Betty Brosmer, innocent and busty

I said the other day on Twitter that an innocent-looking lady showing a lot of cleavage makes my heart melt. I was referring to a different picture, but this is the picture that really stands for that feeling in my mind.

It took me several years to find an actual copy of this magazine, at a New York City flea market in Chelsea–I got it about ten years ago for $25–and when I finally bought it, the dealer thought I wanted it for a picture of Bettie Page inside. It was a nice pic of Page, but I explained to him that it was the Betty on the cover that had turned this magazine into a kind of Holy Grail for me. When I finally got my hands on this issue, I thought to myself, “Well, I might as well stop collecting vintage men’s magazines now. I have found my ultimate prize.”

Of course I didn’t stop collecting–that was not possible. Although perhaps I did slow down quite a bit.

This to me is just the most beautiful men’s magazine cover of all. Amazing picture, amazing Betty Brosmer.

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I got the picture of the cover off the web (just didn’t feel like digging the actual magazine out of my files at 6 a.m. when I was writing this) and discovered (thank you, Google Image Search) you can even get a photo print of this great cover here on Amazon made by a manufacturer called Posterazzi. I don’t work for Posterazzi; just passing the info along for your interest!

 

Femdom fountain of youth…

I was talking with one of my longtime friends from childhood, who is my age, and he was saying how he made no secret of being an “old man,” particularly in his line of work so full of younger colleagues. I told him I felt the same way, and did not shy away from pointing out that in my own field of endeavor, erotica/porn/smut/whatever-you-wanna-call-it, I talk proudly of my many decades of experience.

In fact, 2024 marks the fiftieth year I have been in the literary stimulation business. In 1974 I made my first professional writing dollars for two porn novels, The Screaming Virgins (it was BDSM week at the porn novel factory) and The Punk Stud and His Women (about a young guy entranced by the topless bars of ’70s Times Square).

Nowadays I write a lot about femdom, of course, which is one of my personal fascinations as well as the focus of some of my freelance clients’ websites. And sometimes I think that my mental intoxication with these desires, musings, realities and fantasies keeps the inner me forever young, always yearning…

I was never a follower of politics until recent years when it has become unavoidable, and I think William Butler Yeats’ poem, found here, still sums up my attitude, although I cannot help on a daily basis getting into discussions on the fate of our world…

 

At Union Square in New York City, late January 2024.

The New York Review of Books offers “literary napkins” for Valentine’s Day, with passionate quotes from various scribes through the centuries, and I think anyone in the swirl of admiration for a lovely dominatrix, or any lady for that matter, can relate to James Joyce’s words to Nora Barnacle as highlighted in this sample from their catalog here:

Yes, it is cold in January, but when we can embrace pleasant daydreams–an upside of being a fiction writer, depending on one’s theme–spring is never very far away. 

 

The consequences of crime and love…

An accidental meeting with a past lover at NYC’s Dante Park in Lincoln Center stirs up intense emotions…if Alan keeps his mouth shut, maybe he can get laid, but can he stay quiet to Rebecca about the trauma of that night so long ago?

 

This is my newest ebook, just released a few days ago. It’s part of what I call my “Specialty Library,” meaning stories that are not erotica but delve into other genres such as ghost stories (Do You Remember Me, Lily?) or social/psychological fiction (The Night I Got Off Easy, When A Woman Scowls, and the newest Mugged by Love).

It’s hard to fight being typecast as a porn writer but that’s the price of being able to make a living as a freelancer for so many decades. Like Karloff or Lugosi in horror films, I’ve long been “typed” because of my proficiency with erotica. I’m not complaining, I love writing erotica/porn/smut, whatever you wanna call it; but it’s simply very hard to broaden people’s perception of my writing, although my porn has always had the kinds of social/psychological elements which I emphasize in my Specialty Library work. For example, several of the big-budget X-rated screenplays I wrote from the ’80s through the early 2000s, which garnered awards for actresses and industry award nominations for me, were realistic depictions of sexual and relationship situations (like the two Masseuse films I wrote for Vivid Entertainment, for example). 

In any case, I’m proud of Mugged by Love and these other recent stories and hope you’ll give them a try. They’re available at Amazon on the Kindle stores worldwide, such as here. 

 

 

“A certified sleaze classic”–yes, I aim to please! ;)

In the middle of May 2023 I was interviewed for a very interesting podcast called Tales from the Mall. Host Brendan, who can be found on Twitter at @luso_brendan here, talks with and records his interviewees on a wide variety of topics over the phone or Zoom while he walks around various malls in Arizona, where he lives.

We had a fun two-hour-plus chat about many different subjects, focusing on my career in porn, how I got into it and so forth; erotic artists I’ve known and worked with like Sardax, with whom I recently collaborated on Tamara, Eternal Dominatrix; but also spending much time discussing film noir and noir fiction, touching especially on the recent novels of contemporary noir novelist Jay Cameron Parker; the summer I worked as an NBC page in NYC and briefly met Julie “Catwoman” Newmar backstage at NBC’s Tonight Show in the early ’70s Johnny Carson years; my constant strolling around New York City, going to BDSM dungeons and dominatrices, and lots more! It can be found on his Patreon account here. 

One tweeter described it as a “certified sleaze classic.” Sounds good to me! We certainly covered a lot of ground in the podcast, too, for those who like to leaven their sleaze with other ingredients, like film noir. 😉

It’s always nice to be called an “extraordinary genius writer” but I won’t let it go to my head. I hear something in my ear like what the guys said who stood behind the commanders when they marched triumphantly back into ancient Rome after successful campaigns doing what Romans did to everybody, conquering them:

“Remember, thou art only a man!”

In my case I also hear, as a late art director named Charley would proclaim when he saw me in the office to edit some of my “dirty” magazines:

“You little sleazeball!”

Thanks to Brendan for this opportunity to chat and, of course, to promote my femdom erotica on Kindle as well as my new “specialty library” of more psychological fiction and my noir novel Fate of a Stripper, all of which you can find here. 

This book takes you back to 1978 NYC and Times Square in all their sleazy allure!

Where will a conversation in a midtown Manhattan bar lead a dedicated bookworm and a feisty redhead who tempts and puzzles him in equal measure?

My noirish psychological suspense novel set in Times Square as it was right up to the pandemic...and one of the best things I’ve ever written.

 

I desperately need more work

Selfie with skyscrapers…

Things change. Businesses change. When I started this blog in 2011, although I didn’t know it then, I was in the middle of the best year I would ever have financially as a writer.

I had a main client at an adult magazine company based in New Jersey, a longtime veteran of the business, and I wrote many short stories, articles, and erotic letters for her, and even sometimes the “girl copy” or captions that accompanied the pictorials she ran in her magazines. I wrote for other editors at the same company too. For another outfit, a major adult website in Eastern Europe, I wrote and assembled three online newsletters a week as well as clip descriptions. It was a busy, fun, and very productive year. I didn’t make “big” money, but I made a decent living, just from writing (I was no longer editing magazines), and I even managed to save a little. I wrote maybe a couple hundred thousand words that year, or the equivalent of two very long books, and I never just “banged ’em out.” Every job got tender loving care. I can’t work any other way. 

Then came 2012 and everything fell apart. That chief editorial client lost her job, left the porn field as far as I know, and although I have tried, I have never been able to find another who paid as well and gave me as much steady work and interesting assignments. And then the magazine company–for whom I continued to do a lot of writing–went out of business. And thus truly began my odyssey through the world of online erotica writing, as the reliable sex publications industry in which I had been toiling since 1974 basically collapsed thanks to competition with Internet porn, free or paid.

I’ve had numerous clients since, but over the last couple of years it’s become more and more difficult to find clients who pay a living wage. I am offered rates that might have been reasonable in 1935 (barely), but certainly not in the world of the 2020s. But online I now compete with writers in other parts of the world who will work for 1 or 2 cents a word. That might have been acceptable in America when a hamburger was 15 cents and a cup of coffee a nickel, and you could rent a room for $5/week, but not now. I have to get at least 10-15 cents a word to make the work viable. Otherwise I can’t make enough money to pay my bills. Not the little bills. The bills that keep a roof over your head.

Example: a potential client, someone who seemed like a nice guy I would’ve enjoyed working for, recently wanted 200 word pieces for 2 cents a word. Said he could not pay more. The pieces would’ve taken me at least an hour. So I would have made 200 x .02 = $4.00/hour. I had to say no, because I’d have to work for close to two hours to approach minimum wage. It was not enough.

So I move on. I do what I can to find work in the field I know best and in which I have mastery. One has to be inventive. Here is something I just put up on Twitter the other day.

Basically my point is this. If you who are reading this could use my services–whether writing clip descriptions or any other kind of prose that you might need–or you know somebody else who can use my skills, contact me. Look at my portfolio right on this blog here, and you will see all the many things I have written. Maybe you need posts for a blog, or you want a privately commissioned short story as a gift for a lover or yourself. The possibilities are so many! At the bottom of the portfolio is my email address where I can be reached. And I can also be messaged on Twitter here.

I am flexible to work with. For example, if you don’t want ten clip descriptions for $500, I can do five for $250. I just have to make a living wage for the world of 2023 America, not for 1935. That’s all.

So that’s the story. Weeks have gone by, tax time is coming, monthly bills are coming, and I needed more work yesterday. Contact me and you’ll get your money’s worth.

If you want to see more of what I’ve been up to recently, check out this post too.

Thanks for reading. It was hard to write, because I try to maintain optimism and cool about all this stuff. I think I’m trying to channel Robert Mitchum in a film noir, or something: “Baby, I don’t care.” “If we gotta die, I’m gonna die last.” But the time has come to simply reach out to those who know me, and to those who don’t know me yet, and say,

“I need some more work now. So what can I do for you?”

When I solve this problem, I look forward to getting back to blogging about my usual topics of porn, books, films, art, and whatever else captures my fancy! And yours! 😉

 

Meanness Is Their Method

In the late 1970s or early ’80s I wrote a story called “Looking for Mean Women” that was published by one of the lower-rent porn magazines. I probably have it in my archives somewhere, but I’ve lost track of it for the moment. But the title certainly sums up a lot of the fiction I’ve written since.

Talena Vorell, attorney at law, is very mean in this ebook which I published at the end of 2021. In fact, she might be one of the meanest dominatrix characters I’ve ever conjured up…

She calls herself an “erotic authoritarian” and her behavior lives up to it!

Check out her antics, as well as those of her female compatriots in cruelty, at my Amazon Kindle stores worldwide. Here is a quick link to the one in the U.S.

Happy and horny reading!

She took a new slave further into realizing his femdom fantasies than he could ever have imagined before he met her!

 

Sadistic Doll with whip aloft in an artful tweet!

One of my steady freelance clients is the femdom website Domme Addiction for whom I do daily tweets at @DommeAddiction about their clip prevues and interview features. The other day a dominatrix retweeted this tweet I wrote back in the early fall…

My colleague SlaveBoySmith does the interviews and then I write & assemble tweets to publicize them. He can be found on Twitter at @DASlaveBoySmith.

I was happy the domme interviewed, Sadistic Doll, whose website is here, and whose Twitter handle is @SADISTIC_D0LL, retweeted this because it was an example of something that came together especially nicely. As some dommes do, she obscures her identity in photos, so to make a tweet that’s interesting without showing the face can be tricky. In this case, her photos for the interview were dramatic, and I thought the combination of these two was particularly good. The whip in the pic on the right, and the kneeling masked slave, work well with the shot on the left emphasizing her hands and cleavage.

Photo editing is something I enjoy, and of course did professionally for the sex magazines of which I was in charge, like CHEEKS, LEG WORLD, GIRLS OVER 40, and SEX ACTS.

I give kudos to Sadistic Doll also for her quote, which intersects so beautifully with the snake-like undulation of her whip!

Tweeting can be creative and a lot of fun, and I often get the same pleasure out of it that I did when assembling a photo layout of a model.

If you need creative tweeting for your business, contact me via Direct Message on Twitter here. And check out my portfolio here, for all the other writing I’ve done. There is also an email address at the bottom of the portfolio where you can write me. And scroll through my blog for other examples of recent things I’ve written! I try to keep busy… 😉

 

Writing a story to the paintings of Sardax in homage to the great fetish artist John Willie

Every once in a long while, if one is lucky, there comes along a special project which seems to capture the preoccupations of one’s entire career. Thus it was for me when my British friend and colleague Sardax, the formidable master artist of femdom fantasy and erotica, asked if I would like to write a story to go along with paintings which were inspired by the works of John Willie, the pioneering fetish artist who in the 1940s and ’50s created the great damsel-in-distress comic Sweet Gwendoline. Sardax’s approach, of course, was to turn the tables and make the Gwen in his paintings a dominatrix, along with her friend Secret Agent U-89.

These are the first John Willie magazines I ever saw. I purchased them instantly! 

Besides being a terrific artist, Willie had also been a fine writer, whose witty and sexy copy accompanied his paintings, drawings, and photographs in the pages of his self-published magazine, Bizarre. I liked Willie’s words as much as his art–I loved his satiric, arousing, and also compassionate take on the many aspects of kinky behavior, from crossdressing to bondage–and so I relished the opportunity of paying my homage to him by transforming his dastardly creation Sir Dystic d’Arcy from a mustachioed “villain” putting the helpless Gwen in bondage, into a closet submissive male who yearns to experience femdomination instead.

John Willie’s Sir d’Arcy captures Sweet Gwendoline with the help of the Countess.

And so, with a few tweakings I gave to the names, our heroine became Adorable Gwen aka Mistress Gwen; Agent U-89 became Agent 399 aka Mistress Carlotta; and Sir d’Arcy became Sir D’Evious Dalrymple. On a visit to a unique femdom resort in the Carpathian Mountains, which Sardax dubbed “Masotopia,” off went my imagination along with Sir D’Evious to see what happened in a castle compound full of dommes ruling over those members of 1930s English and European male society who craved the firm hand of Feminine Rule!

Sardax turns the tables on Sir d’Arcy, who’s revealed as a not-so-secret subby!

Although I am as far from being a British aristocrat as one can get (Chicago-born of Romanian and Ukrainian Jewish ancestry), I found myself getting deeply into the head of Sir Dev, as I grew to call him, because like myself, I saw him as both attracted to femdom, but blustering in eternal embarrassment by his desire for it. This conflict has been a central theme in my femdom fiction for decades, both serious and humorous, and I was able to explore through the story of Sir Dev in Masotopia, under the control of Mistresses Gwen and Carlotta, the absurd yet understandable ambivalence of the sophisticated man who fervently wishes to feel himself, as he was brought up to be, the master of all situations–but nonetheless, with a stubborn and therapy-resistant persistence, erotically craves being under the sweetly shod feet and sharp potency of the disciplinary devices and whips of damnably commanding women. “Blast these hussies!” as Sir Dev might say. And let us kiss their arses and whatever adorable vistas are permitted the devotions of our yearning lips.

So–lest my approach sound “heavy,” I want to emphasize that it is not, and I had a great deal of naughty fun writing the story, inspired by the incredible costumes and predicaments Sardax put Sir Dev into under Gwen’s guidance. Using the opportunity to indulge my pleasure in richly descriptive yet understated prose in homage both to John Willie’s style and kind of sly humor I enjoy, I found it ironically amusing as well as exceptionally stimulating to visit Masotopia in the company of Sir D’Evious Dalrymple. More than once during the writing of the story I envied the curmudgeonly gentleman his proximity to these masterful ladies, especially when he was bound in weird attire or posed in deliciously degrading situations for the amusement of the amazons of this small but potent nation!

All this is to say that YOU can take a trip to Masotopia via the fabulous femdom paysite The English Mansion here. Helmed by Mistress Sidonia von Bork, who is a terrific writer herself as evidenced by her blog here, The Revenge of Adorable Gwen has been serialized in eight chapters since April in a section dubbed “Sardax’s Garret,” with a new story chapter accompanying a new painting by Sardax uploaded on the first of each month. The fifth chapter has just gone up for August 2022.

I can remember what I was doing on the day John Alexander Scott Coutts, aka John Willie, died–August 5, 1962–but only by default. Marilyn Monroe’s death had hit the Chicago papers on Sunday morning August 5 (she’d died late the night before) and it was a big event, even for a kid like myself who didn’t know much about her other than she was a super-famous and beautiful movie star. I can’t recall now if I’d even seen any of her films yet at that point–maybe I’d seen The Seven Year Itch on tv, but I can’t be sure; but her dying so young, and presumably by suicide, was so shocking I can remember where I was when I heard it: standing in the bathroom, listening to the news on a transistor radio. I called out to my mother, who was in the kitchen, “Ma, Marilyn Monroe died!” Why would someone so famous and beautiful kill herself? One of the great mysteries of life was thus first introduced into my consciousness.

John Willie died at 59 in England on that same Sunday, but I wasn’t to discover him for approximately another eleven years. By 1974, I was living in Manhattan, and discovering my taste for Times Square and the great informal museum of porn that was 42nd Street. One night I walked into one of the seediest shops in the area–it was located on Seventh Avenue around the corner from 42nd Street–and it was basically a small but cavernous store with tables of magazines and nothing on the beige walls. After looking through some typical photo magazines, I came upon a cardboard box of items on one table that looked different from the usual ’70s smut pix of grungy chicks and hairy studs, and took into my hands elegant digest-sized periodicals wrapped in plastic with artist-rendered covers. One cover had a pretty girl in heels and chains with a devil leering behind her. Another cover was a painting of high heel shod feet with the ankles bound together with decorative ribbon. The title on both magazines was Bizarre, and I didn’t have to look inside to know that these items were worth purchasing sight unseen (the cranky looking clerk probably wouldn’t have let me open them anyway). They were $3 each then, or $18 in 2022 money; so although they sound cheap now, they weren’t: to put it into perspective, I could get two eggs, toast, potatoes and coffee for breakfast at a diner in 1974 for 79 cents, and my weekly rent for a room in a residential hotel was $23 a week, or $92 a month. In any case, I didn’t have much dough to spend from the temporary office work I did at the time, but I had to have these magazines. In the budding stages of my collecting habit, I bought them. I’d been introduced earlier to the work of Gene Bilbrew through reprints of his femdom imagery in Nugget magazine in 1973, but the creator of these Bizarre magazines was new to me, and it was the beginning of an admiration that continues to this day. I still have those issues, too. And it’s odd to me also that I can so distinctly remember the way the store looked, wherein I purchased them. I guess in a way it was a kind of momentous event! 😉

So I was very happy to come full circle, in a sense, and pay a modest literary tribute to one of my personal heroes of erotica. I hope you’ll join The English Mansion to enjoy Sardax’s gorgeous paintings and my story, and peruse too the other many delights of the site, which you can read more about here. For more info on Sardax, visit his website here.

UPDATE: Sardax just did his own blog post today (9/1/22) about the series and you can find it here!

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Elegy for a post office box…

On April 27, 2022 I ended a relationship of about forty years.

I closed a post office box I’d first opened circa 1982.

At the time I’d gotten it, I lived in a walk-up apartment right in Times Square, on the same block where the old offices of the show biz newspaper Variety had been located; where one of the top burlesque agents of the 1950s once had his headquarters; on the same block where the fictional public relations flack “Sidney Falco,” played by Tony Curtis, had his home/office in the 1957 film noir masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success; and a block away from where the great model Bettie Page had lived in the ’50s in an apartment I once read described as “turbulent.” In the building where I lived, I had a tiny mail box in a vestibule that had no security or locked front door (since there were businesses like a rehearsal studio and a musical instrument repair shop upstairs too), so to get packages of any size I needed a secure p.o. box, which I got nearby at Rockefeller Center.

The great Gil Elvgren seems to have done pinups that can match almost any theme!

In the ’80s I ordered things such as my first videocassettes of obscure horror and noir films from companies like the great Sinister Cinema and had them sent to the box. And, in those days when mail order was still a big part of the erotica business, I collected leg art photos and magazines from the likes of Elmer Batters and other creators and vendors of fetish or femdom themes.

When I moved away from Times Square in the ’90s, I held onto the box as it still was convenient to get mail, although I used it less and less. I mostly got announcements and catalogs connected to the movie memorabilia shows I liked to attend before the pandemic, and hope to get back to attending sometime soon.

In recent years I held onto the box because I told myself it would come in handy if I ever decided to conduct a mail order writing workshop to make some extra money, but I never went ahead with that.

I also simply liked to walk over to Rockefeller Center and check it now and then. The post office was near the yearly Christmas tree so I always took a look at that. Its location also gave me motivation for a decent walk (I still live in Midtown) and was also nostalgic because my first job in New York City, in summer 1971, was as an NBC page at the studios at 30 Rock, so I just liked to go over there. In a lot of ways the interior of the complex has changed, but in others it remains the same–for example, the fantastic mid-20th century murals in the main lobby are still there–and also I’d walk by the place where the tourist information desk used to be, where fifty-one years ago I’d sat and sometimes see celebrities such as Claudia Cardinale come out of the elevator after doing Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. I even met a girl once when I was working that desk, and we had a nice evening together wandering around the area. I remember she was a vivid redhead like Ann-Margret, but with a much bigger butt. She wore a summery dress and we sat for awhile at the fountain in Bryant Park as the sun went down…

Anyway, when I went over to the usual p.o. box location near 49th Street earlier this week, it was gone!  Renovation work had started in the last couple of weeks in that underground concourse near the famed ice skating rink, and the entire post office had been relocated over to 51st Street in the building upstairs. When I went to check my box at the new p.o., my key didn’t work, because all the boxes had new locks. I was going to renew it again (I always renewed at the end of April) and get the new keys, but the price had been raised quite a bit so I decided it was time to give up the box, which I really didn’t use very much at all anymore.

Ah, but it used to be fun to get videos of obscure Mario Bava movies like The Devil’s Commandment from Sinister Cinema (in business online here) and copies of the late Elmer Batters’ leg art zine showing up in my box!

Obviously this is not a picture of me at my p.o. box–it would be far less photogenic!–but rather a pinup by the wonderful Gil Elvgren (I did a Google search on “pinup art with postal theme”). You can get this art for yourself at Zazzle here in various forms like posters or refrigerator magnets or postcards. (I’m not connected to this site, just giving credit for my source of the image!)

As a side note, it’s great to see the proliferation of pinups in recent years. Back in the ’70s and even the ’80s, the stuff was still rare and hard to find in any forms!

 

Odd Habits of the Pandemic Era

On one of my daily walks. Fun fact unrelated to this post: the building in the background is where Bela Lugosi briefly lived circa 1950 when he was touring in plays on the East Coast.

I live alone, so even in ordinary times I have leeway to indulge my eccentricities, such as whether or not I’m going to get undressed or sleep in my clothes.  For example, I basically live in my office. A writer friend of mine once described a previous pad of mine as “charmless” and I regrettably agreed with him. My current abode is the same; it is functional. Standing in the center of my studio apartment is my desk, with computer and printer, almost like the bridge of my personal Starship Enterprise; and arrayed all around it are my books, files, and magazines. Near the window is a futon couch which I periodically make into a bed for sleeping purposes.

Or not. Meaning, in the last few months a habit I only indulged on occasion has become far more frequent: falling asleep in my clothes and simply stretching out on the futon.

Sleeping this way has always been a kind of cheerfully rebellious gesture on my part. Coming of age in the ’60s in a comparatively bland middle class Chicago Jewish neighborhood, nodding off like this after a night out and having my respectable optometrist father seeing me sprawled on the couch on his way to work, made me feel I was quite the fringe character. “Why don’t you act normal for a change?” he’d say, or something to that effect. I’d merely grunt an excuse as he went out the door. What I wanted to say, but didn’t, was: “I do act ‘normal’ most of the time, so can’t I get a break now and then?”

In some respects I moved to New York City in 1973 partly to get away from standards of acceptable behavior. I eventually became a professional porn writer and editor; that certainly filled the non-conformity bill. Even in college, though, from the late ’60s to early ’70s, sleeping in my clothes in the student lounge after a night of drinking (3.2 beer, so it took a lot) felt defiant too. I would wake up around dawn and grab the early bus to nearby Cleveland to go see softcore skin flicks at the Standard Theater and browse the legendary Kay’s Bookstore on Prospect Avenue for finds like Truffaut’s book on Hitchcock or an out-of-print novel by Errol Flynn.

Maybe my return to this habit would have come about with age, or laziness, or enjoying the voluptuous pleasure of simply falling asleep without any muss or fuss: after all, I have to move a few books around and make up my futon with a sheet and comforter before I can properly go to bed. But I’ve been falling asleep in my clothes, or deliberately going to sleep in my clothes, much more often in the last several months of the pandemic.

And last night I think I finally discerned why it has become so frequent.

I had decided to get myself some takeout food for my Christmas dinner, after a relaxing day spent reading, taking a walk, and chatting with people on the phone. I called in my order and was told to pick it up in ten minutes. When I got to the restaurant I was shocked to see how many folks were waiting there; usually there would be no more than one or two. But there had to be at least twenty people milling around; masked, yes, but still in fairly close proximity.

The kitchen was backed up and, expecting to get my order at any time, I ended up standing there hopefully yet anxiously for twenty-five minutes. When I left, I felt stressed-out. Yes, I’m fully vaxxed and boosted, but it still made me nervous. Standing around there were so many customers and deliverymen—so I thought, will I be okay? Omicron is supposed to be quite the tricky and transmissible little fella.

I went home and, after doing my usual hand washing for a minimum of twenty seconds while singing “The Road Is Open Again,” my favorite uplifting Depression era tune (which got me through the 2020 election nightmare), I ate my dinner and tried not to ruin my meal with worry. What was done was done. I hoped I would be all right. I was masked, I am vaxxed, and what else could I do? It didn’t pay to not enjoy my food after going through a crowd scene to get it.

As I ate, I indulged one of my pandemic-era “pick-me-up” habits: the amusing comedy of horror host Svengoolie as he screened Earth Vs. the Spider on his weekly Saturday night show on Me-TV. Then I read a 1950s era noir novel I’ve been enjoying (they’re short but I savor them slowly to prolong the time travel-like pleasure). And then finally it was time to go to sleep.

I stood up and looked down at my futon couch and realized I didn’t want to make the bed or get into the t-shirt I usually sleep in. I wanted to doze in my clothes: flannel shirt, sweater, venerable (tattered) sports jacket, jeans, and socks. I would remove my shoes and take everything out of my pockets as a concession to at least a modicum of comfort, however.

Why don’t I want to get undressed? I asked myself, for the umpteenth time in the last few months. And then it all crystallized. If I were just in t-shirt and shorts, under the cover and stretched out on the sheets on my made-into-a-bed futon couch, I wouldn’t be ready. But ready for what? For whatever it was I had to be ready for: the next day in all its usual freelance writer ups-and-downs but living too with the scary smidgen of uncertainty I felt from standing for twenty-five minutes in a humanity-crammed takeout joint. If I acted “normal” and made up the bed and got down to my underwear, I wouldn’t be dressed and ready for the unpredictability of Omicron. Or maybe, staying dressed while I slept would give me strength to ward off the danger. As if somehow sleeping in my clothes would give me an edge, an advantage. I knew it was irrational thinking and bordering on ridiculous, but that was what I felt.

I told myself to make up the bed and get undressed, but wait a few minutes. First I would read some more pages of the novel, then get up and assemble the bed. But that turned out to be my sneaky decision not to do it. The book, as good as it was, lulled me into dozing, and the next thing I knew, I’d fallen asleep for at least three hours with the lamp on the nightstand still on (nightstand? a tv dinner tray table, to be accurate). And prematurely waking up, I was still too exhausted to move the books and get the sheets and…well, go through the whole tiresome routine.

So yes, I slept in my clothes once again on Christmas night, ready for anything—or maybe only wishing I was. But next evening, I forced myself to make up the damn bed!

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Oh, I was so absorbed in editing this post that I almost forgot: HAPPY NEW YEAR, everyone! I hope 2022 is a better one for us all. 🙂