In York, no one can hear you… Except me… And I don’t want to…

My neighbour, whose name I have ascertained is JoJo, but not Mojo Jojo like the monkey in Powerpuff Girls, has a  male friend.  And their relationship has reached a physical plateau.  I know this because they like to wake me up at least twice a week with loud exclamations like they’re having difficulty threading a needle and it’s really starting to annoy them.  I do not need to hear this stuff and do not want to hear this stuff.  I realise that all you normal people do that thing, and enjoy doing that thing, but I’ve not done that thing, and frankly I don’t need to hear other people doing that thing.  Or indeed see it, which is why it’s irritating that these spambots keep trying to shove it in my face too in ever more perverted manner.  I believe this is a proverbial case of adding insult to injury.  Here’s what you can’t have, and in a manner that will turn your stomach.  Asimov audiobook torrents yes, torrents about the love between a man and a husky no.  It’s that simple.

These things are beyond me.  I don’t know how to chat a girl up (or a man either), and I have great difficulty being friends with girls, because I’m afraid that they think I’m like other men and are likely to try to chat them up so can’t just casually ask if they want to do things.  Because the women I meet seem to think that all men are after one thing.  They see subtext in everything.  And I’m not incapable of subtext, but most of the time I just say what I mean.  Le sigh.

Still, I had fish and chips for breakfast and found a copy of Legends from the End of Time by Michael Moorcock, which has been out of print for ages, and which I was rather desperate to read.  It’s very decadent fiction of a kind I’m fond, where science blurs into magic.  Because to do hard science fiction, you have to have characters who are scientists.  And characters who are scientists are observers, and experimenters, less than they are adventurers, or living things in a natural way, so you can’t happily delineate the changes on society that way.  Swashbuckling is better.  Once I’ve finished Sherlock Holmes: War of the Worlds by Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman (his son), I’ll move on to this little treat.

I came very close to buying a DVD of the 1982 Hulk cartoon, which I remember loving  because he fights Quasimodo and his giant bat Salvatore, and Doctor Octopus, who is my all time favourite supervillain.

Loneliness is hard on the wallet.

I want to do a story with Book Pirates in it, after reading about the book pirates of Peru.  Thinking that one through.  Don’t want it to be too like Repent Harlequin, said the TickTock Man, the short story by Harlan Ellison that inspired Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta.  Or Brazil, the film by Terry Gilliam.