Aloha!

The tour I was following concluded at the Neil Blaisdell Center in Honolulu. A place I know by it’s prior name, the Honolulu International Center, or HIC. I used to go see the Ice Capades there when I was small, and the circus, and even some musical acts like the Jackson Five and the Osmonds. 

A few years ago I was following a different band, sort of an alternative jam band from the nineties. They had a lot of cool people in their fandom and I hit it off with some of them. Until one day I found myself in a monumentally stupid argument with the non-binary offspring of one of the band members. 

This was right after the Lahaina fire. I was being sad on social media, when suddenly this person appears in my comments, angrily informing me that I am not allowed to mourn for Lahaina, or even visit Hawai’i, because I am an evil colonizer. 

After this exchange I found myself unable to appreciate that band anymore. The dude I once respected as a freewheeling poet had suddenly morphed into a drugged-out loser who couldn’t be bothered to do any parenting after spawning a psychopath who appeared to be missing a few empathy-related chromosomes.

I also feel like that was the moment when I completely cut my ties with the angry left, who were following what they thought were hivemind marching orders regarding how to think about Hawai’i that originated with a conspiracy meme spread by a real estate speculator trying to scare people away and buy their land cheap. I note that exactly one month later, the Gaza attack happened, and the same people moved to denouncing the Israel side as evil colonizers – it’s like the rage was already there, it was just waiting for a current event to move into the next available parking spot. 

I had Palestinian friends back in the nineties. I’m aware of what has been going down. My opinion on Middle East politics is that I’m generally in favor of minimized killing but I accept that this is a place with thousands of years of history and culture which I could never understand without years of focused study, and my related opinions are not worth much. 

I do have a few opinions about Hawai’i. I haven’t been studying it intensely for years but I was born there, in the sixties, on Maui. At the time, the island population consisted of approximately thirty thousand people, most of them involved in growing rice and sugar. There was no tourist industry yet and Kaanapali was undeveloped. The few tourists interested in Maui stayed in Lahaina, at the Pioneer Inn. 

My dad was the manager at the S.H. Kress store, which was sort of like Woolworth, or Target, or Long’s without the drugs. He wore aloha shirts to work. We lived in a house next door to a farm, and the highlight of my toddler day was watching the cows get led between the pasture and the barn. Our dog, a black laborador-boxer cross named Winnie, would bark excitedly to let me know the show was happening.

When I was about four, we moved to Wahiawa, in central Oahu, which was big and crowded compared to sleepy Maui. We spent a few years there. My teenage cousin came out for an extended visit due to family trouble; she attended Lelehua High School and was always bringing her teenager friends over to play Beatles records. Without realizing she was starting a little addict on a lifetime of chasing musical highs. 

We acquired my brother when I was five. Like me, he was adopted. That was right around the time I started kindergarten. 

My childhood was complicated beyond my toddler years. I was spoiled. Morbidly obese in kindergarten. All the toys I wanted. My parents acquired me when they were in their mid-thirties and smothered me with attention. 

My dad, Cecil (just like the sea serpent), had a mean grumpy mom, a series of stepfathers, and a younger brother, John, who was smart at math, and got into IBM way back in the fifties. And had a normal name too. Older brother Cecil served in the Navy during the Korean War and fell in love with Hawai’i, and moved there after the war was over. He wasn’t a surfer, or a fisherman, or a boat enthusiast. He was just a dreamy impractical guy who loved to stare at the waves. He was always taking me to fanciful movies like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantasia, Arsenic and Old Lace. He took me to Lost Horizon, a musical about Shangri-La, and told me it had been his favorite story as a kid – Western woman finds her way to mysterious exotic Asian town where the people are beautiful and never age, where she falls in love. That was how he felt about Hawai’i. He genuinely liked Asian and Polynesian culture, although it was definitely from a bit of a colonizer mindset. He was more about integrating with the community than profiting from it though, which is why he stayed in retail instead of making money in the nascent computer industry. 

My mom, Layla (just like the song), was unusual. Orphaned at three. Raised in a strict Texas orphanage which followed the “science” of the day, such as swapping out caregivers regularly so the children wouldn’t get attached. Extremely dependent all her life – never learned to drive, never went farther than a couple blocks to the grocery store without my dad. Family curses left and right – her genetic family carried Huntington’s Disease, as well as a certain toxic mindset. One particularly memorable example: mom’s niece refused to let her attend mom’s sister’s 100th birthday party because she didn’t belong to the same church. 

And yeah, she passed that emotional abuse on. And then she’d feel guilty, and feed me a fattening treat. And tell me I was special. Better than the other kids, thanks to that 160+ IQ, not to mention the natural blonde hair. The other kids didn’t like me much, and I don’t blame them. 

Later in life, I encountered my biological mother Susie (as in “Suzie Q”). A cerebral nerd who had wanted to be an anthropologist. But her dad refused to pay for her education. He did pay to put her through school to be a dental hygienist, so she did that, and then moved to Hawai’i and got a job at the Kamehameha School helping students with their teeth while attending anthropology classes at U of Hawai’i. 

Fortunately for me, and not quite as fortunately for her, she encountered my dad, James (as in Bond), who served in the U.S. Navy aboard a submarine, the U.S.S. Charr. 

So here’s where I get all of my names … my adopted parents named me Sharon (for Walt Disney’s adopted daughter) Leilani (for the song Sweet Leilani, composed by the bandleader at the Moana Surfrider, where I was just staying). 

When I was a teenager and interested in punk rock, I determined that “Sharon” was not punk enough. However, if I changed one measly letter, I could have the much cooler name of Charon, which evoked yet another song, Sails of Charon by the Scorpions. As well as the moon of Pluto, and the ferryman from mythology, and a bunch of references in comics and science fiction. It was my stage/pen name for a while, and then I started writing and actually getting paid by checks in that name. So I did an informal name change and started working and paying taxes as Charon, and after doing that for about forty years, the Real ID laws forced me to go to court and spend five hundred dollars doing a formal name change so that my license would match my tax records rather than my birth certificate. After I had only been doing it twenty years, I learned that I had inadvertently named myself Charon after my dad’s ship, Charr. In the Steven King Dark Tower universe, names including “Char” relate to death. 

My dad was an asshole. Very handsome, very drunk, very irresponsible. Sired lots of bastards, including at least one with a girl under eighteen. Died of a massive heart attack on his favorite barstool on his fiftieth birthday, after many years of disappointing the women in his life. He hooked up with my mom, she dumped him after getting to know him a little better. They ran into each other at a party in Waikiki, and both of them had been drinking, and here I am. She tried to make it work and they stayed together for the pregnancy, moving to Pa’ia on Maui for my gestation, but Suzy decided in the third trimester she didn’t want to be the wife of an unfaithful drunk, so she gave me up for adoption. 

When I asked my biological mother what she would have named me, she told me “Lonne.” It’s a German boy’s name that belonged to her grandfather, who emigrated here from the real estate that would later be known as Germany. She thought it would be an unusual and distinctive name for a girl. It’s pronounced more like “Lana” at home but she wanted to call me “Lonny” along the same logic as Bette Davis. Since both my mothers were in agreement about at least part of my name, I use “Lani” socially.

My names are both incredibly hard for Americans to pronounce. I don’t really blame them for Charon, the moon and the song are usually pronounced with hard Ch- (cherish, chain) rather than the soft one (Cheryl, champagne) that I use. I am more mystified by how they botch Lani by pronouncing it Lainey or Lanny instead of the “Lawn Knee” that I tend to expect. 

When I’m in Hawai’i, though, I can order coffee with zero hesitation, and they’ll pronounce it correctly when it’s ready. Same thing happened in New York, actually, where they’re more cosmopolitan. A lot of Americans stumble.

I don’t consider myself an American. I’m a legal citizen because I was born in the United States of America four years before it became a state, and all four of my adopted and biological parents are citizens too. I was not, however, born on the North American continent, nor was I raised there.

I didn’t find my biological parents until I was in my thirties. There was a big experiment back then where the US was trying to save money on social safety nets by taking kids from the poor and/or unprepared and/or single and swapping them into comfortable middle class families. Then psych students would go interview them as busywork. Go see the movie Three Identical Strangers for a good introduction to the whole Baby Scoop Era thing. 

Until then, there was sort of an underlying assumption that my birthmother was some naïve girl who had found herself “in trouble” after an ill-advised affair with a local, back in the days when abortion was illegal. I didn’t get confirmation I was white until I was mid-thirties. Until then, I went around with a sort of skeleton-key approach to race – could be half-anything. The mirror told me that Parent X was likely not full Black or full Asian, but potentially hapa (that’s what we say instead of “mixed” like the people from the American continent say). I’ve got a certain solid, large-bodied build, kind of like a fat Taylor Swift, and people have speculated I look slightly Polynesian. 

Although I owe my existence to abortion being illegal, I have No Opinion about it. I respect both anti- and pro- believers as having valid opinions. I’ve worked for both pro- and anti- forces in my legal career, and was peripherally involved in Dobbs, which I saw as a big disappointment. It’s not my focus, and I believe it falls under the umbrella of Universal Healthcare, which I emphatically support. If people want to use it as a political football that distracts from UHC, well, that’s not a strategy I’d personally choose assuming I wanted to win. So I reserve the right to remain detached as far as my abortion opinions. I have zero problems with affirmatively supporting the idea that people of all genders should receive appropriate health care that doesn’t have a bunch of philosophical or religious strings attached to it. 

Anyway, I’ll blather more about politics later, but that’s sort of why I abandoned that alternative nineties band and their overly zealous offspring in a red-hot minute, and then they broke up anyway. During the pandemic I got interested in different music, especially this one particular K-Pop idol, and I made a bunch of online friends fangirling over him. We planned to meet if he ever did a world tour, which seemed remote at the time, but he just did his world tour, and I followed it to four different stops: New York, Los Angeles, Oakland and Honolulu. 

My last band was all “haw haw, you have to say you hate your birthplace or you can’t hang out with us!”

My new band is more “hey Lani, would you like an excuse to visit Hawai’i because I added a stop there?” 

I love my birthplace more than I loved either of my mothers, in fact. My adopted mother was at odds with Hawai’i. Terrified by the bugs. Repelled by the fish (she was a meat eater from Texas who refused to have fish in her kitchen, or to eat in a restaurant that smelled like it). I never ever saw her in a swimsuit. 

Plus, there’s a certain kind of “my husband dragged me out here to this godforsaken outpost” type of haole (the Hawaiian word for white) wife that winds up in the islands. They moved out there because their husband wanted to, or his career requested it. And they wanted to be a good wife so they said okay. But when they got there, they got smacked in the face with the multicultural reality of Hawai’i, which looks a lot different from the Hawai’i in the travel ads, where everyone is slim and sexy and white. So they get snubbed by their neighbors for acting high and mighty. Pretty soon the only people who will associate with them are other white bigots who don’t quite fit in, and they sit around telling each other how different and weird things are.

I thought my mom was weird because she was always remarking on things that I was born with as though they were foreign and unusual. My classmates’ names were so exotic! Oh look, I drew local flowers in art class! Wow, look at me eating Japanese snack foods! I developed the impression that I belonged there, but she didn’t. And when I got old enough to socialize, I gravitated toward the snack-sharing Asian nerds as opposed to the bossy haole girls. I was still fighting with my own brattiness but even then I could tell I was far better at sitting quietly with the other nerds, reading books, than interacting with power-tripping non-reading kids who resembled me. 

There’s a scene in James Michener’s Hawai’i where one of the missionaries makes his kids wear long wool underwear in the winter, even though they live on Maui, because that’s accepted as a superior and healthy practice back home. Kind of exemplifies the whole “we’re not really from here, we’re BETTER” attitude that haoles, particular the American ones, occasionally get.

Me, I’m a haole from the islands. I know better. I know I’m not the racial majority and the world does not exist for my benefit. I try to live with Hawaiian values like aloha, and being pono, and doing malama. I’m on the other side of this silly line my mom insisted on drawing. By the time I hit my teens, that line had calcified. We’re from different civilizations. Different cultures. Different worldviews. Yours is grounded in ignorance and supremacy, and I reject it. And you think mine is unforgivably brown, and a tad too savage. 

I still think about moving back. Then I remember I’m addicted to live music. In Hawai’i, live music is something that usually involves cover bands or local jams, not going out to see some big star. That’s why I was so grateful my K-Pop dude added Honolulu to his list. Also, I have rent control in San Francisco, in a Victorian flat where I’ve been happily living for over thirty years.

There’s water on three sides, plenty of Asian food, and I can see a palm tree from my window. Too cold for swimming here though. 

When I go to Hawai’i I end up doing extremely pedestrian things, like eating in food courts. This time I took the bus to the museum, stopping at the mall before and after for plate lunches. I ate meat jun, tan tan udon, katsu curry, char siu fried rice, macadamia nuts, and low-sodium spam. 

I spent most of the time in Waikiki. I had a lovely room at the Moana Surfrider with a window seat looking down on the entrance and I would park myself there with a sparkling water, playing Hearthstone on my iPad and watching the crowds, listening to the buskers outside and the dance band downstairs. Early in the mornings I would spend an hour or so floating around in the ocean. Then I’d run away before the sun got too high, wash my hair, and wander around Waikiki in search of lunch. Late afternoon I’d go back in the water, after applying a thorough coating of sunscreen, and that’s how I managed to avoid getting sunburned. 

A few times I thought about going exploring, but I decided it would just make me sweaty, and sad, and nostalgic. This trip was partially to commemorate one year after my neck surgery, and it felt good to be stretching my muscles in the ocean. Rather than bouncing around in a car. 

I made some cool friends among the other music fans at the show, and on my last night, two of them took me out to a fancy dinner at the Aulani resort. I made this patched and embroidered mini-skort to wear to the show, which features anime character Princess Knight; someone from the meetup just happened to be wearing a shirt featuring her picture. Princess Knight was very popular in Hawai’i – another reference mainland kids from America don’t understand. 

I’m really not sure where the world is going to wind up. I have people on my social media feed adamantly insisting it’s going to be thoroughly dystopian. So I decided to travel to all my happy places while I’m at this intersection of being financially capable, physically strong and living in a peaceful country. 

I’ll probably elaborate on my politics at length at some point, having already said more than I intended about that subject. One of the things that I was reflecting on during my trip was the idea that while I’m firmly behind liberal science (high speed trains, walkable cities, sustainable energy, anti-racism), I’ve got issues with liberal religion (Freud, Marx, solipsism, nurture, purity testing and so on). As such, I’d rather focus on nuts and bolts practicality like healthcare, and then when everyone’s pain is being treated we can expound on personal philosophies such as the one that goes “I’m the center of the universe and I created all of you in my mind!” 

For now, Hawai’i tends to save me from extremist thinking. For example, I had one pop up on social media today, a meme about the new age tendency to split medicine into Western (greedy, corporate, profit-centered) and Eastern (enlightened, wise, holistic) as a sales tactic, realizing their mostly-American consumers aren’t really familiar with Asian-ness and see it as exotic and mysterious. Maybe they’ve even seen movies about the ageless people of Shangri-La. Or maybe they identified with the rich girl in Breakfast Club who packed sushi in her lunchbox – familiarity with the exotic as status symbol. 

A lot of people presume I’m rich, given my upbringing in Hawai’i. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My dad worked as a retail manager and my mom was a housewife. We were solidly middle class, with a dark blue Dodge Dart and a black and white television set. We went to the drive-in movie theater, and to McDonald’s. We attended church luaus and Easter parades. On the weekends we’d do beach picnics or the zoo, or sometimes Sea Life Park to see the dolphins and the reef pool. We were frequent visitors at the Bishop Museum, a place I recently dropped by. We didn’t have a boat but occasionally we’d get invites aboard other peoples’ vessels, and sometimes the sunset dinner cruise boats would do off season madness, like raise a Jolly Roger and offer a pirate cruise where all the kids get free eyepatches and fake doubloons, and I loved that sort of thing. 

I fought with my parents a lot, but I had fun with my friends. We were one of the first families to move to Mililani, a suburban housing development in the center of the island. The family across the street had seven kids, with two daughters in my approximate age range, and we liked to explore the border between tropical jungle and neatly plowed land awaiting future houses. Sometimes I’d go with their family to Barber’s Point Beach on the weekends, which was for military only and had lots of cool lava caves to explore. I was still a fat prissy whiny brat, but age and socialization were mellowing me out. Eventually I’d discover psychedelics and introspection. Back then I was just a chunky bookworm, working off the baby fat by riding my bike as far as I could go. 

Weird things make me nostalgic. I was walking around the Museum neighborhood and saw a school that looked a lot like one I attended, classrooms open to the tropical breeze. I remember kids would bring their favorite records, 33-speed albums and single-song 45s. We would stash them in our cubbies all day, and then after school a couple of the cool teachers would bring out the school record player and let us throw a dance party on the patio. Everyone danced. We didn’t have that social stigma about boys asking girls to dance that mainland American kids have. Everyone danced, either in groups or solo, and we had a great time. I sat there looking at that schoolyard for a while, thinking about dancing to ABC by the Jackson Five and Fire by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Probably looked a little creepy, so eventually I moved on. 

The only mainland place that gives me positive childhood memories is Disneyland, which we used to visit every year. Until we moved back to the mainland, and spent a few years struggling. Things were more expensive, and there were bill collectors rather than vacations requiring airplanes. Puberty was smacking me around, and I did not fit into the mainland social scene at all. 

My relationship with my parents backfired on them. When I was little they had successfully bought my love with plenty of toys and fattening food, and once they ran out, I got belligerent. I left at seventeen, still relatively feral until various boyfriends and roommates schooled me in basic human interaction. 

Hawai’i always had time, and space, and patience, for me. Even when I was struggling with the rest of the world. After moving out I spent twenty years before heading back, after my first pregnancy turned tragic. And learning there had been a Hawaiian Renaissance in my absence, and discovering terrific artists, and musicians like Hapa, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and Keali’i Reichel. 

Since then I try to make it back there every few years, just to see what has changed. And float in the water off Waikiki. And eat too much local food, although this last time I behaved myself and stuck to low-sodium spam and unsalted macadamia nuts. And only a few lilikoi-flavored things, most of which I didn’t finish. 

I’ve been thinking about lots of heavy things on this trip. My mortality, which might come to an end sooner than I was anticipating, and whether Social Security will continue being available or if I’ll just end up working until I drop. Which I actually wouldn’t mind, I like my career. 

The writing part, however … 

My first few books concerned teenagers. There were no explicit sex scenes. There were teens doing off-camera sexual things, impliedly, in the Sonny Knight trilogy. There was some ineffective awkward unconsummated bumbling around related to sex in the dinosaur book, which ended with the heroine deciding she wanted one romantic kiss with Mr. Trouble, but nothing further. And there were a few gay characters. 

That means they’re way too lewd for red states, and not nearly lewd enough for the speculative fiction writing crowd. Somewhere in the Twilight Zone of lewdness. I note that some hapless author writing pedo-flavored explicit fiction got hauled into jail in another country. I would never go there. Writing erotica doesn’t come naturally to me, I rarely read it, and I have to have other people go over it to make sure I’m not being cliched. I’m coming from the other side of the problem, as an asexual worried my material isn’t lewd enough. 

I tried writing adult horror, with lewdness, but my heart wasn’t really in it. It was more of a way of dealing with pandemic anxieties. The pandemic really ruined a lot of horror themes, since suddenly life was scarier than escapism. My horror wasn’t successful, and I’ve taken one of the books out of print. The other one, which deals with immigration themes is basically a retelling of Malinche and Cortes as a fotonovela-style drama set in America involving space aliens. I think I put lots of brain cells into that one but it’s a total flop. 

Which leaves me in a weird limbo. I don’t want to write for kids at all, let alone explicit material involving them (and secretly I’m rejoicing that I don’t have to try to write that sort of John Green, Sarah Maas, non-explicit erotica sort of thing anymore now that it’s emphatically out of fashion). I really don’t want to write anything erotic, period, since it would be market-directed fanservice rather than anything I really wanted to do. 

So I’m not sure whether I’ll continue writing anything at this point. Possibly it’s time to pursue another art form, or just devote my twilight years to coloring books and acquiring World of Warcraft achievements. 

There are two books that I think are still in me, however. The first is a spin off from the dinosaur book featuring one of the boy band dudes. I want to make fun of the music industry basically, except on a faraway planet where all the names have been changed. 

The other one has to do with wanting to give back to Hawai’i. Writing a beach book that amuses and entertains tourists. Or maybe collaborating with an author on a storybook, or a non-fictional coffee table book. It doesn’t even have to be a book, but since I’m a writer, it sprang to mind. I feel that if I do that, I’ll feel okay about returning there for my final years. Which is something I’d really like to do.

Running Around, Doing Stuff

I’ve been traveling. I spent a week in New York City, then I went to Los Angeles and treated myself to a day at Disneyland. Soon I’m heading to Hawai’i. I’m visiting all my happy places, while I’m happy. There are all sorts of things looming in the future which threaten my continued happiness, but for now, life is good. Because I can afford to travel, and I'm healthy enough to sleep on strange beds and climb subway stairs. 

When I’m in a multiverse frame of mind, I’m convinced that I’m a New Yorker in at least half of them. Visiting New York City gives me an odd combination of longing and déjà vu. Possibly even past life memories, or epigenetic experiences handed down from my ancestors’ adventures in the city. I feel both like I belong there, like I’ve always been there, and like I can’t wait to get back home. Every block is crowded with amiable ghosts, whispering that there’s an apartment available here, that I should try the deli there. That happiness, love, companionship, and the elusive state of never-being-bored are all right around the corner, waiting for me to change my zip code. Gooble gobble, one of us!

The weather report was predicting heavy rain, and I was thinking I’d spend my time inside museums, but instead it snowed. I generally dislike snow, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to settle in San Francisco rather than New York. We don’t have snow, except for an occasional thin yet photogenic dusting over the Golden Gate Bridge. We have cold clammy fog, and we also have cold sunny days, and usually it’s hoodie weather except for the annual cold snap and heat wave.

New York City was wicked cold, and I was glad I was well prepared with a bulky down jacket and warm cashmere scarf. And a hoodie, and a thermal shirt. And a tiedye for the concert. Lately I have been rebelling from my self-imposed fashion tyranny of band shirts (the greater bulk of my wardrobe) and wearing a uniform to shows consisting of a tie dye and either cargo jeans or my cargo jacket which is decorated with 100+ patches representing all the bands I’ve seen while wearing it (@ConcertCommandoCoat on IG if that sort of thing interests you).

I’ve been dressing like one, but I was never really a Deadhead. I liked them, and I saw them live a handful of times in the eighties and nineties. Their music never really grabbed me but I was fascinated by their scene, and still have a lot of friends who are in it, and many of those friends make tie dyes. Meanwhile I’ve been trying to shed an unfortunate goth phase which led me to dress mostly in black, with band shirts, and tie dyes are a nice colorful alternative. There’s also the added bonus that people tend to treat me gently when I present myself as an old lady in a tie dye, as opposed to dressing as the gloomy old music nerd that I am.

On my first day in New York, I went for gloomy old music nerd, and wore a t-shirt celebrating The Downward Spiral (see last post). And then I walked to Central Park. In the snow. I wandered around the trails and took photos of the frozen edge of the lake, and I hung out with a Russian tour group inspecting the John Lennon memorial.

Then I went over to look at the Dakota, setting for one of my favorite novels, Time And Again by Jack Finney. And slowly made my way through the Upper West Side, Hell’s Kitchen, the Seventh Avenue that you can’t give it away on, the Broadway I regarded. I figured out the subway relatively quick and found my way to the World Trade Center crater, and Greenwich Village, where I ate an overly rare yet delicious steak frites across the street from the Stonewall memorial.

I never did get around to seeing a Broadway play. We have those here. I’m not a major fan, although they’re fun once in a while. Nor did I eat cheesecake, too much sugar. I did eat White Castle, pastrami, and several slices of pizza. And I drank several flavors of seltzer, and had a couple baristas doublecheck to make sure I didn’t want it with cream and sugar. I balanced out my street food with visits to a couple of fancy restaurants, the Algonquin Hotel and the Russian Tea Room.

New York, to me, feels like the most American place in the world. I haven’t seen a lot of America, mostly tourist attractions and places where you transfer planes. My sole ventures outside the US have been brief stays in Mexico and Canada. I’m a homebody. If it weren’t for live music I’d never leave my county. Even with my limited experience, New York hits me right in the patriotism button. It’s full of the same kind of regular normal Americans I grew up seeing in movies and reading about in books.

I did not grow up feeling like a regular normal American. I grew up in a conquered Pacific island nation, and when I grew up I found myself wanting to live around gay commie liberals and similar people. Flag waving confuses me. I’m more about that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, which in my mind means living a European lifestyle as far as walkable cities and grandiose architecture (and food) and also an Asian lifestyle with regard to technology (and food). The whole thing about living in outer burbaria and doing your shopping at a big box, and spending hours of your valuable time in a car … just no. Cars give me headaches. Probably relates to my neck issues.

I had neck surgery almost one year ago. Basically my own body was stabbing me, growing arthritis spurs that sliced my discs to ribbons and trapping one of my more frequently used nerves. The surgeon freed the nerve and fused a couple levels of neck, which helped a lot, but I also had to basically grow new muscle tissue. Which hurts. So does having a bone graft in your neck that lights up whenever it’s cold or the barometric pressure is erratic.

I’m accustomed to pain though. And now that I’m having actual zero-pain days for the first time in years, I feel like I’ve won the lottery. While I won’t speculate on what the future holds, I’m taking advantage of the fact that I can walk and subway all over New York, and then bounce back for Disneyland. After taking a few days to recover from a cold.

One of the things I’ve been doing on my journey is trying to figure out what to do with my creativity before I die. I do love writing novels but it’s an impractical labor of love. Most people don’t read novels. And I don’t get along with that many people in the subculture. I just tend to encounter the toxic call-out type of person, and make enemies for stupid reasons. I’m still planning to show up at the 2026 Worldcon, because Disneyland, and that means I’m going to crank out a novel for it to justify the expense, but you’ll hear more about that when I actually figure out what it’ll be about, and then write it.

I’ve been playing my guitar. My old lady voice is actually way better than my twenty-something voice, because I’ve got loads of character and a low alto range. There was a chance the surgery was going to make it worse, give me a permanent rasp, but it’s actually made my voice better. I’m not extroverted enough to play music though. I lack that all important customer service attitude when it comes to audiences.

And I’ve been doing fabric art. I actually learned quilting and made my first square for a group collaboration. And absolutely hated it. I’m an embroiderer, used to making visible stitches with a huge needle. Not invisible stitches with a tiny needle. I can decorate the hell out of basic garments though, so I’m experimenting with that.

Seeing New York and Los Angeles with my very own eyeballs was good for my art. It reminded me that there’s a greater America – intense concentrations of America, in fact.

Happy birthday, The Downward Spiral

 My favorite album turns 21 tomorrow. The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails came out March 8, 1994. I was pregnant at the time, the closest I'd get to procreating in this lifetime, but things went poorly and on May 5th I gave birth to a preemie who only lived an hour. This album got me through both sides of that experience. I played it so much I actually wore out a CD of it. Trent Reznor went on to enjoy a fantastic career and a solid marriage to the beautiful Mariqueen Mandig Reznor, and they have several kids. His newer music isn't as angsty as this album, which was recorded in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered during Trent's heavy drug abuse period. The last song on it, Hurt, which has made many tears leak from my eyes, got appropriated by the legendary Johnny Cash, who made it his own in a hit single released shortly before he died. Today I bought the new Lady Gaga album, which might have been deliberately released on Downward Spiral day; she's citing '90s NIN as a specific influence. And a few months ago I saw my favorite K-Pop artist, Taemin, do a performance dressed in a Downward Spiral t-shirt (his band, SHINee, sampled '90s NIN song Burn in their hit single Don't Call Me). Some of these songs are still on my everyday playlist, and are likely to stay there. 

GamerGate Memories

I’ve been a gamer all my life. Blue book Dungeons and Dragons. One of the few women who would bother tackling those Avalon Hill games with hex maps. I could play QBert for a couple hours on a single quarter. I was very glad when huge convoluted strategy games moved to computers. I was an early adapter as far as MMOs, starting with Sims Online and then spending several blissful years addicted to Star Wars Galaxies before finally moving to WoW, which I was playing when GamerGate happened.

But wait, there’s more. I’ve also been a writer all my life. Or at least since second grade, when my teacher – I think it was Mrs. Watanabe – told me that if I didn’t write down the weird stuff in my head I would just eventually die with it still stuck in there. In fifth grade I started writing long improbable science fiction novels in composition books. When I was a teenager I ran across my first actual science fiction writers, in a loose clique of historical recreationists and creatives centered around Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of Mists of Avalon. And, as was later revealed, a nasty abusive pedo.

The writers in that scene told me that my dream of writing science fiction was an attainable one, as long as I did the right quid pro quo, jumped through the proper hoops, paid the piper, all that. My solution was to flip them the bird and move into alternative journalism. I got in through an audition, because I occasionally write well. I was doing assorted features as well as a weekly astrology column, when they changed editors on me. And suddenly I was dealing with more quid pro quo harassment, and I did a rather unprofessional table-flipping tantrum in response. Decided that writing could go screw itself, I was going to be a video game addict instead.

As long as I can remember, people had been telling me to go find my people, my crowd, my subculture. So I’m an old hand at investigating subcultures. I’m kind of a tourist socially – I bounce from one group to another, usually staying politely on the fringes. I’ve gone through phases of checking out fringe religions, fandoms for obscure media, and Mensa special interest groups (I’ve thrown a 163 a couple times and a 165 a couple times). I have an unusual mind and growing up, my socialization was possibly weirder than the norm, so I don’t really fit anywhere, but I’m curious, as well as locked in a perpetual search for the new and interesting.

And I’m a gamer. Have spent many blissful hours on Asteroids, Link, Castlevania, Prince of Persia, Heroes of Might and Magic, and the like. My first MMO was Sims Online, and there I met other gamers who steered me to Star Wars Galaxies. After that folded I headed over to World of Warcraft, where I’ve maintained a presence for nearly two decades, with brief excursions into other games, as well as long breaks.

There has been tension between the two social cliques I’m roughly familiar with as “writers” and “gamers” for as long as I can remember. The writers were part of a network of San Francisco Bay Area liberals that included the rapidly evolving and expanding community of people who are not straight, academics, environmentalists, feminists, Grateful Dead fans, and other sympathetic people interested in changing the world. There was a popular book lumping all this together as the Aquarian Conspiracy.

The gamers, meanwhile were the kids who were nerding out in math class while the writers dominated English and social studies. Geeks, nerds, Star Trek afficionados, military history enthusiasts, inventers, programmers, nascent techies, synth musicians, futurists. Yes, it is sort of a boys’ club, and yes, they would tolerate my presence, because I could hold my own on a hexmap or dungeon crawl, and because I wasn’t that interested in invoking culture wars discussions over the casually retro values that occasionally surfaced in their art. I was there to play games, dammit, and win them.

By the time I found Star Wars Galaxies, the culture war had arisen, and we were fighting it in proxy. In a weird cartoonish world based on the Star Wars universe, with several interesting reversals. For one thing, more people wanted to play the heroic rebels than the villainous imperials. This resulted in huge crowds of obnoxious gamers wearing the rebel flag bullying tiny beleaguered packs of imperials – the reverse of the situation in the movies.

I’m going to give you a snapshot of one of them: a disabled wheelchair-using teenage boy, who ended up being featured in some kind of gamer spotlight feature with me, back when the gaming community wasn’t suspicious of saluting gamers for being disabled and/or female. In that context, we were polite, civilized, articulate enough to answer questions. In the game, he was one of the most verbally abusive pigs you’ve ever encountered, with whole subcategories of insults that fell into the category of what would later emerge as hate crimes. His in-game persona was this angry ball of rage who would suddenly descend on other players and deluge them with verbal abuse. After I got his number I macroed the Samuel L. Jackson speech from Pulp Fiction and I’d spam it back at him until the dialogue box was full of our demented nonsense. I did ask him about it once, and he gave me some weird reply about how he was helping other people to refine themselves, plus I got an idea that he’d spent most of his life being the recipient of that kind of verbal abuse and regarded it as normal everyday conversation. Possibly he was autistic too.

I have no idea whether I’m autistic, and have no interest in finding out. I did go through a period of identification with the label, but that was merely my own layperson speculation combined with earlier versions of the science. As far as the current state of neuropsychology, I do know that my IQ puts me in the realm of neurodivergent as far as a lot of professionals are concerned, and whether I have other comorbidities is really only relevant in my life if I want to get prescription Adderall. Which I do not, because chemicals tend to kick my ass and I’m better off sticking with weed for situations like stress occasioned by a verbally abusive, potentially neurodiverse teenager with bigger issues than I’ll ever face. And yeah, I was on the opposing side so I could occasionally have the satisfaction of virtually smacking him around with a lightsaber.

Gaming was where I finally found my people, in a neurodivergent sense. I felt like an anthropologist, wandering around a strange planet interacting with my fellow aliens. I spent the George W. Bush presidency in Star Wars Galaxies, hiding from reality and discussing politics in a removed way, through the rebel-imperial lens of Star Wars. Where we could get frank about subjects like war crimes, because we were cartoons in sciencefictionland, as opposed to being humans in meat space.

After Galaxies evaporated I moved over to WoW, because it seemed like a big stable game that wouldn’t be discontinued anytime soon, and I still play it. These days I’m a mean little Vulpera mage that runs around in battlegrounds turning people into hogs. I’m strictly casual though, having gone through an addiction phase where I did 25-person raids with a huge international horde progression guild every night for a couple years. Until Cataclysm arrived, and our guild broke up, and I was just grinding solo achievements and doing random raid groups until I figured out my next move.

That was when GamerGate happened.

I first heard about it on Reddit. My understanding was that a messy break-up had occurred and the girl got dogpiled – one of the euphemisms we used for “being targeted for harassment by a group that coordinates over the internet.” It was no secret that some gamers were antisocial to the bone, while others, like the boy I mentioned, were only situationally antisocial. I’d heard of things like “swatting” – where some malicious prankster calls the cops and deceives them into believing their target is holding hostages or some other activity that requires an immediate armed response.

The bad guys on the writers’ side involve people like the aforementioned Marian Zimmer Bradley, and Neil Gaiman. You can read about their misdeeds. The bad guys on the gamers’ side are mostly low profile computer users who operate under handles, and during the time period a lot of tactics were being born, such as “catfishing” – where you use someone else’s photo to construct a persona designed to make someone else fall in love and make unwise financial choices.

Some of those tactics come straight out of the punk rock era left, such as flooding people with negative feedback, because the antisocial elements on the writers side were evolving too (Google “helicopter story” or “requireshate” for some lurid tales). Maybe that’ll happen to me too for writing this centrist take on GamerGate, who knows. Getting both packs of antisocials aggro seems to be a spectacularly foolish decision, but I feel like speaking my truth, now that we’re up shit creek from a political standpoint partially thanks to the polarization that crystallized around GamerGate.

So I’m on Reddit, and I read about a girl getting dogpiled, and threads getting locked. I heard rumors both were professionally involved with games in some capacity, which was why it was even registering on my radar.

The next day, I learned we were dead. “Gamers Are Dead” – that was the specific lede. Apparently a bunch of alternative journalists had found out about the dogpiling and discussed it on one of those whisper networks that writers have. Their hivemind had eventually assumed gamers were also a hivemind, and collective blame was assigned, and everyone who played videogames was now responsible for the dogpiling. Because gamers are all bad people. End of discussion. This “Gamers Are Dead” headline was showing up on every single lefty newsblog I was aware of, apparently intended to be a show of force – “shut up dogpilers, we outnumber you, don’t make us fire the secret weapon: media attention.”

I felt a little bit like a kid whose parents just announced they were splitting up as I watched the aftermath unfold. Opportunists of all stripes sprang into the fray, trying to frame the conflict in a way that would capture all those passionate mouse clicking gamers and transform them into a mighty personal army.

On the writers’ side, people like Anita Sarkeesian sprang up. She did a series of videos with cherry picked moments, sort of like sexist gaming’s greatest hits spread out over a long period of time, trying to make the case that games = patriarchy = bad. On the gamers side, people like Milo Yiannopoulos jumped in to transform all those gay patriarchal gamers into new social conservatives. They recategorized the writers side as Social Justice Warriors. SJWs for short.

On my side, as a gamer who mostly hung out with other neurodiverse people and reclusive weirdos, teaming up for idle chitchat and dragon slaying, all of this culture war stuff was horrific because it was driving people out of gaming, most particularly the crew I hung around with. If you were a gamer who happened to be female or gay or extremely liberal, it was like wearing a target on your head, and if either your real-life SJW friends or your virtual gamer friends saw it, you could expect to draw fire.

I quit gaming around then, or actually, just took a long break. I was concerned about gamer slang creeping into my everyday vocabulary, offending someone on the SJW side whose only familiarity with gaming was that it was patriarchal and bad.

I made a few other drastic decisions, like deciding to become a self-published novelist. I have writing skills, obviously. I’ve tried my hand at journalism and it did occur to me that I could have selected a GamerGate faction and made my name regaling them with propaganda. After spending most of my life trying to figure out what my debut novel should be about, I finally settled on writing exciting young adult fiction which gave SJW values a nod without really opposing the other side or doing a lot of obnoxious moralizing. To help encourage literacy.

People opposed to the obnoxious liberal moralizing of the last few years tend to define it as “woke.” I don’t get along with those people, so I’ll just refer to it as obnoxious moralizing. The kind that intends to be in-your-face in a righteous way but is received as in-your-face in a backlash-inspiring way. For instance, I’m seeing a lot of it currently in my social media among the people who refused to vote for Harris because of Palestine.

I tend to get more than my share of obnoxious liberal moralizing. I used to get all angsty about why, and I went through a crisis about it back in my Star Wars Galaxies days, at which point I decided that my loyalties were more about things like environmentalism and universal healthcare than either traditional values or cultural change. And that means I’m a liberal, although I don’t socialize with liberals very much. Because of the obnoxious moralizing.

I learned long ago that it doesn’t matter to those types whether I work hard at a liberal job all day, go home and write empowering liberal fiction at night, and wear nonbinary clothes during my green commute between the two – I’m still an evil fascist, because they say so and that’s their truth, which entitles them to rage at me. Something about my bearing, my being socialized in the South Pacific, my neurodivergent IQ, or maybe it’s just that I’m a tourist. Who hops from one subculture to the next, without fully engaging.

 At the same time, the other side doesn't appeal to me. They hate books, and they don’t want women to live independently. My life revolves around books, and independence. I briefly dated a guy who swung hard to the right and decided it wasn’t my path, although I do agree with them in a few areas. Most notably, I’m not opposed to religion, even though I don’t choose to belong to one. The SJW faction is needlessly critical of Christianity, despite its relevance to liberation from tyranny. Plus there’s the Sokal Hoax, and all I’m going to do is mention it.

Once I finished my first science fiction novel, which turned out to be a bloated trilogy, the Rabid Puppies scandal happened. I had retreated from gaming due to the culture wars, focusing on writing science fiction. Now the culture war had followed me, as a bunch of angry right-wing dissidents attempted to game the Hugo Awards. GamerGate was mentioned again, as said aforementioned angry right-wingers attempted to recruit shock troops from the crowd that had amassed in reaction to the Gamers Are Dead articles.

I kept tabs on GamerGate and its opponents all the time I was writing, because I didn’t want to inadvertently push any buttons. I was still laboring under the delusion that I could write something both sides enjoyed – sort of like Harry Potter, before the author enlisted in the culture wars. I came up with a nice bland inoffensive hero called Sonny Knight, whose story was verbose and circuitous, but it was also the first story I was able to finish, after a lifetime of writing half-completed novels and getting silenced by my own inner critic.

I was going to start out as self-pubbed and see if I could develop a name, and whether I liked doing PR. My plan was to spend my retirement traveling around to science fiction conventions, trading self-published novels with a small circle of likeminded friends. I already know I’m too fringey to be the kind of author that makes piles of money, but maybe I could do a cult following startup.

So I traveled to Worldcon, in Spokane that year, to gauge the climate for myself and see whether science fiction had also turned into a culture war battleground. Because that’s not really fertile soil for an artist like me, who would rather amuse the world than transform or restore it.

I wound up on the same plane with the editor who had inspired my table-flip and retreat from journalism, by trying to hand me over to a Neil Gaiman type. This was back when nobody realized Neil Gaiman was a Neil Gaiman type. We didn’t speak. This person went on to internet stardom writing about science fiction from an SJW angle, and has a few titles out; I see no reason to read them.

Once I got to Spokane, it was on fire, from some nearby forest blazes that turned the sky orange and made the whole town smell like a barbecue. I attended some panels, made some friends, went to some meet-ups and decided yes, I was in. I wanted to engage with this subculture. I was going to write another novel!

The next one involved a co-author, Sally. We were hanging out one day talking about a potential story: Jurassic Park without the sexism. A girl-power story, about dinosaurs. With a heroic girl, rescuing others. Her boyfriend? No, how about a whole boy band, including the teen idol she’s crushing on!

That was how Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler was born. I started writing it in 2019 and was halfway done when the pandemic hit. I had a lot of spare time in 2019, because I got maneuvered of my job by Tony the Embezzler, who stole over a million dollars before they caught him. Tony probably assumed I’d use my neurodivergent brain to detect that sort of thing, so he started with a bullying campaign, and when I refused to budge, a nice severance package. So I took a year off to relax and let my cortisol levels subside. Then I went to a new job which is much calmer, working sporadically on RWRW until lockdown happened and I was able to focus on it. And finish it. But not promote it.

During this time, the culture war grew to Grand Canyon proportions. RWRW was fairly bland when it came out. There’s a gay character, but he’s married. There are no sex scenes, although there’s a dumb miscommunication that leads to platonic bonding. The Rhonda character is more about nurturing baby dinos and mooning over her crush than asserting herself as an action girl, although she does rise to great heights. And there are all kinds of dinosaurs. Four years after I wrote it, due to controversy creep, it now exists in a world where teachers get fired for having books with gay characters in their classrooms (let alone dinosaurs, which are apparently offensive to science deniers).

I tried shifting to adult horror novels, aimed at the SJW side since apparently there’s no longer any point in writing for a general audience. My heart wasn’t completely there, and I’ve taken most of my horror out of print.

The culture war is at the point where California is ready to split off from the rest of the country. I’m approaching the one-year anniversary of my neck surgery, in which a trapped nerve that had been giving me chronic pain for years was repaired, and then I had to deal with physical therapy and the kind of pain associated with bone grafts and muscular reconfiguration. I’m at an impasse regarding what to write, or whether to even bother, although RWRW is about to be excerpted in a forthcoming anthology.

I feel like my head is finally clear for the first time in years … and now everyone else has gone mad, and Elon Musk is deconstructing the federal government.

One of the things I did in the process of writing RWRW was research boy bands. Being in a boy band is one of the most thankless jobs out there. They get plenty of that negative dogpile energy, plus they get bombarded with adolescent sexual energy, and the only constant thread among them is financial exploitation. Like a lot of girls, I grew up crushing on boys in bands, without really appreciating the work they do swimming against the current as female-gaze-centric entertainers. So I made a point of learning about them, reading their bios, and then I did a deep dive into K-Pop fandom to investigate what modern boy bands are like.

Recently I was reading an article about actors who get trapped in their roles and take a while to decompress. Apparently Johnny Depp had trouble getting out of his Hunter S. Thompson character after the movie wrapped, and the dude who played Elvis in the recent biopic reported the same trouble. I had an authorial version of the same thing. 

Early in the pandemic I kept getting stuck to my point of view characters when I wasn't actively writing about them. When I was the musician, I’d play guitar and work on my busking skills. When I was the bodyguard, I’d practice kicking and ducking. When I was the fangirl running a massive online fanclub, I created a bunch of specialized handles and threw myself into real life fandom – and met some cool people. While being trapped in all these fictional headspaces like some kind of multiple personality disorder patient.

Over time, as I came back to earth, some of those people were still in my life, and the idol who brought us together decided to do the world tour we had been dreaming about. So I decided to follow it, both because I like the performer and because I want to do a little traveling. See my happy places, like Times Square, and Disneyland, one more time. Just in case things … change. I’m not going to write about the idol specifically, because this blog is about me and my opinions, and it might get a little raw, so I’m not going to contaminate anybody else’s SEO.

I’m just one of those people who has to write. Whether it’s novels, social media updates, this blog, whatever. And I still hear about GamerGate. Just yesterday I saw people blaming it for the current state of the nation.

I’ve refused to even mention it for years, typing out “G*merG*te” to evade search engines. I actually ran a “gender and games” blog right here on this account, DarthBunnywabbit, which I shut down and deleted months before GamerGate happened, having concluded that writing about games and gender would bring me nothing but headaches because the gap I experienced was a lot different than the one critical theorists were presenting. I have all kinds of opinions about it but the main one is that GamerGate was where the backlash against the Aquarian Conspiracy began, and that embracing a dualist worldview in the dubious name of dialectic was a colossal strategic failure. And so was drawing a culture war boundary that forced all the strategically-minded nerds to the opposite side. 

I might elaborate on that and other things, but right now I think I’m just going to blog about my travels and the situations I encounter. Maybe also write about breakfast and stuff like that. The fake bubbly YA writer persona is gone, by the way. From here on it’s just unfiltered me.

The Big Kahuna has left the building

The Big Kahuna died today at the age of 18. 

He had been struggling with arthritis and had an appointment for his next treatment tomorrow, but his appetite failed and the appetite stimulant drugs weren't working. Yesterday I woke up to find him hiding in a closet. That was unusual. My heart sank. 

He stayed in the closet most of the day, only eating a little milk and a squeezable kitty treat even though I spent most of the day preparing tempting food to wave in his face. At night he rallied and came out for cuddles; I played a Billy Strings concert for him. He always loved guitar noodling. Whenever I'd livestream a concert he would be right beside me, curled up listening. He enjoyed one last concert, then he limped back into the closet. I followed him, covered him up with blankets and lay there beside him talking to him for a while. I woke up well before dawn this morning but when I went to check on him he was gone. 

I saw this scared little rescue kitty on Petfinders and had no idea he was a giant

I needed to get some professional photos taken anyway, so I dragged him along to the photoshoot and got some memorable pictures. He was around his top weight of 35 pounds here. 

This is my favorite picture of him from that session. I have a big print hanging on my wall.

With his pal at Cat Safari, where he would stay whenever I went out of town.

They loved him at Cat Safari.

He had a lot of presence and charisma in addition to being huge, but he was also a very reserved, shy creature. I thought about trying to make him an internet celebrity but both of us were way too introverted for that shit, so he spent most of his life as a private citizen.

Sometimes I would get him to shill for my books

He liked to make me smile, and usually did a good job

Most nights he slept in bed with me

He wasn't very fond of hot weather

Throwing a room party at the San Jose Worldcon

He spent a lot of time in his banana bed

Such a noble profile!

His super-penetrating attention-getting stare

One of those "first thing after waking up" photos

It's going to be tough going to sleep without his presence in the house tonight

“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

Happy Birthday Rhonda!

 

Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler was published one year ago today. 

We’re about to go over it with one last edit and get rid of that typo before I record the audiobook, so this is your last chance to get the Special Imperfect First Edition (which may be a collectable someday, you never know). 

Sally and I are working hard on the sequel, which will have even more dinosaurs and gunfights. Initially I didn’t want to do a sequel, but since we got hosed out of our launch party by Covid19, we’re doing a sequel, and it will have at least two launch parties. 

We could use a couple more reviews to launch us into Amazon’s next level of bot promotion! Write a review and we’ll name one of the sequel characters after you (whether they get eaten by plesiosaurs, gunned down by a cool-looking pop star or obliterated by government tanks for being a terrorist depends on the review).

Author Spotlight: Charon Dunn and Sally Smith

Hey look everyone, I'm in an author spotlight!

As far as a creativity update ... 

My courtroom drama for grownups got derailed by (1) a big long pile of NDAs; (2) I was talking to a science expert and realized that consumers of this kind of story prefer TV-style verite, and I have a tendency to be surreal and warp the edges of reality -- so this might work better in a completely SF setting, such as a space station; (3) the fact that Sally and I deserve a launch party, dammit; (4) someone finally wrote a book about dinosaur behavior, and now I want to write a new dino book with even more state-of-the-art dino science.

Not to mention Charon's Axiom of Art: create art for the sort of people you want to attract.

[For example: litigious grownups who don't appreciate surrealism = hell no. K-Pop stans, science nerds, and people with a goofy sense of humor = absolutely!]

So I am hard at work on a sequel. With more and better dinosaurs.

Not to mention Sebastian Rose's adventures in the sordid criminal world of Exonine pop music as he prepares to make his solo debut because I have a deep burning need to remake something in the spirit of Goodfellas with a cast of K-Pop idols armed with sci fi weapons, so I'm just going to roll with it.

It'll be out in time for 2022 Baycon as long as we don't succumb to lollygagging. See you at the launch party.

Me in the '90s, trying to accept my destiny as a dino book writer