Things are still going at a million miles an hour here at Dragon Con. To the point where I’m actually a bit worn out and glad for a quiet minute to pause and take a break. I haven’t done as much as far as going to events today, more just walking around and looking at things and people. I have managed to not spend any money down in the dealer rooms, which is a pretty big deal if you ask me. I’m surrounded by stuff that is cool as hell and that I want but that I am resisting the urge to buy because I really can’t justify the expenditure.

Next year, however, is going to be a different story. I’m starting a Dragon Con trust fund the minute I get home.

Ok, so I’m going to try and recover from the horrible ordeal of losing everything I wrote last night and give a general impression of what I’ve seen here so far.

Which, for some reason, is suddenly striking me as something very hard to do.

I’m not sure what exactly it is, but I’m feeling kind of down and stressed at the moment. There has been some small amounts of tension between those of us who came to the con together. I guess it’s the cramming of individuals into a small space that none of them can claim as their own. Feelings have been hurt, snide comments have been made, and I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of all of it. It’s hard to be so in tune with my friends sometimes. I catch their feelings when the person who is causing them doesn’t, and it makes me want to try and correct the situation when I honestly don’t see how to.

That was a very odd rant to go off on in the middle of this convention, wasn’t it? I don’t want to give the wrong impression, however. I’m having a wonderful time, I’ve met some really cool (and quite sexy) individuals (some of whom I am hanging out with again tonight) and basically been having a lot of fucking fun.

That’s it. I’m gonna go get my vampire on and stalk some goth chicks.

I just wrote a REALLY long update to my journal about everything going on here at Dragon Con, and it got LOST.

FUCK

Basic summary – things are cool as hell. I’ve taken a lot of cool pictures, including some awesome faerie wings for Faeriegrrrl. I’m really pissed I’ve lost what I wrote, but I don’t want to do it again right now.

As promised, below is the picture I took while I was journaling in the bar in Seattle :

You can see the rest of the Seattle pictures in my new and improved Photo Gallery! Click Here!

Ever gotten one of those emails that goes through a whole list of questions in order for you to get to know people? One of the questions that are often asked in those things is “What do you fear most?”

I usually respond with something fairly predictable. I fear something happening to my son, or I fear being burned or buried alive. I was thinking about it this morning, and I realized that my biggest fear had nothing to do with those things.

My biggest fear is being abandoned. Cast aside. Written off as being unimportant.

The funny thing is that this hardly ever happens, but I’m constantly worrying about it. I become paranoid when I see someone enter one of my social groups that may be similar to me.

I’m not sure what the point of me wanting to write this was. I think that, at one point, I had a clear cut essay in mind and it’s just fallen apart on me. Oh well.

I wasn’t cast in Titus Andronicus. I got an email from David yesterday that thanked me for participating in the audition. He also said that I must realize how difficult the casting process had been. He never flat out said that I wasn’t cast, but I read the message pretty clearly. I’m very disappointed, but I’m not sure in what. Myself? Was my audition not everything it could have been. That’s certainly a possibility. Thing is, I only read 4 lines. Of a minor part. I was basically filler for a reading with two other characters. There was another scene with the character I read that had more in it. Yeah, I know, I sound like I’m whining about things, and maybe I am. I just wish I had been given a chance to read for SOMETHING. I’m honestly not sure I would have cast myself in one of the major roles. I saw a lot of chemistry in the auditions, and no small amount of talent. It still would have been nice to know I had been able to show what I could do.

But I feel like it was already decided that I could not do what was expected of the show.

I could be wrong. It’s just how I feel. My intense insecurities shouldn’t be much of a surprise for those of you who read my journal on a regular basis.

I did decide to get right back on the horse, though. I’m auditioning for “A Streetcar Named Desire” next week with the Eight O’Clock theater at the Largo Cultural Center. The director is Scottie Michaels, who I have worked with twice (almost 3 times) in the past. It won’t be a paying gig, but at least I’ll be on stage again. IF I get cast, that is.

Four hundred and twenty-one dollars later, I realize why it is that I don’t play solitaire in Los Vegas.

It’s been a very bumpy flight so far. We are about an hour out of Tampa, by my guess, and the seat belt light has been on for at least half of the time. It seems as though most of us aren’t paying much heed to that fact, but a few moments ago I noticed that the man next to me (who has been sleeping for much of the flight) seemed to be praying. Not really sure if that is what he was doing, but it gave me pause for a moment.

We all think that “those things” happen to “somebody else.” But right now, as the plane is shaking fairly violently, I’m wondering if it’s my turn to be somebody else.

I’m not scared by the notion. In fact, I’m facing it with a sort of morbid curiosity. Like the times when I’ve contemplated suicide. I wonder what the consequences would be. What would people say? What would they do? Would they be sad? Angry? Would my family sue the airlines? Would Lu kick Karen out of my house? Would they find this laptop and pull all of my writings over the last few days off of it? Have I made my after death wishes known to the right people (as I still do not have a will).

All of these things just crossed my mind. Not an altogether pleasant experience.

Notice, however, I do not say that I joined my co-passenger in prayer. Even when I have flashes of worrying about my existence, I do not turn to the Lord. I just see it being hypocritical. I don’t believe in him. Why the hell would he accept me if I waited until the last minute to say hello anyway??

Hrm…Interesting thing to write if this did turn into a fiery ball o’ airplane.

I snapped a picture of the sleeping guy. He’s funny. I also took some pictures of clouds. Because that’s what you do when you’re flying. You take pictures of clouds.

The batteries in this little lap top are pretty impressive. I’ve been using the machine quite liberally since I left Seattle this morning, and I still apparently have 30% of the power left in them. I need to get one of my own. While I could never code on a regular basis on one of these machines, the ability to write with it is very appealing indeed. I hate to write free hand because I cramp very easily. I think it’s the arthritis that runs in my family. I can’t use a pen or pencil for long periods at all. But I can type for hours on end, and I think perhaps that if I had a lap top I could occasionally hook into my network at home to transfer data from I’d be in really good shape. I’m going to have to look into getting one.

Heh. And I actually said that I thought I was written out for the weekend, didn’t I?

I’ve decided to star recording my times in Eastern Standard Time again. At this point, I have no idea what time zone I am in at all, and I’m not going to bother trying to guess.

I actually believe that I may have succeeded in drinking too much coffee this weekend. I’m having yet another cup right now. I think I’ve had all of two bottles of water, 3 sodas, and nothing else but coffee since Thursday afternoon.

Ate like total crap this whole weekend. Not really extraordinary amounts of food, except for today. I had two breakfast sandwiches at the airport, and then a large Quizno’s sub during my layover in Denver. I also ate the snack box that they just passed out on the plane. What is it about those snack boxes?? Why are they so appealing? I mean, it’s cheap assed bread with processed cheese and meat, some kind of candy item and Fritos. Yet we treasure them as if they were a can of expensive caviar. They are eaten without hesitation or doubt by just about everyone on the plane, including myself.

I don’t know if it was the long stretches of inactivity, or simply being in a new environment, but I have written a ton this weekend. Most of it you see here on my live journal, but I’ve also finished another erotica story. I need to refine it and get it out to my editors and critics before I submit it to the general public, but not only am I going to send it to Literotica, I’m also going to send it to Gallery magazine. They pay like $300 for good stories to print in their periodical. So, if I get published in there, not only will I be a professional actor (hey, pay is pay…so what if it was only 36 bucks) I’ll be a professional smut peddler.

I like that.

I called Karen while I was at the airport, and she told me that she heard from Dani this weekend while I was gone. Apparently, Dani got a chance to see the Washing Well Wenches site and she loved it. I’m so relieved. I was really afraid that Dani would be disappointed in my work, and as this is one of my first independent paying gigs I was really anxious about it. While on the plane I finished the Ask Mr. Wetums logic, and now I just need to do the graphics for it. The site is coming together nicely, and I figure about another week or two of solid work will have it running at 100%. That should segue nicely into the Kicks on 7th Project, and then when Eve and I get that done we should start rolling in full force on the Mortgage Application that Brooks, Karen and I are going to work on. Somewhere in all of that I need to find time to get the Neon Samurai web site up and running. Of course, until I get my artwork from Hailey, I can’t really start moving on that. It’s a good excuse, and I’m sticking with it anyway!

Mmmm…one more cup of coffee. Yay!

Ok, I actually think I may be written out for the weekend. This may change before I land in Tampa (got about an hour and a half to go in that regards) but I think I’m going to spend the rest of the flight seeing how much money I can lose in Vegas style solitaire.

Spending time with Uncle Mike always makes me think about my father, for some very obvious reasons (the most glaring of them being that the two are almost frighteningly similar in appearance). It seems as though Uncle Mike always wants to know about the relationship I had with my father. What he meant to me, and how we got along.

The truth of the matter is that I never really had much of a relationship with him.

My Dad and Mom split when I was six. I have three clear memories of time I spent with my father before he left. The first is of him coming into the bathroom after a drinking binge while I was in the tub and having a good vomit fest. The second is when we went to Washington State for Uncle Mike’s first wedding. The third is him standing in the driveway of our house and screaming “I’ll see you and your fucking kids in court” at the top of his lungs.

So I was one of his “fucking kids.”

After a few years went by and the court thing was done with, I started spending summers with my Dad. I always felt like an interloper when I visited Mississippi. I was the city boy going out to the country. This is where my hatred of trailer trash rednecks comes from. Whenever I was in Mississippi, I felt like an unwanted intruder, and I was made to feel that way be people who, even at that young age, I knew were beneath me. They knew it too. They didn’t know how to handle me. I was too smart and too insightful for a boy who hadn’t even hit puberty yet. I knew them. I could see through all of their bullshit and lies. For that, they hated me. I think my father resented it a bit, too. I would go there, expecting to be with my father, and instead I was with this drunken man who didn’t want to deal with any of the responsibilities that life had for him. He let his wife deal with all of those. He wanted to go to work every day, come home at night to a good meal, get drunk and fall asleep after shagging his young wife. He didn’t want to entertain a bookworm. I do not doubt for a moment that he loved me, but he did not understand me by any means or stretch of the imagination.

Eventually, I stopped going there for the summers. I don’t know who made that decision. I am certain it wasn’t my mother. She may have felt hatred for my dad at that point, but she always insisted that he was my father, and that he deserved my respect and my love. She would not have tried to drive a wedge between us. Maybe I decided I didn’t want to go there any more, or maybe Dad told Mom that he couldn’t afford to have me up. I’m not sure. All I know is that one summer I did not go to see Dad, and I didn’t see him again until after I had graduated from high school and moved to the University of Alabama.

He wasn’t really a father to me at that point, either. When he first saw me, he didn’t even recognize me, and after he invited me into his house he sat a bottle down between us and we proceeded to spend the next few days drunk off of our asses. I suppose he figured that, since he was a drunk, his son would be as well. I have to admit that, at the time, I thought the events were pretty cool, but it was far from what I needed then. If he had been there for me as a father and not as a drinking buddy, I might have been able to tell him the troubles I was having at Alabama. I might have gotten encouragement from him to stick it out, and deal with the bad decision I had made instead of running away from it. Instead, I had a place to run to. Even if he was on the boat I could go over to Mississippi and spend the weekend with Pam and the girls. Maybe try and hook up with their cousin Missy. Anything other than deal with the fact that I was failing every class that I was registered for.

After I left Alabama, we kind of lost contact, and we didn’t really start talking again until after Pam had left him and he realized that he finally had to stop drinking. At the age of 22, I finally got a father.

Six years later he was dead.

Six years. That’s all I got of my Dad. And in that time, we probably spent a total of about 3 months together, if that. We talked on the phone quite often, but the actual physical presence of my Father was not there. I never spent a Christmas or Thanksgiving with him. He never got to see any of my performances. He didn’t come to my graduation. He didn’t come to my wedding. He wasn’t there when my son was born, or when I went through my divorce. In fact, most of our contact during the time when he came back into my life was focused around my two younger sisters. I don’t think there was ever a time when we were together just because we wanted to be together.

So when Uncle Mike asks me about my Dad, I’m not really sure what to tell him. I miss him terribly. I miss the man he became before he died, anyway. I miss his laugh and his good sense of humor. I miss the comforting fact that in his entire life he never changed his hair style, and that he wore the same Old Spice cologne every day. I miss talking to him about history and politics, and how this simple farmer turned mechanic could stun you with his intelligence if he felt like doing so. What I miss most of all is him telling me he was proud of me. He did that a lot, and when he said it not only did I know it came from a place of respect, it came from knowing the mistakes he had made in his life and how I did not follow in his footsteps.

I was honored on Saturday when Uncle Mike told me that I act a lot like him. That we had the same laugh, and that he got the same glint in his eye that I do when there is mischief working behind the scenes. I find it comforting to know that part of him lives on in me, and I hope that carries through to my son as well.

I’m sitting in the terminal at the Seattle Tacoma International Airport resisting the urge to spend an ungodly amount of money to connect to the internet and check my email. I almost had myself convinced to do it, on the premise that I could upload all of my entries that I have been saving on my laptop over the last two days, and that I could check to see if I had heard from David Jenkins on the Titus Andronicus auditions. Then I woke the hell up and realized that $5 for the first five minutes and $.65 for each additional minute was just far too high of a price to pay for me to do something that wasn’t really important.

I’ve had a revelation sitting here, though. I really, really do not like being in contact with someone. I feel very odd about it. Even if I’m not talking with a person, to have them in the same house is a comfort to me. It’s why I love big cities so much – there are people everywhere. I’m always in the presence of another individual. Now, I realize that at the moment I’m surrounded by people at the terminal, so I’m not having some kind of hermit-induced panic attack, but I really want to be talking to someone right now.

I guess the upside to this situation is that I have lots of stuff to write about here in my journal, no?

I was actually thinking that I would do the same thing with my journaling next week while I’m at Dragon Con, but I’m not going to have a laptop that weekend and I will be surrounded by my friends, so I’m thinking the possibilities of me actually finding the time to write will be next to none. I am going to try, though.

This morning Uncle Mike made a comment to me that really made me wish that I wasn’t leaving. We were talking about my plane leaving this morning, and he said that he didn’t want me to miss it, but that “it sure wouldn’t bother me if you did.” He and Maureen both bemoaned the brevity of my visit on several occasions, and it’s making the fact that I’m heading home much harder. It doesn’t help that I feel so comfortable here already, and that I met a really cool person who lives right near my Uncle either. Oh yeah, I actually COULD move here if I wanted to as well. Bill already has a job with a Seattle based company, so if I told them I wanted to move to the Northwest they would actually be ecstatic about it (the facts that she would be FAR away from her parents and near mountains is more than enough to get Jody to move). I have thought about doing this before, but I never really put much effort into seeing if I could actually find a job. Maybe I should do that now. I don’t feel at home in Florida anymore. I love it there, and I love all of my friends, but I don’t have occasions where I just look around at my surroundings and feel content.

This could all very well fade the minute I start looking at the reality of the situation, but it’s nice to dream about it for now.

I just called and talked to Alex for a few minutes. In the midst of all of my travels I’m not getting to see a lot of my son. I’ll have him tomorrow night and Tuesday night, but then he’s back at Jody’s from Wednesday on until I get back from Dragon Con. I think I’ll go ahead and have him go to Lu’s house on Wednesday as well. That way I can have dinner with him and see him for a few hours on Wednesday night, then drop him off at Jody’s. I’ll have to see where I stand on getting ready to leave on Thursday, though. If I’m not packed up I might have to put that plan off.

I’m thrilled about the notion of going to Dragon Con, but I’m very anxious about it as well. I’ve spent a very small amount of money being here this weekend, all things considered. Right under two hundred and twenty dollars, and a large part of that was the car rental. Ironically, I really didn’t need the car rental. I’m sure Uncle Mike would have picked me up at the airport after I dropped off Brian and George, and other than going back and forth between his place and the airport I didn’t use the car at all. This leaves me with about 100 bucks to take to Dragon Con next weekend. Top that off with the fact that my next paycheck will be two days short because of Dragon Con, AND they’ll be taking 200 dollars out of it for my new insurance policy, and I’m not exactly sure if I’ll have the money to pay the mortgage that is supposed to be paid by next Monday. And the money bullshit continues. I need to talk to Brian and see if he’ll hold off and getting back the rest of my advance until the end of October. We will be getting three paychecks in October, which means that we’ll only have the insurance money taken out of the first two. If he’s going to take the $300 that I still owe AND insurance from the next check, I’m basically screwed.

Yeah, I could probably ask Karen for the money, and she would most likely give it to me, but I really don’t want to do that. She is already spending way more than she originally thought she would when she moved into the house. The arrangement is different from the one she had previously, though, and I think her willingness to spend that money is based on that fact. It really is her house too. I’ve given her free reign to do what she wants as far as decorating, and I think that is partially why she has decided she wants to stay with me for the long haul.

That reminds me…Uncle Mike had an incredibly hard time understanding my arrangement with Karen. I told him several times that there was nothing romantically between us. That we were two people who lived together, and loved each other very much, but had no kind of ties between us. He just didn’t see how that was possible. I guess most men wouldn’t, but that’s what has always made me the odd man out among my male friends. They don’t understand how women can be so comfortable with me, especially when I make no bones about how sexually focused I am. I can’t really explain it either, except to say that while I do think about sex a lot, I do not base my relationships with women on whether or not they are giving it to me. I think a lot of men put women into two categories ; Women I’m fucking or want to fuck, and women I cannot, should not, or will not fuck. I certainly have female friends that fall into some of those categories, but I do not let that fact stop me from being their friend.

They are getting ready to start boarding the plane, so I’m going to end this for now.