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Stories from the Past: Tacit Rainbow

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As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

A few weeks ago, as I waled to the coffee shop where I spend a lot of my writing time, a woman coming the other way pointed to me and said “Tacit Rainbow!”

Normally I answer people who randomly greet me on the street (when you wear bunny ears everywhere you go, this happens a lot), but on this occasion I was so gobsmacked I just stood there with my mouth hanging open until she’d passed.

So, a little backstory. “Tacit Rainbow” was the code name for a US Air Force project in the 80s and 90s. The plan was to create a cruise missile that could be launched near suspected enemy surface-to-air missile batteries, to replace Wild Weasel pilots.

The missle (by today’s standards, it would be considered a cross between a missle and a drone) would loiter, flying circles around the area until the enemy activated its anti-aircraft radar. At that point, the Tacit Rainbow would automatically lock on to the enemy radar and follow it down, destroying the SAM battery’s control and tracking capability.

AGM-136 Tacit Rainbow, the only one left in the world, on display in a museum. The Tacit Rainbow was the world’s first loitering munition.

Flight test of an early Tacit Rainbow prototype. It has two sets of wings to give it tons of lift for extended loiter.

The Tacit Rainbow project was canceled some time in the early 90s without ever going into production. I wasn’t particularly a military buff or anything, but when I heard about the project in the 1980s, I really liked the way those two words, “Tacit Rainbow,” sounded together. I adopted Tacit Rainbow as my handle on old-school computer BBS systems. For a time, more people knew me as Tacit Rainbow than knew my real name.

Thing is, I only used that name from about 1988 to about 1996 or 1997 or so. Classic computer bulletin board systems were text-only, no graphics. To my knowledge, there are no photos of me from those days attached to the name “Tacit Rainbow.”

Not that it would matter. I looked a lot different back then. Here’s a photo of me from the days I ran a BBS called a/L/T/E/R r/E/A/L/I/T/Y:

Today, not only have I not used the name Tacit Rainbow in 30 years, the only vestige remaining is my AOL email address “tacitr”. I got that email address in 1992, truncating it because at the time AOL dodn’t allow names as long as “Tacit Rainbow.” I still have it, and even still use it occasionally.

The idea that someone randomly wandering down the street would recognize me from a computer BBS handle I used thirty years ago was so jaw-droppingly improbable I just stood rooted in place until she was gone.

Had I had my wits about me, I would have been like, “Wait, hang on, do we know each other? Were you a BBS regular back in the day? How on earth do you know that name?”

Somewhere around, I don’t know, 1998 or 1999 or so, I was sitting in front of my computer when a chat window popped up asking me if the name “tacitr” came from Tacit Rainbow. When I said it did, the guy was like “OMG, were you on the project at Northrop? I was one of the lead engineers, retired after it got canceled. Did we work together?”

I explained that I wasn’t part of it but I knew about it and took my name from it because I liked the way those words sounded together, and we ended up chatting for about two or three hours. Really interesting guy. The project was fascinating and had some incredibly advanced avionics for the time, though apparently it was plagued by mismanagement, which is apparently one of the biggest reasons the DoD canceled it.

I still would dearly love to know why a random woman on a random street in Portland looked at me and said “Tacit Rainbow!” There’s a story there I will likely never know.

Sex as Fuel for Creativity

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Back in 2019, Eunice and I spent some time in New Orleans, a place I’d never visited before. We did all the normal New Orleans touristy things: explored an abandoned and partly-flooded power plant, did some urban spelunking in the ruins of an old mansion…you know, the usual.

While we were there, we also officially broke ground on immechanica, our near-future, hard-SF post-cyberpunk novel. We officially started working on the background of the world in a laundromat whilst waiting for our clothes to dry.

A couple weeks ago, a random troll on social media informed me, with the cast-iron certainty of those who make their home on the rugged and inhospitable slopes of Mount Dunning-Kruger, that I would never accomplish anything because clearly my entire life revolved around sex. (I’d include a screenshot, but honestly I’ve only had one cup of tea so far today and I absolutely cannot be arsed to go find it.) The dude is, and I’m sure this will come as a surprise to nobody, a conservative Evangelical Christian, and he also exhibits this weird quirk where he (randomly) puts words in (parentheses) whenever he (writes).

I’ve long suspected that folks who do that sort of weird inappropriate (emphasis)—sometimes it’s random Capitalized words, sometimes it’s random ALL caps—have a defineable, quantifiable mental illness, because it’s so overwhelmingly common amongst a certain type of Internet troll—but I digress.

Anyway, the thing is, he’s not exactly wrong, but he’s so wrong he has accidentally looped all the way around to right, in a manner of speaking, kind of like what happens in that video game Asteroids where you go off one side of the screen and reappear on t’other.

But I digress.

Whilst we were there, we went out one evening to a very nice seafood teppanyaki dinner. Before we left for the restaurant, I took some PT-141 (bremelanotide), a potent aphrodisiac that works gangbusters on me.

It started to hit in the restaurant. We walked back to the AirBnB through the French quarter hand in hand, with Eunice whispering the most delicious filth at me the whole time. We got back, got naked, spread out a huge collection of sex toys all over the bed, and…

…started talking about the book.

Then I got out my laptop.

The next thing you know, it’s past 2AM and we’re both sitting on the bed naked, writing, the toys forgotten around us.

See, here’s the thing: I like sex. A lot. I mean, yeah, a lot of folks like sex, but I might like sex more than the average bear.

But when I say I like sex, I don’t necessarily mean I like having sex, or having orgasms, or doing the bumping of squishy bits. Don’t get me wrong, I like all those things, but what I really like, what really drives me, is that the impulse toward sex is, in a literal sense, the most fundamental expression of the creative impulse. I do not see how it’s possible to separate sex from creativity.

Which is kind of a big deal, because co-creation is my love language.

I like sex, yet two of my lovers are on the asexuality spectrum, and that’s fine. They’re both creative, and all creativity is sex.

When I look back over the things I’ve created and am creating, sex is intimately tied up in all of them, even if the connection isn’t necessarily visible from the outside.

I mean, yes, often it is. Sometimes it’s pretty heckin’ obvious.

But sometimes it’s not. There’s basically no sex in our novel immechanica, but the writing of it was a highly sexual act, even though it literally, not figuratively, prevented us from having sex.

Last time I visited my Talespinner, a lover with a sex drive so breathtakingly vast and deep she makes me look like a celibate monk in a monastery, I got an idea for a novel I’m working on that I’ve been stuck on for a while.

In the middle of a very kinky threesome with her other boyfriend.

So I did what anyone might do in that situation: I excused myself for about an hour or so and banged out about 1200 words on the novel whilst they carried on doing their thing. When I was done, I rejoined them and the kinky sexy festivities continued.

Which is kind of my point. Yes, my life is, from a certain point of view, very much about sex (and caffeine), because sex (and caffeine) drives my creativity. My normal background emotional state is basically happy and basically horny pretty much all the time. I turn sex and caffeine into words…even when those words aren’t about sex or caffeine.

To be fair, they sometimes are; I write about sex rather a lot. But in the Passionate Pantheon universe, a series of novels that contain a lot of sex, we use sex to explore philosophy, radical agency, consent, justice, and morality. We’ve received feedback that sometimes people are left a bit confused by the novels because they skip over the sex, but important plot points, character development, and ideas happen during the sex—you can’t take the sex out of the stories and still follow what’s going on.

Right now, my Talespinner and I are writing a novel with the working title A Long Kiss Goodbye. It’s a hyperurban retrofuturist court-intrigue gangster noir. I’ve written before about how we created the book’s setting and plot during sex.

We’ve formally started working on it, and man, it’s been a ride. Indah Tan, our protagonist, is headstrong and stubborn and not at all afraid to tell us “no, I’m not doing that” when we try to write her scenes. I told my Talespinner it kinda feels like this book has three co-authors—her, me, and Indah—and of the three of us, Indah is the most well-armed. Still, it must be working, we’re already a quarter of the way through the first draft.

So yes, sex is an important part of my life. No, it’s not preventing me from accomplishing anything…it’s fueling the things I accomplish.

The United States is, by the standards of Western developed nations, Puritan and prudish to such a degree it’s almost self-parodying. There’s a deep, reflexive hatred and fear of sexuality wired into our collective consciousness, which of course makes us simultaneously fascinated by and repelled by sex. Our advertising is drenched in sex, but serious talk about sex and sexuality shocks us to our core.

In this kind of society, using the sexual impulse to fuel creativity is by itself almost an act of defiance.

Ask Me Why I’m In the Epstein Files

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A couple days ago, a friend of mine from Quora sent me this button, which I wear on the front pocket of my jacket:

Just for the record, it’s true. I am, in fact, listed in the Epstein Files. Specifically, I’m listed in document EFTA00700657.pdf in DataSet 9.

The US Department of Justice has a searchable database that you can use to look up names. Sure enough, I’m there.

I’m certain that the sorts of people who send rape and death threats to random women because they don’t like me will make some hay over this, which should be fun to watch. Meanwhile, here in the real world, why am I in the Epstein Files?

Glad you asked.

I am in the Epstein Files because I am a Top Writer on the social media site Quora, and most Quora Top Writers are listed in the Epstein Files.

Why are most Quora Top Writers in the Epstein Files?

The Epstein Files are not files of people who were connected to serial child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Or at least, those aren’t the only people in the files. The Epstein Files list everyone ever mentioned in any email Jeffrey Epstein ever sent or received (including spam emails), along with everyone known to be at any public event he attended (including events like movie premieres).

Jeffrey Epstein was on Quora for a time. That means he received the Quora Digest, a regular email highlighting popular answers on the site. The digest emails look like this:

Because I’m a Top Writer, my answers are frequently featured in the Quora Digest. (In fact, for a while one of my answers was featured in the screenshots for the Quora appl on the Apple and Google App Stores.)

Because the Epstein Files list everyone mentioned in any email Jeffrey Epstein sent or received (Bernie Sanders is in the Epstein Files 101 times; apparently Jeffrey Epstein loved to whine about him), and Jeffrey Epstein received the Quora Digest emails, I’m listed in them.

I wrote an essay on Quora about a convention in the UK issuing a statement banning palentologists listed in the Epstein Files from attending, an excellent example of how easy it is to manipulate people online. The convention isn’t a serious academic event—their website looks almost as amateurish as a Geocities site, it’s sponsored by a toy company, and as near as I can tell only one palentologist appears in the files, a guy who retired a decade ago and would not have been presenting at the convention anyway—but they got a lot of media attention and a bunch of congratulatory “ooh, ahh, you’re so brave, look at you taking a stand for ethics!” social media from the same sorts of people who boasted they were not going to see the new Avatar movies in solidarity with indigenous and aboriginal groups who didn’t like the movies, but were never going to see them anyway.

The Internet hates nuance. People would, by and large and speaking across the left-right divide, rather be told who to love, who to hate, and what opinions they should voice rather than, you know, applying reason to their own positions. (Liberals love to laugh at conservatives for doing this, but in my experience and observation liverals are just as prone to it, or possibly more so).

Yes, I am in the Epstein Files. No, I don’t know Jeffrey Epstein, nor have I ever visited Kiddy Diddler Island. (I mean, c’mon.)

I know this is not a fashionable opinion right now, but: Folks, it’s easy to manipulate people with phony narratives and social media stories. Living in a polarized society makes this even easier, and it’s cheap to make yourself feel good with self-congratulatory “moral stands” that give you a nice hit of dopamine when other people tell you how brave and moral you are for casting out the bad people and sending rape threats to women and whatever it is the social media mob tells you to do today. In such an age, principled, fact-based attitudes are a rarity. Try to be one of those.

[Edited to add] A couple of people have asked me what point I’m trying to make here. I thought my point was evident, but apparently I wasn’t as clear as I hoped. So:

“Being in the Epstein files” does not indicate wrongdoing. There are tens of thousands of people named in the Epstein Files. Bernie Sanders is in the Epstein Files. Marilyn Monroe is named in the Epstein Files, and Jeffrey Epstein was less than ten years old when she died.

I am concerned about people doing what the DinoCon organizers did, virtue-signaling and gaining unearned publicity by excluding anyone named in the files. I strongly suspect this will keep happening; while I hope I’m wrong, I predict that over the next couple of years this will become more and more popular.

I’m concerned about it for two reasons:

  1. It’s empty, purposeless virtue signaling. DinoCon is not keeping anyone safe; they’re playing look-at-me, I’m-so-great games. I find this kind of empty moral posturing stupid and pointless at best, actively harmful at worst. I believe this is a moral panic in the making.
  2. More important, this empty posturing diverts attention from actual child abusers who are listed in the files. Already I’m seeing a new narrative emerging on social media: “Look, the Epstein Files are a big nothing-burger. Liberals are making a fuss over them, but Marilyn Monroe is in them! Ha ha ha, look how dumb those liberals are.”

Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. The people protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s influential, politically powerful child molesters are monsters. This is a serious crisis, arguably among the most serious threats to American governance in the last century. Let’s not play self-congratulatory virtue-signaling games with it and let’s not get sidetracked. It should be possible to hold both these ideas simultaneously: they are a serious record of deep, systemic abuse of the most vulnerable by powerful, wealthy, connected men, and also simply being named in them is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing.

If we want to see justice, we must be willing to evaluate the evidence critically, rationally, and thoughtfully. Yes, that requires work…but that’s the way it’s always been.

Visions of Llanddarog

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I’d never been to Wales before.

The circumstances around the trip sucked. My metamour (my girlfriend’s girlfriend) received a catastrophic medical diagnosis (cancer), so she and my girlfriend decided on short notice to get married. In Wales, where they live, naturally.

The extended polycule did an absolutely bang-up job of pulling the whole thing together on frightfully short notice. My Talespinner and I ended up in an AirBnB in Llanddarog with Eunice, her fiancé, and her girlfriend.

Wales is…um. Wales is very.

Getting there was a whole ordeal, filled with airline snafus and almost-missed connections and ticketing problems…more on that later, perhaps. Once we arrived in London, things took a turn for the weird.

So there we were, a bevy of Americans and Londoners in a rented minibus on the way to Wales. What can go wrong, you ask? Well, now, let me tell you.

Wales is a place where their understanding of “roads” is more or less hypothetical. In Wales, you’ll often find yourself on a one-lane dirt track with trees on both sides, and you’ll like it, because that’s all you get.

Driving in Wales is bonkers. Driving in Wales at night in the rain is utterly absurd, a bizarre mix of high comedy and desperate panic.

Once we arrived, though…

Once we arrived, Wales turned out to be cold, wet, cold, foggy, cold, and almost indescribably beautiful.

That photo up top? It’s the view out the wondow in the room I shared with my Talespinner in Paxton View Barn, a converted barn at Bryngwendraeth Farm.

That tiny tower waaaaay off in the distance in the left is Paxton Tower, a Victorian folly erected in honor of Lord Nelson, or so the story goes (I find it much more likely that the dude who bilt it didn’t much give a toss about Admiral Nelson and just liked the view).

Everything about Wales is breathtakingly gorgeous, even if it is brutally, bitterly cold. That’s the thing aqbout Europe, they just leave history and natural scenic beauty lying around on the side of the road, instead of packing it up and selling it the way we do here in the Colonies.

I mean, just look at this! Even the town streets are ridiculously scenic. Treacherous to drive, yes, but scenic.

After the wedding, we found a lovely old church.

Our last day, we’d planned to visit Paxton’s Tower, because, hey, you can’t visit a foreign country with a faux-castle nearby and not go.

A ferocious squall swept in on our last night, bringing rain and such fog as can scarcely be imagined by human intellect…

…but we made the trek anyway.

There’s remarkably little to see there—it is literally only a model—but from the foot of the tower, the landscape is breathtaking. You can see the Emyn Muil across the Dead Marshes almost to the great gates of Mordor themselves!

Dispatches from the Front of Mad Science

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I’ve returned from Wales and London, a trip that turned out to be the absolute embodiment of chaos, from canceled flights and impossible connections to ticket snafus and a wedding in which one of the brides rolled her car into a ditch on her way to the venue (she was fine; the car, less so).

All that plus many pics later. First, whilst visiting my Talespinner I had the opportunity to do a live field test of the Giger-inspired biomechanical nipplesuckers I designed for the alien xenomorph tentacle violation pod, and the trial went quite swimmingly, all things considered.

The nipplesuckers are powerful to the point of being right on the edge of pain, just the thing to add authenticity to an alien violation experience. And of course the mechanical suction never gets tired. Like some kind of unstoppable Nipple Terminator, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are a spent puddle.

The glowing electroluminescent wire turned out to be quite lovely, so we did an entire EL wire bondage photo shoot in Wales, sadly not at a castle (the weather didn’t cooperate) but in the charming little AirBnB we stayed at.

Got a couple outtakes from the nipplesucker test that turned out unexpectedly cool, though!

An Unexpected Journey

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I’m sitting in my Talespinner’s living room, tending to her dogs, who believe with surety and absolute conviction there is something Outside that requires their immediate attention every fifteen minutes or so. The fact that they’ve been wrong about this three times in a row now does not in the slightest deter theri certainty that this time will be different. She (my Talespinnter) is at work, where she will be until ten o’clock tonight.

I flew in from Portland, after an entire day of travel. When I left, it was suny and 40 degrees; I connected in Huoston, where it was dark and in the 70s, and arrived late last night.

A week from today, she and I fly together to London before traveling on with much of the extended polycule to Wales.

This wasn’t the trip we had planned.

We’d planned for me to fly to Springfield in late November, when she’d be able to take some time off work, rent a cozy little cabin she found in a remote corner of Missouri, and isolate ourselves from the outside world to work on the third draft of our novel spin, a sprawling far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel that is, in structure and narrative, the most ambitious, challenging, difficult writing project I’ve ever been part of.

Life got in the way.

We’re flying to London and then on to Wales because a person in our extended polycule, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received devastating medical news. Almost the entire polycule dropped what it was doing to go out there to support her.

I would not have been able to make the trip on such short notice without help from the rest of the extended network, and the unexpected generosity of complete strangers on the Internet, for which I am incredibly grateful.

The situation is unimaginably shitty, yet I am deeply, profoundly thankful to be part of such an amazing, supportive, generous, resilient, healthy, vibrant polycule.

If there is one lesson I could go back in time to give my younger self, it would be…well, it would be buy Bitcoin when it was still 25 cents. But if there were another, it would be this:

Franklin, there’s a word for what you are. That word doesn’t exist yet, but it’s “polyamorous,” and it means “loving many.” You aren’t alone in this, and you don’t need to settle. There are others like Find them. And if ever it should come to pass that a person you love tells you that you must break up with another person you love, or that they refuse to be around your other partners, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever say yes. It is, in fact, possible to be part of an extended network of people who genuinely support each other, and don’t play those kinds of games.

Notes from the Front: No Kings Portland

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I’ve never participated in a political rally before. But then, I’ve never lived under a President as crass, stupid, corrupt, petty, incompetent, and craven as the Mango Mussolini/Vladimir Futon Administration.

October 18 was sunny, cool, and gorgeous, with the typical slop Portland calls “autumn” temporarily at bay…perfect poke-in-the-eye weather to crass little tyrant wannabes. And apparently the rest of PDX agreed.

I saw the sign first, the most clever I’ve seen yet in all the current *flails arms* whatever the hell it is that passes for a government we have, and only after noticed that it was carried by someone I knew. I accidentally met up with a group of old friends I don’t see nearly often enough.

I saw a ton of awesome signs, like this one (though the current balless wonders in Congress cut off their own testicles of their own accord, so I don’t really see them rushing out to get new ones).

Not sure if “Epstein flies” is intentional or unintentional, but I find it hilarious. Epstein flies: the people who clung to the lump of shit Epstein, rubbing their faces in it.

I love that Portland has made protesting funny. The worst thing you can possibly do to an authoritarian is not to disobey him, it’s to laugh at him. Trump hates being mocked; it’s one of the cornerstones of his rapidly disintegrating personality.

You go, strange Portland inflatable creatures.

I love the energy and execution of this sign. Reminds me a bit of Woody Guthrie’s “This machine kills fascists.” Mixing old and new pop-culture references? I’m here for it.

Simple, but oh so true.

Florida, where work is for chumps

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I’ve now been in Florida for over a month and a half, helping joreth get her new (to her) RV set up and situated…a project that involved gutting the entire inside, adding 600 watts of solar to the roof, and replacing the house batteries with a very large lithium battery bank.

As we’ve run bto and fro between Winter Haven and Orlando, mainly along I-4, a wretched hive of scum and poor civil engineering, I noticed a very peculiar thing:

Florida has given up on the idea of advancing your station through hard work.

Drive across Florida on Interstate 4. Drive around in downtown Winter Haven, Orlando, or Lakeland. Notice anything peculiar?

I’m talking, of course, about billboards. But not just any billboards. Florida is, to an extent I’ve not seen in any other state, littered with billboards…for accident lawyers. Billboards as far as the eye can see, all advertising how much money you can make if you are in an accident.

Billboard after billboard after billboard, all for accident attorneys. On the stretch of I-4 we’ve been driving regularly, most of the billboards—54%, by my count—are advertising accident attorneys.

They’re everywhere. It’s absolutely uncanny.

I took these photos from inside a moving car, so I know the quality isn’t the greatest, but they just go on and on. We would drive down stretches of road where every single billboard for miles advertised accident attorneys, one after another after another.

Florida has long been legendary for the staggering numbers of terrible drivers on the roads, the result of snowbirds coming down from all over the country without being accustomed to the rain, a olice force focused on making money over protecting public safety, and lax licensing laws.

But I think there’s another part of it as well:

In Florida, there’s a cultural attitude that says getting in a car accident that you can blame on someone else is like winning the lottery.

They even have lawyers who specialize in going after semi owner/operators and trucking companies.

And, of course, language is no barrier to your payday.

But the absolute freakiest thing?

Remember when I said that getting in a car wreck is like winning the lottery? I meant that literally, not figuratively.

Accident lawyers put up shiny happy billboards with shiny happy accident victims wearing shiny happy smiles under headlines trumpeting how much money they made.

(There’s something so very very Florida about this little scene: an “I won $500,000 in an injury lawsuit, isn’t that awesome?” billboard over a strip mall with a pawn and gun shop, an acupuncturist, a martial arts center, an MMA arena, and a weird Evangelical church, all sharing a roof.)

The way these billboards are designed, they’re exactly like state lottery billboards.

“Dude! You got hit by a car and smashed into rubble? Awesome! Cha-CHING!!!”

Every time you pull into traffic in Florida, you’re sharing the road with people who sincerely hope you hit them because that’s the way you get ahead in this world.

It’s really deeply creepy…and perversely, it incentivizes the exact opposite of driving defensively. Coming up to a light and it looks like someone might be about to run the red? Gun it! Get in that intersection and hope he slams into you. Then maybe you’ll be one of the shiny happy people with a big payday, baby!

Work is for chumps.

Borg Queen xenomorph parasite poi

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I like spinning poi.

I haven’t done it since I returned to the US from Canada waaaaay back in the distant Before Time of 2018, so a few weeks ago, something finally snapped. I woke up at 3AM, decided it’s been far too long since I spun, and ordered a set of LED poi from Amazon. You know, as one does.

When the poi arrived, Joreth’s first reaction was “hey, the local dungeon has a photo night coming up, we could do a Borg Queen xenomorph parasite poi-spinning photo shoot!” Of course, I immediately said yes, and so, that Friday, we did.

It’s a little-known fact that when a Borg Queen is parasitized by a xenomorph, a peculiar quirk of Borg physiology makes the Borg Queen spin LED poi. Later, as the xenomorph parasite takes hold, the Borg Queen is driven to do…unspeakable acts by the hiphugger on her hips.

My Talespinner’s boyfriend came into town days before the shoot to help us work on Joreth’s RV, because that’s how my polycule rolls. (Seriously, I have awesome metamours!) So naturally I pressed him into the shoot as well.

We had an absolute blast.

Behind the scenes, Joreth’s boyfriend (who, as it turns out, also spins!) helped with lighting and such.

The alien xenomorph hiphugger is definitely a head-turner wherever we go, or maybe that’s just Joreth.

Transcendent Joy

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Every second of every hour
Let your actions speak your will

Raise your head up high
Raise your head up high
So the heavens hear you cry
Light the brightest fire
From the highest mountain
So the whole world knows
That your spirit can’t be broken

—VNV Nation, Resolution

I love dancing. I’ve loved dancing for a very long time, though partner dancing is still relatively new to me. One of the few things I regret about living in Portland is being able to go out clubbing at the Castle, the world’s best goth nightclub…and I say that after being in goth clubs all over the world.

I’m back in Florida at the moment, helping prepare my wife’s RV for a cross-country trip (during which we plan to shoot photos of abandoned amusement parks all through the US, with an eye toward publishing a coffee table photo book in 2026 or 2027).

So it came to pass that my wife is out of town for the weekend working, but her boyfriend was of a mood to go out dancing, and so he said, “hey Franklin, interested in going to the Castle?”

I first went there in…um, I want to say 1997 or so? Somewhere thereabouts. It’s been a fixture of the Ybor City district for a donkey’s age. And oh my God, it remains just as marvelous as I remember.

There’s something utterly transcendant about dancing.

There is something so pure, so absolute about losing yourself to the music that now, two days later, I struggle to express it, or even recall it, except as a maddeningly vague series of impressions.

I remember the joy, of course. If you could bottle and sell the joy I felt spending the entire night dancing, there might never be war again. It’s a joy so flawless and unadulterated that everything else in existence falls away into nothing, replaced by exultation that fills every corner of my being. I had forgotten, I think, in the years since I’ve last been goth dancing, just whas a jubilant experience it is.

Round about my third hour on the dance floor, when I was starting to feel tired enough that I kinda wanted to sit down for a minute but the DJ just kept absolutely killing it. There comes a point where you push past the fatigue into something else, something numnous, on the other side.

Parts of the evening only exist in my memory in fragments. I remember dancing to the Aphex Twin remix of the Nine Inch Nails song Reptile sandwiched between a goth lesbian couple to my left and a da-glo bubble-gum lesbian couple to my right.

Mostly I remember an overwhelming sense of sonder, the realization that every single person you see is living a life as rich and complex as your own, with their own histories and dreams, goals and ambitions, heartbreaks and sorrows, as though I were surrounded by two hundred brilliant, dynamic, complex universes, fifteen thousand years of joy and desire and loss and tragedy all intersecting in this one brief moment.

The dance floor exists in its own space, a small pocket universe set apart from the world. It’s a bit like being transported for a single night to some Land of the Fae—not a fairyland like one might find in a Disney movie, but a wildland, a place of the old fae, the dangerous and unpredictable fae…but not to worry, they’re not hunting, they’re relaxing and having fun.

At one point, a person who was obviously of the Fair Folk and not even trying to hide it grabbed my hand to lead me deeper onto the dance floor. The music poured through me, vibrating like molten silver down my back, and such delirious ecstasy took me that now, sitting here in front of my computer, I can recall only the shape of it, the outline without its substance.

There is a vicious, ugly streak of Puritanism woven deep in the fabric of American social life, a cynical suspicion and distrust of pleasure, a sneering contempt for doing things simply for the joy of doing them. We are all poorer, I think, for it, for forgetting that joy exists.

I’ve heard people say, often with a derisive sneer, that nightclubbing is fr twentysomethings with no direction in life, as though Serious and Grown Adults™ should eschew mere pleasure. I find that idea both toxic and farcical. If we are, as some people say, spiritual beings having a physical existence, then what virtue is there in denying that physicality, the very reason we are in this world in the first place? What point is there to existing, if we don’t lean into that existence? What has it gained us to turn our back on joy, besides strife, division, and suffering?

I think we are poorer for this turning away from the joy of existence. We are here today, and gone tomorrow. We take nothing with us from this brief moment in the sun. Let us enjoy what time we have.