Zeus has been my part-time therapist since my arrival in Italy. Whenever I got mad or upset about something, I went to look for Zeus and cuddle with him until I could calm down. A golden blond long-hair with yellow eyes, he was so adorable that company fell in love with him the moment they saw him. So it was easy for me to be proud of him. He was my best friend and my “kidden.”

During this spring, Zeus developed a raw spot in his skin, and it wouldn’t heal. He licked at it so much, we were forced to put a collar on him after he opened a hole in his side and bled all over the living room. Sometime during the first night with the collar, Zeus tried to jump off of a tall wardrobe in my room and landed badly, bruising his shoulder. As soon as we’d taken the collar off, I also noticed how the right side of his face was swollen.

We took him to the emergency vet, and they gave him antibiotics. But he lost interest in his food, and he started shedding weight fast. We had company this weekend, and I’d explained how rapid this decline was. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t think it was this serious.

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All right, I’m going to attempt this message without cussing because I would like a reply. At the same time, I will be posting this message on my blog as an open message. I don’t believe I’m the only person being affected by this problem, and I’m sure more people than me would like some straight answers on this topic.

I own a CyBook Gen3, a device I paid 395 Euros when it first came out. At your Mobipocket store, I purchased Twilight and New Moon. This week, I decided to get the third book, Eclipse, only to discover that you have pulled ALL of Ms. Meyer’s titles from your own bookstore. I’ve been forced to buy a Kindle copy because even with e-book locations where I COULD find a PRC copy for my e-reader, I was told that they couldn’t sell me the e-file because I’m not in the US.

What the fff–

But okay, today I download Kindle for PC and pay for a file that will be “delivered wirelelssly” to me. So now I’ve paid extra fees for AT&T and VAT, so I can get a copy of the MOBI file and put it on my e-reader…except, I apparently don’t actually get the file sent to my PC using Kindle for PC, because there are no new mobi files on my PC.

So look, I’m a legitimate Amazon/Mobipocket customer. I’m a regular buyer of books, DVDs, Music CDs and e-books. Go ahead, look through my recent purchases with Amazon.com, and Amazon.co.uk…see that? I’m a regular customer. I am no pirate. All I want is a legal way to read my e-book purchases on the e-reader of my choice. You people own Mobipocket, but apparently I’m no longer allowed to use that store to buy titles. So please, tell me what I have to do just to get this e-book onto my CyBook without resorting to a freakin’ torrent site?

I’ve officially had enough of social networks, and I’ve deleted my accounts with Facebook and MySpace. In both cases, it was suggested ad nauseum that I should join these services to “get in touch with new readers.”

Bullshit. You join these networks so advertisers can get in touch with you, the consumer.

The vast majority of my friends on both of these networks were people who had something to sell. MySpace and Facebook are both butt-ugly link farms surrounded by ads, but Facebook at least had something going for it when I first joined. I loved how often people would talk to me through my status updates. That was really cool, because I was having loads of fun being social without having to think about buying or selling stuff. Imagine that, being social on a social network. CRAZY!

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You may have noticed I haven’t been blogging much, and that I’ve only been posting fiction weekly. In theory this was to allow me more time to write, except that plan got slammed in the sensitive bits by  a dual attack of a frigid Mother Nature and a muse who decided to cop a walk just when things were getting good. My melancholy hit a peak today and I decided to spend the entire day watching Zero Punctuation. So if you watch a few episodes and then attach his voice to this rant, it might end up being funny.

Emphasis on might.

Ten years ago, when I was a young and feminine lad of 25 who got a surprisingly large amount of pity pussy, I imagined myself living someplace foreign while I worked in a lucrative but menial creative role and raising two self-centered, spoiled bastards.

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Given my previous posts, you might think my less frequent updates were me taking a vacation from writing, like I said I would. Um…okay, that actually didn’t happen. In fact, my plans to take a vacation lasted all of a day and a half. Since then, I’ve been writing a lot. I started a new novella, wrote a short 2K story, and added another 20K to an ongoing novel project.

All of this sounds great, until you realize that I’m incapable of resting. You’d think having a handicap would convince me to rest, but it doesn’t. I work myself into fatigue and drop all the time, but I can’t rest. I can try, but soon after I’m doing nothing, my moods crash. I don’t feel right unless I’m doing something productive.

I was actually a worse workaholic earlier in my life. I would work a regular jub for 40 to 50 hours, and then come home and work on my creative projects. Any of my old friends can tell you about the manic phases where I would disappear for weeks at a time because I was taken with a new idea and wanted to work on it on my computer.

Am I really “better” now? Well, no. I do take more naps during the day, and some days, I don’t get started on my projects until very late in the evening. But once I’m on, I’m on until fatigue shuts me off.

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A long, long time ago, on a continent far away, a nerd was born later than the doctor’s predictions. This was possibly to avoid being born on April fool’s day, when people would have promised great gifts only to give pet rocks instead.

That baby’s mother wanted to name her child Spot, but this name was shot down, as were several other ideas, among them James Tiberius Kirk Whitten. (Thank God no one let that woman get away with that selection! Imagine 30 years of “It’s worse than that! He’s dead, Jim!”)

But at last a name was chosen. It was a name which perhaps they did not know belonged to a king demon of the West, a demon whose kingdom was Chaos. The mother would swear up and down that there was another meaning that she had in mind, but it was this chaotic king who ruled the child’s life for many, many years.

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Every few weeks, some celebrity, politician, or pastor is caught cheating on their spouses. Every single time, this stirs up a shit storm of stunned gasps, loud proclamations of virtue, and blame laying aplenty. It’s like we’re all a society of Puritans who are still living out modern variations of The Scarlet Letter

Given my history, you’d think I’d hate infidelity. I’ve been cheated on so often, it wasn’t even funny. But taking that mindset is assuming that I was completely blameless, and that just isn’t true. As a partner, I had to come off as aloof, or as emotionally distant. The alternative was being more open, and then women left me, “for real men.” This too makes them seem petty in a snap judgment, but hey, if you aren’t a lesbian, dating a chick with a penis isn’t going to work no matter how much you try to convince yourself that having a dick equals being a dude.

But my point here is, the women who cheated on me were only one part of a complex equation, one which can be summed up as “human emotions are fickle.” We fall in and out of love. We develop obsessions and fast burning attractions for other people. This is human nature. It is what we are: flawed and imperfect creatures whose insecurities sometimes lead us to temptations that we cannot say no to.

Now, if it were just the far religious right making a big deal out of infidelity, that would be one thing. But I see a lot of supposedly moderate and liberal people who also jump in on “cheaters” with equal vitriol. We as a society pin scarlet letters on men and women, and we browbeat people for being human.

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I keep listening to Ruby Don’t Take your Love to Town, both the original version by Kenny Rogers, and the cover by The Killers. Lately, I’ve been thinking about a reboot using some of the same words, but changing the narrator to a post-op transsexual talking to their spouse instead of a handicapped war veteran. No, not as a parody, but as a real effort to “reboot” the song. So anywho, this here is my first attempt at remaking the song:

You painted up your lips and rolled and curled your tinted hair
Ruby is that my makeup that you plan to wear?
I could take you dancing, just let me get my gown
Oh Ruby, don’t take your love to town

I know my Asian sex change has made you awfully sore
But I was dying slowly in the life I’d led before
And yes it’s true that I am not the man I used to be
Oh Ruby, you still mean the world to me

It’s hard to love a spouse when they’ve gone and swapped their sex
I never changed my mind on you, and don’t to be your ex
You’re still the one love of my life, the best I’ve ever found
Oh Ruby, don’t take your love to town

She’s heading out to see a man; I’m cryin’ on the floor
“For better or for worse” don’t mean a thing no more
And I know she had a husband back when she made those vows
Oh Ruby, don’t take your love town

Oh Ruby, for God’s sake turn around