Sturm, drang, pathos

The internet is weird.

Did I ever tell you guys I had a stalker once? No? Well, I did. The details of this Wagnerian saga are boring after all these years, so forgive me if I skip the vast majority of the story. I didn't die. Which is the important thing. It was over ten years ago this happened. Thirteen? Fifteen? Whatever.

I will tell you a (now) funny story. He was (is, presumably) a painter and on my new arrival to my city some-teen years ago, he brought me to his studio. And there were SEVEN paintings of women who looked suspiciously like me. Like. Gee. Isn't that a painting of a photograph of me that you'd asked for months ago? That black and white one Kelly took of me in her cool hat? And...this painting is oil, but black and white of a fair-haired chick in...er...Kelly's hat? Only...um...I do not have D cup breasts. Seven paintings of fair-haired twentysomething chicks with D cups.

It was weird. The way that walking into a room and having the floors and walls covered with tiny little ants that crawl up and over the entire surface of your body might be, you know, weird.

Okay. So maybe not 'funny' story in the Ha Ha sense....

Anyway, this person is now long gone and not in my time zone anymore, yay for everybody involved. There were some nice police officers involved, but he left of his own accord. I have gone about my little life and presumably, he has, too.

He's popped up again recently in Dancehall's and O's world via internet. (I do not speak for their reaction to his reappearance.) Something they discovered is that he blogs, too. So Dancehall pasted something into an email to me when they found this. On my birthday last year (let's review: significantly over a decade after I've had any contact with this person), he blogs this letter not-addressed to me. He'd found my blog, this page, found Betelgeuse. I do not know how, as my real name is not on it. Nor is my real address. (I feel a well-deserved scolding from luvstowrite coming on...she is very wise in these matters and I should listen to her more closely....)

After googling me several times over the years, he says, he finds it big and significant he finds my blog "today of all days"....i.e. my birthday. (Which is a day that I thought was only particularly significant to me, and to a lesser extent, my Mom and my Dad.) Says he read my entire blog, except for the boring work bits. Sturm and drang on how I've not changed at all despite the fact that I think I have, but then, yes, I did change, in ways I don't even realize or comprehend. And he's done with me, and he's moved on and lives a big full life now. And he bets I think this post is about me, don't I, don't I?

....

Wow.

.....

I'm not gonna go find it and post the link. I just gave you the high points.

Isn't the internet weird? Aren't people weird?

I have no reason to doubt that he lives a big full life in that other time zone, and that he lives and stays there and will not come back to my time zone. Happiness in joy. Regardless, I'm happy to report that I have good relations with my local police department. And my mother can have a restraining order that's valid across state lines within an hour. (She's deadly in respect to my defense, my mother. It's kind of cute. Like having my own dragon.)

Just a random thing that happened this month.

I just can't do it...

To continue my efforts to try and read these books a dear person from work loaned me:

...This is direct from The Return of Rafe MacKade, wherein Regan and Rafe have just had sex again. (There was another sex scene. I missed it with all the nebulous "shattering" and the looking at the dust motes and time...what was it? (JustCallMeJo refers to the text...) Time spinning out, stretching and quivering...time did that, yeah.

The worst part of this sex scene was the apparent afterglow. Let's take you direct to the text, where the drama is happening. Okay, so twentysomething bad, bad boy Rafe has just gotten it on, right? It's the next morning, and the little tartlet has gone to work. We turn to Rafe now, to see what's in dirty little Rafe's mind....

Scowling, he grabbed a shovel and began to deal with the snow that piled the walk. The sun was strengthening, and he worked fast, so that even with the bite of the northern wind he sweated satisfactorily under his coat.

She'd probably head straight for the shower, he mused, tossing heavy snow off the path. Wash that pretty doe-colored hair of hers.

He wondered what it looked like wet.

She'd dig some of those neat, classy clothes out of her closet. Nope, he thought, correcting himself. Regan would never dig. She'd select. Quiet colors, simple lines. One of those professional-woman's jackets, with a pin on the lapel.

She'd fix her face, nothing too obvious. Just hints of blush along the cheekbones, a touch of color above those ridiculously long lashes. Then lipstick -- not red, not pink, a kind of rose that accented those full lips and that sassy lttle mole beside them.


....

I didn't think you'd believe me with how bad it is unless I quoted direct from the book.

....

Because when a man leaves my bed, I want him to be thinking about my makeup the next morning.

I just. I can't continue this book. I just can't.

Bad boys who love antiques

I'm on chapter 8 of The Return of Rafe MacKade. He's a bad, bad boy who happens to love antiques, and has fallen hard for little Regan, who Hasn't Been Interested In a Relationship For Years. She runs the little antique place in this little town. And he just can't understand why her little conservative power suits do it for him.

Rafe bought an old haunted mansion, cos he's returned to the little town ridiculously wealthy, of course. But he still does all the refinishing himself. Is good with a trowel and drywall and likes to work.

It took 106 pages for the sex scene. (I've been losing patience, and I confess, I've been flipping ahead....hard to concentrate and all....it looks like the ONLY sex scene.) The scene was four pages long and with all the euphemisms and nebulous adjectives and gasping and 'moving', I couldn't tell ya what exactly happened. Just that little Regan has never given herself so completely or behaved in a manner so shocking before. (Unfortunately, I do not know in which manner, precisely, she behaved.)

But I could (if I had a head to remember these things) tell you the shade of blue used for the room, and the Shaker tables, correct for the era that this haunted mansion was actually lived in, and the wrought silver candlesticks.

I'm gonna read these books because I love Genie. And Genie is a wonderful person, and I confess that it tickles me that conservative and religious Genie reads this stuff.

But there's something a bit like sticking bamboo under my fingernails about it.

To be fair, I think that it's very difficult to write a sex scene well. Mostly, they're silly. Because, face it, sex is silly. Great fun and a great pasttime, fantastic way to spend Sunday mid-mornings and most evenings of the week, and some afternoons....all about the sex, but sex is also silly. With all the sound effects and the facial expressions and curling and uncurling toes and flailing elbows and knees. Difficult to write.

Cos burying it under three feet of pink gauze is un-sexy for some people. Even some women. Like me. Norah Roberts' writing does not make me hot; it makes me giggle.

I will soldier on and report back to you.