Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/

It really hit hard, today. Mainly because of the abject stupidity of the MAGAt Class who worship Felon47 and revel in him giving rein to their racism and hate. And I see no end to it unless that POS dies in the next three weeks. Then maybe...maybe we'll survive.

Because there is no talking to people like that. They are not open to reason or reality. They too busy enjoying the pain and suffering they're causing. MAGA is a new religion, and just as vile as the old ones.

And it's not just in America. It's all over the globe. Bloggers and commenters in Africa and Asia and Europe and South America choosing the side of terrorism over simple human decency. We're out to kill each other for no more reason than we can. Guns. Drones. Whatever.

I was reminded of John B Calhoun's theory of Behavioral Sink, which he came up with while experimenting with rats...and later, mice...regarding overpopulation. A few rodents were put into a confined space and provided with plenty of food and water, where they overbred to the point their behaviors were altered and they couldn't function. (The link provides a much better description).

I actually wondered if earth was an alien scientist's experiment along the same lines?

What's funny is, I began thinking about this after I found and rewrote one section of Dair's Window that I needed: when Dair and Adam get ready for Marion's third wedding. Initially, I'd had Dair dressing Adam in a suit because he'd never worn one, which was totally wrong. Adam knows class. He's used it to make his way in the world. So I switched it, and it worked out a lot better.

In fact, the moment they finally connect in bed will now come after the wedding, where it just builds from the night and the joy and they support for each other, starting on January 1, 2001. Much better timing.

I went through a rough few moments lost as to what happens when and where is best for it, and this is helping. I've even worked up an XL Spreadsheet for the years 1996-2010 and decided to not have Dair go to trial for beating up Bobby. Just preliminary hearings and delays.

It may be futile to keep going on it, but I can't change now.

Then in honor of Diane Keaton, I watched First Wives Club and loved it. Again. Got it on DVD.

I have hundreds of DVDs. I need to sort these things out.

Well, it appears sections of Dair's Window I thought I'd written either were not or are hidden somewhere in another file. I figure I have maybe 60% of it in order but I'm missing moments like when Dair and Adam are dressing for Marion's third marriage...and Dair is very uncomfortable in a suit but Adam is dragging him through the process.

There's also a bit where Adam comes up with an idea for making Marion's ski lodge a go-to place year 'round by focusing on the Snoqualmie Indigenous Culture and having special events throughout the spring and summer, into fall. Which I know I wrote but is not in either of the ring binders...and I cannot find the file.

I'm also missing the actual part where Dair is put on trial for nearly beating a guy to death. Someone firebombs Dair's lodge and all evidence points to this jerk named Bobby, so Dair confronts him and they start trading blows...but Dair is the better fighter and loses control and would have killed him had he not been stopped.

Probably all buried in one of the massive number of story constructions I've got. So next is digging into every single solitary file I have to see if I can pull together everything I need to tell this story.

God, I have no sense of order in my life. 

I'm in the foulest mood...and I can trace it to receiving a letter from my apartment insurance company telling me my premium hadn't been paid so would be cut off, when I had paid it. So I called them to find out WTF...only you can't talk to a person; you have to deal with their roto-voice bullshit, first. So I just went ahead and verified that way that it's been paid and tossed the bullshit in a folder.

And could not shake my anger over this. So it's probably good I didn't get hold of someone in customer service. I'd have wound up as an example of a male Karen on someone's tik-tok.

Feeding this anger is the MAGAt Class continuing the shutdown in DC until after the 20th, all to protect the pedophile puke in the White house and some of his rich buddies, not to mention a few assholes on the GOP side. They don't want to release the Epstein files to show who paid that monster so they could rape kids.

Of course, it's messing with me. I'm supposed to head for Seattle on the 17th. I guess that all depends on whether or not air traffic controllers are on the job, again. 

I'm also approaching my usual this is all fucked up mindset for Dair's Window because I can't find things I know I wrote. And me telling myself to take it easy only pisses me off, more.

So I dumped everything and ran errands -- getting quarters for laundry from my bank, returning a key to the Caladex office, grabbing some groceries I needed at a Wegmans and having an avocado roll. Normally, that last bit would settle me...but they didn't have any 20oz bottles of DPZ available...and that got me really going.

So I bought an almond croissant, said Fuck it all, and self-indulged. I'm trying to keep my blood sugar down and that will mess with it...but right then I needed joy instead of deprivation. And it was so fucking good.

But son-of-a-bitch, I was still pissy...until I stumbled across this guy. He centered me. Completely.

Marcus Balliette...un homme au France et un trés beau mec...by way of Miami. Shit, he made me fickle enough to think he's a better look for Adam in DW.

Which he is. He's got the beauty and a touch of that French arrogance. I could see any man going for him, gay or self-proclaimed straight.

Sorry, Arnaud, but you been replaced.

Et je suis un merde.

Now I know what Dair and Adam look like, I feel a lot more comfortable with the story and all that happens. I can feel it, better.

The worst part about going over a draft of a book you set aside some time ago is seeing how sections it needs are not there and have to be filled in. Which also means it's going to get longer. But before you can figure out what the story really needs, all the background has to be there.

So I'm reading through and suddenly we jump from Dair and Adam finally connecting in the bedroom to Adam protecting him from Sarah's gossip by going after her cousin, Bobby. She's never liked Dair, even though she's married to his older brother, Gareth. She thinks he's been favored over Gareth and is doing all she can, subtly, to drive him out of town.

So Adam goes head to head with her, and she backs down. For now. But I need more of a lead-up to it. Right now, it's like one of those this has to happen here to keep the story going things, and I don't like that. There's also indications she's talking Adam down so he won't get odd jobs over the summer...which is damaging his ability to make a living.

I need to handle this more carefully. I've made notes, and I've fought back the impulse to deal with this issues now, putting them off till I'm done reading everything I have. But it's not easy.

I mitigated it by staying in bed and using my bed tray all day. Nice and cozy...if not so great on my butt.

I stumbled onto the perfect image of Dair. I'd been thinking of using Kyle Krieger for that but it didn't feel completely right. Too old and well-built.

I considered a few other guys, including a Spanish doctor, and no one fit. I was about to settle on Ben Cohen when I happened onto Derrick Henry.

He's got the right face. He's a few years older than Dair, but that doesn't matter. This picture just stopped me cold...because it's a Dair expression. And attitude. Open and happy, almost like a golden retriever. Doesn't hurt he's got a nice body, too.

Now I'm letting the story expand as it wants, through this draft. The next draft may be to fill in some plot holes and add clarity. Adam's story progresses nicely, if a bit lumpy. I have what I think is a blunt, almost brutal confrontation between Adam and Sarah, Dair's homophobic sister in law.

I need to be careful about one thing -- teen boys being used for sex. Adam is thrown out of his home when he's 15, and winds up placed in a foster home where the man running it sells the boys there for sexual favors. The age of consent in Canada, then, was 14...so long as their partner wasn't in a position of authority over them. 

In Washington state, it's 16, with the same provision. Also included? Adam stumbles onto a group of kids who're selling themselves for drugs and cash, run by a homophobe named Bobby, and helps one get out of that lifestyle. 

Just to be clear, I'm not into guys under the age of 23. I can't even begin to understand the attraction to teenage boys...or girls. But it seems some assholes, like Felon47, are really into that...right down to 12-14 year olds..and that's a real turnoff, to me.

What I've written on DW, so far, is going to take a fair amount of work. I'm still dealing with Adam's time up to and while he's in Fairview. Then comes setting up the conflict between Dair, a snarly brat named Bobby, and Sarah, his sister-in-law. It's okay but needs some aspects to be better established so it flows instead of lumber.

Adam has decided to get as much as he can out of Dair, and acknowledges actually cheating him on work he does on the lodge. And is not sorry...until Dair defends him against Sarah's smarmy gossip. Then he starts to feel protective of Dair.

All this will need at least half a dozen rewrites to even begin to read properly. 

I wonder if I should do the book in 3 parts...or four, maybe? All in one volume. It would be thick, at the rate it's going. I'd like to cut at least 20% out to streamline it...but when I do that I wind up adding more. Like this poem Adam writes after being shaken by watching Vertigo:

Adam I have been 
And now I am him 
In fullness and in grace. 
His visage still my face 
And yet is not... 
For I now renew 
In ways yet untrue. 
Embers burn within. 
Once again, 
I am him 
And I can but begin 
And be forgot.

There will be many more of these.

God, I'm tired. I didn't sleep, last night, and only got a  4 hour nap, this afternoon. Going to bed early.

I recalled I'd printed out a full copy of everything I'd written on Dair's Window so found it and it's all in binders, now. Adam's story in one. Dair's story beginning December 2009 in the other. I'm going through them, and I'm thinking I like getting the reader to know Adam and how he formed.

He's being brutally honest about himself. No excuses. No justifications. Nor is there any willingness to accept judgement from anyone else over his choices. He services men and women sexually in exchange for money and things he needs. He has the ability to leave with nothing if things grow too dangerous for him. And he always makes sure he has enough cash on hand to be able to do so.

He finds ways around any limitations...like getting a Medicare Card for the Canadian healthcare system. And an ID. He knows what he can do and what he can't to also make money legally. He does not accept society's hypocrisy and refuses to lie, though he will sometimes only reveal as much truth as necessary to handle a situation, if need be.

I'm making notes through his story and am to the point of his second year as assistant ski instructor at a resort outside of Whistler, north of Vancouver. It's here he is turned onto Hitchcock's Vertigo by a video store clerk who tells him it doesn't make a bit of sense but is lovely to look at...and the movie tears him apart.

Because it reflects too much in his life.

The film made perfect sense...as a hideous nightmare a man dreams just before he dies. He thinks of how he escaped his death by allowing the policeman at the beginning to die but then builds a story in his mind that draws him back in steps and stages to try and rewrite what happened.

He falls into a dream world where, in an attempt to change the past he kills two innocent women...Madeline and Judy. And do not tell me they were the same person. That was but his mind justifying his obsession with Madeline, a woman of true beauty and meaning, a thing of perfection. Whom he then formed, again, from Judy, who was nothing but clay to be used as the basis for a second attempt at revision.

Both were caught in this man's nightmare. Both were used and tossed aside like they were nothing.Nothing.With him even saying, when Judy fights against his manipulation, "It can't matter to you."

Can't matter to you? That I am destroying your sense of self? That I deny you as you are and will only accept you as what you are not? Then once she has done as he wills, he carries her to the place where she will die.

He had fought, in his own mind, fought to free himself from guilt and his fate only to find himself caught deeper in it as it destroys others, as well. Leaving him on the precipice of his own death.

I bawled at the end. Like a child who has just realized all around him are monsters, not protective angels. Like a man who has just realized his life is nothing to anyone.

Yes, these were thoughts I'd already visited many times, but now I could see that I sensed it only on an intellectual level. The crushing truth of what they meant was crystalized in this movie in my heart and soul, and I could see myself in both women. Used. Manipulated. Destroyed.

I don't know if this makes a damn bit of sense, but it definitely changes Adam's entire world.

I've settled on Arnaud Dehaynin as the model for Adam, and now I'm currently trying to figure out the best way to work the story. I've got 2 possibilities, either of which would work fine but with different tones and results.

First, jump from chapter one into Dair returning to his home for the first time in nearly 4 years, and dealing with how it has not been kept up. This would lay out the area of Fairview that he lived in and what his house looks like. Lodge, actually, because it used to be a small ski resort kind of place.

It would mean jumping back and forth in the timeframe, where Adam's life would come out in reference to actions happening around Dair as he prepares for his wedding and winds up being charged with assault for a fight with a dickhead named Bobby.

Probably a more demanding read but it might prevent any part of it seeming tedious. I think. You never really know. It would also give a specific impression of Adam that would be challenged in parts. Make the reader question what they know about him. For example, presenting him as a loving, caring young man...who got caught stealing money out of Dair's wallet.

But this would also necessitate changes in the tone and sentence structure as Adam tells some parts of the story in his nearly poetic style, then the rest is done in plain third person omniscient, and I'm not sure I like jumping back and forth, in that way.

Second is having Adam tell his story up to the point he and Dair become lovers...or even to when Adam dies...and then jump the four years to him returning after lawsuits and court fights and becoming involved with Wallace, his gay attorney.

This would be a fairly straightforward way to tell the story. Going A, B, C, D, E...and so forth before shifting form to jump around. Go to third person and change the tone to casual. Have the trials and legal wrangling come out in bits and pieces as it goes along.

Either way is fine, I just need to figure out which is best...and right now I'm leaning to the latter.

I pulled the elastic on his shorts and let it snap back against him. He yelped, then I rose from the bed, singing like Eartha Kitt as I slipped into his moccasins and pulled on a thick robe.

“C’est si bon.
 C’est un café au lait.
And I bring it today.
 Maybe on a tray, okay?” 

I then scurried into the kitchen, still humming. I know he watched me go; I heard him chuckle. Heard the mattress softly protest as he stretched to stay warm under the covers. Drifting. Dreaming. Thinking. 

I still wonder at how could I have found such a man. Me! Whose life had been anything but filled with grace and beauty. Who had learned far too early how to use others for his survival. Who had been selfish and feral in his existence. I was hardly deserving of him. 

I should have remembered something my Gra’man had once told me. Never question the fates, for they will never explain and may take offense. Just accept when you are happy, and be thankful. 

I should have listened to her. 

I should have requested the day off, or at least postponed my classes until later. He was right about his mother; she would never have fired me. She knew I loved her son beyond measure and would support him in every way he needed...as well as those he didn’t... 

Or he thought he didn’t. 

Like a child. 

Had I not been caught in that avalanche, nothing could have come between us. 

You may have heard of it. First day of spring after a winter of heavy snow. Caused by a snowboarder who had snuck into a closed off area. It even buried part of his mother’s lodge and the public ski lift. 

My students and I were on an upper slope when I heard it coming. I rushed them to a protective cover. All but one was safe when it crashed in upon us. 

I remember feeling only anger, not fear. 

And then nothing. 

Just darkness and silence. 

And my existence was no longer part of Dair’s. 

And yet I...I could not leave him, not even in death. No more could I touch him. Nor he hold me. Or hear me whisper how deeply I had loved him. But still I remained.

It was a form of hell.

Perhaps of punishment.

Or perhaps...just perhaps...a way of giving me time to find one through whom I could tell my story.

Can it be possible, you may wonder, for one who has left the corporeal world to now speak in it? This is not so difficult to understand. It has taken me some years, but I have located a conduit who has kindly opened himself to me. Many writers speak of their works finding them rather than them finding their works, and here is such a case.

Now my one and only past will flow through him.And every word shall carry none of the carefulness or false remembrances which so easily taint all memories. For in such an existence, only truth is allowed to me. And I must honor it.

So please believe me when I tell you of how lovely my Dair is. How decent a man he is. And talented. And kind. And know I do not say this because I love him. 

Loved him. 

No...still love him. 

I say it because it is true.

At least, it was... 

But since my death, life has been her cruelest to him.For everything that happened to him in the years following was my cause. Not by my fault...and yet, it was. So much so, I wonder if becoming one with him was right for me to do. Because now I fear...I fear he no longer remembers our last morning together. He no longer sees those gentle words between us as being lovely. As lovely to him as they are to me.I fear they are tainted by knowing that was the morning my story ended.

For now I can see...he believes his did, as well.

Adair Carwyn Llewellyn. How I loved to say his name aloud, though my French accent mangled it. 

“Welsh,” he once told me, though I had not asked. “Dad was a freak about that. So my brother got Gareth, which is almost normal, and I got the one for fun. Not as sexy as the French, or even French Canadienne, but...” 
“Québécois, mon ange,” I had replied, smiling. 
“C’est vrai,” was his reply, but he pronounced it, Say veray. 
I had to laugh. His French...ooh-la... 
He was four months short of his thirtieth birthday, that morning. A man but still so much a boy of his world. The mountains east of Seattle had been his home from the day of his birth. And thanks to this, his life had been one of comfort. Safety. Protection. Parents who loved him, if not each other. A brother older, who would leave him to himself. A rambling home halfway up a foothill. A community where everyone knew everyone. 
Named as Fairview.A middle-class name for a middle-class town.But it held people who liked him. Who cared for him. Who helped build his fortress against the few who did not. So he grew to be certain and sure, and willing to live the life he wanted. 
On top of this, he was one of those rare men who, from an early age, knew what they would become. And he did well, with it. Was happy and alive with it. 
And he let my world blend with his. He allowed me a taste of the joy that seemed to surrounded him. The support. The comfort. There were times at night I would hide and weep in the shadows, I could not believe how happy this made me. 
My own name? Adam Henrí Lécuyer, once of Terrebonne, by Montreal. Three years his junior, but at the very least ten years older than he, in heart and spirit. And in my own reality, twice that. Simple to say, while he had been nurtured in a world of safety and care, I had not. 
But that may be discussed at another time. For this moment, my focus remains upon that last day. 
Our last morning, together... 
Oh, dear God, how I wish I had stayed for just a little longer. Held him closer. But instead, in response to his gentle request, all I did was pat his elegant behind and say, “I would love to snuggle, but that could take all morning and I must be to the slopes by nine or your mother will fire me.” 
As reference, I was a ski instructor at his mother’s lodge, during the winter. Sophisticated and cool, was I...to the primitive minds of far too many. An example of easy, masculine grace and sexuality. Were any to mention this to me, I would shrug and reply they should see me in the off-season, when I was a handyman, gardener, and carpenter, with all of the dirt and sweat they entailed. And that would bring an end to that. 
His response to my comment? A soft purring, “She won’t. She loves you more than me.” 
“I am not sure how to understand that claim,” I said, tracing my fingers down his hip and leg to draw them back up the hairs on his thigh. 
He pulled me closer to him, almost whining, "It's late in the season..." 
I looked through the French doors. Soft flakes continued to drift down in the bare morning light."And all my classes are full," I whispered. Then I leaned over him to brush my lips over his thick, lovely lashes and he finally opened his eyes.“Café ou thé?” I asked. 
“Coffee -- no, café, s'il vous plaît.” Spoken in his hideous accent. Ooh-la, it always made me laugh.