our baggage to the table. She's counting on our reaction to the book making it either horrific or titillating, scary or gross, exciting or ultimately just weird. In general, I believe in a group of 10 readers who read this book for the first time I think there will be 9 different interpretations of the sex in the book and 1 person who didn't finish it because they were too offended by it all. The sex isn't the main part of the book, but it will, I believe, generate the most widely divergent views based primarily on the loaded language involved in describing what happened. And I think she does a superior job at not using loaded language (other than "boy" a lot) but when we would try and discuss it we WOULD use loaded language that would betray our feelings about the various acts as they happened... assuming we talked about the sex at all. We may gloss over it by saying, "I skipped those parts. I didn't like them." There are parts of Heinlein I do that with (Number of the Beast anyone? shudder.)   

Sex. Thank God it's only 3 letters long if it were any bigger think of how many more places we could hang our baggage!


The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1

“Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

~ G. K. Chesterton, writer

This is the second post in a series. It might make more sense if you start with The Introduction.

Fairy tales are stories we tell our children to teach them lessons about big ideas using little words and putting it in a framework they will understand now as well as later. They're artful lies that teach us a Truth. Fairy tales and children's stories involve exaggeration and hyperbole. Heroes are always princes, heroines are princesses, there are giants, geese who lay golden eggs. Instead of strangers offering children candy there are witches living in candy houses. Bad guys aren't just bad guys. They're wolves. They hide in the forest behind bushes to leap out at us, and failing that they'll hide in houses and look like family members, grammas with big teeth and big ears who are wolves intent on eating us and our kids. The world isn't safe. It's not safe out in the woods. It's not safe in stranger's houses, and it may not be safe when visiting relatives. Everywhere you look may hide a wolf.

When the characters in Fairy Tales suffer they don't suffer like normal people. They aren't grounded or sent to time out. They're enslaved to their step sisters. They, in myths, have to clean stables out that could never be cleaned out. They're thrown into ovens, gobbled up by any manner of animals and beasts. Their suffering is dramatic and violent. If you've ever seen a spoiled child not get his or her way you know what true suffering and deprivation is. Wailing, throwing themselves to the ground, crying, piteous chest-heaving wracking-sobs! When they hurt themselves, however minor, the screams and screwed up faces are pictures of anguish that would make Munch proud! Nobody suffers like a child... except in Fairy Tales of course.

The lesson of Fairy Tales isn't that the world is dangerous though. The lesson is that even though the world IS a dangerous place things will turn out OK. The good guys win and the bad guys lose.

In The Vampire Armand, by Anne Rice Armand, the protagonist, doesn't start out as a vampire. He starts out as a kid when he starts his story: (This excerpt is from Page 31 of Anne Rice's The Vampire Armand)

They must have raped me on the boat because I don't remember coming to Constantinople. I don't remember being hungry, cold, outraged or afraid. Now here for the first time, I knew the particulars of rape, the stinking grease, the squabbling, the curses over the ruin of the lamb. I felt a hideous unsupportable powerlessness.

Loathsome men, men against God and against nature.

I made a roar like an animal at the turbaned merchant, and he struck me hard on the ear so that I fell to the ground. I lay still looking up at him with all the contempt I could bring into my gaze. I didn't get up, even when he kicked me. I wouldn't speak.

Thrown over his shoulder I was carried out, taken through a crowded courtyard, past wondrous stinking camels and donkeys and heaps of filth, out by the harbor where the ships waited, over the gangplank and into the ship's hold.

It was filth again, the smell of hemp, the rustling of the rats on board. I was thrown on a pallet of rough cloth. Once again, I looked for the escape and saw only the ladder...

That's how his story starts (not the book, but the story of the protagonist). It starts with terribleness. She starts with the worst things she can thing to submit a child to, rape, beatings, kidnapping, rats, filth... it has an almost Fairy Tale like quality to the horribleness she submits the protagonist to. After this what could possibly be worse? Seriously? Is there anywhere to go that would be worse than this?

The next part will talk about loaded language, language that we bring our own baggage to when we hear it. It's part of the piece I expect grief about so I want to bust it out from the rest.



The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion

The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction

A post inspired by a book isn't unusual for me. The book this time is Anne Rice's The Vampire Armand. This is a different post for me.... maybe a different series of posts. It's the content of the post that's different. I'm not sure if it will ever see the light of day... or, since it's inspired by one of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, the dark of night. I don't know how much meat is on this bone... that metaphor will be decidedly tasteless if you choose to read on. I'd advise against it and yet, as a writer, I'll hope you do read it.

One of the things about the Internet, one of the things Facebook and Google+ and just blogs in general grapple with is privacy. Once it's out there, it's generally good sense to assume it is out there for everybody. Privacy settings and such aside, there's nothing stopping someone within the enabled group from copying and sharing things put on the Internet with others. Flickr is an area where that happens. You can lock down photos and then as your friends & family group grows you suddenly find your pictures on other sites, on their Facebook page with no privacy settings at all... Once it's online it's out of your/my control. This post is one I wish I could keep from some people. Which is funny kind of... because I know the way to do it is to not hit publish. The idea for the post (or series if it runs overly long) has been worming its way through my head for days now. Not because it's particularly new or earth-shattering I'm sure... I haven't done any real research on the subjects I'll go over so if you see things you've seen before I'd love links.

• Fairy Tales & Exaggeration

• Hansel & Gretel
• Red Riding Hood
• Exaggeration & Suffering

• Loaded words

• Food Allergies

• Anne Rice's Vampires (briefly for people who don't know)
• Marius & Armand

• Rice's choice of descriptors
• Hyperbole as story telling tool RE: Fairy Tales
• Seduction & invitation
• Fun vs Baggage

• Vampires & Lessons for today

• Undiscovered country -- all that's left that scares us
• Fear like Stephen King does, the monster of the ordinary

That's my back of an envelope outline that I sketched out at work as I was doing something that was repetitive and mindless. 

Some of those, 2 & 3 are short but they don't combine well together so I'll probably combine 2 with 1 and 3 with 4... but 4 will tend towards long so maybe I'll leave 3 short and solitary. I'm looking at the points as individual posts but can't see it working out that way if they're going to be similar in length... I'll work on it as they happen. Or maybe I'll ignore length constraints and wind up with two long ones... I'd rather see it as 3 though. We'll see.

In concluding this introduction I'd like to say this is a thinking out loud piece. It's not a position paper or a well researched topic. It's me thinking about a topic out loud and pulling different things together in my head, organizing them here where you can see it happen. Don't let the outline fool you. Those note are more aide-mémoire than a rigid outline. It's me reminding myself of things I don't want to forget to include... at points I'm intentionally vague to not spoil the upcoming chapter... perhaps in a wave at cheap theatrics, to build some degree of anticipation among my three readers.

One of the things I am going to do is talk as if I know what I'm talking about. I may say, "Fairy tales are stories we tell our children to teach them lessons about big ideas using little words and putting it in a framework they will understand now as well as later. They're artful lies that convey a Truth." That may or may not be true. But it's something I believe to be true. Writing that way is faster and more clear than me prefacing every line with "I believe..." or "It seems to me..." I'm the author of this thought piece so unless I say otherwise the thoughts herein are mine. I'll footnote ideas that I think belong to someone else. If I give an idea as my own that you believe belongs to someone else feel free to leave me a note in the comments. I'm not intentionally plagiarizing anybody and it's possible for people to come up with the same ideas from different directions at different times... I'd be interested in seeing the links.

The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Introduction
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 1
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 2
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Part 3
The Vampire Armand -- A thought piece: Conclusion