UNTENURED. I DISCLAIM. CANDY, CANDY, I CAN'T LET YOU GO. POLITICS and JEWEL. FETISHIST SUPREME. I USE THE “F” WORD.

--Something, or I should say, someone tells me I aught to be careful of what I write. Your students, someone tells me, may read it. You are, someone reminds me, untenured.

Indeed.

Ask Michael Bellesiles (Arming America) about the vulnerability of the academic to the vocally offended.

--I remember my discomfort when students begin to find some of my edgier stories on the net last year. Of course, they had to start with “Broken Harder”, the 22nd most vicious thing I’ve written. I’ve gotten over that discomfort. Now I want them to buy the book (Animal Rights and Pornography); I just hope they don’t read it.

--In any case, I DISCLIAM this blog. It is the work of a creative writer.

No, better yet, I am not the writer of this blog. I am not the writer of these words.

In fact, I am not anything as it relates to any of this at all—not even a fallible author, not even a persona, not even an alter ego.

The voice that tells the stories is not my voice. It is a purely imagined voice chronicling the purely imagined life of a purely imagined being in a purely imagined world.

I am not even the person that did all that imagining.

So release J Eric Miller from the responsibility of these thoughts. They do not belong to him and nor does he endorse them or, for that matter, anything at all but benevolence. And Bill Maher, should he ever run for office. Any just about any corporation that would care to sponsor this blog.

--Still, I shall take someone’s advice and write with caution, even fear.

Though I will, for example, reference my own lust from time to time, I will NOT reference lust as it relates to any student, past or present or potential. In fact, I have no such lust.

If I can live beyond the hunger of wanting to devour the charred corpses of pigs and cows who were tortured through life and then tortured to death, if I can live beyond the thirst of wanting to gulp down the eggs laid by chickens that never knew what it was like to turn around or to lift a foot or stand up straight and who would, if they were exposed to the sun for even a moment, drop dead in shock against its light and warmth, then certainly I can deny that ancient biological urge to notice and react to pretty skin.

--In honesty, there was once a temptation for me to feel a sort of distant sense of longing toward a student, but that was years ago, during my first teaching semester, and anyway, it wasn’t particular to her. It wasn’t tthat she was a tennis player and it wasn’t that she was smart.

It was that she wore a candy necklace. In fact, if anything, all I really longed for was those hardened sugar rings.

In Scared Straight one of the prisoners tells one of the teenage boys he means to scare straight something that is meant to imply how prison life has shaped his sexuality. “I’d jump right over a girl to get to you,” the prisoner tells the delinquency-leaning boy.

So it is with me and candy.

--To analyze the second Bush/Kerry debate would be like analyzing Jewel “poetry”. There’s really nothing to say. Still, for a good play by play, http://ww.wonkette.com/. Thanks to PH.

--In the gym: a toothbrush, purple, lies on the floor next to the shoulder shrug machine. I suppose the quality of the gym will be suggested by whether or not it is still there the next time I am. I puzzle over it. Who would leave it here or lose it here and how and why? What do the other people think when they see it?

This is a documentary I’d watch. Where is Robert Stack when we need him?

--I found a dime while working out. I always find change in the gym. It falls out of the pockets of the other exercisers. I don’t want it to fall out of my pocket, so when I find change, I stick it in my shoe. This is uncomfortable.

I put all my change in a big cup that my son is going to use pay for college—or buy some PS2 games—and as I work out and the dime burns against my foot, I think of how I will add it to his pile of money. I am a good American and I mean to turn him into a good consumer.

The dime calls attention to itself the entire rest of my workout. If I had a little blister that felt just like the dime and a genie, or a god, or some other magic being, appeared before me at the gym and said: hey, I know that is distracting and bothersome, so, for a dollar, I’ll make that go away, I’d answer “yes.”

But for the dime in my shoe I say no.

--Dressed to Kill = a reminder of how horrifying an aged ass, transsexuals, and anonymous and unprotected sex can be.

Really, Brian DePalma—fetishist supreme—offers up a revision of his Oedipal fantasy to displace by murder his mother, the inappropriate object of the desire he had as a teenage science nerd , and replace her with an equally wanton but not by blood related woman that would want to fuck him.