There’ll be no MIK tomorrow as I’m away in Cork at the moment and haven’t anything pre-prepared. Also, I’ve other writing to finish when I get back as I’m going to have a short in this year’s International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. It’s called The Middle Distance, and is a reworked scene from Perfect Paragraphs.
~
Of course, the real reason I came away is that I’m fast on the trail of Mary Christman. There were a couple of verified sightings of her on the west coast of Ireland. So far, the bars aren’t proving helpful. Surely, her resting place must be around here somewhere. It’s due to snow here tonight, so maybe the Winter Wonderland will rouse her christmas horribleness from her pit. I’ve got my crossbow prepared…
For this competition.
I’m vaguely fascinated by David Britton/Savoy Books. I’ve read the follow-ups to Lord Horror (last book to be banned in the UK); Motherfuckers and Baptised in the Blood of Millons. I like his overarching ideas, but his prose is terrible. Clunky, heavy stuff that just doesn’t sit right with me. I do however enjoy his comic series, particularly the comic series Meng and Ecker. Anyway, they had great prizes in this competition, so I wrote a microfiction for them (which is exactly the 100 words they asked for), and forgot to send it in.
Untitled
Looking at Meng’s frankly ridiculous breasts, I realise that if the trend for social cybernetics had’ve reached England, his tits would resemble a cyborg Madonna. It is clear to me now that sexual freedom can only be accompanied by violence. He flutters his eyelids, cockteasing, confusing me but then that’s his kick – confusing everyone with his trans body. Being gay, I mutter to myself, I’m more secure? He holds a lighter in front of me, as if I had a cigarette, and says, “Your labels won’t last in the fire, will they?” and with that he stops the tape recorder.
She would be an odd superhero. I certainly don’t think she’d save Christmas. The robot santas would most certainly defeat her.
Men I’ve Known returns on the 4th January.
Now that we’re up-to-date, posts will now be published once a week on a Monday, next post being the 21st of December. Don’t forget to subscribe via email.
And because the title of this post reminds me of a bus timetable, and given the nature of this blog, it seems entirely appropriate to quote the divine Wendy Cope.
Bloody Men
Bloody men are like bloody buses -
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.You look at them flashing their indicators
Offering you a ride.
You’re trying to read the destinations,
You haven’t much time to decide.If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off, and you’ll stand there and gaze
While the cars, the taxis and the lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days.
Filed under: Site Stuff
Hrm, and there was me thinking that WordPress was the new Jesus, but after tagging all of my posts, it turns out that if you click the tags, or categories filed under on the post, it searches for that tag globally on wordpress, which is not what I intended.
It works okay if you click the main categories on the left, but surely it should work for tags too.
Or am I going to have to retag everything (for me, the whole point of tagging posts as “prose” or “poetry” was that if somebody wanted to, they could click that and see only those posts)
Any WordPress ninjas out there have any suggestions?
EDIT: I suppose that leaving it at the categories as it is isn’t too bad, but the tags had me so excited. I can’t really make 500 categories though; four or five is more than enough 
I should introduce myself.
My name is Mark and for a while I was writing a series called Men I’ve Known and then my interest waned and it kind of died. The first ten MIK’s were published on Gay Community News as a blog called Brief Lives, and were later reprinted on my personal blog. But I kind of want to do something more with them.
Eventually, I would like to turn MIK into a collection, but there’s some barriers to that. Well, one. Me.
I’m your average fiction writer; hiding in layers of characterisation, cloaked in layers of twice-removed subterfuge, I’m just not used to the naked honesty that MIK requires of me. Now, if you knew me, and we were talking, that honesty would be fine, but for some reason, in print, it makes me uncomfortable. To badly paraphrase a line from the movie Velvet Goldmine, “Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth”.
I think mostly I’m afraid of pissing someone off, which is hilarious, considering that if I’m writing something negative about them, then they’ve done something pretty fucking horrendous in the first place.
Anyway, enough about these uncertainties. Bear with me so, if the blog takes a good while to take shape and if MIK veers from left to right for a while, I vaguely know what I’m doing.
And so, to the men. I’ve done “old” ones, from a few months ago that I’m going to repost at one a day until we’re upto date. After that, I’ll try to post once a week.
Before I go, a brief note. Men I’ve Known was intended as “an autobiography in the second person”. I don’t quite know if it will be able to reach that lofty task, but we’ll see. All Men I’ve Known pieces are numbered, but untitled. There’s also another strand of (less frequent) posts called Radials which thematically fit here but whose focus are too broad, or are fictional, or are about more than one person.
(from the original introduction post on GCN: “This is a blog about the men that have crossed my path; be it in a small, fleeting way or in one that made a huge and lasting impact to me. The one night stands, friends, strangers and the men you never had the courage to speak to, the dreams you have and the flights of folly we all go on. Also, in a way, it’s a blog about my relationship with men, and surely, like all blogs, you’ll learn more about me too.”)
