POPPING MY BLOGCHERRY

By Daddy X

“Whatcha reading, baby?”

“Umm … nothing, hon. Coming to bed?”

“Another fuck book, isn’t it? How come you gals are always reading that kinda stuff in bed these days?”

“Tommy, it’s called ‘erotic romance’. Please, don’t make it seem all dirty and stuff.”

“Smells like pussy in here. Read me the next passage, starting right where you are now.”

“Aww-”               

“Go ahead, read it.”

“Okay. Ahem … ‘Waltzing Doris into a dark corner of the ballroom where no one could see, the tall stranger lifted her tiny black skirt from behind. His fingers investigated all the warmest places between her cool ass cheeks.’ … That’s it. Okay? Are you satisfied now?”

“No, go on. This sounds interesting. And leave yourself alone.”

“Sheesh! Okay … ‘Doris responded with an aggressive pelvic twist, angling a knee to press her swollen pubis against his thigh. She wondered if she’d left a stain on the dark gray trousers.’ … Okay now?”

“Damn, sounds hot, baby. Want some company?”

“Sure, hop in.”

“Hey, this isn’t a fuck book. This is Household Hints From Heloise!”

“Heloise gives good hint, huh baby?”

Practical Hints  © 2013 Daddy X

Now let’s get serious. This is, after all, my first blog post. Anywhere. Anytime. Ever.

What I’m reading these days: (Sounds like ‘What I Did Last Summer’)

Better question is what have I ‘finished’ reading lately (that isn’t smut). Seems nothing I pick up holds me through to the end, except smut.  And even then, I have to go jerk off every now and then.

Take Richard Ford’s “Canada”. I think I plodded through 50 pages or so before putting it down. Lots of lovely words, but no suspense, no anticipation of what’s to come. His style seems to be to tell the reader what’s happened, then to tell us again. And again. Then again.

And then there’s Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl”: Right from the first chapter, I wasn’t convinced that her first person Nick’s POV could actually be the thoughts of a man. I guess the story wasn’t enough to hold me either because page 134 stays folded down now for about five months. Yes, it’s a long way to go to put it down, but I guess I didn’t want to spend a lot more effort. I tried, really I did. Back to the smut, I guess.

Better luck on another of Flynn’s comes between the covers of “Dark Places”. Encompassing some truly dark elements, the story evolved for me as a more compelling tale than Gone, and her points of view clicked right on. It’s the story of an emotionally damaged survivor of a family massacre and the search for the real killer. The female protagonist’s teenage brother was initially convicted of the crime, but we soon come in contact with a fringe group that is invested in revisiting past crimes, ala the “Innocence Project” although this bunch is much more we’ll say … ‘informal’ in their organization? Twists and turns ensue, interesting societal rejects leading us off the track, but I won’t give too much away here for those who may want to read it. I must say, considering the audience here, that when compared with a lot of erotica, Dark Places isn’t so very dark at all.

Before that, the last book I finished was Maria Semple’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” Haven’t experienced such a sense of chaos since John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces” back in the eighties. “Bernadette” made Time Magazine’s top ten for 2012, and IMO it is well deserved.  It’s a true hoot of a novel that kinda did break up for me in the final quarter, but evokes enough teary belly laughs to make for a satisfying read throughout.

A very different book is “People Who Eat Darkness” the ominous and quite real-life tale of a missing young English woman, disappeared from a red-light district of Tokyo in 2000; the story of her family, the search of the questionable streets, the narrowing down of the suspects, and the emergence of the killer himself. Then there’s the trial, stranger still than anything that preceded. This is no Mailer’s “Executioner’s Song” and certainly not Capote’s literary “In Cold Blood”, but it is one fucking creepy-ass study of an exotic and unsavory environment … strange to all but those who frequent such haunts around the world.

Another, older work (80’s?) in the same vein, is “Bad Blood”. Sorry for the pun. Terrible title, terrific true crime study by Richard M. Levine. Enter the story of what we call around Marin County the ‘Barbecue Murders’ considering that the doper kids who killed a girl’s parents burned the bodies in a pit on a hill at China Camp near San Francisco Bay. What proved so self-involving about this work is that, adjusting for the forks in the road life offers, one gets the sense that any of the main characters in the book could have been you or me.

Funny thing- when I read that one, I was tending bar at the time. Nobody thinks about hard drugs and prostitution in Marin County, Ca. but it’s here, I can tell you, and I came to know some of the local (by then grown up) characters peripherally involved in the book. 

BTW- Not long after I got that job, I was at a party and jokingly told somebody: “I work at the toughest bar in Marin.”

A big, jock type behind me overheard and asked, “Yeah? Where?” as if I was some kind of wuss, expecting me to say the Silver Peso, a biker bar or the Black Oak (where I also worked for a time). When I told him where I was, he sputtered, “Oh, fuck, that place! Jesus, man, I forgot about that place!”

And so it goes.

Swell to meet y’s all out there. Stay tuned every other Wednesday for my words of hyper-pseudo-non-wisdom, bearing with the fact that it’s tough to think straight with a hard on. 

Be well-

Daddy X