We got two Dillons (not Dylans)...

Names are changing in DCQ...and my latest possible title is Dirc, the Cannibal Queer. Which is not really true; he doesn't actually feast on human flesh...except in a manner most abstract. But that's what he gets called by the media when they talk about him, so it sticks.

He doesn't care. He's just another guy makin' his fortune by kidnapping assholes and providing them to an extraterrestrial named Dyarvos, who uses them as the day's special at its truck stop in the sky. Sort of like how Venom has his way with Eddie, when he's hungry...

None of the ones used for the intergalactic diner actually die. They get attached to hoses and cables then submersed in fluid, and milked. It's the DNA from their semen used to create meals. Which I kind of like. A fate worse than death...and very Yaoi. Maybe even Bara...

No question, the first men Dirc took, those who provided nourishment to Dyarvos and its space craft so they could make repairs and leave, do die...and that gets kind of dark. But I'm going to lighten it up a little. Maybe add a layer of wickedness and emphasize Dirc's uncaring nature is initiated when he is killed by his first victim, Molinaro.

Dirc's main nemesis later in the story is Dr. Captain, whose name is now Dillon. Which is going to be a bit confusing, because in my best bi-polar manner I'm also changing Brian Walstead to Dillon Ainsworth, in The People v. Simon Halloran.

That's washing around in my brain, as well, and quietly slipping into something more real and organic in nature and the telling. I'm also going to have a Zephrim in the story. And maybe a Clarice, just to be obnoxious.

Let's see how much fun I can have, in a brutal vein...without going into Hannibal the Cannibal nonsense.

Great expectations not met...

Job was rough but not bad. I had two helpers and that made a huge difference. We clipped through about 70% of the books to pack. I have these two for tomorrow, as well. Then Monday, guys coming to hump the boxes down to the first floor and, maybe, we can reschedule the pickup for Monday, as well. Not really planning for that part, because that's way more difficult. We're requesting two men and a special timed pickup...so it may still be Tuesday. But that's fine.

I had two fans and my helpers brought one, as well. Those kept the heat from taking over. I'm tired but not feeling pissy. May even get to go home early, so it's going to be okay.

One issue is, I can't work through my problems with DCQ because I have someone who does not really know me working close by. If I start talking to myself in Dirc's voice, they're likely to freak out...and I wouldn't blame them.

One thing's for sure...I was making a vague statement on racism by having Dirc target mainly black and Latino guys, with only about 20% being white. Showing how the authorities don't care when men in either race go missing.

No more. He's going to focus on guys who are mainly right wing shits and foreign men who follow Nazi crap. Russians, too. Their own leaders don't give a damn about their soldiers, so that's good hunting grounds.

That's not to say he's going to ignore men of color. He'll take them when the opportunity arises, but he's going to choose the white boys. Makes more sense, since he's really another serial killer and they tend to operate within their own racial makeup.

This is gonna be one fatherfucker of a story...and I'm finally getting to be glad.

Blank brain, baby...

The drive through Canada was so tedious and uninteresting, I could not kick my brain into gear. I just went quiet and let the nonstop fields and occasional trees and nothingness pass me by. The roads were in beautiful shape. Traffic was fairly light. Didn't have anything in the was of a truck stop till I was more than halfway along...and that was called an OnRoute.

Seriously, nothing interesting happened until I hit Windsor and crossing the bridge back into the US was cut down to one lane. I stopped at the Duty Free shop to use the toilet before braving that mess. I'd probably still be there awaiting passage except I have a Nexus card, which is like TSA PreCheck for Border Patrol, so got to use the special lane.

I'm returning by way of the 90, through Ohio. I hope that's more interesting.

I really hate it when my mind shuts down and just goes from one moment to the next. It's too much like how my life's been...meandering, not really planned. Dealing with shit as it arises instead of working out how to avoid it. Just hoping everything will come together.

DCQ is being that way. Let's see how this does...or that... I don't even know its voice, yet. Still digging. Trying out things. Smoothing over issues. And that's just in the first section. I think I want it to be filled with black humor, but what I've got, right now, is more like snarky and snotty.

Of course, tomorrow's going to be rough. Three floors of a house and the top floor has no AC in 90+ heat. Scary. And tiring. I doubt I'll have a chance to really go over the story till I'm home, again, and can do my usual whining and banging of head crap.

I do be a creature of habit...

Unlikely heroes...

I just learned about Claude Cahun, a surrealist photographer, sculptor, writer, and resistance fighter in WW2 along with her partner, Marcel Moore. Two women who lived life on their own terms. Their story would make an amazing film...

I'm leaving this, here. Reading about their lives, their art, and how they confronted the Nazi occupation of Jersey helped me center some ideas I'm having for Dyarvos...which I can't really address until I'm done with Detroit.

Off in the morning...but driving so maybe I can do some thinking and sorting along the way. Back on the 3rd of July...

I don't wanna adult, anymore...

It's really tiring and never-ending. But you do it or wind up hidden away in your home, hoping no one will bother you and nothing more will happen to make you crazier than you already are. $1350 to fix my car's muffler...which is too damn close to what the car is worth...but it still sounds grumbly.

The mechanic says after-market replacements tend to sound a bit louder, but this is the fourth muffler I've had replaced since moving up here, thanks to the salt on the roads causing them to rust, and those didn't sound that way. I'm taking it by the shop, tomorrow, to have them listen to it.

The job in Detroit is on...and I wish it wasn't. But...it's what's paying for the muffler, so I gotta do it. Renting an SUV here and driving there, through Canada, then coming home via the 90 through Toledo and Cleveland. Working for 3-4 days in what I expect will be an empty house, in 90 degree weather. I taking a fan with me.

I got into a couple of arguments online when I told myself I wasn't going to do that, today...but I swear to God, the MAGAt Class has gone rabid in their actions and attitudes, not to mention their deliberate disregard for reality.

ICE is taking criminals out of the country, and don't bother me with facts about how that's bullshit. Felon47 is playing 4-level chess with diplomacy...at which point you give up on  their fucking insanity and sit in the quiet and dark, and wonder what the fuck happened to America.

However, one connection with a like-minded person on Instagram did lead me to the perfect quote for Dirc and Dyarvos:

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait. Le Père Goriot (1835) (The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.)

Which is often quoted as -- Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Which I've heard many times, before. Just needed to be reminded of it.

Of course, with Dirc, it winds up being a crime no one cares about because of the great fortune being made. Kidnapping and using men for food? Who cares? Money overwhelms morality when in sufficient amounts, which is how it's always been...until the bottom half of society rises up and breaks out the guillotines.

I wonder if that'll ever happen here...

Still self-flagellating...

And not in a good way. Too much is up in the air, right now, and I'm more than a little overwhelmed. But to be honest, I don't know why. Or what is causing it. Just the impression in my head that my world is too chaotic to focus.

Maybe it's the whiplash bullshit going on in Washington and Felon47, and his stupidity about the Middle East. Maybe it's the expanding costs of everything around me. Maybe it's how the world is crashing into a new realm of reality and I have no idea how to be part of it or be myself enough to keep separate from it.

What jolted me most was, while I think of myself as being fairly literate, visually, I saw a video that was supposed to be of American military personnel celebrating the destruction of Iran's nuclear program...which didn't happen, btw. We barely dented it with our "bunker-busting bombs." But it wasn't until the last shot in that video that I began to wonder if it was AI generated.

It was. But I had to get verification of it. Which means 95% of the people seeing that video will think it's realer than and not bullshit.

I sort of feel like the world has taken a giant lead into a new realm and I'm still standing here trying to figure how whether or not to jump. And if I can't jump, how the hell to get myself to let go enough to make it not matter? To let me just fuck everything off and do my own thing?

That's something I've always had problems with...uncertainty in myself. Sometimes I can get past it, to an extent, but never completely. But I want to jump and do so completely, for a change...at 72 fucking years old.

Way to take your time, Kyle.

Too much fighting, today...

I'm not very well-balanced in my mental or emotional makeup. I can be doing great with everything then one simple problem throws it all off. Today, it was several.

First, dealing with PayPal misdirecting an order I'd made and used them to pay for. They had it sent to Caladex, not me. Turns out, they got that address from Ebay. A site I haven't used in well over a year, and didn't even know they had my old office address.

I think, maybe, back before Covid I had something shipped to the office so I could get it ASAP. But never consistently and certainly not in the last 5 years.

But that's what PayPal went for. Which is fucking ludicrous. I've taken it off that site and checked everyone else I've ever ordered anything through to make sure it's not listed with them, as well.

My doctors' office told me I had an outstanding balance...and gave me four different amounts that were still owed. It took half an hour on the phone (10 minutes of which was waiting on hold) to finally get the final amount determined, which I paid since I have another appointment for a surgery consult on Thursday.

Then as I was headed out to get groceries the muffler in my car blew. Got that fixed quickly enough, but still...another large expense I didn't need.

The one good thing to happen today? I walked a mile in 89 degree heat...from and to the auto repair shop. Wiped me out, but good for the heart, right?

But again...no writing done. And I'm really beating myself up for that.

It's a battle...

Being creative, even as poor at it as I am, is a fight with myself. There's a part of me that knows what it wants to do with a story...but then I meet the characters and they start rearranging my entire plan. Which has worked well, for me...when I haven't fought back too hard or rushed things. 

For example, I pushed through Porno Manifesto without really understanding it and now have an idea of what the story should be about, and who the characters should be...17 years after I wrote it.

That was one of those occasions where I really wanted to let loose with my writing, and asked the characters to help me do it and all I got back is, Do it yourself. Show me you can. Like they didn't trust me...and now I think, Rightfully so. I wasn't ready to let it be free-wheeling and dangerous.

That's what I'm going through with Dyarvos and the Cannibal Queer. I am still not enamored with the current title because it screams of a more...I dunno...John Waters kind of narrative. Off the rails and without limits, but done in a way that lets you know it's a wink-wink tale, all just in wicked fun.

Rocky Horror Picture Show was camp to the max, and deliberately so. Which worked beautifully for Frank N. Furter v. Brad and Janet. Catch 22 was caught in a sort of satirical realism, which is also not what I'm after. I've tried to get into A Confederacy of Dunces to catch some absurdist flavor, but it just doesn't grab me.

Wag the Dog is closer to what I'm thinking, but still not exactly right. It's both middle-of-the-road and satirical of that creative level. Cabaret might be a good learning tool for this...with its mix of humor, horror, willful blindness and joyful ignorance of life's absurdities.

Maybe I'm aiming for something I don't have the ability to achieve, because I'm not getting a hell of a lot of help from Dirc or Dyarvos. No, I shouldn't say that. Dirc came up with the idea of choosing a particular build of man in order to make sure they had better marbling in the meat they offer.

And Dyarvos let me know him using a cookbook to try and build himself a helper needed to be more off the wall. Substituting ingredients, which he should not have done, may have been what brought Dirc back to life, but it's also made him a joyously amoral monster. One of those recipes where even fucking it up brings out a tasty treat.

So what can I do but stop whining and let the lads lead?

Here we are...

Apparently, Felon47 has decided to start WW3 to take the focus off his non-stop legal losses and plummeting poll numbers. He's bombed Iran, and in true abuser fashion said, "I want peace, so let's just leave it at this...or else." Blaming the victim for their abuse.

This is how it always works. It happened in Northern Ireland, when the British Army blamed Catholics for them being killed during peaceful protests, then got huffy when they were called out about it.

Well...this takes Russia's planned genocide of Ukraine and Israel's planned genocide in Gaza out of the news cycle. A gift, of sorts, to Putin and Netanyahu, while nothing is offered in the way of plans on how to win this catastrophe. And no one really cares.

I remembered the Iran-Iraq war back in the 80s, when Saddam Hussein went after Iran and got beaten back to a stalemate. Which only happened after over a million people died, between them, mainly thanks to Iraq's use of chemical weapons.

That brought to mind the Thirty Years War, in the 17th Century...which wiped out millions of people. Huge sections of Germany and Bohemia were left desolate...with 50% of their populations killed. Another war basically started by religion.

As was the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 16th Century Paris, when Catholics slaughtered tens of thousands of Protestants...and there was the sacking of Constantinople (a Christian city, albeit the wrong kind of Christian) by the Crusaders, and, of course, the Holocaust (the meaning of which has been desecrated by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank).

I'm rambling...and now think it best to ignore the world for a while. It's all insane, and will drag you into the madhouse with it.

At least my trip home was uneventful.

I'm done, again...

More work than I expected, helping the guys hump the boxes from the 2nd floor of a storage facility to a truck in the basement area, using the facility's carts. Plumping them into D Containers, then finishing everything up at the warehouse.

Now I just need to rest for my trip home, tomorrow. Flight's at 6:30am, but that's 9:30am by my body clock. I've managed to keep that schedule, this time.

I just hope my flights home are better than the one coming to Seattle. That was nightmarish.

I'm trying to get back to delving into my fantasy world as I write DCQ, but the political situation and possibility of war thanks to Felon47's meddling and Netanyahu's obscene use of Israel's Defense Forces to protect him from corruption charges are leading us to a real mess. It's hard to get past that when I'm trying to write.

But the reality is, with the rise of AI and remembering Terminator's war with the machines happened in 2029...writing an book may be an exercise in futility. Because it's looking more and more that James Cameron was prescient and humanity is dead meat.

That or it's the Apocalypse...which would really piss me off.