You want me to tell you a story, Lucy?

Well of course; anything for you darlin’.

Duty calls again, so I’m once more packing up my power ties and my Haig ’88 commemorative codpiece, and jetting Westward for a few busy days. Getting the internets where I’m going is going to be dodgy at best, so I guess in retrospect maybe getting cut off of the grid for a week was a weird blessing; like going into a digital decompression tank to gradually reacclimate myself before stepping out on to sea-level for real.

Good things too; probably saved me from both a bad case of the WiFi bends and ethernet-narcosis.

And in-between making sure that everything is easy-peasy for tomorrow and trying vainly to catch up on enough work so that I’m not struck dead when I walk in the office next week, I noticed a lot of talk in the blogosphere (at Gilly's and at AMERICAblog) about Lefty bloggers getting paid, or feeling weird about getting paid, or about even asking for cash and whatnot.

What crap.

I’m sure you are terribly shocked to hear such language, but Jesus Almighty, if there is one thing that drives me batshit about (some people on) the Left (not estimable Misters Gilliard or Aravois obviously) it’s the way they conceptualize work and labor and getting paid. As if it were all rather dirty. Unseemly. In bad taste, or that the good things of this world should simply float down from Heaven and into their mouths.

They view work and giving honest value for honest value received just like the Right views sex; as something fallen and sinful that nice people don’t talk about. Something to perhaps be done away with once the Revolution comes.

Gather together 10,000 gay men, tart them up in bondage gear and parade them down the middle of the main street of Sugarland, Texas lobbing condoms and hardcore porn to the crowd. The effect of that on the perception working class voters would be immeasurably trivial compared to a Progressive movement that telescopes by word and deed that it thinks hard work is for dopes, or is icky, or that the world and everything in it should be theirs for free.

Sex is to be celebrated, and good work is to be lauded and rewarded.

Tangibly.

And to think or act otherwise is not only ethically indefensible and economically suicidal, it’s also strategically and politically idiotic.

See, ain’t it nice when doing right and doing well can converge so seamlessly?

Oh, and the pic of Lucy?

Well, among the other things I do to, I write. Once in a great while I get paid for it, which is nice, but it’s not a living, so I work other gigs.

But I still write, and every so often I put together a piece of fiction that I thoroughly enjoyed doing but isn’t ever going to find a home, so hey, what the hell, I may be out of touch for a little bit, so why not post it here? Sorta like cat blogging, but without the cat.

And in my mind I shall be reading it to Ms. Liu as she lay spent, sweaty, slaked and smiling beside me...

(Ok, there's sort of a cat :-)

But then this little tirade ran long, so I'll do that next time.

Jeez. Writers. Talk, talk, talk...