The back door opens to a former secret garden, so watch your feet.
Should you find strange matter or be alarmed, it's no place for you. Too many people are scared as it is of what they find bizarre and inexplicable in the "real world".
 Like the trees of the Master Patterner's grove on the island of Roke in Ursula's Earthsea books, fancies and people in the orchard have lives of their own. Nobody, including me, ever knows where they may be on waking up in the morning. The more alleyways I find in the garden, the bigger it is, with more paths to explore.
Before going on, I should note that some of the details in this epic come from 'Real Life Dialogue Practice,' an unpublished imaginary conversation with the White Goddess, the first deity or a sub-atomic something. This unpublished material, mostly about real events, was originally intended for the amusement of friends. There's plenty more!
But it now has a more public raison d'être.
Long before the time came to tear down fences in my life, however, I seeded the first flowerbeds here for Eleanor.
What El makes of Easter I don't know, but to me it's a fine myth once divested of the trappings and accretions of millennia. Today's an appropriate Sunday to breathe new life into these pages without going to the trouble of being "born again".
This first story of spring says just a little of the person she is, no longer the muse and life's dreams projected on to her, though part of me denied do so, when I took her for the woman in my life ... or "wimmel" as Tony called such people. My late friend has a place you may one day find down the end of a path here. So do some others very special to me.
There'll be a little about them, but I've had no occasion to speak to Ellie herself for weeks apart from adding a little spice to Factory cooking on rare occasions. She asked me to write her short e-mails. Several options come to mind, but it's hard to make up my own, so I'll bung three possible mails in here ... later.
After all, while Eleanor Beardsley tells us what's going down in France at NPR, in some of her regular public appearances as a Paris-based mainly radio journalist, I've no idea what's happening behind the scenes.
If I had, you wouldn't be told.
A mystery remains and the answer will always elude me. I've written before March 2004 how some people's paths cross our own and when they do, it changes us.
Soon after starting this log, I described some who are particularly special to me ... even "gurus". Like most people, until recently I put such encounters down -- with reservations -- to hazard, fortuitous accident. Not any more.
Once EB showed up, it was different. Rather like a day I spent with a shaman in Senegal in 1997, within less than an hour of meeting Ellie I knew I'd waited all my life for the encounter. You'll find him here in the orchard, that marabout, along with other 'Hearts of Oak'.
This is certainly his weekend too, given what I told you on Friday about a 'Triple fucking whammy', which Matt swiftly quadrupled as a real four-leafed clover with a trackback!
 It's Weird Stuff, but it's true.
Ellie was no more a chance meeting than the synchronicity surrounding this entry. With her though, I went on to make every imaginable mistake! She became the "last victim" of my love affair. Not with women. With Love. The Big El; not the lass.
Once this was clear to astute observers, if not always to me, I wrote log entries sometimes. The "cover blown" in the office, Ellie took this with remarkable calm. Others would have objected to being written up the way I sometimes do. When they do, I don't. There's no point asking me who some people you read about really are: they've asked to keep their nicknames and Nick's names for them give nothing away.
In the latter half of 2004, the outcome of a psychotherapeutic journey I had to make if an almost split personality, sometimes evident in two years of blogging, was to become whole "changed my mind". Thus my life.
It was a long process, but the search to be healed led me, a while before Ellie showed up, to a wise "Shrinkess", old enough to be my mother. She never became that; there was no "transfer" of the kind some schools of psychological help think important, since France Grisard had practised her skills for long enough to throw away all the rule books.
The Bardo of the Tibetan book of the dead is about the illusions it helps to lose to "get real". I had to lose my own as best I could.
The Shrinkess treated me more like a partner than a patient. If you've read parts of this tale before, you'll know how in uncanny ways, Eleanor meanwhile said or did things that accelerated the process, as if she'd come to pull a series of triggers. Uncanny? Often she did this by "accident", with no way of knowing what she was doing.
 One well-intended mail about flowers, for example, eventually saw me using Grisard's couch instead of the comfortable armchair, and closing my eyes. I wouldn't have believed it until it happened, worse than walking the tracks of the trans-Siberian railway in winter with no clothes on, but once the horrible events of a childhood Christmas had been remembered and confronted, the end of the healing process began. Flowers are symbolic, of course, and played a part in that.
This is a Siberian iris, for Ellie. For all the friends who stuck with me, often funny, sometimes wise.
The Shrinkess, who is part shaman because of her openness to what people label "paranormal" stuff and knowledge about it, helped me take in these events. By Xmas, we knew she was done with me. I felt whole and content with who I am. However, each day brought new insights, rushing me headlong into a world where all Ellie wanted was to see me back on my feet, instead of in the clouds.
I knew I was in for a hard landing when you got 'Private Assignment'. Several people -- Tony was one of them -- told me they found that imaginary dialogue funny. I'm relieved. I enjoy cheering people up with a good laugh or two, but when I wrote that piece on September 4, with its Icarus reference, I had a lot of hurt to hide.
And I was lost.
Days earlier, I'd turned in confusion to my surest guide in extremis, the 'I Ching'. As you'll see in 'Spring, bonfire, lake and leaf fall,' this book I've studied for three decades told me where I was and that the next step, should I take the wise road, would be no less than a 'Revolution'. It's all there. I felt that any "revolution" ahead would be an external one, in the world around me, perhaps even in my relationship with the woman I took for the one of my dreams.
I was wrong. All I got right was to know the 'I Ching' well enough to take what it told me on faith, behave in the way it suggested, and accept the consequences of such actions.
Six months later, I've got the message: the "revolution" the ancient texts put to me as probability theory in action happened inside me and is still, each unfolding day. Wide-eyed as a child but no longer afraid of the winter and of darkness and of death gnawing at my life from the inside, I also began to see signs again of the Quiet Revolution taking place in the world among some people, more and more of them: the revolution I first saw in the late 1960s and which is the real subject matter of my film.
 Ellie wasn't the first to tell me to write a book. She was convinced I have more in me than a weblog, experiments and essays. But she scarcely ever set foot in this garden. Who wants a worship site from an idiot they just begged to be normal?
"Fun, yes," she said. "Lots of it, sure. But Jeez, Nick, you've got to lay off with the heavy stuff, stop giving me things and ramming reading material down my throat when I hate that and you know it. You rush at me and you rush me and I don't want any more of it."
She was quite right and may well never read this.
"I don't like serious talk," El said one day when I started again. Nowadays I completely agree with her, most of the time. "When I have it," she added, "it's only with very few people."
She didn't add "and you're not one of them". But I understood.
Truth to tell, I got all of Ellie's messages, right from the outset in March 2004.
Her considerable discretion might have done for her if parts of me hadn't always taken some notice. But in one of her last mails to me, she was really mad at me, unfairly for once. That time, I sent her an evil bollocking back, on an experimental basis only! I wasn't cross.
She liked my reply and "couldn't agree with you more". I took this on faith, still do though she's not written since, and admired and respected her the more for it, because I was well on the way to being the man I am now.
Between us, across the dimensions, "there is nothing". If never I see her again, as I've scarcely done in weeks, Eleanor is a friend for life.
One of the best:
"Between us
The streets are swept away
The tablecloth is all the world
The rest is just the passing day
Outside of this are Soho and the far-flung islands
The stripjoints in the alleys and the grainhulks anchored in the bay
Between us
The wristwatch comes to rest
The sunlight's in your hands and eyes
By which the bread and wine are blessed
Away from here are Soho and the green seas in the west
The trainee seagulls contour-flying through the swell's long trough and crest
Between us there is nothing but the shadow
Of the future that will never let us go
To be together
Between us there is nothing but the snowline
Of the country where you will not be mine
Its savage weather
Between us
A wineglass learns to cry
But only we will reach the end
The rest is just a passing-by
Outside of this are Soho and the mangrove deltas
The dustbins in the doorways and the Spanish goldtrails in the sky
Between us there is nothing but a promise
Of the future that will make no place for us
To be together
Between us there is nothing but the condor
And the miles of air towards the valley floor
A falling feather
Between us
There is no - thing"
 That's our song.
Mine and she who isn't my 'Lady Eleanor'.
All winter I've heard Pete Atkin's voice, the music and the lyrics by Clive James.
If you, out there, have an available CD of that now unobtainable 1970s record called 'A King at Nightfall', or better still are near at hand and could transfer the old LP of it now in the hands of a close friend, Catherine, my ex-wife, into .mp3 or AAC format, I'd kiss you if appropriate and hug you otherwise for getting it back into my ears.
I used to need "high maintenance", as people say of some kinds of women. Now all I need is decent music.
You're already a long way into my X-Files. The triple X bit is still to come. Along with what Ellie gave me to do instead of the book she wanted. Since I'm doing it, I feel like mailing her. But what?
Hey,
Long, long time no talk, Ms Beardsley. So how flies the eagle, life OK with you?
Today I'll get to find out a bit anyway, because though oh so late to bed, at 3:30 am (working on the film) then up like an idiot at seven, this is a first of four days all for me! Or so I was saying four hours ago before the first phone calls.
I've occasionally kept an ear on your radio work, good as ever, but now plan to listen properly.
I'm writing to tell you what a mean inconsiderate creep you are for being nasty to me so much of last year, then dropping me like a stinking putrid turd you have wiped off your shoe, just when you could enjoy my company instead of making me wake up at two o'clock some mornings wondering "Why does she despise me so much or is she just totally indifferent?" and sobbing myself back to sleep four hours later.
But never mind.
You're great all the same.
I suppose.
Nick
P.S. If you've decided you want to remain the forever mystery woman and never call or write me again without even telling me how I finally pissed you off so much, I'll just go on guessing.
No, I don't believe that's what I meant.
Let's try again:
Hi El,
How are you, honeypie?
Happy Birthday!
Yes I know it's just close, but I'd like you please to drop me a hint about what small token of celebratory admiration might be appropriate to mark a year in which you'll become even more beautiful?
Nick
oxo.
P.S. When may I do Kundalini yoga with you on the table of that Indian restaurant with the boss and his staff doing lingam and yoni dances round us? I wouldn't mind the yoghurt stuff, leftovers, first-rate sorbets and spicy sauces, would you?
Bits of you would taste even better.
P.P.S. If your bloke wants a piece of the action, I know this amazing Asian hooker who's really a plainclothes vice squad detective [that bit is true by the way, but I'm banned from recounting my adventures as key witness in one of the local gang warfare murder cases. She gave me a huge wink at the police detective headquarters on the Seine.]
We could ask her along on one of her days off. On another, she could come and lend a hand when we get to do that bank job.
Bof!
That won't work either. I know what she'll say.
She'll say (but more sparing with the Anglo-Saxon terms):
"i don't want anything, thanks, nick. i don't like it when you give me stuff. now please go away again, stay gone away and i forbid you to tell anyone how ancient i'm going to be.
"eleanor
"p.s. as for the tantric sex, go fuck yourself.
if this gives you too many muscular pains, then let ariane have the rocket in your pocket. that [gorgeous franco-italian psychology grad student with legs and the killer one-button-too-few blouse and the trim golden brown waist and a smile straight from heaven] has been dying for you since you started the riot in the doctors' waiting room with that third chit-chat of yours about sex and the lotus project.
"remember how your dr 'bloghero' yang had to come out and shut you both up before the other guys almost creaming their jeans nearly had your balls off out of 'why him?' jealousy [that folks, is only a slight exaggeration of the truth of a fun Monday afternoon. Ariane and me having quietly decided that the average IQ in the waiting room that day was probably around -60, I stage-whispered to her how we might empty it in two seconds flat].
"adieu ou au diable, take your pick."
What else? I know:
Ellie,
Please give me the serial number of your iPod, while it's still under guarantee.
Two of the others I've bought are busted for real and in for repair before finding happy new owners. One of them, also still under guarantee, was broken by Apple itself for reasons too boring to explain but well documented on the Web.
My latest spat with Apple, which already delayed the repairs for three days, reminds me that I asked you for that number months ago, but now it matters because I don't want to see you run into the same problem with an identical model.
This won't happen unless you risk a certain software so-called update.
But honestly, the musical miracle won't last forever without a wee bit of attention.
Take care,
Nick
 No, that won't work either. She'll think it's a trap.
She'll believe I'm really calling the number of her whole boat in and simply want to get her round to my place so I can drive her mad with serious nonsense while I plug it into my Mac for tedious maintenance routines.
Also, she'll feel guilty and try to give the iPod back to me, so I can sell it to make my bank manager happier. Sod the bank.
I just gave Ellie an iPod because she loves music, I was crazy about her, she does a lot of "shlepping" to get stories, and she's more sensible about what she can "afford". I'm now being punished for having different material values, but couldn't care less either. Because I won't be able to write a film about the Quiet Revolution unless I am one. Subversive to the hilt. And rich in wild fruit to hand out.
I also gave her 'Gaïa'. It was hers.
Eleanor gave me freedom.
Lately, all I've seen of her has been when tearing her copy off an out-of-reach printer to pass it to her nicely; usually a polite refusal of one of the 19 yoghurts acquired from the Canteen to keep my home fridge in stock; acceptance if she's not had the time to eat; "yes please" when it comes to chocolate distribution for the morale and magnesium levels; and the occasional "Nick, what does this mean?" of the kind you get from anyone if you're a bilingual genius with a head full of useless information about obscure French terminology and jargon.
Oh yes, and that appalling erection.
I wonder if she's forgiven me for what I think I confessed about it. The others have, the one or two who know.
It wasn't El's fault. She was just doing her thing, going down to the Serious End of the English desk to fetch some work, no fuss about it. Simply looking ... drop-dead gorgeous. Great dress sense, real class without pretension to the natural hip-swing and the butt-tight jeans, breasts maddeningly outlined in her blouse the translucent side of the neon, and those eyes!
 At first, it was a minor nuisance, I wished I hadn't glanced up. But when she asked me something and I turned to answer, there was a hint of smile, just something in the look. Quite innocent. Not her fault. A couple of hours later, it really hurt, my trousers became far too tight for comfort, the damned thing simply refused to go down.
Was that when BJ was wittering wisely about how "love is the Higgs boson particle of human relationships"?
Of course there were remedies, but I wasn't having that.
Somehow it was possible still to work, almost ignoring the excruciating thrust of cock against zip until I thought of something.
 Three phone calls. I prayed. If I could just hold off until I was out of there. Pick up! But my potential salvation had gone home early, it was Friday afternoon.
Lauren saved me. Lauren got my undying gratitude. Lauren days later said something like: "No problem. Glad to have been of some assistance." Because after more than three hours of it, Lauren said a couple of things so damned funny on the phone from Dakar that I can imagine not a hard-on in the world would have survived the belly laugh she gave me, bless her head!
Still, I'm glad this doesn't usually happen when I see even Eleanor of the onetime Errant Knee. Apart from the curiosity I got as to just how long it could possibly keep up, there would have been nothing more sordid or disappointing that afternoon than having to sneak out to the washrooms.
Of course, it's not just her looks. The looks, those of the straw-headed 'Gaïa girl' since the first lines of what became that epic poem in 1995 clattered out of an elderly typewriter on to a now yellow, dog-eared page back in the '70s.
The part of 'Gaïa's Complaint' in which I still don't know exactly what or who predicted through my open frequency that Eleanor would show up in flesh, fun, guts, good looks and brains one unforgettable afternoon, when most of me knew her for who she was within an hour, came to me early in life:
The coming after
resides where the laughter begins
on her face. On Gaia’s face.
The solitude of wolves
proves to me that out of space,
half lost, you came.
Formed by night on the swell of a thunderous tide
you flew to me on the wind off the hills.
We warmed & shared a cup or two
& the shivering ceased with a lingering smile
& the hope in the storm’s embrace.
Starfire seeping from your hollow bones,
I nearly had you then,
gnawing on your succulent admission
but you dissolved and made me a mist
chill as the threat of no return.
& with the dawn, the loss was there again.
(Extract from 'The Second Watch: The Old Man')
Ellie's quiet arrival on the desk in the Factory came much later in the six watches of the poem. The watches like those of sailors often adrift on life's seas, dependent on the tides and times of the moon, the courses of stars, as well as their own navigational skills.
Some will know that in September nearly one decade ago, when I offered Sylvie 'Gaïa's Complaint', imperfect, flawed but finished, the star-gazer kissed me for it, even that passage above which is not one of its finer parts, and then told me the strange truth I failed to understand for nine more years.
Sylvie knew.
She said: "It's not my poem, Nick."
Now I've this week taken out of hibernation a story about how such things happen to us, I don't pretend to understand. I'm not sure anybody does or can. We human beings, most of the time, are stuck with five main senses and a mere four dimensions. These are insufficient for any grasp of the whole.
Reason alone will remain a most unlikely means of reaching beyond, way beyond the places we usually settle for living in, to those where matter and energy and consciousness may meet and mix and merge as all an endangered world's shamans claim to know they do.
 Again, Ellie's left me clueless. In the dark.
But the Kid was quite right about a double CD I boiled down for the woman into 'squishy tomatoes'. Ellie has the gorgeous mastercopy of those few days' "work".
With the swell of warmth and affection I felt for her, a long underground ride that would have been almost as pointless as the week's earlier journey to sort out musical matters with another Apple wasn't as wasted as it might have been.
This was partly because of a personal phone number I extracted from a potential "deep throat" for use some day on the "other side" of the log. It was mainly because the sound of music throughout the trip was the other copy of "those voices in the fruit" (playlist).
Yes, Kid. It was "wicked". The sound sequence my unconscious sent up to my frontal lobes in the compiling of it probably didn't tell Eleanor the same concept-album story as it does its creator.
The precision differences of timing between songs was as deliberate as the aural blow to the nervous system ruthlessly dealt by the crash of cascading scales opening 'It Happened Today' by Curved Air an instant after the very hushed choral close to 'I would know my shadow...' from Tippett's oratorio 'A Child of Our Time'.
 But for less obvious yet lucidly clear "messages" threaded through an album about the passing of ships in the night and the signals they might flash each other in an encounter guaranteed to leave at least one of the travellers changed for life, I reckon that as an iMix for the iTunes Music Store, what my mind wove with those "silly love songs" about sometimes mixed-up people could top the charts.
She had nothing to say, either, about a witty juxtaposition of the serious and the playful best served up hot, with a decent pinch of salt, and as recommended, "delicious with corn on the cob & beef steak."
But the Kid did, telling me not for the first time that Daddy can be a saucy fellow when he puts his mind to it with as little conscious interference as possible. Though just halfway to sweet sixteen, Marianne was astute enough to catch the lust in the list and I was proud of her for it! By the time it was ready, I had extracted the meatballs themselves from the mix.
And it won't go to the iTMS, because I meant every bit of it, corny or otherwise, brazen cheek with a tongue in it or cocky display, and the poetry too:
"for Ellie.
...forever"
just as 'Gaïa', in this more than four-dimensional universe of hours, was always her poem.
I believe that from the moment the first words of it were bashed on to a now yellow dog-eared page with an elderly typewriter when I was scarcely 16, my heart knew, without knowing it, that almost a decade after those lines were reshaped into a whole story as true to the best of my life as 'Lotus', it would one day give 'Gaïa' to the girl.
 I stopped trashing scenes 'The Sting in the Lotus' when the people in it took on lives of their own and became real. The last time this happened was in a long lost novel, 'Womb of Fire,' but then I lacked the maturity to handle the characters' emotions without being wooden.
But the LP has turned into a much bigger project than its original plot.
The bankers won't finance the LP, that's for sure, any more than they'd back my adventures regarding the 'Voices of Women'. If they did, however, it would be ironic and quite a blow for the Quiet Revolution. If I had the mindset and job of a banker, I wouldn't support art which deals as subversive a blow as I can to established but insane rules and institutions that uphold them.
The LP began as a story about a handful of people who try to behave "naturally" in societies that take absurd and artificial values for a norm. On an endangered planet where the powerful who make decisions pay little heed to what scientists and artists alike are almost re-discovering as natural laws that were well understood in less "developed" societies. My initial plan was to try to bring an original perspective to such issues and build on what attempting to "play by the rules" does to men and women and their relationships. It often breaks them, until ... there's a "sting in the Lotus".
The first idea came to me in the dark. With Ellie, who had an Errant Knee under a table, a knee with a life of its own.
When mine fled, experimentally, hers came up. And then she let me curl naturally into her in the Métro, relaxed, happy beyond belief. It didn't have to go further, it was heaven already. Oh, the good fairy? Kid's stuff, she's moved on since, but still dreams well.
Since that evening, what I've discovered, most often when I take a good look at women, has turned 'Sting in the Lotus' into far more ambitious a screenplay covering a timeframe from the 1960s, when I had "ideals", to around 2040.
The ideals stay. Strong. Being naïf about them got lost.
The real war I go on about isn't the exploitation of developing countries by industrialised powers, nor a born-again regime in the White House fighting terrorism wherever it can stick the label on it. Other people can write about politics and economics. Unless they're sexual politics. There's plenty of that in the LP, but I'm not writing about what used to be called Women's Lib and other social movements which have nourished the Quiet Revolution.
Should you be interested in sex, though, I'll give you plenty of it.
Until recently, I never believed those who say "it all boils down to sex in the end", but they're right. I simply don't see it from the same angle as most of the people who take such an apparently narrow view of life and mean it literally, especially most of the men.
That's one of the things that probably displeases my bank manager because of the great laughs I've had in recent months on the phone, sometimes in long-distance calls, with women who feel as happy talking about it as I do and can get my blood racing with little details which explain, in part, why today I find myself turning other men funny colours with jealousy.
They ask me, "How the hell do you get away with it, you're outrageous! I'd never dare ask them that in a million years, but you've not had a single slap in the face. Even from strangers..."
This is true.
But there are no secrets to it and shouldn't be.
Some disagree. I know people far more attached to their privacy than I am. It's an attitude I respect, but a way I have no wish to live. Keeping my life to myself always hurt me more than it helped anybody.
The money I might earn from "Ellie's film" isn't important. All I'll want is what I need to be probably hammering away on what computers have become long after Factory life. I must finish it before cinema no longer exists and the scientists and artists among the DVD extras lose interest. And I'm still looking forward, maybe, to independence as that "funny retired fool" haunting my stomping ground in a cosy and comfortable annexe to wherever the Kid and her life partners are, coming out to scare them sometimes with my next nonsense.
Women? Absolutely! A lot of them improve with age, I've found, and sex used often to be wasted on the immature when people got all screwed up about it. By the time I pop my clogs, I hope I'll have enjoyed my full subversive part in helping putting a stop to days when a poet and jazz fan considered laureate could generalise: 'They fuck you up your mum and dad' (Art of Europe).
Philip Larkin turned down the job of poet laureate not because he gave two fingers to Her Majesty the Quoog. That's more my style. He said he'd lost his Muse.
I've been luckier.
 Luck is really applied Probability Theory, hence the domain of the White Goddess, along with another private gig of mine, which holds that Einstein stuck out his tongue the day he sussed out that Special and General Relativity are ideas about sex. Ellie told me what to do with my own Big Ideas. She was right. It took me several months to do it. Nearly all the ones I have left are upside-down and inside-out.
Special Relativity is for soulmates. General Relativity is far less sordid, much more fun, than fucked-up stupidity with a "bit on the side". Or fantasies stuck in an attic box along with an expensive fairytale dress worn once, the day people trod on its train. Maybe kept for a daughter destined to the same fearful fate.
Though Marianne is a Quiet Revolutionary herself and sensible about it, her father damps down the fire raging in his that particular chakra just behind his balls any time the Kid's anywhere near the kind of heat she has no more need to see than I would allow her to pursue an account of which bits of "her" bloke she eats beyond the starting flag.
She survived a scene in the film I call the "Excalibur episode", the untrue story of how I had to borrow that sword from the Lady of the Lake and stick it between the hard-on I got and a woman friend who did truly decide to crawl into my bed in nothing but a flimsy kimono because she wanted just a kiss and a cuddle.
The Kid was fast asleep in the top bunk.
Her reaction in the morning was even funnier than the incident itself, but when it comes to her biting, the answer to the oh-so-innocent she merely "really wanted to know how far girls are allowed to go with that kind of thing" was an equally firm: "You'll find out soon enough when he says "Aië, that hurts!"
The Kid's mum has become proud of me and I'm proud of her because of the way Manou has turned out, and all three of us make friends unnecessarily jealous about the totally open relationships and fun we can have when they could have the same between the children and parents if all parties know the very few Rules that matter.
However, it is only that easy in retrospect, since we all respect each other for sacrifices made in the name of trust and responsibility as well.
My own concerned sex, but since a gruelling overhaul and optimisation process, I am making up for lost time.
"Have you been driven to bankruptcy by pornography?" asked the Wildcat on hearing of my financial affairs, so seriously deadpan she got me hooting.
"Heavens no!" I replied. "By the time I'm finished with 'Eleanor's film' it's the porn industry that will be bankrupt."
 I still await the case for dismissal.
For instance, let's take Lauren again as finally I felt it best to confess I plan to do so.
"What's the first thing I'm going to do when I meet you?"
She said stuff about kisses but that was only the beginning. You have to fill a girl in properly, after all. So, if we're off duty, there's a place for this -- of sorts -- up in the Factory's medical service, where nobody's told me what might have happened before on the spare bed.
How about going up there then, where "I shall remove your underwear and eat you up until you've gone crazy, like I've always wanted to do with a redhead."
"You are funny."
Oh really? "Then it'll be your turn."
Ever since I was told about Serbski Jeb, I've wanted it, a lot. This is where the woman ties a man very firmly down.
"With what? Can I use handcuffs?"
"You can use what you like. Stockings, undergarments, rope, bits of the matting they use for roofs in African huts."
Once he's pinioned, she does whatever she fancies. It is torment and wonderful torture. The secret is never to allow the man to come before he can't take any more of it. "Pleading and begging!"
According to a Ukrainian woman -- who didn't actually tell me this face to face, to be honest, but flies an ugly ex-Soviet fighter in 'Shaka', a wild and wonderful science fiction novel set in Africa by Ian McDonald, who knows the places he's writing about very well -- a woman who gives a man his dose of Serbski Jeb from time to rare time keeps him for life.
When I asked Lauren, once she'd been warned I was "hopelessly in love with you too," if this was OK with her, she said "Abso-freaking-lutely!"
But there are drawbacks.
Like Bernie.
And my own desire never to be kept for life by Lauren.
So I didn't ask -- at my own expense, I should add -- how big her boobies are or anything silly like that. It doesn't matter, but may be a purely tactical issue in some circumstances, now I've remembered I like breasts of all sizes.
It seems like she plans to keep Bernie for life, which is great, although I believe anyone who still seriously wants to get married these days like they say they will needs a cranial scan.
This includes my daughter, who knows that if and when she does, I'll have nothing to do with paying for it like a dutiful father. People who are determined to walk into a trap of that magnitude, while I acknowledge that some still appear to be quite satisfied with it, must pick up the tab themselves.
All this has a rightful place in a former garden made as a worship site by a former idiot for a woman who isn't because there's nothing more natural and sometimes sacred about really good sex.
This may possibly cause difficulties -- though I hope not -- for Russell Crowe and Jodie Foster in the lead parts, along with the rest of a sometimes surprising cast I've chosen, who will be directed by Sofia Coppola, since I'm incapable of writing a great story as a superb screenplay about real people in an absurd world without having in mind the actors who get to play the parts.
This is the stuff of 'Lotus'! Without it, I'm lost.
 Without Ellie, life goes on.
Of course it does. But on the head of that White Goddess I regard as my most loyal of allies and friends -- while also knowing she's probably neither a "quark" nor a "boson" but some other element of a deeply mysterious universe yet to be found by the quantum physicists -- I swear I miss her so much sometimes.
Though many will deny it, unable even to take the word of scientists for a truth they don't like, every being born human has an inbuilt religious instinct, impossible to root out and destroy, only too easy to unearth and fabricate dreams with, inventing "ungodily" churches, religions and unnatural laws.
The fourth of the 'Lotus' scenes to be finished tells a fragment of a part of the plot in which the main male character has an experience that is trivial as an event in most people's lives, but confronts him unexpectedly with the worst of his fears.
It's a fear so deep-rooted he scarcely knew he had it, more terrifying for him than even the prospect of death. Death itself holds no horror for him, except ways of dying.
Suffice to say that in the film, the character I see well played by Crowe -- who still doesn't know it -- will have to do what I did in the latter half of 2004 and walk through a door in his mind accidentally unlocked by a woman, to confront not just one lifelong buried fear but all others related to it.
That, in part, will be the 'Sting in the Lotus.'
Today I see signs of the Quiet Revolution everywhere.
Usually I'm swift to recognise others who are equally aware of it, each in their own way, to the extent that such details as I've told of it to my friends, sometimes asking the most "outrageous" questions of them in the process, genuinely fascinates them. It has begun completely to reshape my life, and most notably the oldest relationships in it, which I've restructured -- always for the better for the both of us -- with each person concerned.
Often I can strike up a conversation with a complete stranger in the subway or on the street, because of something they're reading or doing that grabs my attention and interest. Never have I been slapped down for it yet, even when I enjoy doing this with the most eye-catching and attractive of women, who seem to know in the first split second that I'm neither in the least bit crazy nor making a pass at them. It's becoming a habit as regular as feeding the birds who now fly totally free of fear almost into my hands every morning.
 Thus I've talked to musicians, teachers, social workers, company executives and sculptors. A doctor fresh out of one of the worst of Africa's humanitarian disasters, a pretty young student reading a J.D. Salinger novel I enjoyed when I was her age. A stunningly beautiful model from the Czech Republic who was the focus of every horny young male eye in a Métro carriage, but returned my smile and frank words with a warmth as natural and self-confident as my own.
Of course that was an openly sexual exchange, one where I realised in a moment that for all the usual holes in my clothes I could have pushed it had I felt so inclined with every chance she'd say "Yes", because just to start with, I made her laugh and she understood she had no reason to be afraid of me. She was "different", I was "different", we both knew this and enjoyed it, I rode a couple of extra stops to explain a French language difficulty to the woman and when I got off she gave me a kiss on the cheek.
As I see it, QRs believe in sharing rather than ownership, partnership rather than possessiveness, and lives without artificial barriers between work and play. Really successful ones find jealousy as absurd and immature as tantrums. And people come way above careers in their values.
But that's just a part of it.
The "revolution" in 'Lotus' is one scientists in many fields are studying, aware that as a species humanity has reached a turning point. That whole aspect of the film is one I'm writing little about, though it means our next evolutionary step, if we make it, is a "Change of Mind".
While art is for everyone, I'm pursuing the scientific aspects with the scientists themselves, whether they're quantum physicists or neurochemists. Like such people, I know that subjects once considered "paranormal" or "supernatural", such as telepathy or the use I make of the 'I Ching' when my own mindset is right, are no less natural and ordinary than the life-cycle of a pig.
12:50:47 AM 
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