My wife kellyv called it right; I got it wrong.

She said A. would go back to her abusive husband. I had higher hopes than that; I sincerely believed that she had gotten away from him for good, and was willing to make the commitment to raising her child in an environment free from abuse.

Yes, I know this is the typical pattern of abuse, and yes, I know that battered wives rarely leave their abusive husbands for good. Still, I really thought she’d stay away from him.

But she went back, because, you see, this is what God wants.

I’ve always wondered about that. Why is it that all the really sick fucks–I mean, all the hardcore, twisted, violent sociopaths I’ve ever known–are religious? What is it about devout faith in God that attracts irrationally violent psychopaths like flies to honey?

I’m not saying that people who are religious are sick sociopaths; I’m saying that the sociopaths I’ve met tend to be religious, and to use religion to justify their mental illness. “God wants me to put a whuppin’ on my whore of a wife.” What the fuck?

I really do believe that in order to be truly evil–not merely wicked, but really evil, the kind of evil that thinks it’s OK to beat your wife or fly an airplane into a skyscraper–you almost HAVE to be religious.

Mere garden-variety wickedness is not wicked all the time, because the merely wicked are wicked for some kind of gain; if there is no gain, there is no motivation for wickedness.

But real, hardcore evil is irrational. It is evil at all times, regardless of the cost and regardless of the situation, because that flavor of evil is inspired by the motivation that believes itself to be good.

In any event, she’s gone. I already have a sick dread that I know how this is going to play out. Goddamnit, I’ve seen too many adults who were destroyed as children by abusive homes, and even if it’s too late for A. to escape the cycle of violence and abuse, I had hoped that having a child would make her want to try to save it.

“No! No! Just give me a kiss and go about your business!”
—kellyv

, Angie, and I spent the Ides of March watching Jay and Silent Bob Strke Back (just for the record: Kevin Smith is one of the funniest human beings alive today) and chasing a Cuban tree frog around the kitchen.

Cuban tree frogs are one of the delightful little benefits of living in Florida. They’re green, they’re slimy, they stick to the wall, and they have a habit of jumping on you when they’re startled. Oh, and they’re poisonous.

It’s late. I’m going to bed.

Did you know that acrylic is not a suitable material to be formed by vacuum-forming rigs? I didn’t. Grrr……

Gas fare to Pensacola: $60.
New air conditioner belt: $3.99.
Tools to install the air conditioner belt in the car in the parking lot of an auto parts store three-quarters of the way between Tampa and Pensacola: $30.
Per-night hotel rental in a fleabag motel, complete with fire-ant infestation: $49.95.
Attending a wedding presided over by a gay Catholic priest in which the bride spent the evening in the hospital the night before and one of the ushers had to be bailed out of jail for the occasion: Priceless.

It was a long, but good, weekend. I saw A. on Friday; she successfully got away from her abusive husband and made it back to Florida in one piece. She stayed with us Friday night, which was a good thing, on the whole.

I took some pictures of her bruises and bite marks, so that if her husband tries to contest the divorce, she’ll have documentary evidence to support it.

Normally, I enjoy photographing her; she’s laways been one of my favorite models. But that was one of the most difficult and unpleasant things I’ve ever done with her.

Afterwards, we spent some time talking. She’s an inner-city middle-school teacher, with an interesting approach to maintaining order in her classrooms. She luses what she calls the “humiliation approach” to discipline.

Should a student forget his supplies, for example, she’ll make him walk up to her desk, where she keeps a bucket of crayons and a stack of the lined paper they use in kindergarten to teach handwriting, and that student will have to take notes in crayon on the handwriting paper. Or, if a student misbehaves, she’ll revoke the entire class’ privileges–a page borrowed from the book of US military boot camp.

Indeed, she was telling me the story of how she broke up a fight between two seventh-grade boys by telling them “You do not come to school so you can touch other boys!”–an effective strategy, given the psychology of most twelve-year-olds.

Who knew the skills necessary to be a middle-school teacher were the same as the skills that make a good dominatrix? The latter profession pays rather better, of course, but probably doesn’t have quite the same intangible rewards.

I don’t understand people–especially social and religious conservatives.

My friend’s husband believes that nudity is morally wrong. It’s bad, it’s sinful, it’s an abomination in the eyes of God, and any woman who would be photographed without clothing is a dirty whore.

He also beats his wife.

What kind of malfunction do you have to have, what kind of bad wiring inside your head does it take not to see the problem here? Why is it, exactly, that so many people seem to believe that morality begins and ends with sex?

Take Charles Keating, for example. Remember him? He served in the Cabinet under President Regan. He testified before Congress numerous times in his attempts to have magazines like Playboy banned in the United States, and he was also on the Meese Commission on Pornography, the group headed by Attorney General Edwin Meese to try to put pressure on retailers to stop selling Playboy magazine. Keating called himself an authority on morality, and lectured tirelessly on the subject.

He also embezzled billions of dollars from Lincoln savings and Loan, triggering the collapse of the entire S&L industry that cost the taxpayers staggering sums of money.

So: God doesn’t mind if you beat your wife. Stealing is fine. But nudity? Oh, my, no, THAT is a sin!

Goddamn, is it just me, or do these freaks have some kind of moral and intellectual blindness so profound that they’re complete moral cripples, unable to figure out even the most basic things on their own?

At least A. was able to get safely away from her abusive situation, which is good.

In other news, I successfully Google-whacked for the first time tonight, and did it in only seven tries! I RULE!

What is Google-whacking, you say? Well, I’m glad you asked. It’s a sport where you go to www.google.com, the Web’s most comprehensive search engine, and you attempt to find two English words that appear on only one Web page (that is, you type in two English words and get a results page that says “Results 1-1 of 1”). It’s harder than it sounds; Google’s archive contains literally ,i>billions ofWeb pages, and every defined English word occurs on countless millions of them.

My Google-whack? “telomere tankful”

Got another one in four more tries! “haberdashery osculation” Finally, I get to put my college background in linguistics to good use.

Clearly, I have much too much time on my hands.

Some time ago, I had a friend I will call “A.” I met A. at a science fiction convention. She was, and is, an intelligent, witty, attractive woman, and indeed, she even dated a close friend of mine for almost two years.

A. was for quite some time one of my favorite models. In fact, she was even on the cover of Xero Magazine, the small press magazine lordfuckbeast and I have published for the last six years or so. A. is featured prominently in my portfolio, and it’s always been her goal to be in said portfolio more often than any of my other models.

A couple of months ago, A. dumped her boyfriend–a man she had once had a restraining order against because he had spent quite a lot of energy stalking her. (Yes, she was dating him; yes, she dated him AFTER he stalked her; no, I don’t understand it either.)

Well, today I received a call from her for the first time in about six weeks. “Hey, Frankin, can you do me a favor? I’m having a fight with my husband–”

“Your husband? Huh?”

“Yeah, I just got married last month. He wants me to tell you to take all the pictures of me off your porn site.”

“Huh?”

“We’re having a big fight…can you take all the pictures of me off your Web site?.

This call came almost simultaneously with an email from an address I don’t recognize: “I demand you remove all pictures of [A.’s name] off your Web site at once or face criminal charges of pornography!”

Okay. So she has evidently married someone she just met, and apparently, this person has some…um, let’s be delicate and call them “conservative social values.” And apparently, this person is…well, let’s NOT be delicate and call a spade a spade. This person is dumb as a post, not even being aware that there is no way a “criminal charge of pornography”–whatever that might be–is even remotely a possibility in the context of this reality.

So.

What is it about intelligent, well-educated chicks who seem to have an obsessive need to marry people they don’t even know?

I mean, it seems intuitively obvious that one’s happiness rests in no small part on the foundation of satisfaction with one’s personal life, said satisfaction being difficult to achieve if one is…um, married to a dumbfuck with whom one shares no traits in common, such as a framework of shared philosophical beliefs and values, or indeed even an opposable thumb[1].

There is an interesting science-fiction writer named J. G. Ballard (writer of works like “Crash”–turned into a movie by David Croneburg). Ballard’s works tend to be unsettling–at least when they aren’t downright nightmarish–and through many of them runs a common theme–an arc of characters who brilliantly, creatively, elaborately destroy themselves.

In many of Ballard’s works, there will come a moment in the story that is much like the moment when a roller coaster reaches the top of the first hill and begins its initial descent. It’s a moment where things aren’t really so bad, but nevertheless a point of no return has just been reached, and you know, right down to your very bones, that there is nowhere to go but down. You’re committed to your course, nothing can stop the roller coaster, and as you descend you will do nothing but gather speed.

I have seen some of my friends take this course, self-destructing in fiery ruin, past saving and beyond any hope of redemption. Tonight, I think I witnessed that moment again.

It’s a pity, too. She deserves better. But ultimately, we all sleep in the beds we make.

[1] In all honesty, I know nothing about her new husband–not even his name. So I do not know from direct experience that he has no opposable thumb, that being only an inference from his behavioral traits.

Got back from the MegaCon science-fiction convention in Orlando late Sunday, and I’m finally almost recovered. The convention was somewhat good, somewhat bad, and a whole lot of weird.

The good:

– Getting to attend a panel with Kevin Smith, the writer and director of “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma,” and several other movies. This guy is, no question, one of the funniest human beings on the planet. He’s also very cool, even if he doesn’t like “The Lord of the Rings” (“It’s a story about walking! ‘We’ve got to get rid of this ring. Let’s walk over here. Oh, no, a ringwraith! Let’s walk over there.’ The movie is three hours of walking, and in the end….Credits! That’s what was wrong with “Mallrats”–not enough walking!”).

– The hotel suite. Okay, so it’s pretty bad when one of the hilights of the trip is the hotel suite, but it was an awesome hotel suite.

– Spending time with my wife kellyv, my girlfriend, and scarlete and lordfuckbeast.

– My wife meeting the actress who played Vasquez in “Aliens”–one of her all-time favorite characters.

– Hooking up with my old college roommate chipotle and our old friend John, who we haven’t seen in years.

The Bad:

– Two days of nonstop rain, in violation of everything good and true about Florida. It’s supposed to rain for about fifteen minutes every day at three o’clock, and that’s IT.

– Science fiction geeks have no money–leastwise, the science fiction geeks at MegaCon have no money. Sales were dismal. The “Fuck Milk” T-shirts were a big hit, though.

– The official convention party was held in a NASCAR restaurant. What were they thinking?

– The Orange County Convention Center. Two words: It sucks. I will never attend any event in any capacity held there again. From the organized-crime-controlled parking service to the physical layout of the center to the evolutionary throwbacks running the center, the place sucks, sucks, sucks.

The Weird:

– scarlete made Dave Prowss, the actor who played Darth Vader, get a crush on her. He invited her to go home with him…

– The most obnoxious T-shirt I’ve ever seen: A woman walked by wearing a shirt reading “Abortions Tickle.”

So there it is. Perhaps when I have more time, I’ll post pics.