Well that was interesting.

Today has been a very boring day all the way around. The good part was doing laundry.

Now, of possible interest to a few of you, I've been in the process of typing up my old book of shadows starting from 1997 here, but they aren't things I'd type to this account. The problem is as taocub pointed out, they're big on theory and making it look like I have a big "psychic penis", but very small in the details. He mentioned that his from the same period are very similar. I know what caused this for me, but I'm not sure about his, and there's no way to double check, since he built a bonfire out of his notes. For me, I was surrounded by people who kept trying to make me feel stupid, so I really tried to build up my self-image by beefing up my profile in notebooks I thought no one would read. (Of course, I found out later Phoenix read all of 'em while I lived with her in shitville, but that's beside the point.) You know, as I read some of what it is I'm typing, I can see where things were already going bad even then. And I can see why so many of us divorced ourselves from the groups after a while. I'll still talk with the people, but with maybe two exceptions, I would never do any ritual work with any of them ever again.
I let myself be led down the garden path. and I will always regret that. I let Phoenix use me to accomplish her goals of becoming HP of the coven, because I was sure Ishte was unstable. To some degree, I still think Ishte's a bit wobbly, but Phoenix is moreso. And I hate that. I forgave them all a while ago for all the harm they brought in my life, even as I swallowed what little pride I have left to apologise for the things I did to them. But even forgiveness doesn't salve the wounds. I refuse to lket myself get hurt by them again. Thus why when taocub starts trying to get us back to talking about those days, I get scared. A part of me will always be the pissed off man walking out of Ishte's house with my Diabetic boyfriend in tow, cast out because he was "evil" and no one would tell him what their problem with him was. I fogive, but I can't forget what it was like to find out half of the people I trusted most in the world thought that I was the one who put death threats on people's cars while they slept. Two years after the fact, I found this out. All I had been told was that I was no longer welcome in their prescence.
Forgiving doesn't take away the anger, or the pain. Forgiving doesn't cure the memories. Forgiving them doesn't make me feel normal in their prescence, because I will always look for the knife someone's trying to plant in my back. Forgiving them doesn't allow us to go back to the way things were.
Yeah, I tried to bury a lot of it and pretend it never happened, that all of it was mass hysteria or just pretend. And now, I'm going through it, looking to see if I can pinpoint where it all began. For my own sake. But most of the answers I need are in the mind of a madwoman, and people I really don't want to talk to that much. Maybe perhaps we did lie to ourselves all those years ago just to make our pathetic lives seem bearable.

Originally posted elsewhere

I orginally posted this to glbt_books, but I'm posting it here so ya'll can see that I've finally figured out the HTML to post an image. Mow if someone would be kind enough to point out how I make the text sit by the picture...


I believe I posted about his first book (Someone Killed His Boyfriend) at some point, but I just finished reading the second. Oh boy, no Sophomore Slump here. If anything, his writing has improved since then.
The three main characters are back for more. Our narrator, Robert, is out for dinner with his very rich friend Michael at an exclusive Manhatten restaurant. A gentleman interrupts their conversation on romance and sex, introducing himself as Count Siegfried von Schmidt. A little whirlwind romance, and Robert and his German count decide to get married and move to Germany. Well, needless to say, the Count goes down...with a knife in his back. Thus, it's up to Robert, Michael, and their lesbian friend, Monette, to figure out who backstabbed the bitch.
This book improves over the preceeding one in that the ending actually makes sense. When all the chiffon veils are removed, you realize that ll the clues really were there, and you just missed them. It also improves by having more of Julia, Michael's Newport royalty mother, who is even more sinister this time around. (This is saying a lot, since she accidently tried to kill Robert twice in the middle of the first one.)
My only complaint was the length. At 230 pages, the volume is slim, and it goes by too fast. But then, perhaps if it had dragged out longer, it wouldn't have been as much fun.
It's well worth reading, even if you will finish in the course of a day.