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  • welcome to the hole

    welcome to the hole

    Once upon a time, I kept a LiveJournal account, gryphons_hole, a deep, dark, comfy little hole in my brain where I kept notes on my life and queerness.

    This is the archive to that account, mostly password protected, adult, queer content, stripped of photo content after the site restructured its photo hosting feature. I hope to restore that content as well.

    If I know you, ask for the password. If I don’t, hope for a generous mood.

    08.18.24 I have realized a need to continue in this space. A kink reawaking if you will, with content that may range into inappropriate for my other blog spaces.

  • Protected: the subtlety of my arousal

    Protected: the subtlety of my arousal

    This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

  • I need to check my mailbox more often. I forgot someone was sending me something…

    Tonight, I trudged down the front stairs to fetch the mail. A big envelope was hanging out of the box. That is when I remember that I was suppose to be expecting something.

    And here I am, sitting in a pool of the good tears, having opened it.

    It would seem that I am now in possession of a singlet and bib from the Vancouver marathon. Ya know, the one that <philhasablog> ran for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training…

    Yeah… Pretty f-ing cool.

    Thank you.

    ,

  • personal best – and personal whoops…

    Tonight was a personal best. For myself and my helper, I believe. We had eight and a half hours of running on the machine and 30 minutes of down time.

    We ran 40 jobs.

    Holy crap!
    My lead did the numbers and commented that no one else would believe them…

    Once he removed make-ready and down time, we averaged 6.25 jobs per hour. Our pieces per hour came out to 1,412 – or there abouts. Typically would be just over a thousand.

    We hauled ass!

    And now, the whoops. A week ago last Friday, I crashed my first set of knives on the trimmer. It made me sick to my stomach.
    I had to do a blade change. I am about the only one that ever does the blade change. Piece of cake. Only the cassette didn’t lock back into place when I put everything back together… The clamps for the cassette kicked it up out of position and when I started up the machine…
    *crash* *crunch* *clunk*
    Ugh. The machine should not make such noises. If fact, it is the last machine an operator wants to make such noises…
    Ugh.The cassette was lifted up at an angle. The two side blades crashed through the trimming sticks and into the cleats that hold them to the cassette. The trash flap had no place to go with the cassette popped up out of place, so the face knife crashed into it.

    Ugh.

    The face knife just got instantly dull… The side knives lost fragments.

    Ugh. Really. It sickened me.

    As I replaced the nylon cutting sticks, I had to get needle-nosed pliers to pluck out shards of the side blades from the cleats. In fact, I had to replace two of the cleats. In fact, I took one home with me. That is what you see in the photo…

    The cleat itself is about one inch tall and about five eighths of an inch across. That wedge that shouldn’t be there is over an eighth on an inch deep. It still has little shiny splinters of the side blade in it…

    The worst bit about the whole was the fact that I had just replaced the damned things. Brand new, sharpened blades. I had to do a second blade change. Dammit. Over an hour lost for the two changes together. Almost an hour and a half, because after the second change, I couldn’t bring myself to start up the trimmer. I was in shock. I could not push the button. My lead had to walk me there it…

    Honestly, I have been operating the whole set-up for over a year now. This is the first time I have done anything like this. Other operators have lost count of the times they have crashed the knives… In fact, my current counterpart on first shift gave up a fingertip to it last season.

    But, then… he is a goldfish…

    ,

  • Just got in from dropping <kumazuki> off at the airport. He spent the weekend visiting before heading to see his parents in Michigan and then hitting Chicago for IML.

    I am always happy to have him here. And he stops back in for a night on his way back. Yesterday, we spent the early half of the day running errands and shopping…

    I have my new mattress! OMGs! Divine sleep was mine for the first night in so long…
    Yay!

    There is more going on, but I have to get back to that delicious bed. It is calling. Plus, I got up at 7:30 am and still have to work eleven hours this afternoon and evening.

    Later.

  • So…

    In the first five minutes of my day, I received a phone call. I was not yet awake; I let it go to the machine.

    The caller was someone that spoke with me in the past about printing my naughty designs on t-shirts and selling them across the country as he travels for vendors markets. He wants to print up four or five of my designs…

    For IML.

    Yes. He wants my designs so bad, he gave me all of a two day notice before he needs the files to the printer.
    I dislike rushing for someone else’s disorganization. I despise it.

    Also, as a point. The last time he and I spoke about the endeavor, I was waiting for a contract in writing before sending the files. I am still waiting for something in writing. Since he has taken his leisure with that and now needs the shirts, surely I will just send him my files…?

    Um, no.

    I deal – although poorly – with non-profits and fundraisers constantly wanting free stuff. These days, the requests come from folks that have never even seen my stuff – and act like they have. The requests come from people that have not yet even spent five dollars on a note card to support me as an artist. I deal. If they give me advance notice, and I have things on hand, and I like the cause… then I am still good to go.

    I draw the lines as bastard salesmen that want a clean cut profit on my images without offering me the security I need to ensure my own investment in my own art.

    Lack of organization on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

    But what about the money…?

    I don’t care if it is IML. I don’t care if it is the thirtieth IML. I don’t care if every leatherfolk in the world will be in Chicago. If it does not meet my terms, I don’t care how big the opportunity is. Who cares if he can sell a thousand shirts, if I have nothing on paper that says I am entitled to any of it.

    My illustrations are the only thing in my life that are truly just mine. I am the reason they exist. I am fine with not making money on them, but I will be damned if I make nothing while someone else rolls in cash for them.

    Bother.

  • my other secret math life…

    For my first job, I worked in the Cash Control department of a local amusement park. At the time, it was called Geauga Lake Park, locating in Aurora, Ohio directly across the lake from Sea World, Ohio. At some point after I left Ohio, it become a Six Flags and then was sold off again. I am not sure who owns it now…I worked there for seven summers.

    We counted the cash. At night. We ran pick-ups with security to remove a bunch of the cash from the bigger stands mid-day, basically to give us something to do and to get a bulk of the money counted before park close. They were late nights. I started at sixteen years old and often got home from work at 2 am.

    By the end, I was one of two assistant leads, which meant I also worked the morning shift to enter all the numbers and balance the daily sheets. The back to back shifts truly rotted, closing one night and opening the next at 8 am. They didn’t happen often and were usually during the week, not on weekends which ran much later into the morning.

    The counting was divided into departments. We basically had five people on a weekend night. The five counters were (in descending level of difficulty): games, gift shops/vendors, two counting food stands and the fifth did nothing all night but run the massive amounts of coin from the four coin pitch games…

    I don’t think I ever counted games, but I typically counted the giftshops since I was so accurate. Giftshops were difficult. They had to be done by an accurate counter, since many of the stands were on commission and were paid by the sales totals.

    Yes, sometimes overages and shortages in the money could not be traced.

    Very odd that.

    This job is where I developed my tendency to do things exactly the same each time. We had to do so. Adding machine tape for everything. We needed a paper trail for balancing at the end of the night. Large bills were the only optional entry. Back then they were uncommon. Then – always – 20s, 10s, 5s, 1s – subtotal – rolled coin in descending value: quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies – and then loose change. Each station had its own coin machine. If nothing of a denomination was turned in, a zero got entered to mark its place.

    I remember the biggest night I worked. It was a huge weekend. Lots of company picnics. I was one of the food stand counters. I counted over twenty grand that night. The deposit the next day was over 100 grand. It was huge for us. I remember looking at all the numbers and thinking, “Wow!” for the shear amount of work it was for us, but the cash stacked up before me wasn’t too spectacular.

    People used to always ask me what it was like to count all that money.

    Well, it wasn’t mine. It was just pieces of paper that I had to count long into the night.

    I still remember my ten-key training. I use it on the keyboard. In fact, I despise using the numbers across the top of the keyboard. They are horribly inefficient. This is part of what makes me hesitate to get a laptop. I cringe every time I am on one and need to enter numbers.

    My life without a number pad is slow and awkward.

    This is my other secret math life.

    I was never really a bean counter, but I was one of those people behind the glass…

  • oh, piss!

    I just received confirmation that he got his confirmation….

    <dakoopst> is coming to visit in mid-June!

    I feel like a school girl inside.
    *squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*

  • my secret math life

    Inspired by <quirkstreet>.

    My math life, long since hidden and secret from the world, began as a battle of wits between my mother and the counselors at Arthur Road Middle School.

    As it happened, in order for a student to reach calculus by his senior year, he had two options. Either start algebra in eighth grade or double up planar geometry and advanced algebra in the tenth grade. My mom wanted to sign me up for eighth grade only to have the counselor tell her that I was too stupid to take it.

    First. The decision was made according to seventh grade math grades, which sucked because the class used an in-classroom-only set of books. 24 volumes, each student on a different one at a time. I hated that. Yeah, put a hyperactive sugar-binge child in a room with 22 other students and then tell him to focus on a book. There was a reason why all of my homework was done in my bedroom, by myself…

    Second. Do not ever tell my mother that one of her children is dumb in math.

    *whew*

    Her face was purple for weeks.
    She then filled me in on the events. I was just as pissed. So I had regular eighth grade math. I got my own textbook to take home. Straight A’s. Dumb shits.

    So. Five years of high school math in four years of high school. I was on a drive to spite those counselors. Of course, I did it.

    Analytical geometry was the only slip up for me. I had a bad teacher and just couldn’t grasp her points. That was a half year class, three grading periods. B, B and C.

    Totalling up the years, that would be thirty grading periods of math: basic algebra, planar geometry, advanced algebra, trigonometry/an. geometry, and AP calculus. Two Bs, one C and twenty-seven As… F*ck the counselors.

    I started college in mechanical engineering at the University of Cincinnati. I had received a five out of five on my AP calc exam. I had been one of three students studying for the BC exam but I turned coward and went for the easy. Yeah, easy…

    At UC, once I finished the last quarter of calculus, it was differential equations, which I remember little of at this point. Those were not my favorite years. Perhaps, the darkest years of my life really… but at some point, I realized that I simply could not be an engineer. It was based purely on spending time around the other engineering students and my coworkers from my co-op position.

    I just couldn’t be that. Their free time, their extra moments, their breaks, their weekends…
    They never closed the textbook, they never turned off the calculator.

    As time passed, I stopped using most all of it, so it went away. I could once integrate any equation without using substitution. About the only higher math I still use is geometry. I mean, visual design and layout is quite impossible without it, whether one is aware of that fact or not.

    But that is the secret math life of this particular, nutso, big, twisted art-fag.

    My engineer peeked out when I was replacing the timing belt the other day at work. I may have scared a few people that are accustomed to thinking I am silly and pointless.

    I like doing that – both sides of it really: allowing them to see me as silly and then watching when they realize otherwise…

    Remember, I have a sadist in there somewhere, too.

  • so very curious…

    Sunday evening I met a man returning to KCMO for a visit. I think he was a native.

    As the story goes, he owned a dirty bookstore some thirty years ago here in town…

    As the story goes, he spent some time in Paris, doing work with a lab there that dealt with viruses in the eighties. You know… retro-viruses…

    As the story goes, he knows the real folks upon which the entire cast of And the Band Played On was based. Including Robert Gallo. As a matter of fact, he informed me that in order to get hands on live virus back then, one had to pay money to a fake company run by Gallo’s employees that basically stole the virus and sold it black market…

    As the story goes, Gallo was more of an ass than the movie portrayed. And no one was ever in it to save lives….

    As the story goes, this man was doing work with viruses before HIV came on the scene. As it happens, he was working with the Epstein Bar virus, the virus that causes mononucleosis. It is also the virus that causes Burkitt’s lymphoma.

    My lymphoma….

    Yeah, he caught my attention by this point. Actually, he caught my attention was he mentioned that he worked on viruses in Paris in the mid-eighties…

    Wow.
    I am floored.

    I met him through a common acquaintance. He is here for at least a month. I look forward to more time with him.

    I really am pretty floored….

  • conversations with mom

    Just hung up the phone from my Mother’s Day call.

    A nice but brief conversation, Mom never seems to want to talk long on the phone, I think she wants to not make my phone bill large.

    The family might do a camping trip for Labor Day, somewhere in between everyone, so my eldest sister and I don’t have as far to drive. I would guess that means the middle of Indiana or Illinois. More on that later.

    The best of the conversation was being able to report a healthy bank account. I have not been able to do that often with my mom in my life. The next paycheck will be close to forty hours of overtime like the last one. That will make it easier to hold onto some of the dollar signs…

    Even though some other things have dropped out of position, I do feel I am in a good place. I like that feeling.