Happy this-time-of-year to you!

Posted on December 25, 2018 by jaime

It’s Christmas Day in the mountains. I’ve mostly been ignoring it, though I bought presents for my loved ones, as a gentleman should.

This graph gives an accurate representation of my feelings with regard to “The Little Drummer Boy”

I’ve really appreciated that the supermarkets, and most shops I’ve been to, haven’t been piping bloody hymns and carols at me.

I hate “The Little Drummer Boy” with the fire and fury of 10,000,000 suns, and I can’t stay in the same room as “God rest ye, merry gentlemen.” So silence has been golden.

But carollers came to the supermarket while was I doing the last food shopping and sang Christmas songs at me, and I really didn’t want them. I felt the urge to say something piss-offy, though I didn’t. They’re probably nice people.

Anyway, I don’t feel my usual relaxed self about Christmas this year, because too many lunar right Christians are behaving badly.

Catholic Archbishop Fisher expressing something short of love for gays, lesbians, secularists and raped children

So, for example, Sydney’s Catholic archbishop Fisher came out and did a spray – it was his Christmas message! – about wanting the right to discriminate against gays and lesbians, and force kids to go to church, and to continue to protect pedophile priests: if they say in confession that they’ve raped some kid, then the duty to report them won’t apply. He calls this fucked-up agenda “religious freedom.”

So far-right Christians are making Xmas a cultural war zone, where what they’re fighting for is evil. It makes it harder to feel an unconflicted goodwill vibe. And there’s the whole pretence that there’s a war on Christmas, which is just an angry, arrogant exclusion of non-Christians.

All that has got my back up. I usually say, “Merry Christmas” and don’t give a fuck, but some Christians are trying to turn it into the equivalent of a Trump slogan. So, without thinking it matters or affects anything, I’ve been saying “Happy solstice”, or “Good Yule.” Not angrily. Just don’t want to take part.

Anyway, the reason for the season is this planet’s orbit, and in the Northern Hemisphere it means, “Happy Hump Day; the weather gets better now until Spring.” And lots of cultures have turned it into a time of celebrating each other, being alive, being kind, feeling hope.

It’s the people who bang on about this time of year being ONLY about Christianity who don’t understand Christmas.

Solstice, as every good pagan knows, is a good time to get somewhere warm (I like to make my own warmth) and play and fuck like rabbits

All that said, this is as good a day as any to celebrate the spirit of hope, warmth in cold times, renewal, love and tolerance, I wish everybody a wonderful loving time.

Please keep warm – other people help. If you’re lonely reach out to someone, or else give yourself delicious food and a good book in the bath.

Look after each other, and remember to let other people look after you, too. Those are the best gifts.

Warmth and happiness to all!

Hyenas that look like Donald Trump

Posted on July 27, 2018 by jaime

This isn’t a political blog. And this isn’t an argument, just an expression of disgust. The trough-snuffling corruption, the ridiculous lying, the cruelty, the bullying, just piss me off.

I’m busy. I’ve got a book to finish, and the smell of the end in my nostrils. So I’m not going to write politics. But yeah: we have to stop voting hyenas into positions of power. It’s a really dumb thing to do.

Lest we forget the dead donkey

Posted on April 25, 2018 by jaime

My great-grandfather was at Gallipoli. Gallipoli was an attempt to get a land pathway into Europe which British troops could follow, and attack the Germans closer to Germany than the stagnant lands created by trench warfare.

The road through Turkey would be opened by non-British troops, mainly New Zealanders and Australians, whose deaths in a futile and poorly planned operation wouldn’t be making headlines in England. There was a beach selected for this task, and naturally the British navy sailed straight past it and dumped the “colonial” troops into a beach where conditions would be intolerable if you lived, and where the Turks could sit up in the hills safely pouring lead onto the poor bastards on the beachhead.

Anyway, my great-grandfather was stuck on the killing beach. He did what you do under the circumstances. You try to go forward, you try to kill people wearing the other clothing style, you try to keep your head down and stay alive, and sometimes you do crazy brave things because the men you’re with are doing them too.

He came back from the meat-grinder alive but fucked. He couldn’t re-settle, he couldn’t be with his family, and he spent the rest of his life, except his last two years, trying to drink himself to death. Unluckily for him, the Mortimers have weird genes, and though he spent nearly eighty years consuming pretty much nothing but gin when he could afford it and sherry when times were worse, smoking when he could and sleeping rough, he lived until his late nineties.

In the last eighteen month of his life, when he was ninety-six, he became the live-in handyman at a block of apartments in Nelson, chopping wood (I told you we’re genetically weird), fixing fuses and hinges and water piping for the young couples living around him. He was proud of himself for the first time since 1915.

He died in the 1990s. Someone managed to locate his family and contacted my father, who wasn’t actually a relation except by marriage, and he went down and cleared up .

Anyway, my great-grandfather wouldn’t talk about Gallipoli, or Chunuk Bair. There wasn’t much to say. Except one thing. He said he was on the slopes with a donkey carrying water. The donkey got hit smack in the stomach by a cannon shell. It whipped its head around in time to see the middle of its body gone and its hind legs falling. Then the front of the donkey fell too, head facing my great-grandfather.

My great-grandfather used to say that the expression on the donkey’s face, when it realised it was fucked (grotesquely destroyed, if you prefer), was something he’d never forget as long as he lived.

I never met my great-grandfather. The only time I ever saw him was when I was nine. I was at a family wedding that he, pointedly, hadn’t been invited to. He turned up drunk, with a drunk friend, and got turned away. I missed that, but saw him later at a kid’s play area with a helter skelter. He and his friend decided to walk up the spiral of the slide, and come down the ladder.

It took them a long time but they made it, with assorted family members standing a distance away making disgusted comments. I knew nothing, understood nothing, but I did feel a kind of sympathy with him. Not “that poor man”. More like, “that’s odd but kind of cool”.

It was my mother who told me the only thing he’d ever said about his experience at Gallipoli. So I don’t know how he told that story: was it a parable about the way the New Zealand and Australian men were treated when the British decided to throw their lives onto a choppingboard? I don’t know: but my guess is that, yeah, it was that, but above all, he thought it was funny.

The people in my country have the blackest sense of humour I’ve encountered anywhere in the world. Throw in having lived through Gallipoli, and I’d say my great-grandfather would have had get a sense of humour so dark it had infinite gravity.

Anyway, I’ve never given a fuck about ANZAC Day. Nor, I understand, did he.

When I see it being used by politicians to defend more stupid military deployments, for the sake of someone else’s empire, I get really, deeply disgusted and angry. And it’s nearly impossible to make me angry.

So, I think the poor sods in the army, navy or air force who get sent where their country tells them to go deserve sympathy, and most importantly they deserve real help while they’re alive.

But fuck ANZAC Day. It was bullshit in the first place, and it’s now been securely seized by right-wing, race-baiting arseholes. Fuck them, fuck the politicians, fuck the snivelling scumlicking bullies in the Murdoch press, fuck all that bullshit. Fuck, as I said, ANZAC Day.

I remember the mess it made of my great-grandfather, sometimes, in bugle-free private, and I remember that poor bloody donkey.

Gay marriage and becoming an Australian

Posted on August 12, 2017 by jaime

I’m living in Australia at the moment, but I’m not an Australian. There’s always been too much about the country that makes me feel like I don’t want to join it, or identify with it.

There’s the racism, in particular.

I’m not talking about the stuff where someone is making conversation and asks a person who is black or Asian, “Where are you from?” Because there’s a possible sub-text of, “If you’re not white, you’re not from here” about it. But it can also be a well-meaning but under-informed person who means, “I think you look fantastic! Where do they make more people like you?”

My point is, it’s always a clueless question to ask, and sometimes there might be a negative racist meaning to it, and sometimes there might not be. But my sympathies aren’t always with the person taking offence. A little bit of polite person-to-person education goes a lot further, and does more good, than all the offence-taking in the world.

Anyway, when I say Australia is a racist country I’m not talking about that kind of thing.

Rather, it’s about the deliberatively, knowingly genocidal history of what has been done to the Aboriginal people. And the incredible, shockingly callous endorsement of that genocide by a fuck of a lot of Australians, once you get them in private. They don’t even need to have a drink in their hand. The day after I arrived in Australia, some quite wealthy, educated guy said to me, “oh, Abos: they should have put out more poisoned flour sacks.”

Then I was in a Post Office and I saw a police notice. They wanted to know if the public had seen some offender. The ad said, “non-Australian appearance”. What that meant was that he wasn’t white. Then I was talking to a cop, who said it was a pity we’d moved out of the old days when they’d just take Aboriginal young men down to the station and “give them a bit of a flogging”. He was a young cop. By “the old days”, he’d mean “about five years ago”.

It’s about the fact that life expectancy for Aboriginal people in their own country is fifteen years less than any other statistical group. Fifteen fucking years.

And so on. And their media is run almost entirely by Rupert Murdoch, and leans so far to the right it’s lying on its side. And “lying” is the word. “Bullying of people who dare to speak out” are also the right words to describe Australia’s craven, contemptible media.

So I don’t love Australia. I love many Australians, and like a lot of others. But the vibe of the place: No, I don’t love that.

Now a group of right-wing nutters and church-ridden homophobes are trying to stop marriage equality from coming to Australia. They’d decided to put the issue to a postal survey, which is calculated to favour the group most opposed to gay marriage, that is, the over-65s, while cutting out the group – just about everyone 30 and under – who most favour gay marriage.

Knowing that no one in that group uses postal mail, or checks their letter box, any more. It’s a “survey” where the homophobes get to have their thumb on one side of the scales.

So … I’m going to have to become an Australian citizen. Not because I love a sun-burned country. The truth is that I don’t. But I approve of love, and if people want to marry the person they love, I’m not going to let a bunch of heartless bigots keep them from having that right.

Update:

In the end I couldn’t do it.

I can’t join a country that does to its indigenous peoples, and to refugees, what Australia does.

So I let same sex marriage win without me.

The Government did its best to bias it in favour of the lunatics on the Christian Right, which includes more than half the current government, but polls started to make it obvious that the goodies were going to defeat the bigots by a humiliating margin. So I don’t feel too bad. But I hope Australia sorts out its racism problem. Soon.

Laci Green shout-out

Posted on June 6, 2017 by jaime

Eight years ago (i.e. 2009), when she was 18 Laci Green was making valuable, educational and funny youtube videos on sex issues, and occasionally on why she thinks religion is (a) nonsense, and (b) not so terribly good to and for women.

She’s largely dropped making references to her atheism, which I think is a pity, but understandable if your main concern is issues affecting young women and sex-positivity.

Laci Green. Her smile takes up a bigger proportion of her face than with normal human beings.

Anyway, one day in 2009 Laci Green made a video saying that people should be accepting of and nice towards transgender people. They shouldn’t be haters: in fact, “haters” was the name for that video episode. Unluckily for her, she had a transgender person as her guest, and he used the word “tranny” of himself and others.

Not knowing that other transgender persons hate the word, she copied him and used the word too.

I have a bit of a “there but for the grace of god go I” feeling about this, because at the time I would have given the very same offence while trying to say something supportive. That’s because a girlfriend of mine worked as a cleaner at the Gender Centre in Sydney, and I’d often help her clean because I wanted to play squash with her when she was done. (“Play squash” sounds like a euphemism, but it isn’t.)

That meant I knew about a dozen politically aware transgender people at the time, and they all used the word “tranny” of themselves and others. So, when I was in conversation with them and it was relevant, I did too. I’m sure I’ve used it in other contexts, thinking I was being supportive. If I’d made videos, they’d still be preserved, of course.

There’s also the fact that she and apparently other family members have had death threats. I relate to that, because I was once an organiser and media spokesperson for a tenants’ union, and some people didn’t like me getting in the way of certain landlords. Initially I was genuinely flattered and amused when I started to get death threats on the landline. Problem was, my roommates sometimes answered the phone too, and they’d cop the threats intended for me. So I learned that when this shit is directed at one person, it also affects a lot of other people around them.

Anyway, this began in 2012, when someone saw Laci Green’s “haters” video, which was then three years old, and wrote to her asking why she’d used the word “tranny”.

She replied: “You are totally right and I sincerely apologize for my mistake. Before I educated myself about trans issues I had not the slightest inkling of how the word is used to dehumanize nor its place in the cycle of violence against transfolk. Now I have seen people hurt by it and seen it used as a nasty slur. Words have power, and “tranny” is not a word for anybody but transfolk themselves to use because only they can reclaim it.”

As a result of the apology, a whole lot of people went berserk. They decided Laci Green was an anti-transgender person activist, who was leading the charge against rights and acceptance. This would have been news to the various Christian right activists who really were running an anti-transgender persons agenda, an agenda now being put into place in several US States.

Anyway, she got a torrent of hate mail, demanding that she kill herself, along with threats of violence, and, to show they meant it, they posted pictures of Ms Green’s home on-line.

The police took the threats seriously, and suggested to Ms Green that for her own safety she should move. She disappeared off-line for a while. When she came back it was with Planned Parenthood and a MTV spot, which organizations are better at security than just one person.

Anyway, she recently started arguing on her videos with anti-feminists, to see if communication can be helpful. This angered people who feel that giving anti-feminists a platform is wrong, even in a a dialogue intended to open them to feminist ideas. So that has offended many offended people.

My impression is that it is probably a bad idea, because some of the people she’s spoken to really have been assholes on the internet, and it may not be a good idea to give them yet another platform, even if the intent is to argue with them. On the other hand, it’s the kind of thing that sometimes works to change minds, and that’s always a good thing.

[Update:

Ms Green and Mr Ray-gun (artist’s impression)

Ms Green recently started shagging some guy called Chris Ray-gun. I know very little about him, but apparently he takes the piss out of people who called themselves SJW, or social justice warriors. I’m sure he’s said many dodgy things in his career, but I don’t know what they are. Some people calling themselves feminists have said this is why she’s less keen to be associated with “social justice warriors. As though your politics is determined by where you put your genitals. Me, I’ve sometimes agreed with a girlfriend’s politics, and sometimes not. Some people are like that.

Ms Green took pains to point out that she is still absolutely a feminist.]

Her other recent crime appears to be that she’s mentioned that she’d been accosted by a group of feminists who’d been heckling her at some event, who then made threats of violence against her.

If you want to read a column saying that Laci Green was the problem there, and she should have apologised again to the people who were threatening her, you can read it here.

(I don’t know the columnist and I’m unlikely to read anything else they ever write, but that specific column offered an interesting use of the passive-aggressive voice used sanctimoniously. This is only a personal reaction, but I found it oddly creepy.)

As a result, there are signs that the Community of the Terminally Self-Righteous are building up for another bash at her for having, while still a minor, made a video that was supportive of trans-gender persons but used the word “tranny”.

My impression is that she’s a good thing, incredibly decent, harmless and well-meaning, who has done an enormous amount of work on issues like abortion, contraception, sex information, kink acceptance and so on.

I should point out that I’m a dom, so I’m a filthy sexual pervert, who has the goddam gall to call himself a feminist supporter. So what I say will ipso facto have no value for some people, but for what bugger-all it’s worth I salute and support Laci Green.

Wicked Wednesday: Juniper’s Adventures 20

Posted on March 22, 2017 by jaime

This is episode 12 of the series that became the ebook Jennifer’s Pleats and Pleas 2: The Chime of the Bellbird.

In this episode, Jennifer, being over the headmaster’s desk while he massages her buttocks and upper thighs, as treatment and consolation for her spanking, realises that she’s blissfully happy. If only he’d ask, she’d give him more…

I’ve had to remove the actual text, because this excellent and very sexy book has been published and is on sale at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, 24symbols, Angus and Robinson, tolino, Rakuten Kobo and Vivlio.

A link that allows you to choose your favoured book supplier is here.

Wicked Wednesday: Juniper’s Adventures 19

Posted on March 14, 2017 by jaime

This is episode 10 of the series that became the ebook Jennifer’s Pleats and Pleas 2: The Chime of the Bellbird.

In this episode Jennifer finds that having her bare bottom and thighs massaged by the man who just spanked her is the sexist thing she’s experienced in her life, so far. It is relaxing, and yet it … isn’t.

Dublin and pain

Posted on March 9, 2017 by jaime

I’m in Dublin. I had an idea, after my father died earlier this year, that I should go to Ireland, to see where I came from, at least genetically.

Statues commemorating the Irish Potato Fame. The starving, beside the Liffey, in Dublin

Both of my parents were of almost entirely Irish stock. Though the people who were my ancestors left Ireland during or shortly after the Famine, they continued to marry other Irish expatriots over the next several generations. Although there’s the occasional Welshman or Scot in my traceable ancestry, it’s basically all Irish men and women.

I’ve always been grateful to my ancestors for leaving. Ireland is still disfigured by the Catholic Church, essentially a corporation for the enabling and protection of child rapists, and for the torture and enslavement of women, the Magdalene Laundires episode being only one example of this.

I’d been in Dublin for about six minutes when I encountered a march of young women demonstrating for the repeal of Ireland’s stupid, cruel and life-threatening ban on abortion.

I make a lousy nationalist. If I’d been living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, I’d always have voted to be part of the United Kingdom. Not out of nationalism: I’d don’t give a fuck what Cromwell did to the Irish three hundred-odd years ago. Or the Elizabethans before that. (Both sides seem to have forgotten the Scots invasion, and the land theft, famine and massacres under Robert the Bruce’s brother Edward, because that doesn’t fit the narrative.)

I’d have voted to be in the UK because I didn’t want to have the cops, directed by the church, tell me what I’m allowed to buy in a bookshop. I’d have wanted to be able to buy contraception, which you could then do in the UK but not Eire. I’d want a woman to be able to get an abortion if she has an unwanted pregnancy. Fuck nationalism: I only care about human rights.

So it was sobering to be reminded that Eire’s abortion law is still the one dictated by the Church. Rapists, torturers, murderers and their enablers, still claiming moral authority. Sooner that’s dumped into history’s Dead Joke Box the better.

Anyway, the pain I cause is consensual, intended to help, to lead to pleasure and other kinds of growth, and never to cause harm. Ireland is full of the traces of the domination of an organisation that seeks no consent, and is entirely indifferent to the pain, suffering, harm and death it causes.

By the way, I’m thinking about pain because after Eroticon, and after seeing Gretel off on the place back to her native land, I went to Dublin and got a cold. My head hurts. Really hurts. My bones feel like I’ve been beaten up, apparently in my sleep, by the secret police. I need to cough all the time, and it hurts like hell to cough. I’ve got chills. God, I’d love a hot flush.

On the other hand, I’m outside a pub on Talbot Street, drinking coke and watching pretty girls go by. So … silver linings, that’s what you have to look out for.

Wicked Wednesday: Juniper’s Adventures 17

Posted on February 15, 2017 by jaime

This is episode 9 of the series that became the ebook Jennifer’s Pleats and Pleas 2: The Chime of the Bellbird.

In this episode, Jennifer learns that she is the sort of person who gets spanked regularly and often, and that this is not such a bad sort of person to be. So long as she’s loved and cared for, that’s exactly who she wants to be.

I’ve had to remove the actual text, because this excellent and very sexy book has this has been published and is on sale at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, 24symbols, Angus and Robinson, tolino, Rakuten Kobo and Vivlio. A link that allows you to choose your favoured book supplier is here.

Wicked Wednesday: Juniper’s Adventures 9

Posted on December 7, 2016 by jaime

This is episode 1 of the series that became the ebook Jennifer’s Pleats and Pleas 2: The Chime of the Bellbird.

n this episode, our headmaster, Will Beecham, confronts his secretary, Maddie Levine, who’d been listening in on the scene that had just taken place between Will and his student Jennifer.