JamesSavik

I didn't so much come out as I was thrown out. When I was 12 I had a friend that my scoutmaster decided that had grown too close. Then one hot day in July, I'll never forget it becase it was my birthday, I had just turned 13, he threw 5 boys out of the troop for being homosexuals. On the thinest possible evidence, without any possible appeal. To my devout Baptist parents, I think they would have prefurred a serial killer in the family. So, I was 13, and "out" in Mississippi. Parents and kids were warned about the five of us so it was all over town. When school started in late August, I got the joy of starting 7th grade as one of the only known gay people in a not so large town. I'm writing a story about it. Broken

I love it when my office mates eat at the all you can eat India Buffet so I can laugh at them farting all afternoon. Dear God would somebody please open a window! :wacko:

What, no ELO? Ozzy but no Sabbath? no AC/DC? No Zepelin -- dude you're a freak <{POST_SNAPBACK}> This is just what I have on CD. AC/DC, Zep and Sabbath are on the original album format. [for the kiddies, that's what you play on a turntable. Do you know what a turntable is? (vintage audio info link)) ELO?

Here's a list of stuff in my collection: A Flock of Seagulls Aerosmith Alanis Morissett Alic in Chains Asia Billy Idol Billy Joel Bruce Springsteen Butthole Surfers Cheap Trick Clannad Coldplay Counting Crows Creed Darude David Bowie Dire Straits Disturbed Evanescence Foreigner Garbage Good Charlotte Green Day Guns N' Roses Henry Rollins Hoobastank INXS Jackson Browne Jane's Addiction Jeff Beck Jim Carroll Jimi Hendrix Johnny Cash Kansas Korn Linkin Park Marilyn Manson Meat Loaf Metallica Mudvayne Nine Inch Nails Nirvana Offspring Ozzy Pearl Jam Pink Floyd Puddle of Mud Queen REM red hot chili peppers Rush Savage Garden Seether Soundgarden Stabbing Westward Staind Steve Miller Band Stone Temple Pilots Styx The Babys The Beatles The Cars The Cranberries The Crystal Method The Cure The Doors The Eagles The Fixx The Police The Rolling Stones The White Stripes The Who Tom Petty Tool Toto U2 Van Halen X

I hate it when my officemates eat at the buffet at their favorite Indian cafe and then stink up the office all afternoon.

A friend of mine is very sensitive to any kind of jewelry. It causes him to break out and requires a topical steroid cream to make the rash go away. Sometimes the condition can appear out of the blue. All of the sudden a necklace that he had been wearing for years gave him an awful, itchy rash. The condition you describe sounds a lot like contact dermatitus which is defined as: an inflammatory response of the skin to an antigen or irritant. Contact dermatitis can cause discomfort and embarrassment and is the most common skin condition among workers' compensation claims. Contact Dermatitus Info

Review of Angel This is a difficult read- not at all like the typical, happy go lucky romps that you find in most gay fiction. Difficult on several levels. Difficult as it demands the readers undivided attention and only rewards him in porportion with the energy that he has invested. Difficult as the emotions that it invokes are disturbing and raw. Difficult because most people are used to having their art and literature delivered comfortably and gently. Angel is an abrupt and brutal SLAP in the face. The shifts in POV in the story are unusual. Sometimes gentle and sometimes jolting, these changes of perspective broadens and adds to the experience. As an author, I find myself looking at this literary device and thinking: don't try this at home kids, this guy is a professional. Just as it is easy to get to know and like the characters, it is just as hard to confront the reality of protagonists situation. His innocence stands in stark contrast to the horror. You want to turn away yet, you find yourself transfixed like an observer to some disaster unfolding before your eyes. Angel forces the reader into an uncomfortable place. To some it will be just a dark story. To others, it is an acknowlegement of the darkness of our existance and experience. Angel does not lay out a nice, linear story. It is disturbing and jolting with jagged edges and dangerous contrasts that can easily draw blood. This is not a story to be read on a lark. Pack your lunch. Wear comfortable shoes. You'll need it. It is a rough ride through a dark and dangerous landscape. Mr. Duncan is without a doubt a very talented and rising star of the genre. Link to Angel My Rating:

Wrong generation for me. Back in my day if you had piercings you were a pirate. :2hands: I agree with Shadows. The skin that you're in is what makes you hot, not a hole in your ear, a big assed eagle on your back or a rebel flag on your forearm.

OK- it's good that us gay folk have a media presence. I just wish that consisted of a little more substance than obscure made for TV movies and stereotypical fluffy stuff. If they are in need of some good dramatic stories to make into movies and shows, the story archive is loaded with them. I would prefur the "gay media face" be like the Advocate's Future Gay Leaders (link to article) rather than a Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy (Link). Not that it's a bad movie. It's just severly dated.

OK, this is how geeky I am. I name my computers after un-maned space probes. My current machine is named Viking. My last machine was Pioneer. Others were Voyager, IRAS and Mariner.

Meg- College/University is gobs of fun. Take it easy sweetie! You're going to have a ball. The trick is that you've got to balance having fun with taking care of business and that is up to you. Where lots of freshmen have troublel is that they go a little crazy with their new found freedom. Have fun, study hard and everything will work out fine. All the best of luck! -JS

Beware of what you access at work! Employers can and often do use employee internet usage as an easy excuse to terminate workers and it is not easily appealed countered. To successfully protect yourself from charges of inappropriate internet usage is expensive as it requires expert testimony and the company is holding all the cards. Often you are forced to defend yourself without even seeing what information that they had. Unions often don't want to get involved if pornography is alledged. In one case that I'm aware of, an employee was terminated and he appealed. The sites that the employee charged were "pornographic or appealing to purient interests" were 365gay and the news side of badpuppy.com.

I wasn't complaining...

Er...Sophocles? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Probably Plato's Republic. Could have been worse. The Rhetoric of Aristotle will make your eyes bleed. I've got a kick-azz study guide for Plato's Republic. If you want, I'll scan it and email it too you. Just PM me if you want it.

Coke-cola was first formulated and sold in Vicksburg, MS. Back then the secret ingredent was just a smidge of cocaine so it became very popular, very fast. A lot of Mississippians call any soft drink a "coke"... for which they have a strange craving. For example: If you yell to cousin Skeeter: "Hey Skeeter, git me a coke", Skeeter might come back with a coke, root beer, orange or grape soda or an RC cola. However, Skeeter will not bring you Gatoraide as that's called gator-juice and Mountian Dew is that green s***. Mississippians will probably not understand what "pop" or "soda" is.

I'm reading Conrad, Salinger and Rand this summer. Non-fiction, I'm fairly geeky. Reading Forgotten Calculus to brush up on my skills. Understanding the Linux Kernel by Bovet and Stars and Their Spectra by Kaler are on my pile.

I don't believe that the "community of floundering" as much as it is going through some changes and some routine cycles. First- it's summertime. A lot of people are simply doing other things. Second- some premiere authors here and elsewhere have left the community. This has a effect as their fans realign themselves. Third- many readers furiously read everything they can find and go away. They might wait weeks or months before they come back to see what is new. Fourth- If you write it well, they will come. That's not an admin function, that's on the authors. Authors, like everone else, go through slumps, get busy, face real life challenges or just plain burn out. This stuff will work itself out with time. The best plan is not to over react or think of it as a crisis.

Happy birthday Movieguy, and many more!

Keep your head down Bloke. Take care and stay safe.

A good mod should: 1) be mellow and not fly off the handle 2) have a thick skin 3) be objective and not use their power to push their own agenda 4) be able to talk everyone from hormone crazed teens to senior citizens and treat them all with respect- even when they don't deserve it. 5) respond quickly to requests & complaints All in all, it's very much like customer service. Only true masochists need apply.

I have seen this before. Way back in the eighties a statistical corelation between circumcised and non-circumcised males and the transmission of the HIV virus was observed.

All fun aside, 12 step programs are useful to a whole lot of people. Everybody has heard about Alcoholics Anonymous but there are many others. Narcotics Anonymous is the second biggest 12 step fellowship. Others include: Codependents, AlAnon, Smokers, Overeaters, Gamblers all have an "anonymous" 12 step program. If they help some people, and they clearly do, it's all good. I just got a 9 month chip for being drug free for 9 months. I thought that it would suck but I'm a lot better off now than I was. There is one 12 step program that I have an issue with- there is something called Homosexuals Anonymous. It is very tiny compaired other 12 step fellowships. They've pretty much dried up as far as I know.

Well, I don't know Conner well enough to comment. quite The belief in a "higher power" has been placating idiots for eons. Their position is quite popular in some circles.

As I was at my regular Tuesday night meeting of the Anonymous 12 step group of my choice, it occured to me that there needs to be a new one. Idiots Anonymous Who is an Idiot? Most of us do not have to think twice about this question. We know! Our whole life and thinking was centered in Idiocy in one for or another- complete idiocy, displaying the ability to say and do the wrong thing at the worst possible moment. Very simply, an Idiot is a man or woman whose life is controlled by their idiocy. What is the Idiots Anonymous Program? IA is a nonprofit fellowship of men and women for whom their Idiocy has become a major problem. We are recovering Idiots that meet regulary to help each other think through their hair-brained ideas before we making flaming fools out of ourselves. This is a program of [near]complete abstenance from all idiocy. There is only one requirement for membership, the desire to stop being a flaming idiot. Why are We Here? Before coming to the fellowship of IA we could not manage our own lives. We could not live and enjoy life without making complete wankers out of ourselves. We had to be different and we thought that we had found the way in our idiocy. How it Works If you are tired of being a flaming idiot, and are willing to make the effort to improve, then you are ready to take certain steps. These are the principles that make recovery from idiocy possible. 1. We admitted that we were poweless over our idiocy, that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to our higher power as we understand him. 4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourseelves. 5. We admitted to our higher power, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 6. We were entirely ready to have our higher power remove those defects of character. 7. We humbly as him to remove those defects of character. 8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed and made amends to them all. 9. We made direct amends to such persons except when to do so would injure them or others. 10. We continued to take a searching and fearless moral inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. 11. We sought though prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with our higher power as we understood him. 12. Having had an awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to idiots, and practice these principals in all our affairs. This sounds like a big order, and we can't do it all in one day so remember- easy does it. We feel that our approach to the disease of idiocy is completely realistic, for the thereputic value of one idiot helping another is without parallel. We feel that our way is pratical for one idiot can best understand and help another idiot. The only way to keep from returning to active idiocy is to avoid making idiotic choices. If you are like us, you know that one is too many and a thousand never enough. We put great emphasis on this because when we engauge in idiocy or substitute one form for another- pratical jokes, slapstick, vaudville, then we release our idiocy all over again. This is not to say that a recovering idiot can't make a wanker out of himself. It is simply much harder to do when you follow the steps. The Disease Theory of Idiocy Most people are not born idiots. There are such unfortunates but most idiots learn idiocy from our idiotic society. Our society promotes and encourages idiocy by promoting and encouraging counter-productive and unnatural values and mores like sexual neurosis, gender idenity problems, religion over spiritualty, lying as courtesy, and many, many other examples. Who would not be confused by all of this bullshit you ask? The answer is no one. Everyone is a recovering idiot to one degree or another- the trick is to recognize this fact and act accordingly. There is no shame in being an idiot- if you are human then you are probably one of us. It happens to the best of people. Who can claim that they have NOT been an idiot at one time or another? The only shame is to know that you are an idiot and refuse to do anything about it. Release yourself from society's idiocy, work on the idiocy within and maybe, just maybe, someday you'll be a happy idiot. I'm James and I'm a recovering IDIOT. Now what's your excuse?